You probably know the story of the tortoise and the hare...
Well, we started our Definition program as hares. What we now know is, Sprints from our training in Agile planning approaches meant we set off at breakneck speed set by our facilitators.
However, after we set aside time to discuss with new team members, we collectively opted to be tortoises. It is timely. March is the month when hares go slightly mad and start fighting over territory. Whilst that may be the sub-text to a pro-poor charity in the biggest economic shock since the second world war, I was thinking more of Aesop's fable.
The hare runs ahead, gets complacent and rests. The tortoise plods on and finishes the race first. If we are going to succeed as a training cohort and ultimately in the delivery of our project, it will be as result of slow determined and intentional steps. There may be snakes or ladders in our path but if we work methodically, we will deliver what our communities need. Hares live for around 4 years. A tortoise can live up to 200 years. We are here for the long haul.
So, when the trainers tore up this week's agenda to focus on getting all our Definition cohort onto the same page. We all felt better for it. The session also gave us the opportunity to create a 'Playback Deck' which is a slide deck where we can put all our material and progress updates in one place. We might say that this is a canonical method for delivering the project (what we now know as being accurate and authoritative). That's a bit of jargon that fell into our paths this week. This terminology made us think about the delicate balance we aim for as an organisation who empowers and enables. We absorb jargon from a wide variety of sectors. As we work with our communities and others, we make judgements about what we pass on, because it makes it easier to talk to others, and what we replace because it gets in the way of the tasks in hand.
Our second area of work this week was a review of the communications software and systems we use in our project development and client facing work. The methodology for this is called a 'System Ecosystem'. To do this, we worked on Miro to create our "ecosystem" where we listed the digital communication software we use for different areas and projects in our organisation, along with the elements we need to consider further. Streamlining the systems can help drive efficiencies and remove bottlenecks. Whilst this isn’t part of the specific ICT project, anything that reduces our costs or time budgets are very welcome.
Image credit: @visualthinkery / @bryanmathers