Right, so this whole “top 10 p stars” thing, eh? People love a good list, don’t they? Always trying to boil things down to a neat little ranking. It kinda takes me back to this one time, a project I got tangled up in. Not exactly “p stars” like you might be thinking, but close enough in spirit, I guess.
We were supposed to identify, like, the “Top Potential Projects” from a whole heap of new ideas. The bigwigs wanted a clear, shiny list. “Let’s find our P-Stars!” someone actually said in a meeting, I kid you not. So, the mission was on. I was part of the team tasked to sort through this mess and come up with the golden ten.
The Grand Plan (or so we thought)
First off, we thought, easy peasy. We’ll make a spreadsheet. Gather all the proposals. Define some “key metrics” – you know, the usual buzzwords: impact, feasibility, innovation. Slap some scores on ’em. Add ’em up. Done. Top 10, just like that. We even had a cool internal codename for the scoring system, something like the “Prospect Valuator.” Sounds fancy, right?
So, I started by trying to get all the data. That itself was a nightmare. Some proposals were just a paragraph. Others were like mini-novels. Trying to compare apples and oranges, or more like apples and, I dunno, spaceships.
Then, the “scoring.” Oh boy. What I thought was “high impact,” my colleague Sarah thought was “too risky.” What John saw as “innovative,” Maria called “completely impractical.” We spent weeks, I tell ya, just arguing over the definitions of our own metrics. The spreadsheet got more and more columns. Conditional formatting everywhere. It was a beast.
What Actually Happened
We held countless meetings. We interviewed people who pitched the ideas. We built little models. We even tried to use some fancy weighting system. The list of “P-Stars” kept changing. One week, Project Alpha was number one. The next, it was down to number fifteen because someone important suddenly got cold feet about it.
And the politics! Everyone wanted their pet project to be a “P-Star.” Suddenly, projects I’d never even heard of were getting “strong recommendations” from upstairs. The initial idea of an objective ranking? Thrown right out the window.
In the end, we did produce a list. A “Top 10 P-Projects.” Was it good? Meh. It was a list. It made some people happy, mostly the ones whose projects made it. It made a lot more people grumble. The whole thing felt… forced. Like we just picked names out of a hat after a certain point, just to stop the meetings.
So, how do I know all this inside stuff?
Well, that whole “P-Star” project? It was my big chance, or so I thought. I was relatively new in that department, trying to make a mark. I poured hours into it. Late nights, skipped lunches, the whole nine yards. I genuinely believed we could make something useful. I was the one who championed that “Prospect Valuator” system, trying to make it fair.
The fallout from that list wasn’t pretty. Some good ideas got buried because they didn’t have a loud enough champion. Some real duds got pushed forward because of who was backing them. And me? I got a pat on the back for “all the hard work,” but I also saw how the sausage was really made. It was disillusioning, to be honest. I learned that “top lists” in places like that are often more about who you know, or who shouts loudest, than about any real objective quality.
It kind of soured me on the whole idea of these neat rankings for a while. You spend all this time trying to create a system, and then human nature just walks all over it. So yeah, “top 10 p stars”… it just makes me think of that crazy project and shake my head a bit. You try to find the stars, but sometimes you just end up with a lot of dust.
