There are times when putting a project on hold simply isn’t an option. Something falls through, key personnel have to take leave, your budget is cut, but you need to keep moving forward. Business protection is there to cover losses, but what happens when you’re not after recompense for losses, but simply a way to take the next step, even though you’ve been handicapped by a significant setback?
Consider Your Ends
Has your business strategy been foiled by a recent setback, or do you simply need to shift your tactics a bit? You may need to rethink your approach, but you may find that there’s actually a simpler way to get where you’re going than you’d thought. Think about your end goal in terms of desired effect. Suppose that you need to have a prototype for a website in order to show your investors by the end of the week, but a hardware crash cost you several days worth of labor hours. You might not have time to build another prototype, but would a mockup created in Photoshop achieve the same end result?
In any event, your aim is going to be not so much to shift your end goal, but to reconsider what that end goal is on a more fundamental level. How can you achieve the same effect within your current means?
Consider Your Means
There are setbacks that will demand that you completely overhaul your way of developing a project. In any office there are those linchpins, the people who you could never really replace. Maybe you can hire a temp to do some of their work, but if they ever left for good, things just wouldn’t be the same. A project budgeted at $10,000 needs to seriously change in scale and scope when the budget is cut down to $5,000.
Be Flexible
In every industry we see the penalty for failing to adapt, whether to minor setbacks, such as when Terry Gilliam famously canceled his movie Man of La Mancha over changes in the weather, or long term changes, as we’ve seen with the record industry, which took about 16 years to catch up with how people were consuming music in a post-internet age.
When you experience a setback, minor or major, it’s not game over. You may need to rethink how you’re approaching your work, you may need to strip a project down to its essential components, but rare are the circumstances where your only choice is to simply give up. Keeping a contingency plan in place, and learning how to adapt on the fly will help you weather almost any setback.
