💃 The Messy Middle 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! You have mastered the project phases, and today is focused on the center-cut where careers are nurtured and developed.

Today is all about The Messy Middle 🙂.

WHAT IS IT?

What is The Messy Middle?

For enterprise Salesforce projects, you need only follow the utilization to understand The Messy Middle.

At the starts and ends, you have higher utilization of senior resources - partners, directors, etc.

But in the middle, the messy middle, you see minimal engagement from the higher-ups. They disinvite themselves from the project meetings and scoff at attending the daily scrums.

Yet the overall utilization of the project is the same or higher. The frontline resources are gathering reqs, writing stories, designing, building, testing, and meetings…OH SO MANY MEETINGS 🥵.

In the messy middle, the individuals leading the project are one to several layers from a decision-maker.

The North Star dims ✨. The compass swirls 🧭. The day-to-day ambiguity is like 90% humidity, you can feel it and it is uncomfortable af 😓.

This is The Messy Middle.

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

Why Should You Care About the Messy Middle?

Here’s 3 reasons you should care about The Messy Middle-

🥵 Choose your Hard Mode

There’s no such thing as an easy marathon. There’s no such thing as an easy Salesforce project. It’s gonna be hard!

But you can choose your hard.

This is hard 👉 Prepare and plan. Identify risks and considerations. Be diligent in your analysis, execution, and documentation.

This is also hard 👉 Don’t prepare or plan. Disregard risks. Be lackadaisical and don’t write anything down.

You know where each of these choices leads….

👷‍♂️ Understand Your Role During The Messy Middle

In football, an offensive lineman will have a wildly different experience than a wide receiver. The lineman has stakes every play, while the wide receiver may get thrown to just 5 times in a game.

In a Salesforce project, the Senior Manager will have a wildly different experience than a business analyst. The Senior Manager will be monitoring and controlling the project health at 5hrs/week, while the business analyst will be 40hrs/week of gap analysis.

This is important because 👇

🧑‍🏫 This is the Best Time to Learn

In the project kickoff and go-live, there is little room for error. Execs are vested into those phases.

But in The Messy Middle, the parents go to work and you have to entertain yourself!

If you’re a business analyst who has been contractually utilized to a client for 6 months at 40hrs/week, you’re gonna get a ton of reps, be in a ton of sprints, and breakdown a ton of process.

This is an amazing opportunity to refine your craft. To make mistakes. To iterate. To teach yourself new tricks. To bring fresh questions to your mentor or your manager 1:1’s.

WHAT’S INCLUDED

What Do You Get in the Messy Middle?

Here are 3 valuable things that you, personally, will get out of The Messy Middle-

🤝 Relationships. You’re in the trenches with the frontline. Weekly meetings with executives. The messy middle is where your long-term professional relationships are built. In the future, when you become a leader and are responsible for building a team, you will find your old project pals on Linkedin and recruit them, or they’ll be recruiting you; all because of the relationships you built in the trenches 💯.

⛹️ Jump shots. At-bats. Repetitions. Iterations. You may think it boring to have 12 project sprints. Actually, it’s an opportunity for you to polish your skills.

🫵 Know thyself. What works for you and what doesn’t. Your ability to form good habits (update the change log!), or not. Your ability to work well with others. Sure, it’s easy to work with that superstar TA you admire. But what about that snappy stakeholder? Or clueless QA analyst? Will you work well with them? Set them up for success? Teach them and learn from them? This is your opportunity to learn about and to improve yourself 💪.

HOW DO YOU MANAGE IT?

How Can You Minimize Messy Middle Mania?

Here are 3 ways to survive The Messy Middle-

🏃‍♂️ Projects are marathons. Settle in for the long grind. Expect bad things will happen, course-correct, and then re-settle in for more grind.

⛹️ However, unlike a marathon, you have (a little) room to play. Work with your manager, skip-leader, or mentor to identify areas of opportunity for you to improve. Skill up in critical areas like gathering client validations, managing scope creep, and delegating work.

⭐️ Don’t lose sight of the North Star, aka the project objective. While in the trenches, during sprint 6 out of 12, you will feel lost or in disarray. Remember to step back and re-read the project objectives, the definitions of success, and the line-item deliverables in the SOW.

TAKEAWAY

Fuel For Your Career

The Messy Middle is as inevitable as death 💀 and taxes 💸.

The Messy Middle doesn’t have the sexiness of initiation. And it doesn’t have the ASMR satisfaction of a close.

But it does have the most opportunities to fuel up your career 📈. It offers real-world repetitions and cycles for you to iterate and polish your craft in a condensed timeline.

Especially for consultants - The Messy Middle is why they say one year in consulting is worth 3-5yrs in-house. You are cramming in a career’s worth of at-bats in just a few years!

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes