Design Sprint

For leaders who have a clear decision to make but need a workable plan before committing people or budget.

A Design Sprint usually follows a Discovery Review, but it does not have to. It fits when the direction is agreed and the argument has moved on to how:

• The platform choice is settled, but the migration path and sequence are not.
• Everyone agrees the reporting layer needs rebuilding, and nobody agrees where it should start.
• An artificial intelligence (AI) use case has been approved in principle and now needs a shape that can be governed.
• A vendor has proposed an approach and you need an independent design to compare it against.

The goal may be agreed, but the scope, choices and ownership are not yet clear enough to act on. Plans that stay at the level of intent get re-litigated at every step, because the trade-offs were never written down and the people who have to live with them were never asked.

Rory works through the options with you and the people who will own the result. Each option is tested against the constraints you actually have, being the systems in place, the skills on hand and the appetite for change, rather than against a reference architecture.

Where the honest answer is a smaller plan than the one you came in with, that is what gets documented.

• The preferred path, with the alternatives recorded: including why they were not chosen, so the decision survives a change of personnel.
• Ownership: who is accountable for each part, named rather than implied.
• The first delivery steps: sequenced, with the acceptance checks that tell you each one is genuinely done.

Time with the people who own the systems and the people who will use the result. A Design Sprint depends on the second group being in the room; a plan designed only with platform owners tends to be a plan that gets worked around later.

If the decision itself is still open, start with a Discovery Review. Designing a path to a destination you have not chosen is expensive. If the plan already exists and is agreed, and what you need is someone to build it, a Delivery Sprint is the better fit.