The Wow Project

When it comes to Wow Projects, you need to remember one essential fact: Contrary to all of the project-management literature and all of the project-software checklists, the point of the exercise is not to do a "good job" of managing the project that your boss dumped into your lap. It's to use every project opportunity that you can get your hands on to create surprising new ways of looking at old problems. To do that, you need to understand the four steps that go into every Wow Project: finding and creating a great project, selling the project, executing the project, and handing off the project so that you can move on to the next one.

Finding and Creating Your Wow Project

It's out there, waiting for you -- your Wow Project. All you have to do is find it, identify it, and then create it. It's that easy -- and it's that hard. After all, how are you supposed to know it when you see it? And once you've got it, how do you know how to shape it, to develop it, to make it Wow?

To answer those questions and to keep you on the right track, here are four steps to take to make your Wow Project happen, one trap to avoid that could kill it, and five criteria to use to judge it.

Step One: Take the "Does it matter?" test. No project worth talking about ever came to pass without passion. Period. So, as you begin to gauge the worth of a potential project, ask yourself a series of passion-parsing questions: What do you care about? What matters to you? What matters to your company? If an idea for a project is meek and weak -- the equivalent of just another line extension -- it simply isn't worth spending time on. A Wow Project has to meet or to create a compelling need -- or to be capable of being redefined so that it does.

The biggest, boldest, most stimulating and innovative projects often come from the most compelling need for a team or a company to do something that will change the game: Launch a sexy new product. Craft a breakthrough ad campaign. Change the logistics and the service rules in your niche. Those are the kinds of projects that leave a legacy, projects that everyone wants to wrangle their way onto -- or at least to get close enough to collect the commemorative T-shirt that proves that they were there!

Here's the point: Projects -- particularly projects that can actually change the shape of the future -- are all about emotion. So, when it comes to recognizing a project that matters to you, trust your emotions. Listen to your stomach and to your heart. They'll tell you whether a project has the kind of pulse-racing, mind-expanding possibilities on which you're ready to stake your reputation -- and a precious year of your life.

Step Two: Here's the corollary to Step One: No project is too mundane to become a Wow Project. I've seen a person who was assigned a presumably dead-end task -- cleaning up a warehouse -- turn that project into a chance to redesign the company's distribution system and to earn a ticket to even more responsibility and even cooler projects. All it took for that to happen was the application of personal passion (see Step One) and an unwillingness to see the project as anything other than a first-rate opportunity.

How did it happen? Given the project of "cleaning up the warehouse," our passionate Wow Project leader (PWPL) quickly determined that the problem wasn't a "messy" warehouse; the real problem was that the warehouse was poorly organized -- which made the warehouse necessarily messy. A simple cleanup wouldn't do a damn thing to solve the deeper problem: The warehouse needed to be reorganized. That led our intrepid PWPL into a few carefully targeted benchmarking forays to educate herself and a small, select group of suddenly interested team members on the art of warehouse reorganization.

One of their key lessons: The organization of the warehouse needed to take into account both the incoming parts from suppliers and the outgoing parts to customers. So, a short time after getting the warehouse-cleanup assignment, this PWPL found herself making a compelling case for a new distribution system that would feed flawlessly into the reorganized warehouse -- a warehouse that would now stay neat because of newly designed processes that fit the new distribution system perfectly. And that is how you turn a little chore into a Wow Project.

Step Three: To a real life-in-the-projects person, everything is a golden learning opportunity. To Richard Branson, the passionate, daring, let's-try-it-and-see-what-happens chairman and president of the Virgin Group, the whole world is full of projects waiting to be discovered. His main tool for project discovery: a seemingly endless series of notebooks in which he painstakingly records his observations about everything that he runs across. In these notebooks -- which probably number in the hundreds -- are all kinds of observations on projects that are just waiting to happen.