4 ms·

Planning to Start, Planning to Finish

78 points by jger15 7y ago

Lio 7y ago
I love this idea of “planning to start”. The most successful projects I’ve worked on have been the ones that started with very small teams building configurable components that were later scaled up into much larger systems through configuration. The least successful (IMHO) have been where instead of “planning to start” and starting small, senior stakeholders have thrown large numbers of resources at the project too early when the shape of the work was poorly understood. The result is massive amounts of technical debt that rarely gets fixed. Classic Fred Brookes Mythical Man Month stuff[1]. What’s been interesting to observe is that even when those involved had read and could quote the Mythical Man Month they still made the same mistakes. This makes me think of how systems, as modelled in the Beer Game[2], have a tendency to go chaotic even when the players know what’s going to happen and in theory should be able to avoid that... but still don’t. So that leads me to the thought that maybe start ups succeed because even if they lack collective experience they also lack the resources to screw things up early in the development process. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game
0wis 7y ago
I wonder how much startup successes are linked to the founder’s ability to « mise en place »? I see the notion as often neglected by the layman and quietly mastered by the experts in many fields. I’m struck by how much it is important in so various fields : -maths with problem and variable -surgery with room setup and instruments preparation at least -debating where setup and writing is a large part of the work -as stated cooking with « mise en place » -obviously war with -...etc I’m also curious about diminishing returns : when does it becoming useless to prepare more ? Is it also a trending subject or just myself discovering a new concept and seeing it everywhere ? I would be happy to learn about real world experiences on the subject !

78 points by jger15 7y ago

Lio 7y ago

I love this idea of “planning to start”. The most successful projects I’ve worked on have been the ones that started with very small teams building configurable components that were later scaled up into much larger systems through configuration. The least successful (IMHO) have been where instead of “planning to start” and starting small, senior stakeholders have thrown large numbers of resources at the project too early when the shape of the work was poorly understood. The result is massive amounts of technical debt that rarely gets fixed. Classic Fred Brookes Mythical Man Month stuff[1]. What’s been interesting to observe is that even when those involved had read and could quote the Mythical Man Month they still made the same mistakes. This makes me think of how systems, as modelled in the Beer Game[2], have a tendency to go chaotic even when the players know what’s going to happen and in theory should be able to avoid that... but still don’t. So that leads me to the thought that maybe start ups succeed because even if they lack collective experience they also lack the resources to screw things up early in the development process. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game

0wis 7y ago

I wonder how much startup successes are linked to the founder’s ability to « mise en place »? I see the notion as often neglected by the layman and quietly mastered by the experts in many fields. I’m struck by how much it is important in so various fields : -maths with problem and variable -surgery with room setup and instruments preparation at least -debating where setup and writing is a large part of the work -as stated cooking with « mise en place » -obviously war with -...etc I’m also curious about diminishing returns : when does it becoming useless to prepare more ? Is it also a trending subject or just myself discovering a new concept and seeing it everywhere ? I would be happy to learn about real world experiences on the subject !