When we’re busy we seem to get a bit blinkered and force ourselves to keep racing to the next thing to do. Last year (2020) was a year where I caught myself doing that more than ever. In light of this, I wanted to share an activity to help you reflect, and be a bit more strategic about your next steps…
Do we all know the story of the three little pigs? I like to use this children’s story as one of the ways to describe how we develop digital projects*.
First we are faced with the problem – we have to build shelter to protect ourselves from the wolf.
The first thing we try doesn’t work so well, we learn a lot and try again. That was our house of straw that was blown down by the wolf. In a digital project this might be a few tests run on a low cost prototype.
Now we know that the wolf has some good lungs and we look to build our house of stronger materials.
Finally, we get to a point where we’ve built something that can’t be blown down – a robust solution.
I like to take this analogy a step further and focus in on projects. I’ll run through this using my own example now (link to typeform → https://bobirobson808234.typeform.com/to/LJBb754B)
This activity was first shared at SCVOs DigiShift on Tuesday 12 Jan 2020, watch the full session including talks by Wayne Murray and John Fitzgerald too!
*This is an adaptation of a fairly well known retrospective activity from Agile Project Management methodologies.