Plan as a Team


Setting clear, measurable objectives is the first step in trying to plan a successful outcome. But other important steps often get skipped. For consistent success, you must start by clearly identifying and articulating the goals. Then make sure everyone understands the guiding principles and brainstorm about what ideas are possible. Also get as many people involved as possible, so you get a rich set of ideas to choose from. After you organize those ideas, you finally come up with a set of action items or tasks.

I think we often fail to execute when we don't do a good job of tracking our actions, or we don't break those actions down into small enough steps. One of things we try to avoid is accepting coarse estimates like, "I think that action will take me a week." We prefer to break a week-long action into smaller steps, preferably each less than two days. We try to make sure we have a mechanism to track the progress of those individual steps. By doing this, we create a feedback loop that allows us to improve our process incrementally as we progress. Software development by its very nature is difficult to estimate, so you need to calibrate how good your group is at estimating and apply a factor to the estimates. For us, this factor is simply the actual number of hours required divided by the estimate. As the group gets better with estimating, the factor should approach one.

As we've applied this technique over the past 18 months, we've found we are getting increasingly consistent results. There is always room for improvement, but by making sure the goals are clear, making sure the guiding principles have been articulated, making sure we've brought in enough ideas that we haven't prematurely tried to choose a course of action, and then making sure we track that action and have a feedback loop to identify when we fall short, we are able to execute consistently.

When planning your company's strategy for the future, it's my opinion that the process your team uses to develop the strategy is more important than the plan produced. The process needs to include wide participation from throughout the company, and titles need to be left at the door, so everyone feels they are on an equal footing and can be candid. This is best done off-site to eliminate day-to-day distractions and provide a neutral ground. To maximize the productivity of the process, you must create an atmosphere of open brainstorming and constructive debate about ideas, without any hidden agendas or defensiveness.

One of the key parts of this process is to build consensus within the group for where they want to take the company, looking out five years. In 2001 we adopted a new approach for developing our strategy and began working with Paul Bradley from the Bradley Group. I was first introduced to Paul's method when I took a seminar in early 2001. His process for developing a strategic plan had a number of aspects I thought would help us. The first was that our management team met with Paul off-site and drafted a one-page document titled "Ideal 2006." We projected what VanDyke Software would look like in 2006 if everything went as planned, and if we could achieve our goals. Paul shared with the team how companies and organizations have used this technique successfully. One company in Minnesota decided their ideal would be to relocate to Florida. So this isn't just about financials: It is about things that would make a difference to the management and staff. We painted a very vivid picture of our future through 11 bullet points, ranging from "A growing international company with multiple offices and development groups" to "Ensuring company-wide participation in financial success by focusing on long-term ROI."

The second step in this process was for this same group to write three scenarios of what the future might look like from a perspective outside of VanDyke. We looked at something that was of critical importance to us. Most of our growth has been from products based on the Secure Shell protocol. But there are competing security technologies, such as IPSEC (IP Security Protocol) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) in the market. We drafted scenarios of what the future might look like with the demand for Secure Shell-based solutions dropping off, staying flat, or growing rapidly. Based on these scenarios, we tried to identify signs or tip-offs to determine which one of these scenarios might be unfolding. We did this about eight months ago, and we've since found it very useful. Individuals in the company have become more aware of what is happening in our market, what is happening with IPSEC, and what is happening with VPNs (virtual private networks), as well as what is happening with Secure Shell. They are looking for these tip-offs, and we've already identified several that are indicators of how the future may be unfolding.

Finally, there needs to be a process in place to make sure the team executes the strategy. Having a good process to develop the strategic ideas and creating a plan doesn't mean you're going to be successful. You can significantly increase your odds of success by using active mechanisms for tracking the plan's progress, including the necessary follow-up and the inevitable course corrections.




The CTO Handbook. The Indispensable Technology Leadership Resource for Chief Technology Officers
The CTO Handbook/Job Manual: A Wealth of Reference Material and Thought Leadership on What Every Manager Needs to Know to Lead Their Technology Team
ISBN: 1587623676
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 213

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