Odd Question, isn’t it. We spend all this time focusing on getting the story to be the right size, chiseling away on the ones that are too big to fit in a release, and so on. Then we turn around and fight the good fight when Scrum and Agile scales up and we are faced with keeping multiple teams working in peace, harmony and synchronicity. It is this last problem that I keep on dealing with, particularly when trying to introduce Agile QA. I got so frustrated that I took Jim Highsmith’s advice about “more being written about Agile than is known”, stopped reading Agile and read other things – like the Harry Potter series and 20th century history. It is here I re-read the words that on May 25, 1961, changed a generation’s life. President John F. Kennedy said in his, “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs,” before a joint session of Congress.
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”
It struck me it was ‘the’ perfect story. It has a role, action that had to be taken, and a goal. But most of all it had a very tangible, clear, and explicitly well defined definition of DONE – “returning him safely to the earth.” What a story! What an Epic! What a way to get a nation – a world – to focus. But it wasn’t a user story – it had this timeboxing clause,”before this decade is out,” that started the clock ticking.
I refer to it as a Focus Story. It serves as the transforming agent changing a poetic visiony user story into a ‘Mission Statement” and a Commander’s Intent”. With it in place, at the top of Product Vision, enough guide rails are in place to make reasonable initial roadmaps, release plans, prioritization criteria, and definitions of done. But most of all we have a means to understand core values criteria “safely to the earth”.
We also have triggers to inform us when we are losing focus – Meetings get longer, Done isn’t understood. Pieces don’t fit and the conventional mindset you have been struggling to win over sighs and goes back to its safe place of waiting for the fad to die. When these show up it is time to revisit the focus story and build a bigger focus or wrap up what you are doing. Otherwise you risk having “O”rings show up on your Columbia launch. Nobody wants to be part of that type of bad day.
Hi Mike:
Really good post. I have been talking to George about the “commander’s intent” analogy. I’ve also been talking lately about Jeff Patton’s notion of the Shrinking Story. There seems to be a nexus of ideas here, and we should discuss it further.
There is also something missing, IMO. That is the question of what happens when we get feedback.
Inevitably what we get feedback to is the smaller more detailed stories and not these overarching Focus Stories. What does that feeback tell us about our overall vision, and how do we communicate that?
For example, the shuttle program was a huge success, but also ultimately a failure because what the customers wanted was a cheap way to launch and maintain their satellites. The Focus Story was to create a reusable craft that could be launched over-and-over and safely carry crew and experiments as well as payload. But, it was too expensive to launch and customers quickly started looking for disposable vehicles that could do the job cheap and with greater frequency.
So, what should happen to the Focus Story when the customer keeps asking for things that don’t align with it? How can we inspect-and-adapt so that we recognize where the real value is and change our overarching mission to reflect that?
Thanks,
Adam
Hi Mike–
In the great, short book _Teamwork_ by Larson and LaFasto they say that for a team to excel it needs a “clear, elevating goal” and use this exact example. It is indeed a great example of what is needed for a team to *focus* on their clear, elevating goal.
Thanks for your blog post.
Mike,
The Concept of Operations used in defense and space – and other places – attempts this. But the Kennedy statement is the seminal approach.
The one I remember from Hubble was Frank Cipalinni’s (the Hubble PM) for the Robotic Service Mission.
“Fly to Hubble with the robotic service module, and…
1. Do no harm to my telescope
2. Change the Wide Field Camera
3. Attach the battery service umbilical”
he then asked “how much does that cost?” and “when can you be ready to fly?”