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Seven things doing a 1000 piece puzzle has common with complex engineering projects

I was doing grocery shopping during the New Year holidays and the store had a lot of 1000 piece puzzle on sale for $11. My son had never done more than 100 pieces and  I was like hey this seems interesting for him, so I bought one. We started working it on Jan13th and finished between 4 people on Jan25th. During the journey of finishing I saw a lot of similarities with complex engineering projects. I think everyone in engineering should do one of these and here are some of the things I learned.
  1. Underestimating the task: I grossly underestimated the task and amount of time it would take for my son to do it.
  2. Teamwork: After a day or two I realized my son lost interest, the whole family had to be involved to keep him motivated on it.
  3. Prep work: Like engineering projects, you need to do a lot of prep work like:
    1. Turn  the pieces down 
    2. Study the patterns
    3. Sort the pieces
  4. Divide and rule: Like engineering projects you need to pick some quick wins initially to get off the ground and start assigning tasks to team members. In our case, I focused first on building the frame by finding corner pieces whereas other members picked up some unique buildings or landmarks in the puzzle.
  5. Uncertainties: Like software projects, unforseen things can come and derail you, in our case, my wife had to go out of town for a week for school and my son became sick with fever for 3 days.
  6. Tenacity and Persistence: Every project needs a driver who would carry on regardless of how monumental the task is and one who keeps inching towards the deadline. Once you build momentum, puzzles like engineering projects have a snowball effect and the first 50% took 80% of the time but the last 50% went fast because pieces were reduced and when members saw that it's getting close, everyone got excited and put in extra efforts to finish it.
  7. The joy of finishing it: Like complex engineering project seeing something going live is a feeling that can't be expressed in words but can only be experienced by going through the grind.
Here are some pictures of the process and I recommend others to go through this, it's a great tool to increase family bonding and have some time off from tech like TV and distraction from work on the weekend.






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