The first step to delivering a project can be challenging for many organisations.
It’s common for organisations to grapple with competing business priorities, the need for additional funding and critical skills, and the challenge of engaging busy customers. You’re not alone in these struggles.
Some organisations think they have started, but they dither. They need help understanding the challenge they are trying to solve or the environment in which it persists. They start designing solutions in detail, thinking of individual features they want, or thinking too far ahead about the launch of the service or product without understanding what problem it is solving.
How do organisations solve this challenge?
By taking action!
One helpful framework is to think big, start small and act fast!
Think big
Spend time thinking about what you want to achieve and the significant challenges you could face; this should cover:
- Define what success looks like so you know what to focus on, how to measure progress and inspire stakeholders.
- You can understand your challenge by speaking to the right people: customers, users, delivery teams, support groups, managers, leaders, or even other companies.
- Document your findings and make them readily available to your team and stakeholders.
Start small
Once you understand the challenge, you can begin to design solutions. You may need to learn how to solve the problem or have a few options you want to test. Either way, start small.
- Chop the work into meaningful chunks that deliver value that can be tested and iterated upon with customers and users.
- Learn from each iteration and build upon the last to get progressively closer to your goal. Based on what good looks like, you could improve or add more features to ensure you progress towards your goal.
- Document and share your findings, feedback, and decisions to help you spread your knowledge and learn from each iteration.
Act fast
Working fast encourages mistakes, which results in learning, which you can take into the next iteration. Chunking the work up into small pieces reduces the impact of failure by reducing the feedback loop, allowing you to learn and progress quickly.
- Focus on learning by doing rather than learning by planning. While it is good to plan, you learn more about how to deliver something by doing.
- Demonstrating rapid progress to customers and users creates credibility and gains respect.
- Have regular reviews of the way you work or Retros.
Conclusion
Over time, all this activity creates a momentum that builds and builds. When stakeholders see you responding to their feedback, applying lessons and demonstrating progress in rapid cycles, you will engender confidence and gain credibility. Its amazing what you can achieve in a short time while your competitors are still planning how they will deliver a killer product or service.
Want help getting stared…