I’ve started noticing how I’m tackling projects at home much like I do at work. At work, I’m the guy that gets called up to clean up messes — a janitor of sorts — because some projects don’t run perfectly. It requires strong analytical skills which is my strong suit. Based on my experience, jumping into the middle of a project requires three things:
- Ensuring that you don’t waste time on the “blame game.”
- Identifying a path to take the project from the current state to the end state.
- Keeping the team focused on their goal avoid another project “derailment.”
So following these same steps, I decided to tackle our home media network panel (see image above). The network panel was organized in such a way that the wires from each room were bundled together. While in theory it sounded logical as the wires originated from the same outlet, the panel was very difficult to manage because the bundled wires from each room had to be split up and terminated into the same module. For example, the coax wires from the office and the living room, which were bundled with the telephone/satellite/network wires from the same room, had to be bundled together and terminated in the coax cable splitter module.
by Hugh MacLeod. The book is actually a collection of entries from Hugh’s blog where he talks about his hobby of drawing cartoons on the back of business cards. It was a short read — but it was packed with great life lessons, especially if you’re a product manager. Like a product manager, Hugh had to produce and promote his product (art on business cards) while facing plenty of criticism. This book reminds us that there are no such things as shortcut — the road to success is a long one. The three big lessons that struck a chord with me included: