> <i>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.</i><p>Uh-oh, sounds like a big company already. The phrase "is held accountable" is in the passive voice.<p>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 <i>being held accountable</i>, 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?
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:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.
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.<p>(ie: setting the iteration for a fixed length of time, ideally freezing the features in the sprint, post sprint review, etc).<p>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.
> 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.<p>This is going to sound like a rant - please take it as free advice and worth every penny.<p>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.<p>You don't need people who deal with the processes of scaling or building out. You need source control tools.<p>Everything that is repeatable is automatable. Anything being done for the first time is a human's domain.<p>Everything else is either scripted and so zero marginal cost or is an anchor on your profitability.<p>I can really recommend this book <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Race-Against-The-Machine-ebook/dp/B005WTR4ZI/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.co.uk/Race-Against-The-Machine-ebook/dp/B0...</a>