Customer Obsessed Delivery Playbook: Index

Welcome to the Customer Obsessed Delivery Playbook. As a paid subscriber, you have full access to all of the playbook and resources from this index page.

The playbook is an approach to the design and delivery of software. It’s a technique for making sure customer value is identified, protected, and realized throughout delivery. No customer misunderstandings or disappointments. As pointed out in the playbook introduction, it’s been vetted and proven with hundreds of clients. It’s a mature approach to design and delivery that will raise your, your team’s and your organization’s maturity dramatically. Most importantly, it will enable you to delight your customers.

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Navigating the playbook

The playbook is divided into four sections or phases. These phases correspond to major breaks in the software development lifecycle.

Following is a brief description of each phase:

  1. Mobilization. Activities conducted in the run-up to a project, such as team selection, onboarding, kickoff calls, and problem space analysis.

  2. Blueprinting. Implementation of overarching architectural designs, and establishing a target state architecture.

  3. Delivery. Creating detailed technical specifications, engineering work, and building a product increment that is ready for production.

  4. Operations. Ensuring security and compliance is “fit-for-purpose,” delivering the product increment, and capturing feedback into the design process of future increments.

Across the four phases are 28 distinct functional areas. Each functional area addresses a key step in the design and delivery lifecycle. Each step depends on the output of previous steps, and generates inputs for downstream steps.

FREE PREVIEW: For a preview, check out chapter 2.2 Roadmaps & OKRs. The complete playbook has over 32 full chapters, plus supporting articles, project templates, and references!

Reading the “subway map”

The playbook is visually represented in the following “subway map.” As you can see from the map, there’s a flow that progresses from early stage activities (Mobilization) to later stage activities (Delivery, and Operations).

Refer back to the subway map if you need to know where you are in the flow. The map also helps clarify what inputs are needed at each activity, and what outputs you will produce in a given step.

Customer Obsessed Delivery Playbook subway map. Courtesy of Boss Logic LLC.

For example, if you are at the “strategic event storming” subway stop, the map shows us that you’ll need a product vision, roadmaps, and OKRs before proceeding. It also shows that the next activity will be either domain modeling or target state architecture. (In fact, you can parallelize and do both at the same time).

The getting started chapter provides details on how to read and follow the subway map.

Execution tends to be fairly linear, despite the branches in the map. Each chapter of the playbook will make it clear where you are, and what activities follow on from there.

Using the playbook

If you’re new to the Delivery Playbook, start by reading 12 reason to level up your team with a delivery playbook, an introduction to the playbook. From there, I’d recommend reading through each chapter more-or-less in sequence.

If you’ve been using the playbook for a while now, you’ll likely want to treat the following chapters as reference material. I strongly recommend making it “required reading” for your entire team, so everyone is on the same page. You’ll find the subway map an excellent reminder of flow, and each chapter will give you the context you need during delivery.

You’ll want to bookmark the Chapter Index below so that you have a quick link to the subway map, and each individual chapter.


Chapter Index

The playbook is divided into six chapters: An Introduction, four chapters about the playbook phases, Mobilization, Blueprinting, Delivery, and Operations, and a References chapter. The four playbook chapters have numbered sections for easy reference. A glossary of terms is in the References chapter.

Introduction

If you’re new to the Delivery Playbook, start here. The chapters below provide an overview of the playbook, and how it benefits you, your team, and your organization.

Mobilization

Activities conducted in the run-up to a project, such as team selection, onboarding, kickoff calls, and problem space analysis.

Blueprinting

Implementation of overarching architectural designs, and establishing a target state architecture.

Delivery

Creating detailed technical specifications, engineering work, and building a product increment that is ready for production.

Operations

Ensuring security and compliance is “fit-for-purpose,” delivering a product increment, and capturing feedback into the design process of future increments.

References


Publication details

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