#31 - New Project Diligence - Scope, Complexity, Time & Resources
How to understand the dynamics of a project before you actually start it.
As a reminder for newer subscribers, Exonomist is written in raw form. I really try to sit down, write out my thoughts, and press send. This means you’ll find typos, and occasionally undeveloped ideas that I do have a habit of later refining.
Tl;dr — when taking on a new project/program or recruiting others to your effort, make sure to communicate / ask about the scope, complexity, time, and resourcing dynamics for the project. If you want to read more about what to do once the project has started, I recommend reading Letter #8: Tactics for Running Kick-Ass Projects.
I was having a conversation with one of my colleagues this week about project selection. We were talking a bit about how one goes about taking on projects that have increasingly broad impact potential. Said more plainly, the process of going from managing smaller projects to larger and larger programs.
Letter #29 I wrote (“Funnel Like It’s Hot) (god damnit I am corny) was all about funnels, and how you should see incoming opportunities for things to work on as a funnel — not automatically saying “yes” to doing something, but thinking carefully about the effort before you commit. But how should one go about…scoring a potential project? That’s the focus for today’s thoughts.
Before you take on a new effort, you should think about the Scope, Complexity, Time, and Resourcing of the effort
Whenever approaching a new project, I always think through these factors. The value of doing this is that it requires you to consider, in advance, why the project might fail. I wrote a bit about this in Letter 8 (Tactics for Running Kick-Ass Projects) if you want to dive into that for details of what to do once you’ve already decided to pursue an effort.
Allllllright, so what are these factors and why do they matter?
Scope: the span of impact for a project.
Narrow scope = designing the lid on a to-go coffee cup
Broad scope = transforming the entire supply chain for a coffee company
Complexity: the number of factors that must be simultaneously understood and managed
Low complexity = having a 1-1 conversation about a rough idea you have with a colleague you know well
High complexity = facilitating a 200-person workshop, where the workshop has 10 different sub-areas of focus, and oh by the way the attendees are spread out across 10 time zones
Time: the target duration of an effort
Low time = sending a text message to my wife to say, “Hey! Love you!”
High time = embarking on a multi-year turnaround of a business unit that is going to involve changing the entire product offering, shifting the supply chain, and re-tooling the entire go-to-market capability stack
Resourcing: the people and technology powers you have at your disposal to accomplish the project
Tight resourcing = “You’re not getting any FTE support on this. You can take one hour per week from these two people who might have some spare time, but no promises. Might end up just being all you on this one”
Drowning in $$$ resources = “I don’t care what it costs. Get it done. Move however many people to this project that you need. Oh, you want to hire BCG to help you with strategy & transformation? Go for it — here’s five million dollars. Totally OK if you go over budget, just get it done.”
Before you take on a new project/program (or even pitch it to your colleagues), you should make sure to have an understanding of these four dimensions first. It will help you:
A. Give better guidance to your employees about what is going to be required to achieve project success, or
B. Give you, as the potential project member, a framework to ask clarifying questions…to help you understand if you want to do the project or, even better, the blind spots that the person trying to recruit you might have
I WISH I had been better about asking these questions before taking on new projects years ago… There were definitely times where I signed up for something, not fully appreciating the scope or resourcing, only to be miserably researching and building content at 10pm on a Friday night because I didn’t say, “Hey, this feels really broad. Can we bring in one or two more people to help tackle various aspects of this?”
Your time is too important to take on new efforts without understanding the fundamentals of the effort. If you take the little bit of extra time to make sure you understand these four dimensions, I promise that your project is far likely to be a successful and enjoyable experience.