Featured Article -
Strategy and Delivering the
Right Thing
by Kent
McDonald
Have you ever worked for an
organization that has too many projects? The situation is usually characterized
by endless discussions of how long this particular project will really take,
whether the hero project manager can take on one more project, and how you
could implement the newest, shiniest methodology to "leverage the
synergies in your over-allocated resources" (translation: burnout your
employees).
I have worked at and with several
organizations that face the situation described above. In most, the people at
those organizations hold a very specific, and entirely unstated, assumption:
every project on the list Has. To. Be. Done.
You don't have to fall victim to
that same situation. You can choose to be honest with yourself and your
organization about how much you can actually get done, and productively decide
which things on the list will get tackled, and which ones won't. The thing that
can help guide you through those difficult decisions is your organization's
strategy.
Key
Assumptions About Strategy
In order to understand how
strategy can help you, it's important to know the key assumptions I hold when I
make such a statement.
Assumption
1: Strategy exists to guide decision making. A good strategy does not specify the exact actions that your
organization is going to take (i.e. a Strategic "Plan"), rather it
provides guard rails that express the intent of your organization.
Assumption
2: Effective decision making occurs when decisions are made by informed people. The most informed people tend to be the ones doing
the day-to-day work because they are closest to the action, and because they
aren't dealing with filtered information like those near the top of the
organization chart.
Assumption
3: Your organization executes its strategy via projects. A well laid out strategy will have some aspects
that guide decisions for day-to-day operations in your organization. However,
most strategy tends to drive change, and more often than not that change is
driven through projects and/or product development.
Assumption
4: To ensure effective decision making, ensure people working on projects
understand your organization's strategy. If you consider the first three assumptions and follow where they lead,
you will want to make sure that the people working on your project(s)
understand your organization's strategy so that they can make informed
decisions consistent with your organization's intent.
Assumption
5: If people do not understand the strategy, they will ignore it. If the strategy is not actionable, they will ignore
it as well, or they will interpret in a way that makes their lives easier.
Strategies that are communicated by a 60-slide PowerPoint deck, that have a
bunch of vague motherhood and apple pie statements, or that have a stunning
array of goals, do not aid decision making.
Strategy
needs to be simple, useful, known, and understood. Once it meets those
criteria, you can use it to improve the chances of delivering the right things.
Strategy needs to be simple,
useful, known, and understood. Once it meets those criteria, you can use it to
improve the chances of delivering the right things, assuming you are willing to
have some tough conversations once in a while. Here's how.
Using
Strategy to Deliver the Right Things
1)
Understand what the strategy is.
If you don't understand the
organization's strategy overall, you are going to find it difficult to figure
out how relevant your project is to that strategy. The first step here is to
find out what the strategy is.
When I've worked as a consultant
at organizations, I'll often start by looking around the organization's
intranet site to get an initial idea. I'll follow that up with a meaningful
conversation with someone who was involved in creating the strategy (if
possible).
I have always found that a good
way to describe a strategy in actionable ways is through the form of Decision Filters: "Will this help us do
[X]?" where [ X ] is the intent of the organization.
2)
Determine whether / confirm how your project fits within the strategy.
Given you understand the strategy
as described above, apply your decision filter to your project. If you can't
answer with a resounding "YES!!!" You have some work to do. You need
to gain a better understanding of the project to see if it's beneficial to the
organization at all. If you see things that indicate it's not beneficial, it's
time to have a conversation with your project sponsor.
This is not an easy conversation
to have. Project sponsors often fall in love with their projects, to the point
that they have convinced themselves that this project is the organization's
most important project. Never mind that it has no direct impact on the
strategy, does not set anything up, and is operationally irrelevant.
Understand from the Sponsor's
perspective why they want this project. Buried in even the most harebrained
project idea you will often find an actual need to satisfy. Find that diamond
in the rough, and then work with your sponsor to determine if that need is
worth satisfying at all, and then whether the way they envisioned solving it is
worth it. You'll find some needs that aren't worth tackling at all, some that
may be worth solving with a properly sized solution, and some that are
no-brainers that need to be solved no matter what.
The product opportunity assessment created by Marty
Cagan, and my version for projects, provides a good list of questions to talk
through with your sponsor to help you and the sponsor make this
Start/Change/Kill decision.
3) Build
a shared understanding of the tie to strategy with the rest of the team.
Assuming you are continuing your
project, you need to make sure that the team working on the project understands
the strategy and the project's relation to it.
This is the audience
participation part of the project. Your results will not be nearly as good
distributing a document to the team and asking them to read it. That's better
than doing nothing, but involving them in a discussion with the sponsor is even
more powerful.
A technique you may find helpful
for reinforcing this tie is the problem statement.
Start by sharing the decision
filter you came up with up for the strategy. Then have each person write their
own problem statement on four separate Post-It notes, one note for each phrase.
The problem of...
Affects...
The Impact of which is...
We'll know the problem is solved when…
After you have each person read
out their problem statement, have the team collaborate to come up with one
problem statement. The real value in this exercise is the discussions that
occur as the team comes up with a single problem statement and the deeper
understanding that everyone in the team gains by talking through the project
with their teammates.
4)
Reinforce the linkage to strategy throughout the project
As the project proceeds, your
team will face decisions along the way:
- What items should we work on next?
- How should we approach this particular item?
- Should we work on more new stuff or fix the
defects we run into?
When the team comes across these
questions, encourage them to consider your decision filter(s) and use that to
guide their decisions.
5)
Revisit the Continue/Change/Kill Decision regularly
During retrospectives, or
releases, or planning discussions, reflect back to make sure the project is
accomplishing what it should. Ask your team to stop and consider whether the
project is still heading in the right direction. Should you continue, change,
or kill the project? Depending on the nature of your organization you may need
to do this anonymously. If the general direction of the team is
"Change," find out what changes they suggest. If the suggestion is
"Kill," find out why they think that is the case and discuss the
impact of doing that.
You'll also want to be prepared
for the discussion with your sponsor should the team indicate Change or Kill.
The kill option will always be difficult because of the impact of the sunk cost
fallacy and how it plays on people's decision making.
It's
about honest conversations
To deliver the right thing, and
avoid working on the wrong things, you need a strategy that effectively guides
decisions. You need to have honest conversations regarding the alignment of
projects to that strategy. And you need to be willing and able to convince your
sponsor that their treasured project is no longer a great idea. It may be
unpleasant to start with, but I think you'll find it's a much more effective
approach over the long run.
|
