It feels like another New Year
It’s back to school and work, so time to reflect on strategy before we delve into the detail of the daily grind.
I hope all my readers have had a good summer break. It was nice for me not to write during August. Instead I binged BBC’s Interior Design Masters featuring co-presenter Michelle Ogundehin, who is the inspiration behind this blog. Michelle Instagrammed: “As we start a new year (September always feels so much more like one than January…)
We all experience lots of New Years. Front of my mind, but not limited to, are: the calendar one on 1st Jan; Chinese 10th Feb; financial 6th April and the academic year that started last week. Now, with our summer holiday fading into a distant memory we typically begin a period of focused work until the disruption of December’s festive period.
Back at your desk, the theory behind your work’s strategy, the activity to achieve goals or timelines for those things have probably shifted or are not running to plan - because life is not linear, it’s not a Gantt chart. To quote Michelle Ogundehin again:
“In theory, theory and reality are the same. But in reality, they are very different.”
As an experienced Product Manager, Agile Coach, Mentor and certified Master Workshop Facilitator, I know harnessing Lean’s principles in this “New Year” is an excellent way to reflect on the recent past and collaborate with a cross-function team to determine whether to stay on your current performance’s trajectory and the activity that’s driving that, or pivot. If you’re not scrutinising your service or product’s budget I can assure you someone else is. The advice below will allow you to quantify and qualify the plans you have for your product or service and give you greater sway in keeping your budget or getting more when the new financial year comes around.
In other words, it’s the perfect time to have a workshop where you have a space held by a professional workshop facilitator so you can pause ‘head down work’ where you’ve been working in the business and gather key people, bring your heads up and get to work on your business. (To quote a recent happy client of mine.)
Together you can evaluate whether the strategic initiative from earlier on in the year is delivering the results you were hoping for or confident on.
If the answer’s yes, brilliant! It’s a great time to double-down and collaborate in a workshop to define what that looks like and gain alignment from the cross-functional team and stakeholders.
If the answer is no, regroup in a different type of workshop to surface what’s not working and ideate, prioritise and agree on what to do next. With a professional facilitator, you can be sure expectations are set and met, everyone will leave confident on commitments of activity to take ideas forward, and know what the test is to determine if that idea is performing as planned with agreed quick feedback loops that uncover your service or product’s unknown unknowns and convert them into known unknowns or knowns.
These workshops will give you a firm platform of evidence-based knowledge to launch further ideas and initiatives, giving you confidence and evidence supporting your next round of roadmap planning and budget forecasting for the following financial year.
In summary, don’t just dive back in where you left off - you’re not at the side of a swimming pool now. Sit up, look around your product or service’s environment (data, competition, new products, services or customer behaviour for example), evaluate and decide whether to stay on the same track or explore a new idea.
Contact me for workshop and collaboration event enquiries via the ‘Samantha Carpenter’ button at the top 👆
Brief highlights of these blogs are on Insta & TikTok. For more on my professional services see SamCarpenter.co