In my previous post I talked about Communication failures and now I want to look at “over scoping”, particularly as it pertains to setting your daily work agenda.
Over scoping was as term I used a lot previously when I was involved in my role as a “pivotal provider” (a term someone invented for the person or team who liaised between a customer onshore and a development team offshore). We used it a lot because at that time (around 2000) as project-based offshore development was becoming popular there was a temptation by customers, as a result of the lower day rate, to try and cram more and more features into applications. Our job was to try and push back the scope to the core requirements and ensure we didn’t start with a functional specification that was going to lead to a massive deliverable. This approach generally came out of a desire to ship a version one of the project or program with everything in it in order to demonstrate why this project should be funded and delivered.
However, it seems to me to be creeping into the wider world of work as a result of people trying to ensure they as an individual are seen as critical to the future health of the business and become indispensable to the organisation they work for. Rather than focus on incremental, bite-sized, valuable collections of activities people look for and try to define grand, strategic, immeasurable bloated roles. Then fail to deliver on them.
Seems like “strategy” is the one title everyone wants and actually what your co-workers and team mates want is strategic execution, not long-term airy-fairy futurism. This means you must understand and return to the epicentre of your role and build back from there. In their book REWORK (buy it) the team from 37Signals talk about the term “finding your epicentre” in regards to business startup. On their blog they talk about it like this:
Epicenter Design involves focusing in on the true essence of the page (the “epicenter”) and then building outwards. This means not starting with the navigation/tabs, or the footer, or the colors, or the sidebar, or the logo, etc. It means starting with the part of the page that, if changed or removed, would change the entire purpose of the page. That’s the epicenter.
That’s a real challenge when applied to a role in the workplace: What thing (or things) that if I stopped doing would the entire purpose of my role disappear and the ability to serve my organisation cease.
This is what I’m focused on today because I lost sight of it. Finding my role’s epicentre, pulling back on the rest and executing (not talking) against that core.