Validation, beautiful validation

This post talks about the way a project starts, and ultimately gets validated during its operations.

For a project leader, it's important to plan the individual projects really well, and seed them with that "one great idea" that truly defines the project through and through. The "one great idea" is the defining moment for the project leader when the project commences, it's that visionary's moment of truth, moment of joy. And the joy multiplies manifold when later in the age of the project, independent externals validate the original belief with which the project had started.

The PROTON project came to my mind in July-August 2007, when I realised that the PT education group needed to get into formal business school education space pretty quickly now (then). We had the experience, the team-strength, the reputation, the honest intentions, the fire, the passion, and all the good reasons to do so.

I was faced with the big question in August 2007. What will be the defining idea for PROTON? I realised - it could be nothing else but "a transformational educational experience for each and every student". It had to be truly "transformational". The tools, the approach, the people, the infrastructure - everything had to be truly different and exceptionally high quality.

The power of this unique vision thing was apparent to me as I studied several large scale projects that various organisations have executed across the world, across sectors. From Dhirubhai's massively ultra-mega style visions, to Mohammad Yunus's starkly grassroots driven approach, the leader's vision has truly defined every aspect of the reality that finally emerged, and still is. It is one of those things in life that you can possibly do only once with the project. It defines its DNA. It puts a structure for the world to identify the project with.

( This is a long, fascinating, against-all-odds kind of story I will post separately later. Readers will enjoy peeping into the working of the fantastic PROTON team while raising the project from scratch and making it work in 12 months flat. )

So then, once the basic vision was crafted (and later refined several times), we set to executing it. Being a manufacturing engineer helps here, as operations come to me naturally. The added fact that I have always carried the garage enterpreneur spirit inside me made day-to-day operational involvement in a new project really easy and enjoyable. (I had to make do with only 50% of my work time for PROTON, rest being designated for PT education).

So now, today was a big day. Some really solid validations happened for project PROTON.

As part of our regular expert guest lecture series (conducted once every fortnight), we had a panel of 3 distinguished speakers at PROTON Indore campus. The event was connected live with Ahmedabad via video-conference. The talk was special in the sense that it was completely a panel-discussion only, driven by audience queries. There were no speeches. The speakers were : Mr Roger Harrop, Mr Brian Chernett, and Mr Rakesh Bhargava. All are distinguished CEO trainers, with decades of global training experience.

I sat through the entire talk to check for some validations happening in real time. I was especially eager to discover the quality of my product about to hit the marketplace (the second year students who are due for graduation soon, and are in the race for final placements now).

My acid test queries (which I had posed to myself) were

• What will be the quality of questions that Protons (students) will ask the panel?
• Will the questions truly reflect the effort that we have put into their academics, and grooming?
• Will the techonology backbone (V/C) work seamlessly?
• What will be the panel members' natural opinion (reaction) on our students?

And man, was I happy! I discovered that

• The quality of questions asked was WORLD CLASS (though the articulation still needs improvement)
• Yes! The questions reflected it in ample measure
• Surprisingly, it did! (with a minor echo problem that arises when Indore speaks to Ahmedabad)
• It was "We are very glad to have come here. There are things we need to do together!"

That's *positive validation*.

My advice to project leaders/managers : To truly find out how your project is doing at any stage of its life, seek out simple answers to the most straight, most penetrating questions. The joy of discovering positive feedback is truly emotional.
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