First Rule - The mission is the mission! or Eyes on the prize
Most major accomplishments throughout human history have required dedication to a mission: traveling to the moon, winning a major sports championship, writing a novel, or painting a great work of art. Completing a significant project at work is no different. A brilliant project manager I had the pleasure of working with used to say, “The mission is the mission.” I love this expression because it encapsulates so much of the focus and drive that made the teams he led so consistently successful.
In a nutshell: The overall goal of your project must be clear; it must be quantified; it must be understood and agreed to by the stakeholders. And, importantly, any activities that don’t support the project goal must be delegated, postponed, or dropped altogether.
Some effective ways to stay focused on the mission include:
The desired outcomes and deliverables must be crystal clear. Use SMART goals to define the mission.
Make the mission and intermediate milestones visible to the team. Hold a kickoff meeting, and remind/refresh more often than you’d think you need to.
If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Have only one mission; discard secondary goals or delegate them to another team.
This theme, dedication to the mission, includes acting on new (better) ideas and removing barriers to success. When the standard way of doing things is getting in the way of the project goals, the standard should be questioned (and changed if it makes sense). When a single group’s imperatives or metrics run counter to the overall team’s project goals, they should be questioned and changed if necessary.
Remain focused on the mission and you will achieve great things!
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Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
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