Every project needs a project vision: the reason the team is working on this project.
When you define the project's value early in the project, the more the project team is likely to tell you whether the project makes sense--or whether you're starting an impossible project. If you can't articulate the vision, chances are good that you're starting on an impossible project, because there's no way to end a project with no vision. A useful vision is compelling to the project team. And it helps the team make decisions about what's in or out of the project.
Here's how you create the project vision:
1. Define who the primary customers of the project are. They could be the mass market, existing customers, new customers, or a specific market segment.
2. Define the one major focus of the project. This could be a specific feature, or the general approach. If you're new to agile and you're starting a pilot project, you might want to say, "Use agile techniques to see how to adapt them here." A project doesn't focus on five things; it focuses on one overall vision. If your project requirements are too broad to encompass in one vision statement, maybe your project is really a program. A project has one deliverable. A program has one overall deliverable and is composed of sub-projects, each of which has a deliverable.
3. Write as much as you need to, and then edit until you're down to two to four sentences. If your vision is longer than four sentences, you haven't described the project focus yet.
Here's how I do this. With the project team, we decide who the primary customers of the project are. Now, if I know the major focus, I explain it. Otherwise we try to define it together. Now, as individuals, we write our sentences, on stickies. We post them on the wall, and read them out loud, seeing which sentences make sense. We choose sentences and edit. Once we're down to no more than 4 sentences, we are done.
If you're on a project without a vision, stop right now. Take 30 minutes, define it, and get back to the project work. The whole team will benefit, as will your customers.
