How to Recover When Your Project Becomes a Dumpster Fire

Let’s say you are kicking off a new project. Everything on paper makes this project seem exciting. You have the right people in the room, a strong support system, a healthy budget, and an appropriate timeline. And then, one thing goes wrong. And another. And eventually, your beloved new project has become the bane of your existence. Every time you talk to your colleagues, they ask how “that” project is going. You pour another pot of coffee and scream into the void because this is now your life.

If you are in this mess, what do you? Well, hey, I’ve been here many times, and I’ve made every mistake you can possibly think of. Let me share with you what I found was effective and hopefully, we can put out this dumpster fire project of yours.

Pause and Assess the Situation

When everything around you is burning, the logical response is to try and figure out how to put out the fire. You are rushing and scrambling trying to help, but it really doesn’t make a dent. While it’s the hardest thing to do, the first step is to pause and assess the situation. You need to be able to evaluate everything that is happening and identify what has gone wrong. Maybe it was a form of miscommunication, or an important stakeholder was left out of a meeting, or your timeline shifted unexpectedly. Whatever happened, you need to identify what is still salvageable, and where you should be spending your energy. The first step is to stop the bleeding and to buy yourself some time.

Prioritize Critical Issues

After taking some deep breaths, you should prioritize the critical issues. There most likely is a significant challenge or two that you should be dealing with immediately. While you want to fix everything at once, you simply can’t. That’s the real-world. You need to determine the most pressing issues, prioritize them based on their impact, and focus on resolving the most critical ones first.

One trick I found with dealing with so many issues at once is to write them all down on a whiteboard or on sticky notes. All of the information is in your brain, and you need to get this down on paper or somewhere for you to visually see them. Afterwards, you can rank them on what to deal with first. Once you have identified this, give it everything you got to fix this first critical issue.

Communicate with Stakeholders and Team Members

I cannot stress this point enough in that whatever you think you are doing for communicating, you can always do more. A personal issue of mine is that I have a hard time with the perception of over communicating. I perceive that I communicate too much and that my messages can be seen as an annoyance. I try to be respectful of people’s time because time is the only thing we can’t get back. And if I’m asking for someone’s time, there better be a good reason behind it.

However, one project taught me that this isn’t always the case. From my perspective, if I’m not sending you an update, it means that there is no update to share. I’m not going to clog your inbox with a useless email. From the stakeholders’ perspectives though, no email from me meant that I wasn’t doing my job. They reached out to my director asking why I wasn’t updating them and then she filtered this back to me. After hearing this, I decided to over communicate and to send weekly updates. This quickly changed the tide and I heard from several of them about how much they appreciated these updates. Some of these stakeholders even began offering their guidance as my updates would mention blockers. This made me realize that more is better, and I’d rather communicate too much than too little. The more transparent I was with them, the better things went.

I would also say to make sure that you are proactively communicating with your team members, not just SMEs and other stakeholders. I am guilty of not asking for help soon enough. I’ll try to put everything on my shoulders and then once things get truly bad, I’ll ask for help. Obviously, I shouldn’t wait, and the more I discuss with them about what’s going on, the more they offer their time to help. They’ve also mentioned ideas to help that I had never thought of before. Potentially, this can save you several headaches if you share the progress with your team. And as a reminder for me, and maybe for you, asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness.

Create a New Plan

Now is the time to create a new plan. Think about the new deadlines and adjust those timelines and expectations. I would also be thinking about the major milestones and once you’ve accomplished these, it will continue to build the momentum for the project. For yourself, don’t forget about the small wins. I’m going to assume that this project has taken a massive amount of your mental energy. I know you still want to get everything done as quickly as possible, but embrace those moments and boost that motivation to get the job done.

My director had to remind me of this a few times with my last insane project. We do check-ins on a bi-weekly basis and when I updated her with how much was completed since the last check-in, she was shocked. It took an outside perspective for me to realize that she was right. I didn’t see it that way and was still trying to rush to the next milestone, so reflect upon any win you get along the way.

Stay Calm and Focused

For this dumpster fire to turn around, you need to keep a clear head. After, months and months of frustration, it’s easy to carry over these feelings into your new plan. You need to treat this revised plan though as a fresh start. For instance, if something does happen to go wrong and it’s a minor inconvenience, months of baggage makes this feel like, “Oh God, here we go again.” The reality though is that it’s a minor issue and can be resolved somewhat quickly. Anything that can take you a few minutes to solve is not a critical stage three meltdown, but it’s going to feel like it. Remind yourself that all things are figure-out-able.

Reflect, Learn, and Grow

After this calamity has passed, conduct a debrief with either your team, stakeholders, or even just yourself. Talk about what went well and what could’ve been avoided and how to improve for the next time around. Chances are, you may end up working with the same stakeholders again, and if that’s the case, they will look to you for improvements. I learned to conduct retrospectives from an engineering professor, and it was such a great suggestion. It can feel awkward and uncomfortable to discuss where things went wrong with the project, but openly talking about this is so incredible valuable. Even if you don’t apply all of their suggestions and feedback, hearing them out will go a long way.

I’d also consider building out risk management strategies for future projects. When you notice next time that things are taking a turn, you’ll be more prepared to handle them. You and I both know that while we hope every project is going to go well, there will inevitably be another insane project that we are going to work on. Let’s get ahead of this now and be ready for whatever may come next.

That’s my tips for today, folks! Is there something else you would add to this list of tips? I’d love to hear them!

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