Aligning and keeping aligned Ducks 3 and 4

Aligning Duck 3

Duck 3, Skills: The project team must possess or have under their control the skills necessary to design and implement the change.

A skill is an ability to perform a prescribed task. What Duck 3 says is for a change to take place or a project to succeed that the project team must have the ability to deploy people with the necessary skills to do all the tasks that will be required. Ultimately this duck requires the project team:

• Visualize as best they can what steps or tasks will need to be taken, in what order for the project to be completed

• List the skills of the people that will be assigned to do those tasks or take those steps

• Make a list of skills under the control of the project team and which people have or control those skills (the skill set could be controlled by a contractor or consultant).

There can be no missing skills. For a startup with just a few people, complex tasks like making detailed CAD drawings may not exist on the team so the task will require hiring a freelance CAD designer or technician; the name of that company or person goes on the list. If a skill assignment is unfilled then that adds huge risk for the entire team and project.

Small inexperienced teams, as are typical of many startups, can miss realizing some of the skills they will need. Typical misses include:

• Hiring skills (we will soon have a session about hiring and firing)

• Training skills (how do you effectively teach somebody how to do things differently)

• Communicating to large audience skills (as required to align Duck 5). It starts with basic communication skills, but doing it for large, dispersed groups requires additional sub-skills.

• Bookkeeping

• Customer service (as in keeping customers happy 24/7)

• Complex support tasks like CAD drawings

Keeping Duck 3 aligned

People leave, and teams will almost always realize they missed a skill; Duck 3 often gets loose. The leader needs to ask teammates frequently about whether they sense they are missing skills to complete their project. Keeping the list of skills and who has those skills helps in keeping Duck 3 aligned.

Aligning Duck 4

Duck 4, Resources: All the resources required to perform the project must be made available to the team as they are requested.

All projects need resources. Resources can take many forms, and some resources can be challenging to find or find enough of. Resources fall into the following categories:

• monetary, (money, tokens, donations)

• energy, (electricity, power, charged batteries)

• time, (is there enough time for people or equipment to do the actions expected of them. In the case of people, the resource is the time a person promises to dedicate to the project. Equipment time needs to include set up and perhaps instruction time.)

• information, (are specific data required for actions to be taken)

• regulatory (how will third parties be available as and when needed to provide critical permissions to proceed)

• space, (is there enough space available for people, equipment and materials)

• materials, (are there enough materials, particularly specialty materials on hand)

• equipment (what equipment will be necessary to perform required actions)

• contracted support services (like contractors for equipment installation, props, signage, auditors).

The project team needs to think through all the resources they will require to perform all the tasks associated with completing the project. They need to list the resources and where the resources will come from and from whom they will get it. The people responsible for providing the resource must agree on when and how they will provide what is required. Do not accept casual assurances of support for critical resources! One of the worst things that can happen to a project, is for a critical resource to not be available as promised and expected. This destroys momentum AND trust AND moral and most projects do not recover from this. Get all resource commitments in writing, with the consequences for not providing the resource clearly described.

Keeping Duck 4 aligned.

Hopefully all the written commitments will help prevent a critical resource from not appearing or disappearing when required. If there are people whose commitment you do not trust, put in place a backup or work-around plan.

What’s most likely is that a startup team will not know all the resources they will need. Duck 4 gets misaligned when someone realizes a critical resource is missing from the alignment list. The realignment only happens once the team scrambles and finds the resource or figures out a work-around so the resource was not needed as feared.