It happens to all of us. We get excited for a project and make plans upon plans for what we want to accomplish with it. We think “I should add this and that, and it’ll be great!” Next thing you know, you have a monstrosity of a plan and only a few months or less to accomplish it. So how do you recover from this? Well, there’s no universal answer since each project is different, but here are some steps you can take (and that even I have had to take) that should help almost any project.
- Take a step back and really think about what you want to accomplish with this project. Is there a certain message you want to send, or a specific goal you want users to complete? What is the actual point of this project? Why should other people care about it? Consider questions like these carefully. Your answer will help you determine which features of you project are essential and which can be put on the back-burner.
- Prioritize your answers to tip one. If you want users to be challenged by a puzzle, don’t worry about the background music or color scheme first. Focus on the puzzle itself and what makes it challenging. Maybe there’s a certain sequence of moves or new game mechanic they have to master. Whatever it is you decide to use as a challenge, do that first.
- Make sure everyone else in the project agrees on the new or altered priorities. Explain to all team members why you decided to prioritize what you did, and then make sure that once a decision is reached, everyone follows through. You’re already low on time, so everyone should be working on what is absolutely essential over anything else.
- Don’t leave people out of the loop. Nothing is worse than time lost to miscommunication. Everyone is frustrated by it and nobody gets what they want.
- Ask for help if you need it. If something isn’t working and you cannot fix it in a reasonable amount of time, it is OK to ask someone else to take a look at it. Chances are they’ll catch something you missed, and maybe you’ll even get to learn something new and interesting as a result. You never know unless you ask.
- If worse comes to worst, scrap as much as you can. You might even have to scrap the whole thing. It hurts, and it might disappoint some people, but who knows? Maybe by starting almost over you can discover a new and more interesting way to make your project come to life.
Whatever you decide to do, it all really boils down to this: communicate effectively. Whether that means making sure your project is communicating effectively with your audience, your team is communicating with each other, or you and your team are communicating with everyone that should possibly be involved in your project depends on the project itself. But in the end, communication needs to be ever-present and it needs to be understood by everyone involved.