It’s a Waterfall, not a Sprint!

Last week, I walked out of the Harvard Vanguard in Fenway as an official graduate of their physical therapy rehabilitation program for Achilles tendonitis. Four months earlier, I had decided that I was going to run the Boston Marathon. I did what any wise and patient trainee would do, and immediately tried to run 40 miles in the next week.

Bad Move.

If you know anything about training for marathons, you know that you’re supposed to begin training months in advance, and slowly ramp up your distance over a long period of time. I did some basic research and read about this, but I scoffed at it. I had been a soccer player my whole life, and I ran 2-3 miles a few times a week. I’d never experienced any injuries due to running, so I thought I’d be fine if I tried to get a good start my first week of training. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it; plus, I was really excited!!

Surprisingly to me and unsurprisingly to my physical therapist, I injured both of my Achilles tendons due to overuse and I had to go through rehabilitation. In the meantime, I needed to find a way to relieve energy and stress, and I decided to borrow a guitar from my brother and start learning – what a fun idea! Predictably, I tried to play so much in the first few days that I tore up the skin on my fingertips and had to take a breather.

Since then, I’ve come to realize that this is emblematic of my personality. Once I feel motivated to start something, I often dive in headfirst in a rush of excitement, without proper planning, preparation, or patience, and I found that this occurs when managing projects as well.

In the PMO at Dana-Farber, we run most of our projects with a Waterfall methodology. If you’re not familiar with the terminology, part of what this means is that we plan all aspects of our project out before executing, and we try to gather all of our requirements and risks during the planning phase so that during the execution phase we can carry out our plan with minimal changes. An alternative popular methodology is called the Agile methodology, where development is done in shorter time periods called sprints, and planning is done on the fly, sprint by sprint.

Since I started here at Dana-Farber back in September, I’ve been assigned to assist and manage some pretty interesting projects, and I get really enthusiastic about them. Enthusiasm is all well and good, but what I’ve realized after some frustrating weeks and some self-reflection (and assisted reflection from my mentor Meagan Turner), is that this enthusiasm causes me to try and sprint through everything – I want all risks to be resolved as fast as possible and all decisions to be made without any hiccups, so that we can begin, execute, finish the project, and succeed!

Unfortunately, that’s not the way the world works, and I’ve since realized that I need to adjust my expectations during the planning phase– planning is important, and it’s not easy; new requirements will constantly arise, time estimates will lengthen, and budgets will grow tight. I’ve learned two valuable lessons from the perspective of a project manager dealing with this.

First of all, as a project manager, you can only control so much. You don’t necessarily get a vote in the important decisions about the content of your project. Your job is to understand the decisions that are made and plan accordingly. It can be frustrating when these decisions change your carefully planned out schedule, but I’ve learned to accept that change will happen, and it isn’t worth stressing about things that are out of your control.

The second lesson I learned was that just because changes occur, it doesn’t make you a “bad PM”. I used to worry whenever a missing requirement was determined, because I thought it reflected badly on me if our timeline estimate was pushed out or if something would cost more than originally budgeted for. I know now that these changes are not only inevitable, they can be a good thing. For every change that arises during planning, there’s one fewer issue that would have arisen during execution. The fact that these changes occur doesn’t make you a bad PM; it’s how you deal with them that reflects your measure. Follow the methodology, plan for risks, and deal with issues as they arise. Use your change control plan as a guide, and don’t lose hope – the darkest hour is just before the dawn!

You did make a change control plan, right?

As for my Achilles tendons, they are fully healed, and I am finally able to run again. Perhaps this time I’ll create a training plan. First entry of the plan: wait until its warmer!