Sunday night, 8:47 PM. My daughter announces her science project is due tomorrow. Not "I need help with" — "it is due tomorrow," as in the thing does not exist yet and the deadline is 14 hours away, 8 of which are supposed to be sleep.
What followed was the most intense project management exercise of my year. And I do ERP implementations for a living.
Phase 1: The Scope Conversation (That We Didn't Have)
"What's the project on?" I asked, already knowing the answer would hurt.
"Something about... plants? Or maybe bridges? Mrs. K said we could pick."
We had no scope. Not vague scope — NO scope. This is exactly how client projects start: "we need a new system, something modern, you know?" And then everyone's surprised when month four looks nothing like the kickoff deck.
So we did what I make clients do: define "done" first. Not "a good project." Done. Done meant: a tri-fold board, three sections (hypothesis, experiment, conclusion), one visual, name on the front, in her backpack by 7:30 AM. Everything else was optional. The moment we defined done, the panic dropped by half. Constraints are calming. Unlimited possibility at 9 PM on a Sunday is terrifying.
Business version: every project needs a written definition of done before work starts. Not a vibe. A list. If you can't describe done in one paragraph, you don't have a project — you have a hope.
Phase 2: The Critical Path (Featuring a Closed Store)
Here's what I mean by dependencies. The project needed: a tri-fold board, markers, and printed photos. It was 8:47 PM. The store closed at 9:00.
This is the critical path — the sequence of tasks where any delay delays everything. No board = no project, and the board required a store that was closing in 13 minutes. Everything else (research, writing, gluing) could happen at home. The board could not.
I did what any project manager does in a critical-path crisis: I dropped everything and drove. Thirteen minutes, one frazzled dad, a triumphant return with the last tri-fold board on the shelf. (Someone else's kid was having the same Sunday night. I saw the empty shelf slot and felt a deep kinship with a stranger.)
Business version: find your critical path early and protect it obsessively. In ERP projects, it's usually data migration or the one integration nobody wants to talk about. The tasks everyone focuses on (screen layouts, report formatting) are almost never the critical path. The boring dependency — the store hours, the data extract, the vendor API — is what kills you.
Phase 3: Stakeholder Management (The Hardest Part)
Midway through, we had our first stakeholder conflict. My daughter wanted to do the volcano. (There's always a volcano. The volcano is the project's original sin — the flashy idea that has nothing to do with the requirements.)
"Dad, volcanoes are cool."
"Volcanoes are cool. Does the rubric mention volcanoes?"
"...no."
"Then we're doing plant growth under different light conditions, because that's what you told Mrs. K, and we have" — checks clock — "four hours."
She was not happy. I was not popular. But here's the thing about stakeholders: their happiness during the project is not the goal. The goal is the goal. My job wasn't to make Sunday night fun. My job was to get a passing project in the backpack by morning.
Business version: every project has a volcano — the feature the loudest stakeholder wants that isn't in scope. "Can the dashboard also do THIS?" "What if we added AI?" Your job as the person running the project is to point at the definition of done and say no with love. The stakeholders who are maddest at you in week six are the ones who thank you at go-live. Usually. Mostly. Okay, sometimes.
Phase 4: Ship It (Done Beats Perfect)
By 11:30 PM, we had a board. Was it good? It was... complete. The hypothesis was clear. The "experiment" was honest about being a thought experiment with diagrams (we negotiated this with reality). The conclusion was written. The visual was a hand-drawn chart that was, charitably, "expressive."
Could it have been better with two weeks? Obviously. Did we have two weeks? We had one evening and a closing store. A shipped B-minus beats an unshipped A-plus every single time. This is the lesson perfectionists never learn and pragmatists never forget.
She got a B+. The teacher's comment: "Clear hypothesis and good effort." I'll take it. I'll take it all day.
Business version: I have watched companies delay go-lives for months chasing perfect. Perfect reports. Perfect workflows. Perfect data. Meanwhile the old system keeps bleeding money and the team keeps doing double entry. Ship the core. Iterate live. The B+ that ships in October beats the A+ that's still "two weeks away" in March.
The Retrospective (Over Pancakes)
Monday morning, project delivered, we did a retrospective over pancakes (all good retrospectives involve pancakes). Two questions: what would we do differently, and what worked?
Different: start before Sunday night. (She laughed. I laughed. We both knew it would happen again.)
What worked: defining done first, the emergency board run, saying no to the volcano, and shipping.
That's a better project post-mortem than most companies do. And it only cost me one Sunday night, one tri-fold board, and approximately eleven years off my life.
Worth it. B+.
David Strausser, Dead Brands LLC / Quaint Business Solutions
Want help with your ERP? Book a call — I promise better project management than a Sunday-night science project. (Low bar. I clear it.)
Deadbrands.co merch: "Say No to the Volcano" — the project manager's motto.
