Categories
Culture Execution Leadership Management Process

Lightweight Innovation Delivery

(10/20-2/21)

Challenge

Force-multiply in a process vacuum to deliver re-platformed SPA.

Action

At the beginning of December, the CEO announced we’d need to ship the next version of the application by Dec 18th. A BHAG for sure, it was ambitious but not impossible.

As most of the members of the team had not worked together for longer than two months, there hadn’t been much time for the usual storming/norming/forming.

Absent any process, I knew the path to successful launches would require as little overhead as possible. To that end, I peppered my stand-up updates with the terms of “divide-and-conquer,” “punch list” & “dog-fooding” – concepts that neither engineers nor marketers were familiar with.

When shortly before the 18th the cheese moved, and the delivery date became the 3rd week in January with the scope of the application changes increasing, and a new website was to be launched, I knew my efforts were succeeding when those same previously skeptical team members began using my terminology in their own updates, reinforcing a shared and common understanding of what it meant to keep eyes on the prize and ship “good enough.”

Result

Realized my thought leadership was succeeding when others began using same terminology.

Categories
Capacity Planning Collaboration Culture Forecasting Process Program Management Roadmapping

Introducing Program Management

(11/19-3/20)

Challenge

Absence of project or program management made it challenging to forecast delivery and could not get engineer time set-aside for maintenance.

Action

Investigated a few tools (Portfolio for Jira, BigPicture, Aha) for visually depicting dependencies and estimating team capacity.

Ultimately introduced lightweight (spreadsheet-based) processes to support capacity planning and crafted a business case for the CEO on why we should invest in infrastructure.

Results

  • Empowered the organization by increasing capacity planning visibility.