Start with a Project Canvas — and remember the “Secret Sauce”

When I begin a new Project (or Epic or Feature) I almost always start with a Project Canvas, and when I don’t I almost always regret it.

Without a Canvas I find that I either:

• Do insufficient work aligning on purpose and shared understanding, leading to unnecessary confusion in subsequent delivery, or
• Am too heavyweight on Project Inception (aka Kick-off) activities, leading to voluminous artefacts, ironically still leading to confusion — this time for the lack of a distillation that is small enough to easily fit into people’s heads.

As with the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, a Canvas helps to make the amount of alignment work not too light, not too heavy, but “just right”.

Which Canvas should I use?

There are many canvases adapted for many purposes. I first learned about the venerable Toyota A3 Problem Solving Canvas in the early 2010’s when I shared a report with a colleague containing some ambitious recommendations.

After a thorough reading of my report they said: “It’s good, but it would be better presented in the form of a Canvas.”

“What’s that”, I asked?

And so began my education in the way of Canvases, starting with John Shook’s classic book: Managing to Learn: Using the A3 Management Process to Solve Problems, Gain Agreement, Mentor and Lead.

Over the years I’ve had great value from:

• the A3 Canvas — for problem-solving
• the Lean Startup Canvas — for validating startup business ideas
• various Opportunity Canvases — for light-weight business cases

Owing to the nature of my work and the prevalence of Projects, I have most experience with various forms of the Project Canvas. I use it to kick off new Projects, as well as their smaller cousins: Epics and Features.

Choose a canvas that roughly fits your situation, and adapt it accordingly. While the tips here are directly applicable to Projects and Project Canvases, they largely apply to other canvases too.

The Everest Engineering version of a Project Canvas

Not Everyone Loves Canvases

I realise that not everyone loves canvases, and they aren’t necessarily using them as much or as diligently as I do!

Here are some common objections, with my responses.

• Objection 1: Canvases force over-simplification through their fixed size. Dan: This is kind of the point — not to over-simplify, but to simplify sufficiently to obtain a shared high level understanding of the essential features of the Project.
• Objection 2: Canvas X is not a poor fit for the particular domain.
  Dan: Either choose a different and better adapted canvas — there’s a zillion of them! — and/or adapt the specific boxes.
• Objection 3: Canvases require skilled facilitation to get to a good result.
  Dan: I agree with this one.

The “Secret Sauce”: facilitating discussion

I think the Secret Sauce of Canvases is this: it’s not about having the best or most perfectly designed canvas: it’s about facilitating discussions to play out constructive conflict, with the goal of reaching a shared understanding — and documenting the emergent understanding concisely.

A well-chosen Canvas is helpful in structuring these discussions, and it’s limited size helps focus the conversations and sharpen the recorded descriptions.

Some tips on using a Project Canvas

I have a particular method for using a Project Canvas to start a light-weight inception*:

1. Session 1: As a Delivery team, fill out what you already know based on conversations and previous briefings, and highlight in red any questions and speculations to later clarify with stakeholders.
2. Tip: Be sure to repurpose boxes that aren’t relevant to the context, but also allow yourself to be challenged to stick with boxes that might not play to your preferences.
3. Session 2: Schedule a separate workshop to walk through the canvas with your stakeholders. You should directly ask about the items you have marked in red. Expect your stakeholders to also correct many items that you haven’t marked in red!

By the end of this you should have a succinct high-level view of the project.

The other tool I use next in a light-weight inception is a story map or similar, to create a slicing and road-map of the project.

Finally I pull in whatever other tool or tools (but not too many) seems contextually appropriate.

*Most Inceptions are much “heavier” than this. Here’s a structure I like from The Agile Warrior. This kind of activity is appropriate for projects which are “much bigger” in terms of complexity, stakeholders, and other unknowns. It allows more divergence and convergence over a greater time period, involving more people and perspectives.

More Secret Sauce: Championing the Canvas

The other secret sauce is for someone to “champion” the Canvas and keep it alive. This will likely be a Product Owner or similar: someone who was central to the initial facilitation and who is skilled and enthused about maintaining the big picture.

When questions or challenges come up, e.g. stakeholders wanting to move in a direction previously ruled “out of scope” — the Canvas champion can pull out the Canvas to support the ensuing discussion.

By the way: My favourite box on a Project Canvas is Assumptions: if an assumption gets violated it’s time to reconsider the Project plan — doing this sooner rather than later can save a lot of heartache and waste.

Does the Canvas need to be maintained for the life of the Project?

My sense is that for longer projects the canvas does not have to be kept forever, but long enough to feel that the project is cruising to success. Once the assumptions are validated, an MVP or similar delivered, an ongoing delivery cadence established, and the shared understanding turned into actionable reality other artefacts may be more suitable to helping bring the project to completion: e.g. the story map, a list of risks, etc.

However, even a slightly outdated Canvas can be very helpful in orienting people who join the project team or stakeholder group later in the life of the Project.

What about Products?

In a Product Context, there might be an Opportunity Canvas (effectively a lightweight business case) that gives the highest level view of the product, followed by an ongoing series of Epic or Feature canvases (effectively smaller scale Product Canvases) used as above.

Conclusion

So there you have it: Canvases are great — you should start every new project with one!

The “secret sauce”:

1. Focus mainly on the facilitation process around the canvas rather than the exact choice of Canvas. The aim is shared understanding.
2. Make sure you have a Canvas champion to keep the Canvas going, at least until the Project is well on track.

And the benefits of this approach:

1. Shared high-level understanding across Delivery team and Project Stakeholders
2. Light-weight inception on many Projects.
3. Early detection of violated assumptions during the Project.
4. Easier to introduce new team members and stakeholders who join the project later.