Fire, Aim, Ready is an idiom that I see popping up from time to time in software development, project management, and team collaboration. People seem to have a cynical view of this approach to working and I too, am among them. Having worked in Higher Education for a few years now, it feels like a lot of the work at the unit level is focused on driving out projects in rapid order, which typically reveals itself in a Fire, Aim, Ready process. In the end, the process isn’t too bad, but a majority of the products that are released tend to be of a low quality with a low shelf life in the organization. So far, it appears to work well for fad-like projects.
So where does Fire, Aim, Ready work?
A colleague of mine recently pointed out where this works very well. Fire, Aim, Ready works well with individuals who need to lead in an organization. A great example is when a new Higher Education executive is hired and they plan to enact change. If the executive tried to do this on their own, they would ultimately fail given the demand for multiple executions (running several projects at once). A better way for the executive to enact change in a large organization would be to hire a small team and then create a culture within them that could infect the larger organization. This is what I believe happens in large organizations. You need a team to handle the volume and scale of work required to enact the change.