How to create valuable and impactful results for your projects (Part 1)
In this first article of the series on how to create real and impactful results for a project I will cover the importance of being clear and concise.
A small story on where the idea for this series came from
Coming to Singapore, I was not sure if I will be good enough to keep up with school and do an internship at the same time. All I knew, was that Singaporeans are the best high school graduates, have an insane work ethic, and can be really competitive. After three weeks I can confirm that most of this is indeed true.
Every time there is a quiz in our business class, you hear people basically smashing their keyboards and typing as much as they can. At the same time, I might have only typed a few words. If the teacher asks questions, people tend to have answers immediately while I am still thinking about what to say. I tend to get a bit overwhelmed and feel like I am not fast enough ngl.
On Friday we had our first graded quiz of the semester. The questions were open-ended and limited to 300 characters each. Two remarks made by my classmates got me reflecting on what I shared above.
The first student asked how we should know whether our answers are correct or not. The second student said he would like to have more characters available to type out the answers.
The teacher replied that he intentionally framed the questions as such to give us a feeling of real-life situations. Rarely you will find clear yes / no answers and you always have to express your ideas in the most concise and clear way.
That got me thinking: “Maybe I don’t have to be the fastest and just cramp out as much as I can. Maybe it is better to take time and keep your answers as short and concise as possible.”
Today, I will address why being clear and concise I so important for your internships. In next week’s article, I will dive deeper into the problem of working on non-straightforward yes / no questions and what steps to take in order to find a somewhat suitable answer.
You have to be clear and concise in every stage of your project in order to produce valuable results.
Delivering a meaningful and insightful project is rarely about cramming out PowerPoint slides or reports that have tons of facts and are based on massive amounts of data. You can spend hours on research and still don’t provide meaningful insights for your clients.
A valuable project delivers counter-intuitive or unexpected insights that a client can actually implement. So how do you generate these findings? There are many factors that play a role and will talk about them over the next few weeks, but having clarity and being concise during all stages of the project is certainly a key element.
Stage: Being clear about what the project is about and what research has to be done in order to provide a meaningful outcome. Don’t waste your time on unnecessary research which won’t lead to any useful insights. In this article, I am sharing some tips on how to ask the right questions in order to understand a project.
Stage: Be clear and concise in any form of communication with your team and clients. Prepare for every meeting. Do your research before and bring a set of questions that will drive forward the current task you are working on. If you are not clear, you will waste your, your client’s, and your team’s time.
Stage: Be clear and concise about what you actually deliver and show the client. This exercise might help you to find this out:
Determine your hourly wage, track the number of hours you spend on the deliverable, and multiply them. Let’s say this ends up being $60 / hour * 10 hours = $600.
Then ask yourself: “Is the work I am about to present to the client worth $600? Would I pay $600 for this?” Make sure you answer these questions with yes, otherwise think of how to make them more valuable.
I hope you find any value in what I talked about today. If you did, as always, share this with your friends or colleagues to get them on the same track.
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