Most of the time leadership’s ambitions are greater than their willingness to resource them.

If your teams are just jumping directly from one project to the next, you may be sowing the seeds of burnout because how you end projects makes a big difference to the quality of future ones.

Project closures—or sunsets—are just as important as the kick-off.

Transcript

Intro

Most of the time leadership’s ambitions are greater than their willingness to resource them. If your teams are just jumping directly from one project to the next, you may be sowing the seeds of burnout because how you end projects makes a big difference to the quality of future ones.

And this week I want to talk about project sunsets. When I say project, mean, in whatever way you break down your work into a unit of work.

Projects are hypotheses

Every project is a hypothesis. Now you probably know it from OKRs for the actual work of we believe that by doing this thing we’re going to shift this metric and we’ll know if we’ve done it by this time.

But the resourcing of a project is also a hypothesis. Someone, somewhere, maybe you, says, well, I think it’s going to take this amount of people this much time to do this chunk of work.

And obviously it’s based on your experience, but it’s also a guess, right? That’s what a hypothesis is, an informed guess.

What I’ve seen happen often is designers move from finishing a project up with a hectic end on a Friday to starting the new one on Monday morning and they’ve already been in meetings that week previously prepping for it. This gives no time for reflection and importantly it creates no feedback loop to whoever set up the project or sold the work and resourced it in the first place.

So often leadership get the impression that everything’s fine. We asked for this piece of work to be done, we gave these resources and the work got done. What they don’t see is people working at evenings and weekends and people burning out and really stressed, because that doesn’t get fed back up to them and that’s really important. You would likely not skip a project kickoff.

So make this project sunset a part of the way you work. It doesn’t take that long. You can do it in two or three hours and maybe a little bit of extra time to do a case study.

The value of case studies

And I’d really recommend creating a little two page or two slide case study. You may not be in agency land and so you might not think about it for pitching, but those things are really, really useful if you are,

they’re your credentials. But even if you’re working internally, it makes the case for impact and ROI in the future because you sat down and thought about it and very fresh in your mind of all the things you did and the impact you might have had.

So you get used to this idea of articulating the value of your work. They also have another benefit which is really useful for onboarding new people. Invariably new people ask two questions. What does good look like here? Show me some of your work. Show me the projects you’ve done and how you go about them. And when they’re working on something, have we done this before? so I’m not reinventing the wheel.

Closure

Sunsets give people some emotional closure. You get to thank people and show gratitude. It also gives people a chance to say, can we not do this again? Because that was an absolute nightmare. And feed that back. it gives them a moment to have their say.

And that feedback and reflection practice is just like any other reflective practice that you think about what went well, what you would change, what you would improve and learn and that’s how you raise the bar of quality.

Outro

I hope that’s useful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it’s at polaine.com/coaching and I’ll put the link below.

If you have any of your own tips or even templates, post a comment below. I’d love to hear them. Thanks very much. I will see you again soon.