The Seven Guiding Principles
Recommendations, not rules
Guiding principles are universal recommendations that guide an organization in all circumstances. They apply to any initiative, at any scale, and they interact - improving one usually affects the others.
- Focus on value - everything the organization does must map, directly or indirectly, to value for stakeholders, the customer and the organization itself.
- Start where you are - do not build from scratch; assess what already exists and reuse it.
- Progress iteratively with feedback - organize work into small, manageable iterations and gather feedback before the next step.
- Collaborate and promote visibility - work across boundaries, involve the right people, and make information available so decisions are informed.
- Think and work holistically - no service, practice, team or supplier exists in isolation; understand how the parts fit together.
- Keep it simple and practical - use the minimum number of steps needed to achieve the objective; if a step adds no value, remove it.
- Optimize and automate - optimize first, then automate the optimized thing.
Worked example: a team proposes rebuilding its tooling from scratch (violates start where you are), in one large release (violates progress iteratively), with an automated workflow nobody has streamlined (violates optimize and automate). The corrective advice maps directly back to the principles.
Traps: automating a bad process - principle 7 explicitly requires optimization before automation; reading start where you are as "change nothing"; treating keep it simple as "do less value"; assuming one principle outranks another (none does); assuming principles are mandatory policy (they are recommendations).
Rule of thumb: most principle questions are vocabulary checks - match the scenario's verb (reuse, iterate, simplify, automate, involve, integrate) to the principle that owns it.