17# - Knowing When to Start a Project often determines its Success

There are few activities at work more exciting than a "Kick-Off Meeting". Organizations and people love to launch new projects. In most cases, when we see a problem or an opportunity, we rush to launch a project.

Yet, knowing when to start a project is a key factor in its success. And yet it’s a strategic talent very few companies and individuals have developed.

If you begin a project when the idea is still fresh and the solution is too vague, chances are high that the project will fail.

Imagine that you go to a concert and you fall in love with the piano. You decide that you want to learn how to play it and you embark on this project.

Immediately you buy a Steingraeber piano for $58,000 and subscribe for 12 months to the most expensive course.

But after only two lessons, you realize that piano is probably not for you….

A great example of this is the Glass project, Google’s attempt to create the first wearable smart glasses; launched in 2013. Two years after its release, the project was discontinued due to the high number of troubles and complaints from the early adopters.

Apple’s first iPhone is a great counter-example.

Did you know that creating the iPhone was first suggested to Steve Jobs in 2001?

Yet, despite the attractive vision of disrupting the telecom sector, he refused to launch a project straightaway to realize it.

Jobs made it clear that the focus, energy, and key resources of Apple had to be devoted to growing iTunes and consolidating the iPod as the new gadget for listening to music.

But, he did assign a few engineers to further explore the smartphone concept, built some prototypes, and partnered with other telecom players to learn about the technology.

An official project was finally launched in 2004.?

As we can see in these two examples, deciding when an idea is ready to be a project is of strategic importance and an important concept for the project manager to understand.

To address this issue, my colleague and #8 in the Thinkers50 ranking, Whitney Johnson, published a joint article on HBR proposing a framework based on the S-Curve model, to help organizations determine when it’s the right time to start a project.

The model was originally made popular by E.M. Rogers. It’s commonly used to show that every time we learn something new, we go through three phases based on how much we know: Inexperience, Engagement, and Mastery. The lightbulb icons in the chart represent your funnel of ideas.

The base of the curve - in the inexperience phase- represents a period of investigation, where you should find out if there’s really an opportunity in an idea — or not.

Most of the projects that are launched in this initial phase are doomed to fail. Like the Google Glass project which was established in the inexperience phase.

To know if your idea has moved through the inexperience phase, you must consider these six questions:

1. Has the project been done before? The newer the idea, the more time required at the low base of the S-curve to explore it — avoid starting the project right away. In Google’s case, smart glasses had never been done before.

2. Is the project part of your core business? The further from the core business, the more time you’ll need to spend at the lower end of the S-curve. Glasses and wearables were far from Google’s business.

3. How well do you know the scope of your project? If less than 50% of what your project will deliver is known, keep exploring and iterating to better define the project. Many features of the Google glass had not been defined at the moment it was launched.?

4. What’s the investment cost? Do you know how much the project will cost? And do you have the budget for it? These are important decisions to be considered at the lower end of the S-curve. The budget of the Google glass was not known precisely, but you can imagine it was quite substantial.

5. Do you have buy-in from key stakeholders? Excellent ideas have become monumental failures due to a lack of buy-in from key stakeholders. Technology fans were excited about Google Glass, but they were not the target users.

6. What’s the timeline? Do you know how much time you’ll need for your project? Google Glass didn’t have a detailed timeline, it was driven by the launch date. And, it continued to be developed after it was launched. You should only establish a project and invest your organization’s resources once you reach the engagement phase.

In this phase you’re clear on the idea, have learned about the options, and have a better view of the solution that your project will build.

It’s probably no surprise the iPhone was established in the engagement phase.

The 3rd phase is the mastery phase - when you’ve already done many similar projects.

The subsequent versions of the iPhone were developed in this phase, obviously much easier to manage.

As we have seen, knowing when to start a project can make a big difference in determining whether you fail or succeed.

Do you use other methods to determine when is the right time to launch a project? Any other views on this critical topic?

Thanks for reading, commenting, and sharing!

Hasta la vista!

Antonio