Kennedy from 40k for the New Professional has slowly but surely been writing a top-notch series on a unique and very cool approach to army building. Essentially, he's directly porting best business practices to virtually every aspect of building and playing an army. While his focus is on 40k, the tennants of the 4 parts he's written so far apply to everything. Today we're posting part 3 since it's my favorite as it totally saved my life or some shit. Well, that's quite a bit of hyperbole, but it did give me a lot of help in dealing with my own mass of unpainted space doodz. Be sure to check out Kennedy's other stuff as well as parts one, two and four of the series.
So, Project Management... What the hell is that? Well, I know that it can mean a lot of different thing in different contexts, but for me and for the purposes of this article, I'm talking about juggling the different tasks that are involved in moving towards a larger goal. Vague enough?
Ok, let's go to an example. Let's say you've split your army building into several stages of 500 points each so that you can get stuff assembled and painted for an escalation league or something. You've got some stuff done, some stuff is on the painting table, some stuff is still being assembled and some stuff is stiff on the sprue in a sealed box. Another example would be if you're building a Warmachine army, a 40k army and a Warhammer Fantasy army at the same time. The question, of course, becomes how do you manage a couple of different tasks at once?
Before I answer that, let me explain WHY you might want to do multiple projects (or multiple parts of a single project) at once. This has the benefit of giving you a break from certain activities (like if you prefer building to painting or vice versa). An additional benefit is that it gives you options (especially if you're working on a couple of different armies or systems at once). Occasionally, it can even increase your productivity by allowing you to get excited about different tasks and move directly to them instead of remaining stuck in a rut.
Here's where I step in as your guide. There are loads of ways you can go very right and many places you can go horribly wrong. I can't really come up with a good way to organize this other than just making a numbered list (ooh my favorite!), although the numbers (in this case) should not imply chronological order.
1. Don't bite off more than you can chew
Pretty simple, yeah? Well, I'm gonna go ahead and answer that question with a negative. Gauging what you can personally do accurately is something that everybody tends to do poorly. We always tend to think we move a hell of a lot more quickly than we do and we also tend to think we are gonna have more time than we usually do. Unfortunately, random setbacks and obstacles will cause you to move much slower than you'd like while time gets sucked into little things (those extra 5 minutes you spent in traffic, that 30 minute conversation with your mother that you didn't plan on, the extra 10 minutes you need to thaw out a particularly frozen targ steak).
There's really only one way to combat these things is to consciously adjust yourself to thinking you'll have much less time than you think and overestimating the amount of time that everything will take you. This has the added bonus that it will make you happy when you end up with a bit of extra time or when you get a lot more done than you had planned. However, it is pretty difficult to force yourself to be pessimistic in this way.
2. Incremental progress = win
In order for to make this process make any sense, you need to make sure you're always making progress. When you are doing multiple things at once, it's easy to get bogged down or feel like you're lagging behind. Thus, it is vitally important that you push forward with at least a small amount of progress each day. This kind of progress helps you to not fall as far behind. However, it's only a stopgap in the most extreme situations.
Part of the point of juggling different tasks is that it lets you take advantage of your own preferences and allows you to move several things at once. It also allows for flexibility because you can postpone one thing if you're making a lot of progress on something else. However, doing that means that while you get ahead on one thing, you're falling behind somewhere else. If you're going to go one thing at a time, you should do that instead of trying to do several things at once. The temptation will be to abandon your neglected projects.
3. Use project management to make your life easier, not harder
Don't use multiple projects in a way that's gonna make you frustrated or pile on an insurmountable amount of work. Use it in a way that it's a tool for you. Let me give you a good example and a bad example. Bad example first.
I started working on a Khorne Chaos Marines army. After I made a little progress, I decided I wanted to make 3 more CSM armies (one for each god). I built and did some of the painting for each army while playing mainly the Khornate CSM. As a result, I got sucked into a vortex of trying to build and paint way too much. This made sure that I never got any of the armies fully built or painted. Project management fail.
Right now, learning from my mistakes, I have a Tyranid army in the building stage, some Legion of Everblight stuff holding in the painting stage and some additional Marines (Space Cops!) and Dark Eldar in the planning phases. I have a manageable load, and when I want to work on one thing or another, I can switch gears and get some stuff done. I'm making progress in all arenas (although ever so slowly in the painting stages), and I'm not getting frustrated with stuff.
4. Don't use project management as an excuse
Above, I mentioned that many times some projects will get stuck in a limbo while you rapidly advance on others. Let me give you an example before I talk about how to avoid it.
You know Bobby. He's your local BAngels player. He's been working on a his BAngels army for quite a while now. He has a bunch of units built, some in a state of half-constructed and a very few that are painted. Bobby is slowly making progress on getting the rest of his guys done. However, the Dark Eldar have caught his eye. He buys up a bunch of minis and starts building them. All progress on his BAngels ceases...
We've all seen this trend, and it sucks to watch someone abandon an interesting army as the going gets tough. Sure, you might be tired of painting red power armor, but if you come to a complete stop, you'll never start up again. It's simple inertia. An object in motion tends to stay in motion. An object at rest tends to remain at rest. You want to keep all of your projects in motion.
What you don't want to do is answer the question of "Why haven't you made any progress on your ______?" with "Well, I just bought a whole bunch of other stuff and I'm working on it instead." You want to slow a little when you take on other projects. If you're gonna abandon something, don't try to hide behind a new project.
5. Give yourself rules
Just like in other applications of this principle, set yourself up for success by giving yourself conditions you have to meet. If you have something you don't want to do, incentivize yourself by setting up a reward for good behavior.
Example: If I paint 20 guardsmen, I can assemble my new Dark Eldar Raider!
By setting up this kind of conditional allowance, you can push progress along on two progress. It's really nice for when you have good willpower but really hard if you hate what you're trying to set yourself up for. You have to know yourself very well to pull this kind of trick off. If you really don't wanna paint 20 guardsmen, you may never get to that Dark Eldar Raider or you may just skip the guardsmen and move on.
Well... I'm sure I've missed some stuff. If you think I really screwed up, call me out. Otherwise, I'll have something new to pique your interest or offend your delicate sensibilities soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment