The Last Five Percent

It is a beautiful morning here in northeast Indiana. The sun is coming up over the neighbor's farm and I am on the patio with my coffee, watching the light change and letting the caffeine do its work. It is the kind of morning that makes you feel like it is going to be a great day.

I needed that feeling this morning, because yesterday things did not go quite as planned.

I have been working on a project for several weeks now. Nothing exotic, but it is a big one. Lots of moving parts, lots of lists, lots of coordination with the people helping me pull it together. Over the past few weeks the items on that list started disappearing, sometimes one at a time, sometimes in small clusters. It felt good every time another line got crossed off.

Yesterday I crossed off what I thought was the last one.

Then I went back through the materials one more time and found a couple of things my team and I had overlooked. Neither one is a crisis. One is a quick fix. The other requires a little research before we can close it out. But they were there, hiding in plain sight, waiting to be found.

I had planned to present the finished project today. That is now pushed to next week.

Here is what I keep coming back to on this sunny morning: the last five percent of any project is where the work gets honest with you. The first ninety-five percent is planning and momentum and checking boxes. The last five percent is where the checklist stops lying. Every project has a couple of those items. The loose connection you walked past a dozen times. The thing that seemed fine until you looked at it one more time. They are not signs that you did the work wrong. They are signs that you did the final walk-through right.

The lesson I am taking from my patio this morning is simple: declare victory after the walk-through, not before it. A finished project is not the one where the list runs out. It is the one where the list runs out and you went back through and nothing jumped out at you.

Next week, that will be this project. This week, I am grateful the coffee is hot and the checklist is honest.