Excellence Through Clarity and Simplicity

Agile Journey

For the past two years, my team and I have adopted agile development methods to execute complex R&D projects in biotechnology.

We ditched traditional Gantt charts for Scrum, looking for ways to navigate the uncertain landscapes of our projects more effectively.

The switch wasn’t capricious; it was a survival move. Ineffectiveness was causing us to go over budget and overwork to meet deadlines and deliverables.

Scrum’s knowledge discovery cycles were a beacon, guiding us through the turbulence of unpredictability, enabling us to deliver more value to clients and generate more intellectual property for our company.

We still have to improve, though. Despite being overworked, our unfinished stories are piling up, and we’re not seeing the expected increase in productivity. It’s frustrating, to say the least.

Search for Excellence

The room for improvement has led me to the question: “what it means to be excellent”?

In the context of our work and Scrum, excellence implies creating value for our clients and our company while improving productivity. For our clients, value comes in the form of problem-solving and value proposition, while for our company, value is tied to the creation of new know-how and intellectual property.

But did you know that a disheartening 80% of knowledge, our main product, typically goes undocumented, depending on unreliable memories and people to exist?

Documentation is crucial not just for process but for preserving that knowledge itself, ensuring it is comprehensive, accurate, and easily accessible. Yet, there’s an ongoing struggle to find the right balance – the perfect granularity of documentation.

Curtains of Clarity

While granularity poses the challenge of what should be said to whom, to what depth, clarity is about saying it in a way that people will understand. It becomes a roadblock on our path to excellence when our goals, roles, processes, or even the project’s vision are not clearly understood, which leads to inefficiencies. Scientists, in their quest for precision, sometimes sacrifice clarity, creating roadblocks to understanding and communication within the team. The Pareto principle can offer guidance here, suggesting that a significant portion of our value can be created by focusing on a small but crucial set of tasks. The challenge lies in clearly communicating these tasks so everyone understands where their efforts should be directed.

Simplify

This is where simplicity enters the fray. As proposed by Occam’s razor, the simplest solution is often the right one. By peeling back unnecessary complexities, we can expose the core of our work, improving clarity and fostering excellence. However, it’s important to remember that Occam’s razor isn’t a mandate to oversimplify. Nature, as the razor reminds us, is as simple as possible, but not simpler. The challenge is to simplify to the point where processes are clear, efficient, and effective, but not so much that they lose their meaning or utility. By constantly asking ourselves, “How can I simplify this?” we inch closer to clarity, and consequently, to excellence.