Distill What You See Into Action

On Monday morning, you receive a phone call from a Senior Partner in your company. A client of your company is preparing to go live with a new software system in sixty days. The Senior Partner, knowing you have extensive, successful experience delivering technology systems to the marketplace that meet or exceed functional expectations, are secure-by-design, delight customers, generate revenue, and increase brand value, wants confidence that everything will happen as planned and desired. You can name your price, but it doesn't change the fact that you have three weeks to learn, assess, refine, and present observations and recommendations. You have no idea how deep the rabbit hole may go. After some back and forth in the conversation, you accept.

You've done this before. You know what to do. You have a battle-tested framework for assessing large volumes of data in short periods of time to determine planned versus actual versus forecasted deltas, risk, probability, dependencies, and potential remediation plans if necessary. This framework that you've developed over the years and myriads of assessment/salvage operations helps you not only identify what, why, and when, but also what not. In other words, while you've found success making observations and recommendations, the real magic has been identifying what doesn't matter, what doesn't need to be addressed, and/or what can safely be ignored for now, and perhaps forever.

Identifying what does not matter is often harder than identifying what does. Identifying what does not matter is not an acknowledgement of failure or a concession of what you wanted compared to what you will get; it is a canonical categorization of what matters most right now for the money, time, risk, and return attributes required to delight your clients and grow your business. It must not be emotional in nature.

The assessment framework you use for these types of engagements is structured to help you discover project health and corporate risk while eliminating noise. After all, folks pay you to figure out the state and health of their investment in short, thorough engagements. And what they expect is a concise list of observations and recommendations that guide immediate decisions leading to crystallized outcomes.

You know there will be one of three possible outcomes:

• Outcome One: This project is working well. You may recommend some changes here and there to fine tune the performance, but overall, the effort is heading in a good direction and should render the desired outcomes according to the expected parameters.
• Outcome Two: This project is not working well, but is correctable. You recommend a number of changes that will bring the project back into expected performance. You additionally recommend some key areas (health indicators) of the project to keep an eye on from today through end of project so they minimize the possibility of ending up here again.
• Outcome Three: This project is not working well and is not recoverable in a manner that makes financial sense. Your recommendation will likely be to close the project down, perform a retrospective, and use the output to influence project structures and decisions in the future.

From experience, you also know that some projects classified as Outcome Two should really have been classified as Outcome Three. However, after reporting your results to the Senior Leadership team, they were not yet willing to accept the possibility of a sunk cost effort and instead chose to believe doubling down on the effort would pull it back into the green zone. (Where 'doubling down' often equals, "Get more people, work harder, spend more money!")

The Assessment Framework

For each category below, research and understand what is required, what exists, in what state it exists, what doesn't exist, and what must, could, should, or will not be done accordingly.

01 Problem Statement

What problem does this organization need solved? Alternatively, what goal does this organization desire/require to be achieved? Would you categorize this as a business, technical, security, compliance, team member efficacy, or client-driven problem? What is the known/perceived blast radius of this problem statement impact -- industry-wide, existing clients, new target market(s), your enterprise in totality, or localized within the enterprise? And when this problem is addressed, goal achieved, what then?

02 Desired Outcomes

What change must be realized as a result of this effort (expenditure)? What will this/these change(s) look like to the affected parties? Will they care and why?

If the problem is addressed, and/or goal is achieved, what does that look like in the industry, enterprise, business division, department, team, at the client, or for the target market?

In other words, if this work is done as requested, what changes? What will those changes look like and to whom? Under what conditions will those changes be realized?

I had a problem. I solved the problem. My reality was purple. Now that the problem has been solved, my reality is green. Because my reality is now green, I am able to accomplish X, Y, and/or Z more easily, more aggressively, with a greater top line revenue and gross margin opportunity, and our clients are now able to purchase more products and services on-demand than before.

A desired outcome typically illustrates how the world will change once this project is solved and/or goal is achieved.

03 Definition of Done

How does this effort, team, project, or program know when it is done spending money? Typically there are characteristics, descriptors, and/or attributes upon which to reflect.

A definition of done, lower level than a desired outcome, typically illustrates what characteristics, traits, and/or attributes must exist in the solution before the desired outcome(s) will be realized.

04 Constraints/Attributes

Are there parameters, boundaries, and/or attributes to which this engagement must adhere, meet, or otherwise evidence compliance? Examples: Financial (SOC), Health (HIPAA), Security (NIST), Privacy (CCPA), System Availability (5NINES), budget, time, capacity, risk appetite, traceability, auditability, etc.

What are the immutable requirements that must not only be met, but must be illustrated and apparent on demand?

What are the mutable requirements that desirably must be there because they enable other opportunities, but are potentially negotiable?

05 Dependencies

What dependencies exist that may complicate, inhibit, or otherwise preclude this effort from successful completion? For example, is the team assigned to this effort dedicated? Are there clear problem statements, desired outcomes, and definitions of done? Does the organization have a history of delivering well? Is this an emerging market? Are there changing expectations, requirements, and/or standards? Does this project have committed, unconditional budget? Will this solution sell itself into an existing market or do we need to create market demand along with introducing a novel solution? Does the company have direct influence over buyers? Are we innovating on existing things or green-field inventing? Do we understand the target market? Are teams skilled correctly? Is the organization prepared to market, sell, grow, and support this idea? Do we know when to stop spending, when to test and learn, when to change, and when to take a pause?

06 Team

What roles and skills were initially requested to make this effort happen successfully? How has this changed through the course of the effort? What exists today? What should exist? Is the team being simple enough? Are they thinking big enough? How frequently, if at all, is the team being given opportunity to assert, test, learn, and change? How frequently does the team communicate a commitment and delivery of said commitment? Does the team own when they are wrong? What are the attitudes, aptitudes, and existing toolboxes of the team members? Is this an adaptive or inflexible project environment? Are the team members committed to this effort? This company? Do they understand the business need? The constraints? The potential value? Do these team members think, assess, and decide on their own or do they wait for instruction?

07 Work

How is work (deliverable) discovered, defined, prioritized, and realized? Is there more than one backlog? Is there more than one priority? Who are the stakeholders? How are they involved and with what frequency? Who wins in an escalation? Do they all agree on the problem statement, desired outcomes, definition of done, constraints, dependencies, and requirements on the organization? What implementation choices have been made and how will they impact long-term solution viability, cost of ownership, staffing availability, training, and competency? What surety exists that what is prioritized in the backlog is what must be delivered? What surety exists regarding commitments compared to deliverables? Is there transparency on what work is picked up by the team, the status and value of the work, and opportunities for stakeholders to change their mind?

08 Money

Did there exist a plan of how much money would need to be spent in order to realize the desired value? Was there an planned budget? What is the run-rate? What is the planned versus actual versus forecasted spend to time to deliverable value? Does the team see to understand what it costs to build something, what it costs to own it, and what those choices mean in terms of return velocity? Do the team members, leadership, and stakeholders understand the current and/or potential cost of risk in their decisions?

Learn the financial health of the project / effort.

Also, learn the financial intelligence of the team, effort leaders, and stakeholders.

09 Commitment

What was the original delivery commitment? What is currently delivered? Is there a delta? If yes, why? If there is a planned versus actual delta, will this effort require remediation activities now, later, or never? Are there rumblings in the teams about time to market versus quality or value of deliverables? Will original scope be met? If scope has changed, does it make contextual sense to changing marketing place and/or business tides? Or does the changing scope imply something different? Do you know what you are buying and what you are getting? And if there is a change, did you understand the need for the change or was it a surprise.

10 Risks

What are the risks which may impact successful implementation, daily operations, and client delight? What is the associative probability of each occurring? What is the associative impact of each occurring? Particularly, though not exclusively, what are the elimination, mitigation, and/or remediation options for each?

To be a healthy, useful, value-driven and value-realized investment, projects of any size, in any size organization, all require these above elements in some way, shape, and form.

There are more questions to be asked. However, you're not being asked to go molecular or to find guilt; you're being asked if this to-date investment has the probability of enabling a return on investment, and at what remaining time, cost, and risk.

Remember, your job is to provide enough objective observations and recommendations to the buyers of this effort that they are able to understand the state of their to-date investment compared to their overall strategic investment landscape.

To say something useful, you need a framework to see, question, and understand. After that, you need a framework to usefully communicate.

If you've done your job well, your buyers will be able to make decisions confidently to the benefit of their business.

The material I publish is content we discuss every day within Trility teams and with our clients. If you’d like to keep informed, and even interact, please connect or follow me on LinkedIn. Or we can send you an email. And if you'd like to talk, bounce some ideas off me and explore opportunities and options for your company, teams, and projects, holler. I'm happy to talk any time by mobile, chat, or video.

We are always looking for system thinkers to join us – those who can see the broader landscape of serving great clients with outstanding teams. If this resembles you, email us.