Lately, I have been thinking about something that has emerged from a project I am working on.
Like many projects, we track progress through targets, completion numbers and what is still pending. Recently, however, I have been working on improving how we validate and understand that progress.
And something interesting happened.
The more visibility we gained, the more we started questioning what “done” actually meant.
A number can tell us that work has been completed. But better visibility can reveal another question: was the right work completed, in the right way, and does the result still represent what we intended to achieve?
Sometimes this creates an uncomfortable situation. A project can actually look worse as its controls improve.
More exceptions appear. More things require verification. Numbers that previously looked straightforward suddenly need context.
But perhaps that isn’t declining performance.
Perhaps we simply understand the project better than we did before.
This has also changed how I think about automation. We often talk about automation as a way of doing the same work faster. In my experience, its greater value may be that it allows us to ask questions that were previously too difficult to answer consistently.
So maybe the progression isn’t simply:
Are we busy? Are we delivering?
It is also:
Are we delivering? Is it correct? Does “done” still mean what we think it means?
That leaves me with a question for other project professionals:
Have you ever improved visibility on a project only to discover that your previous picture of progress was incomplete?
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