How to Paint a Project into a Corner

Some projects, when you are finished with them, you can take a look back and feel a sense of satisfaction that you accomplished something, and that all of your efforts will pay off in making a situation better for yourself and those around you. And then there are some projects that are marked by a certain, “If only I knew then what I knew now” feeling. These are the projects that are less than enjoyable to take a look back on, but they are often the most instructional if we do take the time to examine them.

For my bachelor’s program, I had to come up with a training module that would resolve a real-world problem that myself or someone I knew was facing, and create the training module. I often have difficulty coming up with these sorts of projects because I am not in a position where a lot of these issues are easy to find. I was not even a graduate assistant at the time—I was and am working at a hotel as a painter. The paint room was incredibly disorganized with over a hundred different paints and stains in the paint room and only a loose organization as to what went where. The paint chart that explained what paints went where was a series of chicken-scratched papers on a clipboard, and it was very difficult to tell what information was most current. Further, I was told that there was an issue with engineers painting the wrong color on the walls—that engineers would just grab a color that looks right and paint a surface with it only to find out that it was the wrong color in the morning. To meet the requirements of my course project, I had to include certain multimedia elements into the project, and this pushed to me to do more than what I felt the issue at hand merited. Perhaps a lot more…

The former painter seemed to believe the problem was simply one of motivation—that people did not keep the area organized by putting things back where they belonged. To help with this, and to clear up the confusion about which paint corresponded with which surface, I created a paint chart catalog with pictures and number callouts that showed the paint that belonged on each surface in the hotel. It was basically a job aid on steroids as well as a way to organize the paint room. I also created a system of labeling the shelves with “warehouse locations,” and the binder with the paint chart showed where each paint was located on the shelf. It’s an alphanumeric coding system that’s used by the military warehouses as well as other warehouses the world over. Throughout most of this project I didn’t really consult with anyone on the details. I mostly saw this project as my prerogative to fix the paint situation.

As a result, it has more or less remained my project. I didn’t really get buy-in from anyone, and now that the project is finished, most of the engineers complain that the location system and the binder is “too complicated.” I tried to make the project scalable in case the organization caught on, so I added more letters and numbers than what was needed for the shelves in the paint room, and most people never bother to take the time to figure out what the location breakdown means. Now that I have been doing the painting detail for a while, I’ve also begun to realize that engineers rarely paint the walls the wrong color. What this turned out to be was one of two things: 1. Someone ordered the wrong sheen of paint or type of paint. For example, the paint was supposed to be Eg-Shel, and someone ordered flat instead, or it was supposed to be the “Mack Creek” color from the “Harmony” Sherwin Williams product line of paint, but they got the “Direct to Metal” Sherwin Williams paint instead, etc. Both of these have an effect on how the paint looks on the walls and makes it look like the “wrong color.” And 2. It is very difficult to mix a gallon of paint to be exactly the same color batch after batch from one gallon to the next. For more reasons than I can name, Sherwin Williams will often give us a paint that is “slightly off,” because they change the formula of their colors or have minor variations in the paint, etc. Also, if the walls haven’t been painted in a long time, the wall’s color can fade, and when applying the new paint it can leave an undesired contrast where the touching up occurred. In both cases, the only real way to fix this is to repaint the entire surface, and make sure that the paint is the right sheen and type to begin with.

In reviewing the questions regarding projects “post-mortem” by Greer (2010), I think there are some beneficial pieces of my project deliverable—the paint chart catalog. However, not getting buy-in from others in advance means that redoing the catalog ordering system is likely in order to make things appear less complex to others who might use the paints, rather than just asking me where something is. There were warning signs of this, and rather than halting the project I moved forward because I was also completing the project for the course grade. Perhaps that was the first  mistake.

References

Greer, M. (2010). The project management minimalist: Just enough PM to rock your projects! Laureate

Education, Inc.: Minneapolis, MN.