Learning Center / The Foundations

Course 1 · Lesson 5 of 5

Naming it

A songwriter needs her publishing statements reconciled and her royalties collected. Written down as "handle royalties", that sentence will produce nothing, forever. Written down properly, it becomes something a person or a system can work, and something she can check on a Tuesday.

Naming is the skill this course has been building towards, and it is mostly mechanical. Six parts, in this order.

One: one owner

A name. Not a team, not a department, not "the office". `Owner: Aisha Bello.` If two people are jointly answerable, neither is, and the outcome will be handled by whoever feels worse about it.

Two: a verb that can be completed

Renewed. Filed. Paid. Confirmed. Signed. Issued. Replaced. Recovered. All of these can finish. Manage, handle, oversee, support, look after, ensure quality cannot. If the sentence would still be true next week with nothing having happened, the verb is wrong.

Three: a trigger and a date

Outcomes run off two kinds of clock. A *trigger* is something happening: a statement arrives, a tenancy ends, a job is delivered. A *date* is a fixed day: the return is due on 31 January.

Most outcomes need both. "When the statement lands, reconcile it within five working days, every quarter" is workable. "Reconcile the statements" is not, because nothing says when it starts.

Four: a finish line somebody could check

Write the test, not the intention. "The tenancy is renewed" is weak. "A signed renewal is on file and the deposit scheme record shows the new term" is checkable by anybody in the office.

Be specific about what counts. A market trader's pitch rent outcome is not "rent is arranged". It is "the pitch is paid for the coming quarter and there is a receipt in the tin".

Five: the evidence

Name the object that proves it happened. The signed agreement. The confirmation number. The receipt. The dated photograph. The log entry. Outcomes without a named artefact drift into folklore, and the folklore is always that it was probably done.

Six: the boundary

Say what the outcome does not include. "The renewal is agreed and filed; chasing the unpaid first instalment is not part of this." Boundaries stop outcomes from growing quietly until one person is holding nine unrelated duties under a single name.

Before and after

• Manage the client renewals.
• Every client agreement is renewed for the following year before its end date, or a decision not to renew is recorded. Trigger: 90 days before the end date. Evidence: signed renewal on file. Owner: the account manager named on the file.

The second sentence is longer and less comfortable to say out loud, which is a good sign. It can be handed to a person. It can be handed to machinery. It can be checked by somebody who was not involved. It can also be shown to be wrong, which is the property that makes the whole discipline worth anything.

Where OutcomeDev fits, and where it does not

Software that runs recurring work needs exactly this kind of sentence to operate on. An ambiguous outcome cannot be carried by a system any more than it can be carried by a person, because there is no criterion for success to test against. The work of naming is a person's work. It is also the work that decides whether anything can be handed over at all.

A last piece of honesty

Some outcomes cannot be named completely, because they depend on somebody else's unpredictable behaviour: a decision from a regulator, a client's health, the weather. Name what can be named, and give the unpredictable part a trigger of its own so that it gets looked at rather than forgotten.

"The consent is granted" is not in the applicant's hands. "The application is submitted complete, and the authority's decision is chased every fourteen days until it arrives" is.