Project Templates to Help Teams Collaborate

Travel Lightly and Make a Big Impact

By Ryan Fullmer

April 5, 2022 

When Projects Fail to Make Progress

When teams are having recycled conversations and revisiting past decisions, it’s difficult to gain momentum and they fail to make progress. It’s a frustrating situation. Teams might try to get unstuck by moving forward without enough information in hopes of “figuring it out later” or over-analyzing the situation to “understand all the details first”. The teams either head off in the wrong direction or take too long to get anything done.

Traveling Light

There is a principle that comes from Extreme Programming (XP) called Travel Light. Traveling light means that the team has just enough documentation to do the work, while staying focused on their primary goal of delivering software solutions to the customer. You can think of this more broadly as “travel light and make a big impact”. From this broader perspective, the principle means the team creates just enough information and shared understanding to move forward while staying focused on achieving their outcomes. In this way, the principle applies to all teams and contexts.

As leaders, we can help our teams improve the way they are having discussions and conducting their meetings. When teams make their interactions more engaging, visual and collaborative, real progress can be achieved.

Visual Tools and Templates for Teams

Teams need simple tools, templates and approaches to travel light and make a big impact. The tools need to be visual, easy to grasp, invite collaboration and be easy to update and iterate upon. The approaches need to provide just enough structure to have effective discussions while remaining flexible and open enough for creativity.

The teams need tools and approaches that support them end-to-end. That is, they are broad enough to support discovery conversations to understand the why, sort through different solutions options and develop a strategy, define and plan the work and get feedback from what is delivered.

Start Experimenting

If you are interested in trying out this approach for yourself, download our guide, “Use Discovery to Focus Your Agile Teams on Solving the Right Problems". We provide you with an approach for facilitating a collaborative discovery meeting and a tool to use during the meeting to get clear on the why before doing the work to deliver the solution.