Long term goals and plans are great but vision without execution is hallucination. While 1-10% of our time is spent looking into the future, the remaining 90%+ should be focused on getting it done in the now.
In this post I want to talk about a vital ritual every team should have — winning the week. We all know how important defining winning is — just think about how massive score boards are at sports stadiums. When you know how to win, how to keep score, and what’s at stake motivation is no longer an issue.
Isn’t it strange not to be just as obsessed in our work?
Why the Week?
Society is on a weekly cadence — the week is the largest contiguous time horizon for getting things done. It has a clear start (Monday) and a clear end (Friday) — usually. Whether you run a larger sprint process or not, teams should always know what winning the week looks like and from that what winning the day means for the individual.
But I’m on a X weekly sprint we know what winning is for that, we have tasks.
Great! Break your sprint into weekly chunks so you can see if you are on track to win the sprint.
What about the day?
- Days are noisy, they get shuffled. Collaboration on the day level is ad hoc and doesn’t need to be scheduled. When you need it poke a teammate.
- Individuals should definitely schedule their goals, and you can have standup if you want though I prefer to only discuss blockers in a live meeting.
- I like to have everyone publish their goals, say in a slack post, or using a tool like this but only because some find it a useful exercise to publish their goals — not for any sort of review process. Software is hard and unpredictable.
Rituals
There are two rituals for winning the week:
- agreeing on what winning means — the Monday planning session
- taking score — the Friday review session
For both sessions, and for standup, use the same artifact to track progress — the weekly scorecard.
Monday Planning
The outcome from this session is to create a scorecard for the week.
Ideally, the entire team is focused on a singular goal but there are also often functional teams where individuals have distinct projects. Regardless, there should be 1-5 bullet points that show what your team is going to deliver. This is your score card as a team. At the end of the week, you’ll mark it up as green (hit) or red (miss).
Perhaps, yellow if you partially delivered or the goal was the wrong goal — beware of this.
Under each bullet point list the activities each team member will contribute for the week.
Example Scorecard from Planning Session
Have your lagging goals and outcomes at the top (as shorthand I use ← for lagging, and → for leading). Sidenote, I like to make each item collapsible instead of bullet points. Makes it nice to zoom in and out. If it blocks I like to nest under the item it blocks. If more complex dependencies don’t worry about it. You all know — meep it simple.
← Deliver Prototype Demo of Teleoperation for Robot X
- → Sally — deliver a URDF model of the robot arm
- → Bobby — deliver .stl mesh files for the robot arm
- → John — create inverse kinematics and controller package with ROS
← Get 100 Pre-Sales for Robot X
- → Tricia — try 5 adword campaigns
- → Bobby — create marketting visuals for ads
← Other XYZ outcome or lagging measure (something an external person would see)
→ Try out new Winning the Week Process (it’s okay to have leading / team activities at the top too)
- you might not need to show the activities here if coordination is needed, add things like scheduling and all that stuff to your daily task list
Keeping Score
Okay, during the week, you can just make notes on your score card. I like to color code it with a little icon or text like:
← (paused — need to shift resources for that fire in prod!) Other XYZ outcome or lagging measure
← 🙀 (in progress 🔥) Deal with SEV XYZ ASAP
- you can use a little icon to denote this was a surprise item and plans changed
→ (in progress) Try out new Winning the Week Process (it’s okay to have leading / team activities at the top too)
You don’t need to have every update here, the goal is to see how the game is going. Are you tracking to win? What do we need to do?
You can show this real quick with your team or post it. The team should be able to look at this and know (1) what they need to do and (2) where they might be able to help.
Review
Now, for the review session do one final check-in to tally your score and then do a post game review.
Tally the Score
Anything not (done) is a miss. Your score is the number of done / total. For example the below is a: 3/4 = 75%
← (done) Deliver Prototype Demo of Teleoperation for Robot X
← (miss) Get 100 Pre-Sales for Robot X
← (cancelled) Other XYZ outcome or lagging measure
← 🙀 (done) Deal with SEV XYZ ASAP
→ (done) Try out new Winning the Week Process (it’s okay to have leading / team activities at the top too)
Post Game
Once you see what the score is — utter failure or success — you then do a post game analysis.
How can we do better next game? What went well and you should double down on. What didn’t go well, how can you improve? What can you eliminate? What can you say no too?
You might be surprised how often missing a goal is simply because someone didn’t work on it. Often, people react to random requests that don’t matter and if you have a scorecard people will know if they are going to cause the team to miss so they will be less likely to get distracted.
Also, it feels bad when an outcome you support is marked in red, green feels much better.
Conclusion
When you keep score it becomes clear to everyone, in public, how to win. When you keep score it’s clear who is delivering and who isn’t.
When you do a traditional standup, everything is a bunch of tasks that you don’t care about. Imagine what a basketball game would be like without a scoreboard. Everyone would be confused. Who’s winning? How do you win? People would be dribbling in the corner chit chatting running plays but missing the point that you need to sink it in the basket.
Instead, frame everything around what matters for the team to win. Keep score. Then win each week. If you win every week you will go places.