Carl Bruiners Agile / IT Development Consultant

Visions and missions

In many businesses you will often hear people talking about visions and missions

Very often I've heard people refer to both visions and missions being the same, they are not.

A vision is a long term, on the horizon, place you would like to get too, you plan your missions to achieve your vision.

How does this translate into the real world? In Agile terms you could view your vision as being the end objective for your product and your missions could be your theme's, release plans, Sprint plans, etc... (depending on how you do this within your business). For example;

Vision
My vision is that my e-commerce site has more features than another

Missions
To achieve my vision I will need to;
* Build a product search area
* Build a checkout process
* etc....

You will often find that your vision will be determined by the board / senior management (in alignment to the business strategy) and the missions will planned  by the Program Managers, Release Managers, Project Managers, Product Managers, etc... and the execution of these missions by all of the 'doing' staff.

Good leaders (I'll be doing a post about leadership very soon) will form a vision that is 90% achievable and 10% very difficult to achieve, but pushing boundaries, as this will challenge the teams. Leaders, to make this work, put a bonus on the team achieving that additional 10% (depending how generous you feel, and if you run with minimal marketable feature sets (MMFS) then you could use everything below the mmfs line as your bonus targets).

To avoid confusion I wouldn't have visions as part of your project planning (unless your project is on a greater timescale than your companies vision, i.e. the company has a 3 year vision and your project is going to run for 5 years), as a project should really be a mission to help you achieve your business vision.