Lean Inception Toolkit
Inceptions help teams achieve better outcomes. This Lean Inception Toolkit provides tools and patterns for the facilitation of inceptions.
I a nut-shell Inceptions answer there questions:
- Alignment on ‘where we want to be’
- Understanding of where we are
- Definition of how we get there
and ensure that in order to be successful we have everything we need in place.
While the set of activities to get to these answers can be quite elaborate and highly contextual, this toolkit is a perfect starting point for most inceptions.
Inception toolkit
This free toolkit enables teams to efficiently and effectively plan and design inceptions. It provides a blueprint, agenda, template and guidance ensuring that the inception covers all must have aspects and has a good ‘narrative’. It is also highly adaptable, so that teams can easily adapt and tailor, to make this truly their own…
Inceptions: What, why and how?
Presentation
It's all about you
What the toolkit includes
This toolkit of includes
- a playbook with guidance notes and advise on how to prep, design, plan and execute lean inceptions
- the lean inception blueprint and agenda as starting point for design and planning
- a (Miro) workshop template that our teams use to facilitate the various workshop sessions
It's all about you
Contextual
While there is a generic pattern, a narrative all inceptions follow, the type of questions, the activities and the way we facilitate these are highly contextual to each inception: they depend on the challenge at hand, type of project, context and the people involved, their culture and experience.
This toolkit provides a starting point and together with the Inception Playbook instructions to how to tailor and adapt to craft the inception your initiative needs.
Working at pace
Lean & Agile
It is very important that we don’t mistake inceptions for an excuse to get into a Big-Design-Up-Front anti-pattern. Instead, inceptions must follow lean and agile best practices, i.e. doing ‘just as much as is needed, just at the right point in time’ to mitigate risks and provide context and actionable insights, while not preventing future agility and flexibility or waste.
Inceptions also need follow agile principles to allow us to adapt to change as we learn and context around us changes, during the inception but also afterwards during implementation.
This template, if well facilitated, will strongly impress and enable these best practices.
Creating momentum
Actionable outcomes
There is always a risk with workshops of this type that they result in profound-sounding nothing-ness whereby we spend 5 days in workshops but are still none the wiser on how to proceed. This template and related facilitation advise focus teams on creating actionable insights, in some cases, in fact start to action certain activities already during the inception, so that teams cannot only hit the ground running, but do so with confidence and at sustainable pace.
How does the blueprint work?
1
Prep
It all starts with the brief which is the basis for design of our inception, and based on which you enter a phase of set-up, design and planning.
Important: Don’t engage in an inception if the brief is vague or you are not confident in its validity (you should be in a discovery in that case). Neither underestimated nor compromise on planning!
Especially Lean: Be explicit about what the inception is supposed to do (usually to jump start delivery).
2
Kick-off
Commence the inception with a kick off session during which a senior stakeholder set’s the scene, outlines goals and re-iterates the relevance. Introductions should be part of this, as well as an agenda walkthrough and an explanation of ways of working during the inception.
Important: Scene setting, alignment and instilling a sense of urgency is of utmost importance.
Especially Lean: Make sure all participants understand and buy-into lean and agile ways of working.
3
Goals
We start with understanding and aligning on where we want to be. We look at vision and goals, and the underlying strategic drivers, i.e. the reasons for the problem or the opportunity.
There is also an early opportunity to start looking at project risks.
There is also an early opportunity to start looking at project risks.
Important: In an Inception we only validate vision, and refine goals at the level of our initiative. If we cannot express these, or they do not make sense you should consider going back to a discovery: you may not have a valid reason to ‘do’ the initiative.
Especially Lean: Goals are a must. You may get away without the rest.
For additional guidance, consult the Lean Inception Toolkit Guidance document.
4
Context
Shared context ensures we are talking about the same thing and can make informed decisions.
To understand the building blocks that make our business landscape we can use the Business Model Canvas, to understand the specifics of our domain (be this process, product or technology) we create a context model. We can use both to model (reverse-engineer an existing domain or model a new target state. Or both to show evolution). We will want to understand who the people we are impacting or who may impact us are and how to interact with them. Finally, and maybe most importantly, we need to understand who our users are, what they desire and how we can delivery a valuable end to end experience.
To understand the building blocks that make our business landscape we can use the Business Model Canvas, to understand the specifics of our domain (be this process, product or technology) we create a context model. We can use both to model (reverse-engineer an existing domain or model a new target state. Or both to show evolution). We will want to understand who the people we are impacting or who may impact us are and how to interact with them. Finally, and maybe most importantly, we need to understand who our users are, what they desire and how we can delivery a valuable end to end experience.
Important: Do not skip this step, even if business stakeholders think this is all known and obvious. I bet, it isn’t.
Especially Lean: As a minimum you need an end-to-end expression of all building blocks that affect your initiative. This may mean all these artefacts, or, you may get away with an existing architecture diagram and a user story m map created in the next step. Your stakeholder map and user needs could simply be bulleted list. Use the business model canvas to design or re-verse engineer a business.
For additional guidance, consult the Lean Inception Toolkit Guidance document.
5
Solution
Here is where we start looking at the future solution. We devise features and document and prioritise them in a Featuremap. Dependent on where you are and what you need to elicit, you may consider service blueprints, user journeys, mock-ups, early wireframes. Whatever helps to ideate and illustrate a potential solution. Dependent on your project you will also want to think about non functional requirements, technical architecture, tech stack and how our path to production and infrastructure looks like. Dependent on our domain we may need to express as-is and or the to-be state.
Important: Don’t go too deep at this stage. We are working at logical level, and breadth over depth. But do cover the high risk, high complexity areas. I have worked with teams who were playing small stories for tech exploration or risk-evaluation as part of this.
Especially Lean: We certainly will want an idea of the solution shape, of potential scope, and featuremaps are great for this. If you are working in an existing domain, non functional requirements, architecture, stack, infrastructure and path to production may exist and remain unchanged, so as long as you have validated that this is the case, there may very little to do on these aspects.
For additional guidance, consult the Lean Inception Toolkit Guidance document.
6
Delivery
Finally, we need to decide on how we are going to deliver the initiative. It is important that we understand dependencies, risks and agree on our ways of working. Setting up a framework for decision making, i.e. the principles you apply for prioritisation and for making trade-offs is also valuable. Ultimately will want a ‘plan’ of sorts, at this point a roadmap (for which we will have to do some high level estimation) and may want an Epic level backlog and maybe Stories for the first sprint. May teams I worked with ended an inception with very clear next steps, sometimes in form of a Sprint0 backlog to action right away.
Important: This is agile, not waterfall. So provide a best-guestimate roadmap, not a plan, but allow your team the time and freedom to estimate. Focus more on risks and dependencies, because these are likely trip you up. Ensure you have your ways of working agreed and with that, ensured team and resource availability.
Especially Lean: the most important output of this stage is a concrete plan of action of what to do next.
For additional guidance, consult the Lean Inception Toolkit Guidance document.
7
Wrap-up
Collate insights, derive recommendations on whether/how to proceed, form a basis from which to proceed at pace. Also do
- a showcase to the inception team and possibly senior management or even the wider organisation
- a retrospective / lessons learned session for continuous improvement of the next inception.
Important: Don’t loose momentum between the last workshop and when you start delivery.
Especially Lean: Make this all about actionable next step.
For additional guidance, consult the Lean Inception Toolkit Guidance document.
Inception Introduction
Conference Talk + Presentation Deck
This is where you might want to start, an introduction with case-study examples of what inceptions are, how they unfold, and how to do them…
Inception Playbook
A detailed description of how to design, plan and run inceptions, covering the overall flow, collaboration&visualisation tools&techniques and facilitation methods.
Tools playbook
Over the last decade, the lean / agile community has created a large number of tools and techniques to solve day to day problems. While these tools may be quite specific, e.g. defining vision, goals or business models, modelling context or scope, managing risks or stakeholders, they ultimately all help us manage complexity, share context and collaborate and communicate effectively.
This playbook provides 1-page recipes and templates we find most helpful in day to day use across all disciplines.
This playbook provides 1-page recipes and templates we find most helpful in day to day use across all disciplines.
Want to know more?
Here are a number of additional resources that you might find interesting…
Get in touch
We’d love to hear from you if you want to chat about an opportunity or challenge we might be able to help you with, if you want to work with or for us, or if you fancy chat to exchange thoughts.
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