Dan Mall shares two ways to keep projects moving: start tasks before they're officially needed so your team stays active, and share rough work constantly as FYI only, no feedback required. This kills surprises and keeps approvals flowing.
Hey, super friends. Have you ever felt like your projects were going a little bit too slow? Like they were just dragging on? You couldn't really build momentum. It felt like you were kind of fighting the tide of the project. Well, I have two quick tips that I want to share with you that hopefully will make your projects feel faster, lighter, a little bit snappier. Especially projects where you have clients or stakeholders that are expecting feedback or you think that they are going to want to give feedback on the stuff that you're doing. The first thing is to kind of look out for the waterfall. So, and the waterfall is the idea that you have to do one thing first before you start the next thing, because that next thing is dependent on the first thing. And so what you have on waterfall projects is a lot of people sitting around where you have the minority of your team, maybe one person or two people doing the brunt of the work at the moment, while the rest of the team is just kind of sitting around and waiting for those people to finish their work. That usually happens when it's UX designers or researchers or information architects that tend to have to do work, or content strategies tend to have to do work before a designer could start, before an engineer or developer could start. Sometimes happens with design where designers are doing work and then developers or engineers are kind of waiting to see what the designers design in order to actually build things. One of the ways to correct that is to just start the work a little bit earlier. And I think one of the keys to that is not giving yourself pressure to finish any of the work, but just to start it. So don't worry about finishing it. If you're a developer, you. You can start doing things while your information architect is architecting or your designer is designing. You can start some of your work because some of your work actually isn't dependent on the work that comes before. Some of it is. And that's the stuff that you might have to wait on, but you can at least start, and especially without the pressure to finish. Maybe that's the thing that makes everything feel like you're going a little bit earlier, you're doing things in advance, and that's the kind of stuff that starts to build momentum on a project. So that's thing one. Thing two is really trying to take advantage of showing work in progress. And now it feels a little bit counterintuitive because when you share something, especially with the client or even with the internal team, you sort of expect feedback to come, right? So the tendency is, let me finish the work. That I'm doing so that I can send it to a team or send it to a client and then get feedback on it. If I only post half of it, they're not gonna be able to give feedback on that. Now, one thing that's a little bit counterintuitive to that is actually you can get into the habit of posting things without any feedback, just to let people know where you're going. And what happens with there is that you start to eliminate surprise. Right? And that's really the thing that ruins projects, is when people or clients or your team are surprised by things because they don't know what's coming. They don't know what form it's coming in or things like that. So if you just get in the habit of sharing work in progress, for example, if you're working on a wireframe deck, rather than posting or all 12 wireframes or waiting until you finish all 12 wireframes, post the first three or the first four. And when you post them to the team or you post them to the client, you just say, hey, I want to give you a sense of where I'm headed. No feedback necessary right now. So it basically just says, here's an FYI, I'm giving you something that you can consider, you can look through it, but I'm not really ready for feedback. And the more often you do that, you actually get into this rhythm of you're not waiting for approvals, because approvals and feedback are really one of the big things that drain a project and drag it down and make it feel like it's just hard to get momentum. So once you establish that rhythm of work in progress, work in progress, work in progress, no feedback needed, no feedback needed, no feedback needed, then you start to get a project that has momentum, where you're not waiting for things, you're just posting, posting, posting, posting. And then with your clients or with your stakeholders, really what you're looking for is for them to have to stop you if you're headed in the wrong direction, as opposed to encourage you to go on. So you start to eliminate this start and stop, start and stop thing where you're doing a big chunk of work, and then you stop for feedback, and. And then you're doing a revision, a big chunk of revision, and then you stop for feedback. So you're just starting to do some of those things where you're building momentum, and that starts to get you in a project where the cadence is light and the cadence is frequent, and you're actually moving and building momentum in the project, and that way that brings the team closer to the work because they're seeing work in progress. That brings the client or your stakeholders closer to the work because you're actually making progress and not expecting them to have feedback. And, and that actually alleviates the burden on people who you post things to because sometimes people feel like, well, somebody posted this, I have to give feedback on it, otherwise I'm not doing my part as part of this team. So if you can set the expectation that, hey, I'm just sharing a quarter of this right now or a third of this right now, I don't really need any feedback right now. You start to build that momentum of not waiting for approval, not waiting for things, and then it also models behavior for other folks to post work in progress too. And that's where a lot of good work comes from, where you can actually build momentum and, and go really quickly in a project. Hope this is a. Hope these are some helpful tips in your project and looking forward to seeing what you all do. Thanks. Bye.
