Are we there yet?
A question my children used to ask pretty much every time we had been in the car for more than 10 minutes!
And my answer would range from 'Yes, we will be there in a minute' to 'No, we've still got another 3 hours to go'...and for a child, who lives in the present moment, 3 hours may as well have been a lifetime!
And this just about sums up how I'm feeling about various things right now.
We have two work projects on the go, both of which were supposed to be 6-9 month projects...and both of which are still being worked on some five years later!! With both projects, we have had scoping changes, unreliable (and downright dishonest) contractors before now, reliance on external forces that are outside of our control and downtime due to other things having to take priority (which is fairly reasonable in a five year period!).
There are other things going on my life where we were supposed to reach the end of the tunnel months ago and then again weeks ago...and now we have to wait another two months before we might see daylight. It was the same when building the house a few years ago and then refurbishing this house a few years later.
Does this make me a poor project manage I wonder? Should I be driving more forcefully to insist that projects come in on time and on budget? Or is it OK that these projects have had the space to evolve and grow? I know the delays on the house refurbishment allowed me to improve the layout, tweak ideas and change things so the end result was even better than I had hoped.
So maybe that is the model for these particular projects. Maybe they evolving projects rather than time specific projects and I just didn't quite realise that when I embarked on them.
Patience will be rewarded...