Taking a discovery driven approach to internal projects

The first step of discovery driven planning lies in specifying what success looks like. For for-profit projects, this usually takes the form of a level of growth or enhanced profitability. But there are many kinds of projects that don’t have such a clearly defined outcome — this article addresses those.

Technical debt and transformational projects

As I have written about elsewhere, many large scale digital projects are created with the intention of transforming something significant about the business. Their success leads not so much to profits or growth directly, but rather builds new organizational capabilities that may be essential to remaining in business at all. As with new ventures, many such projects entail a significant amount of uncertainty, meaning that the goal of planning for them involves reducing what I call the assumption : knowledge ratio. A similar process as discovery driven planning for a new business can be followed.

Of particular interest are projects which are intended to reduce “technical debt.” This is the cost of having to work on code that may have been built to save time, but which can’t cope with the demands of running at scale; or otherwise code that really needed to be brought up to date but which people have been putting off because the current system sort of works, and they don’t want to incur the cost of making upgrades.

Where to start: What would success look like?