Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes digging down into the hidden history of a project helps the project crawl out of a hole. And, of course, sometimes not.

I used to do this frequently. I was given a project that had “lost its way” or “fallen out of favor” or simply been left to rot in the file cabinet of life. It became my job to learn what was happening and what to do next.

I called these “project archeological digs.” I would come into the office on a Saturday. I pulled all the files out of the file cabinet (we used paper, file folders, file cabinets, etc. in the last century) and lay them flat on the floor so I could see all of them. This is why I did this on Saturday as no one would walk through and literally step on the project. Next, I would arrange the folders in some logical order—sometimes chronologically, sometimes alphabetically, sometimes by the thickness of the pen strokes on the folder labels (strong, bold, thick pen strokes often indicated importance). Basically,

Disassemble the project so I can reassemble it.

The basic reason for the digging was to learn a few things:

• Why was this project started?
• Who worked the project?
• When did it fall into the dirt?
• Why did it fall into the dirt?
• Who is still sort of working on this project?

Sometimes—I emphasize sometimes as this didn’t always work—knowing how a project fell away helped to find how to bring the project back. Sometimes, all this digging revealed a good reason to terminate the project and stop spending money on it. Projects that linger still consume precious resources.

It is at this point that I write some grand reason for all this. Maybe this won’t be grand, but…

Every organization has projects that are still going, but most persons don’t realize that. These projects are buried, but not terminated. They consume resources. Dig into the history. Find the persons who still care. Use the information of the past to decide the course of the future. This is a difficult and often thankless task. Still, I always found it worth the Saturday morning.