This weekend, a friend of mine showed me a cool little piece of software called Lifetick that helps you set, track, and achieve your goals. I played around with it for a while and realized, this is a little too much for me. Setting goals and achieving them should be simple, and not something that requires some software to help you do it.
I think that sometimes, we try to set too many goals for ourselves or our projects and that is what gets us into trouble. So, whether you’re setting personal goals or goals for your team’s next iteration, keep it simple. In that way, you can really focus on achieving a single simple goal. If you’re on an agile team and trying to set goals for your next release or iteration, here are a few simple ways to set your goals and achieve them without the use of software. And if you’re not on an agile team, my guess is, these little tactics may help you with whatever goals you have as well.
1. Brainstorm: Get together with your team and discuss of all of the things you’d like to accomplish. Write them on big Post-It notes and stick them on a wall for everyone to see. Don’t worry how many you put up there. You don’t want to miss anything.
2. What’s Relevant Now: From the items posted on your wall, select a goal to focus on in either your next iteration or release. This should be a goal that furthers one of your primary business objectives. If you don’t know what these are or how to arrive at them, check out this post on How to Decide What to Build.
3. Create a Mantra: Guy Kawasaki highly recommends mantras as effective ways to keep focus. Mantras are just 2-3 words that capture the essence of your goal. Forget about long wordy statements to describe what you’re after. Get to the heart of it. Give your team or yourself something easy to remember when you set out to begin working toward your goal everyday. Put the mantra on Post-It’s around the office. Have a Mantra Board where you can write it big and bold for everyone to see. It really does help.
4. What can you do in this iteration or release to make it happen: When you and your team get together to plan your release or iterations, keep the mantra and the goal in mind. Select tasking that will make it happen. Select tasking that is focussed on achieving the goal. Anything else is extraneous.
5. What can you do today to make it happen: When you hold your daily stand up meetings and commit to what you are working on today, think about your mantra and goal and commit to tasking that you’ll work on today to achieve the iteration goal. Keep it very focussed on the goal and you won’t go astray.
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5 Responses
October 24th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Great post Chris! I am going to try this with my team and report back.
Carlos
October 24th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
How would you adjust modify this if your team was distributed geographically and all but a few were not able to see your visual cues?
October 24th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
@ Larry: There are several ways this can be done using some of the tools I mentioned in a previous post on Tools for Distributed Teams. Check out the post here: http://edgehopper.com/tools-for-distributed-teams/ . If you still have questions, let me know I can give more suggestions.
@Carlos: Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it. Let me know how it works out for your team.
October 27th, 2008 at 9:39 am
Excellent points. Any suggested materials on how to converge on goal
October 27th, 2008 at 9:46 am
Interesting article, but I’m struggling to see how this aligns with a strong product backlog, and an active customer who is prioritising and ordering the backlog ahead of the next iteration.
Teams struggling to plan the next release or iteration point towards a smell of a poor on none engaged customer and poor back log management.
Don’t get me wrong there is definately a need to brainstorm each iteration, discuss those niggly little problems and tech debt that people think need to be brought up, so I would keep everything in the article but reword/rewrite Brainstorm section and place greater emphasis on getting together with the customer, reviewing the current backlog and agreeing the priority and using this to create a list of what things that need to be accomplished
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