Last time we looked at the annual planning cycle that most organisations go through each year and some of the poor outcomes that it leads to. We also looked at a potential way out — by improving the information systems within the organisation — building a single demand view, it allows the organisation to adopt a more flexible planning cycle. But what does a view like that look like, and how do you build one?
What do we need in a single view?
In order to plan in a more adaptive way, leaders within the organisation, at all levels, need to be able to balance demand — the work in the system plus the roadmap of future work. They also need to balance capacity — the organisation’s ability to get work done, and value — the benefit being achieved through the work being delivered. All three of those need to be linked via strategic investment through to enterprise strategy.
Single view of work
Most organisations have some mechanism for tracking work. Whether that’s through something like project status reports or through a work tracking system like Jira. The problem with work tracking in most organisations is that the work tracking is disjointed. You can get a view of part of the work, by attending the right status meeting or looking at the right dashboard in a system somewhere, but it’s not possible to see all the work in the system.
Different parts of the organisation organise and track their work in different ways, even if they use the same system to do so – fields are configured differently, and workflows are different. The information about the work can’t be rolled up and compared like for like with other parts of the organisation.
Having a single view of work across the organisation requires a level of consistency — the same information in the same system being recorded in the same way.
The other thing that tends to be missing from views of work within organisations is future demand — what’s coming down the pipe. Even in organisations that have a fairly sophisticated and consistent view of current work, future work tends to be spread across multiple roadmap presentations and spreadsheets rather than being tracked and managed in the same system as current work. Only part of the workflow is captured.
Or only certain types or levels of work are tracked — new features are tracked, but defects are in some other system. Or work is tracked at the team level, but when it rolls up to feature/project/program it disappears back into spreadsheets and PowerPoint.
To build a single view of work, the work tracking system must track work from the initial concept right through to completion consistently across the organisation. The system must track all levels of work from the largest strategic initiative to the smallest user story, showing the decomposition from large to small and allowing users to select the right level of detail for their needs.
Single view of capacity
The flip side of demand is capacity — what is the organisation’s capacity to deliver work? This tends to be tracked at an individual team or project level, but there is no consolidated view above that. And again, only certain types of teams are represented. Usually IT teams. What is marketing’s capacity to deliver on new product launches this year? How many strategic programs can finance support?
While single view of work is largely a solved problem (given a well-configured and consistently used work-tracking system), a single view of capacity is a harder problem for organisations to tackle. Capacity in most organisations comes in many types — marketing, data analysis, IT, finance, legal. Even within a single department like IT the capacity types divide finer and finer-java devs, web devs, testers, and platform specialists.
In order to understand their capacity to deliver, organisations need to understand the skills they have in the organisation. Just like work, a comprehensive view of capabilities must also include a future capability roadmap — what skills will the organisation need in order to deliver on future needs — will we need a team of AI prompt engineers? Data scientists? New skills in IT? Stronger product skills?
Single view of value
Once an organisation has a good view of both capacity and demand, it can understand how much work the organisation can get done. But there is still something missing — is that work the right work? In order to understand that, the organisation must develop a comprehensive view of value.
This is uncharted territory for most organisations. In most organisations I work with, any mention of value tracking usually elicits a response along the lines of “we can’t do that… I don’t want to be the person who tells the director that their pet idea didn’t work”. Tracking value requires courage.
It also requires understanding what value is for the organisation. When the organisation talks about delivering value, exactly what is that value, and how is it measured? When we say a feature adds value, what do we really mean by that? Shareholder value? Customer value? Profit? All of the above? Does value mean the same thing to different parts of the organisation? How do we compare different types of value?
Once an organisation understands what value is, then each piece of work, from the largest to the smallest, should be linked to a value hypothesis — this is how this piece of work will generate value and this is how we will measure that value.
Once an organisation understands the value being delivered, they can fill in the last piece of the puzzle — is the work we are doing the right work? Is it helping us achieve our goals? This is how we link the work being done to the organisation’s strategy.
The right tooling
Building a single demand view requires an investment in tooling. While a system like this could be constructed in-house using existing systems wired together with APIs and BI systems, the resulting system will almost inevitably be limited and very brittle. Any change in the underlying systems will break the Rube Goldberg machine above it.
The right choice of tool will make the job far easier and the end result much better. The single demand view is the mechanism by which the organisation understands the execution of its strategy. If that’s not worth investing in, then what is?
It’s not an all-or-nothing investment either, these systems can be built in stages, each stage giving the organisation a better view of what’s going on and opening up new possibilities in how the work is managed and funded.
Strategic investments: Adaptive funding
The biggest opportunity a single demand view gives an organisation is the ability to accelerate its funding and planning cycle — with accurate, real-time information at its fingertips, the organisation is no longer limited to annual funding. They can make decisions faster and more effectively.
In part 3, we will look at some of the opportunities to adjust the way work is funded and planned that open up as an organisation starts to build its single demand view.
Have you missed our first blog? You can read it here: Annual funding – Driving the wrong behaviours: Part 1
