chapter 6
Agree what you will deliver, and when
Supercharged teams have highly motivated team members who are chosen to make a difference and are ready for action. When your team’s ambition is clear and you’ve found your motivation, you will be keen to get started. I’m the kind of person who prefers to get going than to think too long and hard about how to get somewhere. However, before you leap into teamwork, it is important to agree on what the team will deliver, and by when. A supercharged team deliberately decides how fast they will work, the deadlines they will set, and what success looks like.
As a team you need to be relentlessly focussed on your goal, but not so rigid that you don’t allow time to reflect or pivot if necessary. This chapter will help you to design your project journey with your goals in mind, in order to make the best use of your team’s time, with the momentum and pace you need to get there. Whether your team is midway through a project, or about to start a new one, supercharge your roadmap with these tools.
What you will learn in this chapter:
- • How to plan your project journey.
- • How to avoid the perils of ‘press-on-itis’.
- • How to keep up the pace and avoid burnout.
- • How to create time and space for reflection.
- • How to use pilots and prototypes to achieve better outcomes.
- • How to measure success.
Plan your journey
It is more important to know where you are going than to get there quickly.
Mabel Newcomer (1892–1983)
Even if your team has a very clear destination in mind, you do need to plan your journey. In 2010, a British man bought a motor boat on the internet and set off on what he intended to be a round-Britain trip by sea, armed with a road map and a radio he didn’t know how to use. He set off from the Thames, aiming for Southampton, reasoning that he could motor out to sea and keep the land on his right until he got there. He travelled for a day and a half and ran out of fuel before he realised that he had been circling the Isle of Sheppey rather than travelling west. Coastguard Ian Goodwin said with typical British understatement, ‘We passed on relevant safety advice and advised him that the best way to Southampton would be by train’.1
It’s a funny story and we probably believe we would never set off on a journey with only a destination in mind and no plan for how to get there. However, I do often see teams set off towards a big goal with just a list of actions and dates, without truly considering the shape of the journey and how they will track their progress.
My husband Paul is a sailor and a pilot, and every time I travel with him I’m impressed by the amount of time he spends planning how to navigate each journey before the journey starts. Like anyone in a high-risk job, he wouldn’t dream of setting off without considering weather conditions, traffic, permissions, our equipment, the vessel itself and any risks (including the competence of his crew – that’s me!). Even after all that planning, we do sometimes find ourselves in some big storms or contrary tides out on the Solent. A navigation plan predicts possible challenges, and it plans to overcome them to get to the destination safely. A huge part of being safe is being able to tell at any point in the journey whether you are on track or not.
Andrew Grove, author of High Output Management, talks about ‘management by objectives’ – knowing where I want to go (my objective) and how I will pace myself to see if I’m getting there (milestones or key results). He says that the milestones must provide feedback on the journey so far, no matter where we are, so we can make adjustments if we are not on track.2
Tool 13
The journey plan
Perhaps you are in a pretty straightforward team and you’re not planning on a huge adventure. However, you do have an opportunity to supercharge the journey by considering how your journey might look and what challenges you may face. You can better plan to get to your destination.
There are four stages in creating a journey plan:
- 1Define your destination clearly.
- 2Consider the challenges you are likely to face.
- 3Plan the route you will take to get there.
- 4Identify milestones and signposts to track your progress.
Define your destination clearly
If you don’t know where you’re going, you will not get there.
Andrew Grove3
In the previous chapter, your team created a broad goal. In our example this was ‘To perform a deep digital makeover for every individual in the company so they can experience the benefits of a successful digital transformation at first hand’. In order to make this into a clear destination, we now need to define it more specifically.
Psychologists have found that having a clearly articulated, specific goal significantly boosts productivity and performance because clear goals focus our attention, help us to stay on track and encourage us to be persistent.4 A simple formula for a proper goal was created by John Doerr, venture capitalist and author of Measure What Matters, as follows: ‘I will __________ as measured by __________.’
A goal must describe what you will achieve and how you are going to measure that achievement.5 Our adventurer on his way to Southampton had a wish rather than a goal. Any sailor knows that you need to have planned where you will dock, so a true goal would have been a specific mooring at Town Quay Marina in Southampton, supported by a passage plan of how to get there safely.
Our first step as a team is making a broad goal more specific, which involves breaking it down into important measurable parts, as follows:
- • We will perform a deep digital makeover for all 200 individuals in the company.
- • We will create a personalised plan for each individual’s current digital use, barriers to overcome and possible benefits to them through our project.
- • We will conduct a satisfaction survey to compare how they feel at work, their working patterns and work–life balance, pre- and post-digital transformation.
- • We will deliver digital transformation to every individual, until every person in the company is using at least one new digital device, technology or programme in their job on a regular basis.
- • We will know we have succeeded when by 31 December, at least 90% of people have experienced some benefit as a result of the transformation, as measured by our survey.
Once you have a clear destination in mind, you can see what will help you get there, or stand in your way.
Consider the challenges you are likely to face
In his book The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle talks about imagining what could get in the way of your goal and looking at other teams to see how they overcame similar obstacles. In most projects you should have a good idea of the kinds of challenges you might face, such as team members being swamped with workload at a busy time of year, or a board meeting that will decide whether your project gets funding or not. Think through the likely challenges your project will face, and when they are likely to happen list them out against your specific goal.
Example:
Consider the challenges you are likely to face
| Specific goal | Challenges we may face |
| We will perform a deep digital makeover for all 200 individuals in the company | Staff turnover means that 20% of these will join at some point during the year, so we need to consider how to do this with new joiners, even if they join in December |
| We will create a personalised plan for each individual’s current digital use, barriers to overcome and possible benefits to them through our project | People could be reluctant to be honest about how and when they work – no one wants their work to be scrutinised by a different department |
| We will conduct a satisfaction survey to compare how they feel at work, their working patterns and work–life balance, pre- and post-digital transformation | We won’t know the right questions to ask before we have created personalised plans – so designing the pre-transformation measures will be difficult |
| We will deliver digital transformation to every individual, until every person in the company is using at least one new digital device, technology or programme in their job on a regular basis | Before we begin the project, it’s hard to know whether this is possible or completely over-ambitious. What about if we find that there is one team who simply cannot do anything more digitally in their jobs? |
| We will know we have succeeded when by 31 December at least 90% of people have experienced some benefit as a result of the transformation, as measured by our survey | We need to be careful about how we design the survey – in case people disagree with how we measure ‘some benefit’ |
At this point, don’t worry about solving the challenges, simply list them out as a team. As anyone who has done a risk assessment will tell you, just talking about the risks will make you more aware of what you need to consider before you embark on your project plan.
Plan the route you will take to get there
You have your clear destination in mind, and you are aware of the challenges you may face. Now combine these into an idea of how the project journey might look through the year. A simple way to do this is to plot a ‘roadmap’ on a big wall, or an Excel spreadsheet if you prefer, showing the months of the year from left to right. Start by plotting the specific goals first on the far-right column that represents your deadline. Then work back from each goal to establish when certain things need to happen in the year, keeping in mind the challenges.
Using our example, if we focus on the specific goal ‘We will know we have succeeded when by 31 December at least 90% of people have experienced some benefit as a result of the transformation, as measured by our survey’, with the challenge ‘We need to be careful about how we design the survey – in case people disagree with how we measure “some benefit” in mind.’
We can work back from our goal, with the challenges in mind, like this.
| December | 90% of the people surveyed believe that our project was of benefit to them in their work |
| November | 100% of people have completed the survey, and results are analysed |
| October | Heads of department and CEO launch the post-transformation survey and ask people to complete it |
| September | Project team offers mentoring and further training for individuals or departments who need it |
| August | Project team designs and delivers training to each department in their new digital tools |
| July | Based on the pilots, each department agrees at least one new digital approach they commit to being trained on |
| June | Departments pilot new digital tools and work out which ones make work easier |
| May | Project team identifies technology and programmes to deliver the benefits people have identified in the survey |
| April | Project team analyses survey results and works out the key areas per department where digital could improve their work |
| March | Project team sends out a pre-transformation survey based on the feedback from the department meetings, including specific benefits that people would like to see in their jobs by December |
| February | Heads of departments cascade the digital transformation plan to their teams, asking for them to be involved and reinforcing the benefits to them. Collect from each team the kinds of benefits they would hope for from digital transformation in their job. |
| January | The CEO announces the company digital transformation plan and the aim of making people’s work–life balance better as a result |
When you focus on each of your destination points in turn, and work back through the year, you will start to see where there may be problems, stresses or difficulties as the activities overlap and cause issues. For example, if the company-wide training is planned for August, but most people are on holiday, you may need to speed up the earlier stages.
Once you’ve completed this for every goal, you will see the amount of activity your team has to plan for, and the journey of the project, month by month.
Having a plan, feeling confident and being competent are the greatest antidotes to fear. If you’re just trying to deal with the unknown by crossing your fingers and hoping, you will be utterly helpless when a situation finally manifests. . . You need to take ownership of a situation, break it down into bitesize chunks and plan accordingly.
Chris Hadfield6
Identify milestones and signposts to track your progress
Your team will now have a big map that outlines all of the key tasks that will happen through the year to deliver all the destination points. Now we need to work out how to measure whether we are on or off track. Of course, in regular team meetings to check on the project’s progress, but we need to be able to tell where we are and make adjustments to avoid going off course.
To go back to our man travelling to Southampton, we need to identify specific points along the journey that he recognises, so he knows he is going in the right direction, such as passing Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower before he gets to Southampton, and crucially what he will do if he doesn’t see the Spinnaker Tower after travelling for over a day.
Organise your project journey into key milestones (important stages in the journey) and how you will measure progress at each point.
| Quarter 1: Launch and cascade | Board members have approved the digital transformation plan and have booked dates with their teams for the cascade sessions. There is a company-wide buzz and excitement, although some departments are less enthusiastic than others. |
| Quarter 2: Digital investigation | We are working on multiple investigations into new digital tools and have already identified one or two key pilots and departments to trial |
| Quarter 3: Digital training | Teams are talking to each other about the training and encouraging each other to go on it, although some departments are trickier than others to get the training booked in because of workload |
| Quarter 4: Assessing project success | Most departments have had their training and are using the new technology, so now we need to get people talking about the benefits to encourage each other |
Once you’ve identified where you should be at each stage of the journey, it is far easier to know if you are not on track and adjust your journey at that point. It is especially important for longer term projects to keep adapting to fit new leaders, new market conditions, or new customer needs. If by the end of Quarter 2 you have not identified the right digital tools to train people in, you may need to push the training to later in the year.
Along with milestones, think through signposts with your team – the things that you see along the journey that give you warnings or encouragement. In my experience with working on big, company-wide projects, one important signpost that shows you are heading in the right direction is when someone gets cross about the project because they feel they have been left out. The fact that they want to join your team’s journey is a good thing and can be a great opportunity to get more people on side.
In my years of leading innovation projects, we knew that there were two signposts that were the death knell of any new product. If at any time a consumer said ‘I like this, it would be good for a picnic’ or ‘This would be good to take on holiday’ we knew that we should just stop the project right there and go home. When consumers think they like a product but can’t imagine using it in everyday life, it’s time to call quits on that innovation.
The Show Must Go Online
Imitation is a good sign
Another signpost of success is being imitated. Robert Myles and Sarah Peachey created The Show Must Go Online in response to COVID-19. The idea was to perform all of Shakespeare’s plays live via Zoom in the order in which they are believed to have been written. Within a week they broadcast their first show, with 730 people watching them performing live via YouTube, and more than 10,000 views in three days. In just eight weeks, major media outlets across the world had covered them in over 40 articles, including the UK, US, Australia, Singapore, India, Russia and more, with over 100,000 views combined.
Rob says that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Over 20 theatre companies, drama schools and universities reached out for advice on how to replicate the success of the show, with others, from one-person operations to national institutions, replicating certain features of the broadcasts, even down to the wording.7
Avoiding press-on-itis
Press-on-itis is the official name given to a well-documented human error that occurs in airplane accidents, also called ‘goal fixation’ or ‘hurry syndrome. Pilots go against advice or data, and continue on even when safer alternatives exist, such as trying to land again and again, even if the weather hasn’t improved, or racing ahead of a thunderstorm to try to beat it home. Press-on-itis accounts for 42% of landing accidents and serious incidents in aviation.
The types of pilots who suffer the most from this are those who have the most professional pride and want to give superior service for the company and its customers.8 Project teams, especially the ones who are trying their best to make a project successful, can fall into the same trap. When we are working in a team, sometimes the very fact that we’ve been working on something for so long means we are even more likely to keep pressing on with it, in spite of ever mounting difficulties.
However, many successful teams agree that stopping the wrong project is just as important as starting the right ones. Trying to do too many projects or working ad hoc projects can dilute your team’s effectiveness.9 When your project journey becomes difficult, and all the signposts are telling you to stop, you may need to consider doing so.
You need a ‘stop sign’. . . . It’s OK to put a stop to some things.
Benchmarking Innovation Impact10
It is hard to put a stop on projects that are failing if we work in a culture that fears failure. Shalaka Karandikar is a Senior Innovation Manager at Lloyds Banking Group, and she says it is important to encourage a culture of learning by encouraging people to share successes and ways in which they failed fast through experimentation. In her project goals, she instils the acceptance of both success and failure by identifying hypotheses to disprove, or identifying how much money will be saved if a project is stopped early enough.
To avoid press-on-itis, we must keep a lookout for signs that tell us to stop or pivot. Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, coined the term ‘pivot’: the idea that successful startups change directions but stay grounded in what they’ve learned. Lessons may be learned from the project so far, and work may be repurposed, but if the project is becoming a wasted effort rather than progressing, it is time to cast aside the original plan and work towards a new goal.
A great example of this is Thai Airways’ pivot to encourage travellers to stay at home during the coronavirus pandemic. In order to support social distancing and people staying at home, they rewarded members of their loyalty scheme free miles to stay at home. To be validated, members download an app which uses geolocation technology to determine their location. From a company who encouraged people to travel more, the pivot was significant, though temporary.11
Be careful to look out for all the signposts in your project, including those that help you to know when to pivot. Consistently failing to complete the progress you thought you would make in a given time can be one sign that you are fighting an uphill battle. Another sign is stakeholders not giving you time or support on a project. If people aren’t giving you time in their diaries, it may be because the idea is not strong enough to engage your internal clients and therefore your external customers may be even less interested.
Keep up the pace
Most people are motivated by a deadline, and teams are no different. If we have a weekly team meeting on a Tuesday, we tend to leave getting our actions done until the day before. Why do we wait a whole week to complete our actions? Could we instead have a daily meeting and undertake our actions the same afternoon, getting five weeks of progress completed in one week instead?
This is the principle of a sprint, a short period in which a team works intensively to complete a goal12 and is at the heart of agile working. Many teams work in a sprint because they are responding to an urgent problem, such as an HR and IT team working together to help their teams work remotely when COVID-19 forced people to work from home. Because they are working to a very real deadline or against a huge business need people roll up their sleeves and make it happen.
It is harder to get momentum on a non-urgent project, because when the business is not at risk it feels easier to spread out the work at a comfortable pace, timed by weekly or monthly meetings, with not much progress needed in between. We naturally do this because many of us are working on more than one team and so we are spreading the work out. However, if we don’t focus on what needs to be done and get it done as quickly as possible, we risk getting distracted by other projects and our work getting diluted. In today’s working environment things change fast, and by the time you deliver your project, it may no longer be relevant. Setting a good, crisp pace for your team’s work is essential for creating some momentum towards your goals.
Faster is better. Speed accelerates value creation and intensifies value appreciation. And speed means that more can get done in less time.
Michael Schrage13
One of the fastest moving company cultures I’ve ever worked with is AB InBev. I like to say they work in dog years because they are seven times faster than other companies. When I interviewed Laura Diamond, Head of Consumer Strategy, Insights and Innovation in Europe, she explained to me that the business is very action-orientated, so projects kick-start fast and they test and learn quickly. They focus initially on stress-testing the idea to identify potential risks, making small iterations and improvements, and learning at speed. They are looking for the early signals that tell them to pivot if necessary. Laura tells her teams to ‘be calm and unreasonable’, keeping an eye on their ultimate goal and accelerating towards it, and making sure they learn as they go.
Even though they work at a fast pace, it is not speed for the sake of it. The balance between rapid progress and reflection is important. The key is to get started quickly, fail early, learn from it and move forward. Rather than speeding ahead blindly, this is working at pace to make progress, then learning and adapting as a result of that progress. Mark Zuckerberg’s motto for Facebook is ‘move fast and break things’, but there is an increasing recognition that moving fast for the sake of speed, without being responsible to customers or society, is no longer considered good practice.14 Teams need to move with momentum, but allow themselves the time to learn from their work and be responsible to their customers.
Momentum comes from people feeling a sense of ownership on the project, and wanting to progress, rather than reluctantly waiting for actions to be handed out. Think about how you can set a good, fast pace for your team’s work that gives immediate, ambitious deadlines, and tightens up your timing to get the job done quicker. There’s no need to wait around or stretch it out – achieve your goals earlier, so you can move on as a team to achieving more.
One thing at a time, most important thing first, start now.
Caroline Webb15
Tool 14
Accelerate and reflect
If our time expands to fit the available tasks, the risk is that we can spend the whole project journey only just keeping up with our actions and leave no time for reflection. When I worked at ITV Imagine, my boss was Pele Cortizo-Burgess, the Director of Creative Strategy and a legend in the advertising world. Pele was an inspirational leader who gave me many great pieces of advice, such as blaming ‘technical issues’ is unacceptable (sort them out well in advance), being controversial is far better than being mediocre (be memorable not boring), and have a fluid mindset, using the ‘colour and advance’ conversation tool. We used this to practise presentations, to help presenters learn to balance between interesting details and the story. When I’m telling a story, and the listeners think I’ve skipped an interesting bit, they can say ‘colour!’, which means ‘we want more juicy detail before we go further’. If my story is too slow and people are feeling a bit bored, they say ‘advance!’, which means ‘get to the point’, or ‘tell us what happens next’. If all you do is advance your story, it becomes flat, but if all you do is colour the details, you’ll never get to the end.
‘Colour and advance’ is the inspiration for this tool, which is to find time in your project for moments to accelerate and reflect. Instead of one big long set of actions that the team ticks off, identify the points which you can accelerate and progress quickly and intensely, so that you leave your team time and space in which to reflect, learn and improve the project, before accelerating again.
To use this tool, look at the project journey you have designed, and work out where you can accelerate the work, to provide space for reflection afterwards. For example, if you are a team delivering a conference in four weeks’ time, the tasks might look like this.
| Week 1 | Set the date and time, choose and book the venue, consider who to invite |
| Week 2 | Choose theme, design and send invitations, create content and branding |
| Week 3 | Review RSVPs, set menus, finalise venue set-up and logistics details, send final reminders, create content and printing |
| Week 4 | Rehearse key speeches, set up the venue, deliver the event |
| Week 5 | Pay suppliers, gather attender feedback, wrap up on what went well and what to do differently in future, book the venue for next time – and have a rest |
No matter how big or small your event and your team, we tend to work back from the event and spread the tasks out over the four weeks, doing each at the latest possible moment that they are required. We do this because we are avoiding putting too much work in at any one time or for any one person, so we create a gentle pace for the team, with weekly updates on actions. But what if there’s no reason to wait? How about if most logistics tasks can be done and out the way in Week 1, leaving your team more time to reflect, adapt and improve the event itself?
This tool asks you to separate ‘Accelerate’ tasks (actions and progress) from ‘Reflect’ tasks (learning, improvements, inspiration). Get as many of the Accelerate tasks out the way as early as you can, and put aside some of the time for making the event better.
Here’s an example of how a new timeline would look, in the same five-week period, but allowing for the ebb and flow of progress and learning.
Example:
Accelerate and Reflect
| Week 1 | Accelerate Set the date and time Choose and book the venue Consider who to invite Choose theme, design and send preliminary invitations and get initial RSVPs Set menus, venue set-up and logistics details |
| Week 2 | Reflect Review RSVPs, understanding who is coming and why they have accepted and what they want from the event Understand who is not coming, why they declined, and if there is anything we can do that might attract them to attend Get inspiration from other events people are attending Ask attenders who have accepted about the best and worst events they attended in the last year Based on RSVPs, inspiration and feedback, create new ideas for making this event more attractive for those who are already coming and to attract those who declined |
| Week 3 | Accelerate Update the event approach, messaging, agenda, look and feel Send fresh invitations to those who declined to see if they will change their minds Create content and event branding to reflect the improved event ideas Update speakers, logistics and theme if needed |
| Week 4 | Reflect Reflect on progress and feedback, looking at new and updated RSVPs Rehearse key speeches and content and improve them in line with feedback and attendees |
| Weeks 4 and 5 | Accelerate Finalise all logistics and send out confirmation of agenda to attendees Deliver the event Pay suppliers and book the venue for next time |
| Week 5 | Reflect Reflect on feedback, success, and learnings, and create ideas for making the next event even better – and have a rest |
Do not mistake activity for achievement.
Mabel Newcomer (1892–1983)
This example demonstrates how you can push as much action and progress as you can into the early stages, leaving the team time to truly reflect and consider. You may worry that this adds to the workload, and it might well do so. At the early stages, this is likely to mean that everyone works in parallel on a number of actions, rather than waiting for one admin person to deliver them sequentially.
By accelerating the work early, you then create the space to reflect, learn and adapt. If you fill the timeline with all actions and no reflection, you can, and will, deliver an average event. Instead of blindly delivering an event without any time to reflect and improve it, you are completing the basic logistics early, to give you time to make your event truly exceptional. Some team members work best when they have time to think and reflect, rather than pushing for action constantly. This helps us to avoid MAFA: mistaking action for achievement.16
Make sure you separate your ‘Accelerate’ meetings from ‘Reflect’ meetings – it is very hard to evaluate and be inspired at the same time. Even if they need to be on the same day, separate them with a break, or move to a new room to mark a difference between them. Think of this as a lean in, lean out approach – focus on the details, get things done, then sit back and reflect on where you are. Intense actions followed by intense reflection. All of which allow you to improve what your project delivers.
Whether in business or in war, the ability to react quickly and adapt is critical, and it’s becoming ever more so as technology and disruptive forces increase the pace of change.
Walter Isaacson17
Ready, fire, aim
Perfection is the enemy of progress.
Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965)
Michael Schrage’s book Serious Play introduced the concept of ‘ready, fire, aim’, challenging the more traditional ‘ready, aim, fire’. Firing before aiming refers to creating an early version of a new idea (a quick prototype of a new software) to see how people react, and learn from that, rather than working out a list of the perfect requirements before getting started. Michael says the value of prototypes resides less in the prototype itself and more in the interactions that it generates, including the conversations, arguments and consultations that are caused by discussing it.
Eric Ries refers to creating a ‘minimum viable product’, an early version that allows a team to collect as much learning from customers as they can with the least amount of effort,18 and the Innovation Leader/KPMG report on innovation shows that successful innovation teams are distinguished by their ability to test, learn and iterate.19 One innovation client told me that she purposefully gives UX designers challenging deadlines so they don’t spend ages crafting and perfecting the look and feel. If it is too polished, she says customers will be reluctant to challenge it and may not get as valuable an insight.
For your team goal, consider what is the earliest possible version of that goal, and how you can experiment with it to get early feedback to learn from. In the Accelerate and reflect example, this was sending out an early invitation to see who would come or not, then use the feedback to improve the event to get more people there. Early ideas are like seedlings – you might see one and not know if it will develop into an oak or a weed – you need to grow it a little first. Most great ideas start with a brilliant need or essence, it’s just the execution that needs work. How you work on that execution early enough to get learnings should be your key focus early on. Don’t wait until the solution is 100% perfect. Consider launching something early, to get early feedback.
The purpose of an experiment is not to solve the problem, but to generate insights.
Michael Schrage20
Tool 15
Measuring success checklist
The final tool is an important one that is often not planned for at the beginning, and can get forgotten at the end, which is measuring whether or not your project has succeeded. We don’t tend to plan because we are keen to get started, and figure we will know when we get there. At the end we are moving on to something new and don’t have time to measure how we did.
Measuring success is also not simple. Of course, you can tell whether or not you produced an event on a specific date, or you managed to get 90% of the company to benefit from your digital transformation programme. For example, we may have got 90% of the business to benefit from digital transformation, but if the project cost far more than the projected budget, that’s not a complete success. If we delivered an amazing event, but with only 50% attendance, it’s not a true success, despite us achieving our specific goal. If our wannabe sailor had managed to get to Southampton, but arrived exhausted, sunburned and possibly traumatised after days at sea, would that be a successful outcome? Arguably not.
This is why planning to measure success at the beginning of a project, and then actually measuring it at the end is so important. We tend to only measure timing and deliverables, but we also need to measure the outcomes and the journey itself.
Measuring success means working out how the team will know when you have. This checklist gives you some ideas for how you might set up your success targets in three areas: deliverables, outcomes and the journey itself.
Measuring deliverables:
- • How will we know we’ve achieved our specific deliverables?
- • How will we know we have delivered on time?
- • What will we overhear people saying about our team when we’ve succeeded?
- • How will we know we’ve delivered within budget?
- • How will we know if we’ve used our resources properly?
Measuring outcomes:
- • How will we know we have delivered a quality outcome?
- • What are the qualitative signs of success we can use to measure our success?
- • What will we tell our families about this project when it is successfully completed?
- • What will the company say about our project to its customers if we do a good job?
- • What difference will we be able to see outside of our company if we are successful?
- • What do we want people to post on social media about this project when we are done?
Measuring the journey:
- • How will we know if we’ve worked well as a team?
- • How will we want people in this team to feel at the end of the project?
- • What will we have learned on this journey as a team?
Going througeh these questions as a team and considering how you will measure your deliverables, your outcomes and the journey itself, you will be able to set up some measures that raise the importance of all three elements of success.
Active recovery
As any athlete will tell you, rest is important, but research has found that switching from high intensity workouts to doing nothing may not be the best way for your body to recover. Which is where active recovery comes in – a low-intensity activity (a walk, a gentle bike ride or a yoga session) on the days following an intense workout that helps muscles to recover and helps them to adapt to the demands placed on them, improving performance overall.
Like in sport, the direction and energy of a team towards a goal is not linear. Bursts of work are followed by periods of reflection on what has been learnt and improvements to be made, for example, by completing a ‘Sprint retrospective’ between iterations, where a team reflect on what they have achieved so far, and identify improvements to make before the next iteration.21
Treat your supercharged team as elite athletes, and plan what you will deliver and when, with natural ebbs and flows of energy for the most effective journey towards your destination.
Key take outs
- • A well-developed project plan is the best roadmap to success.
- • Pace is important, but don’t blindly press on regardless.
- • Successful projects maintain a balance of action . . .
- • . . . and reflection, because achieving your team goal is not linear.
- • Piloting and prototyping saves time in the long run and achieves a better end result.
- • Genuine success is measured by not only output and timing, but also outcomes and the quality of the journey itself.