Learning Launch        challenge        I am the project manager of a digital agency dealing with twenty to thirty projects on monthly  basis. Our services consist of website design and all sorts of online marketing campaigns. A  while after I started in my position, I noticed significant changes in the quality of work from  month to month. The fluctuation has been more dramatic in the case of online campaigns.  Imagine a social media campaign with monthly reports full of ups and downs in their various  metrics. The outcome also has had a dependency on the person who was taking care of the  tasks. The difference in outcomes was some times dramatic, making it sometimes so hard to  maintain the business with some clients. My challenge has been to make sure we overcome the  fluctuating quality of work as quickly as possible. My goal is to understand what is exactly wrong  with the system not working smoothly and to find possible tested solutions to enhance the  consistency of the quality of work delivered to the client.        Selection        My initial hypothesis was that the team members are not having the same understanding of  tasks and associated processes. This understanding was constructed out of spot checks and  conversations with different team members (e.g. copywriters). To test this hypothesis, I decided  to go for the learning launch as the tool. Learning launch is basically a controlled and quick  experiment with the idea in the real context to see whether or not the idea has a potential to  grow. I decided to go for a real-life and time-boxed experiment to see how the results will  change if we enhance our understanding of the definitions of tasks and the steps with need to  take to accomplish them.        Application        Typically, the planning for each project was done once by the previous project manager. Each  month the manager would pass the title of tasks with a brief description to team members. The

team members had do finalise the tasks within the given time individually. For example, the  copywriters would receive orders for specific tasks of various clients. Being time-boxed the team  could not go over the limits. Therefore they used the most accessible knowledge about the task  and rush into doing it before the time is up. They would have tried to copy the processes from  each other and stick to personal takes of their peers on how to do things. For the first learning  launch, I asked all different teams (e.g. copywriters, social media experts, etc.) to sit together  and plan the month collectively. They needed to read the existing strategies and collectively  come up with a list of tasks and steps to accomplish the tasks. We have used Trello for this  experiment and used ‘boards’ to separate the projects, and ‘cards’ to separate the tasks. I made  sure everyone is involved with the conversations and all the projects are being discussed. We  spent almost 2 days to take care of all projects’ tasks. The team was told not to be perfectionist.  The goal was to get to a minimum viable definition of tasks.        Insight    During the learning launch, I have interacted with the team and the leadership, facilitated  conversations, observed the behaviours and in some cases resolved the conflicts between the  team members. It was visible that the team became more aware of the issues with their  understanding of the tasks. We also identified tremendous lack of processes. It was interesting  to see how much conversation were created. While everyone was pretty confident about what  they were doing, it became visible to everyone that there were many undiscussed subjects. At  the end of the first experiment, I could hear many positive comments on how positive and  eye-opener the practice was. It was also interesting to see how our very silent team members  started to express themselves after a while. The transparency created by this practice in the first  run was so impressive too. The leadership gave me the opportunity to repeat the learning  launch for 2 more months to see how we can learn from it and see if we can restructure our  production processes based on the outcomes.         Approach    Our first learning launch worked very well when it comes to both meeting the goal of the  experiment and opening new windows to work more productively to the team. We tested the  hypothesis successfully and somehow validated it by finding people on the same page  regarding the definition of tasks and the steps the team needed to take to accomplish them. The  learning launch will be used for a few iteration untill we get to some stable practices and  process. I am considering having other tools (e.g. mind mapping) involved soon.

