Merge pull request #8 from jeff-breece/post/collaborative-planning-an…

…d-scoping

Collaboration post ready

_posts/2024-12-14-collaborative-planning-and-scoping-a-roadmap.markdown

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+---
+layout: post  
+title: "Collaborative Planning and Scoping, a Roadmap"  
+date: 2024-12-14 07:00:00 -0400  
+categories: collaboration  
+image: /images/football-play.png
+description: "Collaboration & planning should be done with empathy and without boundaries, this post should help to explain how this tech trys to foster better attitudes during those orchestrations."
+---
+
+**Summary:** 
+Communication is important for many reasons beyond just the “technical” or “business” problem. When you open the doors between all the folks involved instead of shielding some from others, the team has a chance to understand how a participant feels emotionally about a given issue, component build, or deliverable feature. Often these are lost to hierarchical organizational structures, to the detriment of all—whether it be cost overruns, the wrong thing being manifested, or too much, too little, or just plain off-base due to bias tipping the scales.
+
+This post is a collection of strategies I try to get my teams to align with wherever I can because it just makes the experience—and the products we build—better.
+
+<!--more-->
+When working as an engineer, a dba, a cloud admin, and architect of any level with product or solution owners, stakeholders and or CIO’s and above it’s critical that all parties are on board with the direction a given project is taking. As a solution architect, former engineer and cloud guy myself, here are some of the things I have learned from experience, some of my key mentors and of course valuable lessons from past projects that had more friction than needed that causes all the humans involved pain and suffering for no reason beyond communication failures. 
+
+#### Collaborative Planning and Scoping Early Involvement:  
+- Bring engineers into the design process early to assess feasibility and technical constraints before designs are finalized.  
+- Workshops and Discovery Sessions: Facilitate joint workshops where engineers and product owners can align on goals, identify potential trade-offs, and brainstorm solutions together.  
+
+#### Feature Prioritization: 
+- Use frameworks like MoSCoW (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won’t have) to help product owners prioritize features based on engineering feasibility and business value. 
+- Establishing Shared Understanding Design-to-Engineering Handoff Standards:  
+- Use clear (but also high-level summaries of for the execs) documentation, mockups, and user stories to reduce ambiguity. 
+- Tools like Figma (design concepts) and Azure Dev Ops (ADZO)/GIT Boards (discreet engineering tasks and or feature stories/epics) can help ensure consistency.  
+
+#### Technical Feasibility Reviews: Regularly schedule technical feasibility reviews to validate designs before they are committed to development. 
+- Building Strong Communication Channels Cross-Functional Teams:  
+- Set up cross-functional teams with dedicated product, design, and engineering representatives who work closely on shared goals.  
+- Regular Syncs: Conduct weekly or bi-weekly syncs between product owners and engineers to discuss progress, risks, and changes.  
+- Teams/Slack Channels or Chat Groups: Create shared communication spaces where both parties can ask questions, clarify expectations, and resolve issues quickly. 
+
+#### Educating Product Owners on Technical Constraints Tech Demos:  
+- Organize short demos to showcase how certain features work behind the scenes, emphasizing technical challenges and limitations.  
+- Technical Literacy Training: Provide basic training or resources to help product owners better understand the engineering process.  
+- Impact Mapping: Use visual tools to explain how certain design decisions impact technical implementation, cost, or timelines. 
+
+#### Incremental Delivery MVP First:  
+- Focus on delivering a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to test key features before expanding to more complex designs.  
+- Agile Iterations (even in a waterfall world): Break down complex designs into smaller, manageable tasks that can be iteratively built upon.  
+- Proof of Concept (PoC): Develop PoCs to validate risky technical components before committing significant resources. 
+- Note, if both are politically charged words? No problem, call it a “prototype” to avoid the 2020’s business aversion to throw-away-work. 
+
+#### Emphasizing Trade-Offs and Decision Ownership Trade-Off Discussions:  
+- Regularly discuss trade-offs between ideal designs and feasible solutions, involving stakeholders to make informed decisions.  
+- Risk Matrices: Use risk matrices to communicate how design choices impact delivery timelines, quality, or cost.  
+- Decision Logs: Maintain a record of decisions made (and their trade-offs) to create accountability and avoid revisiting the same debates. 
+
+#### Strengthening Trust and Relationships Empathy Building:  
+- Engineers should understand the product owner's user-focused goals, while product owners should respect engineering constraints.  
+- Celebrating Wins: Acknowledge and celebrate successful collaborations and delivered features to strengthen relationships.  
+- Post-Mortems: After each release or sprint, hold retrospective meetings to analyze what went well and what could be improved in the collaboration process. 
+
+#### Leveraging Tools and Metrics Project Management Tools:  
+- Use platforms like ADZO to maintain transparency in task ownership, progress, and dependencies.  
+- Technical Debt Tracking: Create visibility into technical debt and its implications, helping product owners understand the need for balancing innovation with maintenance.  
+- Roadmaps with Dependencies: Share roadmaps that clearly outline technical dependencies and potential bottlenecks. 
+
+#### Aligning Around a Shared Vision OKRs:  
+- Define shared Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to ensure both product and engineering teams are aligned on high-level goals.  
+- End-User Focus: Center discussions around end-user needs, encouraging collaboration to solve user problems rather than focusing solely on individual responsibilities. 
+
+#### Conclusion
+
+When a project team—not just the node under the project manager, but holistically all the potential persons involved in shepherding and using the product—is involved, things just work better.
+
+In case of emergency (e.g., personality clashes or power struggles), ask that person out to coffee, sit with them, and, more importantly, listen to them. Chances are it’s just fear of not being heard or understood, or anxiety about the responsibilities set upon them. Don’t let that situation cast a shadow on you or the project. Instead, try to help them through it.
+
+We are all humans, and as such, we need each other.