Beginnings are always the hardest thing to do, in life as in writing as in projects and products. So here I am beginning my blog on technology and project management with an article about beginning.
There are 3 components to good beginnings. The first, trite as it may sound, is to begin. The impetus to start – whether it’s to sit down and set thoughts to words, to decide to bring some new idea to life, or to make a change to one’s habits as an individual or an organization – can be a difficult hill to climb. In chemistry, there’s a notion of “activation energy”. This is the minimum amount of energy one needs for reactants to form products in a chemical reaction. This is often pictured as a hill on a graph. Not enough energy to climb the hill, and nothing happens. Everything in the environment can be in place, but without the spark, nothing starts. It sounds trite: if you want to have a beginning, you need to begin.
There are many ways to get the spark going, but oddly enough getting the spark itself requires a beginning, an activation energy if you will. The environment has to be conducive to starting and setting off sparks. There are a few ways to do this which are congruent between personal and professional life, which one can consider to be classified between push and pull.
Pushing means that you’re in a spark-rich environment – either you or the organization around you is used to, and hence practiced at, starting beginnings. Humans are creatures of habit – we seek and crave patterns in our environments and lives. Successes or failures, once you start something once, the second time is easier as you can point to how you got going the last time. Keep going and then it just becomes a habit to initiate starts. The converse is also true, and unfortunately endemic in corporations. It’s the easiest thing in the world to set up environments which actively discourage sparking.
In a company I was recently with, management had a habit of demanding that software projects only got green-lit if a full prototype was already built – not key technology de-risking, but actual, full-blown systems running on final platforms. At the same time, the same management had a major issue with engineering doing anything without upper management sanction. This restriction, needless to say, led to a rather odd dynamic where technology de-risking and investigation had to take place on a skunk-works basis using cycles stolen from more visible projects to produce essentially 70-80% complete products, all while running the risk that upon presentation the engineering team would be censured for having wasted time without management direction. This is not the environment one needs to generate sparks.
A slightly less onerous damper on spark generation comes from an over-reliance on process at the expense of innovation. At the same company, at an earlier point in its history, we had a process of running projects through a series of “Gates”, spanning the gamut from project opening to product commercialization and delivery. In principle, this structure was a good idea, as its standardized procedures meant that what at its core are very similar processes would not have to be re-invented with every project delivered. The Gate process for commercialization required input from a number of different company roles, from product management to marketing, operations, and sales. Each Gate in principle required answering a number of fairly reasonable questions, ranging from market projections to operational flow.
Unfortunately, as the company shrank and single people ended up taking on more scope, the Gate process became more and more unwieldy to operate, and eventually had to be dropped as the number of people dropped to the point where the Gate meetings became the same couple of people talking with each other. The Gate process became a relic of a much larger company which became a drag on starting and progressing projects.
In the end, a successful company. whether startup or established, needs to be one which pushes beginnings –constantly generating sparks. Some of these sparks catch while some don’t. The only way to light a fire under your company, though, is to do more starting.