This one is about a three month project that I worked on in 2019. A simple project, it was given to me as something that nobody else wanted to do. No creativity to it, just: we need 25 widgets by next week.
I’m using the term “widget” to suggest a completed deliverable unit. Think of each of them being a unit of creative output. Each “widget” is unique and needs to be built by a single individual.
The task being something that I had never done before, I went into a research mode. I found companies that built widgets for hire, and outsourced it to them. I started with pushing them to give me widgets quickly, I had to get the widgets by the beginning of next week. I got till about 15 widgets the first week, and was comfortable with building 30 for the second week.
But the plan changed, there were 50 widgets needed that week. So here I was in a scramble again. Got to about 35 widgets in week 2, and the needs changed again, 120 widgets.
In 10 weeks from the start of the project, the demand had gone up to 800+ widgets a week, I had built up a buffer of 400 widgets available at any given week, I pretty much had control on what was going on. We built over 5000 widgets. In the words of management, I was the widget king; AND I WAS HAVING A GREAT TIME!!!
Those 10 weeks required:
Evaluating Partners: I evaluated 9 partners. I ran test projects with all of them. I shortlisted 5 partners to give me widgets regularly. No one partner had over 35% of our business, all of them were competing for it.
Product Definition: We built detailed definitions for all the widgets we wanted, if there was a variant required, that was maintained in shared documentation.
Production Planning: We had a planning sheet that we reviewed every day, it had widgets consumed, predicted widgets needed, styles of widgets, which supplier we choose for that variant, and expected cost for the next week.
Quality Control: We instituted testing at each of the partners. Each partner had their own process to make a widget, we define what constitutes a delivered widget. We had an incoming widget process, before it went to inventory. We had random tests on incoming widgets. Failing quality resulted in two partners being blacklisted.
Deployment: Before we shipped a widget to customers, we had automated tests that verified quality and usability of the widget.
Issue/Conflict resolution: With so many partners, there are issues that come up. We took them head on with detailed discussions with partners and internal teams. If we needed to change a process internally we did, if partner needed to make a change we make sure they did.
Continuous Improvement: Any issue that we found during quality control and deployment we documented and shared with partners. Any changes to product definition triggered a document update, and a phone call with project managers at the partner.
My little skiff that I launched in 10 weeks had become a pretty large ship. And when product definition changes turning a ship takes much longer. So I had to plan, I was forcing business teams to give me projections of how many widgets were needed, I was monitoring consumption and changing delivery schedules as and when needed.
Why is this worth a blog post:
There are so many projects that I have worked on that I have not talked about. This is me standing up and stating that I get stuff done.
To get stuff done, requires functional requirements, design, planning, execution, and delivery. There are no shortcuts to delivery. As I have said in many other posts:
Laziness: Doing more work; to do less work
Writing this also took me back to a story I had read when I was very young, one that inspired me greatly.
Samyeer Metrani 