Skip to main content

Nine questions to ensure your project is set up for success

By:

March 23, 2022 | , ,

We are big believers in the value of moving quickly to solve important problems. And sometimes, that requires jumping in to solve technology problems that are the cause of immediate frustrations. Can we mitigate outages by adding more compute resources? Or can we quickly add some plain language to make something clearer?

While those immediate frustrations are addressed, there is also an opportunity at the same time to answer some really important questions. These questions can help your team understand the broader context of the problem you are solving, whether you understand the problem you are solving, and if it is the right problem to solve in the first place. Do we move that PDF form online or do we figure out how to streamline the process and eliminate it completely?

Ensuring you understand what success looks like helps your team constantly evaluate if it’s heading in the right direction. This is especially important with government and civic technology endeavors where success can’t be defined in terms of revenue or profit.

We use the following nine questions to help set our projects up for success:

  1. What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon
  2. How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
  3. What is new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
  4. Who cares?
  5. If you are successful, what difference will it make?
  6. What are the risks?
  7. How much will it cost?
  8. How long will it take?
  9. What are the mid-term and final ‘exams’ to check for success?

We’ve found time and again, that if a team can answer all of these nine questions, they are well on their path towards understanding what they need to do, why they need to do it, and why it might (or might not) work.

Answering these questions doesn’t have to be a long process. A well-designed but short initial discovery process can go a long way to answering most of these questions, at least at a high level. As teams continue experimenting and learning, they should then keep coming back to these questions and refine the answers.

If you’ve seen these questions before, it’s because they’ve been around since the seventies. They were crafted by George Heilmeier to help the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) officials evaluate research proposals. Heilmeier was an engineer by training and the director of DARPA from 1975–1977.

Have you used these questions (or similar ones) to guide new projects? We’d love to hear about your experiences, successes, and challenges with similar techniques.

Additional resources: