Transformation Canvas

I was part of a group of change agents driving a large, enterprise-wide transformation initiative. The mandate from the top was to utilize Agile, Lean and Kanban practices to enable better delivery. There were lots of techniques that could help the IT organization improve its delivery. But introducing these changes in a haphazard way was not ideal. We, change agents, had to strategize and prioritize based on a good understanding of the organizational context. We used the Transformation Canvas as a tool to help us think through and organize the implementation of changes on this large transformation initiative.

Urgency

The first thing we had to do was to determine the most urgent problems that needed to be addressed. Identifying this will help those affected by the change to understand the need for change. Change always brings discomfort, and by articulating the realities of the situation, change recipients will hopefully be more open to try out the new ways of doing things.

We identified the following to be the top problems:

Change Recipients

We then identified the roles that will be involved in the change. In an enterprise-wide transformation, there are by far more people involved than the delivery teams alone.  

In our case, we identified the change recipients to be the following:

Vision

With the problems identified in mind, we determined what our guiding vision was for the change.  We came up with this:

Target State

Using the vision as a guide, we described the ideal methods, behaviors and working environment that we were aspiring to have.

 

Actions

To enable the achievement of the target state, we identified specific actions that need to be implemented:

Required Commitments

Given these various activities, we estimated the time commitments required by the change recipients:

Key Benefits

We then identified the key benefits that are to be expected once the actions have been implemented. 

Success Criteria

It was important to clearly define what success meant. Our thoughts were:

Communication

Finally, we defined methods and cadences of communication that needed to be implemented to support the change.

 

After our initial brainstorming session, we socialized the canvas to the CIO, Executives and Managers to get their feedback and then socialized it to other change recipients. We modified the canvas based on their inputs which resulted in our first baselined version of the Transformation Canvas. We posted this on a wall for everyone to see. It provided visibility into the why and the how of the transformation. We then used the information on the Transformation Canvas as a basis for introducing Minimum Viable Changes.

Link to the Transformation Canvas http://canvanizer.com/canvas/yGYp5yH85rI