Ever started a project only to realize down the road that the deliverable isn’t going to meet your needs? Or had a key stakeholder drop surprise changes at a stage where it’ll be costly and time consuming to implement them?
These are symptoms of poor team alignment, and this risk can be mitigated by a process that resembles ordering a cheeseburger.
Imagine your next branch or main office project is a cheeseburger that you have to order for your team.
Everyone is getting the same cheeseburger, but you all have different wants and needs for the burger.
Everyone wants a patty. Pam in operations wants cheese, Bob the branch manager really, really has a thing for chipotle mayo. Board member Sally absolutely cannot stand pickles. Sam in IT would like to have onions, but Mary in marketing would prefer not to have them.
Imagine if you ordered a burger that only represented the needs of a few people on their team. That’s going to be an awkward lunch, right?
It’s a much bigger problem when you’re looking at a facility that represents a major expenditure and plays a key role in your credit union’s strategy for the next five, ten, fifteen, and even twenty years.
But luckily there is a solution to this.
We kick every project off with an alignment session, and a key part in this is building a list of requirements that are categorized with input from all key stakeholders.
These categories are: Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, and Won’t Have.
For our burger, a patty is a Must Have. But Tina is lactose intolerant, so cheese is a Won’t Have. The burger Should Have a sauce, but the nature of this sauce will be hashed out later as the other ingredients are finalized. The team is lukewarm towards onions, so this burger Could Have onions if they’d help the tie the final design of this burger together.
At the end of hashing out this list of requirements you may not have a burger that’s everyone’s favorite, but you’ve reached a compromise that represents an optimal solution for feeding your organization.
When you work with us, our team of branching and workplace strategy experts ask the right questions to guide your credit union’s stakeholders through this process. We help you build a list of requirements as well as a charter statement that serves as the ground truth for this project.
This process aligns both your team and ours on a common vision for project success. With it, we remove many of the risks and obstacles standing between the initial concept and an optimal deliverable.
Learn More
To learn more about this process, check out our Learn the Process blog series. And reach out to us today via the button below to start a conversation!