Work is Not School: Assignments are Really Projects

Not everything worth doing is worth doing well.  This is a quote you probably won’t hear from your teachers or professors.  But it’s true.  And you need to understand it if you are going to advance your career.

In school, there is a direct relationship to the effort you put in (studying, reading, taking good notes, attending class, etc.) and the outcome you get (good grades).  And every class you take contributes to your GPA — in other words, every class you take is equally important in terms of your GPA.  And your GPA is your primary performance metric at school.  So it follows that you should do everything as accurately and precisely as you can.

But this is not true in the world of work. In the workplace, the assignments are often vague, the success criteria are not precisely defined, and you are not going to be given a letter grade for your work.  All you can hope for is sporadic feedback from your boss and your peers, a performance review on a periodic basis, and (hopefully) nice raises along the way.

How to bridge this gap?  I suggest that you view all assignments at work as projects.  Every project has three competing factors — Spec, Budget, and Time.  For example:

• It might be more important to get the project done fast (an hour, a day, whatever) than to get it done cheaply or well, so that Time is the most important thing.
• Or maybe,  meeting the precise letter of the Spec is the most important thing.  This is most similar to the classroom environment.  But such situations are rare in the workplace — most specs have some room for negotiation, especially if a different spec can save money or time.
• Sometimes the Budget is the key thing, because if a budget is exceeded then a new round of approvals need to be asked for and granted, and nobody wants to ask for such approval.

Goodman Ager’s Says: Whenever you are given an assignment, you should always ask questions to clarify what  is being asked.  The first question you should ask is “When do you need it?”  Getting the time frame right makes it much easier to frame, negotiate, and document the rest of the assignment.  The next question is “Please rank these factors in order of importance — Spec, Budget, Time”.   This question will generate good discussion about what is really being asked, what else is going on with the project, any sensitive issues that might not have been mentioned before, and so on.

Both you and your boss will be much happier with the results of your efforts, and you will advance your career more quickly, if you take the time to get on the same page before you begin any new assignment.

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