What problem are we trying to solve?
No, really. Stop for a second and ask it plainly: what is the problem here? If we are doing projects, we are problem solving. We are trying to help our business run more efficiently, compete more effectively, or do something it could not do before. That is the whole point. Everything else — the methodology, the tools, the ceremonies, the frameworks — is in service of that goal. Not the other way around. The Problems Come in Every Shape and Size No two projects are the same. The business problem might be a spreadsheet that one very clever person built five years ago to track customer orders, and which now has 47 tabs, three people who understand it, and zero ability to scale. Converting that into a real system that can be supported and maintained is a genuine problem worth solving — and it looks nothing like building a new customer-facing mobile app from scratch, which looks nothing like upgrading a twenty-year-old core banking platform that nobody wants to touch. The permutatio...