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STRUCTURED INSIGHT

A new approach to structuring insight

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Overview

Providing insight is at the heart of what consultants do. The quality of this insight has historically depended on the expertise of the consultant and their tenure on your account. This new method accelerates the process by allowing your internal consultants (employees) to bring structure to internal complexity that leads directly to insight.

Introduction

One of the most enjoyable moments in consulting is providing key insight on a complex client issue. Where this insight comes from is difficult to explain but the reaction by the client is priceless.

Since clients don’t call us to solve simple problems, this capability to bring order to chaos is fundamental to a long and successful internal or external consulting career.

This concise POV will introduce you to the approach by walking you through an in-process client example. Case studies, in my view, are the optimal way of transferring knowledge. I hope you see the value in the approach and will join with other practitioners in its use.

Why this works

Complexity disappears when its internal structure is revealed. By structure I mean the connections between the parts of a complex system. Each client organization is an example of a complex “system” with many parts: policies, processes, people, and technology.

This method works because it surfaces these parts by asking what would change if a certain issue/painpoint were solved. Then we compare each issue to all the other issues and ask the question: “If we solved this issue what other issues would also be affected?” From this issue to issue analysis we surface the connections—the underlying structure.

The Leverage Diagnostic tool drives this process and then produces a leverage map that helps bring order to the complex problems faced by our clients. Out of this order comes insight.

Structured Insight www.leversource.com

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Case Study Context

The IT Finance Director of a very large retail client requested our help on benchmarking how other clients handle the financial reporting of their IT function. Being new to the role she was trying to understand if what she was experiencing was the norm.

On our initial call we discovered that another benchmarking firm was already engaged so we recommended not starting a competing study. However, during the call I captured 18 different painpoints from her overview of the situation she was facing. I pointed this out and she was very interested in seeing the list. At that point I suggested since we have to wait on our benchmarking study (which I described as an “outside-in” view, we could start on an “inside-out” view by performing a quick (free) Leverage Diagnostic).

The justification I gave was that many clients look for external answers but many issues are in fact self-inflicted.

Below is a cleansed version of the follow-up memo I sent to her:

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Client name,

As promised, here is a snap shot of the issues I captured during our call yesterday. I summarized each issue by

a key phrase and indicated your desire to increase (+), decrease (-), or stabilize (~) its behavior.

Please review the descriptions and provide any corrections additions etc..

In our next meeting we can go through an initial impact analysis (an interactive walk through the leverage

potential of each issue) so I would suggest we either do this in person or on a live meeting.

The purpose of our Leverage Diagnostic is to provide you with directional indicators of what issues to address

first to get the most leverage on “solving” the remaining issues. Of course the more folks (Business & IT

Management) we involve in the process the more comprehensive the suggested path forward will be (including

targeted benchmarking).


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Thank you for taking the time to talk yesterday and I look forward to working with you on “unraveling” the

situation you face.

Take care,

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Following this email we had an hour long virtual meeting where we walked through the issues she raised on the first call and clarified my descriptions, then walked her through the initial leverage map below (please refer to the eroom for a description of how to enter the issues, connect the issues, then create and interpret the following leverage map).

Looking at the map above, I explained the further an issue is to the right the more influential it is on helping solve other issues. Then I highlighted the “-Delayed ‘Ranch’ Tracking & Allocation” issue on the bottom right to show all the issues it directly influences (in green), and those it was dependent on (in red) as shown below:


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Next, I pointed out that the higher up the issue is on the map the more dependent it is on having other issues solved first. Then I highlighted the “+Quality of IT Communications to the Business” at the upper left to show the results below:

I commented that those items in red are pre-requisites that need to be solved before the quality of IT communications to the business can improve.

Finally, I pointed out the most interesting issues are found in the upper right quadrant where they are at the heart of the matter given the high number of dependencies and influences. I then highlighted the “+Forecast Accuracy” issue to show just how connected it was to everything else as seen below:


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She said: “I’ve never seen anything like this before and I’m very interested in having more people provide input to the process.”

Case Study Approach

I suggested we start the process by setting up 30 minute interviews with her boss (CFO), her peer (PMO Lead), and her direct reports. In total seven folks were interviewed over the phone. Everyone except for the CFO and her peer PMO lead were ask the following questions:

1) An overview of the reason we’re having this call. “The IT Finance Director gave me you name to provide input to a study we’re helping her with…”

2) General background information: “How long have you been with the client organization and could you give me an overview of your role and how many folks report to you?”

3) Starting the pain point discussion: “Where do you spend the majority of your time that you wish you didn’t?”

4) Expanding the pain point discussion: “Can you think of other issues in People, Process, or Technology?”

5) Closing out the pain point discussion: “If you were in charge, what would you like to see changed?”

6) Leave open the option of another meeting: “You’ve been very helpful, I’d like to reserve the right to follow-up if I need to clarify something you’ve said.”


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For the PMO peer, I spent much more time on answering the following questions:

1) “Why are you doing this?”

2) “Why do you need to talk with me since this is all a financial department concern?”

3) What’s in it for your company?”

As you can guess by these questions there is some friction between the two departments. I answered the “Why are you doing this?” and “What’s in it for your company?” questions by simply saying I was trying to build some good will toward our firm, and personally I needed a qual for the method from the Retail sector since I’ve used it successfully across other sectors.

Regarding the “Why do you need to talk with me?” question, I pointed out that his PMO area was a major “customer” of the IT Finance group, and to not include his input would significantly limit the credibility of the study.

For the CFO, I changed the dialogue to more of an executive update on what I was hearing so far and ask him if it resonated with his understanding. Several times during the interview he thanked me for doing this for free, and summarized our conversation by saying: “You’ve very accurately captured a situation that has taken me three years to understand!”

Case Study Results

By the end of the interviews I had collected 27 unique issues. Many folks raised the same issues and I captured their initials at the beginning of the description line to give some indication of each issue’s popularity.


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A joint workshop readout meeting is planned over the next two weeks and below is a draft of what will be discussed.

Overall the leverage map did change significantly as seen below:

Of particular interest is the fact that the most influential issue (bottom right) to solve ended up being reducing complexity in the project managers data entry task (-Complexity of PM data entry). This changed based on widening the conversation beyond just the Finance folks to include their customers (project managers and the PMO office). The highlighted map below shows how influential solving this issue would be (those items in green):


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While influential, to solve this issue requires reducing the number of systems the PM’s have to enter. The options we’ll probably discuss are:

1) Kicking off a software selection project to find a more integrated management tool (like PMC etc) and consolidate the legacy systems

2) Kicking off the design of a new front end portal to automate the data entry across the multitude of systems

3) Performing targeted benchmarking on what other clients use as their project tracking and reporting tool

The central issue of increasing the forecast (spend) accuracy for projects (+ Forecast Accuracy) is still the same as show below:

I will point out that every software project suffers from this issue given the uncertainty of the development process. Discussions might lead to the following options:

1) Performing a maturity assessment on their software development process

2) Providing more transparency to the development process status

3) Changing their policy by taking the average error rate over the last 3 years and building in a hidden buffer etc.

4) Performing targeted benchmarking on how other clients handle the uncertainty of financial reporting of IT development

Finally, the meeting will end with a discussion on what is needed to achieve the overall objective of increasing the quality of IT communication to the Business by showing the following view:


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The discussion should generate a shared understanding of their situation and bring clarity on what steps need to be taken to begin to unravel the complexity they face. Of course I will end the meeting by asking them to comment on their experience in this process so we can continue improving the method.

For more information please contact Dr. Don Frazier at [email protected]

Or visit us at http://www.leversource.com

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.leversource.com/

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