How Nautilus Projects Work

Although we’re still building and learning about how to make Nautilus as effective and impactful as possible, we have defined some key guiding principles.

  1. Organizing the work into projects focused on specific topics makes it possible to solve large, systemic problems.

  2. Projects need more than just the experts on a topic. Projects also need people to organize and prioritize the work, as well as those who drive market adoption.

  3. The foundation of each project is developing standards that define what excellence in a topic looks like. This makes it far easier to drive adoption and prioritize which resources should be built to simplify achieving the standards.

  4. Understanding how projects connect to each other and build on each other is critical for success.

We expect these guiding principles to evolve over time as we build and learn together. Nautilus is an ambitious, long-term initiative to change market norms. This won’t happen overnight and can’t be done by just a few people. We need everyone to get involved.

What Does Each Project Create?

Each Project focuses on three related sets of activities that together create a virtuous cycle of improvement.

Standards of Excellence

Enabling
Resources

Adoption Campaigns

Standards of Excellence are shared definitions of what good looks like in a topic. This could include definitions, metrics, scoring criteria, or other approaches to define good.

Examples include contract scoring criteria, vendor capability requirements, or benchmarking datasets.

Enabling Resources are anything that makes it easier for an employer, union, advisor, vendor, or other stakeholder to adopt standards in their own organization or work.

Examples include template contracts, analytical methodologies, datasets, RFP questionnaires, software, or anything else that simplifies adoption.

Standards and Resources that aren’t actually adopted by market participants is a pointless exercise. Because of this, building the need for adoption into the fabric of each project is critical.

Examples include awareness campaigns, educational courses, tiering standards adoption to meet practical market realities, or even policy work where relevant.

How Projects are Built

While Projects don’t just move along in a totally linear way, they do follow a general path. As Projects mature, we expect activity in each area to occur simultaneously.

  • There are two layers to prioritization.

    1. Across Nautilus: which projects should be focused on at a given point in time.

    2. Individual Projects: what standards, resources, and campaigns will be most valuable at a given point in time.

    At both levels, scoping activities help ensure that Projects progress and don't fall into the trap of letting perfect be the enemy of good.

  • This starts with a launch panel of highly-dedicated people that get the ball moving. As a project makes initial project, the launch panel recruits three primary types of panel participants.

    1. Organizers: The people that just want to get things done and can help make that happen.

    2. Experts: The people with deep knowledge in the project topic and ensure the standards and resources are deeply useful.

    3. Evangelists: The people that help drive adoption of the project, whatever that looks like. This also includes people that just want to spread the word.

  • This is where the rubber hits the road. The first primary deliverable of any project is a definition of excellence that is agreed to. At this stage, we expect these definitions to look different for different types of projects, but checklists, scoring criteria, and metrics are likely to be the deliverables that reflect these definitions.

  • The enabling resources will vary immensely by Project. The common thread to enabling resources is that they should all answer a single question: What would make it easier for an individual or organization to meet the Project's standards?

  • The sky is the limit here. Whatever is needed to ensure adoption of the standards. We expect Adoption Campaigns to work in concentric circles, focusing first on early adopters and then spreading to others.