This last bit of the MBA is, like many, heavy on heavy models and theoretical underpinning, as you’d expect. But through this abstract fog occasionally shines a particularly relevant bit of research that pulls dozens of strands of thought together.

Smith and Reinersten’s The Fuzzy Front End is such a bit of work. Put simply, it’s the theory that, during development of a new product, the time to rush is not at the end (during “crunch mode”) but right at the start. Yep - the time to really put the foot down, the time when hurrying up is going to have maximum impact and save the most money, is right at the point you’re sucking on your pipe, metaphorical or otherwise, and saying: “maybe we should do…. this“.

Why do we take our time at this point? First, early on there are no traditional managerial “handles” on the process - no schedule, budget or objective. You can’t deviate, after all, from a plan you do not yet have.

Second, at this stage managers aren’t giving the new idea their full attention; the idea has no financial impact attached to it, because it’s unlikely anyone’s worked out the full benefit of delivery, and nobody has been devoted to it (thus incurring costs). Good managers focus on big bills, not small ones, right?

But, say Smith and Reinersten, we’ve got it all wrong. Massively, expensively, wrong.

“In fact, the true cost of this phase is usually many times higher than managers suspect. In this phase the most important influence on cost is the cost of delay, not of the manpower assigned to the project. The calculated cost is often 500 to 5000 times higher than the visible costs of the assigned personnel. Managers unaware of these costs will tend to ignore the ‘fuzzy front end’. Those who understand these costs will instead focus a great deal of attention on this phase.

[...]

The front end offers some of the cheapest opportunities to cut development time that are to be found anywhere in the cycle.”

So hurry up and decide what to do, and then do it now.

[Postscript: interesting to note that, amid contemporary enthusiasms for Getting Real and the rest, Smith and Reinersten first published their book in 1991. It's also faintly disappointing that the course expects us to take a long, hard look at PRINCE methodology which - it seems - front-loads the fuzzy front end with planning and bulks up the rest of the development process with the need to document, control and approve. In this more Agile age, it all seems a bit backward. A little startup could build and launch in the time it takes the biggie to gather together the first PRINCE end stage assessment, and do the PowerPoints.]

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