If you’ve ever attempted to cook a meal, you’ll know that some things just have to happen in the right order. You don’t throw raw chicken into a salad and hope for the best, nor do you sprinkle salt into your caramel latte and call it an innovative twistl cooking is a sequence. So is running a successful project or securing funding. And if you mess up the order? Well, let’s just say it’s not going to taste great.
A well-run project is like a well-executed dish. Follow the steps, use quality ingredients, and respect the process which breaks down kinda like this:
Step 1: The Prep Work – Defining Goals and Needs
Before you start throwing things into a pot, you need a plan. What are you making? What ingredients do you need? In project terms, this is where you define your objectives and scope. If you don’t, you’ll either end up making a mess or improvising halfway through with whatever’s in the fridge (which is how you end up with “spicy peanut butter bolognese”).
Step 2: The Right Ingredients – Team, Budget, and Resources
You wouldn’t try to make a chocolate cake with a head of lettuce and some brown sauce (or at least, I hope not). Likewise, a project needs the right people, funding, and tools. Too often, people rush in with enthusiasm but without the proper ingredients. That’s how you end up with an underfunded, understaffed disaster that’s only palatable if your Gran has a heavy cold and has lost her sense of taste.
Step 3: Timing is Everything – The Execution Phase
Ever added eggs to a cake mix before the butter is melted? Or dumped raw onions into a dish at the last second and hoped they’d magically caramelize? Timing is critical. In project managemen;, certain steps must come before others. Secure orders before making big commitments. Test a prototype before rolling out a full launch. If you jump ahead, you might find yourself trying to salvage a half-baked idea that just doesn’t work.
Step 4: Taste Test – Review and Adjust
Chefs taste as they go, making tweaks along the way. A project requires the same approach. Check in, gather feedback, and adjust. If something’s too salty (or your budget is bleeding money), fix it before serving it to stakeholders who might send it back to the kitchen permanently and leave the restaurant.
Step 5: Presentation Matters – The Final Pitch
Even the best-tasting dish can be ruined by bad presentation. If your proposal looks rushed, your presenter is hesitant, your numbers don’t add up, or your messaging is unclear, you might as well be serving gourmet cuisine on a dirty plate. Package your final product well, whether it’s a funding pitch, a product launch, or a project report.
Projects, like cooking, require patience, planning, and precision. Sure, some people claim to thrive on chaos, but the results usually tell a different story (just ask anyone who’s ever eaten “experimental” cooking). If you want success, follow the recipe you planned to make based upon the advice you got from coaches, mentors and even the organisers of the angel investment events themselves.
And remember: Just because you have the ingredients doesn’t mean you have a meal. The magic is in how, and when, you put it all together and that magic lies within you and your team.
Photo by Kevin McCutcheon
