07.
The Daily Bookend

Daily Rhythm That Operationalizes Commitment and Boundaries

It's hard to lose when projects finish on time. It's not clients that cause delays in the average project, it's technical debt. Plainly, that means we could have had a conversation earlier to iron out the creases we're now seeing, but we didn't want to. When projects take longer than they should it's because innumerable small assumptions, unasked questions, and exclusions in communication were all tolerated. If we want to avoid big delays we need to avoid the small ones, or at least manage them.

"Delays in feedback loops can mask important, often critical, system information and system dynamics. Management must be aware of the delays."

— Simple_Complexity by William Donaldson

This is why we use the smallest reasonable unit of measurement — a day — to measure progress against our plans for projects:

1. We review today's commitments across all active projects each morning
2. We end each day by reviewing the delivery of each commitment for that day, to ourselves, our teammates, and our clients

What this accomplishes:

• We replace surveillance with trust. By confirming what we can expect today, then measuring the result against the expectation, we create a simple repeating cadence that signals to your team what the standard is. You trust them to get their work done without micromanagement
• We create professional excellence during work hours. When you're at work we expect 100% and less than that is below our standard
• We separate work from life. When we say go home and enjoy yourself, we mean it. Outside of emergencies, no one will contact you about work out of hours
• We make scaling possible. The approach provides clarity, whether we have one or 20 projects. And if things are hectic with 6 people delivering 12 projects, imagine the stress of doubling both those numbers