The DAPA Formula of Project Success

Hey!

I had a few different exchanges on email, the phone, and social media this week about how to successfully launch projects, how to be successful starting projects, and how to set yourself up to be successful when you are going get involved with a team.

All of these things struck a chord with me like:

• When you are starting a project, you make sure you get your diagnosis right at the start.

• If you have a bunch of different folks involved in a project, you have to get everyone on the same page.

• People want to jump to action right away because they want to show that they are doing something.

Then I realized that what I had developed over the years is actually a framework for success that goes by the acronym: DAPA.

Diagnose

Agree

Plan

Action

Let me explain.

Diagnose:

Every project starts with the idea that the diagnosis is the most important aspect of your situation.

If you aren’t sure what problem you are solving, how can you possibly solve the problem?

The answer is you must spend whatever amount of time you need to get the diagnosis right.

If you don’t, you are going to ultimately fail.

Think of it like the analogy of the person not wanting the drill but the hole the drill will help them make.

Same thing.

Agree:

In the past, this is where I’ve screwed up the most.

I will feel like the answer to the diagnosis is clear as day and want to jump into the planning or action stage.

No good!

In every project, you have to make sure that you spend time on gaining agreement on what is going on.

In the before times, I worked on a project with a national sales team, we had extraordinary success, doubling the size of the business in about 90 days.

Only, later, when we were debriefing did it become clear that despite success, we had “agreed” on pumping sales, but we hadn’t actually “agreed” and that we could have tripled sales or quadrupled sales…wouldn’t have mattered because what we really needed to agree on was making the new processes stick, not just the sales grow.

Growing was easy. Sticking was difficult.

I had missed that what I thought we were agreeing to wasn’t what we actually agreed to.

So make sure you dig deep enough to get the diagnosis right and make sure you really have an agreement on what people are actually looking to achieve.

Plan:

In my experience, it is pretty easy to jump past the planning stage.

As a trained project manager, I’m pretty comfortable with planning, but it can still be difficult to get to the point where you really get the planning right.

A simple framework for planning is:

• State the objective

• Set your timelines

• Understand your resources

• Look at potential pitfalls and roadblocks

• Lay out your action plan

• Create a reporting function or communication expectation

I could get much deeper here because some of these things need complex planning and contingency plans, but for our purposes these six steps will work just fine.

Action:

Duh!

If you’ve done a good job planning, you’ll have laid out your next steps and deadlines for completing them.

I like to keep these action lists pretty tight so that you can adjust constantly.

The big key is to take action and, specifically, to take action in a manner that enables you to get some early wins.

Momentum is real, even if you can’t easily measure it.

So DAPA is the framework that I’ve used and now I’ve codified it in its own little acronym!

Patent pending!

Let me know how y’all are doing!

Dave