WHY DOES IT MATTER?
Pushing work to the back of the desk and neglecting it can result in one or more of the following outcomes:
- It rots. Stakeholders become upset, and relationships are damaged. Even with the best relationships, and the most understanding stakeholders, programmes can be of utmost importance to them
- It goes backwards. You lose elements because people move on, stuff gets lost or forgotten about. This means when you do pick it up again, you may have to redo work that has previously been done – at a greater cost than necessary.
- It turns into a monster. If the programme or project has hard delivery dates – even if they are a long way out – the time pressures when you pick it back up again can throw a well-organised programme into chaos.
- Very occasionally, nothing happens. This could be because it was a “now” piece of work – ie it only delivers benefits in a very short term, or, it could have been work that was not well-scoped and benefits not well identified in the first place, and nobody misses it when it goes AWOL
While people are working from home, it can be a good idea to do some future planning, package up your work, and put a nice bow on it so that when someone picks it back up, it is tidy and ready to go again. Timing is everything – a programme that is attractive, easy to restart, and under control is vastly more likely to be successful than one that has people holding their noses or running for the hills. What sorts of things should we think about?