Serge Lucio is the VP and GM of Agile Operations Division, Broadcom Inc.
Consensus action toward shared goals requires trust.
In the world economy, for example, high-trust societies enjoy competitive advantages over those that must coordinate activities through coercion or regulation. Corporations, too, are more competitive when internal trust is high. A full 91% of CEOs recently surveyed by PwC acknowledge that trust is pivotal in achieving success.
But lacking bonds of kinship, culture or nationality, corporations must often build trust from scratch. Where to start?
A common purpose, clearly and consistently articulated by effective leaders, is essential. But employees and teams also need a way to connect that purpose—“Why are we here?”—with their day-to-day contributions toward it—”What should I do right now?”
For strategic objectives as wide-ranging and fundamental as digital transformation, making that connection is imperative. And it can only be accomplished with data.
Why Poor Data Undermines Trust
Incomplete, inconsistent or outdated performance data undermines trust. Teams can’t plan their work to optimize its strategic value, measure progress, coordinate their efforts with other teams or resolve issues. Without transparent and timely data, initiatives waste resources, fall behind schedule and fail; demoralized teams retreat into defensive silos.
Attempts by individual teams to compensate for poor data often just make things worse. Spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and custom tools are seldom up to date or integrated. Waste is colossal as each team duplicates others’ efforts to collect their own data, then sanitizes it to show progress and minimize problems.
Instead of a window into progress toward strategic goals, management gets a mosaic of “sanitized” fragments—a poor basis for decision-making.
Where Value Stream Management Fits In
Value stream management (VSM) is one way to alleviate the problems of poor data. VSM measures and stimulates value flow in software development, ideal for organization-spanning strategic initiatives like digital transformation. VSM features:
• One data source to align business, IT and other teams on a shared set of metrics and eliminate fragmentation.
• Real-time delivery that supports accurate scheduling and rapid decision-making and eliminates timing discrepancies that obscure real trends.
• End-to-end coverage that encompasses all the activities that contribute to customer value for all teams and managers with a stake in the outcome.
Value-based plans created with VSM can replace a mishmash of delayed, incomplete, self-serving reports with trusted metrics that reveal the value contribution of strategic investments.
Making VSM Work
Setting up a system to track value flow in a complex initiative is itself complex. However, a disciplined, top-down approach can simplify the process and yield important benefits in transparency and trust. Here are a few key steps:
Connect value definitions to measure value creation.
The value that an organization receives from any strategic initiative will ultimately be determined by its impact on customers: greater sales, higher margins, lower churn, faster upgrade cadence, etc. Planners should define value outcomes objectively and link them to work efforts, prioritizing those with the greatest expected impact.
Connecting work performance with value generated fosters responsibility and ownership as well as trust as team members grow to count on colleagues who deliver value.
Set up portfolio hierarchies and outcome-oriented roadmaps.
Portfolio hierarchies organize value outcomes into structured frameworks; roadmaps organize them in time.
Hierarchies should reflect an organization’s structure down to the team/project level so teams can easily focus on their contributions to the value hierarchy; roadmaps should be aligned so that iterations and releases coincide, to simplify combined views of a value stream’s status.
Hierarchies and roadmaps reveal each team’s contribution to value-stream execution. With this step, using a single data warehouse can consolidate all the data, meaning that updates are available in real time to stakeholders.
Build and align strategic objectives and key results (OKRs).
Where VSM illuminates the entire workflow, OKRs measure individual value contributions. Aligning the two fosters a culture of trust with transparent communication, accountability and empowerment.
A word of warning here: Individual teams have powerful incentives to craft metrics that favor their contributions. They may jump at the chance to take the lead in formulating “friendly” OKRs.
Workshops, cross-functional reviews and transparent performance metrics dashboards can help establish a set of metrics everyone will trust. A system of record can also keep OKRs synchronized with objectives, key results and interim actual values and targets.
Making It Pay
Nobody will deny that organizing these inputs is a lot of work. The payoff comes in the form of dashboards and reports that deliver the data you’ve assembled in a way that your teams will use and trust. Here’s how:
Provide progress visualization for stakeholders based on common data.
Progress visualization includes program dashboards, progress reports and release tracking pages, all based on common data aggregated. They keep every stakeholder on the same page.
Although different teams will assess “progress” in different ways, objectivity, transparency and alignment are universal.
Address alignment and issue resolution difficulties.
When consensus comes under strain, quick resolution is paramount to maintain trust.
The best approach is to anticipate challenges and prepare deep-dive reporting tools to dig into root causes. At Broadcom, we use “four-dimensional” reports for insights into the predictability, productivity, responsiveness and quality of each program and team.
Create executive reports for better decisions.
Executives need high-level reports tailored to the decisions they need to make, such as:
• Rollup reports summarize the most relevant results, KPIs and metrics for each executive. They should exclude excessive details that obscure the big picture or insights that belong on a different executive’s desk.
• Portfolio status reports give leadership a snapshot of their product portfolios: the value customers will receive from each objective, the funding horizon of the objective and the percent complete for each.
• Strategy mix analysis shows planned and committed spend for each strategic objective with the strategies each objective supports. It helps executives keep spend percentages in line with expectations.
Conclusions
Data builds trust by revealing the connection between the organization’s strategic goals and each stakeholder’s personal efforts. Organizations must make that connection transparent from end to end and in real time to achieve their most critical customer value initiatives.
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