A reasonable plan executed in a timely fashion is better than a perfect plan hatched in a prison camp - DefSvc1's paraphrase of General Patton - World War 2 General
Independently Viable IterationsThe greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan - Prussian General Karl von Clausewitz, 1873
Earlier stages do inform later stages but in more of an informal, unplanned way …Running a pilot is fundamental to the business plan. It’s a proof of concept. The business plan is set up to deal with this uncertainty. Some people would like to reduce overlap between stages and do things more sequentially to reduce the variability in the planning. For instance its hard to finalize the design of the power station without well outputs, which depend on the results of the subsurface work. The solution we are trying to work with is to design scalability/adjustability in subsequent stages (e.g. power generator) to allow them to adapt to the results of the early stages as they become known. (Startup1)
Competing-Experiments
I’ve got at least five projects out and about in the market place, with different producers and different people, at different stages of consideration and it’s exactly that multi-layered approach that’s enabled me to survive. On average, for instance, a documentary maker estimated that one in twenty experiments turn out, and I would say, from my own experience, that that figure is accurate…..in the film business it is an essential survival mechanism as the industry is both fickle and intensely competitive (Film Producer)
