Communication Framework

For the past few years, for almost all tasks and communications, I have used the SCR (Situation-Complication-Resolution) framework:

  • Situation: A factual description of the current state.
  • Complication: The reason why the situation requires action. What is the problem (or opportunity)?
  • Resolution: What we need to do to resolve this complication (or take advantage of the opportunity). Its advantages lie in its universality, simplicity, and the presence of context. It is easy to implement and monitor.

Here I need to make a small digression. Any platform team has 3 sources of tasks: tasks from product teams, platform support/development tasks, and incidents. There are even more types of tasks, and they differ significantly across all parameters:

  • Incidents: urgent tasks that usually have no solution at the initial stage.
  • Platform operational tasks: short and assume the presence of ready-made solutions in the form of runbooks and automation in the form of scripts.
  • Platform development tasks: often involve R&D to build possible solutions, take a long time, and work well when describing the problem being solved or the desired outcome.
  • Product team tasks: assigned by people who don’t know how their tasks will be solved; plus, validation is important to avoid misunderstandings.

And from the properties of platform team tasks, the downsides of SCR emerge:

  • You cannot validate the result by it.
  • Not all tasks can have a “resolution” filled in at the time of creation.
  • It often has to be filled in from the middle because the “situation” needs to be described depending on what is written in the “complication” to provide all necessary context without writing too much. And sometimes there’s no point in describing the “situation” at all because everyone understands. The last two downsides are minor, but the lack of an analog to DoD (Definition of Done) is a real issue.

So, while I’m on a break, I decided to take another approach and see what else has been invented in recent years. And it’s somewhat depressing. PAS, STAR, What-So What-Now What, and other 5W1H frameworks aren’t any better for our tasks than SCR and GOS (Goal-Obstacle-Solution) which I used before.

Together with o3-mini-high, we created our own version - G.O.D.S (https://gist.github.com/korchasa/49da2144e2e21a6cec2af53b78c4e9ec): Goal, Overview, Definition of Done, Solution. Of course, I should make a nice website for it. But I don’t think it’ll be possible to popularize it. After all, I’m not McKinsey, who developed SCR. But I’ll try to use it in future projects.