When I joined MassChallenge five years ago, we were a measly 7 employees building our first office in a scrappy and haphazard way. Fast forward five years and the organization is now over 60 employees in 5 countries and growing daily. That type of growth is not easy to manage and, over the past year, we were faced with hundreds of significant barriers that would prevent our successful growth. We had to address the issues thoughtfully and consciously to set the roadmap for long-term success. We came up with a solution – and it seems it may be working.

Last year was our first full-program in the UK. The team there came up with a new curse word… “So, did you know?”. This was something the MassChallenge team and I probably said to them a dozen times a month. “So, did you know you need a venue for judging?”, “So, did you know you need security cameras in the office?”, “So, did you know you need to buy laptops for your team” and so on. It was an operational failure on our part - not properly informing the team of what they needed to do and being reactive to address gaps rather than proactive to ensure nothing got missed. There had to be a better way.

After spending time on the ground and working closely with the UK team, our COO Des and I decided we needed to once and for all create a guide of how to run a MassChallenge program. We called it the Vitruvian Project.

The name is pretty well suited for MassChallenge. Vitruvian is the name of a famed Leonardo da Vinci renaissance-era drawing. At MassChallenge, our mission is to do what da Vinci did for the arts in 15th century Europe for the modern day innovation economy, by catalyzing a global startup renaissance. The beauty and relevance of Vitruvian is the origin of the drawing — the idea is that it is a drawing of a human being with the ideal geometric proportions. However, we all know not all men look that way, and there actually is no real depiction of ‘ideal’. For our guide we took the same approach — we defined what we believe to be the “ideal proportions” for a MassChallenge program, but emphasized the understanding that there is significant operational flexibility and most programs will fall outside of the boundaries we draw.

Our First Failed Attempt

When we started, we thought the guide would be a printed and bound book that provided detailed text on how to run MassChallenge. We told ourselves that new Managing Directors would read the guide cover-to-cover and things would work perfectly. After two months of authoring the text, my colleague Fhiwa and I finished with a 350 page, 110,000 word textbook.

It was obvious this format wasn’t going to work and no one would ever make it past page 10 of this guide, let alone page 310. But we also knew the text was good and the purpose was right – we just needed a different medium.

Creating an Online Version

When we went back to the drawing boards, I took the lead on creating on online platform for Vitruvian to live on. I knew when users had easy access to the content with a visually appealing user interface and easy to use tools including high-quality search, they would find value in the content.

I went ahead and created the online guide with three unique sections – all the same content we had already written – with a specific audience and purpose for each section. The main philosophy was focused on making the information easy to find, easy to understand and easy to act on. The three sections we created were:

1.   Monthly Guides
2.   Key Activities
3.   Systems and Procedures

Monthly Guides

One of the main audiences for Vitruvian is the leadership team of new programs that MassChallenge is launching around the world. The Monthly Guides section was designed to avoid the “So, did you know?” problem and gives staff in new offices a very clear month-by-month guide of exactly what needs to get done that month, why it needs to be done and what to be planning for in the next month. This section is used as an annotated index to link users to other sections of the site which give more detailed explanation of activities.

Key Activities

This is the bread-and-butter of Vitruvian. The Key Activities section has detailed explanations of 30 core activities MassChallenge does on a yearly basis – things like application promotion, judging, awards ceremony, etc. Users have two options of how they want to view the list of activities – either as icons roughly ordered by time of the year, or on a monthly timeline where they can see when each activity needs to take place from the planning to execution stage.

Each activity page varies in length, but they each give a detailed overview of what the activity entails. Using the web format, I created “highlight boxes” for each activity giving a quick view for the user to key details on each activity such as who is responsible, what the timeline is, how flexible the structure is and who to contact for more info. Another beauty of the online format is being able to include downloads to key relevant files and templates for each activity right on the page and provide dynamic images as examples of each activity.

These pages will also act a bit like a Wiki moving forward, where users have the ability to edit and update the text as time goes on and improve it for future staff. That will likely be the hardest part of maintenance for Vitruvian, but we are working on a plan for it.

Systems and Procedures

This sections is probably the least interesting part of Vitruvian, but it has become an important internal repository of policy and documentation for employees to easily reference. In the Systems and Procedures section we have things like our corporate travel policy and harassment policy alongside an operational best practice sections related to email, calendar and document use. We also have resources like our brand guidelines and online systems overviews explained in this section.

Building off the Success

Based on the success of Vitruvian and the strong reception it received from all employees, we have decided to put even more content and resources within the platform. I have two main items I am currently working on adding to Vitruvian – our new hire onboarding process and our metric tracking process for offices.

I believe that by putting onboarding into Vitruvian, as the very first thing new hires use at MassChallenge, will make it even more of a core system for our program operations moving forward. The onboarding section will have content including our company overview and guiding principals as well as all of our technology onboarding steps to setup email, calendars and software accounts on day 1.

The metric tracking section will be intended mainly for managing directors to use throughout the year in order to input and identify how they are doing related to core performance metrics.

After these, who knows what Vitruvian will turn into, but it will absolutely be a helpful resource as MassChallenge scales operationally.