Why is it so much harder to re-do a project than it was to do it the first time? I’m at work right now reworking a project due to major changes in scope by the client. I’m getting paid the same as I was the first time I worked on it but I know I’m far less productive this time (Exhibit No. 1 - this post). This happens fairly often in my line of work. What’s the solution? I’m always tempted to dump the whole thing and start from scratch but I think that would take even more time.
I have the opposite feeling.
Many times I’ve had to re-do work, usually because of a disk failure, system crash, lost printouts, etc.
It’s always just rolled out, and the improvements I was planning come right in as I go.
A lot of my work now is 3-D modeling/animation, and you’re never perfect, so re-dos are liberating as well as annoying.
The changes that do hurt me like you say are when the client cuts back goal in the middle and I have to trim out good work. Just recently I had to remove a bunch of detailed city maps that I had slaved over. It seemed endless trimming them back.
Sputnik, I have the same problem, and for me, it’s because the first time around, I had the challenge of thinking up several possible scenarios for each step of the process.
In the re-work, I get annoyed because it’s so glaringly obvious what the best choice is – the one I had decided upon in the first place. It’s hard for me to break out of that thinking, and get invested in other possible courses of action. This happens on minor things (let’s bind the reports in green covers, oh we’re out of green, well shoot, the other colors won’t be as nice!) and major things (let’s hold a conference for 100 people in London, oh, our travel budget was reduced and we need to transport everyone on buses, well shoot, how do you expect me to get 100 people from NY to London on a bus?) Of course, if the original parameters had included blue reports and a conference in Buffalo, those would seem like the best choices to me.
Needless to say, that’s something I have to constantly check myself on, otherwise I wouldn’t be very good at what I do.
When the re-work happens during the design phase (I’m an architect), I don’t mind so much. You’re right when you say that the product is usually better because one can “roll in” the improvements. In fact, I’ll admit that on more than one occasion I was secretly happy that the client shot down my original idea (which I thought was my best work) because upon re-design I came up with something I liked better. My current nemesis is a set construction documents that WERE complete until the client decided to move the commercial kitchen here, move the elevator there, add a few more rooms, etc. The retro-fitting of a partial re-design into nearly completed documents just SUCKS! I’m sure this is true in any line of work. Thanks for listening to my gripe.