Think! And! Feel!

Have you ever experienced that a task has been agreed, and half-way through somebody comes back beaming with the statement “it’s done!”?

Every once in a while, this happens, and it happens more often in distributed teams than in localized ones. The point is: there was no real agreement about when the task is done. I’ve started a new experiment in my teams, I’m starting to add to every task a little “HDWKTWD” section.

What’s “HDWKTWD”? – It’s short for “How Do We Know That We’re Done”. A good task assignment already does that implicitly (compare “discuss the schedule for XYZ” to “agree on a schedule and inform everybody in an email.”), but sometimes it helps to be even more explicit

User stories deal with the user observable behavior of a system. Who says that this characterization of user stories should apply purely to programming? The trick is: If I’d make a movie – would an outsider be able to judge whether the goal has been reached or not?

In the example: “discuss the schedule”, everybody would be able to see that a discussion has happened – but that’s not the desired outcome. The desired outcome is an agreement. However, the agreement is not visible to an outsider until it’s documented in an email. Hence the re-worded HDWKTWD…

My first impression is that “user observable behavior” ‘s doing good for project management, too.

It’s already a while ago that I presented my Influence Diagram to our sponsors (one may remember the Decision Analysis II article). The main value of the presentation was – as so often – in its preparation:

• I’ve had my own mind clear on what I suggest and why
• In the preparation meetings, peers and sponsors had to wrap their head around the entire topic.

So, eventually we had an engaged discussion about a situation most people had pretty well understood. While we didn’t really go through the presentation, we still arrived at – from my point of view – the right conclusions.

And a few days after the meetings, I received an email with four words: “good meeting – unlike most”.

It works.

Lately, I started to realize that a lot of the project management I do has to do with anecdotes.

I like using anecdotes, it matches my mentality for managing projects, especially larger projects: I believe that problems should be solved as close to the actual work as possible, and I believe that I am in charge to help the teams to leverage their own full potential. Anecdotes have proven a valuable means to unlock successes, like in the following example: Lately, I realized that I’m using the following joke over and over again with different people:
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Two types of people are in for a surprise when they read this:

• Traditional readers of my “old” personal Blog, dietl.org. It now looks very different, the language has switched from German to English. A range of low-interest articles have disappeared alltogether.
• Traditional readers of my “old” business blog, think-and-feel.net. It looks slightly different, but a couple of things are now out of order and – despite all my efforts – I had to break a couple of links. At any rate, the site itself has moved to dietl.org, and think-and-feel.net redirects there now.

My apologies for any inconvenience caused.

I realized that this kind of split-brained approach takes more energy than it’s worth. There are still a few password-protected corners for friends and family (let me know if I missed you in sending out the passwords), but the rest should come together here.

So, if anything appears wrong, out of place or missing, please drop me a line in the comments here. Over the coming weeks, I’ll clean up whatever may have gotten lost in the transition.

Getting an objective decision straight despite the Decision Analysis quote from the pervious article has kept me thinking since mid-December.
Meanwhile, I have drawn an Influence Diagram for one of the more tricky questions on the job. First and foremost, drawing the chart has significantly helped clarify my own thoughts, so even if I dump it here and now, it was attention well spent. Analyzing the ~5 decisions, ~25 random variables and ~5 goals that contribute to this one set of decisions was quite enlightening.

To my own surprise, the other day I managed to transform the diagram so that I could actually present it without major unwanted political implications. The breakthrough came when I was about to give up and draw separate diagrams reflecting the assumed preferences of my main stakeholders.
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