InfoQ

News

Does Your Team Have a Mission Statement?

Posted by Mark Levison on Apr 29, 2008 12:10 AM

Community
Agile
Topics
Leadership ,
Collaboration
Tags
Business/IT Alignment

Is your team juggling conflicting requests? Is your Product Owner struggling to decide which customer's to serve and which to ignore for now? Does it seem that everyone has a different agenda?

In "Make Your Mission Possible" Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant, suggests that the lack of a mission statement is making it difficult for your team to say no. Johanna tells a story of company whose sales staff promise additional reports with understanding that this is exactly what the team doesn't need.

In the story Janice, the manager and her team leads discuss the work they do now and other work that they think needs to happen in the company (even outside of their group). Next they examine the work that they're doing but don't think they should. Based on all of this they right a mission statement that says:

A good mission explains what we do and don't do. It establishes the boundaries of our work and explains how our development group fits into the organization. A great mission will provide reasonable and measurable objectives for our work so other groups can see what we are responsible for--and not responsible for.

Along the way Johanna's suggests that we don't write promises of 24hr turn around into the mission statement unless there is staffing and organizational support for it.

In Got Mission? Neil Bourgeois, a Software Developer, observes that most mission statements are written by the wrong people. Neil believes that a team should write its own mission statement helps the team take ownership of it. In Neil's case his PM brought the team together for a brainstorming session to help them

  1. List what the needed to accomplish
  2. How to accomplish it
  3. Render the key concepts from those lists into a few words or sentence.

In Neil's case many of Agile values popped out during the first two parts, for example Communication, Feedback, Simplicity, Responding to Change, Customer Collaboration. In the end the team crafted a mission statement "Positively impact every project."

Related Sponsor

VersionOne is recognized by Agile practitioners as the leader in Agile project management tools. Companies such as Adobe, BBC, CNN, Dow, HP, IBM, Sony and 3M have turned to VersionOne to help deliver greater value to their customers.

No comments

Watch Thread Reply

Educational Content

Bindings, Platforms, and Innovation

This presentation focuses on the Internet and separating myth from fact, history from the future, and the mundane from the imaginative. Bob Frankston presents a vision of what could and should be.

Orchestrating Long Running Activities with JBoss / JBPM

This article explores the use of JBoss and jBPM to implement design solutions that effectively address the issue of orchestrating long running activities.

Neo4j - The Benefits of Graph Databases

This presentation covers the use of graph databases as an optimal solution for data that is difficult to fit in static tables, rapidly evolving data or data that has a lot of optional attributes.

Realistic about Risk: Software development with Real Options

This session introduces Real Options and shows how it can help in running your project. Real Options is a decision-making process that can be used to manage risk.

Communication Flexibility Using Bindings

This article discusses the use of bindings on services and references (including the instance of non-configured bindings) as the means to implement SCA communications in a Web and SOA environment.

Writing DSLs in Groovy

After a short introduction to DSLs, Scott Davis plays with the keyboard showing how to approach the creation of a DSL by typing working snippets of Groovy code that get executed.

Scaling Agile with C/ALM (Collaborative Application Lifecycle Management)

IBM Rational and InfoQ present, Scaling Agile with C/ALM, an eBook showing organizations how to become “finely tuned software delivery machines” by enabling team integration and scaling.

Concurrent Programming with Microsoft F#

Amanda Laucher presents a real life enterprise application written in F#. She shows actual code snippets, explaining design decisions and suggesting how to use some of the F# constructs.