What is your lead domino?

OSS can be complicated beasts with many tentacles. It can make starting a new project daunting. When I start, I like to use a WBS to show all the tentacles (people, processes, technology, contracts) on a single page, then look for the lead domino (or dominoes).

A lead domino is the first piece, the one that starts the momentum and makes a load of other pieces easier or irrelevant.

Each project is different of course, but I tend to look to get base-level software operational as the lead domino. It doesn’t have to do much. It can be on the cloud, in a sandpit, on a laptop. It can show minimal functionality and not even any full use cases. It can represent only a simplistic persona, not the many personas an OSS normally needs to represent.

But what it does show is something tangible. Something that can be interacted with and built upon. Most importantly, it gives people a context and immediately takes away a lot of the “what-if?” questions that can derail the planning stage. It provides the basis to answer other questions. It provides a level of understanding that allows level-up questions to be asked.

Or it might be hearts and minds exercise to get the organisation deeply engaged in the project and help overcome the complexities and challenges that will ensue. Or it could just be getting key infrastructure in place like servers, databases or DCNs (Data Control Networks) that will allow the pieces of the puzzle to communicate with each other.

On an uplift project, it might be something more strategic like a straw-man of the architecture, an end-to-end transaction flow, a revised UI or a data model.

For OSS implementations, just like dominoes, it’s choosing the right place/s to kick-start the momentum.

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