When I was a young boy and attending school, there were art classes that I kind of liked. You either were told cool stories about lunatic painters or painted cool pictures by yourself. I still remember one particular assignment that sticks out to me: draw a bird!
In case you ask what this blog entry is all about: It is about project management and expectation management. It will stray a little bit into process territory. But mostly, it’s about a picture of a bird in a jungle.
When the teacher told us the task for the next weeks, my imagination ran wild. Draw a bird! I envisioned a stork-like bird with long legs and a long beak, fishing by a river in a tropical setting. The river would flow through a full-blown jungle with lots of plants and insects and things to discover. The bird would be in the center of the picture, drawing your attention to its eyes as it hovered over a fish in the water, ready for the strike that would provide its supper. But if your eyes follow the water, you would see that the bird is just a piece in a complex ecosystem with lots of untold stories. My pen would tell some of those stories!
We had rougly two hours of art class, so I had to move fast. Because the bird was the essential piece of my picture, I had to draw it last, on top of the background jungle and aligned with all the secondary motives. In the first hour, the jungle grew on my sheet of paper, following the outlined river. If I grew weary of drawing plant leaves, I added a bug or a little snake. Somewhere, a happy little jungle squirrel peaked through the green (Ok, that’s not true. I didn’t know about Bob Ross back then and my squirrel was probably not happy).
The thing was, the art class was suddenly over. My jungle wasn’t completed yet. Worse, the entire river, fish and bird were still missing. The teacher asked me if I misunderstood the assignment. What a joke! Of course I understand, my bird will be majestic – once it is finished next week.
I peeked at the pictures of my classmates. Most of them had some bird-like outlines, a beak or a foot. Nobody had finished their drawing. As far as I was concerned, I was well within expectations. Many classmates took their picture home to work on it in the afternoon. I waited until next week, I was certain about my plan.
Next week came and a sudden realization followed: Most of my classmates had indeed worked on their bird at home. Their drawings were energetic, strong and defined. They looked like black-and-white copies of bird photographies and nothing like the awkward lines from last week. They had traced an image through their sheet and called it a day. Two classmates had even traced the same image and produced essentially identical birds. Those cheaters. Not me!
When half the class had already turned in the assignment, the pressure began to rise for the strugglers. My plans were in jeopardy and I skipped several trees and mountains in the outskirts of the picture to save time. This also meant I had to fade out the picture at the edges to make it seem deliberately.
This art class went over so fast, I still hadn’t drawn my bird when the bell rang. The teacher wanted to collect our pictures, but I had to bargain for a week of work at home. With that much time at my disposal, I could implement my plans. I drew six evenings and half the weekend. My jungle was never right. My river wasn’t as dynamic as envisioned. But most of all, my bird was nowhere near majestic. It was a stork-like bird, but way too small. It didn’t hover over the fish, I had to make it dive into the water to even be near its prey. In the end, I had spend around 20 hours on a two-hour assignment that produced a drawing of a jungle that happened to have a hungry, desperate bird in the middle. Somewhere in the outskirts, a squirrel laughed.
The teacher gave me a mediocre grade out of pity. It was clear I didn’t copy from anywhere. But it was also clear as the water of the river in my jungle that I didn’t follow the instructions at all.
Looking back now, I can smile about the naive boy that set out to tackle a task that nobody asked for while getting lost and receiving an average grade for an enormous effort. You can probably already see that the return on investment was awful.
The interesting thing for me to see clearly now is that the project was doomed from the start. Mostly because I didn’t work on the teacher’s assignment, I worked on my own assignment. And my own assignment was much bigger than the original one, but the time budget was not. If you don’t see it as clearly, just count the words in the teacher’s assignment (“draw a bird” – 3 words) and just the nouns in my plan. Calculate one hour for every noun and you can see how this would never have worked. So this is the first take-away: Always make sure that you work on your customer’s project and not your own. If the customer didn’t use a specific noun in the mission statement, why did we include it in our project plan? In my story, the teacher never even mentioned a “background”. Just a bird. Draw it and be done. Go home and draw the jungle in your spare time.
The next thing that sticks out now for me is that I delayed the essential work (the bird) as much as possible. This is exactly the wrong approach if you want to act at least a little bit agile. Cover the essential things first and fill in the details later. In my today’s work, we call it the “risk first approach”. The most critical part comes first. It might not be pretty, it might not be complete, but it already works. Applying this to my story: If I had drawn the bird first (big and majestic in the middle), I could have called it quits anytime afterwards. Nobody asked for more and my teacher wouldn’t grade the background – only the bird.
The third thing is about expectation management: The teacher expected us to try, fail and cheat at home. Those clearly traced pictures matched the assignment better than my work. I just refused to fail and start over. I didn’t set out to match the expectations of my teacher, I wanted to fulfill my own expectations that were not grounded in reality. I even ignored the grading scheme of my teacher (my customer, but I couldn’t see it that way at that time) and got upset when all my effort just yielded a mediocre grade.
Today, I see all these things and can handle them successfully. As a young boy, those were foreign concepts for me. Between the two points in time, I acquired concepts, terms and words to reflect on the process. But I’m still learning. Perhaps you see something in the story that I haven’t seen yet? Tell me in a comment below!
Nevertheless, I often think about my bird in the jungle as a reminder to keep on track.
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