The RACI matrix almost got it right but still harbors too much ambiguity. In your team’s formal planning, govern only what is worth documenting outside email, and nothing else. Govern with just Five Verbs: Draft, Review, Revise, Approve, Distribute.

It’s one thing to identify what a user wants to be able to accomplish. It’s another thing to capture what they consider a chore and want to leave their scope of responsibility.

A script is a simple, raw, unambiguous format to get the sequence of actions on paper, primed for a Future State Process Flow.

Visual representation of the customer journey or employee experience - sequence of actions, primary path, and peripheral paths.

Surely some activities in your organization are important to measure. A scorecard captures the “Metrics That Matter” - Leading and Lagging. Historical, Current, and Target values.

Corresponding with the R of ADKAR, a Closure Report is Reinforcement for the new Customer Experience and formal declaration that the project is complete.

To manage the People side of Change, apply a framework such as ADKAR (owned by PROSCI). Shepherd your stakeholders through Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement with corresponding assets.

Verb Sprawl is a real problem that slows teams down. In planning your team’s work, instead of governing meetings or emails, govern what is worth documenting outside email. Govern with just Five Verbs: Draft, Review, Revise, Approve, Distribute.

What is worth documenting inside your organization? For starters, ALL these. Execution’s best two friends are simplicity and transparency. These documents ruthlessly keep you simple and transparent. These are valuable for months, YEARS, elevating documentation to a title of ASSETS. Building and maintaining these in your innovation work ensures a healthy, Ruthless Asset Factory.

Which of your culture traits can you trace to impacting your speed? Consider trust, ambiguity, interruptions, fatigue, burnout, bottlenecks, egos, hero mentality, simplicity, complexity, silos, bureaucracy, meeting gridlock, and email overload. Fix your culture. Fix your Speed.

Your organization might be caught in meeting gridlock and email overload. You cannot just talk and email your way to success. You must document things outside email. It’s dry, sterile, unforgiving, and ruthless. But documentation keeps its value. A ruthless factory results in a valuable Asset Portfolio.

Use Five Verbs to pace, synchronize, and assign building your project’s Asset Portfolio.