4. Treat monitoring, learning and disbursement as the skeleton key to making method work
Part of our methodology series
Someone clever once said “don’t tell me you’re funny, tell me a joke”.
We believe the decisions we’ve made regarding monitoring, learning and disbursement for FTL speak volumes about the kind of programme we want to run.
In previous posts we’ve shared the thinking and considerations that fed into our process and our artefacts, most crucially our Sprint Report.
In this post, we bring our process and reporting together — to illustrate our ambition to be agile, not just say we are.
To recap:
- Our method follows Sprints of work
- Sprint Report captures the intention of the Sprint and the outcomes, with a focus on how we plan to use the insights we’ve gained in the Sprint that follows.
Sprints and Hypotheses
The logic and flow that the report guides you through shows the relationship between Sprints and Hypotheses.
Sprints are experiments and batches of work that we tackle in order to work towards our overarching hypotheses. By working and measuring in this way, we’re making course correction imperative where necessary.
By the end of project, in theory, we should be able to read the Sprint Reports in chronological order for a thorough case study of how it all played out, why decisions were made and what we learned along the way.
Walking the walk
This way of working gives the teams full accountability to use their insight and work efficiently. It was really important for us to make sure that our project and disbursement milestones followed this logic.
Creating project milestones that focussed on outputs alone or arbitrary monthly reporting rhythms just wouldn’t walk the walk for us— or, it would be a bit like telling someone you’re funny instead of telling them a joke.
The end of Sprint is the only milestone that matters
- This works in rhythm with each individual project, not on an arbitrary monthly basis or similar
- The end of a Sprint occurs when insights are captured, not when the activities are finished
- Though outputs will be created along the way, our focus is on the outcome and specifically, how it informs the next Sprint of work
- The end of Sprint milestone is when funds are disbursed
Livestreaming
There’s a reason our project is called Frontier Technology Livestreaming. That’s because we will have a live stream of stories published about the projects, sharing our challenges, lessons and achievements.
The end of each Sprint also marks the moment where teams are invited to share a direct live stream into the project. So make sure you follow our Publication here on Medium for news from the projects and teams in the coming weeks.
