The Rocketship Files IX: Define ways of working & communications (keeping Rocketships on the flight path)

Setting out your ways of working will help keep missions on track and create clarity for anyone who will work with crews. We share our approach to designing ceremonies & artefacts in a scalable, repeatable way.

Introduction to the ‘How to’ blogs

It was important for us to document our approach in a way that could be repeated, so we can minimise the amount of ‘management’ that needs to happen to give Rocketships momentum. The aim is to design ourselves out of the process as much as possible, but this in itself created a large backlog of things that needed to be defined or codified upfront. We gathered our replicable steps into a runbook for crews to navigate their own way through the Rocketship launch process. Although this runbook is specific to us, there are topics that will be applicable to any context. We’re sharing those here.

To launch your own rocketships you will need to;

• Find the problems (Define your missions)
• Pick your fleet (explore Rocketship types)
• Assemble the crew (find the skills needed)
• Define ways of working & communications (keeping Rocketships on the flight path) — You are here

This series of blogs will share our approach to setting ourselves up with repeatable steps, templates, hints & tips that you can use to help you get started. Our ways of working & thinking about Rocketships is emerging & evolving. If you put any of this advice into action we’d love to hear how you get on & how you’ve adapted this approach for your own context.

To skip straight to the templates overview, you can visit our previous post; The Rocketship Files I: Resources

Designing our ceremonies

We’ve set up some key ceremonies that help us manage Rocketships. We’ve tried to keep them as light touch as possible. This blog gives an overview of what those ceremonies are, and shares our step by step approach to identifying our needs & designing our ceremonies.

When considering our needs, we came up with 3 main areas;

• Setting direction — Prioritising & planning future Rocketships
• Delivering — Supporting successful missions
• Measuring & continuous improvement — Understanding our impact & sharing our work

We agreed some overarching principles which shape how the ceremonies are ran;

• Collaborative & inter-connected
• Visible and accessible to crews, leadership & stakeholders
• Owned and happen with regular cadence
• We regularly reflect upon these still meeting the needs of all
• Attended by the people who would get or give the most value

5 ceremonies were born, each with a clear purpose & attendees;

Ideas Refinement

Purpose: Reviewing ideas for potential future Rocketships

Attendees: Rocketship Leadership (Nikola, Lianne & Louis)

• To collate ideas for potential Rocketships from multiple sources
• To describe & document things with ‘rocketship potential’ in a consistent format so they can be easily understood
• To group ideas into ‘themes’

Rocketship Planning

Purpose: Prioritise Rocketships for launch

Attendees: Rocketship Leadership & SLT (CDIO & Director of Digital)

• To prioritise Rocketships against key criteria
• To ensure scope of Rocketships fits the organisation strategy and therefore will be moving us closer to our vision
• Review how previous Rocketships have performed

Launch Planning

Purpose: Detailed planning for successful launches

Attendees: Rocketship Leadership

• Review outputs of Rocketship Planning, and next steps for launch
• To ensure scope is clearly articulated that crews will understand
• Plan for crew / sponsor recruitment
• Review outputs of Pilot’s Forum, agreeing actions in detail
• Update roadmap & discuss impacts

Pilot’s Forum

Purpose: Support Pilots with what they need for a successful mission

Attendees: Rocketship Leadership & Pilots

• Revisit actions from previous meeting
• To raise, own and action risks that can’t be dealt with at crew level
• To review current & proposed crews / people needs
• To review current & proposed fleet / delivery models
• To review how we’re doing against our objectives. Where are our successes, and where might we need to give more support
• To look at data to identify themes
• To summarise those themes for the continuous improvement backlog
• Check in on regular communications

Rocketship Showcase

Purpose: Show what we’ve been working on

Attendees: Whole organisation

• To seek feedback from interested people
• To find connections between the work
• To celebrate our successes and what we’ve learnt!
• To create a bigger sense of cohesion and partnership with our people

Finding flow

The ceremonies should flow to ensure we’re having the right conversations at the right time. They support decision making, planning & risk management. We fitted ours together as illustrated below, and used this flow to inform the scheduling & frequency of meetings.

Designing our artefacts

We defined 11 artefacts needed to support communication, planning, decision making & working in the open. These were connected to the 3 main needs; setting direction, delivering, measuring & continuous improvement, plus an additional need for comms. We’ve described these below;

• Organisation strategy & priorities — Provided by the organisation. It’s important we understand where we’re going & why so that we can align ourselves with organisational strategy and therefore communicate clear purpose & value of our missions
• Ideas backlog — A consistent way of collating & describing ideas for Rocketships so they can be prioritised. People can see where their ideas are in the workflow.
• Rocketship Roadmap — Crews can see what others are working on. Leadership & Stakeholders can see what’s being delivered, when it’s likely to be done and celebrate success
• Risk & Action Log — Tracking high-level risks & issues that crews can’t manage themselves
• Crew Plan — Showing current, future & past crews as a recruitment & celebration tool (our Hall of Fame!)
• Data Dashboard — Understanding if we’re moving closer to where we want to be. We don’t currently have this in place as we need to define what universal metrics we can measure that are applicable to the wide variety of Rocketships we’re launching
• Continuous Improvement Backlog — Capturing lessons learnt & ideas for improvement
• Intranet — Sharing our work & artefacts openly within the organisation
• Rocketship Broadcast — Providing frequent updates from crews and Rocketship Leadership. Building organisational memory & engagement
• Rocketship Runbook — Documenting our repeatable, scalable process for setting up crews for successful missions. It’s essentially a fill-in-the-blanks workbook that crews complete. It covers most of the activities on our Templates Miro, with a few extra treats and guided activities
• External blog — You are here

We’ve condensed multiple artefacts into single documents (e.g. combining risks & actions with continuous improvements), but we’ve presented them as single things in this blog as they meet distinct needs.

You can explore them in more detail on our Miro.

Fitting it together

The ceremonies, artefacts & people fit together in a lovely flowing, quarterly cycle. Like all good agile plans, this looks simple & tidy on the illustration, but in reality we find ourselves jumping into adhoc conversations as needs arise. We might have mentioned that we’re still figuring this out as Rocketships mature and are embedded within out organisation, but for now our ways of working come together to look like this.

The outputs of ceremonies become the inputs of the following ceremonies. Artefacts flow from one meeting to the next to try and reduce the need for creating bespoke documents for a particular user group. They’re stored in a visible, open place (our intranet), and we use our retros to reflect on whether they’re still meeting our needs.

HOW TO: Design your ways of working

You can find the Miro templates for this activity here

What?

Ways of working should support the needs that you have. Craft your ceremonies, artefacts & communication flow around these needs.

How?

We’ve shared our approach within this frame. You are free to use it as is, or pick & choose what to reuse & tweak. We’re really interested to see how Rocketships work for others, so please share your findings with us

STEP 1 — Explore your needs — Start here to understand what you require from ways of working, and ensure whatever you design can be linked to a clear purpose.

STEP 2 — Describe ceremonies — What ceremonies do you need to help meet your needs? Can they meet more than one need? Explore the purpose of each of these, remembering that they might have different audiences.

STEP 3 — Find the flow — Ceremonies should fit together so you have the information you need, when you need it. How does the flow of communication, decision making or artefacts support you? Are there principles that apply to each ceremony?

STEP 4 — Explore artefacts — Artefacts can be excellent communication tools, helping people to self-serve & maintaining organisational memory. What might you need to support communications, planning & decision making?

STEP 5 — Fit it together — Create a high level map fitting all of your thinking together. This will help people navigate your ways of working, as well as assisting with rollout and implementation.

STEP 6 — Consider communications — Think about what questions you’ll need to answer, who needs to know the answers? How can you communicate with them in a clear way? What needs to be in place?

This is a series of posts over the next few months. Read all chapters here https://medium.com/rocketships

The Rocketship Files are a collaborative initiative by Lianne Mellor, Nikola Goger and Louis Allgood.