DoView use for visual strategic planning growing April 30, 2010
Posted by Paul Duignan in : Uncategorized , trackbackMy best intentions for blogging on a regular basis have fallen by the wayside as I have been swamped with work from all directions. Just last week I spent the evenings webinaring into Cairo and into Europe as the demand for people wanting to know about advanced ways of using DoView outcomes and evaluation software are mounting. Interestingly, my day consulting work at the moment is focusing in on a number of assignments where DoView is being used for strategic planning, rather than evaluation work. I will be putting up some case studies of this work soon as some of the organizations I’m working for are graciously letting me share the work I’m doing with them. More in later blog postings on these case studies.
It’s interesting the way that DoView is increasingly being used – in particular for strategic planning. A new DoView How-To article on Doing Strategic Planning Better: Using a DoView Visual Strategic Plan has just been put up on the DoView site to help people who are wanting to use the software in strategic planning.
A typical project I was involved in last week using DoView in this way was a straight forward strategic planning workshop. The traditional approach is to scrawl all over a whiteboard and flip charts and end up with a whole lot of material to process in some way into a written strategic plan. In contrast, what we did last week was to work directly with a visual outcomes model. One which had actually been prepared for the organization earlier as part of an exercise to work out key evaluation questions. This is the second time I’ve been involved in a situation where an Executive Team could immediately leverage off work down for evaluation planning and use it for their strategic planning. This is where my theoretical work has been heading and its great to see that it is starting to be translated into practic. (The DoView Systematic Outcomes Management / Easy Outcomes process is a fully integrated process running from strategic planning, through monitoring and evaluation, right down to accountability specification and result-based outcomes-focused contracting – all done against the same visual model which encouraged organizations to leverage off work done for different purposes in this way).
In the case last week, that of a fairly small organization, the Executive Team just went through the visual model one page at a time and marked up the boxes within the model which show the steps that they regard as highest priority. Once that was done it set the strategic direction for the organization. More detailed planning is still to be done by mapping ‘projects’ (call them activities if you wish) onto the steps in the visual outcomes model. Once this mapping has been done, it is then obvious whether or not the organizational activity is aligned to its strategic priorities as visualized on the marked-up visual outcomes model.
What this all goes to show is the efficiencies which can be gained by using a standard DoView visual model underneath a whole range of organizational functions.
Paul Duignan, PhD. (Follow me on my Outcomes Blog; Twitter; or via my E-Newsletter).
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