The Rocketship Files VI: Find the Problems (Define your missions)

Sharing our approach to identifying high impact, cross-cutting missions within our organisation. Including replicable steps & templates you can use to do the same in your context.

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

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

The Rocketship Files VI: Find the Problems (Define your missions)

Listening to the organisation

You might already have a clear idea of the problems within your organisation that have ‘Rocketship potential’ and meet the principles of Rocketships, but it’s useful to verify these via a funnel to avoid siloed thinking.

By listening to the organisation, you’ll be able to find the truly cross-cutting problems that excite people. When finding our own backlog, we listened in various layers;

• You — Start with yourself. What are the pain points that you feel on a regular basis. What are the things that you wish you could fix if you had a magic wand? Are there some basics that could be fixed if only someone had the time dedicated to solve them?
• Peers — Are there things that you know are duplicated with you and your peers? Can you find people with the same or similar role to you and listen to their challenges? (we share a process for this later in this blog)
• Communities — How can you listen to wider communities about the things they want to solve? These could be professions, areas, roles or something else. Are there existing meetups, survey results or ways of listening that could create a source of challenges to be solved?
• Strategy — Reflect on your organisational strategy. Are there themes that can be used as prompts? What could stand in the way of delivering on the strategy? Is there anything that could happen now to ensure future success?

Following a period of listening & synthesising, you’re ready to create your first backlog. It’s important that you balance the need to listen across silos with the energy to move Rocketships forward. Organisations are large & complex, don’t aim for completeness with your backlog building. Listen enough to have confidence that you have a few good places to start that feel like they’re cross-cutting. The backlog building process will be continuous on your Rocketship journey.

HOW TO: Creating a Backlog

You can find the Miro templates for this activity here

What?

You’ll need a way of making visible all the current & potential improvement initiatives from across your organisation.

How?

How you create your backlog will depend on multiple factors within your organisation; profession / organisation maturity, readiness of other collaborators to get involved, visibility of current & future issues / initiatives, trusting relationships etc. Below are the steps we followed to begin our Rocketship backlog, they might help inspire your own approach

STEP 1 — Share Backlogs — Starting with the Heads of Profession team, we shared the profession’s backlogs using the BACKLOG TEMPLATE (see image below). These are things that communities of practice may be working on, or leaders of professions may have on their minds.

Example structure for sharing the things that are happening within each profession — Template is available on the Miro

STEP 2 — Theme Sort — Come together as a group to share back your completed templates & sort into common themes — Is there any duplication? Are there common outcomes being sought?

STEP 3 — Refine Tickets — It’s likely things will be written at different levels of detail. Can these be broken down or expanded upon into distinct, small enough initiatives? These can be visualised as layers within the themes, or you can use the ROCKETSHIP SUMMARY TEMPLATE (see image below) to describe them in a way that anyone can understand.

Example structure for summarising a Rocketship idea, aligned with wider organisation strategic aims — Template is available on the Miro

STEP 4 — Stretching your ideas — If you feel like there are gaps, or you’re struggling to identify energising ideas, use something like Lotus Blossoms

Example Lotus Blossom template used for stretching ideas and expanding beyond the initial thought — Template is available on the Miro

STEP 5 — Roadmap — It may feel right to make a high level roadmap. Perhaps some things are time-sensitive and would need to happen sooner than others, or you have dependencies that need to be made explicit. You can use a roadmap to show in-flight & future work

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.