Thoughts on my 30th Project Inception
I’ve been spinning up agile projects using Thoughtworks ‘quick start’ methodology (now called Inception) since 2014. I like to think that I’ve got less wrong on each subsequent engagement.
Inception is a neat way of fixing the tricky problem that agile project suffer from. This being that once established, a healthy agile project, being run by a high performance team is self managing, self sustaining, and highly productive (IE. delivers value to users, organisations and stakeholders).
The problem exists because the monolithic requirements document from a traditional waterfall based project is missing, or rather it’s purposfully not produced. This means the project team is able to be ‘agile’ and react to pivots, or new needs, however there’s no instructions as to how the project is started. This is where Inception comes in.
Since I’m now classified as a Product manager, I use this role to define what I do, and how I make projects start well;
- Direct initial user research, and collate the outcomes into ‘actionable insights’ that the team can quickly understand.
- Write a North Star, or project vision with the stakeholders input. Decompose this into hypothesis that will define the metrics and governance for the projects.
- Facilitate a week (or 2) of workshops that…..
- Help the team agree the scope of initially the Inception, then the entire project.
- Define personas using research outcomes and map their needs against them.
- Collate, group and prioritise the user, organisation and service needs into a backlog thats initially used for Inception, and is the foundation for the project backlog.
- Analyse any existing user journeys, identify pain points, quick wins using as-is and experience mapping.
- Build prototypes via service blueprints and to-be user journeys, with alignment of technical needs.
- Define a 3 horizon roadmap, with the initial sprints (iterations) defined in decreasing fidelity.
This effort when done with the entire team means everyone on the project knows; why thier doing the project, who their delivering value to, and what they’re doing. The managers have a direction of travel, a backlog and roadmap with just enough fidelity to move forward.
