Did you know that a Chief Operating Officer can run most business functions, making them the most efficient and effective tool for any growing business with a limited budget?

An early-stage COO is, on average, responsible for about 7 different business functions.

From the anecdotal experience of my peers and me, this usually covers HR, Legal, Finance, Fundraising, Sales & Marketing, Product, and Engineering. 

A COO can be responsible for such a broad range of disciplines because they're also responsible for the business's Strategy - aka turning the Founder’s wild and exciting vision into a reality - which has implications for all departments. 

In this new series of posts, I'll break down how a COO does this - how do I, a detail-oriented completer-finisher with an unbridled love of spreadsheets, turn a creative, forward-thinking, relatively nebulous idea into a structured and realistic roadmap for success (and how I keep the entire company following that roadmap). 

We’re going to follow the same 6-Point Strategy framework that I developed for my best-selling book How To Write Your Strategy. If you’re (like me) someone who likes to read ahead, you can get the whole book for 50% off here for the next few months using code SUMMER24).

BUY THE BOOK

All the articles in this series

1. Part One: The End Goal

2. Part Two: The Mission Statement

3. Part Three: The Objectives

4. Part Four: The Key Results

5. Part Five: The Projects (this post)

In the previous articles in this series, we looked at how your end goal for a business can impact even your earliest decisions, how important a Mission Statement is to a company’s success, how to translate your wildest dreams into numbers you can achieve, how to set more manageable bite-sized goals, and how a COO can help you through the hardest bits of all of those crucial tasks.

In this post, we’re going to look at your company’s Projects, specifically:

• What a Project is.

• How to prioritise competing Projects.

• The three key things every Project needs - a measure of success, an owner, and a deadline. 

Below is the Pay As You Go COO 6-Point Framework for a Strategy that I developed for my best-selling book How To Write Your Strategy. We’ve been working our way in from the left-hand side. 

We've now reached the second half of the framework, the planning side. The planning side is where I see a lot of companies falling down.

In my experience, it's comparatively easy for a leadership team to set goals (the Exit Plan, Mission Statement, Objectives, and Key Results); being able to sit down and thoroughly map out all of the individual steps to achieving those goals requires a completely different skill set that isn't always a priority in the very product- or mission-led founding team.

If this is a gap you see for you and your business, it's a great sign that it could be time to work with a Chief Operating Officer.

What does a COO do in an early-stage company? How a ‘vision’ gets turned into a ‘reality’: how to design useful Projects to keep your company on track.

Where your OKRs are your goals, your Projects and Tasks are your plans that take you to those goals. These are individual pieces of work designed to take you from a clear starting point to a clear end point.

A ‘Project’ is essentially a grouping of Tasks that all lead towards a particular outcome.

Should I follow a specific Project Design Framework to plan my Projects?

There are a lot of different frameworks for designing Projects and you’ve likely heard of some of the most popular ones, like Agile or Scrum or Waterfall or Six Sigma. All of these frameworks share a common goal; they are designed to help you plan your work so that you get from ‘x’ to ‘y’ as efficiently as possible.

Each framework has its strengths and weaknesses. A lot of books have been written and sold about these different frameworks and each one has its fans and its detractors. The framework’s fans will tell you you must use the one they use. 

At the earliest stages of your business, I, conversely, suggest that you don’t take the time to learn and adopt a specific Project design framework at all. Instead, I recommend just asking yourself a simple question: If I want to achieve a Key Result, what do I need to do and when do I need it to be done?  

Remember when you were in school and preparing for exams; did you ever spend so long building a revision timetable and colour-coding it to perfection that you ended up running out of steam and not having the time or energy for the actual revision? Planning in an early stage business can be a little like this.

There are so many things to do and a lot of them are hard and require really deep focus over long hours. It takes dedication and sacrifice to achieve your dreams and it’s really easy to distract yourself from that dedication and sacrifice, especially when that distraction looks a lot like ‘work’.

Building a complex framework for Project design at this stage is a distraction. It’s needlessly complicated. Focus instead on that simple question: If I want to achieve a Key Result, what do I need to do and when do I need it to be done?

Then spend the rest of your time doing the really hard part - actually getting the work done. 

The only non-negotiable for us in how you design your Projects is this: 

In order to drive accountability and progress, a Project is not considered a Project unless it has an owner, a definition of success, and a deadline.

Without those three things, you’ll have no-one responsible for ensuring the work gets finished, no clear communication (and, remember, successful businesses are built on clear communication and quantitatives are the building blocks of clear business communication), and no sense of urgency.

How can a COO help you achieve your Projects?

When you’re pushing a business towards success, it’s not just about what you do - it’s about when you do it. But how do you decide what order to complete your work in?

A core skill of a good COO is the ability to prioritise work and to see the link between individual Projects and the longer-term, bigger goals of the organisation.

Generally, when I start working with a company on their prioritisation and applying this skill, I ask myself - is there a common sense order here or do we need to adopt my Relative Prioritisation Matrix?

The choice of which one to go with will be determined by the nature of the business and I'll usually need to call on the Founder's industry and product/service expertise to help me make that decision - it's a wonderfully collaborative relationship.

For example, if you’re selling a physical product and your Projects are ‘build the product’ and ‘ship the product’, you can’t ship the product before you’ve built it. Thus your prioritisation is simply a common-sense order. Your expertise will tell you if you’re just in need of a common-sense order or if you need to apply my Relative Prioritisation Matrix. 

What's a Relative Prioritisation Matrix?

My Relative Prioritisation Matrix is a version of what’s popularly known as the ‘Eisenhower Matrix’. 

If you’re selling a product or service that’s less reliant on a specific order of completion, my Relative Prioritisation Matrix will come in handy. ‘Matrix’ here is just another word for a grid - a way of visualising your work based on how much or little it contributes to your overarching goals.

Named after Dwight D Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States of America, an Eisenhower Matrix divides work into four categories of priority, allowing you to focus first on the work that’s most important to your Objectives. My Matrix is what I call ‘an iteration of the Eisenhower Matrix’ because I apply slightly different criteria to build the categories. Let’s look at the details. 

To build a Relative Prioritisation Matrix, you need two lines - one vertical and one horizontal. These are your ‘x’ axis (the horizontal) and your ‘y’ axis (the vertical).

The horizontal ‘x’ axis represents the relative ease with which you can take a Project to completion and the vertical ‘y’ axis represents the relative contribution that the Project will make to your goal. 

Thus, something in the top left of the Matrix would be easy to complete and would make a large contribution to your goal. Conversely, something in the bottom right of the Matrix would be hard to complete and would only make a small contribution to your goal. 

By asking yourself 'what pieces of work need to get done to achieve our Key Results' and then by plotting those pieces of work on the Relative Prioritisation Matrix, it becomes much easier to see where your priorities are and what is 'work' and what is 'a distraction'.

What's next?

In the next part of this series, we’re going to look at the penultimate step in the Pay As You Go COO 6-Point Strategy Framework - the Tasks. This is where we get really into the specifics of what each person in your team is committing to and how you're all going to share the goal of your Mission by being exactly the right level of accountable for exactly the right things.

In the meantime, if you want to read ahead and learn more about Projects via some great examples, get your copy of How To Write Your Strategy for 50% off using the code SUMMER24 here.

If you’re a Founder with big dreams and you’re looking for a partner-in-crime who can make those dreams happen, we should chat. At the time of writing, I’m currently taking calls with prospective clients for both Business Coaching and Fractional COO services (though I only take on 2 Fractional COO clients at once, so you need to get in there quickly). 

Book a free, no-strings chat with me here:

Pay As You Go COO Discovery Call

Book Now