Making your own Way of Working — Part Two
This is part two, you can read part one over here.
In part one we set about defining a guiding problem statement of the issues we wanted to solve. We then identified how our processess currently worked and all of the pain and gain points within them.
Once we knew how we worked it was time to define an ideal future.
Future State Workshop
As designers and facilitators our job is to gather insights to help teams make decisions, instead of coming up with the solution ourselves and then telling the team “this is what we are doing”.
With this in mind I ran a ‘Future State’ workshop using the tried, tested — not to mention super relevant for a publisher — ‘Newsflash’ template.
The concept is simple. You tell the team to imagine it’s 5 years in the future and ask them to write a newsflash about what is happening. The newsflash template just needs a catchy headline, a couple of sentences about the story and an illustration of what it might look like.
This can be a bit daunting at first, so we used the Current State map (from part one) and the pain and gain points we identified as starting off points for new ideas. It’s much easier to think about the future when reflecting on what you’d like to change.
The end result was a heap of concepts, which team members took turns pitching and prioritising on an Impact vs Effort prioritisation matrix.
Impact was assessed by how well the idea answered our problem statement (“How Might We engage, support and enable the team in a new way of working which delivers value to the business through more responsive, metric driven processes”). Effort was a rough estimate from the team based on how complex implementing the change would be.
The prioritisation is facilitator led (you make a best guess and then let the team streer you and come to a general agreement on where the item should go — it’s not an exact science)
As a facilitator your most important job is to listen. The “pure gold’ will come from what people say as they describe their ideal future state. This is really important for the next step so take notes and be present.
Once done the team individually dot-voted on the three ideas they liked the most. This helped me gauge the team’s sentiment on what mattered most to them and ultimately determined what Future State ideas to take action on.
Making the Change
Ok so now we’ve got a bunch of newsflash cards, prioritised and voted. But there isn’t much detail. And no clear action. This is where that listening you did while facilitating the workshop comes into play.
First you need to filter the ideas you’re going to take forward. I recommend picking the top 4 to 6 voted items as voted by the team. I went with 6 highest voted ideas as our team is quite large. You might be tempted to make a “captain’s call” here, and push your favourite idea through. Don’t. The team wants what they voted on. Good ideas have a way of happening, and if it doesn’t happen it probably wasn’t a good idea.
The second step is to turn each chosen ideas into Lean Initatives. This means for each newsflash card you will need;
- A one line overview of the future state card and what the idea is
- Summarise the Pain point which the team is facing (this should come from your current state map)
- Define potential Gain from the proposed solution (this would be identified by the future state card)
- Document the Estimate and Priority (this comes straight from the prioritisation matrix)
- Define a deadline (ideally you want enough time to make change, but make it short enough to keep accountability)
- Define how you will measure the change
- Define some Milestones (we called them Development tasks) which give you steps to achieve your desired KPIs and Outcome
Here’s how one of our initatives looked once done. I kept the drawing from the workshop as it helped communicate the continuity of the idea from the workshop to firm action.
You’ll note for the KPIs we used OfficeVibe. This is the tool we use for our employee pulse survey, which runs weekly. For this kind of change you’ll need a tool like OfficeVibe to verify the change. Alternatively a simple survey measuring your desired KPIs would do the trick. Run the survey before you start making changes for a baseline, and then periodicially to track your KPI for the initative.
Making it Happen
Ok so you’ve got maybe 4–6 initatives. Now what? It’s probably a good idea to first of all consult the team through casual one-on-one chats, and make sure you didn’t make any mistakes. “Help me get this right” is a really good prompt. Once you’ve done some individual consultation you can finally surface it at a team level for their review.
Once it’s all signed off by the team it’s your time to shine.
Effectively the team has given you a mandate to make change, they’ve told you where they want to go.
So as a servant leader you can go about doing just that. First of all ensure the leadership of the team owns the success of each initative and specifically it’s KPIs (you got their buy in before you started right?). You will have a hard time nailing your KPIs without management support.
For yourself, keep the initative cards top of mind, print them out, make it a ritual to review them and make sure you’re implementing the changes needed to realise them.
In our team we made a point of ‘checking in’ on them a couple of times through out the year in our monthly team meeting. We’d review our KPIs and progress through our milestones for each initative, surfacing any changes along the way.
When the deadline comes around it’s time to review them all, asess how your team did in each one based on completion of the Development milestones and our agreed KPIs.
As you can see, this isn’t a fully quantitative thing outside of the KPIs and you might have made amendments on the way. You could asess completion with a GIF, or a qualitative measurement (Nailed it, Get ’em, Needs a re-work etc.), a colour a stamp, whatever really.
Go with what works for your team. The main thing is you celebrate your successes and attempts!
How this worked
The beauty of this is being outcome driven. Our actions for each initative were aligned to achieve a vision which ultimately improved how we operated as a team. We didn’t end up making one big switch to a new framework and instead progressively changed to a hybrid of Kanban and the Linear method. The ideas we came up with are still giving us momentum and direction on the decisions we make today.
Sometimes you might see opportunities outside of the agreed plan (remember the agile value of Responding to Change over Following a Plan), which will help you get to the future state. Sometimes it’s a simple as following the original plan you came up with.
With this kind of larger change holding regular retrospectives are essential. They give the team an opportunity to tweak and steer things. You won’t always get it right, so you need the team’s help in fixing things which aren’t working in the processes they use.
Where to from here
Once all these changes are made — we’re good right? No need to do anything else?
Well, probably not.
Like I said in part one, businesses, teams and people are constantly changing. Individual team member’s priorities change, people leave for new jobs, the business might change direction, people get promoted, the team might be re-structured. This kind of process can be run again and again based on the needs of the team.
It should be done at rate which is meaningful for your team, and ultimately this is a judgement call you will need to make.
If you’re running them back to back every 6 months you will invite chaos, not having enough time to settle into new habits and routines.
If you do it once every 5 years you’re leaving too much time for the rot to set in.
Sometimes events (like a re-structure, new management or a changing of the guard in terms of team members) can give you a clear signal on when is a good time to re-start the process.
So when do I get started?
If you don’t know when to start, and you have an established team you might as well start now! The whole process only takes a 3–4 hours of workshops from the team outside of any regular cermonies and a bit of elbow grease from you. But the results you’ll get are well worth the effort.
In between these ways of working re-designs let your ‘Reflect’ and ‘Improve’ process (like regular retrospectives — you’re doing them right?) steer the ship and keep things ticking over. And for youtself keep revisting your initatives to make sure you don’t go backwards on any of your future visions.
So give it a shot! Let me know how you get on.
