Abandoning Your Work: The Key to Unconventional and Effective Strategic Planning

If you want to innovate, drive profits, and keep your staff engaged, you have to dispense with traditional strategic planning.

While leading IT strategy years ago, I used one of the most sophisticated modeling tools. The team built out roadmaps by capability/category, tied in our resource plan to forecast length of stages, created a capital plan and depreciation, and delivered timelines. It was comprehensive, the outputs were colorful, clear, complex, visually compelling and beautiful.

Changing a project in the model was this side of hell.

So, we didn’t update the models. Teams were socialized to complete things they were working on, even if the projects were bad ideas. Instead of discussing changes to make projects stronger, smaller, different, teams would either quietly insert scope changes or proceed on the original path.

Leadership wanted to know why there was no innovation.

As I lead teams in strategic design, we deliberately design our strategic planning to allow us to abandon ideas.

About 90% of our crazy innovative ideas that go through a rapid proof of concept are happily dropped as we find something better, something different, or realize the business need has changed. About 10% of our crazy ideas become projects.

Nearly 60% of the projects on our current year road map change in some way – they are accelerated forward, moved out, or deliberately replaced with more impactful projects.

We do not invest in extensive analysis or planning of our projects until they reach the inception stage. If you think about it, if we spend time doing a deep cost and value analysis on all our early stage ideas, we will end up discarding more than half our analysis.

Instead, we redirect our smart people to doing challenging work.

Key to our model:

Tiered roadmaps. These roadmaps have different criteria for each stage; our goal is to be good, not perfect, seeking just enough information to make decisions that are appropriate for each level.

• 2 and 3 year vision These efforts have placeholders by year, simple aspirational titles, and are supported directly by business partner, or by CTO if the work is technology replatform)

• 1 year potential  These efforts have placeholders by quarter, reviews starting with architects and business partners using discussion documents, and placeholders for capital funding)

• Current year active   These projects have early design, charters, committed dates and resources and show timeline by month.

Discussion Documents – These one-page documents are used to guide conversations with leaders and impacted teams about the early stages of ideas or projects. They have: Enough information to have a good conversation with IT leadership about the possible project, Space for someone to take notes, Focus on options or decisions that need to be made, and / or reasons for doing. This is a precursor to charter, design reviews, and funding approval. As a result, no hours are invested in calculating costs for something that may be adjusted, abandoned or delayed. IT Leadership can then…suggest adjustments in direction (before all the charter work is completed, and would have to be redone), suggest others to involve in the early discussion (like another impacted business team, or Cybersecurity), become familiar with the project and offer support early in the process.

Program Leads Program Leads co-own roadmaps with business partners and use the consistent guidelines above to organize plans. They take planning a step deeper, and use release plans to organize Agile epics into releases, or project plans to build stages of work.

Lean, but frequent reviews. Roadmap priority meetings happen every three months with all leads. These are casual, supportive meetings over lunch with a review of each plan. Subtle adjustments are made to active projects, managers of teams can discuss resource contention or changing priorities, and bring challenges forward for advice. Senior leadership can give early indications of shifting need and support from Executive leadership based on their discussions. In addition, teams briefly review resourcing changes across projects monthly.

This process took three months to stand up the initial structure (coaching teams one-on-one to develop baseline roadmaps) and another twelve months of quarterly reviews to establish efficient patterns and cadence. Early on, review meetings were longer, and they have become shorter and more efficient over time.

Quick math says we have saved at least a person-month of time each year for our program and leadership teams, which we have redirected to ‘running the experiment’ to test out new ideas. 

We are stronger, our projects more impactful, and our folks get to work on intellectually stimulating technology.

Planning to abandon work in flight and take on new work instead is key to our impact.