Andrea Jones explains the "structure" pillar of Executagility — a lightweight, repeatable project framework to help organizations execute priority projects. She presumes teams have alignment (what/why/who), available time, and competence, and then prescribes an agile cadence: a planning meeting to define the quarter's definition of done and list tasks, two-week sprints with daily 15-minute standups, a 30-minute biweekly review (showcase), and a team-only retrospective to improve process. Roles are explicit: sponsor (oversight), project manager (organizer/facilitator), and cross-functional team members. Time guidance: project managers ~8–10 hours per project (roughly 10 hours/week in earlier guidance), team members ~5–10 hours/week; one PM can handle about two projects part-time. The cycle repeats each sprint until the quarter's definition of done is met.
Questions this video answers
Two weeks
15 minutes
30 minutes
About 8–10 hours per project (approx. 10 hours/week earlier in the talk)
About 5–10 hours per week for team members
Chapters
Hi, I'm Andrea Jones and today we are talking about structure within executagility. So again, execute agility is your organization's ability to execute your most important projects consistently over time. There are four pillars in executagility and we've already talked about three of them. We've talked about alignment, we've talked about the what people are doing, knowing why that's the important thing to do. What, when? Right now, this quarter, and who is responsible as a sponsor, project manager and team. We talked about available time, all three of those different roles, and what it takes to do that project work on top of their normal day job to get you from here to there. Talks about competence and their technical skills so that they can definitely get that work done and what it means to make sure that's true. And now we're going to talk about structure. Because you got all three of these, you still don't want your team wasting time on how to get organized and who's doing what and roles, responsibilities and tracking those tasks and tracking their results and all of those things. Let's put in a quick structure, a lightweight, agile structure that gives you all the results you need with none of the overhead burden. You don't. Okay, so here's what that means to us. Remember, you've prioritized. Here's your list. You've got project 1, 2, 3, 4, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You figured out why you're doing what you're doing. You've got some criteria. These are all highs. You're doing this and you're doing this. Let's just say, okay, now you know who the sponsor is, the project manager is who the team is for each of these things. They all have the amount of time that's necessary to do this work, about, you know, 10 hours a week for the project manager and five to 10 for the team and sponsor 0 sue. They're competent to do it or they've got enough time or motivation to figure out how to do the work. So let's pull the team together. Okay, let's call this Project one. And here's what we do. We kick off with a planning meeting. The project manager says, hey guys, we got to get this work done. This is the definition of done, what we're trying to get done at the end of this quarter, right? Q and definition of done. And in order to get there, what are the tasks required? So they start listening their tasks, and with the project manager, they're facilitating. Okay, what's like the first Test the second. Let's put them in sequence, right? And we may not know every single discrete task to last us an entire quarter. That's 12 weeks. But all we really need to worry about is the next two weeks because we're going to do a sprint. So let's say we've got our tasks out to N and the team is now saying, well, I think we can do these 10, right, and you've got person A, person B, person A, C, B, whatever. They're specifically allocated and to each person. And this team says they can do this. They commit to those tasks in the next two weeks. Two weeks only. We call it a sprint. Every day, 15 minutes virtually. So it's real quick. Team gets together and the project manager said, hey, you know those 10 tasks, what'd you get done yesterday? What are you doing today? And do you have any roadblocks or barriers to getting that work done? Work accelerates the pace you meet. This is just the way it is with cross functional, especially teams. That means people that are coming from accounting and procurement and sales or operations, new different groups. They need one person in charge, that's the project manager, so they know who's organizing the show here and they can then say, all right, well I got this done that I need to meet with so and so, or I was on hold with such and such when I called the vendor or whatever and they can bring up any escalations. The project manager will then say, great, I can help you with some of those. Or maybe I'm escalating something to the sponsor, but 15 minutes tops, if it needs to go over that, then the project manager will call a secondary conversation with only the relevant people. Okay, so every two weeks, let's say in this case we said we committed to 10 things and they got eight done. That means that they were 80% accurate. If they committed to 10 and they got 12 done, you know they were still around 80% accurate. You really want to be accurate so that your company can allocate the amount of work or the definition of done that makes sense. This will get better over time and that's 100%. Okay, but here you know exactly what things weren't done. And after you Showcase this every two weeks in a 30 minute review, which is again online, project manager puts together the review. It's very straightforward. Everybody just says, I got this done, I got that done. Here's the problems I encountered and what we're going to put back on our list or our backlog for next. Sprint sponsor watches this. The Team's there, the project manager's there, and anybody else that maybe is peers of the team or other managers, Right? That way, it's a training session every two weeks you get some things done. And now everybody sees exactly what's been done and what they need to do about it too. It's just an inherent communication channel and a training management system as well. It's actually super great for bringing people together and creating camaraderie tends to really go well. Then we kick out everybody but the team and the PM kick out even the sponsor. And they do what we call a retro or retrospective. And in this conversation, this is super important because what they say is, hey, we got eight things done, how can we do better next time? Right? Or we got 12 things done, how could we be more accurate? Should we commit to more next time around? So in the retro, they talk about how to improve the process itself. In that way, it gets better every time, and there's no expectation of perfection. That way people don't feel like they're being held to some unattainable measure, but they themselves get to say, well, we could do this, we could try that. And they commit also to some improvements. And then they go back to their planning. Okay, now we've gotten these eight things done. We're going to keep going on our list, you know, out to whatever they might have to add some things, even insert a resequence. You. Then they commit to the next set of things and start in the next week for two more weeks. They do it again, they do the review again, they do the retrospective again, they do improvements again over and over until the end of the quarter. And they hopefully are at the definition of done. But if they're not, we know exactly what still needs to be done. We've got a list of improvements to try and be better. We've been escalating any problems over time so that we are getting better and better over time. And soon enough, you'll find you can accelerate your pace and you can take on more things at the same time, or you can accelerate the amount of work that's being done and the definition of done within an individual quarter. And this is how this thing compounds in perpetuity. So exciting. The last thing I really, really need to touch on here is this project management role. Said this before, the project management role is about eight to 10 hours per project. That means one project manager can handle about two. In halftime hours, you could get someone with an amazing experience in education and background, terrific project manager, maybe even a former consultant or a stay at home mom or someone who's quasi retired that you think still has tons to offer. Super savvy. They could run these projects in part time hours for you. You can insource that person. You don't have to get someone brand new. And now you have your own little fractional project management office using Execute agility in your own company. I couldn't be more excited about this. This is what my consulting firm has done for almost 20 years and we are now teaching other people how to do it themselves. All right, we'll talk about more of that a little bit in an overview wrap up, but thank you so much for listening to this structured conversation.
