About The Playbook
Korio is a group of professionals who came together to help companies re-platform and become agile and fast. We prefer to work with established companies in the mid-market who might be struggling with the transformation to digital. Collectively, we have gone through dozens of transformations. We have witnessed successes and failures.
Based on what we have learned, we have become quite opinionated on what works and what doesn't. This short post is part of a larger Playbook that we have assembled based on what we have learned.
For details on each on our approach to organization and team structure, explore the links below.
As we learn more from our clients and if we think that the learning is: A) actionable, B) validated and C) doesn't state the obvious, then we will add it to our Playbook.
Remember, everything we propose can be done incrementally and with very little lead-time. If you want to adopt the plays in a more gradual manner, go ahead but consider setting each up as an experiment: have a hypothesis, measure the impact and act on what you learn.
The Play: Internal Alignment Through Value Mapping
When companies decide to up their digital game they often struggle to keep the critical dots connected. Most organizations have no trouble committing to digital and modern technology as a strategic necessity. Where they stumble, in our experience, is charting a path from the statement in their strategy through to implementation and sustained focus.
We have noticed a concerning trend where the senior leadership team affirms the committment - even going as far as to say that "going digital" is part of everone's job - but then fails to synchronize all the moving parts.
At Korio - we are strong proponents of creating simple and powerful planning artifacts to synchronize efforts and to drive the alignment across the business that is necessary to ensure things stay on track. We use Value Maps for this purpose. Value Maps describe how value is created by the organization for its stakeholders: most notably prospects, customers and partners.
We began using Value Maps to "disentagle" how our clients described their future state and to give shape to what it meant to be the best in their industry. We immediately noticed that the maps uncovered significant holes in capabilities and showed compelling opportunities to do things differently and better. Value Maps also showed how the current organization chart was not the best way to describe the business or even think about how it functioned.
We heard from our clients that they were beginning to "think in Value Maps" and use them, cross-functionally, to prioritize areas for improvement, fill gaps in capability and stay synchronized across the whole enterprise. This realization is what prompted us to position Value Maps as the primary "documents" to drive organizational alignment. They also filled the hole we typically see between business strategy and execution.
Value Maps are not simply an artifact that gets dumped on a shelf. They stay ever-green and are referred to daily and optimized (based on data) mothly or even weekly. This is partly because they do double duty as the same artifacts we use to generate code and metrics for our low-code platform, and partly because they provide an engaging canvase to describe what excellence looks like.
How
In our collection of Business Architecture plays, we describe how to build and maintain Value Maps.
Why Bother
- Strategic plans often translate into a series of "special projects". We encourage you to rethink this and reframe the steps that follow your strategy articulation as a map of how value is created in the service of that strategy.
- "Going digital" for many leaders and departments is the job of IT and possibly Marketing. We don't agree. It needs to be a primary point of focus across the business.
- If we agree that digital isn't only an IT and Marketing responsiblity, we need a way to keep everyone engaged at a strategic level. We think Value Maps are the key artifact to support this engagement.
- Value Maps are easy to keep ever-green and, because they drive the configuration of your platform and how success is measured, they must stay ever-green. This means that the artifacts that you use to keep everyone aligned will always be current and that updates to it will require meaningful and ongoing strategic discussions.