Now it is official and I get my skydiving “A” license which gives me the ability to jump out from the plane on my own. And today I want to talk with you about what people who run IT projects can get from this interesting sport. But first let’s figure out what we have in common between IT projects and skydiving jumps.

A skydive:

  1. Has an objective and planned outcome
  2. Is limited by time and resources (altitude)
  3. Requires planning upfront
  4. Mistakes during execution can lead to dramatic issues
  5. You have almost no control on environment
  6. People who do it with you can either significantly contribute to success or help you fail everything

Looks comparable with an IT project, right? And it has one small difference: a skydive is around 5 minutes long and an IT project can be 5 months long, or 5 years if you’re unlucky. So let’s come back to the point — what is important to have a successful skydive project and come back in one piece.

You Need to Know Your Environment

It includes weather, landscape and who is together with you in the airplane. For IT it is a common mistake of managers of different levels to start doing something without turning their head around and collecting information about the current state of the organization or system, what is going on and why, and what is the main wind business direction.

Unfortunately, the environment is usually out of our control and you have to adapt to it. Ignoring this simple fact can cost you significant overspend of resources and maybe failure of project goals.

Planning Is Essential

Based on information about the environment and what you want to do — you need to plan all phases of jump, from exit till landing. You’re probably not doing it alone, so everybody in your group needs to understand who is doing what.

Failure of planning and communication in a group leads to mess during execution. Keep in mind that time is very limited and if something goes wrong you will spend time to fix it instead of doing what you planned to do.

In addition, if you failed to check weather conditions and did not react to it properly — you can land on somebody’s backyard (or tree) instead of the designated landing zone.

Both these issues you can see in IT projects — people spending time fixing issues which occur because they’re not working together properly. At some point time is over and they have to release into production something which is quite far from what was expected.

Safety First

You do a gear check when you’re preparing, you do it again before boarding and once again in the aircraft. Also you will go through emergency procedures at least a couple of times in your head. Of course you have a reserve parachute which is checked every 180 days. And if you’re smart enough you checked the map to know where your reserve landing zone can be.

And let’s have a look at production systems execution:

  • Who knows what to do if production servers will go down? Are people trained for it?
  • How often did you check that the business continuity plan works for real? Do you even have backups?
  • Did you ever try a deployment rollback procedure? Do you check it every time before deploy? Do you have it?
  • Do you know what to do if the surrounding environment will change, like a 2-3x increase in load?
  • Do you monitor what is going on and are you able to react before the issue becomes dramatic?

Majority of IT projects fail on all of these questions. Regardless of the fact that a day of production system downtime can cost your organization a significant part of revenue which can be critical for business or can almost kill it. And the second part here — you need to learn from your mistakes. Every jump is recorded in a logbook. If you are not lazy, you will write down what was good and what you need to improve. And you will work on what needs to be improved. Next time before a jump, you can read it again and make sure you’re not making the same mistakes. Do you learn from mistakes in your project or just punish people who made them?

You Should Know Your Priorities

Priorities for a jump sound simple:

  1. You should open the parachute
  2. You should open the parachute at proper altitude
  3. You should open the parachute in a stable position

But these simple rules give you the ability to act fast when needed and not lose time and altitude trying to get things done perfectly when you just need to open it.

In IT projects, priorities may not be so simple but usually what I see is that people do not have them at all or they’re so vague that you can’t make a simple choice between two Jira tickets. Or it happens worse — everything is priority one and you need to do everything. In this case, together with some changes in the environment and unpredictable things, the team has nothing else but overtime or moving release dates.

Teammates Are Key to Success

During a skydive when time is limited, good teamwork becomes key to great achievements.

If the team knows each other and knows the behavior of teammates — they’re able to react to issues and help fix them. To build such a team you will need to spend a lot of jumps before people will start working as one team. Experience level of members helps build the team faster and take on more difficult things, but you can’t expect that people who didn’t work together will do a great job from the first attempt.

But for some reason in IT, people sometimes don’t have any chance to build a team — they’re not motivated to do it and act as a set of independent persons, or they’re shuffled back and forth so basically they do not have time to learn how team members work.

The major criterion of a team which is built well — coherent work. Which means that when you turn to find your teammate’s shoulder — it is at the place where you expected it to be.

The second thing which is usually missed is the fact that teamwork also takes some time. It is very clearly visible that if you’re doing solo you’re able to do the same maneuvers which are planned for the group much faster. The reason is also simple — you don’t need to wait and coordinate with other people.

And in IT it is the number one mistake called “let’s add more people to do it faster” which completely misses both items above.

Relax

Stress reduces your ability to think. First jumps are so stressful that you barely remember and repeat three simple hand actions.

So the major rule in the course of a jump — be relaxed and don’t make sharp actions. You should not delay in actions but rushing will provoke mistakes. And usually recovery after a mistake takes 5-10 times more than the delay which you get from taking a deep breath.

So, just relaaaax.

Summary

Actually all activities which happen in the skydiving world have one objective — make jumps more safe and predictable. And this industry shows constant progress in it.

If you combine good knowledge about environment and safety, proper planning and prioritization, teamwork and calmness — your projects’ executions will also be a lot of fun, like one of the scariest sports on this planet.

And it is probably why I like it — because people here are able to have a balance between having fun and keeping the rules which keep them safe in place.

PS: not a single skydiver was hurt during writing of this article.