ARTICLE
Creating a Shared Technology Project Vision
Your nonprofit is taking on a new technology project. You think you have a pretty good understanding of what’s important to your organization…but are you sure? And do others in your organization have the same understanding? Misunderstandings here can really trip you up. If you get halfway through the project only to find out that others were aiming in a somewhat different direction, you may have a lot of rework to do.
If your team is actually on the same page, it’s a fairly quick process to confirm that and move on. If this takes more discussion and time… well, it’s important to spend that time up front so you don’t spend way more time trying to repair your project down the road.
A Quick Vision Definition Process
A quick process: with your stakeholders, define your goals, audience, the audience’s goals, and the constraints for your project.
What questions should you answer to create a shared vision?
Who are the organizational stakeholders for the project? Who should be involved in the project—in decision making, brainstorming, and helping you understand how relevant processes are currently done? Identify a way to at least get input, if not representation, from all the departments and types of employees that will be affected.
Who is the Vision working group? You may not be able to practically include all your stakeholders in every meeting, but you should create a core committee. These people should be committed to participate in all the conversations and meetings it will take to define the Vision.
How will you get to a decision on the questions below? Your working group should discuss or sign off on 4-8 below. For a small project with few stakeholders, you could simply send them a document with a starting point for all five, have an hour-long conversation to walk through and codify them, and be done. For others, you could have a workshop for each item on the list, or more (see “More Tactics”, below). As a first step, ensure your working group agrees on your approximate process for defining the Vision.
What are the goals? Goals should be things you hope to increase or decrease. For instance, if you’re thinking about your website, “New visual design” is not a goal (that’s a tactic). Goals in this area might be “Increase credibility of the organization” or “visitors can more easily find ways to get help”. These goals might be addressed with a new visual design.
What are your “North Star” goals? You’ll likely identify a lot of goals, but try to approximately rank order them, and identify a few to be your “North Star” for the project. These are the ones that will determine whether or not your project will be at least mostly a success.
Who are the audiences? Who will be impacted by the project? This is anyone who you’re trying to address with a goal, whether internal or external. Be specific; “the general public” is never a useful audience. Try to approximately rank order the audiences.
What are the audience’s goals? This is a very useful question to brainstorm with your working group. For your top several audiences, what do you imagine they would most like to see from your project? Be realistic; for instance, if you have a website with educational programs, your clients are much more likely to be looking for free stuff than be immediately interested in information about a paid certificate program.
What are the constraints? What are the limitations that you’ll need to design around? Budget and timeframe are obvious ones here. It’s important to think about personnel as well—do you need to be able to support the new project within a certain number of staff hours? Are there technology constraints—for instance, is it impractical to change an underlying content management or constituent management system?
If you’re able to get general agreement within the working group on these questions, you’re good to proceed. Define an action plan for the work, and get going!
More Tactics for More Complex Projects
When in doubt, add research. It’s surprising to what degree nearly any kind of additional perspective can help a working team come to agreement.
But what if you get stuck? Or what if you know your stakeholders aren’t going to easily come to agreement via a workshop format? There’s additional tactics that will help, for more complicated projects or ones with more complicated sets of stakeholders. These can be used one-off or together; it’s kind of my “bag of tricks” for defining a vision when things get more complicated.
Interview some audience members. Even a set of four or five interviews with external audience members can help crystallize many of the aspects of the vision. They certainly will inform the definition of audience goals.
Gather internal staff priorities. Putting more staff voices in the mix can also help clarify what’s important for the organization. I’ve had a lot of success with simple “email surveys”— a few questions sent to staff that they can quickly answer and send back. You then analyze the responses for trends to inform goals and audiences.
More research. Audience research, competitive analysis, academic research all help provide clarity when your vision is a bit murky.
Try to define an approximate “Product Vision Statement”. This isn’t quick or easy, but if you’re spinning as to what the goals of the project are, or think you’re likely to, starting with a “vision statement” provides a more top-down approach. I like the fill-in-the-blank approach discussed at the end of this excerpt by the publisher from the book Product Roadmaps Relaunched (the whole book is worth reading).
Create audience personas. Personas are fictitious profiles of the users of your project, which are quite useful as you try to put yourself in other people’s shoes. They’re ideally based on research, but even just creating a quick set from existing knowledge can help people identify realistic audiences.
Create Documentation for Easy Reference
Whatever your precise process is, make sure you end with good documentation that’s quick to refer to. If things go in a strange new direction in the middle of the project, it’s great to be able to refer back to your vision documents. Are you still heading in the direction of those “North Star” goals? Focusing on your core audiences? A quick one-pager of your vision decisions could be the difference between a quick re-adjustment and a lot of expensive rework.