You’re not managing a project. You’re launching a cannonball on Europa.

Have you ever tried to fire a cannon on a moon where you don’t know the gravity?

Of course, you haven’t. But you have tried to manage a project with no real sense of what the team can deliver, what the scope actually is, or whether that last stakeholder demand is going to send you into orbit.

That, my friends, is what we call the ascending phase. Everything’s up in the air—literally and figuratively. Discovery, exploration, and wildly guessing what might work. You’re firing shots and learning the terrain only after the fact.

You’ll know you’re here if you’re using something like JIRA. Task counts, user story counts, or user story points will all be headed up faster than they’re being completed.

The reason you may get stuck here is scope explosion. There’s too much upward pressure on the cannon ball. Cutting down high level scope of what counts as complete here is key to avoiding this. You don’t want to reach scope escape velocity

Then comes the plateau phase: you're not gaining new ground, but you’re not crashing either. The project has inertia. Meetings are happening. Slides are being slid. You might even be in orbit—which sounds cool until you realize that means endlessly circling the same problem set with no descent in sight. Congratulations, you’re now running a zombie project.

In JIRA, this will look like tasks being written about as fast as they’re being completed. You should expect to spend some time here on every project, but you need to descend eventually. Time boxing is effective here. But note, the reason a project may be stuck in orbit is more likely to be technical than scope creep. In other words, you keep making progress on the implementation, and discovering even more implementation you have to do. Escape velocity is a product problem (usually), orbit is an engineering problem (usually).

Only once the cannonball begins its descent do you know where it’s going to land. That’s the predictable phase. You’ve mapped the landscape, you’ve figured out gravity, and now you can forecast, plan, and maybe even ship something.

In JIRA, this will look like tasks being worked off faster than they’re being written. This is the only time attempting estimates on a delivery date will make sense.

The Mistake? Predicting Descent While You’re Still Ascending

Most teams—and I include many senior leaders in this—try to make accurate delivery promises in the ascending phase. They’re pressured to. That’s like launching a rock into space, not knowing the gravity, and confidently predicting it’ll hit a specific rock 200 miles away.

You don’t know the gravity yet. Stop pretending you can do trajectory math when the constants are still variables.

The Point?

Project management isn’t a Gantt chart. It’s physics in hostile territory. You are not a conductor; you are a field scientist trying to model gravity mid-launch.

And sometimes? The cannonball doesn’t land at all. It floats off into space. That’s fine too. You learned something. You didn’t fail—you mapped part of the system.

What About Burndowns?

Some folks like to use burndown charts to manage this. Burndown charts are when you fix scope at the beginning of a sprint in Scrum or similar method, and then watch the scope get worked down by the end of the sprint. It’s from this that you can determine velocity.

In the case that you actually deliver real and concrete value to the customer at the end of a sprint, this is great. This is the equivalent of putting very little powder in the cannon as a risk mitigation measure. The cannonball is not likely to go high. Moreover, with enough iterations, you’ve started to get a feel for the gravity on this planet.

But in the case where your sprints are just breaking up a much larger project? Then they don’t help here. Burndowns become the equivalent of snapshots of what work is left right now, and how fast do we work through it. It starts to measure gravity, but it hasn’t measured the powder charge or the intrinsic scope of the project. It has no idea what the overall lift is, because we don’t know how fast new tasks are being written.

“This is helpful. I wish I had someone like you to help me on my projects!”

What’s that you say? You need some help (or know someone who does)?

Well, you’re in luck! We’ve recently had a client graduate, and we have openings. Email us at [email protected]