The art of leadership could not be put better than this surely …

Involvd is a big fan of the Lean Startup methodology as popularised by Eric Ries and Steve Blank (Eric’s doing a webinar later today if you’re interested) and we’ll be following the methodology for as long as it continues to drive the company in the right direction at the right speed (or until something even more amazing comes along).

I’m not going to go over all the detail that has been covered elsewhere as that would be a waste of everyones time but rather pick out bits from our experiences as we go through them that we have tweaked slightly to meet our needs better. Hopefully the will be useful for you too.

Little bit of background. We’re a web startup, will be a SaaS offering though not a subscription-based service to begin with (that doesn’t mean we will be Freemium either so please calm down biz dev bods!) and therefore have quite a bit in common with Ash Maurya’s CloudFire product.

Ash laid out his processes for the Customer Discovery and Customer Validation phases here and here and they are well worth a read if you’re just starting out and need a helping hand up (a true love for process-flow diagrams is a must).

I think the main reason I fell in love with the Lean model when I first read about it was when I saw that a key part of the process was to ‘get out of the building to validate the business model by talking to your customers’. Music to my ears as second only to a good process-flow is my passion for sitting down with people and talking about new business ideas. Now I had the best of both worlds, a process and an excuse to talk.

I’ve tweaked his “Problem Presentation” interview structure slightly which is what I’d like to share with you today. Point of process – don’t take notes but listen to, talk with and record the conversation using your nifty iPhone voice recording app. If you’re writing you’ll miss the all important key emotional cues that is the other half of the story.

Our process goes like this:

1. Lay out laminated cards randomly on the table in front of the potential customer where each one has a ‘problem’ on them that the customer might currently be experiencing
2. Ask them to pick their top 3 problems and discard the rest
3. Ask them if they’d like to add any of their own in place of one or more of their top 3
4. Ask them to rank the 3 they are left in first, second and third place (where first = biggest problem)
5. Ask them how they currently solve these problems today
6. Ask them how these solutions work for them right now (i.e. let’s hear how happy or pissed off they are with their current situation)
7. Briefly describe our product (with a few wireframes if appropriate as sometimes it’s easier to show and talk rather than just talk)
8. Ask whether our product would solve their top 3 problems better than their current situation
9. Ask them whether they would pay $X/unit to use our product
10. Ask them if there is anything else they want to add – Ideas? Criticisms? Feedback? Quotes?
11. Ask them for referrals

The major difference between our process and Ash’s is at the very top with the stating of the problems. In mine I don’t state my view of the world first and let them build on top of that, I ask them to create their own using a suggested but not exclusive set of answers.

Asking them to build on mine is effectively leading the witness. That’s OK but you need to bear in mind that if you lead the witness there are only three types of responses you get in return and only one of them gives you what you are looking for. Let me introduce the personalities:

1. The lazy people - The vast majority are those people that if given the opportunity to not think too hard about something then they will invariably take it. They might look like they are thinking hard and even fake the thinking process by talking about a couple of pieces of low-hanging fruit but if you delved into their mind at that moment in time it’s barely ticking over. They would just simply prefer to not work too hard and will most likely just agree with what you’ve come up with (no good)
2. The bloody-minded people – If you are interviewing business leaders then these people may actually seem the majority to you. If you are interviewing Joe-public then you will see this a far smaller category compared to the ‘lazy people’. These people don’t like to be told how to think and will always flex their intellectual muscles to try and impress you by choosing completely different problems to your set (again, no good)
3. The fair thinkers – These are the people you need as these are the ones that are going to give you their honest and well-thought-through opinion. It’s very difficult to find them though and even if you do you must catch them at the right time as there’s a chance they’ll slip into one of the above categories

Much better to take all of these characters out of the equation altogether and put them in a situation where they are forced to form a well-thought-through unbiased opinion. Using cards does just that.

The Project Plan – another post for the series of effective project management tools essential for getting the job done and delivering a successful outcome. Another very general tool that will work in any project situation to help communication within your team and up to your sponsor.

Yes yes Nick, come on! We all know how to do project planning, tell us something new for goodness sake!

Fair enough, I say, and if you are one of those that do it well then feel free to move on. The thing is, I’ve seen far more examples of bad planning than I have the reverse and usually that’s been because the project manager has missed the point before they even began.

The secret of creating a successful project plan is to realise that it’s not the plan itself that’s the valuable product here, it’s the process you go through to create the plan.

Most plans fail to hit the mark either because the format that’s used is overly complicated with features and dimensions or it’s created in an unfriendly format (sorry Microsoft!) or the creation process meant it was drafted by one person (normally the PM herself) in a darkened room all on their lonesome. Worst case scenario is that it’s a combination of all three.

Think back to previous projects and remember at least one example where you were the one doing the planning and then another when you were a resource being put into the plan.

How did you feel about your plan at the point when you had finished that first draft before you sent it for review? Chuffed to bits? Well it took you a long time, right? There was a lot to consider and the timeline was pretty aggressive.

Now, remember how was it received by your team. Any unhappy people or was everyone over the moon with what you had done? Anything like …

How do you think we’re going to be able to do that in just 4 days? What planet are you on Nick?

We can’t do those activities in that order because Mike needs to be involved in both. What’s he supposed to do? Work 80 hours a week?

That milestone can’t be achieved until we’ve done that one. You have them the wrong way round. Might have been a good idea to come and talk to us don’t you think?

Come on. Be honest. Never has a first draft been right on the money in anything I’ve been involvd in (unless it was only me on the project of course!).

How many revisions did you have to make before people agreed on it? How did you feel when members of your team picked your beautiful plan apart so callously. How did you feel at the end of the process? A little tired? How long did it take overall when you factor in the initial drafting and then all the subsequent conversations and revisions (not to mention the emotional fatigue)? Too long I’d wager.

Most importantly, what happened to the plan after that? The centre of all the action for the duration of the project or a dust collector in the 3rd folder down on your shared drive?

The problem here is not in the plan itself but the process that the team so often goes through to create the plan.

Remember, this is an incredibly important document in a project, arguably the most important, as it holds a lot of the important detail of how the team is going to operate to achieve the objectives that the project is setting out to achieve.

Remember also this is the most emotionally charged document you have (hence the bolding of the letters above) as it holds the immediate personal future of all the people involved. People tend to care quite a lot about their own destiny and most of the time like to have at least some control over it. Some of us even HATE being told exactly what to do, who to do it with and by when (ahem!). That’s just human nature I’m afraid and to change that you’re going to need a bit more than your measly plan!

So what can you do differently?

Two things – keep it simple and create it as a team.

Do those two things well and you not only have a higher quality final product but you have also helped bond your team together even more and saved yourself a heck of a lot of time in the process. You need a solid process though so as a starter for 10 here’s how I go about it.

What is it?

A project plan is a document or tool that maps out the entire implementation of the project – capturing roles, a timeline and activities shown in “swim lanes”.

It highlights all milestones, activities, interfaces, decision points and deliverables along the way.

When would you use it?

Early in the project after you have a team, you’ve developed a shared vision of the objectives (how might you do that? coming soon is a tool for you!) and you have agreed each team member’s role and responsibilities (how? again, coming soon).

A good plan then becomes a living working document that changes shape as the project progresses. It should become the place to look to see what the latest position is and what’s coming up in the future.

Who would you use it with?

Every tool should be used in a team environment if possible as I said with the Stakeholder Map.

This one, though, should ABSOLUTELY DEFINITELY and UNQUESTIONABLY be done as a group. Anyone and everyone on the project should be invited along to this workshop as they need to be able to contribute their thoughts and ideas on potential ways forward and hold their hands up to volunteer when it comes to plotting out activities.

Invite other interfacing workstreams and projects along if you can (or at least representatives). Rarely is a project a standalone island and a good way to foster intra-project relationships and collaboration is to get as many people’s fingerprints on this plan as possible. There’s less chance they’ll turn around at a later date and complain if they were part of the planning process in the first place.

Are there any rules?

Don’t plan alone. Have I said that already?

Start with the high-level milestones and work from right to left (i.e. start with the final deliverable first and then plot in subsidiary milestones back to the current day) before you start looking at the activities that will be required to deliver those milestones.

What’s the process?

Step 1 – draw the map

For this tool you need to go big as it needs to be on the wall so your group can crowd around and work comfortably with it. Length depends on how long into the future you’re planning and height depends on how many ‘swim lanes’ you might have. As a guide about 2 metres high and 4 metres long should do it (you can always tap extra paper on to the end or below if needs be.

Before you mark out the paper you need to work out the number of ‘workstreams’ in your project. For convenience, these are ways of dividing up the work for planning purposes. For example, they may reflect the responsibilities of different stakeholders in the project or they may reflect different functions. It’s totally your team’s choice how you do this, go with whatever you feel most comfortable with but make it a group decision.

I’m going to use the generic example of renovating a house for this post and my ‘team and I’ have decided to chunk the project into three workstreams – architectural design, work on the house itself and then landscaping the garden.

The workstreams therefore are called ‘design’, ‘house’ and ‘garden’ and are designated their own swim lanes for the duration of the project which is represented by the ‘timeline’.

Step 2 – plot the milestones

You should then start to populate the plan by identifying ‘key milestones’ first. These are events, deliverables or decision points that symbolise significant achievements at certain points along the timeline. Write one per post-it note (use post-its if you can as you’ll want the flexibility of being able to move them around) and stick them on to your plan starting from the end of the project and working backwards (i.e. right to left).

Your first milestone will probably always be ‘Project Complete’ and this should be stuck at you target date. Working right to left you might have others like ‘house complete’; ‘new kitchen floor down’; ‘loft conversion finished’; ‘sign-off architects drawings’ etc.

If you have a large number of workstreams and enough people in your team working on this then you might want to split into sub-groups to get the first draft up onto the wall quicker.

Use square post-it notes to represent the milestones, twist them 45 degrees and you now have a diamond (the international symbol of a milestone!). Write clearly the identity of each so all can be easily read from a distance.

That should leave you with a diagram that might look a little like this. Take a good look as a team and do a sanity check. Do they look in the right order? Any glaring errors? Does the flow look OK? Are they doable in the timeframe allotted? Are any clustered too tightly together that ‘feels’ like a bit of a stretch?

Don’t be afraid to challenge your initial assumptions (as a team through discussion mind) and move them around to your hearts content. That’s what this about.

If you’re the PM facilitating the process make sure everyone in your team is engaged and inputting. Any who aren’t gently bring them in by giving them the space, time and permission to contribute. It’s quite often the quiet ones that have the best ideas and once they’ve got going you won’t be able to stop them. You also want everyone to get in there to ensure this is a whole team effort.

Step 3 – plot the activities and dependencies

Complete the plan by using post-it notes to represent activities (note that for clarity, each workstream has been assigned a different colour). Activities are the work that must be done in order to meet the planned milestones. By using a string of post-it notes you can represent the planned duration of each activity, from start to finish. Use a marker pen to write on the identity of each activity.

Finally, it is advisable to indicate where the start or finish of one activity is dependent on another, by drawing lines between them.

If different people in the team were assigned to a workstream and have stuck to planning their ‘own’ swim lane, their thinking should then be challenged and informed by the planning of other workstreams on which they are interdependent. This results in a far more rigorous plan and builds ownership of the final product going forward.

That might leave you with something that looks a bit like this.

Now isn’t that just as good as those fancy MS Project plans that you’ve seen so many of? The big difference here is that, apart from the striking colour scheme and the wonderful flexibility that this plan has, it also has the hugely important advantage of being created by your team all at the same time. Finger prints are all over it and as a result it will be much more implementable and therefore have much more chance of success.

Don’t take it down, electronify it and bury the original in a cupboard somewhere. Be proud of your work, give it a central place on the wall by your team and watch it evolve naturally as the project progresses in open view for all to see.

Summary

That’s my take on project planning. When I was first shown this and got the chance to experience the process firsthand I can’t tell you how enlightened I felt (a little sad I know!)

You may feel that it’s a little upfront heavy in terms of resource and you wouldn’t be wrong. It does take your whole team away from what they would normally be doing for a while and therefore the temptation to go back to the usual method of one person creating the first draft and review modify review modify might seem lighter. It’s one of those false economies though as total time spent the old way will outweigh the new in the end and you miss out on theteam-building opportunity and emotional trust building that a productive workshop environment provides.

All those years I felt like I’d wasted watching myself and others create, discuss, struggle, modify, repeat, sign-off and eventually hate the very document that was supposed to bring us all together. All I’d ever heard was people complaining about that ‘the tool wasn’t fit-for-purpose’ when in fact the tool wasn’t really the issue. It’s ‘the process’ that most often needs the attention and to change that all you really need is to change your approach to creation.

I hope get the opportunity to give this a go.

Happy planning!

3 minutes, 2 slides and a founder …

What is (will be) Involvd.com? That’s the million dollar question (hopefully more) that I get asked most often at the moment.

It’s a difficult one to answer quickly as we’re aiming to be a very broad-based service. Maybe it’s easier to answer what we’re not:

• Not a social network though we will be highly social
• Not a community though many of the features will be designed to foster community interaction
• Not a project management application though will definitely be used as one
• Not a collaboration tool though you’ll find it harder not to collaborate if we do it right

How about the largest online purveyor of the finest productivity porn then?



Productivity porn (aka ‘productivity pr0n’ for those old-handers) are those little tips, tricks and techniques that one can use to maximise one’s productivity. Most often, it refers either to objects that we can use to help us like index cards, post-it notes and to-do lists or to organisational systems like ‘when to do your email’, ‘when to answer the phone’ and ‘how to structure your diary’.

Marc Andreessen of Netscape, Ning and most recently Skype fame wrote a cracking article on productivity porn here (now in archive).

I have since implemented his ’index card the night before system’ and can tell you it works extremely well (especially for those that work from home like I do). I would also love to be in a position one day to ‘not keep a schedule’ like he did in 2007 (from the book, A Perfect Mess). Not sure I’m quite there yet professionally.

As a descriptor for what Involvd.com will be I think it marries pretty well. Every part of the business model is 100% focussed on our primary aim of increasing the productivity of individuals and groups. The hypothesis being that if people are more productive then that will leave space in their time-poor lives to do extra stuff of greater personal and social value that they maybe feel they don’t have either the time, inspiration or inclination to do right now. Crying out for some productivity porn as you can see!

I also like the initial reaction I get when I use the term.

If I get asked more out of politeness than interest what it is my fantastic new product is going to do the ‘porn’ word never fails to inject immediate attention into the conversation.

Take, for example, my pitch to Startup Bootcamp last Friday. As I was last out of lots on stage with the audience a little jaded I felt I needed to inject a little pick-me-up into my short. I decided, therefore, to give my new product genre a little run-out. A lady on the front-row exclaimed, several others gasped and plenty drew sharp intakes of breath that almost demanded me to explain myself (OK maybe a little more dramatic than it actually was but it certainly got more than if I’d gone with my original intro).

That’s all the ammunition I need to know I did the right thing and judging by my conversations after the session I could tell the rest of my pitch had piggy-backed in on the attention. The video will be online soon so I promise to post it up here once I have access to it (thanks for a fantastic night Alex Farcet).

This raises an important personal question however. If this venture goes nowhere then I’m likely to hear nothing about this again. If it’s successful however, I run the chance of being known as the Productivity Porn King for the rest of my career … hmmmmmmm … that sounds like a lose-lose to me … ah well, publish!

Today is a big day for Involvd.com as I am launching the much anticipated recruitment campaign on across Copenhagen and the internet.

I am looking to build a large experienced team of IT professionals located in and around the Copenhagen area. If that’s you, you will be able to choose for yourself what you work on, when and how you do it. If you have experience with open-source technologies and the development process that will be an advantage (though not essential as long as you are a fast learner).

I can promise you I will work tirelessly to create an environment for you where you’ll meet, learn and work with like-minded technical people on a cutting-edge product.

You are, and will always be, my most important commodity and therefore you will work for a company that will include you as a shareholder when the prototype launches. Those of you that make the largest impact will be offered employment when funding is secured.

If all of that sounds good then the first step is for us to meet, get to know each other and discuss the project and your contribution in detail.

Call me … we’ll have a lot of fun

PS A big thanks goes to my good friend and hugely talented copy-writer Hugo Bone (www.hugo-bone.com) and his man Rich for putting this poster together. All your time and effort is very much appreciated

PPS Contrary to how the poster might look to the casual observer this project is not all about money. We will certainly be looking to turn a tidy profit but it’s not my absolute core purpose. I had many debates with Hugo about this message as it definitely made us both, at different times, feel a little uncomfortable but we wanted something that would make an impact on the passer-by and I think it does that. Do you?

To help describe the route I’m intending over the coming months I’ll try to cater for different learning styles, especially both right and left brain thinkers, so I’m going to lean on an excellent concept being developed by Peter Hilton (@PeterHilton) of Lunatech Ventures currently. The Plancruncher website is here.

Having been inspired by the simplicity of the Creative Commons icons they’ve created a series of images that could be used to cover-note business plan Executive Summaries. They’ve identified seven standard sections of a plan within which the writer can summarise their offering (the team, the idea, the product/service, the revenue model, funding requirements, partnership requirements and the return on investment detail). Here’s Peter’s full presentation.

Now I’m not looking to summarise my business plan for a pitch just yet but I should be able to use the model to show the position I’m in today, the position I’m looking to get to when funding will be a requirement and a mid-way step in between. So here goes:

Phase 1

• The product is vapourware (no working demo or prototype)
• There is no team (it’s just me)
• The idea is new and is going to take the world by storm
• The founder is an ambitious and wildly enthusiastic entrepreneur
• There is an elevator pitch that receives great feedback wherever it’s rolled out

Phase 2

• The product is a combination of several well proven concepts
• We are building the product ourselves
• We’re open-source through and through (both technologically and culturally – see earlier post)
• We have a prototype that is invite-only to allow us to manage load and receive valuable early feedback
• We are bootstrapping (self-funded) and are extremely careful with our expenses and costs (as we always will be as long as I’m involvd)

Phase 3

• There is a main revenue stream with more in the pipeline (none are advertising-based)
• We have developed the product and own all the IP
• We have a working product live on the internet
• The community is our #1 asset and we treat them accordingly. Network effects are present and we’re heading for critical mass
• We are looking for funding in return for a share of equity

So there we go, I hope that gives you more of an idea of where I’m going with this. Priority #1 at the moment is to turn this from an “I” to a “We” so early next week I’ll be launching my recruitment campaign.

When I have built a team I intend for us to work out together the details of how we’re going to get from Phase 1 to Phase 2. I’ll be sure to let you know how I get on.

Coming soon — launch of the recruitment campaign, early progress

Q: What the **** is copen source?
Me: Fair question! Copen source is my chosen development style or methodology. Mostly open source with a little closed thrown in.

Q: Not heard of it I’m afraid. What’s that?
Me: Not surprised really. I’ve just made it up.

Q: Will it succeed?
Me: No idea. I’m not sure it’s been tried before.

Q: Why are you doing it then?
Me: Because I want lots of people to come and help me bake the cake.

Q: What are you talking about?
Me: Well it’s like this. I’ve created what I think is a nice sounding recipe of a cake and I want to get lots of others to come and help me make, bake and taste it. I’m figuring that the more people that come and stick their fingers in the mixing bowl the better the likelihood that the final recipe will be knock-out tasty. The tastier it is the better it will sell, right?

Q: Yeh I guess. What happens when this cake of yours is done?
Me: Well that’s another reason to go down the copen source route. Once the cake is ready then it needs to be decorated. Now not everyone wants their cakes to look the same, do they? So we’ll need lots of others to come and help pretty it up. If there are plenty of people already involvd in the project then we’ll be off to a flying start.

Q: Right … think I get it … can you break it down for me and maybe keep these cakes out of it?
Me: Sure. As the name implies (visually) it’s 80% open source and 20% closed. C-O-P-E-N. These 5 convenient ‘C’ words provide a little more detail of the characteristics from both systems that I’ll look to leverage:

Cost [open]

• Developers will self-organise into teams or work individually (depending on their inclination) which will mean very low management overheads
• They are also involvd for the opportunity of achieving the project’s vision and not solely for monetary compensation. They are here to be part of something great (with the added bonus of employment and share options if the launch goes well)

Capacity [open]

• “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” said a very wise man once. Larger groups of developers coding and fixing bugs can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into solving problems and developing new functionality than they can in smaller closed systems

Capability [open]

• Every open-source project has some kind of under-the-table reputation management system bubbling away. This dictates who in the project exerts the most influence and the best naturally rise to the top

Condition (also read Quality, Reliability and Security) [open]

• Implementations that have been comprehensively peer-reviewed by many can be better trusted to have code that is efficient, scalable and secure. Developers tend to be less territorial over their code in open systems
• Developers who work on their own terms (when, how, on what) are more content and motivated to produce better work, “enjoyment predicts efficiency”
• Open and transparent feedback loops ensure project goals are defined not by management committees but by users alone
• Succession planning naturally occurs in open-source systems which mitigates an otherwise key project risk

Control [closed]

• The development team are located in close geographic proximity as face-to-face requirements events are necessary to shape and define the project. This will result in a more closely bonding team than you would see in open-source and offers a more friendly community dimension
• The code falls under copyright and remains proprietary until such time as network effects have led to market dominance

It is my plan at this time that the platform code will eventually go fully open-source whether this succeeds or fails as a project. Eric Raymond’s discriminators that push towards open source are all there for this project. The reason not to do so at this stage is that for open source to work one of the key rules is:

It’s fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode. Your nascent developer community needs to have something runnable and testable to play with.
Cathedral & Bazaar

From the time the prototype is up-and-running the decision on when and how to go fully open source will be on the table.

The term copen source also has a nice tie in with our location of course —- Copenhagen

Coming soon —– high-level plan, launch of the recruitment campaign

I’m going to start this journey with a few rules of the blog. Not for you really but for me (right now there is only me). This first post may well be a living updateable post that I (and you when you arrive) may come back to make sure I’m staying true to my values before I get infected by various emotions along the way like ambition, failure, disappointment and success (god forbid).

So here goes:

1. I give you brutal honesty, where possible, at all times – ‘where possible’ because I reserve the right to hold back on stuff that may put myself or others in trouble with the law (don’t worry, I’m not robbing banks)
2. I will never moderate authentic commentary – steps will be taken to delete spam as that ruins the resource for everybody. Your input, however positive or negative it might be, will be left for I and others to respond to. If you’ve taken the time to write something then I think it’s only fair it’s published (unlike a certain newspaper that I commented on recently)
3. I will tell you how I feel as well as what I do – I would only be revealing a third of the story if I didn’t tell the emotional story as well as the rational. Plus, it would probably be incredibly dull if I didn’t and I want you to come back
4. This is the company blog, not solely mine – I think it would be a little strange to setup a business that is so dependent on the community angle and not open the blog up to others in the company. Right now though, it’s just me