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 configurabl

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