Is Your Project Team Building An Asset Portfolio?
The right documentation is so valuable to your future team, it qualifies as an Asset Portfolio.
Documentation has been out-of-favor for a while. Agile favors working software over comprehensive documentation. Agile encourages the keystrokes in software for technology and doesn’t encourage keystrokes upstream, among businesspeople.
As documentation fell out-of-favor, what filled the void has been meetings (meeting gridlock) and email (email overload). Meetings and email are now the comfort zone of many teams – an addiction they cannot break – even as it leads to fatigue and burnout.
A healthy project team is an Agreement Factory. Meetings guarantee that people talk AT each other. Email guarantees that people type AT each other. But these communication channels don’t guarantee agreements. They don’t guarantee or enforce collaboration. Teams cannot exclusively meet and talk their way to success. Meetings and email are wonderful servants. They are horrible masters.
Documentation is unpopular because of its discipline and upfront cost. However once documentation is done, the team benefits from it for months and years because its low marginal cost keeps the team informed and aligned.
Execution’s two best friends are simplicity and transparency. Nothing accomplishes simplicity and transparency for a project team like documentation, outside email. And as a factory, the output of a documentation factory is more durable than the output of a meeting factory or an email factory. Over time, documents are so valuable, they qualify as assets. Together, documentation forms an Asset Portfolio.
The assets that the Elegance methodology proposes fits into almost a dozen categories:
People, Process, and Technology
Fire up your agreement factory by building whatever assets feel easiest and most natural to you.