Actually more than once and for the same reason pattern. As an important milestone in a project involving multiple teams approaches, alignment meeting takes place. In a meeting participants go through the list of tasks, discuss dependencies, questions are being responded. Once all of this is resolved, the usual question pops-up: ‘is everything clear’, followed by multiple yeses. Then the day of execution comes and we fail as a delivery team. Why does this happen when everything was clear?
In metal working, especially machining, we are very specific when it comes to question if some surface is level – level against what? If table top is level against its legs, round things could still roll off it if the floor, on which the table would be placed, wasn’t level. One would obviously want to have height adjustable table legs to compensate for difference in height and have table top perpendicular to the direction of Earth’s gravity.
I think the same principle applies to clarity as well. You see, without any point of reference, things are always ‘clear’ to ourselves. We rely on our perception of reality and imagine how the events during the project delivery sequence will unfold, but without checking our understanding with others involved, we lack the reference point, i.e. cannot establish clarity.
I think each of us in the delivery team should verbalize our understanding on the dependencies during the alignment stage – inputs from others expected and outputs planned to be produced. Yes, it may sound repetitive in such meeting as some of the things may have been discussed just recently, however remember, without verbalization of the understanding, one cannot expect the reference point being established.
As we don’t like things rolling off the unlevel desk, we don’t like compromised team delivery even more.
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