One-person band? Not anymore!
Introducing my first collaborators: Whyhive
I last left you pondering how to make a yearly work plan. While you did that, I did something else.
I remembered something. I have a budget. One of my mother’s greatest criticisms of me is that I rely on money too much and think I can buy my way out of anything. She warns me that one day I won’t be able to buy my way out.
Today is not that day, it seems.
While it may be true that one should not depend on money to such an extent that it stunts personal development, I would argue that no amount of training or practice will ever make organising any less painful for me. Rather than killing myself trying to efficiently organise this project into a holy, ever-knowing, yearly work plan, I could simply outsource the problem to someone else.
Queue in my first collaborators for this project: WhyHive.
I really like WhyHive, and let me tell you why. First, they’re good at what they do, and I know this because I’ve seen their work. Perhaps you’re familiar with some of their collaborations (if not, it’s worth familiarising yourself, especially with She’s a Crowd).
Next, they share common values with me, in that they want to work on projects that have a social impact.
I made a brilliantly naive mistake when creating Red Files in assuming everyone was altruistic like me! It just so happens that’s not the case! Many people who seemed initially interested in leadership roles or ownership of Red Files, suddenly became very unavailable when they were informed they were expected to keep their work confidential and private. It appeared like people weren’t endlessly driven by a sense of justice like I am.
I think we all make the mistake of assuming other people think like us - when it’s often not the case. It took me a long time to wrap my head around the fact that a lot of people choose not to spend a good majority of their energy and time doing things they thought were needed for the betterment of the world. For me, to find people with similar values, who went as far as incorporating these values into a business model is just *chefs kiss*. Finding them was like walking in a desert to see, yet again, another mirage of an oasis, but this time it’s not a mirage.
Let me explain how WhyHive expresses these values in their business. WhyHive takes a real Robin Hood-type of approach to the social enterprise landscape, using their powers of data analysis to contract the rich and discount the poor (hey, that’s me!). But they’re not just data nerds. This lot also has experience in project management, consulting, and a bunch of other business words I really don’t have the tenacity to care for. Which is exactly what I need.
The other day, I had my first big business meeting with WhyHive to focus on deciphering this oh-so-elusive yearly work plan. I’m looking forward to cracking this nut of a plan. But by the end of the meeting, I realised something.
Why do I need to know everything, all at once, from the very beginning? That hardly seems possible. But without a well-structured blessed yearly work plan, how will I know what to do?! Or when to do it?! How do I prevent myself from falling into the swelling depths of ADHD, where I can’t stop doing things that have no relevance to the project at hand?
Well then, it seems like there is no cheat sheet for this project. There is no real recipe to follow. I settle down to forecast my future for only a few weeks, or months, at a time, until the next steps become clearer. I recognise I need a feedback loop, where new information or insights inform the development of a (not nearly as divine as I thought) yearly work plan. I don’t need a totem on the horizon, I need road marks assuring me I’m heading in the right direction.
Is this how the rest of you plan your projects? Or have I completely missed the mark? These are the tools I have on my side: Slack for communications, Trello for to-do lists and allocating tasks, Google Calendar for organising timelines, Google suite for information storage, Excel for a broad spectrum forecast, and my own paper diary.
If you were open to sharing, I’d be interested to hear how you organise your projects to see if there’s anything I can learn from you.
But stay tuned, I should have an announcement to make about the project soon.
That's effectively how we organise projects in my corporate insurance setting now. We're pretty much all-in on an agile type approach and doing things in chunks of a few weeks or a month or so at a time even if we have the bigger picture of what we think we will do (across the quarter, year, etc). We do that through a combination of milestones that are revisable and then having the shorter more detailed 2 week forecast.
I flat-out struggle to not get stuck into things with no relevance to the project at hand.
We have the same basic split of comms (teams), to-do lists and tasks (planner / asana), and then use microsoft products for everything else (sharepoint for information management / storage, excel etc).
My team itself (Data Science) do have some difficulties doing everything cleanly in those two week chunks because our work can be really variable in our firm. We might have some questions we are investigating and it might be the case the data / information my insurance company has is flat-out unreliable, we might not be able to directly answer their question, or we see evidence that it might be the wrong question to ask in the first place.We are often tasked with exploring the data in context of a general problem, and our project managers want longer term planning, but we don't even know what we'll find yet.