Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

Context The current typical model of starting a large program is to have a discovery workshop for the program followed by detailed project inceptions. The project inceptions are spaced and detailed. There are not a lot of discovery workshops we do that is mutual discovery. It is more of sense making of an earlier discovery process. The Pitfalls and some thoughts With the discovery process feeding into the project Inceptions was great. it gave direction. However, validation of the direction based on feedback from projects seems to be missing. The reason the feedback is missing is 2-fold: #1 - The discovery workshops don't seem to have a cadence with the project Inceptions #2 - The team that does discovery workshops is to involved with the project inceptions and vice versa,

Before I jump into the topic, I will start with some context. We were working on a very complex product - Complexity in multiple dimensions. As a team, We needed a simple way for us to understand how we manage complexity as team scales and use it as a simple communication tool.  To generalise: Context: A complex project A fairly large team High Volatility Product Engineering team Challenges A way to manage complexity as a team Tool for communication on progress  A mechanism to calibrate progress with the bigger roadmap Crystal Ball Crystal Ball is a simple tool for visualising progress on a granular scale. It helps in tracking progress and for teams to look at what they can achieve going forward.  It helps in internalising the progress that the team made in the past few weeks and then relate to it as they plan forward. How we used it Our team was fairly big - a 7 pair dev team with 3 Was , 1 BA and a PM. We also had an XD and...

User  story  mapping  is  a  technique  that  allows  you  to  add  a  second  dimension  to  your backlog. The  visualization  enables  you  to  see  the  big  picture  of  the  Product  Backlog. I references a lot of material from Jeff Patton's website here:   http://jpattonassociates.com/the-new-backlog/

When I started out in the team, I was tasked out with coming out with a plan so that we can demonstrate the product with real data. The idea was to demonstrate it to our prospect with their own data and win them over. However, when I started working, I found out that what we lacked was not a plan but a vision. I quickly put together a one day workshop with our team and our product owner. When we started talking, we talked about several things and figured out that we needed a plan of various proportions. We needed a plan that could help us one the following: Provide a focus for the long term with near term focus on just one thing Help us talk to prospects on what we are going to do Help us decide on when we would need to focus shift on which function - Engineering , sales etc We also did a quick “Product in a box” exercise so that all of us in a team can practice and imbibe the elevator pitch. We needed this since we had to do this pitch at several levels - Inter...