Ship it...or cancel it

January-April is our slower time at Collegewise.  Every year, this is when we tackle our projects—new ideas, improvements to our programs, updates to our materials, all the things we thought about during the fall but just didn’t have time to get to them.  And this year, we’re trying something new to see just how much we can get done.  For every project, we’re picking a date by which we’ll ship it (finish and put it to use), or cancel it.  No in-between, no half-finished projects with no resolution—it’s either done, or done away with.

We all came into 2012 with ideas/projects we wanted to try.  We picked our favorites to start with and did three things:

1. One person volunteered to ultimately be responsible for shipping.  This person doesn’t necessarily have to do all the work alone, but every project needs a champion who will see it through or pull the plug.

2. The person in charge picked the ship-it date. 

3. We all agreed on what the project has to do or look like in order to be good enough to ship.  The truth is that most projects don’t need to be perfect in the beginning.  In fact, you won’t know whether or not they’re perfect until you actually ship them.  So we decided ahead of time what “good enough” looks like.  We agreed on the acceptable level of funding and risk we could take for each project.  Then on the agreed-upon date, we’ll ship it if it’s ready, or cancel if it’s floundering.

The idea behind the cancel option isn't to just give up.  It's to give you an ejection lever to pull if a project starts to take too long, cost too much, or just can't be made good enough to ship.  In 1991, Duke Nukem was one of the most successful video games ever created, so successful that the company decided to make a sequel.  And every time it got close to shipping, someone wanted a new feature or had a new twist that would make it even better.  Nine years later, there was still no sequel and they cancelled the project.  Couldn't they have reached that conclusion a lot sooner (and cheaper)?

I’ll share the outcomes of several projects in future posts (whether we ship or cancel them).  But for now, we’ve got “ship or cancel” dates on the calendar and a lot of projects underway.  There's focus and energy knowing that a project is either going to launch or get scrapped and we’re pretty excited to see how they turn out. 

If you’d like some inspiration for your own projects, we got this "ship it" concept here.