Using Mckinseys 3 horizons of growth as a lean roadmap
I initially used the 3 horizons strategy when helping clients define priority for business objectives. I’ve since used the same model to help teams manage the clients need for a roadmap of goals met towards the delivery date.
The problem
When a team (or organisation) have a collection of jobs to be done, it very easy to perform a quick prioritisation of all the tasks, start with the most urgent, then move onto the next. However, no matter how much you re-prioritise and respond to pivots in a lean a agile manner, you’ll still be ignoring a large portion of your backlog.
3 Horizons in a lean agile context
Three horizons is a neat way of ensuring that the teams effort isn’t just spent of the most immediate project needs. Let’s say you’ve run a Lean Inception, and have a backlog that’s got enough detail on the most urgent jobs for them to be covered in the next couple of sprints — this is your short term horizon. But what you’ve also done in the inception is designate the other jobs to be collected into 2 subsequent horizons, those being the medium term, and far term.
The team are now obliged to spend a portion of their effort on all 3 horizons.
- 70% effort on the current sprint jobs (the near term)
- 20% on medium term jobs
- 10% on far term jobs
In practice this is (for instance) the delivery manager, product manager and business analyst ensuring the job in the medium and far term have detailed enough stories for them to move in the nearer horizon.
Here’s the neat part, the backlog moves, medium become near, and far becomes medium. With each receiving the appropriate level of attention. And the next iteration of work have enough details to be worked on.
That’s common sense
This sounds like common sense, and it’s how you’d imagine an agile project working. However when a team needs to learn these behaviours, a model like this enables them to learn a good behaviour with a prescriptive (yet non-restrictive) process.
As I mentioned initially I use the 3 horizons in both traditional and innovative ways. The byproduct in all cases is that a valuable project team tool is also valuable when a ‘roadmap’ style of document needs to be shown to stakeholders and sponsors.
