What do you see when a manager sends an 11:47pm e-mail about a deliverable that’s due by the next morning? Nothing. The same goes for a client seeing a team leader check in on a deliverable, even if no one told him/her to. What they can’t see are the late nights, early mornings, and long hours that went into creating that deliverable. This moment, although invisible to the client and largely uneventful to anyone outside of the team, represents the actual story of how projects get delivered. We believe this is a good story to tell.
Why do your deliverables look so easy to create from the outside? They’re not from the inside. There’s a human element involved in getting from “yes, we’ll take it” to “the final deliverable.” Below is the human process that takes place behind the scenes at iARATech.
First there is an understanding, not a presumption.
Before any tasks are assigned to individuals, a member of the iARATech team sits down with the project brief and asks questions that may not have been asked in the original project brief. What is this client really looking for? What will make this project truly valuable for their business as opposed to simply being technically completed? The difference between these two is huge.
Next is the hand-off. Hand-offs are never completely smooth.
Let’s face it, every team has some degree of miscommunication during the hand-off process. For example, someone misreads the column header. Two people interpret a deadline differently based on the time zone they are working in. A file comes in a format that was not anticipated. Things like this happen all the time. However, what sets great teams apart is how quickly they identify the problem, fix it, and continue moving without drama. This ability to recover from mistakes quickly is built through many years of doing the same thing (in this case, project management) for 10+ years.
The middle of the project!
The glamorous part of a project is the initial excitement of receiving a new brief. The not-so-glamorous part is the middle of the project when the excitement has worn off and the end of the project is still out of sight.
It is also the part of a project where the details begin to require effort instead of becoming second nature. At iARATech, the middle of the project is also the period in which quality control becomes more strict and not less. We understand that while the majority of the errors occur at the beginning and end of a project, most of the errors occur in the quiet middle of the project when everyone assumes that someone else is watching.
Then, right before the project is to be delivered, someone always finds something.
The number doesn’t add up. The formatting is inconsistent. The section could have been cleaned up a bit more. Whoever that someone is, they are probably the person who cared too much to let it go. Every team has at least one person like this. Our team has several. And we are thankful to each of them.
The delivery of a project is often anticlimactic.
An e-mail. An attachment. A short note explaining what is included. Clean. Professional. On Time. What the client does not see is the version history behind the file. The three internal reviews that were done prior to delivery. The quick meeting that took place at 4 PM the day before delivery. The collective sigh of relief once the send button was clicked. That collective sigh is well-deserved.
Each time, and the next morning, the team opens their computers and begins another project. Not because someone told them to care, but because somewhere along the line, the work became personal, the clients became real, and the goal of providing a quality product became a source of pride.
This is the story that occurs behind the scenes of iARATech. Not perfect, but always genuinely trying.