Learn the right lessons from your mistakes of 2023...

Good morning,

If your good resolution this year is to never make this mistake again (but if, you know, the famous mistake that cost you three months of late delivery on a project, and endless discussions with your professions)... then you are in the right place.

To get off to a good start in 2024, we suggest that you focus on the mistakes we continued to make in 2023: prioritizing the wrong projects to launch, neglecting the tools used, not involving the professions enough...

A short trip to the past is necessary to see the brighter future, and launch your business transformation projects properly in 2024!

On the program today:
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💡 The challenge of the month : how to make the various projects to be launched prioritize for businesses who always want to do everything, right away.
🔥 The lesson to remember : a method to learn (good) lessons from mistakes made in the past.
🔩 AirSaaS news : a look back at the Airsaas Expert Bootcamp, which is taking place right now - Spoiler Alert: we are delighted!

🎧 No time for reading?
In the subway, in the car, or in the middle of a jog, Listen to episode 85 of CIO Revolution. An episode 100% dedicated to the OKR framework, with one of the most famous experts on the subject in France: Laurent Morisseau, author of Kanban for IT and The OKR toolbox. A golden opportunity for us to dive into the heart of this method, which makes it possible to cause profound changes in organizations, in their culture, and in the way they govern their project portfolios.

When you go to see your jobs to align yourself with them, it's often the same tune: they want to start everything, right away! No matter how hard you think about the priorities to be given to their various projects, you always run up against their difficulty in projecting into the involvement they should have in the process.

And yet, the involvement of professionals is crucial to move your projects forward, but also to ensure that you create deliverables that will be really useful for end users... What should you do?

Our position : Make them project themselves into their real capacity to be involved in the projects they propose. Instead of assuming that they won't be able to devote time to it, ask them clearly what resources (human and temporal) they could devote to this project in the coming months.

Very often, they will see for themselves that they will not be able to take full responsibility for all the projects they dream of right away, and will have only one solution: to prioritize with you.

• Businesses will never accept this process! They want to launch their projects at all costs, even if they don't have time to take care of them afterwards... so the discussions will go round and round.
• One cannot trust the good faith of the trades... If they really want to push a project, they are capable of overestimating (voluntarily or unintentionally) their capacity for involvement.

• This trick allows for real leverage. The fact of co-building with them the time available over the next quarter by Build helps them understand the operational weight they have, versus their desire to change everything. It's a good first step in prioritizing.
• Involving the professions also means taking into consideration their own constraints. So you might as well do it at the stage of the discussion. Yes: no transformation without real collaboration.

📚 The must-read of our blog
This month, join me on one of my latest LinkedIn posts, where I decipher the sacrosanct triptych of business transformation in a very simple way: Process + People + Tool. A real method to inspire you to diagnose what you could do better to transform your organization more effectively. It's happening here. And if you want to, why not follow me on the social network, to participate in the debate?

“Who controls the past controls the future.”

No, we did not suddenly decide to turn this newsletter into a collection of quotations. But if we chose this one, by the famous novelist Aldous Huxley, it's because it perfectly illustrates our lesson to remember this month.

Make a list of all the initiatives of the projects you launched in 2023, and observe which ones did not succeed, that made you fall behind the others, or that should not have been launched last year. You have the past in front of you - and there are invaluable lessons in it.

By analyzing what went wrong in these projects (process, tools, tools, resources, organization...), you will discover the keys to better choose the projects to launch in 2024. No more wasting your budget on projects that will not see the light of day, that are useless, or that were not a priority! You are faced with an ROI analysis to present to your CEO the next time a discussion on the priorities to be given to future projects arises.

Since January 16, the first Airsaas Expert Bootcamp has been taking place - and everyone is thrilled! It must be said that the concept is great: twenty independent CIOs and PMOs meet in six 1.5-hour sessions, first by video and then in person at the beginning of February, to explain their use of Airsaas, according to their different contexts.

Result? Practical-practical exchanges, inspiring feedback, and a summary of enriching use cases, which will end in apotheosis on February 8 around a convivial dinner.

Are you tempted? Stay in the area: we'll be organizing another session soon. You can even register here, to be kept informed about the next bootcamp.

This month, it is Cécile Dijoux, Lean Agile coach, who inspires us, in this very comprehensive article where he focuses his Lean lens on the productivity of software development teams.

Are you still wondering how to measure the productivity of an agile team or program, and how to use this productivity to drive the development of the skills of your employees? The author gives you an overview of what this can give, in a very concrete article. Exciting.

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See you next month!

The AirSaaS 💙 team