by Janus Boye
Projects are all about implementing something useful and ideally with alignment in the first place. Still, that’s far from what always happen. Planning tends to be static while the world is clearly dynamic and always changing.
Specifically designed to foster creative thinking and deal with high impact changes, David Hobbs has developed the concept of depth scales. These are intended to help you get a project started on the right foot towards useful deliverables and satisfied stakeholders.
Enter depth scales
David presented his concept in our recent member conference call and use the scales of value and difficulty as an example. What you might implement in your project can be more or less valuable and also more or less difficult as shown on the scale below.
You can place the different features and options for your complex project on a scale like this to do dynamic feature planning
The idea is to map out the different options and David has done it in several projects and mostly used it towards the leadership team on the more visionary stuff. As David said in the call: “The detailed stuff shakes out from under that”.
Learn more about depth scales.
To me this was a new concept and it made a great deal of sense, in particular to big projects. I can see how it’s more than 1-pagers, but valuable at early stages of complex website projects.
David has written an introductory blog post on the concept, see Depth Scales: Dynamic Feature Planning.
You can also view the slides (PPT) from the call or enjoy the 30-minute recording from the call below. Towards the end you can hear some great questions from Carrie Hane and Hilary Marsh.
And if you are ready to go out from behind your screen, we naturally cover topics like this in our digital project manager peer groups and you can also meet David at our upcoming Boye 20 Brooklyn conference.