Project Poster

Project posters are split into three parts to support the evolution of your project:

• Problem space: Explain why solving this problem matters to your customers and to the business. Get clear on your project goals and possible solutions.

• Validation: Identify knowledge gaps and risks. What do you know, and what do you need to find out? 

• Ready to make it: Visualize the solution, and put a project plan into place.

You don’t need to complete the entire poster at once. As you work through each section, link off to other project artifacts, or note other Plays you might run, like DACI, Experience Canvas, Trade-offs, etc.

Schedule 60 minutes with your team for the first session to focus on defining the problem and setting your project goals. Collect and share relevant information in advance, like notes from user testing, analytics, customer feedback, market research, etc.

Start the first session by sharing the project poster template with instructions.

Lead your team through the questions in the template, starting with the problem space: the reason the project exists. It should include just enough detail that someone outside your team can understand why you're considering this initiative and what your project goals are.

Try to reach a consensus on each section before moving on to the next. If you reach a stalemate or team members have wildly different ideas, take the time to discuss them. If you can't come to an agreement, someone from the team should take on a follow-up task to gather more information and share it with the whole team.

Ultimately, the project's full-time owner (i.e., the project manager) or executive sponsor may have to resolve differences of opinion by simply making a call on which direction to go.

Note:

You'll probably revisit your problem space several times before you're ready to execute. As feedback from sponsors and stakeholders comes in, teams often find they haven’t been asking the right questions or haven’t met customer needs. You might also find that your assumptions weren’t exactly spot-on. That’s ok!

The more feedback you can get on your problem space, the better. Ask stakeholders, higher-ups, and anyone else you think has good insights to leave comments directly in your collaborative document, such as your Confluence page. This way, you’ll have all their thoughts in one place, plus a written record to check on as you progress. 

Defining the problem space will force you to make assumptions that need to be validated so your team and sponsors are confident in the solution.

The answers to the “validation” questions on the poster may initially seem like a to-do list. However, as the project moves along and you record your findings here, the poster provides an overview of your validation efforts and the information you've gathered.  

Your research should confirm (or disprove) the potential solution and its relative priority before you go any further. If you can't do this, you may need to revisit the problem space or brainstorm more solutions to consider.

Don't get discouraged! For massive projects, it can take weeks, or even months, to work through. As your research progresses, update this section with summaries of what you've found and links to supporting documentation. 

This section will be empty when you first create the project poster, and you'll fill it in as you reach conclusions about which solution to pursue, an idealized vision of what you'll deliver, and what it'll take to deliver it. 

This section is where your project plan will come into focus. Involving multiple team members with diverse skill sets in answering the "ready to make it" questions helps ensure you capture all aspects of what you'll deliver and develop a shared understanding.

This document is your project’s guiding light, so make sure everyone can see it as they get to work!

You may not complete the entire project poster in one session. To keep working on it, schedule follow-up sessions with your team. In future sessions, start by briefly reviewing progress and/or what's changed since the last meeting.

Also, be sure to re-group with your team after you get significant feedback from stakeholders. Depending on the size of your project, the number of project goals you have, and the number of stakeholders who provide feedback, you may need to schedule several follow-up sessions. That’s totally okay—it’s more important to get things done right than to get them done quickly.