Do the smallest thing that adds value

So I've finally started a blog. I've put this off for a long time and I finally realised it's because I'm a hypocrite.

Everytime I think about setting up a blog, my thought process goes through the following steps:

1. I want a blog (to inflict my thoughts on the world).
2. I have my own domain (leishman.org) so I would really like people to find my blog using a hostname in this domain. This would be easy if I had my own hosting.
3. Oh - I've also been thinking about playing with some rails apps and other technologies and it would also be great if I had my own hosting to run these on.
4. So I better find my own hosting provider.
5. There's a billion different hosting providers out there, so I better survey my friends/colleagues to figure out what is flavour of the month.
6. After getting a dozen different opinions, I need to google them all and decide between them (based on cost, features, reliability, etc).
7. Then I need to sign up and set up my blogging software and start blogging.

I usually get as far as step 6 where I spend a few hours researching. After this I've always remained undecided and just put it off until a few months later - at which point I start again from step 1.

What I'm forgetting in this project is something that I spend every day at work thinking about and evangelising. As a consultant for ThoughtWorks, I too often come across customers with a big list of 'needs' (aka requirements) that they believe they want done. A traditional (and naive) approach is to accept this and go off to work on delivering all these needs and not report back until they've all been satisfied. At which point the needs of the customer have, in many cases, partially or even totally changed - or you've used up all their money before giving them anything of value in return.

Instead, what I do is try and understand what single 'need' I can deliver for the customer, right away, that is as small as possible and still gives them value in return. By quickly delivering something to them I mitigate the problem of changing 'needs' and I start giving value as early as possible. We call this "Do[ing] the smallest thing that adds value". And to encourage not spending effort now to add in extra stuff because it might be useful in future (if needs don't change) we use the term YAGNI (You Ain't Going To Need It).

I'm getting myself stuck because I'm speculating about things I might need in the future and I'm spending time and effort dealing with these speculated needs when I don't get any immediately obtainable benefit. Maybe I'll never get around to needing somewhere to host rails apps. When dealing with myself as a customer, I forgot YAGNI.

Now I've finally realised my mistake. So I've decided to "do the smallest thing that adds value", which is just step 1 - get a blog. I've gone to blogger.com and signed up for a simple, free blog and 15 minutes later here I am. Does it satisfy all of my 'needs' as I currently imagine them? No - definitely not. Does it give me value? Yes - here is my first blog entry.

And, now that I have some value, it's time to look at step 2 (using my own domain name).