How is your project?

This is a loaded question, isn't it?

What's the first thing that comes to your mind? Let me tell you how it goes for me:

Pretty grim

In my current project we're in a pretty tough spot. For a couple months, pretty much half a year now it has been really stressful. Non stop we've had tight deadlines, critical requirement changes during development.

We had to cut a lot of corners to make it to production on time.
We pushed deployed code without proper testing to test it on production.
We disabled e2e tests.
We skipped CR.
We worked on stuff without proper understanding of the business-side of it.
We had to work overtime and on the weekends.
We coded to documentation, trying to integrate with an API that we didn't understand and that wasn't ready.
We missed deadlines and critical requirements and some parts of the business process had to be done manually.

This has been even more frustrating, because we feel like we can do nothing to improve the situation, because all the pressure is from outside our team and even our company.

Now the same project, from our client's perspective

We just saved the IT department in our company and some of our executives' careers. Sure, for a couple months, pretty much half a year now it has been really stressful, but we managed to provide the core service to our clients within reasonable time.

The previous application we used fell apart, we couldn't deliver on time. At that point we partnered with and we managed to rewrite and improve that application in a little bit over a year.

That year our biggest client threatened to leave us and take away <insert lots of $$> yearly revenue. Now they signed a contract for next year in advance and are bringing more companies (and more $$) to us, because they want to use our software.

During the busiest critical time, we managed to gather user feedback and implement changes within a month, so they can verify them on actual production data.

All of that during a raging pandemic, so it gives us stability for the coming year.

Peculiar, isn't it?

I'm pretty sure most of us would prefer to work in the second project of the two described above.

But even if we can, most of the time, we don't

We focus on the immediate, technical perspective, we focus on the negatives.

Most people in IT are idealists. We want to produce top quality code. Deliver functionality predictably. Use good practices, write tests, setup CI, DI etc.

If all of the above is not present, we feel like we're not doing our job correctly and beat ourselves down because of it.

We might even do that if the client's perspective is different and our product is "doing it's job" and users are happy.

Think outside the box

Try looking at your project from different perspectives, regardless of how well it's going.

I'm sure it will give you a fuller picture, or even a much needed motivation boost.