The most important project delivery heuristic? Discover stuff first of all.

Right at the start of any sort of delivery project — building a world famous museum, a new digital service, a house renovation, or whatever — there’s one basic rule of thumb that will save more time, money, anxiety, and recrimination than any other. It's this:

Discover stuff first of all.

For a Chief Delivery Officer or other delivery principal, heuristics like this are vital tools to help service and project delivery start out on the right track and stay there (heuristic = fast and frugal rule of thumb).

Find things out at the start, before you even begin thinking about a plan let alone getting to work. Save time and pain later on by discovering as much as you can up front.

What does "discover stuff" actually mean?

Before you commit to building a service, especially if you're going to be spending a lot of time and money and effort doing a thing, you need to properly understand the problem that needs to be solved.

You need to fully comprehend the why of what you're doing — why are you building it? what's it aiming to achieve? — at a deep level.

What's you're motive?

In other words, what is the intent or motive that is driving this effort?

That means …

1. You need to know what people (the ones who will be using your service) are trying to do, what difficulties they have at the moment that your service will solve. What are the ways that they do this at the moment (if they even do), and why is that problematic or difficult or annoying as it is?
2. You need to know the constraints and risks of doing it — all the technical, practical, legislative, regulatory, security, budgetary or other limitations on what you can do. That might also cover whether it's being addressed already in some form, i.e. what the market already offers.
3. That then gives you a platform on which to do some further research, sketching out some quick-and-dirty ideas, making a super-fast mock-up, say, to test them out and see how they might address the things you've discovered. You're looking for opportunities here, things to build or improve.

At this stage, you're trying to learn as much as you possibly can about what you're thinking about doing.

And especially, you're trying to see all the places where it could go wrong! All the places where the traps, pitfalls, difficulties, risks, etc., lie … so you're not surprised by them later!

All of that is necessary to help you make a key decision — do you want to progress forward into the next stage?

It's all about learning everything you can to that you can make a decision.

Fail while it's cheap … and learn from it!

At this point, everything is cheap (relatively!), so all the work you put in at this stage to learn as much as possible and make sure you understand things in as much depth as possible will pay off dividends later on when it prevents you from making mistakes.

Bent Flyvbjerg, the great programme and planning expert, calls this 'think slow' at this pre-planning stage, so that you can 'act fast' when you come to doing the implementation work. (See also this great interview with Flyvbjerg.)

The UK Government Digital Service calls this Discovery — understand the problem that needs to be solved.

It's a stage that's easily overlooked, a phase that's often bypassed — it's often too tempting to want to be seen as people of action, keen to show progress, to get 'spades in the ground'. But without properly understanding the problem, you don't know the risks, and you're highly likely to fail.

Discovery is a requirement

So, when you're delivering a service, absolutely, definitely make Discovery a requirement.

Discover stuff first of all. Find things out at the start, before you even begin thinking about a plan let alone getting to work.

Save time and pain later on by discovering as much as you can up front.

There's more delivery heuristics online in The Chief Delivery Officer's Handbook:

https://helios360.co.uk/handbook/delivery/heuristics/