Another Brilliant Idea

The world abounds with new ideas – who can honestly say they've never had a brilliant idea? I know I can’t. But which of us can also say that we've put our ideas into practice? "There," as someone once said, “’s the rub." So how do we get our ideas off the ground? How do we find someone interested enough or rich enough to finance them? Well, in most cases, we don’t. We just give up.

However, the more we share our ideas, the greater the likelihood is that we’ll find someone with a similar passion and, if we’re lucky, the financial wherewithal to help us get our ideas up and running. Our blog is called ABI, which stands for Another Brilliant Idea. The blog is about bringing together like-minded ideas-builders to make ideas reality sooner!

Inventors sometimes assume that theirs is “only such idea out there” and tend to be possessive about it; but the chances are that 149 other people have had the same idea and may already be working on it. In a way, if people come up with the same idea at the same time, it’s a positive sign. It can boost your confidence and encourage you to innovate and perfect your own idea. Consider a recent story about scientist Michael Levin. He’s exploring the body’s regeneration ability through specialized electrical stimulation. If ten other “Levins” around the world had been exploring the same thing, who knows, maybe people would already be re-growing their worn out limbs and organs.

Revolutionary ideas can take years to be accepted into the mainstream, but having others in your space can help educate your potential clients and drive them faster to your offering.

While it may seem like there’s no space left on the market anymore, when you look at the scope of ideas in the technology space, the world is actually becoming bigger, as more businesses are launched and more users around the world join the connected community.

Finally, people like having a choice. Some are mad about iPhones others would kill for an Android. If you do a good job and your competitor does the same, it’s not the end of the world. The question becomes how much more valuable can your implementation be to your target audience, how much better are you going to be at expanding and supporting it?

If you have an idea, and you hold on to it like a miser, don’t be surprised when you read in six months’ time about someone who had the same idea and is now a multimillionaire. It would be better to share the news and get like-minded people to join you to help realize your vision and make it happen. And, with that in mind, we leave you the following words of wisdom, attributed to Thomas A. Edison (the lucky man who invented the light bulb before 149 of his contemporaries): “Vision without execution is hallucination."

Rachel, Dmitry, & Dan

Terminating Dead-End Projects

Believe it or not, most IT projects fail. And, worse still, about one in five of these failures can threaten the very existence of the organization. Watching out for the early warning signs of a failing project can empower an organization to take timely action to stop a dead-end initiative before it spirals out of control and, by doing so, open up the possibility of transforming a failure into an opportunity to try again, and ultimately to succeed with fresh insight.

Having a great vision is no guarantee of success. IT projects fail for many reasons —frequently internal— over which the company has direct control. They might be the result of poor alignment of vision with the best plan for execution, failure to define an accurate project scope, having the wrong stakeholders involved and on a “different page” and, finally, failure to establish effective project leadership.

Dead-end projects are initiatives that have reached a point from which any further investment of time, effort, or money can at best produce only marginal improvements. Projects may have failed to deliver on the vision, they may be incomplete, lacking in key features, unsustainable and un-scalable. When a project reaches this stage, painful, embarrassing, and uncomfortable as it may be, the company would do better to take control of the situation and, to use a morbid analogy, take the patient off the life support system and give others a chance to live. Or, going back to our project discussion, the more proactively a team can recognize projects as “failed”, the faster they can cut their losses, move on, and try again.

The good news is that there are a number of things that can be done to reduce the likelihood of a dead-end and ultimately a failed IT project. Start by ensuring that the list of gotchas above is in place. Share the statistics about IT project failure rates with your team and get them to do a pre-mortem to identify all the possible risks before starting a project. This may not be the easiest time to think about such a seemingly negative topic, so outside perspectives may provide valuable insights. Encourage your shareholders to come up with a “plan B”; having one in place in not an excuse for failure but rather an assurance that things will go on if anything should happen.

Most importantly, define your milestones. These are the mutually agreed points at which deliverables must be delivered within budget. Be as specific as possible when defining the tipping point beyond which no further work will be done, regardless of excuses. For example, the point might be after two milestones have been missed. This will get everyone on the same page; focused on working together to ensure that it doesn’t happen, and prepared to switch to plan B if the worst comes to the worst.

Terminating a project is never easy. A lot of people will be disappointed, not least yourself. Your mistake may cost your company/investors money and lost opportunity, and it may even cost you your job. However painful it may be, you can still turn failure into an opportunity to start with a clean slate, but not from scratch. When you do move on, you will be much further along than someone about to embark on the same journey. From this perspective, killing a dead-end project can be liberating. Once you have the plan in place, the next step is to admit mistakes, de-brief and analyze, take a break, and move on to the next project. And maybe this time, it will work like a charm.

Rachel, Dan & Dmitry

Brilliant Ideas Do Not Always Have to Stay Fictional

Hoping spacecraft Rosetta will wake up today for humanity to take the next step in space exploration: on top of the comet! http://tinyurl.com/ocfps9r. Probe by the international space exploration community has been hibernating in space since it was launched in 2004. Alarm is set for today. If everything goes as planned, Rosetta will wake up, warm up and ultimately connect with 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet in August and discharge a robot named Philae onto its surface to conduct further research. 

Beware of Best Practices

“Best practices” is the buzzword currently used to describe recommended approaches to business processes. These are the magic words that open boardroom doors and put a spell on countless executives, seducing them with their obvious power. Sadly, few are able to resist. If they stopped and thought, and asked the ultimate question: “Do best practices really offer the best solution to my organization’s specific challenges?” The answer would be a resounding: “Not always.”

Industry experts speak confidently about cutting-edge benchmarks; business consultants come armed with success stories of other companies dealing with challenges that seem the same. It’s a “no-brainer” – drop everything and jump on the bandwagon, right? Wrong! Your company’s business environment may be subject to a different set of circumstances; it may operate according to a different set of values and rules. Don’t be deceived into complacency by assuming that a cookie-cutter approach that worked for one company else will automatically work for yours.

A simple example of where best practices can fail is, by definition, in innovation. Benchmarks are all very well when it comes to aligning yourself with others in your space, but sometimes you need to break out of the box and create a brand new standard. Now, we’re not advocating reinventing the wheel – please, examine the approaches that others have taken and learn from their mistakes, but don’t just stop there and become a mere follower. Try it; learn from experience, make improvements and see if you can take it to a higher level. Don’t be afraid to “break the rules” (within reason). This approach can take you much further than your competition could even dream of.

While third party experts can provide a valuable outside perspective, skilled talent on the inside, with an intimate understanding of the challenges facing your organization, can make better-informed choices about whether and how a best-practice approach will work for you. It takes effort to nurture this inside talent. Challenge your managers to prove they really understand the problem and to convince you that the suggested approaches are right for your particular situation. Do they understand why these practices worked for others? Are they sure that they will work for you? And if they are, can they guarantee that they really are “the best?”

Whether you’re starting from a clean slate or attempting to untangle a business puzzle, checking out the best practice approaches commonly used in your area of operations will give you a great starting point from which to address your company’s challenges. Use them as a template to build practices that really are the best for your organization. And let’s make 2014 the year to challenge the status quo!

Dmitry, Rachel, Daniil

One of my favorite inspirational videos. What are you prepared to sacrifice to make your dreams come true? It could be as simple as taking advantage of your natural talents and the opportunities all around you.

Dream Big but don't forget to Wake Up Every Now & Then to Do Something About Those Big Dreams of Yours