BAUs (Business-as-usual) are initiatives anyone at AppUnite can start, comment, or contribute to.

You simply share an idea, discuss it with others and are free to act! Get involved – and be the change you want to see! 💪

BAUs can be accessed by everyone here: ‣.

Additionally, teams can have their own filtered Team BAU Lists like this one: ‣

If you want to write a BAU…

1. Give a context of the situation you want to change
2. Describe how you think it should be resolved
3. Give your BAU a meaningful title
4. Fill in important fields:
   • Hypothesis — to give a short context of what we count on,
   • Strategy Pillar — this helps us go in one direction (see: ‣)
   • Affected Team(s) — this will make a BAU appear in this team Team BAU List
   • Status — to make the current status visible, read about statuses below
5. You can share idea through BAU, and your responsibility is to find a change leader or engage other people into your idea and execute it.

How to write a hypothesis

It’s simple, just use causation:

IF we do this THEN this result will happen. TO ACHIEVE this result WE SHOULD do this.

Example:

• If we wash our car, it will be clean.
• To make our car go faster, we should wash it often.
• If we wash our car often, it will serve us longer.

All of these hypotheses are properly constructed even though some of the statements are disputable or simply incorrect.

Status

Use statuses to describe the life of your Initiative:

• Candidate 👈 you have an idea but feel we are not ready to start yet
• Go 👈 you have an idea, feel we should start working on it, but it needs someone to drive it
• In Progress 👈 it is happening already and has an owner
• Done, Paused, Abandoned 👈 the initiative is finished, abandoned or put on hold

Post link to your BAU to a Slack channel to make it visible

Use a channel that you feel is most related to the hypothesis – e.g. #appunite-pulse for company-wide initiatives. Mention the right people and use a natural language so that people can see what it’s about, e.g.

@people @sales I’m researching the available possibilities to replace DocuSign with another platform for signing the contracts, details in this BAU Replace DocuSign with Autenti.

Experiments

Use the experiments database to document your learnings as you run tests against your hypothesis.

It’s important for us to validate your assumptions fast, use this place to share it with others and generate learnings as input for your next tests.

👆These are all the basics you need…

👇…but if you want to master BAUs, here is M OAR!

Link to database: ‣

Each team can have different linked view and adjusted to their needs. They usually filter their own team BAU.

Description

BAU is a "project" that can begin by defining the problem, an idea, or a definitive change that you want to implement. The idea is to have a place where we can loop more people in, get feedback, and contribute. To make things happen, we want to document our approach, promote a collaborative approach to problem-solving, and share knowledge.

BAU, a place where teams can collaborate on various incentives. Those are supposed to contribute to the AppUnite mission at the team, functional, organizational, and cross-functional levels.

Every card has the potential to be a company incentive, free thought, project, conclusion, or task. In terms of outcome, different types may have different expectations. Free thoughts are used to share a context or one team's learnings on a specific topic. A project card is one that aims to bring about a specific change or generate an outcome. A company incentive is an idea that one would like to change at the company level (we tend to test assumptions on smaller projects before we propose pan-company changes).

A project, conclusion, free thoughts can lead into multiple outputs

• making decision (by creating ADR)
  • can be multiple ones
• generating problem or challange
  • we don’t know how to handle it, or we don’t want to provide a solution immediately

Good practices

Changelog

A good practise is to include changelog in the card, so any important event can be registered, and other people can track where the card is at. Thanks to that, people can track what changed and how active is given card. They are also able to see if it isn’t a stalled card.

Conclude cards

Try to keep as low numer of cards in WIP or idea as possible. If you have a project, you should include a plan and iterate on card. If it’s a free thought and you don’t have any solution to your problem, create a problem in given team space. If that’s a conclusion, then have an ADR or share your conclusion to wider audience.

Engagement and incentives should be intentional

You should think what drives you in specific card, what you want to solve and what future situation you’d like to be when finished. When you propose something, you should have enough time and energy to drive that change. If you know you don’t have it, but you wish something to happen, invest time in finding ambasadors of the change.

You are free to unloop from cards that you aren’t engaged in reality

Many people once they create the card loop people in Engaged field to interest them with a topic. That’s a notification mechanism. From various reasons you might not contribute to given card with your activities (lack of time, no interest, you don’t believe in given project). You are free to unloop and make a comment in changelog about that.

Fields description

When creating or ending a BAU card, you’re prompted to fill some predefined fields. Here I describe what those fields mean.

<aside> 🧩 Don’t worry if you do something wrong, it’s better to fill a card wrongly, than spending too much time considering if you are doing it right finally deciding you won’t do it at all.

</aside>

• Status - What state of the card, whenever is “Not started” or “Done”, it helps track what needs to be done, or what is already done.
• Working group - This is a list of people who actively contribute to the topic. This will help those people find the theirs on their private board. Those tasks where you’re listed as Engaged or Owner you will find on “Engaged by me” BAU tab
• Change Leader - Who takes ownership of the project.
• Affected Team(s) - Team or Teams that this project is related to and can contribute to this project. Teams that are going to take care of the task. Those can be all types of teams: Product Teams, Operation Teams, Platform Teams. If you add a team, the task will appear on their board.
• Deadline - If the task finish is time bound, you can add deadline for the task. I.e. if something should be delivered by Q4 2022, you can set December 31, 2022 as Deadline.
• Created at - When card was created (automatic)
• Tags - Company Incentive, Free Thought, Project, Conclusion, or Task. In terms of outcome, different types may have different expectations. Free thoughts are used to share a context or one team's learnings on a specific topic. A project card is one that aims to bring about a specific change or generate an outcome. A company incentive is an idea that one would like to change at the company level (we tend to test assumptions on smaller projects before we propose pan-company changes).
• Suggested by - Who has created the card
• Related ADRs - If a decision was made after the card was introduced, we should link it to the ADR document.
• Type (obsolete) - Removed

All BAU cards are by default public, as it should, be in case we have some sensitive data you can create a private BAU card that only certain people have access.

How to create BAU filter for your team

how to prepare your project BAU.mov

How to create Private BAU/ADR

Usually everything should be public, but when given BAU or ADR contains sensitive information, you can consider making it private.

Screen Recording 2023-04-14 at 14.58.37.mov

Doris talking about BAU

Google Drive: Sign-in

Useful materials

• Idea behind BAU, why it was created (In Polish)
• How to contribute to AppUnite’s mission by @Piotr Bernad