5h ago

My late father had taught me a general purpose 5 stages to complete any project. I added a 6th stage...

Planning
Materials
Setup
Production
Breakdown
Cleanup

I added materials, since you're not going to get much of anywhere without them. Sure, you could consider that part of either the planning or the setup stage, but I feel that materials should be explicitly stated as well.

I guess on that same note, tools count in as materials for sake of this list. Any which way, if you don't have all the stuff you need to do the thing, you're going to hit a roadblock in your project.

And always keep at least 3 extra 10mm sockets around, just in case...

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7 comments

I don't see the difference between breakdown and cleanup.
Unless breakdown means an emotional breakdown because the project failed and you need to start over or deal with a huge unexpected issue.
- Unless breakdown means an emotional breakdown because the project failed and you need to start over or deal with a huge unexpected issue.
  It's just good sense to account for that.
- Well, my late father learned the 5 stage process from the US Navy, so the breakdown stage can more or less be thought of as breaking down large temporary equipment such as cranes and scaffolding and such. Still got cleanup to do after breaking down such large equipment, and of course that applies to many other fields as well.
- Breakdown is probably a non-military version of “debriefing”. Just because you completed the project, doesn’t mean that there are’t obstacles you didn’t initially account for that you’ll need to address during the project. It also helps to break down (heh) how successful the project was, or if there will be follow up actions. Then you cleanup once unknown unknowns are taken care of.
  
  Yeah, there's sort of that too, but my dad learned these steps from the US Navy. Still, generally speaking, these steps basically apply to any project in some way or another.

7 comments