In my experience it does not go without saying that a project needs a goal. Not a list of acceptance criteria or next steps, but WHY are we doing what’s being asked. It’s staggering how many times I’ve seen entire projects without a clearly defined goal or problem statement, and after 3 months the work was shelved. Management simply shrugged it off as, “That’s business for you – targets move,” when plenty of people on the front line were unsure what the point was and it would’ve taken a 10 min convo with the intended audience to learn that the feature was nowhere in their top 10 and they’ll never use it.
In my experience it does not go without saying that a project needs a goal. Not a list of acceptance criteria or next steps, but WHY are we doing what’s being asked. It’s staggering how many times I’ve seen entire projects without a clearly defined goal or problem statement, and after 3 months the work was shelved. Management simply shrugged it off as, “That’s business for you – targets move,” when plenty of people on the front line were unsure what the point was and it would’ve taken a 10 min convo with the intended audience to learn that the feature was nowhere in their top 10 and they’ll never use it.