Pace wanted a clearer vision of the future, including a short-term work plan, a roadmap for the next three years, and the leadership capability to deliver.
Pace is a leading technology developer for the global payTV industry. The Company's main focus is on creating intelligent and innovative products and services that benefit customers and fuel the development of digital TV.
The Networks team wanted clarity of what the future looks like, including developing a short to medium-term work plan, and producing a future product roadmap for 2009+.
A one-day workshop was arranged with the key business drivers, including the company’s President, whose attendance ensured timely decision making and senior management buy-in to the strategy – key components to giving change the best chance of success.
The business aim of the workshop was to get the Networks team more organised with a single vision, and to force the leadership team to make future strategy decisions and choices.
We used our Visual Management process, which involves letting business experts talk about the future, being led by our impartial questioning and direction. This ensured the emergence of key deliverables and timeframes, which were captured visually on coloured ‘Post It Notes’. These key milestones were positioned using a timescale and either a work stream, customer, or product to bring to life a visual business plan.
To support this, any activities that were not clear (such as a due date not agreed), were registered to capture all issues and risks, with proposed actions to address them.
What emerged was a ‘plan on a page’ that the leadership team built together, creating ownership and clarity. Our impartial facilitation forced actions to be argued and agreed to eliminate future potential business issues.
Pace’s paper-based ‘Plan on a Page’ was converted into an electronic, visual one-page plan. This provided key activities, due dates, issues and risks, ownership, and RAG (red, amber, green) status. In addition, a supporting key actions list complemented the plan with the details on areas to closely manage. This often replaces mountains of MS Project plans, providing for clear communication through all levels of an organisation. In the case of Pace, the result was clarity for their work-streams in delivering their new business direction.
The visual tools were then easily utilised by Pace for weekly tracking and governance, which encouraged employee participation through frequent and open communications.
Finally, Pace developed active and visible executive sponsorship. With only a short use of their leader’s time, they were able to champion the new strategy, and allowed Pace to improve their speed to market.