Episode transcript The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.
Hi everyone, here is Ricardo Vargas, and this is the 5 Minutes podcast. Today I want to talk about something that happens in almost every project. But most of the time, we do not give the right attention or the attention it deserves. And it's rework. A simple word, but an extremely powerful one that could create massive damage to what you are doing. And I want to start with a very simple question. How much of your project's money is being spent doing against something that should already be finished? Think about it. A presentation needs to be redone because the original decision was not clear. Software needs to be changed because a requirement was understood differently. A proposal needs to be rewritten because nobody clearly aligned what the client expected. All of this is rework. And the problem is that the cost is often invisible. Because people keep working, hours keep being charged, meetings keep happening, deliverables keep being produced. So we have the impression that the project is moving forward, but it's not. Part of the effort is simply being used to return to the point where we thought we were already there. So for me, this is one of the most damaging costs in a project. Because you pay twice and receive once. Oh, to be even more honest, you pay many times to receive once. Because you don't rework only once. And there is another very important aspect. The later you discover that something needs to be redone, the greater the impact tends to be. Imagine a requirement that was not properly understood. If you discover this during an initial conversation, maybe it takes 10 minutes to fix. But if you discover it after the design is complete, then you will take a couple of hours. But if you discover it after something is being built, tested, purchased, and implemented, oh, the impact can be massive. This is why I always say that speed does not necessarily mean efficiency. I have a quote that I love: haste makes waste. Sometimes the team that looks faster at the beginning is exactly the team that will spend most of the time fixing things later. And there is one type of rework that particularly bothers me. It's management rework. How many times do we redo a presentation because an important person did not participate in previous discussions? How many times do we reopen a decision that was supposedly already made? How many times do we replan a project not because the work changed, but because the previous planning was done without enough attention? How many meetings happened simply to clarify what should have been clarified in the previous meeting? This also costs money. And more importantly, it costs attention. I'm not saying that all rework can be eliminated. Projects involve uncertainty. That would be unrealistic. We learned that the environment changes, the client changes their mind, we discover new things, and some rework is a natural part of the process. The problem is the avoidable rework, rework caused by rushing, by poor communication, ambiguous decisions, by requirements that nobody really validated. Maybe it's worth asking a different question in our next project meeting. Instead of asking only how much we have completed, we should ask how much of what we completed did we have to do again? The answer may tell you much more about the efficiency of your project than you imagine. Because an efficient project is not simply a project that works fast. It's a project that transforms effort into results with the minimum possible waste. And perhaps one of the best measures of efficiency is extremely simple. How much of our work can we do only once? Think about it. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and see you next week with another 5 Minutes podcast.
