I am all for taking on all comers—when it comes to projects. That’s usually how I’ve engaged the world, with the attendant pros and cons. However, I have also seen enough projects to know that there are some fundamentals that need to be in place first in order to fulfill the work requirements of a project successfully.

Fundamental requirements include resourcing—the proper human resources (the funding for hours and the skill sets at the table) and the technologies. Without the fundamentals, people will be struggling to achieve tough aims with vapor. And that’s a fast way to get to vapor ware.

Tough Combinations

Usually, it’s the small projects that go unfunded…and if the work goes beyond the pre-set free hours I can offer, then I let the individuals know, and we can move on to something else. Or I can contribute my free hours to get a project on the road and move on.

Sometimes, though, there is just a confluence of poor decision-making, and then you get a mix of high high ambition, high high risk, and no resourcing. Or there may be too many leaders at the table and too few workers present to achieve the work. Or, add to that, there is no funding for support multimedia development. Or worse, the technologies are only an inherited laptop.

Suffice it to say that people on a campus get to know each other’s reputations. And while it’s a good idea to stay out of political kerfuffles, it’s still important to stay attentive to situations where something may be politically challenging. If there are people who are trying to encumber one with their responsibilities, that’s a good time to state the policies clearly and then to back those policies up with follow-through actions.

Something to Prove

For new administrators, they have to prove their capabilities. Part of their strategy is to show that they can do a lot on a small budget. This means that most will try to hand off freebie pieces to all those around them. This situation is made worse if there is no real logical sensibility for what it may take to achieve the work in a legal way—with proper accessibility (transcription) and intellectual property protocols. There are many ways to achieve lightning-fast work, but quality usually isn’t achieved unless the team doing the work is well versed and effective at teaming. Without the perspective to know what quality online learning looks like, it can be hard to know what one is building to.

Having a lot of energy is not a counter-balancer to this lack of knowledge or this poor resourcing or this unwillingness to reach beyond the borders of one’s department (except for free work) or these outsized expectations.

Are such scenarios easy to turn around? That all depends on the players. That said, it is hard to see massive changes of behavior from people. So maybe the more balanced sense to this is that there are other projects that one has to let go because there just aren’t the supporting scenarios to make something happen.