Page 75 - Straight Talk On Project Management IV

Remember what my friend Malc says, “Methodology, resources and all the mechanics of an IT
project matter but nothing makes or breaks an IT Project like our habits.”

Footballers celebrate every goal along the way – we should too!

We berate ourselves for our bad habits, it’s only fair that we celebrate our good ones!

Atomic habits
Habits are all the rage again thanks to James Clear’s brilliant best-selling book “Atomic Habits”,
which is all about building good habits and breaking bad ones! It’s over thirty years now since
Stephen Covey’s book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and habits have interested me ever
since.

It’s so easy to get into bad habits. A glass or two of wine in the evening, biting your fingernails, a
Greggs steak bake for lunch each day instead of a salad, sedentary lifestyle, etc, etc. at work it MAY
be allowing scope TO creep, not keep a tight rein on budgets and losing track of delegated tasks.

Steak bake

Getting into good habits is harder because the rewards are so far downstream.

Take the steak bake versus the salad argument. Oh my, the reward for eating a steak bake is instant
isn’t it, before you’ve even tucked in!! The aroma of the freshly baked pastry!! The lovely warmth
that you feel through that paper bag as you hold it in your hand!! And when you do bite into it, the
taste of that crisp, flaky pastry, the flavoursome gravy and the tender steak that melts in your
mouth. Then, when you’ve finished there’s always a scrap or two of flaky pastry to be salvaged from
the bag or your lap … and … afterwards don’t you just feel satisfied.
The rewards for the salad on the other hand … they’re way off in the future! Sure, you’ll be able to
drop a dress size or get into slimmer trousers – in six months or so. OK, you’ll be less breathless
climbing the stairs – a year from now. And yeah, you’ll probably live longer … so … you get the
reward for salad in six months, a year or a lifetime away?

It’s easy to see how Greggs draw you in.

Good habits
And so it is with IT Project habits. Again, let’s consider scope creep. When you say ‘yes’ to a
stakeholder request you’re a legend! A hero! It’s nice to be thanked, great to be popular and the
rush of serotonin when you feel significant or important is scientifically proven. Instant reward.
Fabulous!!

The habit of saying no to a scope change request, on the other hand, doesn’t yield benefits until,
usually, the end of the project. When you can look back and say that delivery is on time because you
stuck to the plan and didn’t accommodate this, that and the other.

So, what’s the answer? Can you release short term rewards while developing good habits?

One of the ways that James Clear suggests that this is possible is by creating some form of daily
visual record of the good habit. So, for instance, if the good habit you want to have is that you go for
a run every lunchtime – get a wall planner and each day that you stick on your trainers and jog down
the canal towpath, you put a mark on that day. You repeat this the next day and the day after and
that and soon you have a daily challenge of not wanting to break the sequence. It’s like Snapchat’s