Last night, my wife, son, daughter and I watched the movie, Frozen II. We had a great time; the movie theatre was nice (gigantic screen--IMAX; huge reclining lounge chairs; fresh popcorns; refreshing water) and the movie was great! There is a line in the movie that I immediately correlated to lean agile; Elsa to Anna: ' There are two sides of a bridge...' My correlation of that line to lean agile is this: Side #1) intent. Give intent; not instructions. This will be more meaningful to people... they get to perform something in their own way. Let your people think!…
Intent is a 'broad stoke of the brush' kind of sketch of what you want to achieve... without providing instructions on how to achieve it... to provide others an opportunity to lean in and think creatively on how to achieve it -- the intent -- in their own way. Example: intent: [I intend to] lose weight What does an intent look like if you want it to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound? And yet not providing instructions on how to achieve it? Make it SMART! Example: [I intend to] lose 50 pounds, one year from now. How about…
One might ask the following: "Why bother checking? We "know" that we are on track already!" "Can we just keep working and deliver the work when we are done?" "Can we just tell you what tasks we did and have completed?" "May we provide you a PowerPoint deck, screenshots, metric, list of lessons learned from our Spikes, some documentation and toll gate decks?" Good questions! Think about those questions for a few minutes. The thing is, a few errors accumulated everyday/ every sprint/iteration... unchecked... for a whole program increment (PI) spells disaster. Does it make sense to show the incremental…
