Got a high-pri­or­i­ty project up your sleeve?  Cool, me too.  Think hard at the begin­ning of the project about where you want it to go.  What is the pur­pose of this goal?  Write down ten­ta­tive con­clu­sions for your project.

By writ­ing ten­ta­tive con­clu­sions for your project and focus­ing on the final prod­uct, you will be able to break­down the project into small­er, man­age­able actions, eval­u­ate your tasks and rank them in order of impor­tance.  Spend a day (or more) gath­er­ing research and estab­lish­ing your ten­ta­tive con­clu­sion.  This data will help you dri­ve your pro­jec­t’s strat­e­gy.  You can apply this method­ol­o­gy to what­ev­er project you’re work­ing on.  

As your project pro­gress­es, you will need to reassess what you’re doing.  Approach your project as researcher would approach the sci­en­tif­ic method. Come up with a set of hypothe­ses, test those and reassess your project based on your find­ings.

Too often, though it seems log­i­cal, we tend to start at the begin­ning of a project and work our way down with­out real­ly know­ing where we’re going and with­out check­ing to see if pri­or­i­ties should be shift­ed based on what’s hap­pen­ing in the mar­ket.  How many com­pa­nies can we think of (or have been a part of) that start a project — per­haps a new product–and spend weeks and even months work­ing with­out stop­ping to assess their goals because they’re so busy try­ing to reach their dead­line.

In web devel­op­ing, I often see devel­op­ers spend a real­ly long time work­ing on a project, the client does not inter­rupt the progress and 9 months lat­er their web­site is ready to launch.  How­ev­er, tech­nol­o­gy is con­stant­ly chang­ing and now their new web­site needs to be respon­sive, or mobile friend­ly if it wants to keep up with con­sumer expec­ta­tions. This respon­sive fea­ture was very new 9 months ago, but became more stan­dard 4 months ago.  As a pro­fes­sion­al, inform your clients about the new changes in tech­nol­o­gy.  As a client, keep up with trends; talk to your team about fea­tures that you can aban­don or replace.  Try the “back­wards” method, stop mid­way to check on progress, reassess (when nec­es­sary) and save weeks of research, mon­ey and resources.