Have you ever found yourself stuck in the middle of a project that has come to a perpetual standstill? It’s likely that the project is stalled due to internal factors that are completely in your control. This is a common problem, but can easily be avoided if you’re organization is willing to change its fundamental project management mindset.

Let’s take a look at the why both internal and client projects can get stalled out, the mindset shift your team needs to have in order to achieve progress and how to apply them in your organization.

If you’re like most business owners or marketers you’ve probably been involved in a project that hit “quicksand” and came to a virtual standstill. You got so entrenched in the excitement, chaos and flow of ideas that the project’s progress spiraled to a halt.

Many times this standstill occurs right under your nose and isn’t even recognized until you took a step back to observe the project’s landscape to see what’s really happening in regards to actionable workflow.

I’m currently experiencing this slowdown with a new project I’m working on. Over the last 6-months I’ve been developing Master Inbound, a comprehensive Inbound Marketing online training Learning Management System. Our goal was to develop a minimal viable product (MVP) for the course, get it to market, collect feedback and continuously develop the content.

However, the project has hit a wall over the last two months and has been crawling along. I didn’t even realize the project was stalled out until I took a step back and asked two important questions.

1. Are we going to hit our launch deadline?
2. If not, why has progress slowed?

It was at this point that I had realized that we had run into a barrier of progress called, “Feature Creep” (which we will talk about more below). We had gotten caught up in all the excitement of developing our Inbound Marketing course that next thing we knew it wasn’t a MVP anymore, it was a HUGE course with over 200 lessons comprised of 20+ hours of whiteboard videos. With so much content to produce, the project stalled out and has been crawling along for the last two months.

So how did we adjust in order to kick start the project’s progress? I’ll tell you, however, first let’s take a deeper look at the most common reasons projects stall out so we can identify how to avoid them within your organization.

Feature Creep

Have you ever been working on a project where you and your team have tons of amazing ideas just flowing. Everyone keeps thinking of awesome features and functionality to add to the project in order to make it even better. Although ideas are awesome, the slowing down effect that can happen once you try and implement all your ideas can cause another form of paralysis: Feature Creep.

Feature creep occurs when you have too many features or ideas to act effectively on. Instead of focusing on 3-4 critical features, your resources and brainpower are scattered over 50 features which ultimately will cause a delay in the project and even cause a poor production of the critical features.

This is exactly what happened with our Master Inbound project. We kept thinking of great lessons and topics that we wanted to create content for and before we knew it we had over 200 lessons. Having so many lessons to create caused a stall on the project.

An example of this that could happen in your agency would be if you did a website audit and identified 10 important SEO updates to complete. Then while implementing those updates you thought of some conversion rate optimization changes and then some additional UX/UI changes and next thing you knew you have a task list three pages long with little to no actual action taken on any of them.

The approach one should take instead is to identify the key features that generate the majority of the value for the users/client. Then identify the other “this would be nice” features and add them to a cue for future campaigns or releases. If you use this prioritization concept, it will allow you to continue to focus on the key features that actually matter and get your project or minimal viable product completed faster.

Analysis and Planning

In my opinion, this is one of the most common reasons projects stall out. Termed “Paralysis by Analysis” this can occur when a team digs too deep and over thinks every possible facet of the project.

“What if this happens” – “Should we word it this way, or this way” – “This data says this, but other data says this” … these are the types of questions that start the “snowball” rolling down the mountain and before you know it that snowball is the size of a house; Stuck in paralysis questioning and pondering the best way to do everything with no results. 

A common scenario where marketing agencies get caught in the analysis and planning “trap” is when they are developing the initial strategy for a client. It was an old train of thought to spend countless hours plan out the entire year of marketing activities up front with great detail. Years ago, before the internet turned the marketing world on its head, this could have been possible.

Now days, the world is dynamic and every changing place. If an agency plans too far in advance and something new comes out to cause a shift (new technology, new communication method, etc.), all the time and energy that when into the initial planning was wasted. In an effort to avoid waste and become more agile with clients, I would suggest planning each quarter in detail with simply a global vision for the other 9 months. Then break down those three months in one-month sprints focused on one specific objective with validated learning.

Don’t get me wrong, analyzing, planning and strategizing are the most important parts of any project. It is the foundation and will set the tone for if a project is a success or failure. However, there needs to be a balance between planning and action.

When in doubt, have a bias towards action so you can finalize and implement your strategy. Here’s why…

• My Question to You: How can you 100% prove your strategy will be successful?

The answer is you can’t and this is why your strategy is just a starting point. There is no possible way to say that you’ve created the absolute perfect recipe for success, it’s simply an educated hypothesis of what you believe will work.

Your goal should be to complete and implement your strategy and then test each one of your hypothesis within your strategy to see if what you predicted was correct. If you were correct, we push forward with that piece of the strategy. If you were wrong, then we pivot and change directions towards a new hypothesis, getting us closer to the perfect strategy.

This process of scientific testing, measuring and adjustment is called “Validated Learning”. Every time we test a hypothesis, we are learning and becoming smarter about what actually works and doesn’t work with that particular project and industry.

The graphic below explains how we can use validated learning to pivot or preserver on different components of a project in order to get it closer to achieving our goals and success. 

It’s possible that you are spending countless hours planning and perfecting a strategy that in the end is completely in the wrong direction. In this case, you wasted hours upon hours due to over planning.

The critical thing to keep in mind is that the ONLY way to perform validated learning and direct your project to success is to take action and get your project live. If you get stuck in this “pit” of over planning and analysis you will never be able to start testing your hypothesis. Again, the strategy development and implementation isn’t the end point, it’s a starting point on which you can build and adapt from.

Perfection

There is one in every organization; the individual who is in a perpetual pursuit of perfection. I have seen first-hand how the pursuit of perfection has caused projects to stall out and never take off. This is the third item to keep in mind when examining the progress of your project.

I’m not suggesting that there shouldn’t be a lack in attention to detail and that the small things don’t matter, however, there comes a point where you and your team need to put a stake in the ground and say, “This is it. It might not be perfect, but it’s damn good. Let’s get this puppy to market and start testing our hypotheses and make educated improvements“

Remember, there is always opportunity to make tweaks and updates on future version updates. The goal is to be always biased towards action and getting the project public to perform validated learning. This should always be your number one concern. Spending grueling hours on the search for perfection is a waste of time if you find out the product didn’t align with users in the first place.

So Change the Way You Think – It’s Time to G.S.D.

It can be so easy to get stuck in this slippery slope of paralysis within projects. The more complex the project, the more likely this can happen. Ultimately, your goal should be creating action and progress.

My suggestion is to host a 15-minute meeting each morning where each person talks about their project they are working on and answers one simple question: “Am I Getting Shit Done (G.S.D.)?”

When at answer is “no.” for too many days in a row, it’s time to take a step back and see which one of the above problems is affecting the progress of the project. Then work collectively with the entire team to overcome the obstacle to keep moving forward.

In the case of Master Inbound, we identified the problem of feature creep by starting to host these types of meetings. Once identified, we took a step back to identify what critical lessons needed to be in the LMS for us to launch. Once identified, we could focus in on getting these critical lessons complete and figure out creative solutions for those lessons we haven’t completed yet.

This will allow us to launch the course, gain the valuable feedback from initial students of what lessons are important and valuable and then start creating content based on that feedback. This approach will allow us to solidify a launch for this quarter and after launch continue moving the course forward with the user in mind.

In your agency or organization, make it a part of your standard process to schedule in validated learning. Break your implementation into short monthly sprints so you can easily perform this learning and make educated decisions whether to pivot or preserver on the piece of the strategy you’re testing.

I hope this blog has given you some new perspective to start an internal discussion within your organization on how to avoid these types of project paralyzing problems. I want to hear your thoughts, please comment below.

Learn More:

If you found this blog interesting, I’d highly suggest reading Eric Ries’ book, “The Lean Startup”. Many of the project management topics talked about in this blog are from the lean startup movement. Additionally, here's a great presentation by Eric:Youtube: Eric Ries Explains "The Lean Startup"