EPISODE 039 - Organisation: How do I stay motivated during long projects?

Michael Seidl: Welcome to a new episode of the Get Shit Done on IT podcast. My name is Michael Seidel and the topic of this episode is how do I stay motivated during long projects? And I often see these customers and also by myself that it is very important to have, if you have bigger projects, to take care, to plan it in a specific way to make sure that you're not losing motivation during that project. You're not losing focus. and the goal and those projects and those things what helped me I want to share today. And the first thing is to break down your project in smaller steps. So if you plan to maybe upgrade all your old 2016 servers to, I don't know, 2022 or 2025. If you just do that project and that's it and you go from day to day that it would be hard to keep track and to stay motivated. So if you break it down to smaller steps, it is much easier. You have always an overview where you add at this project and maybe also your supervisor have a live view of those projects. So if you break it down to smaller steps, And it might be clear that what the steps are, but it is different to write it down, to maybe think about a few minutes. you, and it's also okay to add more steps during that project. So it's not about you write down your steps and that's it. You're not allowed to add anything. It is okay to add more steps in the future. if you, maybe for this project, take five or 10 minutes, what are the steps? What is the logical way, the logical step? to achieve upgrading all your old servers to the newest OS. So the easy step would be maybe make a list of all your servers, maybe either virtual or physical, either in the cloud or on the private cloud. What applications run on those servers? So this is Microsoft application, then it might be a little bit easier to upgrade. Are the third party applications, then maybe you need to take

Michael Seidl: need to talk to the vendor. And so those would be the logical steps. Maybe you need to buy new hardware, new software, new licenses, different programs, because maybe the existing software is not allowed and not able to run on latest versions of server operating systems. And that's the little steps you have to plan. If you also mark those steps as done, you're also staying focused, you stay in line and you also see what you already achieved. So if you have a project, for example, about 50 tasks and you see after maybe one week, you already did 10 of those. I think it's very motivating. So you see that you have already achieved 20 % of that project at least, according to the tasks. Of course, some tasks take longer time and so on. And the second thing is also your maybe project leader or your boss or your team leader has a live view on that project. So you don't have to write anything when you want a status update. You just give him that to do list and you see, okay, 10 steps are done, 40 to go. And that's also good for your... for colleagues and for yourself. what maybe fits in that same topic is to visualize the way what you already achieved in that project. So if you have those steps and you mark it as done, you see what you already accomplished, what you already done. And that's also very motivating to see, okay, we already did 10 tasks, 40 to go. It's easy, easy, easy. And to celebrate the small success, maybe not with a huge party, but at least maybe if you stand regularly with your team on a team meeting, social fixes, whatever, maybe you can just throw it in. Hey, we already did 20 % of this project. So, wow, we did already achieve that and this. so you can do a little celebration of this. And this is really, really helpful to

Michael Seidl: to make sure staying motivated. One more thing is to break bigger projects down to different phases. So not the small steps, but different child projects or phases. So for example, we often do automatic user onboarding for our customers. And normally, the state when we... initially have the first contact with our customers. The normal state is the IT sometimes gets a note that a new user is coming. Sometimes he is already at the front door and we need a new user and hardware now. So that's usually the state. And from this on, the goal is to have a completed automatic user onboarding without the interaction of the IT department. And this is a very huge step or a lot of steps to do and this things we are breaking down in phases okay so the first phase would be to to maybe have

Michael Seidl: The first step would be to use the existing workflow and automate those steps with some minor changes and to use it as a tool for the IT. The IT is then using that automated steps and doing the same. To get the node, maybe, maybe not, but to have at least a tool at hand to onboard a user in a few minutes. Okay. So all those things in Active Directory, Azure licenses, whatever can then be done automatically by the IT. And then the next step would be to go to the HR department to say, Hey, we need that information from you because HR mostly gets informed at the first point when a new employee is coming. Okay. So then we go step by step or face to face. And that's a huge difference if you break it down to those phases. So, and also next one is to maybe remind yourself what is the purpose of this project. In our last example, it would be to move away those manual steps from the IT department to move that complete process away from the IT department so they can focus on different things. on involvement of other systems and so on. And to keep an eye on this. It might sound very easy, but it helps a lot to write those initial idea and goal down to project description or something like this and remind yourself what is the goal of this. So if you have a project that takes a half year, a year, and you're just not sure why you're doing all those shit. It reminds you what will be the outcome and that helps to recharge you with motivation. And one more thing on top of the last one is if you break it down in those phases, it is also a huge increase of making sure that the project will not fail. So for example, what I told you with the user onboarding, if you are at that level that

Michael Seidl: as IT, you do all the user onboarding manually and you hope to get the information before the new employee stands on the door, then it's a huge step to HR is completely in charge for user employment and IT only takes care about the system. That's a huge step. And if you try to do this project in one step or in one task or in one phase, it will definitely fail. because you will work maybe one year on those projects without any outcome. You don't see any outcome until you're finished. And if you do it in little phases, then just doing automation of that what the IT is already doing, but everything else stays the same. Then the IT has an immediate outcome and see the benefits of this thing. And then you can take the next step and the benefit increases and so on. But if you do the huge step, You put in work, you put in work maybe for a whole year without seeing any outcome, without seeing anything what it is worth for. And that's really frustrating. And I can guarantee you this project will definitely fail because I already did it a few times in the past because maybe customers want to try it. Maybe they don't believe what we saw already in different projects and that wanted to try, but maybe they're not always able to see what comes on the side to this project. So make it sure you do your project in smaller steps, small phases. And so you see an outcome, a return of your investment. And then it keeps you motivated to do more, you see more and so on. And that's what helps me to stay motivated. on longer projects. So that's for this episode. If you have any questions, send me a message on LinkedIn, a text message or a voice message. And for this, I wish you a happy week. Stay productive and bye bye.