A new project⌗

You’re setting off on a journey to build a new {table, whole series of tables, dashboard, predictive model, pick your adventure book, etc…}. The initial request from THE BUSINESS lacks any semblance of detail required for immediate execution. You’ve done this before, people love quick calls to discuss the minutiae (a.k.a any level of detail) that was left out of the request. Lets hop on a quick call.

Things to remember when beginning “$project”:⌗

Entitlement:⌗

There will probably be no specific “entitlement”, “$ benefit”, etc… associated with the request, if you ask for this you will get:

  • “I don’t know”
  • “this will save x hours per week”
  • a round number in the $ millions
  • “let me circle back with you on that” (You will not hear about it again)

Context:⌗

The person you are talking with may have less context then you. If this is true, you will most likely need to approach the most tenured member of their team to understand what is going on/why this is being requested. This is important if you can find the person who actually understands the broader picture, you will be able to sort out hours of hand waving in minutes.

Urgency:⌗

Remember, everything is high priority and needed to be done yesterday. Wether the request “saves $100MM” or “saves me 15 minutes per week” it will be something urgent for the requestor. This is because:

  1. In a race for constrained bandwidth, teams will continue to increase the unfounded urgency of requests to get things into a sprint, this causes the “urgency” to lose its meaning
  2. People default to a general sense of what I’m working on is dire, important, and most be completed… this can be internally driven or imparted by point 1. above
  3. Information is siloed causing large changes to remain unknown until just before/after implementation. This inflates a sense of urgency as things literally needed to be done yesterday

Create a graph:⌗

A graph can be quite helpful in determining what you’ll actually need to do to complete this. I typically use Obsidian and jot down notes in markdown files and then link them as needed to create my graphs.

These notes are my scaffolding for how I’d go about executing the request. What information, alignment, data, sign off, etc… will I need to do this? if I had all of that right now, how would I execute this, what tools would I use, etc… What does the end result look like, how does it operate, whats the UX like?

This will NOT cover everything that comes up… it serves as a base to begin to cover edge cases and open questions that you’d like to establish an answer to now rather than weeks into this thing.

The Questions you ask:⌗

What are you going to compare this to?

  • One of mt favorites gets to the heart of what you need to do.

If you’ve created a graph above there is a good chance you may have put more thought into the request than the requestor has, thus these questions may be just as important for them as it is for you.