Alignment Through Visibility
In my last post, I described how a lack of true alignment could create rework for a team. Worse, a lack of alignment may be the root cause of projects that are over budget and behind schedule. So driving alignment isn’t just a nice “political” move, it actually is smart business for your organization.
Because alignment is so critical to project success, it’s important to know whether your stakeholders are truly in alignment or just appear to be aligned but are actually going in different directions. There’s an easy exercise you can use to verify true alignment or simple agreement. This exercise is based on the concept of visibility.
Before I explain this exercise, it’s important to understand the difference between visibility and transparency.
Visibility vs. Transparency
I recently had a great conversation with a colleague about the difference between visibility and transparency.
Transparency is a behavior that a team member exhibits. Leadership and stakeholders have full awareness of the team’s effort and progress because of the transparency provided by the team members. Although this is desirable, it may not provide the stakeholders visibility into the project’s future.
Visibility is the result of transparent behavior. If I have visibility, then I know what to expect in the future.
Verifying alignment through visibility
Here is a simple exercise demonstrating how you can use visibility to verify true alignment.
Lets pretend we have business stakeholders who have agreed to build a lightweight version of Microsoft Word for a mobile device.
Originally, one stakeholder, we’ll call him Michael, was concerned over the concept of “lightweight”. He believed that the version needed to be able to read any version of Word, including showing “markup” made by tracking changes. He also thought having a lightweight version of Excel released at the same time was important.
After much negotiation, the stakeholders agreed to deliver a lightweight version of Word. The technology team provided an estimate of five months for the initial working release.
To make sure everyone is on the same page, I might ask the technology team:
“Is it reasonable that within two months, we will have a prototype showing us the base app that can l open and save documents and do fundamental editing and formatting?
Would it also be reasonable that everything related to formatting, spellchecking, email integration is done by the third month?
Finally, is it reasonable that the app will be fairly complete by the end of the fourth month so we can run some quality testing? Will we be able to complete the final testing and defect fixes in the last few weeks?”
If everyone high-fives and agrees to these assumptions, then there is a high likelihood of true alignment. Everyone has clear visibility and common agreement on how we track progress to our agreed upon goals. On the other hand, if the stakeholders don’t have agreement on these assumptions, then odds are they’re not in alignment around the ultimate goals and definition of project success.
In summary:
- Assume it’s about five months to deliver
- By end of second month we will have initial preview of base app, file functions, core editing
- By the end of the third month we will have spellchecking and email integration
- By end of the fourth month we have the app fairly complete and can start testing, packaging up, etc.
However, what if the delivery team reacted differently:
They say that five months was heads down development time. The testing, packaging, and changes would be “added” to the end of the five month schedule, making it six or more months.
Then, the business stakeholders may ask: “When will I see the markup-review? Is that at the second or fourth month check-in?” Only by having clarity and a common understanding on the future visibility of the project, can we truly be on the same page and have true alignment.
A quick summary:
Another way to look at visibility: Let’s agree upon how we track expected progress. If we can’t agree on that, then we probably are NOT in alignment.
So what do you think?
Do you believe this is a problem in your world? How bad is it? I’d love to hear examples in the comments below. If you don’t have this problem, why? What do you believe you are doing right?
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Category: Business-IT Alignment, Defining Success