Kickoff to Delivery: The Most Difficult Phases

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Something I’ve noticed over the years of being an engineer is that project staffing tends to look something like, “Let’s get our best and brightest involved early to get the project moving–once it’s moving, the rest of the team can finish the job.“  Part of this statement shows great sense for project delivery–and the other completely opposes it.  The two most difficult phases of any project are the initial kickoff and the final delivery–and you need a different set of people for each.

Looking at the philosophy above, it is generally understood that getting the ball rolling on a project is a difficult task.  Especially in the IT world where a project may call for some new technology that the majority of your staffers aren’t yet up to speed on, it’s great to bring people in who tend to be somewhat ahead of the curve.  They serve both to lay the initial groundwork in actual code–but more importantly they support the development of the staffers that will continue the work after they leave for the next project.

The best people for this phase are your leaders, your entrepreneurs.   They’re some of your top technical people who also bring strong technical leadership to your team.  They inspire others to follow them into the project and motivate the people around them.  Most of all, they are able to charge into complex technical problems and tackle some big challenges early on and clear those roadblocks for the team while providing solid examples of how the team should proceed.

As these people move off the project, it is assumed that the team “left behind” will bring the project to its completion. However, completing a project presents the same level of challenge as starting it.  The challenges are different, but they are equally complex: fixing defects, tying up loose ends, and the inevitable realization that something that worked every time you tested it up until now has a couple of edge cases that, while not common, are possible enough that they must be accounted for in a new design. As a project approaches that end date, another personality type is required to join the team.  I call them “closers.”

Closers are methodical, detail-oriented executors.  Winding a project to completion involves fixing often very delicate defects without destabilizing the entire system (or even large portions of it).  Rather than being solid team leaders, they are usually the absolute top technical talent you have.  They’re people who have seen nearly everything that can happen as launch approaches and can maintain their calm while dealing with the challenges.  Most importantly, these closers act as a buffer between management (which is usually in full-panic mode as the launch approaches) and the rest of the team working to knock out those last few defects before launch.

We already put a lot of effort into people and process to get a project started; it’s time to pay more attention to Closing the Deal.  

  • http://blog.codeeg.com Calvin

    Great observation.

    I would say though that the qualities of a starter and a closer aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

    There is also a flaw with having different people start and end a project, and that is the issue with ownership. How much ownership will the starter accept if he knows he won’t have to see it to completion? And how much will the closing team accept when they have to finish what someone else started, especially if they don’t agree with how it was started in the first place?

  • http://briancrescimanno.com Brian

    Valid points on all accounts, Calvin.

    I didn’t mean to imply that the qualities are mutually exclusive–only that people who are great starters aren’t necessarily good closer and vice versa.

    I completely agree with your notion of a lack of ownership; but I was approaching this from the perspective of many “real world” scenarios where removing some of the top “starter” folks from a project after it’s running is a fairly common practice. I wish that it wasn’t the case; but being that it so often is, I felt it necessary to address that projects don’t just “coast” their way to the finish line (as they are often able to during the “meat and potatoes” days in the middle.

    Ultimately, the best environments allow for the same people to be on a project together from start-to-finish and your starters and closers each have their time to shine.