This advice comes often from seasoned entrepreneurs and investors. We also see these claims from software development methdologies like Agile. But there is an equally important area where this concept holds true which could dramatically help decrease overhead and help us “corporate cogs in the wheel” live a pretty comfortable life.

As someone with an entrepreneurial bent of mind, I recently really thought about the setbacks I have faced (I myself have never really launched anything myself – yet – and that’s either a setback or an opportunity waiting to happen depending on how you see it) and the real impact of “Release Early, Release Fast” dawned on me like I had just awakened from a deep slumber.

First, I must confirm that the advice from entrepreneurs and investors is indeed a sound one. Release early means you give your customers something to work with quickly so analysis paralysis is avoided even as motivation levels remain high from early market lessons, findings and successes. Second, release fast means we keep incrementally adding new features and services to keep competition on its toes and meet customers needs at the same time. Customers get to participate and we end up building a product as per their requirements, not as per our understanding of the requirements.

Now, lets get back to the revelation I was speaking about. As a consultant working to help my customers decide their investment and business capability roadmap, a formal “Release Early, Release Fast” paradigm may solve the most fundamental of problems with our projects, i.e. communications and expectations management. Indeed this advice is suited for anyone working on anything for someone else. And that includes business leaders, project managers, business analysts, functional experts, and talking about IT, even programmers.

And what do we release early? Everything. Our understanding of the project, our understanding of what is required, our understanding of who the stakeholders are, risks we see, a draft of the solution architecture, minutes of meetings, our initial hypothesis and just about everything. In fact so long as the “partial release” is correct to the best of our knowledge, send it out. You can never seal it.

And why don’t we do it as often as we should? The expert syndrome and our own internal consciousness of the limits of our capabilities is our downfall. We think they think we know how to do our job best. And they think we want them to to leave the deed up to us as experts. How wrong I have been! Having acted as a client several times now, I now realize (better late than never) that I never expected my vendors to be omnipotent. I always wanted them to ask me questions, show me what they think, and learn really about what I was thinking about. But the expert in us takes us up the wrong tree, and then the fall is imminent – by way of compromises, conflicts, dissatisfaction and often money and reputation.

So to all experts out there, tell them what you are thinking and doing, so they can tell you how to do it right.