Puzzle Like an Expert

I love working puzzles. They are brain bending and rewarding, sometimes complex and sometimes downright chaotic.

During this past holiday season, my immediate and extended family worked a puzzle together for hours on end, and it really was an event grounded in team work and patience.  Then, in early May on the day when it snowed 10 inches (yeah, that’s right, it snowed 10 inches in May), my husband and two young sons worked on another puzzle and nailed it.  Our success, however, wasn’t without a little planning, focus and lots of communication.

Part of the reason why I love puzzles is because they remind me of managing a large program.  I have spent a substantial portion of my career managing large scale programs and portfolios, and the comparison to puzzles is uncanny.  At Kenway, one of the services we provide our clients is Program Management, and I think this service is just as intriguing as doing large puzzles (most of the time!).

How so, you ask? Following is a chart that compares the key steps involved in our Program Management and Delivery service to what’s needed to excel at puzzle making.

Setting up and Instantiating the Program

Program Management and Delivery Excellent Puzzle Making Team
Create the Charter and Scope: Document the goals, functions, features and tasks that drive quality, cost and timelines — critical for product alignment Discuss your goals. Do you want this puzzle to be done before we eat the turkey dinner, or are we ok with getting as much done as possible? Lay this out so expectations are clear.
Define Roles and Responsibilities: This will provide clarity to enable lateral coordination efforts between functions and business units. Discuss who wants to take which part of the puzzle. Divide up the puzzle, so everyone can contribute in a meaningful way.
Communication and Cadence: Define knowledge sharing targets and channels to keep all stakeholders engaged and up to speed. Make sure that if Aunt Sally is pulling together the part of the puzzle with the sleigh, she is frequently talking with Uncle Joey about where his reindeer fit in.

Delivery and Execution

Program Management and Delivery Excellent Puzzle Making Team
Project Plans / Roadmap: List key milestones and their associated timelines + program – and project-level tasks. At a minimum, communicate with each other on the goal of completing the puzzle, so everyone knows the end game. Do we have a goal of finishing the frame before beginning the interior?
Status: Provide a formal report on project scope, timeline and budget progress against the project plan. In our family, we provide status by singing a little song every time we get a set of pieces that make up a large part of the puzzle. “Got a piece, got a piece, yeah, yeah, yeah.” We consider this our status update for the group.
Risk and Issues: Track risks and issues by severity and probability to ensure transparency across the program. It is important for everyone to know if one of the pieces of the puzzle is lost, or if the dog may have run off with it, or if one of the babies running around is using it as a teething ring. Those could be the pieces that make or break completion of the puzzle! Be sure to make it known, raise the risk, and work to mitigate.

 

Program Readiness

Program Management and Delivery Excellent Puzzle Making Team
Assess Program Readiness: Evaluate the ability of the program to operate effectively in a business-as-usual, post implementation state. You are counting down to the last 30 minutes until completion of the puzzle. Is everyone ready to bring their parts to the larger puzzle? Are we ready to call this complete so we can go eat that turkey dinner? Check in, make sure your last 30 minutes will be productive, and be ready to go live with that puzzle.
Playbook: Outline the steps needed to execute on various program initiatives (i.e. program integration or operational processes) to enable repeatable processes. Decide if you are going to break your puzzle up and start from scratch or go ahead and frame that puppy. Either way, you have a plan for how to execute the next time around.
Transition Planning: Think through the steps required to transfer knowledge from consulting organization to client, citing key personnel and logistics considerations. Like we had to do over the holiday, make sure that Grandma and Grandpa (or whoever) are ready and available to take over the puzzle to completion when you must leave or can no longer look at puzzle pieces.

 

If you are looking for help with a puzzle or need some assistance with managing your program, Kenway is here to help.  Reach out to us at [email protected].

 

A Well-Oiled Machine: A Robot’s Guide to Program Governance

In today’s market, the driver for innovation is often not the need to develop new products or services, but to increase the quality and speed of delivery.

The rigor traditionally associated with new product development must be applied when choosing process optimization as an enterprise-wide strategy. These large-scale efforts require participation from diverse internal organizations with varying levels of technological expertise. Firms are often incentivized to rush from pilot to production without a strong governance and delivery framework, eventually finding themselves unequipped to scale.

To gain efficiencies across its enterprise, one of Kenway’s clients introduced Robotics Process Automation (RPA) to its organization after successfully piloting a leading software. RPA, a technology designed to replicate human activity, can be thought of as a “robot” performing the clicks and actions exactly as a user would during repeatable processes across multiple applications.

Eager to realize the promising return on investment, the organization quickly moved to enable all interested departments with this technology. The RPA program leaders soon found it difficult to accomplish their goals, as they were balancing different expectations of how RPA should be implemented without a unified strategy. While the organization had resources with technical expertise, it struggled to create structure and rigor within its program.

Kenway recognized the need for an operational methodology, delivery framework, and strategic program management to ensure that the program could scale successfully. Our team analyzed the outcomes of the pilot and identified the operational functions required to repeatedly deploy robotics across the company. We then documented characteristics of ideal processes for automation (essentially linear, repeatable procedures), and developed an estimation model to manage the supply of development and business analysis capacity against the number of candidate processes.

With the client’s RPA operational methodology defined, internal organizations were reengaged through a strong change management process and new roles and responsibilities were defined. It became apparent, however, that different business units would instantiate RPA more successfully than others.

In efforts to serve the program stakeholders, Kenway categorized each internal business unit based on its level of RPA maturity. Less mature units required more oversight and assistance from the program than those that quickly adopted the operational methodology. We found that units that had direct experience partnering with IT organizations to implement solutions fared the best.

The mission of the RPA program was to increase the efficiency of implementing robotics across the organization by training more junior groups and ensuring that experienced business units were continuing to identify new opportunities and maintain positive returns on their investment. The enterprise-wide program began to communicate uniquely with each internal organization to ensure that expectations were well-set, the path to greater efficiency was defined, and that accountability was sustained. This exercise brought process governance to the program but, as more pain points were identified, it became clear that these could not be resolved without a large strategic shift.

As the program grew, it needed to continually examine itself and right-size its processes and governance structure. Innovation is required for survival; static business processes will eventually be abandoned or replaced. Without a continually improving delivery strategy, the program was not rolling out quality products on time, which was the very driver of taking on the RPA initiative. However, with new automation candidates being identified and improved communication channels in place, a new arm of the program dedicated to strategic initiatives was created.

Our team solicited feedback from program leaders and end-users to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement. New projects were created to address the various problems and were prioritized based on their potential benefits. Dedicating resources to a strategic roadmap, outside of the day-to-day operations, ensured that the program would maintain relevance and meet its commitment to the enterprise. We introduced program governance that was specific to RPA, but the principles applied are relevant to any enterprise-level program that intends to realize long-term benefits.

At Kenway, one of our Guiding Principles is, “To never rest on our laurels, always looking to the future to identify necessary changes to maintain and improve strategic advantages.” Many organizations set aside the strategic lens after defining an objective and kicking off a project. Kenway helps our clients build stable and profitable programs not simply by asking “what are we doing” but, rather repeatedly assessing how well we are doing it and ensuring that we – and our clients – keep innovation and self-improvement in focus.

 

Fire Prevention

Veterans of large, multi-team, cross-functional programs understand how difficult it can be to synchronize so many moving parts to deliver value to their customers, especially when resources must be pulled for constant fire fighting. Teams typically experience some type of frustration during the project lifecycle. Everybody works really hard, but always spend more time than expected on operational “keep the lights on” activities. Corners inevitably get cut in order to meet unrealistic deadlines. Unforeseen customer requests, which are always urgent, can force constant starting, stopping and reprioritization of projects. You know the list of projects requested by the business is growing, but you’re not sure how long it is and don’t care, because you will never get to most of it anyway. If your program is good at putting out fires, perhaps life would be better if the fires never blazed at all. Perhaps you would like to do more strategic projects in a less chaotic environment. The answer may be to assess your Program Management function. From my experience, you can accomplish this in five steps over the course of six to eight weeks.

The first step is to create a project repository. Some words to live by are, “You cannot determine where to go until you figure out where you are.” The importance of a project repository is to provide program leadership with visibility into all of the projects being demanded of the program. Be warned, seeing a full list on paper for the first time can be a shocking experience. Start by identifying and interviewing business owners within your company or organization, as well as IT and support colleagues. It is important to understand all types of projects, and not just those requested by the business. As you interview these people, gather basic information that allows you to understand the projects enough to categorize and eventually prioritize them. A predefined questionnaire is a helpful tool to expedite this process. Some key things to learn about the projects are description, objective / benefit (i.e., increase revenue, reduce cost, mitigate risk, etc.), preferred delivery date, etc. The key data to gather will be somewhat unique to each organization, but the idea is to capture enough information to understand high level priority and level of effort.

Once you have a comprehensive repository, define a simple prioritization methodology. I have found this works most efficiently if you start with a qualitative “gut instinct” assessment of each project. Of course, it is important to understand what the Business Owners think, but most of the time they believe their own projects are high priority. As a cross-functional program team, discuss the priority of each project quickly using the data you collected in step one to make relative comparisons between projects. Typically, high priority projects rise to the top and low priority projects fall to the bottom quickly. Next, create simple quantitative parameters to provide checks and balances to your qualitative assessment. I like to use a simple balanced scorecard approach to come up with a single numeric grade (1-5) for a project in terms of total value and then apply the scoring system across the spectrum of projects. This helps you to move the projects at the bottom of high priority and the top of low priority into a true medium category, and also helps to rank the medium priority projects.

The next step is to work with IT and support colleagues on high level parameters to estimate the complexity and duration of each project. Do not get too bogged down in extreme detail at this point, because the goal is only to understand enough to make a determination of “small,” “medium” or “large” with ballpark estimates associated with each category. This will differ based on organization, but maybe small is two months, medium is four months and large is six months.

With this information, you can now move forward with creating your twelve month program roadmap. I like to use a high level Gantt chart format, which is a visual deliverable depicting project beginning and end dates, lifecycle phases and project overlaps with colors to indicate different types of projects. Share the roadmap with Business Owners and leadership to help them understand what and when things can get done. Once the roadmap is approved and baselined, it becomes a valuable management tool as it provides a basis from which the Program Manager can have informed discussions with Business Owners and leadership when demand changes during the year. It also provides a solid foundation for Project Managers to dive into details on approved projects. Putting together a twelve month roadmap is like a puzzle. Start with the obvious pieces, and then layer in other projects around these that make sense based upon priority, complexity, critical path and resource capacity.

Once the roadmap is complete, move to get approval by your steering committee or governing body and then continue to update it as the year progresses. I recommend a thorough review of the roadmap and new projects at least quarterly with your management team. You will be amazed how much more efficiently your program will operate by being able to be proactive in dealing with new projects as opposed to reactive. It will allow you to get ahead of the demand and will speed up your next annual planning cycle, because you will have a basis from which to start. Most importantly, you will be able to explain the opportunity cost associated with “fire fighting” that takes place in every organization. Perhaps with a more complete, top-down understanding of your program, you will be able to prevent fires before they start.

To learn more or to schedule a Program Management assessment, contact Kenway Consulting at [email protected]