Hint, the answer is yes…

“Arrrrgghhhh” I let my head fall to my desk with a resounding thud.  I let the momentum of the bounce  carry my head down again, and again, and again. Honestly I’m surprised my desk hasn’t broken with the number of times my head and it have come into repeated and violent contact.

I honestly don’t know how Don Quixote was able to tilt at all those windmills. After months of tilting at windmills I was utterly wiped out. It seemed every time I made a little progress, something would come along and drag me back into the quagmire of command and control  planning cycles.

“How on earth am I supposed to engineer an agile transformation when  no one in the organization even knows what agile is?” I muttered into the darkness of my office.

“That’s your problem” came a reply from out of that darkness.

I sighed. Just what I needed, as if trying to swim against the tide of anti-agile wasn’t enough, now I had to deal with my 800-pound gorilla conscience telling me just what I did wrong.

Looming out of the darkness, I could just make out Hogarth’s outline. “What now, Hogarth? Can’t you see I’m busy denting my desk?”

He gave a nod as he settled onto the edge of my desk. The desk gave a groan of protest, which Hogarth ignored instead producing a branch of bamboo from somewhere. The only bamboo I knew of in the office was in the CEO’s office and I cringed to think of what worse could happen to me if the CEO found out my gorilla ate his plant. “Relax” he said, waving the bamboo at me. “Bamboo plants over-night from Amazon prime.” He pointed at the spot where my head had been impacting the desk, “so problems with the agile transformation again?”

I leaned back with a sigh, “Yes,” I rubbed my face, “they know they want to go agile, but they haven’t the first clue what it is and every time I try and suggest something I get pigeonholed back into my little box. I can’t make any progress because they haven’t even gotten started. Resistance to change is high. I don’t know what to do.”

Hogarth shrugged, “not much now. It’s what should have been done before you even got here.”

I looked at him confused, “Huh?”

“Before you can pave the road, the path must first be found.”

I glared at my gorilla. He had a knack for pulling just the right quote from history to make his point and I’d been burned enough times by this that I was learning to ask before snapping. “Okay, who said that?”

“I did,” Hogarth said with a certain amount of smugness.

I blinked. He’d done it to me again. Just when I thought I had this whole invisible, conscience gorilla thing figured out he’d done it again. Then I stopped and blinked again. Realization dawned on me. He’d done it twice.

“The path must be found…” I muttered.

Should I hire an Agile Contractor, Agile Consultant, or Agile FTE Coach?

In my last blog, “To FTE or not to FTE” I looked at the Consultant, Contractor, FTE question from the point of view of the Agile Coach. Here I want to discuss it from the hiring company’s perspective. What are the pros and cons of hiring different types of agile coaches?

Full Time Agile Coach: A paid employee of the company, the Full Time Agile Coach is in for the long-haul. They are directly invested in the long-term well being of the company, often in the extremely measurable form of stocks and options. While still relatively uncommon, there are several notable companies using full-time coaches to help their scrum masters and scrum teams. As I write this I’m working  for AOL as one of four internal coaches. Salesforce.com has a large agile coach team to support its 1500 plus scrum teams. Other companies I know that have used full-time coaches at some point are Twitter, Lending Club, Fit Bit and General Electric.

Benefits of hiring a Full-Time Coach:  It is an oft stated truism that you are never truly done with an agile transformation. It’s an ongoing journey that never ends. And if your journey is never truly over, having a full-time coach means you have someone helping you no matter when or where you are in your journey. Think of it this way, when the Denver Broncos won the Superbowl, in Feb 2016, did they say “Oh we’re the best now, we don’t need our coaches anymore?” Not likely, while sports team coaching staff may change, what doesn’t change is the need for them. Having the full-time coach means you always have access to this critical resource. Something else you gain is organizational knowledge. There is only so much you can learn about a company in the common 30-90 day consulting arrangement. Your full time coach knows the people, the process, the history and where all the minefields are. They don’t have to “come up to speed” and have plenty of time to build strong relationships.

Downsides of hiring a Full-Time Coach:  The downside to a Full-Time coach is that being part of the system impacts their ability to effect large-scale change. Unless your agile coach is a vice-president or higher role, with a big army of directs, they rarely have the positional / role authority to make changes. This leaves them working from within the system on their influence power. This can slow down change and if you are just starting out, can make it very hard on the coach and the company. Often to the point of the transformations failing and the coach looking for a new job. When this happens, it is not usually not the coaches fault.

Consultant Agile Coach: The hired guns of the business world. The have deep expertise and a broad background of knowledge gleaned from many clients and past jobs. The consultant’s job is to come in, solve the problem and then ride off into the sunset while you murmur “who was that masked coach?”.

Benefits to hiring an Agile Consultant: They are the expert. You hire them because they have a deep well of knowledge on your problem. They know how to fix pretty much any problem you may have and thanks to the “hired gun” aura, they can actually get the problems fixed. Even the lowest tier consultant carries the authority equal to a director (a manager of managers) and often has the aura of authority to go all the way up to the CEO and direct what should be done. When you need something done and done fast, hiring a consultant is often the most expedient solution.

Downside of hiring an Agile Consultant: Eventually your hero-for-hire is going to leave. And that is usually a fixed schedule event. It’s the rare consultant who stays until the work is done (scope driven). So just like your average product release, they have a fixed schedule and way more features than they can ever hope to deliver. This requires the consultant to work fast to get everything done. And like in software, when you work under a pressure deadline, they will often end up sacrificing quality or documentation. When the consultant rides off into the sunset your implementation may be incomplete, have undetected flaws, still have organizational resistance or lack the education hand-off needed to sustain the change. I know of many agile transformations that were initial successes and then slid back into their old waterfall ways because they lacked a sustaining force.

Consultants also come in two major flavors, Independent and “Firm”.

The independent consultant is a sole proprietor business, sometimes with a support staff and sometimes not. They can also range from the small name shop up to a “named” agile thought leader. When you hire an independent you know you have their attention. If you hire one of the “names” you also get their specific expertise, which is often what everyone else bases their work on (If you hire Jeff Sutherland, you know you’ve got the expert on Scrum theory). However the Indie is also always going to be partially unfocused. They always have to be sourcing their next client. Even with a support staff, you often need the consultant to make sales calls to close deals. For the smaller independents, they can be a great choice for a small company getting started.

Hiring a “Firm” means you are often getting the combined knowledge of the whole organization. Even if only one coach shows up, that coach has the backing of their firm and can tap into the tribal knowledge.  Three of the most notable firms that fall into this category are SolutionsIQ, Leading Agile, LeanDog and Thoughtworks. Other Firms are more like a talent scout, finding really good independent talent and connecting them with the best fit. cPrime and Agile Transformations are a great example of this type as they work with many independent coaches, while also having an internal practice org that supports them.  Hiring a Firm comes with a lot of benefits on the engagement, however they can often be more expensive than the small indie coach. Though likely less expensive than one of the “named” independents.

Contractor Agile Coach: The hourly agile coach. Like the brilliant coffee aficionado, working behind the Starbucks counter, their knowledge and skills are often not seen or used because of the perception they are just a “temp” or the “hired help”.  Added to all the other issues, contractors have plenty of rules around them so that they never really one of your employees and rarely have support from a parent company like a consultant.

Benefits to hiring an Agile Coach Contractor: There isn’t. Companies that hire contractor coaches are losing out on nearly all the benefits of either the FTE or the Consultant. The only real value comes in the lower costs and being able to source them from contract firms (there are several that either specialize in agile or do a lot of agile business). However, you get what you pay for. While scrum masters as contractors works out okay, coaches as contractors is bad for the coach, bad for the business and I’m not aware of any successfully sustained successful transformations with a contractor coach.

Downside of hiring an Agile Coach Contractor: You get what you paid for. Contractors are usually considered “Staff Augmentation.” This puts them into the org structure like an FTE, only they generally end up at the bottom of the social and role power pecking order. Coaches need to have stability or authority to operate and get neither as a contractor. As Nancy Reagan used to say “Just say no.”

So… (Conclusion)

Let’s get the hard and fast out of the way. Never hire an agile coach as a contractor. While this is an excellent tactic for a Scrum Master, for an agile coach you are getting none of the benefits and all the of downsides possible. It may save you money and it may be easy. And you will get exactly what you pay for. Every company I’ve heard of, that tried to use contractor coaches to work an agile transformation, has not only failed to make any real change, they have burned through multiple coaches and gotten  a poor reputation in the agile community.

So then, Consultant or FTE Coach? 

Both…

My belief and recommendation is that for a successful agile transformation to take hold in an enterprise company, one must take a little from column A and a little from column B.

Start by hiring a good enterprise-class agile consulting company. Bring them in to help you find your path and get you on it. They will have the ability to overcome the institutional inertia and get the transformation rolling. Part of their transformation work though is to set you up for success once they have left. Before they leave they need to help you raise up an internal resource or bring in an external resource to carry on as your full-time coach.

The full-time coach (or coaches) will then carry forward using the inertia of the agile consulting firm. They will keep the transformation on the rails and act as the guides whenever things start to get lost.

By combining the authority change-agent power of the consultant, with the stable expertise of the full-time coach, you will greatly enhance the chances you will be successful in the long run.

“Seriously?!” I was dumbstruck. How did this happen?

What I was looking at was nothing short than a monumental divergence of goals. The VP over the product group wanted to open up small satellite offices in several locations across the US. Granted, each location would be fully connected, high end telepresence rooms, live work space cameras all backed by a top-end online agile management tool. On the face of it, not the worst implementation for a distributed workforce using an agile development model. 

Only it was in direct contrast to what Jake had been working towards. He’d been working with facilities and they had a plan all in place to gut the development floor and rebuild it as a fully integrated team workspace. Pods for each team, quiet spaces, team dedicated meeting rooms with floor to ceiling white boards, the works. The perfect co-location workspace. 

Two wildly divergent plans. Yeah, they both were completely supportive of the company’s move to agile. The problem was they were pretty much diametrically opposite approaches.

“How on earth did I get here?” 

“Well, you got in your car this morning, got on the 280, headed south…” 

I looked up from my computer display to my unwanted visitor. Hogarth, my 800 pound imaginary gorilla and self-appointed conscience was leaning against the door to my office. He’d already reached over and stripped a branch from my latest fichus tree and was carefully plucking a leaf from it (Someday I’d figure out how an imaginary gorilla managed to cost me a fortune in real plants). 

“Hogarth, I’m not in the mood for your beat around the bush word games. If you have something to say, just spit it out.” In retrospect, telling a gorilla, imaginary or not, to spit probably wasn’t the best choice of words. 

Fortunately Hogarth didn’t take me up on the format of communication. Instead he quietly snacked on the fichus branch for a minute. “Well,” he said as he tossed the denuded branch to the side, “sounds to me like an alignment issue. The teams and management don’t have the same view on the why. The same order of values.” 

I gaped at him as if he’d suddenly grown a second head and it was speaking in Latin. “Look, everyone from the CEO down to the front line coders can recite the agile values and if they don’t know the principles by heart, we’ve got them on posters around the whole office.” I pointed to an example of such on the wall of my office. “So we are plenty aligned on what agile means.” 

Hogarth looked at the poster of the agile principles and cocked his head to the side, “Which one’s first?” 

I shook my head forcefully. “Are you crazy? They are all equally important. The Manifesto drafters didn’t number them.” 

“Oh, so they are all a P0 feature, I get it now.” Hogarth nodded with a satisfied smile. 

“Wait? What!?… No… I mean… Umm….” 

I really hate it when he does that.

The Agile Principles, they can’t all be Priority Zero

How many of you have seen a classic Product Requirements Document (PRD, MRD) where the majority of the feature requests are priority zero or one? Yep, me too. It’s the job of one of twelve principles of agile “maximizing the work not done” to address just this problem. It’s part of what drives the creation of a rank ordered backlog. The backlog is one of the overarching “artifacts” of agile (and lean). You can be running sprints, doing Kanban pull, DAD, SAFe, LeSS, XP, etc and you will have a backlog. Few if any other “artifacts” have that kind of span.

And yet, we’re expected to hold all four agile values and twelve agile principles as equal?

Okay, yes, that would be awesome. A truly transcendent self-organized working group that has moved beyond the material concerns of today’s world.

Reality though tends to point out that having more than one priority is nearly impossible. Peter Drucker said something to the effect of “an effective executive can focus on one thing really well. An exceptional executive can focus on two.”

We rank order our product backlog. We even rank order things coming out of our retrospectives. And yet we don’t spend time aligning on the principles of agile? We can’t do twelve things at once, so what do we focus on first?

Agile Principles 20 / 20 Exercise

This simple exercise can quickly let a team, of up to twenty, rank order the agile principles from highest priority to high priority (recognizing that all the principles are important). By conducting the exercise across the company, you can quickly get a sense of priorities and where alignment is lacking. For example, I’ve found development teams often put “welcome changing requirements” very low on their list, while a product management or sales team might place this very high.

Understanding where alignment is lacking, will then allow the conversation to bring about that alignment. At the end of the day, Sales could end up realizing that development’s goal of “delivery working software frequently” is better than getting to make changes weekly. You have to have the knowledge, to have the conversation, to gain the alignment.

Exercise In a Nutshell: The exercise in two hundred words or less (152 to be precise).

Print each principle on a single sheet of paper. Find a bare piece of wall. A neutral facilitator then randomly shuffles the cards, placing “Our highest Priority” principle at the bottom of the deck. The facilitator places the first random principle on the wall and invites discussion. Then the second principle is held up and the team is invited to decide if it is more or less important than the first. This proceeds through eleven principles, with discussion as each one is placed (trust me, there will be a lot as more cards get on the wall).

When you get to “Our Highest Priority” explain that while the signers of the manifesto did not rank order the principles in general, they did put this one at the top of the list on purpose, feeling it to be the most important of equals. Challenge the team on if they feel it is also the most important.

For a complete walk through of the exercise, you can download it from my Dropbox share: Agile Principles 20 /20 Exercise.

I’ve also created a Pecha Kucha format presentation, which I’ve shared on Slideshare , under the name “Agile Principles 20-20 The Gorilla Coach”

Credit where credit is due. I learned this technique from the dual powerhouses of Jason Tanner (@JasonBTanner) and Luke Hohmann (@lukehohmann). Jason is a Certified Scrum Trainer and CEO at Applied Frameworks, a company that specializes in helping your company get its product direction and strategy going in the right direction. Luke is the founder and CEO of Conteneo Inc., well known for their Innovation Games which is now part of their larger Collaboration Cloud. I took a Certified Scrum Product Owner class co-taught by these two gentlemen and learned this exercise in their class, which uses Conteneo’s 20/20 collaboration game as a the framework.

Photo by Danilo Rizzuti

“I just don’t get it.” I was staring at the email thread on my screen. I was in utter disbelief as to what it was telling me. Like pulling on a single loose thread unravels a cartoon sweater, this one email thread had just unraveled three months of my hard work on the Jericho project. I felt like the walls were falling in on me and a part of me was hoping the building would collapse and crush me so I didn’t have to deal with the fallout.

Turning in my seat I stared out my window taking in the inky black of a moonless night. Jake’s email had started the thread innocently enough. He wanted to make sure we’d addressed the dependency with the data team before he started work. Donald’s reply pointed to a dependency with the release operations team and capabilities of that datacenter. This led to a ever growing cascade of dependency and communication issues that were culminating in a pretty simple message, the project was dead before it ever laid the first brick of its foundation.

“I just don’t understand”, I said to my reflection, in the window. “We planned everything, we reviewed the plan, we had buy in. What went wrong?”

A voice answered me from  the darkness of my office, “I believe the technical term is that the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing.”

Why did I ask a question? Didn’t I know exactly what would happen if I asked  rhetorical question?

“Of course you knew what would happen,” replied my 800 pound conscience. Hogarth reached his massive hand out of the darkens to turn on my desk side lamp. My office no longer lit by just my computer screen, I could clearly see Hogarth looming from the darkness of the rest of my office. Flashing me a blindingly white smile, he continued “Don’t feel bad, you know I would have answered even if you hadn’t talked out loud.”

I sighed. He was right of course. May as well just take the medicine and hope to get it over with. “Enlighten me, oh wise one.”

My gorilla wagged a baguette sized finger at me, “Now, now, I’m the sarcastic one here.” His other hand came into view with part of my fichus clutched in it. Nibbling on some leaves he said, “your problem is you didn’t tie off with your stakeholders right.”

“Seriously?!” I just stared at him. I had most definitely met with my key stakeholders. Heck, half of them I met before the project even started.

“Having coffee with Jake doesn’t count as meeting your stakeholder.” Hogarth scolded.

“Don’t start, Hogarth. I know how to talk with my stakeholders. I have relationships with all the key ones.”

He nodded his beach ball sized head. “Yes, you do. Let me ask you a question though. When the teams create user stories, is there a specific formula?”

I nodded.

“And when you do release planning, is there an agenda and set of questions you always ask?”

I nodded.

“And yet your meetings with the stakeholders are informal, not structured and not the same. How do you expect to know if  they are on the same page if you don’t ask them the same questions.”

Huh…

Ask the Same Questions, you will see Patterns

The Internal Customer Interview has been a staple tool in my project tool box for years. I first adapted it from Manager-Tools.com and over the years have  tweaked it and discovered its value beyond just when starting  a new job.

Now stakeholder meetings are nothing new. Even the Hogarth me knew to have meetings with the stakeholders. The secret to why the ICI tool works over standard relationship building meetings is in its consistency. If you don’t have consistency across your reviews, you’re not getting proper value out of your interviews.

Say you meet with ten stakeholders and with each of them you have a different agenda and questions, then you only gain the context of that stakeholder in that stakeholder’s domain.  You are less likely to pick up on trends that crossing the organization.

With the ICI format the key is to ask the exact same questions to each stakeholder. By asking the same questions, you can take the qualitative data of a single interview and begin to form a quantitative view of the whole through repeated asking of the same questions.

An interview shouldn’t be more than 30 minutes, so generally you want to limit yourself to five or six questions.

The Questions:

New Job / Major New Project:

These six questions are what I used when would start a new PMO job or major new PMO project.

1‐ What do you and your org need and expect from the PMO team?

2‐ What metrics do you use to assess us?

3‐ How have we done relative to your needs?

4‐ What’s your perception of our org in general, that perhaps the numbers don’t show?

5‐ What feedback and/or guidance do you have for me/my role/my team?

6- What are your biggest pain points?

Agile Stakeholders:

I developed these questions working for LeadingAgile. They are designed to evaluate where company is with its agile transformation (or preparing for an agile transformation). It extends beyond the recommended number of questions because of the sub-questions. It still fits into 30 minutes though, since the follow-up questions are generally shorter answers, so it still fits the model.

1- How well do you think <your company> is doing at establishing long-term, executable product vision?

2- How well do you think <your company> is doing at release planning (next 3 months) and making this plan transparent?

   2a- How well are you doing at meeting the commitments in the planned work?

   2b- Was new work added to the release plan after planning close and if yes, what percentage of overall backlog changed?

   2c- If yes to 2b, what percentage of new work was from farther down the existing backlog as opposed to brand new features/stories that did not exist when release planning closed

3- How well are you doing at delivering of working, “accepted” product to the end customer? Is it high quality, is it delivering value to the customer?

4- How well do you think <your company> recognizes problems and opportunities for improvement? With it’s Products (internal and external)? With it’s processes?

   4a- How well are you at executing on these opportunities for improvement?

5- Do you feel you are getting sufficient support to fulfill your  job role?

6- What are your biggest pain points in your job (or what keeps you awake at night).

Meeting Setup:

While the questions are the secret to a successful series of interviews, you need to make sure you set things up for that success.

Invitation: Contact each stakeholder individually. Request 30 minutes of their times to ask for them questions related to X (new job role, project, initiative). In the invitation include the one slide overview (see below) and a copy of the questions you will be asking. Never send this out as a broadcast message. Each person should be contacted individually.

One Slide Overview:  This isn’t a presentation. This is a focus for talking points. The contents are:

Mission Statement/ Goal Statement- What is being attempted?

How Statement (Optional)- It may be helpful to include how something is going to be done in some instances. For example the Goal focuses on improving predictability, and the How states this will be done through the rollout of agile governance (for example).

Plan– For a new job this is usually the 90 day plan. For a project or initiative this should be the next steps planning, not a detailed list. There should be no more than 5-6 bullets.

The Questions: Have them prepared before hand and let your stakeholders see them before you meet with them. For about half your audience, they won’t ever look at them. However the other half will look at them and be much better prepared to answer them in the interview because you gave them a chance to think about them before hand.

Stakeholder interviews are too important to go in off the cuff. Take some time to plan them and you’ll get a lot more value from them.

“I just don’t understand how we can be so far off schedule?” I was staring at the reality of the latest monthly progress review and trying to decide just how many floors the General Manager would blow through when he hit the ceiling on getting this news.

A voice echoed out of the dark corner of my barely illuminated office. “Just imagine how far behind schedule you’ll be next month.”

Wonderful, just what I needed at… was it really 9:00 pm? I grabbed my coat and hurriedly shoved my computer into its bag. “Not now, Hogarth, I need to get home.”

The 800 pound gorilla emerged from the shadows, his inky black fur blending with the darkness so that only his glinting eyes and brilliant white teeth showed clearly. “No problem, I’ll walk with you.”

I signed and pushed out of my office doing my best to ignore Hogarth.

“Tell you what,” he said as he lumbered behind me. “Do me one quick thing and I promise to not pester you for a week if it doesn’t change your view.”

I stopped and turned. “Fine, deal. What do you want?”

Hogarth pointed at the cube lined hallway in front of us. “I want you to walk down the middle of this aisle, without hitting anything.” Before I could tell him just how easy and stupid that sounded he held up a massive hand. “Oh, while you are walking this way, you must keep your eyes on that wall clock over there to the right. No matter what you can’t take your eyes away.”

” Seriously?” I rolled my eyes. “Fine, just remember, you promised not to bother…” WHAM!

After picking myself back up from the floor I looked to see who the heck had left one of the rolling file cabinets in the middle of the hall. Only problem was I was looking up at the side of a cube wall. I’d not only not stayed in the middle of the hall, I’d veered into one the side halls and then into the wall of the corner cube.

Hogarth offered me a hand up. “You knew where your goal was. What happened?”

I brushed away his hand and straightened my coat. “If I was allowed to look where I was going…”

“So you mean like checking your project status more than once a month?”

I really hate it when he’s right.

We Achieve Goals We Look At

How is making your goals like riding a horse?

Some time back I introduced you all to Peet, my horse. At the time Peet was helping Hogarth and I explore a point regarding too much focus on work being bad for you. Today Peet and Sky, my wife’s horse, are back to help us demonstrate why keeping the goal in sight is so very important. If you ride a motorcycle, you already know what I’m about to demonstrate.

About twenty years ago, my girlfriend (now wife) told me I had no business ever riding a motorcycle. She said something to the effect that I didn’t have the focus. Being an overly confident young man I naturally disagreed with her. I mean I was a guy, I could do anything right? Well luck, fortune, or fate prevented me from realizing my dream to own a BMW Touring bike. This was one of those times to be thankful for unanswered wishes.

About eight years ago I started riding. My wife got me into it and I am forever thankful. As I talk about in the Gorilla Robot blog, it gave me a sense of peace and relaxation I had been lacking. It wasn’t all wine and roses though. About three months after owning Peet I took my very first solo ride. When I came back from the ride I found my wife and asked her “You remember when we first met, you told me I should never ride a motorcycle?” To this she answered something to the effect of, “yes and you still shouldn’t”. I nodded to her and said “you’re right. If I can make an intelligent animal walk into a tree, I have no business on a motorcycle.”

What Peet demonstrated to me that day was the principle of “you go where you look.” In the opening  photo is another very real demonstration. When cutting cows (herding), if you don’t keep your eye (and the horses eye) on the cow, they will happily go where ever they want. If I were to have looked away (I did), then Sky would have (he did) and the cow would have run back to the heard (she did). 

When you drive a car, the car is amazingly forgiving. If you look off to the side of the road, you don’t immediately swerve. You will, given time, but the car is very forgiving. Horses and motorcycles are not if you lose focus, if you start looking at something on the side of the road, very soon you’ll end up on the side of the road. Your entire body shifts when you look and aligns to move in the direction you are looking. With horses and bikes you see this effect very easily.

And the principle applies to goals and objectives as well. My mind really made the connections this week, when I attended the Bay Agile Leadership Network. Dan Kimble of Resonance Executive Coaching came to speak on the topic of the Leadership Crisis in the Digital Age. Dan has done competitive motorbike racing and drew the example between where you go on a bike and where you go with your goals. Being a horseman (who once nearly rode his horse into a tree) I instantly saw what he meant.

Think back to high school and the English final. You know, that multi-page essay about some book that at the time you would have rather read anything but it? You had a whole month to do the project. Yet how many of us didn’t even put the first word down until the week it was due? And how many of you wrote the entire paper the night before?

When we don’t keep our goal in sight, we don’t reach our goal.

So what can we do?

Do One Thing

Back in 2013 I expounded on not Multi-Tasking. This is not just for your day to day work, it’s for your goals as well. Try not work on two life goals in the same week, neither will get the proper attention they deserve. Since you’ve already broken these goals down into tasks (you have, right?), just focus on one task at a time and if a week is like an agile sprint, and the goal the product, work on only one product at a time.

The Daily Goal Look

Let’s pull a page from the agile community and hold our very own daily standup. Every day a Scrum team gathers around the task board and go through the three question ceremony. When they do this, they are not just reviewing what happened yesterday and what they plan to do today. They are also focusing again on their goal. The backlog shows their goal for the Sprint and every day they are focusing back on that goal. When you only review program status once a week, that’s four business days (and a weekend) to get distracted and end up completely off track.

So every day, connect with your goals again. This can both be your current work goals (what you’ll do this week) and more importantly your purpose goals. This won’t take long, just five or ten minutes a day. Your purpose goals should be no more than five at any one time and you can only do so much work in a week so don’t overwhelm yourself. Just reconnect with your goals so you can get to them at the end of the ride instead of running into the wall.

Until next time…