I was fielding complaints about slowness in the UX team’s contribution to projects until I started talking to the people I support about this concept. Turns out it is good for anyone who works on a team, anyone who works with others.
When starting on or working on a project, I expect everyone to:
- come to a project with a plan,
- share and negotiate that plan, and
- be conspicuous in fulfilling that plan, by
- regularly offering work-in-progress for discussion (there’s no such thing as “not ready to look at yet”),
- regularly offering the status of current work,
- regularly predicting when the current activity will be done,
- allowing for the renegotiation of the plan, and
- offering modifications to the plan as project or business conditions change (active renegotiation).
You’ll note that the default mode here is active – actively planning, actively sharing, actively predicting, actively responding to change.