Avoid rushing like a bull into a China shop
Moving towards a value exchange system in the Public Administration.
Introduction
Due to my current role as a fractional / consultant / interim, you name it, product person, I have the chance to interact with companies that I was not familiar with. Most of them from the industry 4.0 and public administrations as well.
A month I embarked on a journey to help the Digital and AI office in one community, to transition from a PMO (Project Management Office) to a VMO (Value Management Office). Although we have just started, I’d love to share some of the learnings so far and the approaches I’ve taken, to help them thing about value rather than just about projects.
Although this could sound like an Epic endeavour, which it is, I decided to avoid rushing off and think this is live or dead, also for the people that are going through this journey. I tried to convey that we should enjoy the process and also work hard.
This post from John Cutler resonated a lot with the way I should face this challenge:
Defining the game and its rules
One of the easiest things to do, and get it wrong about change, is to act like a bull into a Chines shop. This implies having no consideration for the context you client is coming from and start applying the “best product practices” from the latest product management book released as if they fit like a glove.
Disclaimer: I don’t know if the things I’m going to share in this article are the right way to implement this. If you don’t think so, please share a review suggestion how you would have done it, rather than keep it to yourself.
Defining the game (problem space)
The first thing that I did was to empathise with the client to know what they were struggling with. To illustrate how abstract the situation tends to be, the only thing they told me was “we want to move from a PMO-driven development to a value approach”.
As normally happens, they told you about the superficial problems they have, but there are much more things that they don’t know how to articulate, therefore your job here is to unpack what they say. One schema that I when interviewing customers is the following one:
Another great tool that I use that helps me understand the main causal mechanisms is the forces of progress. After the first and second interview, I was able to fill the following chart that gave me an idea of the progress they were trying to make. The problem is the language they have to articulate that was moving from project (PMO) to value.
If you want to take this further, you could also draw a causal loop diagram, based on what you have extracted from your interviews, to show all the different variables within the problem, and how they are connected.
The rules
Once you have a clear idea about the problem, and before doing anything, I wanted to define the boundaries we were allowed to play. Defining the boundaries is something that helps people to make decisions faster, keep ourselves accountable on potential red lines we don’t want to cross, and define the enabling constrains and floats that will helps to make progress.
There is no fancy framework for this, just reflecting on the following topic:
No Negociable (Limiting Constrains): These are the things that cannot be negotiated.
Problems we ARE NOT going to solve now (Out Of Scope): These are the things we should forget for now, unless something else happens. It’s quite useful define them in advance to make sure we don’t waste our time talking about the,.
Guiding Principles: These are “operating” principles we agreed early on that will act as an anchor to know how to action things. Some examples are:
We are going to start fixing things inside first, to start taking care of the outside factors later.
We will be looking for small AND sustainable changes. What we do should help us in the longer haul, otherwise we will be critical on whether we implement it or not.
We respect and don’t criticise what exists today, but we have the courage to challenge it.
Main problems to solve: This is the main focus that will drive our attention.
Main traits that are required to achieve a value and outcome mindset: This is a reminder of the traits that we should follow to ensure we are moving from a project-driven organisation to a more value-driven one.
Mapping the current space (reality)
Once you have a bit the name of the game and the rules, you want to get to the bottom of it as much as possible. In order to do so, you must understand how things are working today. For that I love using one of the principles stated in the Lean methodology, which is visualise the value stream.
Ideally you want to visualise it with the aim of removing the no value activities. In this case it had another purpose which is, let’s be aware of what we have today and what is stopping us to delivering value. With that in mind we created a high-level value stream.
Regardless of how long and arrows we have, I like the idea that this triggered SO many conversations and comments, and brought awareness and validation that some things are not working as they should, to achieve our goal.
Disclaimer: You will be adjusting this visualisation, especially if you don’t have all the people participating in it from the get-go.
Mapping the future space (dream)
While we were still iterating the previous diagram to gain more detail and visibility on things we might have overlooked, we hopped on the Delorean and travelled into the future to see how would the future look like, if we were working as group delivering value rather than just output.
To avoid giving too much detail, we envisioned a future relaxing the constrains we have today, knowing that some of them will be flexible to be changed. Here is the result (modified for obvious reasons) we obtained:
Regardless of what is written here, with this activity you allow people to think outside of their reality. At the same time, you can take advantage and explain some of the ideas they might not be familiar with. This has the effect of getting people to “question” what they have today and how this could be different for the better.
ProTip: If you want to run an activity like this one, give people the time to “forget” what they have today. They are too bias and anchored on today’s constrains, than what would be possible. Ease the conversation by just talking about the magnets and progress they would have made when working more on value and/or outcomes.
What do we do next (the messy middle)
The previous two points were “the easiest”. You can map your current situation because you live in it every single day, and who doesn’t like to imagine a better future.
Defining how you are going to tackle the next steps is probably the most difficult step. Not only because it assumes that the previous steps are ok, but it’s when the rubber hits the road, and expectations are compared against reality. I would like to be super transparent and outspoke here, and remind people that this is not about implementing a new framework. This job has a cultural part as well, which means changing old behaviours and adopting new ones. That doesn’t happen in a week or months. It could take years.
The crux is to know what are the part(s) that are going to:
address a specific problem that is stopping us from transitioning into a more value-driven organization: even if it’s not the most pressing one - sometimes you need to start somewhere else, to pave the way for a more successful landing.
show progress / results: we must define a measure of progress that shows that we have change something.
prepare the soil for a new sowing: what is the work we need to do before getting our hands dirty. Remember, we cannot intervene like a bull into a China shop.
Although this could be the most difficult part, I would like to introduce you a technique that could help with this, which is call the interrelationship diagram. This is a technique I came to know thanks to Ryan Singer.
Before showing the result, we describe all the parts of our puzzle that we had identified as potential pains that are stopping use from reaching our first desire state (which was getting the product people to have a clear idea of the problem and form an opinion of how important the problem was). Then we use the diagram to see which parts should be taken first, and divided the work.
This is just the beginning. We have started by tackling the elements in this order, and we will see the results pretty soon. Although this may not be the perfect way, it’s something that brings clarity to the client, it helped us to thinking on a limited number of things, rather than trying to boil the ocean, and we haven’t spent millions of hours drawing the perfect schema.
I hope this post can provide a mental model on how PdMs can tackle initiatives that are quite uncertain.
Stay tuned for the results!!!