

The 90 Day Plan - ryancarson
http://ryancarson.com/post/41700372023/the-90-day-plan

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jpdoctor
> _The person who was assigned to an action will report on progress and
> everyone is held accountable. We take minutes so that everyone is held
> accountable for the next monthly Leadership meeting._

Uh-oh, sounds like a big company already. The phrase "is held accountable" is
in the passive voice.

When you have to implement process in order that people "are held
accountable", you are acknowledging that you have a problem: There are people
in the company who would shirk some or all of a task. OK, at 50 people perhaps
it's unavoidable. However, if you need to counteract shirking by _being held
accountable_ , then you really want to switch to the active voice. Where is
the active subject of that sentence? It really wants the active voice. Also:
What happens when someone fails on a task?

~~~
ryancarson
The necessity of holding people accountable is the first thing I learned when
managing folks. As well-intentioned as everyone is, people consistently
deliver on things that they're held accountable for. They ignore things that
you never ask about or measure.

~~~
MattRogish
I find it's better to have a culture where everyone holds each other
accountable on a continuous basis, rather than a privileged few lording over
the rest periodically.

See: Valve, Github, WL Gore and Associates

Not that you can't run a company that way, but you start to introduce too much
overhead for too little gain, and you start to look like the traditional,
highly hierarchical, command-and-control companies. Once you start down that
path, it's really, really difficult to come back.

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dworin
Switching to a 90 day planning cycle was one of the best management approaches
I ever implemented, and helped me get more done in a smaller period than I
ever had before. A few reasons:

1) Shifting from an annual planning process to a 90 day plan lets you try
things out faster and learn from what works and what doesn't. It also keeps
you away from huge initiatives that quickly become boondoggles without
breaking them down into smaller pieces.

2) Once you get to a shorter time horizon, you can get down to specific
actions, rather than broad objectives. In doing so, you can actually verify if
the goal is being accomplished.

3) Most companies struggle with getting one-off project work done at the same
time as their normal day to day jobs. When you have a longer time horizon,
people don't spend more time on the project, they just wait until the last
minute to get it done. So the further off you put the last minute, the longer
you're going to wait.

4) You build momentum by ticking things off the organizational to-do list at a
regular clip. Keeping the pace light and fast makes sure things move forward
and don't get bogged down (or if they do, that you can unblock them quickly).

5) This last one might sound simple, but when you write things down, you make
it harder for people to forget to do something, or what was said, or what the
expectation was.

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rpwilcox
Seems like there's a lot of parallels here between a scrum style sprint and
what you're doing, except the iteration is muuuuch longer.

(ie: setting the iteration for a fixed length of time, ideally freezing the
features in the sprint, post sprint review, etc).

One wonders if you could either take more practices from scrum to make this
better (90 days seems like a really long sprint cycle), or if lessons from
your 90DP execution could make your development practices better.

~~~
ryancarson
We had to go with 90 days because it gives us enough time, company-wide, to
execute. Anything shorter and you're constantly changing course and
distracting everyone.

~~~
rpwilcox
Interesting. Might be something to evaluate at the end of the 90DP - sounds
like you are assigning too big tasks and doing waterfall style work. Maybe it
works for these things, but seems to me, "Can we iterate fast enough with a 90
day cycle? How could be cut that in half for the next iteration?" would be my
first retrospective question.

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hipjiveguy
what's that tablet thing that the lady has in the front page video? Looks
cool!

~~~
ryancarson
That's just a post edit graphic ;)

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lifeisstillgood
> As I said, I never went to Business school so I’m now hiring folks who know
> how to scale companies and build out operations.

This is going to sound like a rant - please take it as free advice and worth
every penny.

Don't get me wrong, the folks you hired may well be peaches and we love them.
But the world has changed - Instagram scaled to ridiculous levels with 8
people and no HR department. Build out operations - you mean repeatable
processes right? If they are not already scripts on a server make them so.

You don't need people who deal with the processes of scaling or building out.
You need source control tools.

Everything that is repeatable is automatable. Anything being done for the
first time is a human's domain.

Everything else is either scripted and so zero marginal cost or is an anchor
on your profitability.

I can really recommend this book [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Race-Against-The-
Machine-ebook/dp/B0...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Race-Against-The-Machine-
ebook/dp/B005WTR4ZI/)

~~~
ryancarson
I appreciate your comment but I don't think you know what our business is.
We're a school with full-time Teachers. We need to teach more and more content
so we're going to have to scale our Content Team. This isn't a typical SaaS
product with just an app team.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Thank you for your (and jimrhoskins?) considered replies to what re-reading
could have been taken as inflamatory.

I think I worried about the trauma of copying BigCo culture - I like
Treehouse's approach and hoped I could put up a warning flag.

Having said all that, good luck.

