NCT: Sample Project Template

Explore

NCT: Sample Project

Narratives, Committments, Tasks

Bill French

This project management resource utilizes the

NCT approach⁠

(narratives, commitments, and tasks), a slightly more straightforward form of OKRs.

Imagine the phrase “Why, What, and How”. This is the essence of NCT.

Narratives - why we are doing this project.

Commitments - what we are actually doing for the project.

Tasks - how we will achieve the commitments we made to complete the project.

I recommend you explore the

NCT Tutorial⁠

I provided. It will help you internalize the vocabulary of this project management approach.

This Coda app was designed to easily navigate the relationships between narratives, commitments, and tasks. From the

Narratives data frame⁠

, you can select a narrative and drill into any associated commitments. This template supports multiple narratives, each with multiple commitments and each containing multiple tasks.

Dive Deeper

⁠

If you need consulting or guidance, don’t hesitate to reach out.

bill.french@gmail.com⁠

⁠

For paid subscribers to my

Impertinent Substack⁠

, I will provide free huddles from time to time in the

Coda Makers Slack Community⁠

. Or, feel free to buy my a coffee so I can stay up late and write more code to buy more coffee.

⁠

Donate

⁠

From the commitments, you can drill into any of the tasks for that commitment and you can create observations, notes, and static sub-tasks in the task items. Coda does this well - assimilating vastly unstructured data in a structured and deeply relational experience.

If you encounter or experience issues with the template itself, you might want to add them as tasks to the

NCT Adoption narrative⁠

. Think of this as a bug tracker of sorts. A place where you can make observations of ways to improve your NCT framework. Nothing about this template is cast in stone, but it’s certainly a framework for incremental improvement as much as it is ideal for agile project management.

Many will ask - what about task due dates? Yeah, knock yourselves out. You know what to do. I decided to avoid this element of project management to simplify the adoption of NCTs. Embellishing it with due dates, timelines, and task dependencies - that’s on you. Coda makes it possible for you to be the hero. Lean into it.

NCT Tutorial

Narratives

Narratives

NCT Adoption

This NCT Adoption narrative is intended to nudge our team into using a more refined approach to project tasks and eliminate the often debilitating lack of software development management processes rigidly controlled by top-down planning. We have a chance to move the productivity needle by introducing NCTs as a viable yet straightforward way to rally around a vision, commit to that vision, and execute tasks to make the vision a reality.

Test

This is a quick test narrative for playing around.

NCT Adoption

Created By

Bill French

Last Modified

11/29/2023, 7:50 AM

Modified By

Bill French

Spreadsheet View

Narrative

Commitments

In-Progress

Improve the NCT Template

Commitment

Continuously improve the NCT framework by reporting bugs and new feature requests.

New Commitment

Commitment

Show hidden columns

⁠

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.