Saving projects

I was recently asked at work what I felt about a project that I had been closely working with and putting in a lot of effort. I was seeing only problems and not that much potential in the project and we were getting our back against the wall as a competing project had emerged recently and they were cutting corners by taking a less academic approach. So I had to suggest that our project be canned as it hadn't produced any tangible results for a while. Since then, I allocated 50% of my personal targets into the said project for 1H08, which, all things considered, still is a completely idiotic thing to do, if you would want to optimize your bonuses. This is starting to resemble a hit-or-miss situation with the odds against me.

Today we were finally able to deliver preliminary results to the powers that be and right now I have to say that I'm cautiously optimistic that we just might be able to pull this off. In fact it seems that the ground work that we've done is in fact sort of decent and the approach might be the right one, after all. And I have to admit that maybe it was my pessimistic self again who was standing way too close to the project and the problems to see the potential in it. I guess that's a common problem when you're hitting your head against a wall; you lose your perspective of things and then you're in trouble. If you're an optimist, you keep digging yourself into a swamp since you can't see the reality. But if you're a pessimist, you can only see the things that can fail. So maybe it's time to learn a bit of optimism again...