How to VPMOM (90%)
VPMOM is an exercise in awareness. When correctly implemented it results in total alignment across organizations while executing at high speed. VPMOM (pronounced “Vee Pea Mom”) is an acronym for vision, priorities, methods, obstacles, and measures and is expressed as a one-page document communicating these five areas of a strategy.
VPMOMs are the API resourcing and ROI measures at our company.
Structure
Writing good VPMOMs is a critical skill for leadership in thinking through what they are asking of their organizations and concisely laying out how the organization should operate, make choices and measure progress.
When you write a VPMOM, imagine that you’re posting it to both your organization and the company as a whole, and can have no further communication for the quarter. Your organization and its service providers within the company and outside the company, need to use your VPMOM to plan, prioritize, execute and make trade-offs during the quarter, and present to you at the end of the quarter what they have achieved based on what you have asked.
Assume your team is high performance and will aspire to 150% of what’s been required, but due to circumstances beyond their control they have achieved only 70% of what their own aspirations. Your VPMOM should ensure the right priorities were delivered, which feed into the VPMOMs across the company that depend on your success.
Vision
One sentence definition of what we want to do
This is a summary sentence to concisely communicate priorities.
Priorities
List of the most important parts of the vision in priority order
When an organization needs to make trade-offs, the VPMOM tells it to cut the lower priorities in order to achieve the higher priorities.
Methods
List of what’s needed from everyone to get the job done
Obstacles
List of key challenges to be overcome to achieve our vision
Measures
List of desired results, often numerical
VPMOM Example
Vision
Operate efficiently with Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that are aligned, documented, easy-to-use and deliver value quickly
Priorities
Alignment - SOPs should clearly align to vetted VPMOMs
Documentation - All SOPs found online through web search
Ease-of-use - Experience of using SOPs is fast, obvious and forgiving
Agreement - RAPID feedback and agreement achieved
Fast time-to-value - We move faster with SOPs, not slower
Methods
Education on how to draft, RAPID review and publish SOPs
Table of Contents - Public list and link all SOPs at Operations section of handbook.mattermost.com
RAPID review - Update SOPs with RAPID stakeholder review
Onboard and train - Include onboarding, training for new and updated SOPs
SOP iteration - Measure, monitor and manage SOPs
Obstacles
Too many procedures stored in email, channels and tribal knowledge
Too many undocumented, unclear procedures
Duplicate, conflicted procedure documented
People not knowing about and/or following SOPs
Measures
All SOPs are clearly tied to a VPMOM
90% of non-confidential SOPs can be found via a web search
<5% error rate by SOP
80% of SOPs document RAPID sign-off within last 12 months
NPS of 20+ on SOPs from users due to ease-of-use and speed
Commentary
In this VPMOM “Alignment” is the top priority. We note in the obstacles that the organization suffers from duplicate and conflicting SOPs today. If there was only one thing achieved in this VPMOM during the quarter it would be aligning SOPs with VPMOMs. This is measured by “All SOPs are clearly tied to a VPMOM”
The next priority is “Documentation” with a measure of “90% of non-confidential SOPs can be found via a web search” to surface SOPs to further ensure alignment and removing conflict.
We note here that Documentation and Alignment are interlinked, and that there are multiple ways we could have priorized the two. For example, if we have gaps in VPMOMs then Alignment this period might not be feasible and we could prioritize Documentation, and we may end up documenting duplicate and conflicting SOPs, but in doing so resolve them.
When you write a VPMOM you need to decide how to prioritize the elements of your vision so that our organizations know how to make decisions. It’s okay to get things wrong once in a while so long as we are right most of the time, and we can course correct when we make a mistake.
VPMOM Template
The following template is used to lock annual VPMOMs in one page. Anything that doesn’t fit on one page should be added to the “Commentary” section at the end of the one page VPMOM.
History
VPMOMs are a fork of V2MOMs created in 1999 by Marc Benioff to align the efforts at Salesforce.com.
One key difference is we use the term “Priorities” to describe the stack ranked priorities of the “Vision”, instead of the word “Values” which gets too often confused with a company’s “Core Values”. Also, people would get confused thinking a specific method or measure was the priority for the vision, and it became necessary to be explicit on the priority for the vision.
For example, a VPMOM for R&D may have the bulk of methods and measures on product delivery, and the Vision statement may have many elements, but when “High Quality” is clearly listed as the top priority it is unambiguous what our focus needs to be.
Also, VPMOMs are defined by Mattermost and therefore can be optimized for our business and cadence. Whereas, VP2MOMs have been used for over 20 years at different organizations, in different ways, in different eras, in different departments and when we tried using V2MOMs in the past they created too much inconsistency and confusion, despite good intentions.
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