I’m involved in a rather large training project at work that the training team and I have been working on for the better part of a year. We’re about a month away from going live with the project. It’s THE big project for our team in 2016-2017. 

And something feels off. There’s this one crucial day within one of the training series (the first day, in fact) that’s crammed too full of information. It’s too disjointed. I’ve been feeling uneasy about it for a couple months now, but I kept telling myself I’d find a solution to make it work. 

Today, I realized that the whole root of the issue probably ties back to some project parameters that I set months ago. 

I mean, the team set them, it’s a team effort. But I laid the groundwork and pushed everybody forward with it. I’ve been saying for months that we can make it work. I’m certain we can make it work. I WANT TO MAKE IT WORK! 

Only now, with only about a month left, I’m not so sure it will. And the worst part is, the solution is probably as simple as adding one more day to the beginning of training. But so much work has already been done, that ship has kind of sailed. 

I brought my concerns up with my coworkers today. They’re not super happy with me. Some think I should have said something sooner if I had been feeling uneasy about it. Some insist it will work just fine as-is and it’s too far along to change anyway. Some want to see if we can still adjust the schedule. 

The whole thing is kind of a mess and it all probably could have been avoided if I hadn’t been so stubborn about sticking to the wrong parameters so early on. Not my best day at work. 

And then, as weird as this may sound, I thought about @markrosewater’s Drive to Work podcast episode #425 “Lessons Learned: Battle for Zendikar.” And I wonder if this anything what it felt like for Maro to realize so late in the design process that the set he loved so much was struggling because it was built on the wrong parameters. And how frustrating it must have felt to realize what the solution probably was, but to have realized it too late to do anything about. To feel like other people were counting you, and you felt sure of your ideas, and then it turns out you were wrong. 

But then I also thought about all the useful lessons that came out of that experience that were shared in that podcast episode. And how even though it was frustrating and probably even hurt, it wasn’t the end of the world. Work goes on. Life goes on. New projects come up. And even though Battle for Zendikar had its problems and was far from perfect, they still got it done and did the best they could with the options available.