How to Ruin your project – 6 pro tips!

Tip 1. Don’t tell anyone anything.

If teammates ask you what you are doing with your project and want to know if they can help you, do not answer them, blank them…

It’s a lot better for shaping your project if nobody in the team or the customer knows what you’re doing. Then they cannot interfere with you and help you to accomplish your goals. Even if you need help, the same rule applies: speaking is silver, silence is gold.

Tip 2. Keep the customer uninformed.

Why should you regularly provide updates about the progress of the project? “It’s done when I say it’s done”. It is much more fun if the end result is a complete surprise for the customer! Interviews provide you with the risk that the customer will change their mind in the meantime, which will give you more work and change the end result. By not informing the customer now, you increase the chance that he will be dissatisfied after presenting the final result.

Tip 3. Just good enough.

Good is never good enough. Therefore, just aim for your project to meet the bare requirements. Only the obsessed in your organisation and the customers will care, and if you let them get involved they will just delay you by going over small details that can only be a bit better. Whether it’s fit for use is not important…

Tip 4. Only do projects that are FUN.

Just take projects that are really fun to run. Feasibility and yield, what does that matter? If you only do fun projects, you will have a great time at work. Therefore, take a critical look at the fun factor of projects and consider it the most important argument for entering or rejecting a project.

Tip 5. Find a Scapegoat.

Keep your ass covered. By doing whatever you are doing, you will be able to document every piece of code that you type and document each post you send. Of course, you should be able to prove that if something fails it was not your fault. Documenting everything makes sure you have irrefutable proof that you were not responsible for any mistakes. Tip: find a scapegoat, you can point your guilty finger at someone else, preferably someone who hasn’t documented every keystroke.

Tip 6. Plan once.

At the start of the project, you make a plan. This plan needs to stay the same throughout the entire project, whether it’s a month or two years! Never change your plan. It does not make sense to keep track of schedule changes and add them to your planning. With a little luck, when something fails because your schedule is not up to date, you can tell your customer that the delay is because it wasn’t planned so isn’t your fault.

Congratulations! If you’ve followed all of these tips, your project has been a gigantic failure and you’ll probably be fired! (If that was your aim, well done!) Are you curious about how to successfully complete a project? Feel free to contact us about our consulting services.

By Richard De Boer