Project Steps Response
I've been reading people's project step posts. A few general comments:
Judging Project Plans
I can see that people don't have clear enough ways to judge what is success or not. But there can't be a simple answer key for good project plans. So you need to develop some judgment that lets you evaluate whether a project plan is any good, at least in some cases (expand the cases over time). How can you do that? Some options:
- Try planning the same project multiple times and comparing your answers. Which is better and why?
- Try using plans. Some of the plans I've read would be inconvenient to use, and don't really match how you would do the activity (even though it's an activity that you actually could do successfully – so you'd find it annoying and worse to try to follow the stated plan).
- Try imagining someone using a plan (you can do yourself or various types of other people) and see how well it works for them in that imagined scenario.
An alternative to developing project plan judgment would be to work on something else where you can get a better answer key. There are generally ways to get correct answers while still having bad judgment though, or to rely on other people's judgment without developing your own, so that's not foolproof and can be more tangential.
Uniformity
Lots of different people are writing similar things. And they're more similar to Anne's than to my own examples. It's hard to tell how much people are copying her errors vs. independently have the same misconceptions. But if you're going to model what you do after any role models, aim for my examples. But variety is important. To develop useful experience and intuition you need to try doing things different ways.
Goal
I think some people tried to take action without a clear enough idea of their goal. Do not outsource goals to me. I give suggestions. You think for yourself. If you don't know why you're doing something and how your actions will make progress, even if I died tomorrow and never posted again, then you should be asking more questions first or otherwise trying to understand it more before proceeding.