Below my office they are adding a patio onto the popular restaurant downstairs. This project started months ago and still continues today. It seems to me to be never ending. The workers come in each day, mess with this or that. They never seem to make great strides. When the project began this wasn’t the case. The first day they started building it you would have thought they had a deadline of that weekend. A lot of action, brick layers, carpenters, concrete trucks, landscapers, etc.
Slowly as the months progressed the work slowed down. Now that temperatures are around 45 at night here the patio is still being built. So the investment they made in the additional seating will not be reclaimed for several more months now.
This is often the case with enterprise as well. Months are spent deciding on a solution. Once purchased the project starts with great excitement and then fades away. Another business objective starts and the original project may or may not be finished. The money was spent though but the goals are never realized or realized later on.
As the year winds down we are in the process of wrapping up our projects and goals and starting to think about 2012. Our business is not the same as it was 11 months ago I can assure you. And what I thought I wanted to do has changed as well. Some things I thought were great ideas were failures. Some things I didn’t even think about have been a tremendous success.
With a looming recession affecting many businesses and fast changes affecting others, have your projects been reevaluated? Have the products you are using been reevaluated?