Lessons Learned in Execution

Note: This article is updated at Project Execution Lessons Learned.

I’ve been thinking about execution and the lessons learned.   I’ve summarized some insights and reminders.

I’ve been lucky enough to grow up with patterns & practices over the last 10 years, so I’ve been able to see what works, what doesn’t, and the difference that makes the difference.

The Vital Few
Here are the vital few lessons:

1. Portfolios, Programs, and Projects.  The portfolio helps paint the map of investments at a glance.  It’s your heat map of opportunity, where to invest, and de-invest.    Programs connect the projects to simple themes and big bets.  Your execution is gated by how many projects can run in parallel at a healthy rate.  For example, “each year, we can produce 5 big projects, and 3 small ones”, or “every six months, we can do 3 big things, or 10 little ones”, etc.
2. Product Line and Catalog.  Internally, you have a product line – the “things” you make.  Externally, you have a “catalog” which organizes your products in a meaningful way for customers.  Customers can ask for “xyz” in the catalog.  An effective model for catalogs is organizing by “topic or category” and “type of thing”  The closer you can map your portfolio to your catalog, the easier it is to see execution, results, and customer impact.  Your product line helps you know at a glance, roughly how long a given product takes to build.  A good product line is also a way to ensure that the interfaces across your product line and the key relationships among your products is well understood.
3. Project cycles and product cycles.  Having a distinction between the project and product cycle help you optimize and use the right tool for the job.  For a simple example, Scrum is more of a project process, while XP is more of a product development process.  The project cycle is important at the business level.  It’s the cadence of the projects.  It’s where the vital few milestones are established in terms of start, key checks, ship, and post-mortem.  Product cycles on the other hand, are geared towards the product development.  The secret sauce here is that the work breakdown structure (WBS) is shaped by the product line, and maturing your work breakdown structure is how you streamline execution.  The WBS is also a way to share tribal knowledge and promote success across teams.  It’s how we know how to build patterns, or build a guide, or build a Reference Implementation versus make it up as we go, do it ad-hoc, or just wing-it.  It’s also how we know the right people and skills to have on the project, understand the nature of the work, know the key bottlenecks, and know the basic timeline.
4. Vendor partners you trust.     This is the key to scaling execution.  It’s the key to keeping engaging work.  It’s the key to moving up the stack.  It’s the key to keeping up with a changing landscape.  The partnership is also key though, versus throwing over the wall.  Sharing values, principles, patterns, and practices helps optimize the execution.  One way to improve execution here is to have the right relationships in place (such as an account owner).  Another way to dramatically improve results is simple checklists that help share tribal know-how.
5. Project teams and resource pools.   If project work is how we get things done, then the model for the project team is essential.  Time and again, projects fail because they didn’t have the right skills or capabilities on a team, and too many dependencies or risks, that weren’t obvious.  The key though is having resource pools of the right disciplines that support having the right project teams.  The keys to effective project teams are: roles, responsibilities, capabilities, accountabilities, empowerment, processes, and tools.

20 Additional Game-Changers …
Here are some additional ways to improve execution:

1. Planning Frameworks.    This is the heart of the portfolio planning and creates buy-in from the top down, and an execution framework for the bottom up.  What’s important is that you have an agreed planning framework and that’s easy to change.  Additionally, it should be responsible to learning from the bottom up and by people in the trenches.
2. Organizational model.  This is the heart of the execution engine.  The key here is reducing decision making complexity, pushing autonomy to the end leaf nodes, and providing a clear escalation path for cross-team issues.
3. Feature/Scenario crews.  This is the unit of execution for projects.  It’s the assembly of the key roles and disciplines into a functional team, for a product, feature, or scenario.  In patterns & practices, our “solution” or feature crews consisted of program manager, product manager, architect, developers, testers, user education, and vendor support.
4. Cadence and communication.   This is where project milestones, checkpoints, and communiqué or newsletters, as well as quarterly business reviews help make a difference.
5. Know your Worst Bottleneck.  TOC (Theory of Constraints) boils down to knowing what you’re gated by: ideas? People? Money? Time? … where’s the friction?   If you had X, how much more Y could you do?
6. Rhythm of the Business (ROBs) .   ROBs help create a cadence and a framework for enforcing accountability.  Minimally, this translates into quarterly business reviews.
7. Measures, metrics, and Scorecard.  The key here is having a small frame around both internal success and external success.  For example, external success is measuring awareness, adoption, and sat.  Internal success might be around product impact, execution excellence, team health.
8. Dashboards.  Dashboards are a simple way to reflect back to everybody how we’re doing.  A good dashboard helps confirm what you know, reveal surprises, and helps create a spirit of momentum and learning.
9. Customer Success Metrics.  This is crucial for online success.  It’s about having one measure that you can use to evaluate customer success.  For example, with Amazon, they can measure completed transactions.  That means somebody found what they wanted and voted for it by paying, and Amazon successfully fulfilled the need.  When you have the one simple measure of success, then you can experiment with your online strategy and do A/B testing to see whether you improve or reduce success against the one guiding metric – it’s your North Star of online success.
10. The Pie and the Slices.  This is about knowing at a glance, how big the pie is, and what your slices are, that you can impact.  This impacts charter and helps establish boundaries and collaboration, and reduce or change competition in a healthy way.
11. Innovate in your process and product.  Innovation in your process is what enables innovation in your product … otherwise, you end up to expensive or get pushed out by a competitor’s approach.
12. Pilots and experiments.   This is a way to reduce risk, while setting the stage for innovation.  The simplest way to reduce the risk is to timebox it, constrain resources, or set a budget limit, or a combination thereof.  The key to getting results is knowing what your pilot or experiment is testing for.  Start with hypotheses so you can guide your work and make the most of it.
13. Raving fans.   Measure results by building raving fans and brand loyalty.   Net Promoter score and customer satisfaction scores are keys.
14. Customer-Proof Points.    These give you a quick way to tell stories of customer success, and to boil down to two simple numbers: 1) a change in satisfaction, and 2) a change in customer confidence.
15. Customer-Connected Engineering.   Co-create the product with the customer.  Rather than build it and they will come, or throw it over the wall to see what sticks, pair with customers up front.  See Customer-Connected Engineering.
16. Surveys are the short-cut.   Surveying customers up front to influence the investments and where to invest, helps ensure hitting the customer sweet spots.  It’s part of Customer-Connected Engineering for creating feedback loops.
17. Scenario Maps.  Create maps of questions and tasks from customers.  This is one of the most effective ways to gain a solid handle on the problem space.  What you lose in time from execution, you make up in time by working on the right things (and more importantly, by not wasting time on the wrong things.)  It’s a focus on the vital few, while having a shared map of the larger context of the problem space.
18. Measure against effectiveness.  This is the short-cut to intrinsic value.  Rather than chase perception, you can cut right through and measure customers against performing concrete/actionable tasks with the product.  This provides actionable feedback to improve your product, and it improves customer success, effectiveness, and satisfaction along the way.
19. Quality gates and inspections.  A simple way to streamline the execution and to avoid downstream do-overs is to inject just enough quality gates and inspections that bake in the learnings.
20. Templates and tools.  Templates speed up projects.  By having templates for scorecards, vision scopes, and checkpoints, it makes it easier to scale section across the team, and make success more systematic and repeatable.  It also makes it easier to fine-tune the process since there is a common backdrop.