Projects usually don’t end because someone decides to stop them; instead, momentum tends to fade slowly due to delays, dependencies, unanswered questions, and waiting.
I was especially aware of this when I led one of the biggest application lifecycle projects. Because of limited resources, unclear lines of responsibility, and dependencies involving multiple stakeholders, progress was slow. At that stage, I discussed the objectives, timeline, and risks with some senior colleagues, and the result was unpleasant: meeting the desired deadline no longer seemed realistic. The project faced significant technical uncertainty, as well as several dependencies beyond our control. For these reasons, the project was slowly losing momentum.
I raised those concerns with my manager, and he told me to continue.
So I went on, focusing on what could still move despite the uncertainty.
Every day I looked over the project, asking myself where we were in our work, what still remained to be done, what we were waiting for, and what I myself could do. Step by step, I found that one question was the most useful of all:
What can still move today?
When I realized that one item had been blocked, I checked to see what else could still go ahead in parallel, for example, another dependency, a decision, or the next meeting.
From Responsibility to Outcome
A common scenario was that we couldn’t move forward because we were waiting for the supplier. Although this might have been true from an operational point of view, the business team did not experience the project through its separate tasks and dependencies. They experienced the result.
That changed the question I was asking myself; rather than simply asking, “Who is responsible for doing this?”, I began to ask:
What can we still do to move the project forward?
That could involve escalating the issue, following up, using internal resources, clarifying the next steps, or proceeding with another aspect of the project while one dependency was still blocked.
Was It Actually Only Persistence?
For a long time, I thought of this response to interrupted progress as persistence. That made me wonder whether there was a broader principle behind it. This is how I came across the paper “Making Things Happen: A Model of Proactive Motivation” by Sharon Parker, Uta Bindl, and Karoline Strauss.
The authors define proactivity as a goal-oriented process: starting by establishing the future you want and then actively working toward it. What spoke to me was the difference between knowing the result you desire and continuing to take action even when it becomes difficult. In my project, the goal itself was clear; the difficulty lay in making progress toward it.
This caused me to think again about the term I had been using for persistence. Maybe some aspect of it should be seen as proactivity; that is, not merely reacting to situations but instead continuing to act to achieve a desired result.
While I was looking into this more closely, I also came across Karl E. Weick’s paper, Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems. His idea of tackling large, complex problems by breaking them into smaller, achievable steps closely matched what I’d seen myself. Most of the time, progress didn’t come in big leaps. It came from urging one task, one decision, or one dependency forward at a time. On their own, those steps hardly seemed like much. But together, they built real momentum.
Protecting Momentum
We finally finished the project, even though it was later than originally planned. Getting there wasn’t the result of any single major push, but of a continuous series of small actions that built up over time.
That doesn’t mean all delays should be accepted; some constraints are real, and there are situations where it is appropriate to wait or stop. What strikes me is how readily projects end up in a state of waiting even though useful actions could still be taken.
To move a project forward, I realized it wasn’t enough to make a plan and assign responsibilities. I also had to pay close attention to what was hindering progress and choose the next action that would get things moving again.
Maybe getting things done is partly that: not having all the answers, not taking on everyone else’s work, and not forcing movement for no reason, but instead staying focused on the outcome and protecting enough momentum so that the next decision, action, or solution can happen.
And when progress begins to stall, I keep coming back to one question:
What can still move today?
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