The 4W Pattern Explained

# The 4W Pattern, a Bird's Eye View The "4W Pattern" was given its name, because it defines strategic work patterns around 4 Ws: * **Why** – Why are you considering an intiative, what value is to harvested or objectives met? * **Who** – Who do you intend to deliver value to and who is involved in the work to provide it? * **What** – What strategies or ideas for solutions do you have for delivering the value to the stakeholders * **When** – When is it necessary to have something accomplished or objectives met, external constraints. You focus your attention on the four different areas, when trying to reach to a prioritization of what to do in certain project or inititative. Always start with the "Why", there has to be a goal, that can be identified and later on verified if we met it. A business objective, a value of sorts. Someone said ## History In terms of leadership principles or management, there is ofcourse complex, but it is a fair interpretation to say that there really are two different threads. One starts with Frederick Winslow Taylor and his *Scientific Management* in the beginning of the 20. century., and the other with Walter Shewart and W. Edwards Deming around the 2. World War. ### The Top-down Trail F. Winslow Taylor | Henry Ford | Alfred Sloan | Bjarne Corydon --------------------| ---------- | ------------ | ----------- ![Taylor] | ![Ford] | ![Sloan] | ![Corydon] Introduced Scientific Management| Introduced the assembly line | Introduced the top-down budget | Perfected the pure bureacracy This trail focuses on the expert the manager making the plans, defining tasks, pushing these to people who perform said tasks and checking that it is done. The premise is that things are ordered, a detailed, upfront plan can be made, enough knowledge can be acquired by analysis. The principle reaches its pinnacle with the Prince2 creed: **Plan – Delegate – Monitor – Control** ### The Bottom-up Trail #### The early history leading to Lean Walter A. Shewart | W. Edwards Deming | Peter Drucker | Peter Scholtes ------------------ | ----------------- | --------------- | --------- ![Shewart] | ![Deming] | ![Drucker] | ![Scholtes] Quality comes from the individual| Allow people pride of workmanship | The knowledge worker Focus on objectives | The Power of the team #### The story of Agile Tom Gilb | Jeff Sutherland | Ken Schwaber | Dave Snowden ------------------ | ----------------- | ------------------- ![Gilb] | ![Sutherland] | ![Schwaber] | ![Snowden] Focus on Value Impact Estimation| Created the first Scrum project |Agile Software de- velopment with Scrum | Introduced *Cynefin* Complexity This trail starts with the premise that most of what we do is complex, we have some knowledge, but there is also some we do not possess. We cannot get this knowledge without starting the journey, no matter how long we think, plan and anlyze. To get this knowledge or find solution we need to harness the mental capacities of everybody involved, starting with those who perform the jobs. The trail is best described by the Deming cycle: **Plan – Do – Study – Act**. Not all of these people were directly inspired by each other, nor were they the only sources of inspiration. The jury is still our as to what this overarching principle should be callled: Some say *Lean*, others *Agile*; some writers promote *Radical management*, some *Management 3.0* but it is really more a contest for who is going to hold the value of the brand in his hands. We have chosen to use the overarching term "Lean Thinking" and pay homage to W Edwards Deming as the great-grandfather of it all. ## The 4W Pattern, more specifically What we cal *The 4W pattern* is a set of good practices to apply when you are expected to accomplish something like implementing a project. We choose to use the broader term an *Initiative*, as many activities in organizations cannot be called projects, but are still good candidates for the 4W Pattern. ### The inspiration and contribution to the pattern There are many streams that have led to the 4W Pattern, let us just mention the most important ones: * **Impact Estimation** – Has been around since the 1980s through Tom GIlb's releentless pursuit of getting people to focus on outcome and not just effort in projects. * **Kano Analysis** – The Kano model is a theory of product development and customer satisfaction developed in the 1980s by Professor Noriaki Kano, which classifies customer preferences into useful categories. * **Cynefin** – The *Cynefin* complexity model was formulated by Dave Snowden and Cynthia Kurz around 2003 in a series of papers at IBM. * **Agile Estimation and Planning** – Mike Cohn is one of the authors, that have contributed greatly to the understanding of how to plan in the complex domain. * **Story Mapping** – Jeff Patton introduced the term in full flavor in 2008 [here...](http://jpattonassociates.com/the-new-backlog/) * **Impact Mapping** – Gojko Adzic combined Gilbs Impact Estimation and Story mapping added a few spices and called it *Impact mapping* in 2011, readmore [here...](http://www.impactmapping.org/). * **Lean Canvas** – The Lean canvas was pioneered by Ash Murya in 2012. It contains a perscriptive method to develop a businessplan interactively for at startup company. > In the next sections we will explore the details of the *4W pattern* and how to apply it succesfully, but that - as they say - is another story for another day ## The individual parts ### The Why ### The Who ### The What ### The When ## How to apply the 4W pattern | Author | -------:| --:| | *2015 Kurt Nielsen* | [Taylor]: ../images/WinslowTaylor.jpg "Frederick Winslow Taylor" [Ford]: ../images/HenryFord.jpg "Henry Ford" [Sloan]: ../images/AlfredSloan.jpg "Alfred Sloan" [Corydon]: ../images/BjarneCorydon.jpg "Bjarne Corydon" [Shewart]: ../images/WalterShewart.jpg "Walter Shewart" [Deming]: ../images/WEdwardsDeming.jpg "W. Edwards Deming" [Drucker]: ../images/PeterDrucker.jpg "Peter Drucker" [Scholtes]: ../images/PeterScholtes.jpg "Peter Scholtes" [Gilb]: ../images/TomGilb.jpg "Tom Gilb" [Sutherland]: ../images/JeffSutherland.jpg "Jeff Sutherland" [Schwaber]: ../images/KenSchwaber.jpg "Ken Schwaber" [Snowden]: ../images/DaveSnowden.jpg "Dave Snowden"