Have you ever had a great idea that just never came to fruition? It’s not uncommon. Great ideas happen every day, but bringing them to life takes grit, focus, and a lot of documentation. Without alignment and a path forward, ideas can be lost between mismanagement and scope creep.

In this course, you’ll learn best practices to support your team throughout the development process, such as:

• Holding retrospectives

• Creating valuable documentation

• Building an innovation repository

This article is a special sample of our free Lucid Training Labs Course, “Document and Deliver on Your Ideas.” You’ll find some great tidbits here in this article, but sign up for the course for the entire experience. It’s free, easy, and quick to complete!

Hold a retrospective

A retrospective is the last stage of your creative session. This is usually done before returning to more ideation and planning so that you can quickly make changes to the process. Retrospectives allow you to adapt and challenge the established process and to think critically about areas people struggled in—this scrutiny can often be key to making a big impact on the final product. 

To guide the discussion, we highly recommend using one of Lucid’s Visual Activities or templates (of course we’ve got your back in this area—the course has recommended templates for you to use). 

Things to consider when choosing a template/activity

• What’s the goal of the retrospective? 

• Did the session achieve those goals?

• How much time do you have?

Communicate with stakeholders

Communicating with stakeholders early in the process allows space for questioning, helps you gather feedback, and ultimately aids in gaining crucial approval. Without buy-in from the right people, your vision can’t come to life. 

The challenge is that stakeholders are often very busy, so Lucidspark can help clearly communicate your ideas to them for a better chance of success.

On your board you’ll be presenting to your stakeholders for approval, you’ll likely want to include:

• The problem

• The solution

• Logistics

• Support and key players

Paths help communicate information to stakeholders clearly. Think of them as curated experiences. Create a Path, arrange it to your liking, and then share the link with your stakeholders. Their experience will be interactive, so they can provide feedback as they go along. You can also use software like Loom to record yourself if you can’t present to stakeholders in person. 

Create an innovation repository

Documentation has a bad reputation, but it’s critical for ensuring that the right people can access the right information at the right time. An innovation repository is great for this because it houses information in a single place and also makes it less boring, so people remain interested in your ideas and want to help guide them forward. 

Innovation repositories are a mental model for viewing charts, documents, and plans for how you plan to execute your ideas. A good repository will act as a launching pad for change, make the team more efficient, and reduce the learning curve that comes with repeating mistakes. Plus, it involves everyone in decision-making. 

Your innovation repository should include:

• Tasks and timelines

• Wireframes

• Links to resources

We have so many great ideas to take your documentation and delivery to the next level. Sign up for the course to access templates, guided tutorials, and practice activities to master this concept so that your ideas can go from a spark to real life easier than ever!