Question: What’s a camel?
Answer: A horse designed by a committee.
Sometimes a Project Vision Statement can become clumsy-looking and all-inclusive like a camel, when what is needed is a sleek, powerful racehorse. Using the right tools skillfully can keep your Project Vision Statement thoroughbred thin.
A Guide to the Scrum Body of Knowledge (SBOK™) suggests four tools for the Create Project Vision process: Project Vision Meeting, JAD sessions, SWOT Analysis and Gap Analysis. With some soft skills and reliance on the dozen or more inputs possible for this process, you can keep the statement focused and usable.
The Project Vision Meeting
This meeting pulls together the Program Stakeholders, Program Product Owner, Program Scrum Master and Chief Product Owner or company equivalents. These participants help identify the business context, business requirements and stakeholder expectations in order to develop an effective Project Vision Statement. Scrum believes in closely engaging and collaborating with all business representatives to get their buy-in for the project and to deliver greater value.
JAD Sessions
A Joint Application Design (JAD) Session is a requirements gathering technique. It is a highly structured, facilitated workshop that enables Stakeholders and other decision makers to arrive at a consensus on the scope, objectives and other specifications of the project.
Each session consists of methods for increasing user participation, speeding development and improving specifications. Relevant Program Stakeholders, Program Product Owner, Program Scrum Master and Chief Product Owner often use these sessions to outline and analyze desired business outcomes and focus their vision for the Scrum project.
SWOT Analysis
SWOT is a structured approach to project planning that helps evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats related to a project. This type of analysis helps identify both the internal and the external factors that could impact the project. Strengths and weaknesses are internal factors, whereas opportunities and threats are external factors. Identification of these factors helps stakeholders and decision makers provide direction to the processes, tools and techniques to be used to achieve the project objectives. Conducting a SWOT Analysis allows the early identification of priorities, potential changes and risks.
Gap Analysis
This tool is a technique used to compare the current, actual state with some desired state. In an organization, it involves determining and documenting the difference between current business capabilities and the final desired set of capabilities. A project is normally initiated to bring an organization to the desired state, so conducting a Gap Analysis would help decision makers determine the need for a project. A Gap Analysis can look at current offerings and identify opportunities for products that are lacking in a particular market. Likewise, it can be used to identify missing software functionalities that can be developed into profitable products or services.
The main steps of a Gap Analysis to identify the difference between current business capabilities and the final desired set of capabilities
With these tools, that Project Vision Statement can be the race-winning thoroughbred every company needs.
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