By Lionel Berger, Executive Architect — Inspire
Yves Wullaert, Executive Architect - Inspire
EDP, the main energy company in Portugal, worked with ServiceNow Inspire to define their digital transformation journey leveraging Human Centered Design techniques.
In a couple of workshops, teams of six to ten people took time to think where they were with their current business, where they wanted to be in a two to three years horizon, and how they could get there with a pragmatic and realistic value-based roadmap. ServiceNow Inspire conducted workshops with four workstreams to drive the breakdown of a common strategic goal into a comprehensive set of business objectives, a high-level architecture and a three years roadmap. This document explains the way we delivered this roadmap.
1 — Business Strategy and Objectives
An Inspire Engagement always starts with the understanding of the overall strategy and goals, with concrete metrics and targets. We had a couple of meetings with EDP's CIO and his management committee to understand those strategic objectives and identify the four focus areas for the transformation:
- The Digital Employee Workplace
- The Next Generation Infrastructure
- Simplified Project & Portfolio
- Reduced Security Threats.
The following sections describe how time-efficient workshops were conducted to define a concrete value-based roadmap for each of these workstreams. These workshops leveraged the Human-Centered Design techniques to ensure timely outcomes.
2 — Define the Challenge
Using brain writing techniques, the team gets a challenge (goal) from the workstream sponsor, and rewrites it to make it their own.
1 Min Each - Present Each other
3 Min Total - Write Post-Its for Keywords on the Challenge Definition
1 Min Each - Share
That challenge becomes the vision of the workstream, which is fully embraced by the team. Here is what the teams came up with for the different workstreams:
- Digital Employee Workplace: How might we create one easy digital environment to enable us to be more productive, to think & breath?
- Next Generation Infrastructure: How might we increase efficiency, reliability and visibility in IT Operations through automation and orchestration in a secure way without rework
- Simplified Project & Portfolio: How might we address the most valuable needs with the right quality and resources using easy and friendly tools to make stakeholders and users happy and productive?
- Reduced Security Threats and Risk: How might we proactively manage risks to increase E2E Information Security, Personal Data privacy, System Availability to ensure Business Resiliency?
3 — Identify the Users & Stakeholders
In this second exercise, the team gets five minutes to write on post-it notes all users & stakeholders involved in the workstream. Each participant then has two minutes to explain what they wrote and why, which will make everyone realize who is going to be impacted by the workstream's transformation. While most participants will identify similar users & stakeholders, some people will have different views and understanding of the scope and impact, which they will share with others. After this we Re-write and Agree on the Challenge (see 2)
3 Min Total - Write Post-Its for Users & Stakeholders
1 Min Each - Share
3 Min Each - Re-write Challenge
1 Min Each - Share
6 Min Total - Agree on new challenge
4 — Recognize what works well
Before diving into what needs to be transformed, the team looks at the areas that are currently in good shape and should be strengthened. This is an important step that gets everyone to recognize the achievements made in the past that need to be protected. Furthermore, discussing accomplished outcomes will generate positive energy in the team, and willingness to change what is not working well.
2 Min Total - Write Post-Its for What goes well
1 Min Each - Share
5 — The Hot Air Balloon Customer Journey Destination
This technique consists in listing the outcomes that need to be achieved (in the balloon), the challenges that may keep the balloon on the ground (the anchors) and the opportunities that will help the balloon to reach destination (the tailwinds). Post-it notes are used by the participants to capture their thoughts and share them with the team. Common ideas are grouped and summarized, and the outcome of this exercise provides a good understanding of what the team wants to achieve, what will help and accelerate the transformation, and what challenges need to be addressed. Some examples for the Next-Generation Infrastructure:
- Outcomes: Deliver complete cloud-based environment fast, optimize cloud resources cost against consumption, understand business criticality of a cloud instance, etc.
- Anchors: People mindset, compliance requirements, Legacy Systems, documentation requirements, etc.
- Tail winds: CIO sponsorship, willingness to change, technology experts, etc.
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2 Min Total - Write Post-Its for Capabilities to Achieve our Challenge and put it in the Center of Balloon
1 Min Each - Share
2 Min Total - Write Post-Its for Roadblocks to Achieve our Challenge and put it on the Anchor
1 Min Each - Share
2 Min Total - Write Post-Its for Opportunities to Achieve our Challenge and put it as a Tailwind
1 Min Each - Share
6 — The Outcome-Based roadmap
As the destination of the Hot Air Balloon is known, next step is to identify phases and milestones for the three-year roadmap. Participants take the post-it notes from the Hot Air Balloon and move them on a timeline drawn on the wall. This exercise generates alignment discussions amongst the participants who will move the post-it arounds a couple of times until they get to a common agreement on what should be achieved by when. At this stage, constraints and required efforts are not considered, this roadmap represents the ideal outcomes, milestones and timelines.
The above video shows the 3 slides per Stream and the Picture shows the consolidated Timeline.
7 — Success Metrics & KPIs
Knowing where we want to go with our roadmap we come to ourfinal step of the workshop which is to get the success measures: What are the metrics & KPIs that will allow to confirm that the expected outcomes were achieved, and what are the associated targets that should be set. Again, every participant will come up with their ideas and stick them on the wall. Some examples for the Next-Generation Infrastructure:
- Increase Predictability of delivered services
- % of automated runbooks & recurring tasks, % of anomalies identified and proactively fixed, etc.
- Increase Speed to deliver services
- E2E Time to deliver Resources/Changes, E2E Time to resolve Incidents, % of automated delivery, etc.
- Increase Quality of delivered services
- % of reworked Changes, % of Incidents caused by Changes, employee satisfaction survey, etc.
- Reduce Administration overhead in service delivery
- % of discovered CMDB data Completeness/Correctness/Compliance, % of automatically mapped services, % of innovation vs. run budget, teams' productivity, etc.
8 — Review & Validation
Once all workstreams' workshops are completed, the CIO and management committee gets together to review the outcome of all workstreams and provide feedback. This feedback is used for a final round of reviews and adjustments with the workstream owners before completing the readout material. At this stage, we initiate a Business Value Assessment that will use the identified metrics and KPIs to estimate the concrete benefits that can be targeted for the transformation program.
9 — Final readout
The final readout presentation to the CIO and management committee is mostly delivered by the customer, with some support from the Inspire team. The agenda is typically covering the following points:
- Review of engagement activities and timelines
- Executive summary of engagement's deliverables
- Personalized demo of expected outcomes for the various workstreams
- Overview of the roadmap and associated business benefits
- High-level capabilities architecture
- Platform Governance recommendations
- Program/projects initiation, transition to realization
