Perform a 5x5 Intake Analysis to Simplify Your Project

It’s tempting to feel like technical efforts require a group of people and countless meetings to even get started. 

After all, as someone overseeing the team, you simply don’t have the time to get too far into the weeds. 

But there is often a middle ground between being heavily involved, and entirely delegating the effort to your team—which we’ll explore in detail in this whitepaper.

Further, even if and when your team does take over the initiative, it’s very easy to “get lost” in the complexity, which can make it very hard for anyone not deep in the project to easily understand specific problems or meaningfully contribute. 

In this whitepaper, we’ll discuss a format for documenting and understanding complex technical efforts, and which achieves the following:

• Allows for directors and managers to contribute without the need to read a long and detailed document
• Documents the collective understanding in a compact format that is easily understood at a glance
• Allows for anyone on the team to iterate on the document, rather than having one person spend considerable time alone translating the team’s understanding into a long document
• Provides visibility at the appropriate level of granularity for the audience (people less involved should only see the “higher-level” points—unless they want to dig in further)
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How to get started?

The key to getting started is keeping in mind that you do not have to have all (or even many) of the answers to start. The output from your initial efforts will be incomplete—and that’s okay! Your team will be key in filling in all the missing pieces and gaps. 
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List “five things” in 5-10 minutes

Set a timer for 5-10 minutes and create a bulleted list of five “high-level” topics, concerns, issues, features, ideas, etc., trying to keep each bullet to 5-7 words (you’ll know what they mean, and you are the only one who this document needs to make sense to right now).

When you’re done, if you have a couple more than five bullets, that’s okay. It’s also okay if you only have three. The main objective at this point is to ensure that the bullets are concise and understandable (to you, at least) at a glance - and that you don’t have too many. 

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Next, consolidate into categories

As you developed your list, you likely started to think about additional aspects of your idea that you hadn’t yet considered, or remembered from earlier thoughts. 

That’s a normal part of the elaboration process. Your goal now is to start “bucketing” your ideas into (ideally) no more than five categories, with (ideally) no more than five items in each category. 
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Allow your team to iterate

You’ve made great progress! You now have ~25 things in a list, broken out in groups of five within each of your five categories. 

Believe it or not, this alone will help your team get off to a great start. You having pre-processed your understanding of the situation in a concise format like this achieves a few things:

• It helps you think through areas where there may be uncertainty or risk and allows you to tip your team off to this as they further iterate on it
• Your team gets a skeleton that they can immediately start developing based on each team member’s unique strengths and insights
• Your team knows where you stand on the issue, allowing them to proceed with more certainty and with fewer interruptions of your time

From here, you can ask your team to elaborate on the document. Instruct them to strive to keep the document as compact as possible, but fill in the details where needed.
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For example, your team can:

• Rework the high-level categories
• Add more bullets to each category
• Move bullets from one category to another
• Etc…

Ask for a check-in meeting when they have completed this step so that you can give it your stamp of approval before further detail is added. This ensures that you’re looped in to changes in direction or understanding when the differences are small and easier to wrap your mind around. It also allows you to give valuable feedback before the document is elaborated on. 
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Filling in the details

From here, your team should be tasked with adding a concise bulleted list of what exactly each item means for each of the 25 items on the list. Again, we want to avoid long blocks of text. Ideally, each bullet should be no more than 7-10 words, and again, we’ll want to limit the list to around five bullets (though a few more isn’t a huge deal). 

This is really where the rubber hits the road, and it’s where the details will be thought through. If more detail is required, the team can elaborate on the item on a separate document, and reference it in the detail bullets with a short 7-10 word summary.

This compact structure is important because it allows for higher-level folks on the team (who may be short on time) to understand the gist of the details without the need to dig into a long document. 

Lowering the time barrier to understanding the effort will allow more people to contribute, yielding more ideas and insights for further improvement of the collective understanding. 
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But is more detail needed?

For many efforts, a document of this level of detail will be more than enough for successful execution. In many instances, this exercise may help the team see that the approach is flawed or the effort is not worth doing (which is a good thing because it saves time and allows you to pursue more fruitful efforts).

If your organization requires more detail before beginning an effort, then this exercise will serve as a great guide to this document, and will also serve as a summary for anyone curious to learn more at a glance in the future. 

In conclusion

The "5x5 Analysis" is more than just a tool; it's a mindset that champions clarity, brevity, and inclusivity in the complex world of technical projects. By adopting this method, leaders empower their teams to contribute meaningfully while maintaining a high-level overview, ensuring that everyone is on the same page. This approach not only streamlines the process of managing and understanding technical efforts but also fosters a culture of collaboration and efficiency. Ultimately, the "5x5 Analysis" serves as a beacon guiding teams through the intricacies of technical projects with a balance of detail and simplicity. It’s a testament to the idea that sometimes, less is more, and that well-structured, concise communication can be the key to unlocking a team's full potential.