The Organization’s Wish List

Keeping an inventory of ideas and wishes for your organization can make you incredibly focused.

I am a big proponent of keeping lists. They help us focus because we know that everything that needs to be done is captured some place and we can be reminded of all those items in an instant (just go take a look at the list). The same goes for organizations, there are lots of ideas and things that we would like to do, but can't all at the same time. These ideas and actions need to be captured in what I call The Organization's Wish List (TOWL).

The idea of keeping the TOWL came to me through the intersection between the concepts of Brainstorming and Scrum (an agile project management methodology).

• Brainstorming: to get the most out of your brainstorming session, the group should throw out as many ideas as possible. Don't care about the quality of the ideas, just keeping putting them down. What you end up with is a list of everything possible, reasonable, impossible, and unreasonable at this time.
• Scrum: Scrum is an agile project management methodology introduced by Ken Schwaber. It primarily related to software development initiatives, but I use its best practices and principles in management consulting. The key concept that relates to TOWL is one of a Product Backlog. The goal is to keep an inventory of everything that needs to be done and add to the list as new items come up.

At an organizational level, keeping the TOWL provides the following benefits:

• Keep track of your organization's ideas at a centralized place.
• Create an opening for management and employees to engage.
• Promote creative thinking and problem solving within your organization.
• Allow for an optimal use of an organization's resources – during the ebbs and flows of workload, resources can be directed to work on a TOWL idea. This helps build and maintain momentum.

The bottom-line is to keep your pipeline of ideas open and manage that pipeline as your business development and sales pipeline. You never know when the tide changes direction and you may have to consider new ways of doing business.