# ♻️ Reality Check

**[What](https://www.notion.so/hashwiki/Reality-Check-2088f00ff68e4b388331daff9e7f6687) · [How](https://www.notion.so/hashwiki/Reality-Check-2088f00ff68e4b388331daff9e7f6687#51214dea07894819be04c0d0233dc55f) · [Conclusion](https://www.notion.so/hashwiki/Reality-Check-2088f00ff68e4b388331daff9e7f6687#6f0a85afd50a4cdf8df1dece4cf9bced) · [Focal Point](https://www.notion.so/hashwiki/Reality-Check-2088f00ff68e4b388331daff9e7f6687#4b8e250305aa4cd799876468e1083ea2)**

## What is it?

Reality check is a meeting that we normally run on demand or with a certain recurrence, the purpose of which is to align delivery expectations between business and technology, helping to anticipate any change in delivery plans for stakeholders or any kind of block & dependecy between deliverables.

## How it works?

The participants of this feedback loop should be the development team and the people that decide the business plan. It could be the CEO itself, it could be a Product Manager that works as a proxy for the stakeholders, or any other person that could influence the business side.

Before the meeting, the facilitator "sticks" to a board, all tasks left to reach a defined milestone (it could be a new release or any other fixed dates). And they should be ordered according to the former priority decision.

After the feedback loop gets started, the development team goes over each one of the cards explaining, in high-level, what they are about and eventual difficulties on their development. The idea here is to put everyone on the same page about the project, and inform all the present stakeholders of the progress.

*A more visual example:*

*A reality check board.*

- There is a column for the prioritized tasks, like a To-do column;
- There is a column for each week that the team wants to put in alignment (*it is not recommended to go beyond 3 weeks, the quality of the information drastically decreases*);
- All tasks that go to reality check must already be part of the team's WIP (*work in progress*);
- The group tries to reach an agreement on which week each task will be delivered;
- Usually this feedback loop is run on demand, but some teams have adopted a fixed recurrence;

## Conclusion

The idea of this feedback loop is to increase the project visibility to others outside of it and, if needed, trigger some changes in the business plan. The faster we have that feedback, the easier and painless will be to think of other solutions. The reality check has served as a substitute for daily in some teams at Hash, it also ends up giving useful inputs for other feedback loops, such as weekly, increasing the accuracy of the information.

If you see advantages in implementing this feedback loop in your team or have points for improvement, just contact the focal point of this page.

# 🎯 Focal Point

[Matheus Marzochi](https://www.notion.so/Matheus-Marzochi-3da2ff8ae4f841178d8a2dc564c948bd)