Not Management

A friend of mine has a very good idea for an on-line commercial business. He's sold the idea to a number of companies, even got some seed investment, but he can't bring it to fruition himself because doesn't have the technical skills to bring his dream to reality. A year or so on from the original idea, he's still unable to bring his unique proposition to reality.

Why? Two simple reasons:
- A lack of leadership & people management and
- A lack of detailed requirements.

Without these fundamentals his project will not succeed.

To keep costs down, my friend decided to rely on volunteer developers, working in their spare time inspired by both the idea and the promise of shares in the company. He also handed all responsibility for website development to the developers and left them to it having given them only a high-level idea of what the website was supposed to achieve.

Unsurprisingly deadline after deadline was missed. My friend was getting more and more frustrated. He had to persuade his seed investors not to demand their money back, very embarrassing. Finally on the way home from the golf course one day, we talked about the situation and managed to make him realise why his vision was failing to appear.

Simply, he had never given the poor developers sufficient detail in the requirements, had not controlled or managed them and had never controlled the direction the project was going at the hands of the developers. He listened and nodded, hoped it would all work out and got madder and madder, but would not acknowledge it was a management issue, simply put, he told me that "I don't believe in management".

I persuaded my friend to allow me to take control of the development. Up front, I told him there were only two possible results now:
1) Our developers would be reined back in and would follow detailed requirements we would provide. Or
2) The developers would entrench and then throw in the towel.

Either was acceptable. With the first result we got the website my friend wanted. The second result meant we could move on to pastures new using the newly detailed requirements that my friend had produced.

So, my friend and I took time out to develop the full requirements and logical map of how the website should work. We quickly had a far better idea of what the website was going to do than at any previous time. This logical diagram was given to the developers and openly discussed - many further requirements were formed. By the end of the session we had a decent set of documents that described the website and what needed to be achieved to make it a reality.

Now the developers had the detailed requirements, we had them constrained sufficiently to drive delivery. Initially we broke the whole thing down in to smaller portions, prioritising the work and agreed delivery dates. Every workpackage content and delivery date was decided by the developers - there was no chance that we could be blamed for setting unrealistic deadlines or deliverables.

The developers got going, time past, but instead of ignoring them as my friend had in the past, we did daily update calls and dug in to the detail every time. In the end and very much as I suspected, the developers threw in the towel. My friend saw this as a disaster at first, he thought we'd failed, but then he began to realise how far the relationship had fallen apart. My intervention brought about a dramatic conclusion, but helped bring issues out in to the open and mutually they discovered they were un-solvable.

Having seen the management in action my friend has acknowledged the need and he's also improving his ability to provide detailed requirements. We've found some professional developers who are better equipped to deliver specific work packages to deadlines and will be working full time, not part-time. Yes, the website has been delayed, but now it's far more likely to be delivered rather than never see the light of day.

I guess the point is, however small your dream or business is, never forget that to deliver that dream, you're going to need other people. Fundamentally that means leadership, people management and project management as a minimum. If you're not good at it, find someone who is. Don't bumble along believing that it'll all be fine. My friend learnt the hard way, please don't do the same thing.