Friday, August 9, 2013

Exploring Different Method Plug-Ins for Completing a Change Canvas - Part 2 Vision & Target State

In my previous post, I wrote about some potential options for completing the Urgency and Change Recipients section of Change Canvas. For this post I'll focus on the vision and Target State sections.

 

Vision


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The Vision portion of the canvas is all About articulating what the objectives of the change initiative our in a single, compelling statement that resonates with change recipients.

A good vision statement will connect change recipients with the benefits achieved through the target state.
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Filling out the vision section At a minimum requires a single, bold statement. While we want our vision to be achievable, we also want To make sure that we excite action.  A good vision is short, we don't to repeat all of the elements found within our target state
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We also recommend that change agents trying to fill out the vision section of the canvas try to engage in thinking visually and coming up with some kind of picture or diagram that can articulate the elements of the target state. Good art skills are not required, just a little willingness to be creative and imaginative.
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a good vision statement can often come in the form of
<outcome or objective >for <change recipient segment >through/with/using <key target state enabler >

For example, achieving accelerated delivery for the integration team through best in class technical practices
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achieving a highly collaborative and continuous improvement culture for the maintenance department through the adoption of the Kanban method 
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helping managers within the channels line of business group to enable organizational agility for the channels department to adoption of management 3.0 techniques
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If we continue to follow the example we had been using. Then a good vision statement could be one that discusses how to win the trust of the client through the use of a co located, cross functional business technology solution analysis team that can rely on agile modeling techniques.
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Target State

In the target state you want to describe what the working environment will look like for your change recipients once they change initiative has been successfully implemented.
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When developing the target state, many change agents fall into the trap of trying to create an overly detailed design. Processes, artifacts, working structure, are all described in great detail.
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My experience is that this is an anti-pattern to say the least.
We recommend thinking of the target state as a story that can help guide both the change agent and a change recipients on a common path. While some upfront design is required, the focus should be on helping to communicate a potential option toward success. Not on trying to blueprint an uncertain future.
We recommend considering a number of elements to use when trying to tell a story of the target state.
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A set of semiformal narratives can be complemented with pictures and photos, video mockups, semiformal prototypes, reenactments, and even seen some folks articulate the target state using blocks of Lego.
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One approach that we have used on several occasions to help articulate and refine a target state is on your network design. There are a number of eminent leaders within the lean and agile community that I've talked about how knowledge workers can be organized as a value network. These include Juergen Appelo, Don Reinersten and David J. Anderson.

Juergens' approach to visualizing value networks is especially compelling. He describes value networks as a set of teams that relate to each other as a set of interconnecting concentric circles. Knowledge workers are almost always located in a cross functional team, and are occasionally part of more than one team. Workers who serve in more than one team serve as the integrators who ensure that the work of more than one team is properly integrated.

This value network approach helps organizations to scale the agile notion of a cross functional team to support an entire organization without sacrificing the need to coordinate different specialists with each other.
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Each team in the value network can be tasked with one or more responsibilities, and the interactions between teams can also be specified using a simple notation.
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Unlike value stream mapping, modeling value networks allow us to take advantage of how we want work to be processed in an agile and lean environment. When engaging in application delivery work activities and value very rarely flow into straight line from requirements to delivery . Work typically tends to move in both directions back and forth across the lifecycle.

Work also scatters and aggregates. For instance a business case developed by the customer team will scatter into many user stories which will be handled by the solution analysis team which made them scatter into many acceptance criteria that are delivered by the delivery team. Eventually stories acceptance criteria will need to form into a workable solution that meets the needs of the business case.

In agile world work is also rarely handed off from one team to another to be processed in isolation. Work tends to progress through collaboration both within and across teams, and value network support this concept.

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The value network can also be extended to show the typical heartbeat that he intended to produce value. Folks familiar with scrum will know that teams tend deliver in iterations that range from one week to month.
The notion of A sprint or an iteration can also be applied to other teams, providing approximate guidelines of how often these teams will start and finish new work.

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Using the value network, specific knowledge workers can also be grouped into specialist teams. This makes sense where delivering value requires part-time support is highly specialized. In our experience security experts, legacy system subject matter experts, software and hardware administrators can be effectively placed into specialist teams rather than as full-time members of our functional teams. We feel that most knowledge workers should be working within cross functional teams with organizational agility is an objective.

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Once the target state has been mocked up using the value networks, or some other convention it can then be articulated as 3-full bullet points within the target state section of the canvas.
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It's important to keep the target state component of the canvas short and concise, people wanting more detail can refer to the more complete picture that has been defined.   

Read More Lean Change - Chapter 3: Advanced Change Canvas Topics
  1. Using Plug-Ins to Explore the Urgency and Change Recipient Sections
  2. Using Plug-Ins to Explore the Vision and Target State Sections
  3. Using Plug-Ins to Explore the Actions and Success Criteria Sections
  4. Using Plug-Ins to Explore the Benefits and Commitment Sections
  5. Using Plug-Ins to Explore the Communications Section
  6. a Catalog of Reusable Agile Change Patterns

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