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Hello everyone, here is Ricardo Vargas, and this is the 5 Minutes Podcast.
August is ending.
In Europe, people are coming back from holidays; in Brazil, we are already deep into the second half of the year, and in a few days the calendars fill up again.
And here is what almost all of us do next.
We open the plan where we left it, we look at the tasks that were paused, and we press play.
That instinct feels responsible.
It is actually the most expensive mistake of the whole year.
Because the plan we are about to resume was written by people who did not know what we know today.
Those people were us, eight months ago.
They did not know how the budget would behave.
They did not know which supplier would be acquired.
They did not know what the technology would be capable of by August.
Think about how much has changed around artificial intelligence alone since January.
If a project we approved in January still looks exactly right in August, that is not stability.
That is usually a sign that nobody has looked at it carefully.
So let me suggest three things we should do before we press play.
The first one is to recalculate instead of reconfirming.
There is a big difference between asking the team "are we still on track" and asking "if this project started today, with everything we know now, would we design it this way".
The first question invites everyone to defend the plan.
The second one invites everyone to think.
We ask the first question far too often, usually because we are afraid of the answer to the second one.
The second is to look outside the project, not only inside it.
Our status reports are almost entirely internal.
Tasks, deliverables, budget consumed, risks we already identified.
Very little of what changes a project actually happens inside the project.
It happens in the market, in the regulation, in the technology, in the priorities of the people who fund us.
Take one hour and list what changed outside your project since January.
Then ask which of those changes your plan has absorbed.
In my experience, the answer is close to none, because nobody owns that job.
The third is to re-decide the portfolio, not just the schedule.
This is the one we avoid.
From October onward, something predictable happens in every organization I have worked with.
The pressure to close the year takes over, and we stop choosing.
We finish whatever is closest to done, not whatever matters most.
We deliver the easy thing in December so the annual report looks complete.
That is why the window is right now.
We still have enough time to stop a project, to move resources, to change a scope.
In six weeks we will not.
In six weeks, the only honest answer will be "let's push it to next year", and we will start January with the same list we started this January.
Let me be clear about something, because it is easy to hear this as an invitation to throw the plan away.
It is not.
Replanning is not admitting defeat, and it is not a sign that we planned badly in January.
It is the recognition that the world moved and we noticed.
The projects that get in trouble are almost never the ones that changed direction.
They are the ones that kept walking in a direction that stopped making sense, because changing looked like failure.
So here is what I would ask us all to do this week.
Block two hours in the calendar, before the meetings take over.
Bring the two or three people who actually know what is happening on the ground, not only the people who own the reporting.
And answer one question honestly.
If this project started today, with what we know today, would we approve it in this shape, with this scope, with this team, at this cost?
If the answer is yes, we go into the second half with real confidence instead of inherited confidence.
If the answer is no, we have just found the most valuable four months of the year.
The question is not whether we can finish what we started in January.
The question is whether what we started in January is still what the organization needs in December.
I hope you enjoyed this episode, and see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
