Communicating the Vision

After the team has created the first draft of its Vision Document, it's time to start communicating the vision, obtaining buy off from upper management, incorporating other people's expertise, and getting everyone excited about delivering on the vision's promises. This process involves the following steps:

  • Validating the vision The team should review the vision with everyone inside and outside the group. This is a time to gather feedback, verify agreement, incorporate the feedback into the next revision of the vision, and justify why issues are not incorporated into this product vision, as appropriate.
  • Selling the vision The Vision Document should be reviewed with the key players so that they understand why the product is important and what it will do for them. Additionally, they should understand that only the features that are part of the vision will be included in the product. This is a good opportunity to reinforce stakeholder training about tradeoff decisions, prioritize feature sets, and determine product versioning. This multi-stage communication should begin with those who have the most knowledge about the product's area, and should work outward to other more tangential groups and stakeholders.

CAUTION
Communication is a two-way street. The team should continually incorporate stakeholders' feedback into the vision. Team members should not only tell stakeholders what the product will do, but should continually validate that the product meets the stakeholders' needs.

During validation and selling of the vision, the team creates revised drafts of the vision document. When the team believes it is time to move on to the planning process, the product vision is agreed upon by the team and stakeholders, and the Vision Approved Milestone is reached. This milestone is the identification of a baseline vision that will be used throughout this release of the product. Although the baseline vision may undergo slight changes during the remaining project phases, they nevertheless constitute a foundation for this product release.

At this stage of the envisioning process, it's important to remember that the vision does not belong to any one person. To deliver the vision, the team must own it, not a single individual. The whole team must nurture the product vision to life, so the whole team must clearly understand and be committed to it.



Microsoft Corporation - Analyzing Requirements and Defining Solutions Architecture. MCSD Training Kit
Microsoft Corporation - Analyzing Requirements and Defining Solutions Architecture. MCSD Training Kit
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 1999
Pages: 182

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net