Last week, I had to do some work on the kitchen, and that involved taking all the cabinets apart and refinishing them. Simple, boring stuff that’s wouldn’t be mentioned on a data newsletter. But while working in an increasingly high humidity (and thus high heat index =D ) and desperate to finish the huge number of small cabinet doors I needed to paint.
Painting these cabinets is fairly easy work — paint the inset panel, paint the edge, then use a roller to finish the flat surfaces. The small complication is that the roller can’t reach into all of the inset (Duh), while the brush can reach all the nooks but if you’re sloppy about it, it’ll push up a bunch of paint onto the flat surfaces and ruin any surface that you’ve set up.
Now you can of course be extremely careful with brush and roller to not hit those issues, but that’s slow and after a dozen doors in oppressive heat, I don’t have the mental stamina to do that. So over time, I found that if I slather on paint liberally with the brush in the insets first, hit the sides quickly, then roll the surface, it works out that I don’t have to go back and issues.
Order of operations. The thing you might’ve learned as “PEMDAS” in grade school math. Some things are required by the laws of physics or rules we work under — you can’t bake your cookie ingredients without first mixing them together. Other times, there are sequences of operations that make things significantly easier, or better, if done in a particular order — you can possibly put on a pair of shoes before putting on a pair of pants (theoretically anyways) but it is MUCH easier to put your pants on first. Today I’m going to be discussing the latter.
Like many very important concepts in the world, order of operations is sorta scale-free in that it can be applied at multiple levels. As you grow and mature, you just find new places to apply the concept.
Basic order of ops is about learning your own toolbox
Starting out in your career, you’re just learning how to do the work. Order of operations is important for making sure things are done correctly. Disinfect surgical implements before surgery, clean and understand your data sources before you do a big analysis, take your frozen pizza off the plastic cutting board before baking it. It sounds trivial, but just getting to this part takes years of study. It’s also something that you never finish building upon. We’re all still inventing and learning new and better ways to use our tools to best effect.
What’s interesting about this aspect is that it’s often very personal. This is the “build your own workflow” part of life, and we all have our very unique and esoteric ways. We pick the best tools available at the time we’re learning, build up habits and and shortcuts, and over time those habits becomes so ingrained that the cost of switching becomes too high to switch to a “new and better” tool . For example, I still use vim and Excel for a surprisingly large amount of my work, even though there are probably better development and query environments for whatever it is I’m working on.
About the only thing I can say is that find what works for you, switch if you feel it’s worth the time investment.
Looking beyond your own work, at other’s work
But learning order of operations doesn’t just stop with learning to execute. When you finally get your basic execution down, you finally can look up from your work and look around to see how many of the discussions done about work are actually people negotiating and figuring out the correct order to do things in.
In fact, a major portion of the art of project management is optimizing for a good order of operations. Gantt charts and project scheduling, are all ways to understand and visualize how things are going to progress, as well any interdependencies involved.
Your own work is very often just one tiny component of the much larger picture. That means that your work usually depends on inputs from someone else, and someone is depending on your own outputs. If your goal is to make things proceed smoothly, you should be developing an understand of how you fit in the grand project schedule. Very often, you can find a flaw in the order of operations where you won’t get the inputs that you need, or the person who is supposed to work with your outputs isn’t technically savvy enough to work with data output. Those mismatched handoff areas within a project are things you’d want to avoid. If you can foresee that you won’t be collecting/getting the data you need, you need to say something sooner than later.
By learning what causes you pain, such as bad input data, and moving to stop that from happening, you’ve started affecting the order of operations at a broader level. Most people learn about this as they work and come across situations. Very often, becoming a “Senior ~~” means that you’ve seen enough of these painful situations to know when and how to stop them from happening. They adjust how they do work in anticipation of future problems.
Looking beyond even that, into the future
Anticipating and heading off problems becomes a massively useful skill, You were once able to anticipate when a new process will cause trouble for your own work and negotiate a solution. At some point, you’re going to wind up actively participating in the planning and negotiation discussions that set the original project plan in motion to begin with.
Now you’re going to be anticipating what tasks need to be done when. With great ownership comes great headaches. Know how halfway through a project the scope changes? Or how an executive will always look at the perfect dashboard you crafted and require “just a few changes”? Well, they come up so often that you include them into your project planning. Even those little things become operations that need to be ordered.
If you’ve ever wondered why some teammates might have suggested that seemingly sub-optimal milestones and share-out meetings to a development process, it’s probably because the teammate is working to avoid certain types of issues. It’s better to have the executive give their feedback early on not only so that they can be happy with the final result at the end. but also to avoid having to throw away too much work that said executive dislikes.
The tricky part about working at this level of operation ordering is that when everything goes according to plan, it feels natural. Things were supposed to work out this way — of course you paint the inset of the door before the main surface. Why would anyone do anything different? The perfectly painted end result is the only thing visible, all the potential disasters that were avoided due to good planning didn’t happen. This happens despite all the time, thinking, experience, and skill that goes into it.
Where am I going with all this?
On some level, we’re all project managers of our own lives and careers. It’s important to learn the basics early on, because you’ll be needing those skills more and more until you rise up into the managerial ranks and it ends up taking over the majority of your work day.
So think about the order which things are done. Then think about it a bit more. It’s worth it.
About this newsletter
I’m Randy Au, currently a Quantitative UX researcher, former data analyst, and general-purpose data and tech nerd. The Counting Stuff newsletter is a weekly data/tech blog about the less-than-sexy aspects about data science, UX research and tech. With occasional excursions into other fun topics.
All photos/drawings used are taken/created by Randy unless otherwise noted.
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