Why should we fill in "Progress & Next Steps"?

Here's why it's a good practice to routinely update the "Progress & Next Steps" fields on your Blueprinter project home page.

It's best practice for your team to meet on a regular basis... every week or every other week. These can be short meetings, something the "agile" world refers to as "scrum meetings"... with fast moving "sprints" in between. When you do this, your team maintains strong forward momentum and moves the Blueprinting process along much faster.

Every time you have a meeting, make sure someone does a quick update of the "Progress" and "Next Steps" fields on your Blueprinter project's home page. This helps in several ways:

• Recording "Next Steps" together as a team is an excellent discipline, because writing this down ensures agreement on "who will do what by when."
• If a team member misses a meeting, they can quickly get up-to-speed by reading these sections.
• Is your project set to be "Tracked / Visible to Executives" at your project's Menu > Project Settings? If it is, your business leaders will be able to open up your project to this home page... and they'll be expecting to see a current update.
• New product development is a learning process for your company. By recording your steps as you go, future teams can review your work and learn from it.
• If this is your first project and you're getting coaching from AIM or an internal Blue Belt, your Progress and Next Steps entries will automatically flow to their Coach Home Page... which helps them keep abreast of your work when they support you.

Keywords: progress, next steps, Blueprinter home page, team meetings, agile, scrum, sprint, coach home page, project updates, project meetings, visible to executives, tracked