There’s nothing like starting something from scratch. You have a clean slate. The possibilities for your dreams and ideas seem endless. But, make no mistake, starting something from scratch is hard work. And if that something needs to eventually make money or otherwise show success, there’s a lot riding on getting it right. I’ve started several successful programs over the years and even launched a whole school. I love starting new things and putting in place the right elements to make something sustainable for the long haul. Here are just a few things I’ve learned.
Start with the end in mind
It’s always best to start with a clear picture of where you want to end up. Envision what success looks like. The more specific you can be about this, the better. The goals may indeed change as you go as you learn more about the market, the needs of the people you plan to serve, or the resources you have at hand. But having a clear goal at the beginning gives you direction.
In order to set clear goals, you will need to do your research. You want to have a realistic goal and a solid understanding of the situation you’re stepping into. The Design Thinking Framework can be helpful here. Sometimes the problem you think you’re solving at first isn’t the problem you’re really trying to solve. In order to figure out if your goal is viable, you can do market research, focus groups and more. In Design Thinking, this is often called empathy work where you’re trying to determine what it is that your customer really needs. This could be your students, parents, or other constituents.
One of my favorite examples of this in action comes from an 8th grade student I had a while back. I was teaching Design Thinking in conjunction with a Programming and Engineering class. I had asked my students to find a problem around school to solve and prototype a solution. This student decided she wanted to solve the backup of the drop off line. She initially thought she was solving a traffic problem. Once she interviewed her fellow students and some parents, she decided what she was really solving was a stress problem. Being stuck in the drop off line stressed students (and parents) out. This led her to lots of different solutions, some of which did indeed involve changing traffic patterns, but some of which simply sought to alleviate stress without changing the traffic patterns at all. This leads me to my second piece of advice.
Get creative about your ideas
Too often, we limit ourselves to one path forward or one particular solution. Before you decide exactly how you’re going to reach the goal you outlined, consider lots of different ways to reach that goal. This might mean reframing your goal like my 8th grade student did. If you’re working with others, this is a good opportunity to put every crazy idea out there. Post-it notes are great for this kind of work. Have your whole team spend 10-15 minutes generating as many ideas as they can. Then put your post-its on a wall somewhere and read them out loud. Often this generates even more ideas, which you can add to your wall. The main goal is to get as many ideas out there as possible.
Pick a few ideas to test
Once you have a lot of ideas to choose from, pick two or three that resonate and try them out. This may take some time to narrow down, depending on the size of your project. There are many different ways you can test your ideas. Surveys and focus groups are great ways to find out if your idea resonates with people you hope to market to. You can also create a prototype or mini version of your idea. For example, if you want to create a class or an extensive program, try running a 1-3 hour workshop at your organization or through a related organization or public library. You can offer it for free and then follow up with surveys or interviews to find out if it’s a viable or what would need to change to make it viable. If you’re in a school setting, you can do something similar or create a club or ungraded class before launching a for-credit class or program.
When you’re testing, it’s best to find people similar to those you will serve. If you’re adding on a middle school, your focus group should consist of parents or students who are or will soon be in middle school not those for whom middle school is a long way away or who are already in college. You can hire market researchers to help you find these people.
Similarly, you will want to loop in appropriate stakeholders. This might mean keeping your board or leadership team informed or even inviting them to participate in some way. As you think about who to include, think broadly about who the project might touch now or in the future.
Make a plan
Once you’ve tested your ideas out and decided what’s going to work, it’s time to make an implementation plan. Again, it’s good to start with the end in mind, in this case, the when. When does the project need to be completed? When does the program need to launch? For schools, these dates often coincide with the rhythms of the school year. A new class or program is best launched when students register. Building projects might best be started in the summer.
For big projects and programs, it’s best to have a leader for the project and a team. For smaller projects, a single person or two to three person team might be sufficient. For example, when I was planning the implementation of a strategic plan, I had a whole implementation team of about six people. We set a launch date and worked backwards from there to determine what needed to be done when and by whom. Similarly, when launching a new school, I had a board to work with as well as a staff. For building the Computer Science program, I went solo at first. Once we started to grow, I hired staff to support the further development of the program.
Big projects may also need to be broken down into smaller milestones. When building a new school, we had recruitment, curriculum building and fundraising as buckets of work we needed to set goals and target dates for. Under each of these, we had to break down the work into further components with target dates. In many cases, we also had to determine who to delegate work to, and sometimes hire contractors or new staff to support work we didn’t have expertise in house to complete.
When projects get big, it can help to implement the concepts of project management. There are lots of different methods and tools out there (Asana, Air Table, Notion, etc.) you can use. In a school or nonprofit environment, it’s rare to find someone with project management certification, but you might have someone on the board with that expertise or at the very least, someone internally with extensive experience working on big and small projects of various kinds. While an internal person can be a great option for your project, it can sometimes help to have an outside person facilitate a short-term project from beginning to end. They can be objective and will have the time to focus on your project. They can also help set things up to hand off to an internal person to manage after everything is up and running.
Plan for iteration or reboot
Once your program, project, or even building is out in the world, it’s not time to sit back and watch it run. The first iteration will never be perfect and so it’s important to gather feedback and then make adjustments that will improve the project or program for its next phase or iteration. Just as when you set goals and did your research to begin your project, you can use similar methods to evaluate the project. Interview participants in your program or people who use your new building. What do they like or not like about it? What friction did they experience in participating? You can also look at numbers and data. How many people participated? Was this more or less than you expected? Who were they? Where did they come from? And then you can continue to dig deeper and find out why you have more or less or more of this kind of participant and less of another kind.
Sometimes, you have to completely refresh or even sunset a program. Part of being creative and innovative also involves pruning, changing, or eliminating things to make space for new ideas. I’ve also experienced going through a refresh of various kinds. At one institution, I inherited a program that was successful but some aspects weren’t quite working, and it needed to become more sustainable. That meant letting some things go and adding new things. Sometimes, a program launches and it turns out it’s not quite right and so it gets sunsetted immediately and the team goes back to the drawing board. That may feel like failure in the moment, but it’s really not. The learning you gain from the project can go into rebuilding or re-envisioning a new project.
Other ideas and resources
Building a new program, product, or institution can be challenging. It’s helpful to break big projects into smaller tasks and take things one step at a time. Many people use a version of Design Thinking to envision and implement a new idea. Stanford has many resources, including this guide, that can help you use this process. The tools I mentioned above–Asana, Air Table, Notion–as well as tools like Slack can keep you and your team organized and on track. Most of these tools have project management principles built in or offer templates that make use of those principles. When things get tough or confusing, it can be helpful to have a trusted colleague either within or outside your institution to bounce ideas off of. Having different perspectives can help you see new ideas and get unstuck.
I hope this guide gave you some good ideas for building new programs and projects. And, if you want help launching something new, you can always contact me.