A well-used metaphor that has a different meaning for everyone who uses it. Personally, I don’t enjoy running at all but it’s a simple useful metaphor since most people realize that sprinting requires speed and running a marathon requires endurance. That a sprinter can see their finish line and a marathon runner needs to have smaller goals along the way to at the end reach the finish line. Both are still running and both have the goal of getting over the finish line as fast as possible. Yet they are very different.
Does it matter?
I would argue that whatever metaphor you use, make sure that you use it to its full potential and not just the first layer. As above, a marathon isn’t about taking things slow just because the speed might be slower – the objective is still to do it as fast as possible. It’s not that a sprinter doesn’t have goals or analysis of their races, they both do. Use the metaphor to the extent that you narrow down the common things that all agree on, thereby getting the things that differ and need some alignment.
It is not unusual that your steering group or project sponsor talks about what needs to be done like it was a sprint, after all, everyone wants results fast. It’s your job then to challenge if it is and if the runners are trained and lined up for it. Far too often you get project members that are marathon runners and identify the project objective as a marathon, while to reach expectations from sponsors or stakeholders, you would need to line up sprinters and change the objective to be shorter.
Perception of the task
“No, it was just a short run this time.”
Oh – how short is short?
“Mm, about 10 kilometers. I usually do three laps, but today I focused on speed so I kept it short.”
What is a long project and a short project? It depends on the runner’s perception and training, so it’ll depend on your stakeholder’s perception and likewise training. A house project of five years might be a sprint for a building company that is used to take on bridge projects of twenty years. While an industry project of five years might be very long for a machine company in relation to their bread and butter of delivering machine projects of six months.
The importance is to get a grip on all stakeholders’ perception of the project, is this common daily work or something exceptional that they’ve never accomplished before? Your perception matters as much but to lead the project you’ll need to have their perception firsthand. After all – if it’s daily work for them you would want to facilitate more and steer less. If it on the other hand is something new or exceptional to your team or steering group, you would want to put more focus on discussing and the learning process to get people forward. In both cases, it doesn’t matter if it’s your backyard type of project or you’re new to it. You’ll adapt to the team members and key stakeholders’ perceptions.
Preparations
A runner will train and prepare for the race, and so should you and your project team. It will look different however depending on what sort of race it is. The most obvious preparation one have together is at your kick-off. Some will expect that a project is formally started after that and the clocks start ticking on the production tasks. That you as a project manager brings a finished plan to the table and there are minor adjustments in it during the meeting. Others expect a kick-off to co-create the plan which starts with some preparation time for all involved after the meeting. If you’re in an environment of the former, you do wisely in calling for a couple of planning meetings before that kick-off. If it is a culture of the latter, then, by all means, take the time on the kick-off to have these discussions. Regardless and not to dive into kick-off planning and purpose, use your metaphor to get people aware that preparation for a project will look different and we need to agree on what it is for this project. And also actually prepare what we agree needs be prepared.
Preparation discussion could include things like:
- Runners training schedule beforehand: How do we ramp up for this project? Do we need to rehearse or specifically look into certain areas? Resources that need to be lifted from other tasks that require lead time?
- Meal schedule beforehand: Do we change the material/information that we will work with? Sourcing activities or information backup activities we should prepare for?
- All roles in place: Do we need to bring in extra people, competencies, or skills from within or outside the company to get through this run/project? Can we afford a special physician to help us recover better?
- Minimum time level to be reached before we start: Do we have a go/no go criteria before we start this? Gates that need to reach certain criteria to be passed along the way?
Planning
You can do planning without doing the preparations. But you can’t prepare without partial planning. Planning is discussing how to get from a to b, on how to crush this race of ours. You’ll have part of these discussions in the preparations but planning also about the strategy of the race and maybe competitors analysis. Should we take a certain position in the race? Are there different routes to be considered? Shoes to be changed? It will be about visualizing the full race and all scenarios you can come up with so you can choose what to prepare for.
The documentation of your planning will become the project plan. Now, a common runner might not have a plan for each race they run but if you are going pro you will. And when you have a team supporting you to win the race, they will definitely have their own schedules and plans. However you decide to document, visualize or draw it afterward, make sure you have the discussions.
Planning discussions should focus on:
- Alternative routes: Can we approach this project in more than one way? Pros and cons with each?
- Alternative scenarios: Is there a possibility of more than one scenario happening? It will be. How do we approach these and support the one we want and mitigate the ones we don’t?
- Race communication: Do we need to communicate during the project or meet up at some gate? Communicate progress, wins or losses?
- Recovery period before and after race: For a runner, this is crucial but when talking projects, there’s nearly never happens. Make sure that you get this into planning and discussion early on and make it more likely to happen.
I got something else
What if I got a triathlon or iron man at hand? Well, that’s just as great! How do those differ from each other? At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whatever metaphor you use. The important thing is that you are aligned with your stakeholders on what sort of project it is. Find that metaphor to get everybody on the same page early on, it’ll be much easier than aligning expectations further down the line when frustration and argumentation have begun.
