Anyone who has watched a lot of football knows the feeling of a match turning. Nothing on the scoreboard has changed, but something in the air has. One team begins to win every loose ball, to string passes together, to push the other side deeper and deeper. The momentum has shifted, and everyone watching can feel it ten minutes before it shows up as a goal. Matches are not played at a constant temperature. They run in phases — spells of pressure, spells of survival, periods where one side simply has the game by the throat. The good teams understand this and play it deliberately. And projects, I have come to believe, work exactly the same way, even though we plan them as if they did not.
We tend to plan projects as a flat sequence of tasks, each given its allotted time, progress assumed to accumulate evenly from start to finish. But that is not how delivery actually feels or actually works. Real projects have phases of momentum and phases of struggle, periods where everything clicks and periods where every step is uphill. The leaders who get the most out of a team are the ones who read those phases and respond to them, rather than pretending the work proceeds at one steady pace.
Momentum is real, and it compounds
Momentum in a match is not mystical. It is the accumulation of small advantages into a psychological state that makes the next advantage easier to win. A team that is on top wins the next ball more easily because it believes it will, because the opponent has started to doubt, because confidence and doubt are themselves forces on the pitch. Success makes the next success more likely. That is what momentum is — a feedback loop, running in your favour or against you.
Projects have the identical dynamic and it is just as real. A team that delivers a few quick wins early gains a confidence that makes the next deliverable easier. The stakeholders relax, the trust grows, the team starts to believe it is a team that delivers, and that belief becomes self-fulfilling. The reverse is equally true and far more dangerous: a project that stumbles early can fall into a spiral where each setback erodes the confidence needed to recover from the next, until a team that was perfectly capable is losing simply because it has started to expect to lose. Momentum is not a soft factor. It is one of the most powerful forces acting on a project, and it compounds in whichever direction it is pointed.
Early wins are worth more than their size suggests
Because momentum compounds, the timing of success matters as much as its scale. A modest win early is often worth more than a larger win later, because the early win sets the feedback loop running in your favour at the point when it has the most time to compound. The good manager knows to chase an early goal not only for the goal itself but for what it does to the shape of everything that follows.
This is one of the most practical things a project leader can act on. Sequence the work so that something real and visible is delivered early — not a status update, not a plan, but an actual outcome the team and the stakeholders can see and feel. The early win buys confidence inside the team and credibility outside it, and both of those make every subsequent phase easier. I have deliberately reordered plans to bring a winnable deliverable forward, even at some cost to pure efficiency, because the momentum it generates pays back the cost many times over. Starting well is not a nicety. It is a strategy.
Knowing when to push and when to hold
A team cannot press at maximum intensity for ninety minutes; no team can. The art is in choosing when to spend energy and when to conserve it — when to throw everything forward in search of a goal, and when to sit deeper, absorb pressure, and wait for the moment to pass. The manager who asks for maximum effort at every moment gets a team that is exhausted when the decisive phase arrives. The manager who reads the rhythm spends intensity where it counts.
Teams on projects have the same finite energy and the same need for variation, and we routinely ignore it. The plan that demands peak intensity for months on end is the plan that burns its people out before the phase that actually decides the outcome. The skilled leader varies the tempo deliberately — pushing hard through the phases that matter most, easing deliberately through the ones that can absorb it, making sure the team has something left for the periods of genuine pressure. This is not a licence for slackness. It is the recognition that sustainable intensity is variable intensity, and that a team asked to sprint the whole way will not be standing when it counts.
Surviving the bad phase without losing the match
Every team, in every match, goes through a spell where the other side is on top. The mark of a good team is not that it avoids these phases — nobody does — but that it survives them without conceding, holding firm until the pressure passes and the game turns back. The bad team panics during the bad phase, abandons its shape, and concedes the goal that turns a difficult spell into a lost match. The good team weathers it, stays organised, and is still in the game when conditions improve.
Projects have these phases without fail, and the same discipline applies. There will be a stretch where everything is hard, where the wins dry up and the problems pile on and morale sags. The instinct in that phase is to tear up the plan, to make dramatic changes, to do something. Often the wisest thing is the football thing: hold your shape, do not panic, keep doing the fundamentals well, and survive the phase without conceding the catastrophic blow that turns a hard period into a failed project. Most bad phases pass if you do not do something rash in the middle of them. The leader’s job in the bad spell is often less to fix and more to hold — to keep the team organised and steady until the game turns back, as it usually does.
What to take into your own projects
Reading a project in phases rather than as a flat line is one of the more useful shifts in how I think about delivery. A few things to carry across:
Treat momentum as a real force. It compounds in whichever direction it runs. Protect it when it favours you and act early to arrest it when it turns against you.
Engineer an early win. Sequence the work so something real lands early, when the confidence it generates has the most time to compound. Starting well is a strategy, not a nicety.
Vary the tempo on purpose. Push hard through the phases that matter and ease through the ones that can absorb it. A team asked to sprint the whole way will not be standing when it counts.
Hold your shape through the bad phase. Most difficult spells pass if you do not do something rash in the middle of them. The job is often to hold steady, not to fix.
The scoreboard of a project — the milestones met, the deliverables shipped — tells you what has happened. The momentum tells you what is about to. The leaders who feel the phases of a project the way a good manager feels the phases of a match are the ones who push at the right moments, hold firm at the right moments, and are still standing when the game turns their way.
This piece sits alongside Why the World Cup Is a Program, Not a Project and Why the Best Teams Plan for Failure.
Ben Webb is a Sydney-based project leader and former Australian Project Manager of the Year, sharing practical lessons from major projects, events and complex stakeholder environments.
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