About

Outlining the fuzzy notion of how best to form a proposal.

Goals

Guidelines:

• I use these as flags/holy grails for the team to orient their thinking in every situation that comes up.
• Less than half a dozen, any more and people will not remember them.
• These should be broad and intangible, even unattainable.

Examples:

• Zero Configuration! Setup and installation of the robot fleet at any site should eliminate all and necessary steps.
• Developers can modify anything in the source tree with confidence!

User Stories

A collection of user stories to understand workflows and where needs must be met.

As a <role>, I would like <to do/use/see/experience/a tool>, so that I can <do something>

Requirements

Guidelines:

• Derived after an analysis of the user stories.
• Requirements should be actionable, measurable, testable, traceable, but not actually any of these things themselves.
• They should aim to:
  • provide shape to all the user stories and people involved, i.e. eliminate surprises, show them to users!
    
  • be used to eliminate useless objectives, i.e. if there is no connection to a requirement, eliminate it
  • be used later to easily verify (by tests, or survey forms) whether the needs were met
• They are not the how.
• There are functional and architectural requirements. Both are important.

Examples:

• ...

Dependencies

Looking at the requirements, you should be able to determine if there are blocking dependencies that are outside of your control. This should then motivate you to connect with whoever is blocking to a) let them know and b) estimate a time of arrival so you can plan.

Challenges

The requirements should also serve as pointers to where the challenges will be. It is useful to be aware of these so you can front-load and de-risk them in the action breakdown.

Success Criteria

What will define success? Can be considered globally, and also at the individual objective level.

Objectives

These are the actions. Measurable, sequencable and timeable are key criteria. This is what allows you to achieve the planning.

Useful Resources

• One Man's Requirements is Another Man's Trash