The Rocketship Files VII: Pick your fleet (explore Rocketship types)

Rocketships are an opportunity to experiment with new ways of collaborating (as well as delivering impact), but what ways of working might you want to experiment with? This blog shares our approach.

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

The next 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 VII: Pick your fleet (explore Rocketship types)

What’s a fleet?

Your ‘fleet’ is a menu of ideas of modes of delivery. Imagine you have a space garage filled with different spacecraft. They can all get you into space, but you will want to choose the best one for your particular mission.

Think about the ways of working you want to experiment with in order to have successful missions, this is what becomes your ‘fleet’. This provides future crews with a number of options to consider when preparing a Rocketship for launch.

Exploring modes of delivery

We started with 2 axis (intensity & length of mission) to create our fleet. However you may have different scales you want to consider. We’ve mapped a few early ideas that we want to try (mostly leaning towards short term). Feel free to build off our fleet, or create your own, we’d love to see it!

Crews will choose their own ‘type’ for their Rocketship depending on the scope. This can be used to set clear expectations of how long the mission will be, how much time the Crew will need to dedicate to it (and therefore manage their existing workload & priorities) & manage stakeholder expectations.

Once you’ve selected your type e.g. Hack Day, you can use this to plan key milestones & activities.

Sharing some definitions of our fleet with suggested use cases

• Hack Day — Although the Hack Day itself will be short & intense, this crew will spend some time upfront ensuring the scope is clear & tight enough to be completed within a day. Effort will be spent on creating a structure for the day, and inviting relevant people & subject matter experts depending on what needs to be achieved. This could be a good choice for something with a relatively clear solution, but that needs some problem solving and energy to get the thing done in a day e.g. creating a way of finding learning & development opportunities
• Design Sprint — Intense and held over a few days/week, design sprints are a great way of understanding a problem space (when its not already clear), synthesising lots of information about a complicated process and exploring multiple potential solutions to a problem before narrowing down on something to prototype & test. This could be a good choice for something classed as ‘complicated’ e.g. designing a new triage process
• Swarm — Smaller scale & less intense than the previously described types, a swarm will bring together people to get something done over a short period of time. This might be ideal for those missions that start with someone saying “if I just had a day to put aside, I could get this sorted!”. These are best when the outputs are clear e.g. gathering/writing content for a welcome pack for new starters
• Working Group — This is usually where most profession objectives start. Working groups will be familiar within most organisations, and may be a less radical way of working. Not everything can be achieved in a short intense period of time, so working groups help create & embed change over time. The challenge with this is keeping momentum when working groups member’s priorities inevitably change. A working group could be used to help tackle most challenges, but you need to be comfortable with the longer-lived nature of this way of working, and it taking longer to realise the value from a successful working group mission

You can view our fleet on Miro

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.