Three Good Projects, One Bad Fortnight

There's a fortnight coming where everything is due at once.

Two submissions, a client presentation that can't move because somebody is flying in, and a site that's reached the stage where it needs you there twice a week. Everybody in the studio will work late. Something will go out less resolved than it should be, and whichever one that is will be decided by what day of the week the panic arrives rather than by which project deserved it.

Now look at how that fortnight was built. Three separate conversations, spread over about nine months, in which three projects were taken on. Every one of those was a good decision. Decent fee, client you wanted, work you were glad to get. Nobody made a mistake, and you would take all three again.

The fortnight is just where those three projects happen to arrive, and the arithmetic of that was never done by anybody.

This is the part that gets misread. In the middle of a fortnight like that, the questions everyone asks are about the week in front of them. Who's overloaded. Who has any room. Which project needs somebody put on it. And the questions feel urgent, which disguises the fact that they've become unanswerable. Nobody has room. Every project needs support. All three answers are the same answer, and none of them is useful, because by then there is nothing left to allocate.

The information that would have helped was available nine months earlier, and it wasn't in the room.

Because think about what actually gets checked when a project comes in. The fee gets checked, carefully. The scope gets checked. Somebody has a view on whether the brief is realistic and whether the client will be difficult. All sensible, all necessary. What doesn't happen is anybody opening the programmes of the other live projects to see where this one's heavy stages are going to land. Not through carelessness. It isn't what the conversation is about, those programmes are in four different places, and the person deciding is often not the person who'll be drawing in month seven.

So a studio's capacity gets treated as a number of people, when it's actually a shape over time. You don't have capacity for four projects. You have capacity for four projects whose demanding stages don't coincide, which is a completely different thing and a much harder one to check.

And here's what makes it close to impossible to see coming, which is the bit worth sitting with.

Projects don't run to their programmes. Everybody knows this. What's less obvious is what happens to the load when they slip. A project that loses three months doesn't get lighter. It gets moved, and it lands on top of whatever was already sitting in that month. So the delay you were relaxed about in March, because it took pressure off at the time, is the reason October is unmanageable. Slippage doesn't reduce work. It relocates it, usually onto something that was already full.

Which means the bad fortnight isn't even the fortnight anybody would have predicted from the three start dates. It's the product of three programmes and every delay that happened to all of them, compounding quietly, with nobody holding the combined picture because the combined picture doesn't exist anywhere.

The consequences land in the usual places. Somebody who should be designing spends the fortnight firefighting. A drawing set goes out that would have been better with another two days. A client gets a slightly thinner presentation than they paid for and probably doesn't notice, which is worse rather than better. And afterwards everyone describes it as a tough patch, which is true and which also treats it as weather rather than as something that was built.

There's a version of this that gets blamed on the team, and it's worth refusing that one plainly. A fortnight where four things peak together is not a performance problem. Nobody could have worked their way out of it, and the people in the middle of it generally did better than the situation deserved.

The thing that would help is small and happens at intake. Before taking the next one, look at where its heavy stages fall against what's already live. Not a detailed programme, just the months where each project is going to need real attention, lined up next to each other on one page. Five minutes, and it doesn't need a tool.

It does need the information to be somewhere. Which is usually the actual obstacle, because reconstructing where five live projects currently stand means opening five different places and asking two people, and nobody is doing that during a sales conversation.

Projectsmate keeps every live project's current stage and what's outstanding in one place, so the collision is visible while the decision is still open rather than eight months after it was made. The answer might still be yes. It's just a yes that knows what it's agreeing to.

The fortnight that breaks your studio is rarely a management failure in that fortnight. It's three reasonable decisions that were never introduced to each other.