System Thinking Needs Assessments
Improve a tough product constraint in 2-3 days
Do you ever have difficulty getting to common agreement with colleagues on important work decisions impacting your organization's products? Do you strive for more positive ways to solve conflicts? Do you wish you could have more win-win outcomes? System Thinking approaches have been used by leading companies to achieve such decision making goals.
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A needs assessment is a practical, hands-on way for you to make tough business decisions with confidence and delight. A Moonraker Insights specialist will work with you and your stakeholders to clarify your primary project goal, then work with you to map out current constraints and a systematic solution to these constraints. This process involves three System Thinking tools: Current Reality Tree, Conflict Resolution Diagram and Future Reality Tree. Each of these visual techniques can immediately deliver actionable insights at your organization. Together, these assessments enable you to better understand the potential significance of process changes, providing you increased confidence and increased profitability.
We will also address best practices for both remote and in-person implementations of these visual techniques using online and physical whiteboards, respectively. These three tools combine the System Thinking fundamentals of Deming and Goldratt with the presenter’s personal implementation experiences for organizations ranging in size from multinationals to startups. These needs assessments are most typically requested by leaders of medium and large organizations with challenging stakeholder constraints. A case study and typical assessment details are described below.
Advantages
Choosing Moonraker Insights as your partner to drive organizational improvements offers many benefits, including...
Confidentiality
Ideate potential internal approaches to sensitive topics with a third party
Transparency
Broaden decision-making to efficiently and effectively align root issues
Independence
Gain trusted neutral advice to inform tough decisions for both processes and outcomes
Activities
Moonraker Insights will guide you through three core activities to systematically map out what's constraining you, then visually map out a solution that's practical, manageable and easy to communicate with all your stakeholders. These are hands-on activities to solve one of your actual problems. A Moonraker Insights facilitator will support you at each step until you have successfully achieved your goal.
List competing pairs of options into "conflict clouds", then describe unifying scenarios that would solve each conflicting constraint
Case Study
The following case study highlights a typical needs assessment using system thinking tools for a health tech company's software product division. This case study involves mapping how people within the company contributed to software product innovation within the division.
Problem
A 900 person health tech company had four vice presidents for sales regions spanning USA and Canada. The company had been successfully selling white-labeled software created by external engineering & design teams for several years. Stakeholders at the company decided to grow by developing their own new software that would be sold by their established sales network. After hiring a professional internal product engineering & design team, the company was experiencing significant problems with its internal tech team's performance. Activities were often delayed, morale was low and sales were below targets. Moonraker Insights entered to help at this point.
Solution
First, the Moonraker Insights facilitator met separately with the product team and sales team stakeholders, then co-created Conflict Clouds that contained the needs of the individual product & sales teams and the company as a whole. At this point, the facilitator observed, and the Conflict Clouds illustrated, that the sales VPs and product leaders often had overlapping decision making expectations related to product development of the new internal products. The facilitator then met with each of the regional sales VPs to create regional, then company-wide mappings (a Current Reality Tree) of their decision making related to internal product development. Finally, the facilitator worked with the sales VPs and product leadership to build a unified mapping (a Future Reality Tree) of a solution to improve product-related decision making.
Results
In consultation with the facilitator, the company's senior leadership decided to (i) create a new global product VP role and (ii) create roles and responsibilities documents for the existing sales VPs and new product VP positions. Within a few months, software sprint velocity increased by 18%, product team turnover reduced by 5% and sales increased by 55%. These Conflict Cloud, Current Reality Tree and Future Reality Tree activities were accomplished with three one-day sessions with a Moonraker Insights facilitator and two days of additional advising over a period of four weeks.
Typical Assessment Details
Almost anyone can grab a few people off the street and ask their opinions. However, is such an approach the best for your key business decisions? We at Moonraker Insights prefer a better approach. Guided by the "garbage in, garbage out" maxim, we lead quality participant screening to help you focus on the best feedback, ethical procedures so you maintain regulatory compliance, and careful research analyses to provide you confidence in your evidence-based decisions.
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Moonraker Insights will lead the creation of tangible, visual mapping documents of current and future activities. We will also work with you to integrate these insights into your existing business processes to make sure they are acted upon and implemented successfully. Contact us to discuss deliverable, target audience, and time & budget details that best match your needs.
Deliverables
Visual mappings (Conflict Cloud, Current Reality Tree, Future Reality Tree); quality participant management and research analyses that you can rely on for key decisions
Audience
Leaders responsible for strategic product decisions; typically medium-sized or large-sized corporations of 250 staff or more
Time & Budget
Complete assessments starting at 2 days and $6900; lead times as little as 1 week;
followup advising available by the day
About the Facilitator
Dr. Colin Swindells helps organizations successfully combine user-centered and technology-centered approaches to improve quality and satisfaction. Client projects include: product innovations for CAE surgical tools, BMW iDrive controls, Boeing aircraft parts, Microsoft Xbox video game controllers, Agilent / Dako cancer systems, Nike wearables, Google Nexus Asian character entry displays, and Yara agriculture supply chain systems. Colin has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia, a BASc in Engineering Science from Simon Fraser University, and a professional certification in System Thinking from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has 27 peer-reviewed publications, 11 patents, and has led projects on 4 continents.