This work kinda sucks right now

Staying motivated in the uninspiring phases of long projects

In April 2015, I was the technical project manager of six software teams all working on one gigantic project. It was the biggest challenge the company had ever taken on. The goal: create and stand up a transaction account product for small and medium business so that we could apply for an unrestricted bank license.

We were 12 months in and were about to finish the project bang on the week we’d estimated, when the inevitable happened: we received a new raft of requirements that would add at least another 3 months of work. The extra work wasn’t glamorous; it was mostly security enhancements, disaster recovery preparation, and a complicated behind-the-scenes tweak of the product that added little benefit for users but was a requirement from a regulatory point of view.

Understandably, morale took a hit, but we needed to keep the pace up or we’d risk missing the deadline we’d been set for acquiring our license. After an interesting discussion with my father-in-law about the project, I found a new perspective on where we were at, and it prompted me to write the internal blog below to help motivate the team towards our final goal. A few people told me they appreciated it, and grumbling seemed to subside as everyone hunkered down and pushed towards the finish line.

Just recently, though, I was surprised when I overheard a colleague, in a team that is in a similar last-20%-grind scenario, recommending this three-year-old blog to a newer comrade and looking it up for them to read. Curious, I went back and had a re-read of it myself, and I found that what I thought was a point-in-time pep talk for a particular team, was actually a fairly general motivational piece.

So, whether you’re currently in a team slogging its way through the boring final stages of a project, or in the exciting first phases of something that will eventually end up in the same place, I hope you find this useful in granting you some perspective and grit for the long haul.