Playbook Process Guidelines Level 1

1. Playbook Process Guidelines Level 1 The main cause of late projects is the daily slip of the schedule due to having incorrect priorities. Delays also occur when the person on the critical path is blocked or unavailable. It’s obvious, every day you don’t work on the critical path (pink task) the schedule gets one day longer. What’s not obvious is how much this adds up. A simple formula to remember is that if you have incorrect priorities half the time, your project timeline doubles. Fortunately, Playbook is very good at correctly determining priorities. But it does take a little bit of input from everyone. However, the input required from the Team Members is just a few minutes per day, plus an additional plan review every week or two with the Project Manager. That relatively small amount of effort has a huge payback in terms of getting projects done sooner. This guide is an overview of the roles involved, what they’re each responsible for, why it matters, and how to do it. Here’s to working smarter, not harder! Playbook creates flow for fast product development teams. Collaboration becomes barrier free. Teams hold themselves accountable. And innovation becomes predictable.

3. Level 1 The goal is simple. Make sure the Team Members have correct priorities each day! All that’s required is a plan with a Major Milestone (MM). Playbook will determine the critical path, and the slack of every task connected to that MM. Obviously, the more accurate the plan, the more accurate the task priorities will be. But any plan is better than no plan. And a good plan isn’t that difficult to create and maintain if the Team Members and Project Managers each follow a few simple steps.

4. Level 1 Level 1 maturity requires four simple steps: create a plan, have standups, update your tasks, and do rolling wave planning. The following tables summarize these.

5. Level 1 – Step 1 Build a good baseline plan • Tasks are linked to the appropriate successors and ultimately the appropriate major milestone. • Tasks include estimates for total work in addition to duration and are 50/50 or best case assuming no multitasking. • Major milestones have appropriately sized buffers. • All tasks are assigned to a single resource/owner (or a department). • Structure is clear, with no tasks too deeply buried, and everyone can easily navigate to find what they need. • Use templates and other best practices to save people time building and maintaining workstreams, and keep things consistent for all consumers of the information. • The people assigned to the tasks understand the meaning of their tasks. Generally, this requires in-person discussion, either in a collaborative plan-development/review meeting or 1-on-1 discussions with the involved people, where the relevant tasks are on the screen. • Check resource loading and level the plans/resources (the critical and near-critical resources at least).

6. Level 1 – Step 2 Update active tasks daily • Be sure that you don’t have pink or orange tasks in your backlog that are queued and ready to be started. • Scheduled tasks for tomorrow to show what you plan to work on making sure you’re not overbooked. • Tasks on yesterday and today should accurately reflect what was done. • Scheduled tasks should have an accurate end date. • Close the Day check box to indicate your tasks are up to date! • That’s it! In less than five minutes per day your part of the plan is up to date and you’re ready for the next standup. You can go home!

7. Level 1 – Step 3Huddle every 1-3 days • Goal is to keep the project flowing smoothly and to avoid unnecessary, avoidable delays: • Ensure everyone’s priorities are clear and correct - everyone is working on the right things at the right time which helps minimize multitasking and resource overloading. • Ensure handoffs are smooth, especially between the critical resources. • Identify blockages and ensure help is provided to eliminate them, especially for the critical resources, to keep the project flowing smoothly • Identify actionable, queued, tasks that are waiting in the backlog and find ways to get them started as early as possible, especially critical tasks. • Use the Huddle view for large integrated project teams. • Use the My Playbook view for highly matrixed teams and projects. • Open the Game Plan split screen and show Slack in Game Plan and in the calendar. • Avoid making changes to tasks - owners are responsible to do it outside the meeting.

8. Level 1 – Step 4 Update future plans weekly • Individuals: • Move out-of-date tasks to the right and delete invalid tasks. • Add detail to near-term plans where the detail doesn’t exist yet. • Review changes/plan with any affected resources. Get feedback to improve the plan. • Review resource loading (at least critical and near-critical resources) and level any overloads.

9. Level 1 – Step 5 Review & improve plans weekly • Team: • Assess recent buffer usage. Review timelines for ‘what changed’. Capture reasons for delay and implement corrective & preventative actions to minimize delay the present and future projects. • Assess the critical chain for improvement ideas. Identify risks to the critical chain that don’t already have mitigation plans. Assign risk owners. • Review resource loading (at least critical and near-critical resources) and level any overloads