Results Triangle

Short description
When you deliver a result, you have to balance quality, time and scope. The ideal is high quality, on time and within budget. Learn to balance and prioritize how you deliver.

Exercise type: Short exercise

A short exercise takes 30 minutes or less. They typically address one specific element of a topic. You can use them in your meeting, at the start of your day with your team. We have written them to be fun, easy interventions.

When to use this exercise?

In many situations, you cannot deliver perfectly on quality, time and scope at the same time. You have to choose or prioritize.

Have a discussion with your team about what you prefer, versus what your customer needs most. And how can you balance all the demands? Would you choose higher quality, but a later delivery date? Is the increased quality worth the extra budget? Can you deliver half the scope (the most important half, of course) at top quality and still be fast? Or do you need the full scope at high speed, and accept a lower quality?

How does it work?

Step 1: Look back at the last six months. To get the conversation started, reflect on the last ~6 months and how you made trade-offs before. Why did you make them? And what feedback did you get from your customer (or manager)?

Step 2: Draw your success triangle and your challenge triangle. Draw two triangles on flipcharts. At each corner of the success triangle (quality, time, scope), write examples of past deliverables where you managed that dimension really well. Then fill the challenge triangle with deliverables you were not happy with, or found challenging.

Step 3: Pick the examples that stand out. If you gather a lot of examples, ask each team member to pick 3 that stand out and are typical for the team.

Step 4: Reflect together. Time to reflect! Are you unconsciously natural perfectionists who always prioritize quality? Is that the right thing to do? Do you always deliver on time, but put quality at risk? Do you deliver on quality, but not within budget or with a larger scope than planned?

Step 5: Agree how you want to deliver. Agree as a team on how you can and want to deliver differently. And what you need to do to balance your imperfections, or work well with your blind spots. This is an important conversation! Capture the results on your team page.

What do you need to get started?

Two flipcharts and markers. A list of deliverables or achievements from the last 6 months can help, but is not necessary.

EXTRA TIPS

Balance positives and negatives. Make sure this doesn't become a negative-only session. Keep it light and fun! Focus on what you can improve, more than on what didn't go perfectly yet.

For some teams, cost or budget is an important dimension as well. You can turn the triangle into a square, or put cost/budget next to the scope corner.

This exercise is for:

Team size: 2 to 13+
Team development phase: Norming, Performing
Difficulty: Easy
Duration: 30 min

Related Tools in teambooster.app

You can find these related tools, and many more, in the Teambooster App. Go to teambooster.app, create a free account and explore if it's something for your team as well.

Source: Exercise written by Teambooster. The delivery triangle is a well-known model, but its original author is unknown to us. We learned it from one of our clients.