The very best of the plans get delayed due to some event that was never expected while executing the strategy. Quite often we almost stop thinking and looking ways to crash the time line or do something to speed up the critical path etc…
I remember this story which my mentor once shared with me while walking me thru one of the biggest lessons in handling stress while execution… and am now updating the same on this blog…
“An old farmer had plowed around a large rock in one of his fields for years. He had broken several plowshares and a cultivator on it and had grown rather morbid about the rock.
After breaking another plowshare one day, and remembering all the trouble the rock had caused him through the years, he finally decided to do something about it.
When he put the crowbar under the rock, he was surprised to discover that it was only about six inches thick and that he could break it up easily with a sledgehammer. As he was carting the pieces away he had to smile, remembering all the trouble that the rock had caused him over the years and how easy it would have been to get rid of it sooner.”
Things to learn from this story and remember while we are executing our projects…
1. No matter how strong you have planned you will surely meet obstacles (Unknown Open Issues)
2. Don’t follow the orthodox principle of time management of meeting the deadlines by crashing or focusing on critical path instead take a step back and look at the hurdle and see how to resolve it.
3. While you do a resource planning always have one dedicated person in your team to wear a black hat and do a FMEA (Failure mode effective analysis) for every item on the work breakdown structure
4. Last but not the least… if something goes wrong don’t get frustrated because of the criticism or conflicts and look for a quick fix (Just like in the above story where the farmer kept replacing the plowshares and assumed that there will be a huge rock and did not try to dig the ground to see how big the rock is)
5. Remember you are the project leader and you have a lot of arms in your artillery to resolve all issues you are facing… and my experience says there is nothing like a time tested solution that works always… go ahead and explore any unorthodox way of tackling the issue at hand and will surely be successful
Execution is an art… a science… and a moment of truth… history proves that all good stories of execution are written only after one has done it successfully … no one knows if he / she will be able to execute and be 100% successful unless its completed.
