
Planning to Start, Planning to Finish - jger15
https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/planning-to-start-planning-to-finish
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Lio
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)

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0wis
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 !

