How we use Method Grid (at Method Grid!) | Part 4 | Ideas capture and strategic plan prioritisation - Blog

As described in the first blog of this series, from our earliest days here at Method Grid HQ, we recognised that the more we used our own solution (took our own medicine) the better we would understand the feedback we received from our user community.

It is probably fair to say in the early days that this was a somewhat forced, contrived behaviour i.e. we were using the solution to handle aspects it was not optimised for. Now, however, we can hand-on-heart say that we would really struggle to run our business – and connect our team – without own own application at the heart of it.

In this Art of Gridding blog series, therefore, the aim is to describe the multiple ways we use the solution – with the hope that it initiates further ideas as to how you can derive even greater value from your own accounts.

How we use Method Grid …. here at Method Grid HQ

By way of summary – we use Method Grid for (at least) the following:

To deliver structured service methods/projects to our clients (Methodology playbooks)
As a (connected team) weekly task progress list (Kanban board)
To coordinate our fortnightly product development sprints (Kanban board)
To capture our ideas (and bug fixes) (Kanban board)
Strategic plan prioritisation and allocation (Prioritisation matrix)
Staff Induction (Induction playbook)
Team Summit agenda planning (Event grid)
Sales Playbook (Capability playbook)
Repetitive monthly process (e.g. month-end financial close) (Procedural elements)
Marketing Initiatives (Kanban board)

You can read the previous example blogs via the links above.

This blog post focuses on the next two examples …

04 To capture our ideas (and bug fixes) (Kanban board)

Another Kanban board type adaption that we harness is a grid for all of those brilliant ideas we receive from our user community (new feature suggestions etc.) and all those annoying bug-glitch fixes that accumulate with any developed product.

The best place to hold all of these for constant review and prioritisation re-ordering?

You’ve guessed it.

Our “Ideas and Bugs” grid.

Each element can capture a wealth of information and resource on a specific idea or bug; with regular team discussion, these elements are drag-dropped to our current assessment of priority order. Visual ownership and bespoke element labelling further helps with the sense of future task categorisation.

05 Strategic plan prioritisation and allocation (Prioritisation matrix)

We recently undertook a major strategic review of the commercial aspects of our business – how we position our product, market segment targeting, pricing, sales operations etc.

It was a major piece of work – the kind of “very important internal review” that most businesses need to go through periodically.

As the Method Grid team coalesced around the recommendations, so discussion led to all the work-package items needed to actually bring this new strategy to life: some forty plus!

The perfect way to then facilitate the exercise of prioritising these work tasks was to gather around a prioritisation grid (large screen) at a recent team summit.

A prioritisation grid (available as a template in the Method Grid store) is effectively an X (priority/benefit) axis by a Y (cost/effort/complexity) axis – in our example, five columns (low to high priority) and five rows (low to high complexity).

You can find out more about this type of grid template here.

Each element (work package) was assigned a lead-owner and then – with discussion – moved to the appropriate column/row grid “cell” in this grid. Discussion notes were captured in the actual work-package elements. We used element label colouring to describe the type of work involved.

The resultant, sorted grid is now a rich capture of our prioritised strategic plan – and also the reference point for our weekly team-to-task calls – such that we can start chipping away at the work in a logical order.

Of course, we are now able to use this same grid as a project/task management enabler – with a colour-labelling rule (turn completed elements green) in place to indicate how far through this strategic effort we are.

Next up in the series … we will look at: 06 Staff Induction

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So there you have it.

A couple more of our core use case scenarios.

We are clearly at the more mature end of solution use (indeed, we were the platform’s first ever users!) but, hopefully, this gives a flavour of the breadth of benefits that can be derived once the intuitive (connected team) features are fully harnessed.

Hopefully, this series has given you one or two new examples.

As always, we love hearing about all such innovative grids and real-world user stories so please just drop us a line if you would like to feature in a future “Art of Gridding” blog.

Happy gridding.