About ten years ago, I had an engineer working for me who had come out of the aerospace industry. He was careful, complete, and thoughtful, but missed every deadline ever given to him. Fred (not his real name, of course) had developed an amazing ability to turn even the simplest project into a never-ending stream of revisions, changes, and upgrades. He was the quintessential continuous engineer, working long hours, but not accomplishing very much. Constantly under stress, he eventually resigned, citing health issues.

Like any good engineer, Fred could see in a nearly-complete project a better way to do it—so he’d go back to the beginning and rework the entire project. Or, he’d run into an issue with a design, and instead of developing a work-around, he’d pitch the design and start over. He never seemed to understand the value of scope and schedule.

Successful project execution, interestingly, is defined as delivering the defined scope within schedule. Please note there isn’t any reference to delivering perfection—yet many engineers burn precious hours tweaking a design to make it just a little better and miss the deadline!

Another variation on tweaking is when the job is up and running (effectively delivered) yet the engineer feels compelled to “improve” it simply because there’s time left in the schedule. Those are burned hours, folks—hours that could have been spent getting a new job underway.

Here are suggestions to avoid these pitfalls:

1. Understand the requirements of the project clearly. While scoping the project, repeat, in your own words, what the client is asking for. This feedback loop ensures you and the client understand what’s needed. Often you think you understand what’s needed, but by repeating the requirements, you find that the client wanted something else altogether.
2. Verbalize the scope to team members or peers. Believe it or not, if you can’t explain the project in short, simple, clearly understood sentences to another person, there’s a good chance you’re unclear on what needs to be done. Taking the time to think through an explanation will allow the project to coalesce in your mind. It has to!
3. Commit to an end date. One of Fred’s biggest shortcomings was he’d never commit to completing a project. When pressed, he’d respond by saying he would try to meet the schedule, never agreeing to, and thus never meeting the date. By committing to an end date, you 'own’ it and are compelled to meet the deadline.