Leadership Rule no. 2: Avoid Strategic Scope Creep

People are helpful. Very helpful. They have all kinds of ideas about your business.  You know the business I'm talking about? The one that you've slaved over for years and poured countless hours thinking about and meditating on.  The one that can sometimes be blamed for damaging your personal relationships.  Yes, that business.  Odds are, every day you'll meet somebody and within 10 minutes of them hearing about your model, they'll have an idea about how you could be doing it better.

But its not just strangers and cab drivers that have ideas about new and exciting things you could do.  Employees, bosses, board members, advisors, pundits, and circus clowns.  Pretty much everybody will tell you what that next killer feature is.  You'll even tell yourself that!  Very exciting.  Lets do it!

Fortunately, the technology leader has a secret advantage: developers are uppity.  Uppity developers are the fortuitous crutch of technology strategy.  It has to do with resource scheduling. Something most managers understand well.  So, managers will prioritize and schedule lets say 6 projects in a given year.  About 2 projects and 5 months in, everybody will realize that the 6 projects won't get done that year. Developers will get very frustrated that their managers don't understand that project timing is an output, and not an input.   In the end, 2 or 3 of the projects get scrapped. 

Now, this is really fortunate.  The projects that get scrapped are ultimately scrapped because a more accurate assessment of the cost of the project has been forced down everybody's throat.  Unfortunately, if a project isn't bound by technology resources, no such correction occurs.  Which brings us to this premise:

Great strategy is about choosing what *not* to do.

What is forced on us from a technolgy standpoint should be embraced with open arms:
-Project timelines are an output, not an input
-The actual cost of a project is always higher than initial estimates
-Lower priority projects are better *dead* than *delayed*
-Quality  "if time permits" is the same as "no quality at all"

Comments

[Emile Cambry]

Great post! I have a complementary post in my drafts right now around the same topic. These days, everyone has their two cents on what you need to do to succeed, and far and away, most advice is terrible. I think one of the things I am working on to improve on is to better filter advice.