With the new age of generative AI, the pace of technology continues to exponentially increase. If you’re like many others, you’ve been working at the same job in the same way for years, if not decades. Every morning, you log in to the same system with the same screens and execute the same processes with the same issues.
In these situations, inertia and boredom can set in, which, along with obstacles such as manual processes and legacy technology, can keep you, your colleagues, and your organization from working faster and better. New software solutions have the potential to expedite business processes and increase growth.
This article will explore the journey of implementing a new technology from the psychological point of view. It’s easy to think that technology project implementation is all about, well, the technology. However, a lack of consideration of the psychological factors behind project implementation can lead to delays, poor decision making, and, ultimately, a less-than-successful outcome.
You’ve probably been involved in projects that run over budget while delivering less than the promised outcome. While the psychological approaches in this article can’t fix poorly conceived technology implementation projects, they can help you approach obstacles in a productive way, come up with solutions, and understand how the aspects of mindset, motivation, and decision making can contribute to the success or failure of a technology implementation.
In this third article of four on the psychology behind successful project implementation, we will explore fixed versus growth mindsets and their implications for and relationships with prioritization to successfully deliver a new technology solution.
The ABCs of Mindsets
Mindset, which is defined as an individual’s mental attitude or inclination, is a major contributor to the success or failure of any new initiative. Mindset influences the behavior of everyone involved in a project implementation; specifically, how they react to obstacles, how they relate to each other, and how well they prioritize their work.
Two different types of mindsets, fixed mindset and growth mindset, emerged from the research on motivation and achievement of Carol Dweck, PhD, the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. “Someone with a growth mindset views intelligence, abilities, and talents as learnable and capable of improvement through effort,” wrote Catherine Cote for Harvard Business School Online. “On the other hand, someone with a fixed mindset views those same traits as inherently stable and unchangeable over time.”
When implementing a new technology solution, it is easy to fall into a fixed mindset. With a fixed mindset, you may think you are incapable of learning and will not complete your task(s). If you’ve been working at the same job in the same position for years, complacency is the path of least resistance. With a new technology solution, you may be given new opportunities with new duties such as figuring out a new ticketing system when communicating to software developers or undergoing user acceptance testing to make sure everything works as expected.
On the other hand, if you approach a technology implementation project with a growth instead of a fixed mindset, you’re more likely to be more open to learning new ways of dealing with the implementation. You may also find that, with a growth mindset, decisions can be easier to make—and when decisions are easier to make, prioritizing tasks is much simpler.
Leveraging Growth Mindsets for Impact
To maximize your knowledge gain and break through challenges, there are several strategies for cultivating a growth mindset, such as:
- Taking on challenging tasks and situations with curiosity
- Focusing on what was learned—including the effort—rather than the outcome
When implementing a new technology, imagining the possibilities can create excitement and energy. On a personal level, given how fast technology is growing, helping to implement a new solution can teach you many things and keep your expertise more relevant. On an organizational level, implementing a new technology can help create bonds among colleagues, build a sense of purpose, and create a sense of accomplishment.
Testing is one example of how this works—specifically, user acceptance testing. For teams and individuals involved in this activity, testing growth mindset approaches during this phase of the project can reveal paths forward for the rest of the project. These approaches might include:
- Welcoming challenges—reviewing and determining what went wrong and how to improve next time
- Seeking feedback from managers and colleagues
- Adopting a learning mindset—going to conferences, staying up to date on literature in your field, and seeking out opportunities for continuing education
There’s no doubt that making a mistake is frustrating. Instead of steering around something that doesn’t work as expected, perform a root cause analysis, take a deeper dive into what went wrong and how you can try to avoid it next time. Talk to others. Don’t be afraid to ask for help and learn as much as you can, when you can. During this process, adopting the following behaviors can be helpful:
Prioritization and Software Project Management
Decision making, which involves gathering information, evaluating options, and making an informed choice, is a critical part of prioritization during project implementation. If you, your supervisor, or your teammates are indecisive and cannot properly prioritize, the entire team and the project’s success are in jeopardy. Indecisiveness and an inability to prioritize are two factors that can make it difficult to make important decisions, preventing work from moving forward.
There are five key features that can help you navigate through the murky waters of indecisive thinking and lack of prioritization:
- Make peace with uncertainty: Uncertainty is a fact of life. In this case, it’s a good idea to counter an indecisive mindset with the acknowledgement that it is impossible to control everything.
- Go for the win: Instead of ruminating over the potential for every unknown to sink the project, admit for the possibility of success. This helps avoid the trap of an indecisive mindset that catastrophizes, seeing only failure at the end of the unknown.
- Avoid analysis paralysis: In the midst of a complex project implementation, it is all too easy to overanalyze issues that aren’t issues yet. You and your team can, and do, handle problems that they’ve never handled before, all the time.
- Embrace gray areas: Project implementations are never all white and black. An indecisive mind can view decisions as such. There are gray areas, more than one way to solve a problem, and usually a team to help.
- Avoid perfectionism: Nobody is perfect. When choices and priorities are seen as absolutes, and a negative outcome does occur, team members with indecisive mindsets can be overly critical or themselves of others.
One-to-four-week intervals of time where numerous tasks are planned and completed, known as sprints, are big part of technology project implementations. The exact time estimate may change and challenges may arise, which is exactly why decisiveness, rather than certainty, is important. In the chaotic environment of a technology project implementation, specific tasks may take more or less time than anticipated. Once you and the team make a decision, sprints have the potential to serve as a fluid learning process, working with surprising efficiency.
Indecision, anxiety, perfectionism, and more tend to fuel distress, creating the potential for either avoiding or overthinking problems. For example, in the testing phase, you and your team may not consider every single possible scenario that might occur. If you miss something, forgive yourself, ask yourself how you can alleviate this in the future, make a new decision, and look forward to the next challenge.
Agile Fundamentals, Learning, and Prioritization
The process of the classical, waterfall project management style is similar to that of constructing a building. First, plan everything out, assemble the materials, and put everything together step by step. However, with this style, there is little to no return on investment (ROI) until everything is fully complete. In other words, using the building analogy, no one can move in until the building is fully built.
If change is needed within a waterfall project style, it may go unnoticed until everything is completed. Many hours can be wasted redoing work that was originally predicted to meet every need in every way. This can lead team members to ask questions pertaining to how to prioritize the next steps of the project.
Consider a different, more iterative and incremental approach where project implementation delivers portions of the completed project, each with its own value and ROI. Known as the “agile method,” this approach is more friendly for a large technology project implementation with many features. Because there are so many unknowns within these types of projects, agile tends to provide a more effective framework for learning and value creation than the waterfall approach.
Going back to our construction example, think about moving into a new house. You’re excited, and you may even invite friends and family over to celebrate. You’re already living in the house, so it is providing value before it is complete. Over time, this allows you improve your new house—buy more furniture, create an addition, finish the basement, decorate or repaint the walls, and make it even more of a home. Similar to a new technology implementation, priorities change over time and new ideas manifest, but using an agile framework and establishing a minimal viable product helps with prioritization.
What does this look like with a new software implementation? When deciding what to work on first with a new technology solution, it is vital to establish a minimum viable product. This is what is actually needed to conduct business. In the universe of insurance software, things like premium rating and invoice creation are essential needs and should have a high priority. Using an agile approach to this process, premium rating and invoice creation can be worked on at the same time at different stages and later re-worked or improved as needed, when needed. Without these, the business screeches to a halt.
Other things such as workflow rules or the logo on the login page—akin to your home’s addition or new paint color—may be more important to some people and less important to others. The vital thing for everyone to remember is: What is essential for running the daily business. Keep in mind that over time, more and more will be added, even after a solution is live.
One last point to remember is that of the deadline. Our lives are ruled by deadlines. When you’re making a sizable investment in a new technology solution it is completely understandable that deadlines are needed to plan yearly finances and budgets. That being said, how many times are deadlines either pushed back or advanced, depending on the progress of a specific project? For example, you may reach your minimal viable product sooner or later than you anticipate. That’s why it’s always a good idea to continually assess if a project is ready to go live or not. You always want to be asking whether you run your business efficiently with what you have today. Frequently, you reach this point sooner than you anticipate, especially if you’ve adopted agile frameworks.
A Final Word
Prioritizing work for a new technology implementation can be a daunting task. When you remember that everyone in your organization and on your team has the ability to thrive in this challenging environment, you’re more likely to succeed. Incorporating an agile approach rather than a waterfall strategy can also be beneficial. When you realize that you and your team have the ability to adapt, prioritize, and fulfill your objectives with a proactive and positive mindset, implementing the project will seem more manageable and, perhaps, fun.