No Rush

Questions of the week:??Why are we not rushing to the next checkpoint of Scorecard Day, and won't it reduce our chances of hitting our goal by the end of the year?

I write this article based on the insight of my conversation with my team in our monthly 1-on-1 call. I speak with each one of my team members. This article is to share the question of this week and our method to work on it. You can subscribe to the Building Our Team newsletter (2800+ subscribers)

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Why are we not rushing to the next checkpoint of Scorecard Day, and won't it reduce our chances of hitting our goal by the end of the year?

For new members, Scorecard Day is our year's theme. Its goal is to complete a scorecard with 25 distinct cards with the help of 16 team members in 1 business day. Clients will provide us with the data, and we will build the scorecard in a day.

This is a step towards creating an innovative process; we picked the method from lean manufacturing. We do a one-day weekly iteration for the whole year, and to take baby steps, we have three checkpoints: Starter (about 6 cards), Simple (about 16?cards) and Standard Scorecards (about 39 cards).

When we started iterating using Starter Scorecard with Zero automation, it took us about 4 hours to complete. It blew the minds of many to see what an autonomous team (group of people who manage themselves with minimal supervision and interference) could build if it worked towards a common objective using a system. Others were surprised that it was all done using Zero meetings and Zero errors were produced.

This breakthrough alone is good enough to identify parts of our business that are most valuable to our clients and can be transformed into systems that can produce outcomes even faster. Stop doing or start saying no to deliverables that don't delight our clients.

Doing this alone would help us grow 10X and let back this with evidence. Before we started, I took the survey from the team, and the most common answer was 4 weeks, which means 160 hours and, let's say, instead of 4 hours, we take 16 hours, aka 2 days, to complete a Simple Scorecard (2nd Checkpoint). Its 10X

Many of you would be tired of me talking about this like a broken record. However, it is important to understand the process that got us the breakthrough, which will also give us the breakthrough of creating a scorecard for a client who will pay us.

Thus it is important to remember to go back and relive your transformation from a naysayer to a gogetter.

Now that the context is set Let's see how this innovation growth curve will work for us. It's known as the ?S-curve pattern (Google it to find some images). Imagine a flat line slowing the rising step and converting again into a flat line. Remember my previous post about the 5X growth we had at 73bit; now it is almost a flat line, and when we click with another idea like pricing on story points instead of billing our time we will see another 5X or 10X growth.

My bet is that Scorecard Day is one such idea in the making.

Once we add all possible automation, the team develops and converts the 2-level merging process into an automated 1-step process, bringing the time to create a starter scorecard to 30 minutes (currently between 60 and 100 minutes).

We would be able to see the following magic.

Prep work - The top ten performers of the scorecard team will take a week (1 Me day) to set a dummy simple scorecard and source data. Including formulas, card components, data points etc

• Week 1 -?(1 Me day) will be dedicated to delegating (All members) the missing documentation and formulas, testing parts of automation to identify the gaps, and creating a list of missing documentation and assets. The most important is deciding how many cards out of 16 in a simple scorecard can be completed in 1 Me day.
• Week 2 - (1 Me day): Complete the decided cards from the previous week and be ready with complete documentation for next week.
• Week 3 - (1 Me day) Finish up pending work, checks and reviews. Conduct the Scorecard Day in the following Friday with an incomplete but working Simple Scorecard to test out all documentation and components at work. Find the issues and fix them on the scorecard day after you complete it.

Repeat the above 3-step process till the Simple Scorecard is completed.

It took us 5 months to reach 60-100 minutes to complete the Starter scorecard, but if we set up better automation and documentation processes on top of it, it should take a lot less to test out Simple Scorecard.

Since we will be using the same

1. Automation tools
2. Source Data Structure
3. Documentation Method
4. Formula Formatting
5. Chart structures
6. Card Components
7. SOP
8. and more

In the case of the Simple Scorecard, we will go directly from manual to automation, thus skipping multiple interim steps like Instructional SOP, formula formation, copy-paste of fields, manual chart setup, Chart HTML instead of components, etc. Avoiding more manual Scorecard Days.

We will not reinvent the wheel and build automation from the get-go

The above is not a thoroughly thought-through process, but using your creative brain can spark your imagination.

I hope this clarifies for you to see what the transition between the checkpoints will look like and how it will be faster.

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