1.0 Mobilization (phase 1)

Introduction

Mobilization is the first phase in the playbook. It focuses on getting the team organized, establishing communications channels, and starting your discovery activities. Discovery activities include building a product vision, creating strategic goals, and establishing your product value stream.

Mobilization activities are highlighted in the left portion of the subway map.

There are a total of four activities included in Mobilization. These are:

1. Team mobilization
2. Current state analysis
3. Product vision
4. Business capabilities & functions

Each of these will be covered in the next four chapters of the playbook.

Overall goals

The objective during Mobilization is to set the project up to deliver: assemble the right team, understand the current state and agree on where you’re going. By the end of this phase you’ll have a mobilized team with clear roles and responsibilities, a documented current state, a product vision that pulls everyone toward the same future and concrete business capabilities that define what you’re building.

Discovery here is deliberate, not exhaustive. We’re not designing the product yet — that comes in Blueprinting. We’re establishing the shared understanding and working structure that let design and delivery move quickly later. Time spent mobilizing well pays for itself many times over; skipping it is how teams end up parachuting into projects blind — exactly the failure 1.1 Team mobilization exists to prevent.

A word about quality gates

You may recall from the playbook introduction that all activities have inputs and outputs. These are protected using quality gates. You can think of these as prerequisites you need to have in place before beginning an activity, and we refer to them as our “definition of ready.”

Before we start any of the activities in phase 1 (Mobilization), we need to make sure our definition of ready is met. If we don’t follow our definition of ready, we set ourselves up for failure later. The playbook introduction explains more about quality gates.

Creating impact

The playbook is, more than anything, about creating impact with your customer and delivering reliably and repeatedly. It achieves this by integrating Value Stream Engineering throughout the playbook.

Identifying customer value and preserving it is what Value Stream Engineering is all about. It’s an engineering practice that achieves these outcomes with simple, day-to-day actions. Because it defines day-to-day actions, it has to be integrated into your delivery pipeline from day one and every day thereafter.

You can learn more about creating impact and Value Stream Engineering in this case study: How to create impact with your customer.

Phase 1 quality gate

Mobilization cannot begin until we check off any necessary definition of ready action items. Having clear preconditions establishes a checkpoint in our delivery control process.

If we don’t meet the preconditions, in this case we stop, go back to pre-mobilization, and fix the problem. If you haven’t finished pre-mobilization, you can go back and do that now.

Activity sequence

The four activities in the Mobilization phase are conducted in a linear fashion, one after the other. That’s not always the case with other phases, where branches and parallel activities are possible.

Once you’re ready, kick off your project with the first Mobilization activity:

• 1.1 Team mobilization