What is the most prevalent approach to strategy in your chosen area of practice? (or SoI) with which you may be familiar?
- SCRUM - The starting point of the whole process is a business problem declared in the form of a statement of work (SoW). It is usually a text-based document describing the overarching business strategy or vision and a set of objectives that the project is meant to achieve. This document, or set of documents, is used to guide the conversations with the Product Owner and the SMEs (subject matter experts). The result is a high-level list of requirements (Epics) which is then prioritised and decomposed into user stories.
To what extent is this compatible with the SODA approach?
- There are situations whereby the SoW is very broad or where the mandate to the project is to define or explore best possible alternatives for achieving the vision or overarching strategy. In these situations, which are not uncommon, SODA-related mapping exercises could be used to clearly define and collectively agree the list of objectives and their priorities. This output would be used to seed the SCRUM process and increase the probability that the outcomes/deliverables would be in agreement with what the organisation requires.