Development directorate

Transcription

1 Development directorate Brown paper Spring 2007 developing people, improving young lives

2 Brown paper What is it? A brown paper technique which uses the power of the team to plan a change implementation while building team ownership of the output It documents an entire implementation capturing roles, a timeline and activities shown in swim lanes It highlights all milestones, activities, interfaces, decision points and deliverables When would you use it? During the Develop stage, prior to Delivery Are there any rules? Don t plan alone always use the team by assigning responsibility among team members for each swim lane in the plan Start with milestones working back from right to left with the final deliverable first, then the subsidiary key milestone events/deliverables 2 For this tool you will need a large brown paper (hence Brown Paper ); lots of post-it notes and flipchart marker pens. The idea is to engage your change team together in all the things that need to be done in order to implement a change initiative. You already will have a vision of what the future will be like and will have progressed through Discovery and Deepen stages using some of the other Remodelling tools and techniques to arrive at a solution at the Develop stage. Now it is time to plan how you will deliver the change and this brown paper tool helps to build ownership of key people in the execution of that plan.

3 Brown paper starting point Timeline Design Workstreams Swim lanes 3 Start with a large brown paper about 2 metres high and perhaps 4 metres long. Mark out the paper as shown above. There are three things to bear in mind: workstreams; swim-lanes ; and a timeline. The team will first need to identify a number of workstreams. For convenience, these are ways of dividing up the work of implementing change for purposes. For example, they may reflect the responsibilities of several different stakeholders in the project; or they might reflect the different but related functions that make up the change solution. For example: if your change project was all about moving house, then for purposes it might be sensible to think of different streams of work that correspond to the roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders such as: vendor; purchaser; solicitor; estate agent; building society; etc. Each workstream is allocated its own swim lane a row across the brown paper into which all the activities assigned to that workstream are planned. The timeline reflects the duration of the change project, working backwards right to left, from the end of the project back to the start date. Divide the timeline into equal columns to represent convenient blocks of time or calendar dates in weeks, months, or school terms, whatever is sensible.

4 Expanding the plan milestones Planning 4 Populate the plan by identifying key milestones. These are events, deliverables or decision points that symbolise significant achievements at certain points along the timeline. In the example of moving house, these might be making an accepted offer ; exchange of contracts ; completion ; etc. Use square post-it notes to represent the milestones and orientate them in a diamond shape. Write clearly the identity of the milestone in each case. In the slide shown here, there is a series of four milestones in the workshop swim lane each representing the of one workshop. In the workshop outputs swim lane there are two milestones that represent: an interim draft report; and the final report; respectively.

5 Expanding the plan activities and dependencies Planning 5 Complete the plan by using post-it notes to represent activities (note that for clarity, each workstream has been assigned a different colour). Activities are the work that must be done in order to meet the planned milestones. By using a string of post-it notes you can represent the planned duration of each activity, from start to finish. Use a marker pen to identify the activities. Finally, it is advisable to indicate where the start or finish of one activity is dependent on another, by drawing lines between them. If different people in the team are assigned to a workstream and plan their own swim lane, their thinking is then challenged and informed by the of other workstreams on which they are interdependent. This results in a far more rigorous plan and builds ownership of the plan going.