How to (finally!) Tackle that Project (Challenge #87)

Stop me if this sounds familiar. You walk into your office on Monday morning. You say hi to your colleagues, fill up your coffee mug, pull out your to-do list and there it is, staring at you. The Project that’s been gathering dust on your list for 3 months. We’ll call it a TPS report redesign, to give my fellow Gex Xers a chuckle. Redesigning the TPS reports is kinda important, but also not an emergency, and the assignment was pretty vague. Basically, the report, which has been in use since at least 1999, needs to be shorter and work better. And so of course, with a vague destination like that, it hasn’t gotten done. Every Friday it’s been bumped back another week, but now the higher ups are starting to ask about it, and in any case you’re almost as tired of staring at the stupid task on your to-do list as you are of the dang TPS reports themselves! That means, it’s time for a sandwich. Or more accurately, the sandwich method.

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Welcome to the Kind Leadership Challenge, where every Monday morning I teach you how to heal your school or library in the next ten minutes! I’m Dr. Sarah Clark, founder of the Kind Leadership Guild, where I use my PhD in Higher ed leadership and nearly 2 decades of experience in academic libraries to advise a growing community of educational and library leaders who want to build a better world without burning out. 

Kind leaders make the tough decisions without becoming jerks. We plan effective systems that help us get the job done with less money and effort. And we’ve learned that once we stop controlling and start collaborating, any vision becomes possible. To be clear, Kind Leadership’s pretty simple, but it’s rarely easy. So if you’re up for a challenge, stick around to learn how to create a legacy that will strengthen your community long after you’re gone.

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A few words about the sandwich method—this is not what you want to use for some major initiative like a system migration or a building project. This is however a great method for creating a path to complete those fiddly annoying projects that involve more than, say, two or three steps, but less than ten. Something like redesigning a broken process, like our TPS report here. Usually with these kinds of projects you have at least a basic idea of where you want to go, but you’re not sure how to get there. so you postpone it until you have a better idea of what to do, then get distracted by more pressing matters, then still feel like you’re stuck, and postpone it again. All the while the project ends up feeling bigger and scarier the longer it sits undone. 

The good news is that you don’t have to know the whole path to your goal, or even the exact outlines of it. You just need to have that general idea of where you’re heading, where you are right now, and then build on each of those two known points until you’ve filled in enough of the middle to at least get started. You’ll figure out the rest along the way. Hence my calling it the sandwich method, because it’s like a sandwich, where you start with two slices of bread, put the toppings on each piece, and then put the whole thing together.

So, back to our TPS report. You are starting with the current overlong, overcomplicated form that everyone on your team is totally sick of, you included. After thinking about it for a moment while fiddling with your beloved red swingline stapler, you realize your desired endpoint is a mechanism that collects all the data you need to collect in a week to make YOUR stakeholders happy, but no more, and ideally in a short format that can be completed in a few minutes.

After writing out that slightly more detailed description of your desired goal for this plan, some questions pop in your head:
 
 What makes the TPS reports such a pain for everyone?

What data that you’re currently collecting in the TPS report is still needed?

Is a weekly report actually the best way to collect this data?

Those questions, and others that crop up as you go, will inform the steps you want to take to get from the starting line to your goal of collecting necessary data in a manner that doesn’t make people want to burn the building down. 

For instance, these questions have already given you ideas for both your next step and your next to last step. As a team leader, you’ve become the person who collects the TPS reports instead of the ones who have to fill them out. You hated the TPS reports when you were filling them out and still hate them now, but why does your team hate them, and more importantly, do they have ideas about how you could collect the same information more effectively? So your next step should be to get your team’s thoughts about the current situation. And as soon as you write that down, you realize that you need to have the same conversation with your boss. You know roughly what happens when you send your summary of the TPS reports to your supervisor every few weeks, but you’re a little hazy about which bits of data are used for what. Abd just like that, you realize that the first few steps in your plan need to be a fact-finding mission so you can hone in on the exact nature of the problem you’re trying to solve.

 Then, you start thinking of the other side of the sandwich, the last tasks that need to happen before you present TPS 2.0 to the administration for approval. Because just like you need to get more data about the strengths and weaknesses of the current TPS report format from the people who fill them out and the people who analyze them, you also need them to test out the new and hopefully improved report so that you’re not right back in the same place in a few months. So you add testing to the bottom of your project plan, right above delivering the new report format for final approval. 

So, at this point you have your first couple steps, your last couple of steps, and maybe a few key landmarks in the middle. So now you keep filling in the blanks until you have a complete plan and can start, right? 

WRONG. Now is when you take action, in this case gathering more information about the exact uses and evils of the TPS report. Once you’ve done those steps, they will most likely suggest where to go from there. When you get stuck and truly aren’t sure what to do next, that’s where you go back to planning, by figuring out what has you stuck and how you could start to tackle it. By cycling between planning and acting, you will be able to move forward slowly and surely until both your procrastination and that hated TPS report are nothing but a memory.

So, your challenge. Look at your to-do list, particularly the amorphous stuff that’s been hanging out on the bottom of your list for a while. Is there anything on there that’s your personal TPS report? You know, something that isn’t an urgent pain, but that could make life a lot more pleasant if it were fixed? Follow the tips in this episode, start building your sandwich plan, and then take action. You’ll figure out the rest as you go along. 

Thanks as always for listening to the kind leadership challenge, and for growing humanely, managing effectively, and creating collaboratively in your own organization. And if you know someone who might find this episode helpful, hit share in your podcast app or send them over to kindleadershipchallenge.com/87. Never doubt that day by day, you’re building a better world, even if you can't see it yet. So until next time, stay kind now.