Move your team forward with a Lean Transformation Map

06 Feb 2016

Prioritisation is hard. It’s even harder when you’re working on multiple streams with many stakeholders.

• How do you split your time and effort?
• What do you prioritise now, next and later?
• How do keep your stakeholders up-to-date, help them see the roadmap for their goals and expose how they fit alongside your other priorities.

If this sounds familiar you can use a Lean Transformation Map to organise your team around your highest priorities and keep everyone (including your stakeholders) onboard with the way forward.

I was first introduced to the Lean Transformation Map by my colleague Darren Haken and we’ve been using the Lean Transformation Map to handle our many streams of work for ThoughtWorks.com.

How does the Lean Transformation Map work?

Let’s look at the end state and then we’ll look at how to create one with your team.

Now - Here is your Work In Play (WIP). These are your most highest priority pieces of work that are in flight and only the next highest priority comes into Now. It’s important to have a clear WIP limit for the team that your stakeholders are aware of to prevent too many spinning plates and the focus being lost (for your team and the wider business).

Streams - Your streams reflect your goals, where you’re heading. Within each stream is a collection of meaningful chunks of work that get you closer to the goal (more on this later). I recommend colour coding your streams to make them more distinguishable at a glance.

Priority in the bands - the proximity of the cards within the bands reflect their rough priority. But things change so don’t spend too much time getting the placement exactly right, this is not waterfall planning! Streams will flow at different rates and priorities will evolve. In fact the Transformation map can help you avoid waste by splitting work into testable milestones, so you can take stock check ‘is this working?’ before moving on with the next part of that stream.

Review and update it often

The Transformation Map should evolve frequently. Not on a daily basis but you should test it frequently whenever there is movement or in key meetings when you have your stakeholders at hand. It’s a living document that you should always question and challenge it against your business goals. Remember, this is not waterfall planning, your priorities and game-plans can change and your Transformation Map should reflect biggest priorities based on what you know at the time.

Timelines and planning

The timelines are purposefully ambiguous, it gives you foresight into where you’re heading (your direction and pathway to your goals) but it’s not a week by week account of how you’ll get there. Applying concrete timelines would be dangerous as it would be out of date on a daily basis! The Transformation Map is most suited to agile teams and allows you focus on the Now, prepare for the Next and have an eye on the Soon & Future. If you’re determined to give it a timeline, use Now as the next month or two, Soon as three to six months and Future for beyond.

Prioritisation is hard but if everyone is aware of the constraints you're dealing with and the available options it makes moving forward a lot easier

If one stream has a hard deadline for one of the milestones, you prioritise it and pull these into next, making sure you have room within your WIP limit, the other streams may need to slow down but you will be able to show and demonstrate to your stakeholders how the work is being split using the Transformation Map. Prioritisation is hard but if everyone is aware of the constraints you’re dealing with and the available options it makes moving forward a lot easier. You can’t deliver everything at once so you make a decision about what to prioritise or look at alternatives such as more people to handle more streams.

Prioritisation is hard but in my humble opinion that difficulty is a good thing, it forces you to drop what is least important in order to deliver what is the most important.

Communicate changes

Display your Transformation map proudly, don’t place it in the corner, display it next to your Kanban wall and wherever your team frequently gather.

Add it to your key communications. Review it at every opportunity, always as a team with your key stakeholders. Make sure everyone is aware of it’s current state. Make a digital version using Google Docs so that distributed teams can check in and review it remotely.

Creating your Transformation Map

So how do you go about creating your Transformation Map? It’s ultimately up to you and your team but here’s my recommendation.

Firstly, do some prep work and explain the Transformation Map concept and benefits to your stakeholders to get their buy-in.

Next set aside time and gather people together (Cross-functional mix of your most important stakeholders, SMEs and delivery teams), you can’t create a Transformation map in isolation.

The best way forward for any team and organisation is to gain a common understanding of your Goals, Opportunities and Risks (amongst others). This is not a full account of how to do this, it’s more of a high level example.

1) Onboard your team - Gain a common understanding as to what’s important

When everyone is gathered in one space, go through the process of getting people up to speed and on the same page. Share context, ask people to do a flash talk or share back on their subject area. The executive sponsor should give an overview of the business strategy and goals.

Make it a healthy environment to share. This exercise not only helps in sharing knowledge but also creates empathy between team members by sharing what’s important to them and the challenges or problems your teammates face. It can also spark new ideas when people approach existing problems from new angles.

2) Establish you goals

Again, share and gain a common understanding of your goals. What does success look like? How will you measure your goals? Are they testable? Are they aligned to your business strategy? Do they have different levels of priority?

3) Break each goal into meaningful chunks of work

Each goal will consist of more then one task or piece of work. Break them down into meaningful and testable chunks of activity that get you further to your goal. Don’t worry about going into a granular level.

Make sure to test each piece of work against your Goal - is it aligned? Can you measure it? What’s the minimum you can do to learn whether it’s the right thing to do?

By doing this you are establishing milestones that will naturally fit into the Now, Next, Soon and Future model.

Review your current backlog against your goals, are they still relevant? If not send them to the trash pile or if you can’t let go put them in a holding pen.

Okay. So you should have identified your streams (Goals) and meaningful chunks of work that get you closer to that goal.

4) Next, prioritise and construct your map

This is the hardest bit of all but it’s the most important. There’s many ways in which you can do this but lets start with a few example exercises to get you started.

There's always more to build than we have time or people to build - always

Jeff Patton

From here on I’m going to refer to the meaningful chunks of work you’ve created as stories for ease of phrase (although these are much bigger than the stories you’d use in an agile development process).

Exercise: Silent prioritisation

I like this method because it cuts through any debating and gets things moving fast and you can really see people concentrating and thinking through the priority of each story. The premise is simple, you ask your teammates to silently organise the stories onto the Lean Transformation Map, you’re allowed to rearrange stories that your teammates have already organised, the only rule is that you mustn’t speak. The debate comes afterwards.

Allow about 10 minutes in total and play some music in the background.

If you get into the hilarious situation whereby there’s a silent battle between stakeholders moving the same story back and forth you know it’s time to break silence and start the debate.

Exercise: Dot voting

The purpose of this is to quickly narrow down your stories to a more manageable amount to focus on and prioritise. Give each stakeholder a set number of votes that they can use to select the highest priority stories. The amount of votes can vary depending on how many stories and stakeholders you have. In most cases you can start with three votes each as this will help narrow down the top stories. Stakeholders can use all three votes on one story if they wish to. You can use stickers or give each person a sharpie to make their mark.

Once everyone has used their votes, pull out the stories with votes and arrange them in a decreasing order of votes.

You’ve now got a straw man of your priorities that you can talk through as a group and arrange them onto the Lean Transformation Map. The Dot voting is just an exercise to get you started so don’t feel that you have to prioritise a story that has three votes over a story that has two. Once you’ve got to a good place and have arranged them on your map, you can do the same process for the remaining stories.

Prioritisation is hard but stick with it

Don’t worry, you’ll get to a good point if you persist. When I’ve done this exercise before, we’ve struggled for an hour or two debating the priority of our stories and then suddenly we moved a few cards around and we were done in the space of 10 minutes.

A rule of thumb for prioritisation is…

Use Business strategy to choose Target customers, use their Goals and activities to choose Features and content.

…and always Minimise output, maximise outcome and impact.

Many streams, many teams

If your teams are working across more than a few streams of work you can easily reflect this to show all the different teams transformation maps on one master map….