Writing: Practice for Your Career

I love sports. When I was younger, I played all the time, but I rarely took part in organized sports. Why? I hated to practice. Practice wasn’t like playing; it felt a whole lot more like work. If you’ve played any kind of organized sport, been in a band, a play, or any activity that required practice, you know what I mean.

Practice always entails activities that don’t seem like they have much to do with the game. I never played a single football game that required me to step through a tire, or a single concert where I had to play scales, but I had to do it in practice. Playing is free-flowing and fun while practice seems tediously prescribed and planned. You end up doing the same things over and over. What’s it all for?

The answer is that practice prepares you for the real thing. Repetition of plays, lines, or notes ensures that you can execute in the game, play, or concert without thinking about what you’re doing. Practice allows you to master your craft, creating a sea of calm in the midst of the ocean of chaos that is the competition or performance.

Why am I talking about practice? Because writing is great practice for your career. Not only are you likely to do a lot of writing in your career, but there are other aspects of the work world that writing mimics rather effectively. For example, even with the growth of the service industry, many jobs – especially those in the engineering and computer science fields – require you to create some sort of product.

Typically, there is a process for creating the products your business sells or uses. This process is often referred to as the Product Development lifecycle. To ensure the efficient completion of the product, this cycle must be managed. That process is called Project Management. These two disciplines can also be found in and developed using the writing process. The writing process yields the product of a final draft. In this way, the writing process parallels the product development lifecycle. Similarly, you need to employ project management techniques in order to complete your writing assignment on time.

Eric Verzuh, in his excellent book entitled, The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management, breaks the product development lifecycle into four stages:

1. Define product requirements
2. Design the product
3. Produce the product
4. Release / Operate the product (24-25)

These stages closely mirror elements of your writing assignments. Usually, your teacher defines the product requirements for you. Your paper needs to be on a certain subject, needs to be so many pages, etc. Similarly, your teacher usually prescribes the design of your paper, often requiring you to follow a certain style guide. Even without a specific style guide to follow, your teacher may prescribe a format for your paper to follow – put your name here, use a staple, leave 1-inch margins, etc. Your job, then, is to write the paper (3. Produce the product) and turn it in (4. Release the product).

So every time you write a paper, you are taking part in the product development lifecycle. The difference is that in your career, you might have more authority to shape the product’s requirements and design. In fact, just as in the classroom, the design and production of a product are often handled by different groups of people. The definition and design are where the decisions are made. If you like theory, analysis, and talking to customers, you’ll like the definition and design stages. If you’re a hands-on kind of person, you’ll most likely enjoy the production part of product development.

Developing the product is only part of the equation, however. The other part is managing the project. According to Verzuh, the project lifecycle has four linear stages:

1. Definition
2. Planning
3. Execution
4. Closure (20-21)

That looks a lot like the product development lifecycle above, and indeed, there are similarities. Just as a product has defined requirements, so too a project requires definition. This definition usually involves identifying not only what the project is, but also what resources (human, financial, and material) are available to complete the project. Just as the product needs to have a design to follow, a project needs to have a plan to follow.

In the planning stage, you identify each task in the project and allocate resources to accomplish those tasks. In a writing assignment, you will usually be the only human resource. However, you might anticipate the need for feedback from your teacher, tutor, or someone else who might review your work. You should identify these people in the planning stage so you can let them know you’ll be asking for help. This will help you to make out a schedule for your project, a key component to the planning process.

A schedule helps you estimate the time you will need for each task. Just as importantly, it helps you identify which tasks might need to be accomplished first and which ones can perhaps be accomplished relatively simultaneously (for example, you might conduct further research while your teacher reviews and provides comments on an early draft).

It’s very important to think ahead. The more complex your project is, the more advance thought you need to give it. JetBoy made this same point in his post at writing.bytes. Talking about outlines – a recommended project planning step for any writer – he wrote, “spending twenty minutes jotting down a rough outline of my paper saved me boat loads of time. I know where my paper is going, and I know how it's going to get there.” How right he is.

As important as it is for you to plan your own writing, it becomes even more important when you are employed in a project working with other people. When business projects are poorly planned – or not planned at all – other people suffer. Co-workers, customers, and the company itself can suffer huge consequences. How huge?

An entire methodology for ensuring quality by identifying defects, called SixSigma, has been developed to address the issue. According to iSixSigma.com, a content provider for users of the SixSigma method, the Systems Sciences Institute at IBM found that the cost of fixing a software defect was more than six times more expensive after implementing the software as it was to fix the same defect during the design phase. Once the software product was actually being used by customers, the cost to fix the defect was one hundred times what it would have cost to fix during the design phase. While these figures relate to software defects, the same principle is true for any kind of product creation from building a house to creating a fighter jet to writing a paper. When JetBoy says twenty minutes of planning saved him “boat loads of time,” he wasn’t exaggerating.

The third stage of the project lifecycle is execution. This parallels the product lifecycle’s third stage, producing the product. In the project lifecycle, however, what you are executing isn’t the product, but the project plan itself. Usually this means following the schedule you set up and making adjustments to it as certain tasks are accomplished more quickly or slowly than anticipated. In this sense, a project is a living thing, constantly in need of attention and maintenance.

Finally, the project is ready for closure. As with the product release, this fourth stage of the project usually means you are finished. However, the project can extend beyond the completion of the product. Once you turn in a paper, for example, your project really isn’t complete. A good project manager waits to receive feedback on the project. So, for example, your writing project might not conclude until after you get your paper back and you get the opportunity to see how you did. You can then assess not only how well you did on the paper, but learn from the results whether or not your project plan was effective.

Managing a project isn’t just about checking all the boxes in your plan and getting the project off your desk. As Eric Verzuh notes, “The definition of project success is that a high quality product is delivered on time, and the project concludes on budget” (17, emphasis added). Translated into writing terms, it means that your writing met or exceeded the criteria (measured by your grade), got done on time (usually also a criteria) and didn’t take you more time, effort, or materials than you thought it would.

Practice can suck, but it also prepares you to succeed. Like practice, writing is sometimes arduous, tedious, and can seem unrelated to what you really want to do. The reason is that writing is practice, not only for other writing, but for learning product development and project management skills that can help you succeed in your chosen career, whatever it may be.