Key Distinction · 03
Complete Work
A task completed as it was intended, from beginning to end — until one customer is successfully using it.
Delivering Complete Work is the key to performance at CRS.
A simple example: an engineer has completed a feature as described and has tested it locally. While this is a milestone, this is not Complete Work. To understand the Complete Work distinction, you have to go back to what the original intention of this work was.
The intention of this work was not the technical completion of the feature, even if that was done to the requester’s full satisfaction. The actual intention of this work was to get this new feature into the hands of a customer, working as needed.
Complete Work is doing something as it was intended — which is distinctly different than how it may have been originally communicated.
In our previous example, Complete Work could have included: documentation for marketing, sales training on go-to-market, the feature having proper production-ready monitoring, and one customer using the feature successfully.
That is Complete Work.
¶The Burndown List
The Burndown List is a fundamental tool in the World of Performance. Most companies will provide you with a range of project management tools. At CRS, all you get is a sheet of paper.
The Burndown List finds its adjacent origins in the burndown chart generally found in the Agile project management community — a visual graph showing the remaining work versus time. The Burndown List is our name for a sheet of paper outlining the critical tasks needed to get from Point A (where we are now) to Point B (where we intend to be).
Format your Burndown Lists this way:
- A defined Owner, who…
- Leads with an Intention
- Followed up with Demonstrated By criteria
- A jobs-to-be-done list
- Where jobs are assigned
- Held together by a series of By Whens
Build your own burndown list
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