Align Transformation Efforts Using Business Value Engineering

Organisations are complex, dynamic, multi-dimensional, interconnected organisms where each separate function tends to focus on its own local scope using methods, metrics, practices and technologies that suit their particular needs. Meanwhile, organisational leaders want dashboards of data to analyse, measure, monitor and assess performance, with related levers to adjust business operations. 

For an organisation engaged in digital transformation (attempting to reinvent how to deliver value to customers and external stakeholders): 

• Trying to work out how to untangle the complex collection of silos, stakeholder needs, systems and disparate technologies is like trying to tease apart a multi-coloured ball of string while it is still rolling downhill. 
• These differing interpretations exacerbate the challenges of change and organisational reinvention.
• Misaligned views of the target vision and what needs to change, usually lead to higher costs, slower change cycles and increased risks of programme failure. 

Without shared ownership of a set of holistic multi-dimensional models that captures how the business really works – a shared operating model – complete with the plans for reinventing it, the net result is often just change theatre. Yes, you may get “go faster stripes” on the existing mess, but usually in this situation there is little actual transformation, innovation or reinvention.

From clarifying strategy intent through to supporting agility in execution, at Capsifi we help enterprises design, capture and organize their organisational value proposition. We enable connected enterprises to build their own “knowledge graph” – a shared set of fluid and evolving models that help stakeholders align.

By enabling interaction with the knowledge graph through focused “pathways” we help participants collaborate, gathering information to answer complex business questions such as:

• How do individual objectives and key results support desired business outcomes?
• Which innovations should we prioritise and why?
• What does the potential roadmap look like for this differentiating business capability?
• What benefits do we expect and what will be the impact on inflight change efforts?
• What are the costs and resources needed for an idea against the benefits identified?
• How can we best align our investment decisions to the value contribution of an initiative?

Collectively, we call that Business Value Engineering.

Business Value Engineering Reinvents The Value Proposition

Of course, the interpretation of value will depend on the type of stakeholder. Typically, organisations focus on shareholder value, but there are other types of value. For example, the value perceived by customers, internal stakeholders (employees) will differ from shareholders. Similarly, there are different sets of value dimensions for sustainability, corporate social responsibility and environmental concerns.

Regardless of the stakeholder type, Business Value Engineering relies on engaging to:

• Decompose the perception of value. Identifying a set of MECE value drivers for that type of stakeholder helps elucidate the goals and challenges, ensuring transformation and change programmes align to corporate strategy and governance initiatives.
• Re-envision the products and services that the stakeholder consumes.  Working together to describe how organisational offerings (its products and services) deliver the value stakeholders expect provides the opportunity for innovation and reinvention.
• Focus on distinct customer segments and personas. With a clear idea of whose problem they are solving for, teams can more easily design new customer journeys and experiences with supporting processes and value streams.
• Map ideas and innovations to business outcomes and value drivers. This then helps them identify the material effect that these experiences have on the business outcomes and ultimately the performance impact on a given business capability.
• Group and prioritize change efforts. Breaking the scope into “capability uplifts” helps the organisation articulate the order and dependencies of changes to its people, process and technologies. These models in turn drive the backlog, epics and sprints of agile change delivery teams.

Effectively, Business Value Engineering means understanding the value your stakeholders need – aligning around a trajectory – before working backwards to design the experiences delivered.

However, this is not something a small team of consultants sitting in a meeting room can do. It’s got to be more inclusive than that. Business Value Engineering relies on mixed teams of strategy, operations and technology colleagues – fusion teams – working together to design the future state as well as the steps required to get there. With so many moving parts it’s impossible for change agents and participants to keep up to date and informed without this set of structured models. Moreover, each type of stakeholder has a different expectations of the value delivered – even collaborators up and down the value chain – they can no longer rely on traditional project management methods and manual mechanisms such as Excel to keep everything in sync.

Takeaways

Business Value Engineering delivers:

• Successful alignment around digital transformation. It helps stakeholders explore and catalogue the value and outcomes they need from a change initiative.
• The shared set of connected and structured models that make up the “knowledge graph” of the enterprise. This carefully structured set of dynamic views provides effective governance from the CXO in the boardroom, down to digital strategists, product owners, service designers, enterprise architects and software developers.
• True round-trip visibility from strategic intent down into the discrete elements of change. Changes to strategy and goals are imply staged change to people, processes and technologies, while changes in the engine room need to bubble up to the CXO in the board room.

Contact us to learn more information or to schedule a consultation. Our expert digital transformation team is ready to best help your company chart its course to success today.