A few weeks ago, I went on a residential for the BELA and ML's involved with the Duke of Edinburgh Award in my area. It was a fun weekend, with a couple of easy hikes (mainly to the pub!), and one more challenging hike for those who fancied it on the saturday afternoon. We spent the Friday evening chatting and planning a route, which is when I realised that I could apply everything we did to a development project.

But You Can't Take A PC Up A Mountain

You can take a netbook, though! In all seriousness, there's nothing specific about working on a project in this post. It's more about the process we went through before we started, and what we did when we were out hiking.

Design By Committee

The first thing we had to do was find out what people wanted to eat while we were there, and how far they wanted to walk. There were 20 of us, so trying to please everyone was no easy task. Sound familiar? If you've ever had to work with a company who do design by committee, it should do. Eventually we managed to decide on how far we wanted to walk, and what we wanted to see. Our specification basic plan was done!

The specification

The general idea was that we were going to walk 15km and we had 7 hours to do it in. (General idea and a budget, anyone?). People then added that they wanted to walk past a certain town so they could get an icecream. Some others also wanted to walk past a lake, and some near some old mines. Things were starting to get a bit more complicated.

Getting Started

Finally, we knew what we needed to do and started to wireframe plan our route. An OS map and a drywipe marker was our weapon of choice. After quickly sketching out a route around the points of interest we measured it and made sure we could get it finished in time (Sounding familiar again?).

Doing The Work

We set off at about 10am and by 1pm approx 1/4 of the group were getting tired and starting to lag behind. To be fair, they were new walkers and hadn't had much practice. We would never have finished with them, so we gave them a shorter route to follow. Anyone who wanted the shorter walk was free to go with them, and the rest kept on the specified route.

It turned out that there were 5 of us who wanted to do the long route, and so we set off again. We spent 5/6 hours rambling around the hills (project) without looking at our map, guesstimating where we needed to be and how long it'd take us, as we needed to stop for lunch etc (I'd like to think of the lunch break as a progress meeting with a client. As long as we headed in generally the right direction, they're happy). By 6pm we decided we should be getting back and wrapping the hike up - and we took a look at the map. It turned out we were only 400m away from our original path, and were en route to the village. (Almost done with the project)

So You Second Guess Projects and Wing It?

No, I don't second guess things, I just try not to get caught up in the details until the bulk of it is done. It's one of the thing I've learnt and it's applied to many things, coding and hiking seemed enough like chalk and cheese (opposites) to be used as a good comparison. Basically, decide what you want to achieve at the start, make a quick plan. Start doing it and once you get the foundations down, just work at it without being too meticulous. Every now and then, check your "map" and make sure you're still close to where you should be.

Though I've only applied this approach to programming and walking, I think it's a decent framework to help achieve any goals. Decide what you want, do it, just don't go off task.

Do you have any methods that you use yourself for achieving long term goals? Do you think that this post is completely off the mark? Let us know in the comments

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  2. New Design