Notes From The Corpreneur: The Clock Is Ticking
March 12, 2008 – 3:47 pm
When Chad (the other co-founder of Profile360) and I started off on our product, we were given a strict deadline of autonomy: 2 months. That’s all we would get, but that’s all we needed. Now it was just a matter of making an outline of how we could get there.
2 months might strike some as fast for a full social network type site. But I personally like time crunches and speed. It’s part of why I like tech so much and why I have involved myself with projects that otherwise seem an impossible task. It gives you a great opportunity to come out on top, against the odds.
In these situations, however, the clock is ticking. Which means we need to be highly organized and involved. That meant we had to take a very organized approach. Before we created our timeline, as I saw it, 4 things absolutely needed to be done. We had to:
- Define a vision
- Set our drop dead date (our deadline)
- Identify our milestones (prototype, closed beta, open beta, etc)
- Set our goals and when they need to be achieved
With those things in mind, we could move on to our timeline. The method I used in the past is pretty simple.
Identify needs
No matter the project, you will have needs. Some needs are more “simple” like figuring out the product name and logo. Others are more complex like getting the tech specs done and figuring out your marketing plan. The best method in identifying needs is to create a list of needs. Put anything you might think is a need on the list. Don’t worry on whether or not it’s actually a need right now. The next step handles that.
Rank needs
Obviously, some needs are more important than others. After you have your list of needs, take some time to go through them and rank them in order of importance (priority). Is it more important for us to have our name decided or to have our technical specifications done? We chose technical specifications. It’s important to keep order in mind when making these decisions. In most cases, you have to have your tech-specs before you can have your prototype.
Create the timeline
Once we had a list of all our needs and their priority, we put together a timeline (wrote it on a whiteboard calendar that was easily viewable). Before adding all our needs, however, we added the 4 absolutes. We wrote the vision above our timeline, added our start date (as determined by the company), our drop-dead-date, and our milestones (design, prototype, closed beta, open beta). We also wrote our goals down to the right of the calendar. Once these were in place, we could properly plan our needs within those crucial points.
Because of my skills, I personally took it a step further and entered our entire timeline into microsoft project. It comes in quite handy when needing to manage a number of tasks with priorities and various needs needing to be met before another can begin. Using project is also nice when you need to figure out slack time or rush different parts due to delays.
With all that said, a timeline is a great guiding factor. But sometimes things happen that you don’t expect, as they did for us (boo!) and they do wonders to delay you.
(picture by thosearewolves)
Update: I always wanted to ask. What are methods you all have experienced? Methods you prefer? I’d love to hear as maybe I can integrate some aspects into my own process :)
