When You’re Deep in the Project Weeds, How Do You Keep a 10,000-Foot View?

Building a website is kind of like skydiving.

There you are with this beautiful end goal ahead of you, staring down at the view from a mile away, and screaming toward it at a hundred miles an hour.

One of the questions I’ve been asking myself and my team lately is how do we keep our eyes on the big picture while we’re pumping with the adrenaline of a fast-moving and sometimes chaotic project?

How do we keep that 10,000 foot view in the middle of the fall?

We need sanity checks along the way:

• Are we going in the right direction?
• Are we still in-line with the initial project goals and strategy?
• Are change requests coming because there are too many cooks in the kitchen, or because they’re truly the right thing for the project?

We’ve been putting some systems in place to help us maintain perspective throughout a project. We’re combining regular checkpoint meetings (the dreaded M-word) and early project documentation.

Checkpoint Meetings

We schedule meetings at set periods throughout every project -- at 25%, 50%, and 75%. As a project team, we use these check-ins to ask ourselves and each other:

• Are we on the right track?
• Do we still have the same goals, the same constraints, and the same resources?
• Has anything primary changed about the project since kick-off (or the last check-in)?

Early Project Documentation

Sometimes we’re running so hard and fast, we jump right from an approved proposal into the project work. The problem there is that half-way through when we need a common, agreed-upon set of guidelines and project goals, the only thing we have to refer to is the project proposal -- which was organized and tailored for the client. Not exactly the right tool for our internal compass-setting. So now we set up at least two additional internal docs at the kickstart of a project:

1. Process Document: The project timeline, key steps, and deliverables.
2. Scope Document: A technical brief that defines project requirements and our execution approach.

In addition to those docs, we also use project management software (Asana) to set up and assign project tasks; reference the approved budget from our client proposal; and rely heavily on our account manager to keep us aligned with the big picture as we dive into the nitty gritty.

So the good news is that we’ve added a few safety features to catch us in our free-fall toward a launch date in case the parachute won’t open. And even if we don’t keep our eyes wide open the whole time that we’re hurtling toward the landing pad, at least we’re peeking out at the horizon line from time to time to make sure we haven’t drifted too far off-course.

Anyone have a skydiving story to share? Bring it on.