Why might you set premium mediocre as the standard for managing your project? Why not excellence? Improve! Achieve! Run the fastest!
But to what end? Let’s utilize human movement as an example project.
Suppose you wanted to run a long distance. You might ask questions like the following. What is your goal? What is your previous track record? What is the desired future performance?
A runner may have the following table of past results:
| Year | Distance | Time (mins) | Pace |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3.1 | 30 | |
| 13.1 | 132 | 10.15 | |
| 26.2 | 360 | 13.85 | |
| 2 | 3.1 | 27 | |
| 13.1 | 125 | ||
| 26.2 | 300 | ||
| 3 | 3.1 | 20 | 6.5 |
Look at that! What an improvement!
Whoop-de doo. Who really cares? Those are all actually times from my very, very mediocre middle school running career. (See note one below if you care at all about that context)
If you want to optimize marginal gains from a mediocre baseline, this approach to project management is not for you. No the goal is premium mediocre.
Last year I ran my first half marathon in basically two decades. I did the beautiful Zion at Night race and achieved all my goals.
I did that without actually training explicitly for the event. (I do a lot of cycling and yoga.)
Premium Mediocre Performance Par Excellence if I may say so myself