Execution of complex and difficult tasks is … well, complex and difficult. To understand the challenge at hand and to understand how it can be solved in an efficient way is what makes you a professional within your field.
But let´s say you also have to do the following things:
- Explain there is a problem to solve or some opportunity to catch.
- Explain it to people that are unfamiliar with everything you know and do.
- Get resources from people who don´t understand the potential outcome from the investment.
- Work with stakeholders that seek improvement and change, improvements that you are working to implement, while at the same time the same stakeholders don´t see the connection between their own demands and what you are doing.
- Implement new solutions in an environment where most people want to do things the same way they have always been done.
- Find out that management doesn’t back up necessary change when they are confronted by employees that resist change.
- Constantly motivate why things take time to people that can´t relate to what you are doing and therefor has very little understanding for why it takes time.
- Invest a lot of time in describing basics, thereby wasting time, thereby delaying results and therefor having to spend even more time motivating why things take time.
Etc. Etc.
Execution of complex and difficult tasks is a challenge in itself. Add the above, and you get to work very long hours to achieve something that is OK. Excellence in this case is no longer possible (and if you say it is, I don´t agree with you).
For every professional it is important to deliver results, and at least some of the time it needs to be excellent results. This can only be done in a professional environment. So, besides making sure that you stay on top of things, also make sure that key people around you do as well. Otherwise, offer your blood, toil, sweat and tears elsewhere.
Andreas,
So true.