These notes are taken while reading "Liftoff: Launching Agile Teams & Projects".
When projects start, a liftoff generates the momentum team need to overcome the inertia presented by lack of common purpose, unclear communication channels, undefined working relationships, and other areas of ambiguity.
A liftoff also provides the positive force that moves a project toward its destination's successful delivery.
A great proportion of the issues teams wrestle with can be traced back to a lack of clarity and alignment from early days of the project: miscommunications, unexamined assumptions, and misperceptions create an environment in which people make decisions and take actions that unintentionally work at cross-purposes and undermine overall progress.
- it's hard to recover when teams don't start well: an unaligned start results in a team spinning its wheels and losing ground
- uniting strategy and execution keeps everyone focused on what the customer needs
- the business and the development team move into alignment, creating a shared understanding of what is involved
- a group of people gets the opportunity to begin building themselves into a team before the pressure of development work begins: which skills are present in the team, which roles are needed to do the work.
Before the liftoff, we expect you'll have already received approval to initiate the process and have assigned or assembled a project team.
Earlier in the life of the project is better. Ideally, the liftoff happens before the work has begun; however, in some cases, a retroactive liftoff can help a project regroup and get back on track (it's never too late to hold a liftoff).
- the Sponsor is the visionary or the person who has decided to spend the budget, assign people, and commit resources
- the Product Manager (aka Product Owner or On-Site Customer) has ultimate responsibility for delivering business value to the organization and customer value to the buyer or user
- the Core Team takes responsibility for building the product
- Project Community members contribute time, resources, and information to the core team, as needed, and may receive hand-offs, information, and deliverables in return.
- The Liftoff Facilitator/Coordinator helps the sponsor / product manager to plan the liftoff, and keeps the meeting on track.
When:
- sponsor, product manager, and core team have initial commitment to a common purpose
- sponsor, product manager, and core team have a shared understanding of success indicators and measures
- core team agrees on initial approach to work (e.g. which process? what practices?)
- core team members appreciate their interdependence, skills, and potential
- core team has enough initial understanding of business needs, risks, and opportunities to begin to work
An effective project liftoff:
- Achives alignment by establishing a clear shared understanding about what the project involves and why it exists
- Builds momenutum by getting the project community and core team to work together to start the project
- Clarifies roles and develops working relationships among project community, core team, and sponsors
The faciliator should be external to the project.
Let the project leader or project sponsor introduce the liftoff at the beginning of the day. This is important as it makes clear right from the start who was the leader
Present yourself in a concise manner: name, experience and role as a faciliator.
Share some "golden rules" of the liftoff. E.g.: switch off the phones, close the laptops, use the post-it to collect questions and doubts (parking lot)
Start by sharing with all the partecipants (and fixed to the wall during the workshop)
- a flip-chart showing the goals of the kickoff workshop
- a flip-chart showing a rough outline of the agenda (only the start and end times should be stated with the exact times)
Use some ice-breaking activities and games to let the people get to know each other
Have lunch together with all the partecipants.
First, we need to confirm that we're really ready to start the project.
- Does the deliverable have a committed sponsor and identified product manager?
- Can we articulate its business case?
- Does the project have a budget?
- Do we have a clear intention for what we want the project to accomplish?
For this purpose, a product discovery process or an "Agile Inception Deck" [1] session may be useful before planning the Liftoff. The Inception Deck can answer to all the questions above.
To plan your liftoff, you may try to answer some questions, like
- What will create the best starting point for everyone involved?
- Is this a single-team project or a multi-teams project?
- What will the team need to start well?
- What project community members should we invite?
- How much of the liftoff will the executives / sponsors attend?
- Will the team need new skills? new knowledge?
- Have we identified all the right team members for cross-functional work?
- Are there known issues or contraints about the project?
- Are there many known unknowns about the project?
- What tone do we want to set?
Add more project-specific questions to help the liftoff plan.
The most effective liftoffs have been planned by groups of people, not individuals.
Sketch out a high-level view of information to transmit or gather, skills training, team building, ...
From a half-day to over a week, depending on the size of the project, familiarity of the team, risks, areas of content to cover, etc.
Include everyone whose partecipation is essential to project success. This typically means:
- business sponsors
- core team members
- product managers
- customers
- people who will act as resources for the team
- Liftoff Coordinator / Faciliator: helps the plan, keeps the meeting on track, attends to any interpersonal dynamics that arise, lead group activities. Should be neutral and have no stake in the project outcomes.
- Product Manager: Works with the sponsor and other business decision makers to explore and understand the business case, recruits the team members for the project, helps identify the project community members, helps prepare the session (+logistics, +scheduling, +invitations)
- Sponsor: Works with the product manager to explore and understand the business case, introduce the liftoff, publicly confers project-related decision-making authority to the product manager
- Agile Coach / Scrum Master / PM: models the collaborative, focused behaviors desired from team members
- Core Team
- Project Community
- Trainer / Technical Coach: leads skills training sessions
Don't underestimate it!
There's no cookie cutter approach, standard recipe, or best practive template. The following are effective practices that worked for many project teams.
- single meeting: from half-day to two days
- series of events spread over a week or more (including training and coaching sessions)
- meeting focused on builing a draft charter
Include a good mix of information topics, activities, and social events.
Each agenda item should lead into and building on the information and understanding emerging from the previous one.
- Welcome partecipants
- Explain why everyone is present
- Review the meeting agenda
- Provide a project overview
- Statement of support from executives and sponsors: their views of the project, why it's urgent and important
- Introductions: ensure that the people attending the liftoff have a chance to get acquainted if they don't already know each other. Choose icebreaker activities that fits the tone of the liftoff.
Other intro activities:
- One word check-in
- Speaker Q&A
- Graphic check-in
- Retrospective
- Agile Chartering: this deserves a section on its own, as it's probably the most important feature of a liftoff
- Training: to develop project-related skills, to learn together in a safe environment (e.g. workshops on TDD or user story writing and estimating, training sessions on new languages or tools)
- Project planning: you may include real-time planning in the liftoff, or leave out explicitly the backlog development to a following step just after the liftoff (e.g. user story mapping session)
- Team Building: holding a liftoff in itself accomplished a degree of team development. How much of team building activities to include depends on how you answered to the planning questions
- Social Events: lunches, dinners together. And always bring food!
- Brief reports: summarize the outcomes and relevant outputs of the activities, put flipcharts and other material created on the walls as information radiators
- Share the next steps: provide partecipants with schedules, what to expect next, and any other resources available to help teams get started.
- Offer appreciation
- Gather feedback: ask or an evaluation of the liftoff as a whole or request feedback on each agenda topic (see Improving a liftoff)
Hold a retrospective with the planning group to review the most recent liftoff, gain insight about how to improve the next one, and create actions for implementing what you learn. Plan your liftoff retrospective to happen within a couple of weeks of the liftoff (sooner is better).
Capture feedback from the partecipants as part of the wrap-up. As a liftoff ending activity, a modified Return On Time Invested (ROTI) exercise is a quick and easy way for partecipants to give both qualitative (sticky notes) and quantitative (dot voting) responses.
Invite the planning group to the liftoff retrospective meeting (and bring food).
- Set the stage: explain the agenda and the focus on improving future liftoffs, ask everyone a "one-word check-in" about their liftoff experience
- Gather Data: capture data with a timeline, bring in all the ROTI charts you collected and display them for the group
- Generate Insights: build on "drop, add, keep" ideas of the ROTI. Split in pairs and generate 3-5 ideas for improving future liftoffs. Post all the ideas on a flipchart and cluster similar ideas. Decide which ideas to carry forward with dot voting. Add the new ideas in the new liftoff checklist.
- Close the Retrospective
Agile chartering is a lightweight, minimum-documentation approach to creating initial understandings, agreements, and alignement about the work and how it will be accomplished.
Chartering is a discovery and negotiating activity that transforms 'bright ideas' into valid and manageable work efforts. The Charter balances the interests of project gold-owners with the capabilities of the development team. It also ensures that the outcomes we expect are in line with the resources available to achieve them. It serves as a contract that guides and supports the work, and it provides a reference point for re-negotiations when conditions change.
Traditional project charters means many different documents or sets of agreements (sponsor-created or project manager-created), and tend to create obstacles to resilent planning, development and delivery. Heavyweight change control procedures are typically required to change a formally approved project charter, and these activities does not add any value for the business and the customer.
However, the highest value comes from the chartering process, not from the charter document itself.
Focus on the inter-relationships of people, ideas, actions, and outcomes - both the whole of the project and the parts.
Work together to learn from one another's experience and perspectives, create new possibilities, and set the stage for discovery.
Do just enough; resist perfecting.
Begin each endeavor in a context of possibility; set a tone for achievement and success.
Learn more as the work unfolds; update the living charter as we gain knowledge.
Provides inspiration and conveys the meaning of the project.
It includes:
- Product Vision
- Project Mission
- Mission Tests