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Setting Strategy
The program context defines a strategy that chooses what to change (”where to play”) and how to change it (”how to win”) to achieve the desired outcome for the program by the target date, given a funding constraint.
Capture Outlook
By this point, the Leadership team should have emerged, often as a program manager. The extended leadership team will include various stakeholders, but the accountability for strategic decisions falls on the program leader.
The program leader receives a Budget from the business, via decisions made in the portfolio context, to drive its responsibilities and deliver its outcome. This is the budget that is deemed sufficient to enable the program to change the targeted business capabilities.
The program leader begins the process of program strategy development by working with their stakeholders to capture Beliefs about the current state of the targeted business capability, using the KPIs, to assess the needs for change.
Program leaders should also capture their current positions on classic Tradeoffs choices. While many tradeoffs are program-specific, the classic examples for technology projects include:
- Fixed Scope vs. Cost/Budget - would we be willing to add budget to get more scope?
- Target Date vs. Fixed Scope - would we be willing to reduce scope to hold the date?
- Target Date vs. Cost/Budget - would we be willing to add budget to hold the date?
Imagine Future(s)
Program leaders seek to understand how the underperforming business capabilities are utilized. Program leaders take their active beliefs (and positions on trade-offs) and imagine some possible future Scenarios of a stronger business capability, that is, one that helps the business “win” where they choose to “play”.
Ask: “What is known?” (and “What is unknown?”) with respect to their beliefs and these possible futures. Establish a set of mutually exclusive scenarios that outline different possible futures (and different directions for the business capability).
Research the domain of the desired change and to find Prompts from industry experts and thought leaders, to spark the exploration of scenarios, via questions.
Collect open Questions like this to explore the amount of uncertainty across the program leadership team and stakeholders. Then solicit answers and refine the distinct scenarios into specific Possibilities, that begin to speculate on paths of action. Finally, drive a dialog through the possibilities by asking, “What would it take for this Possibility to be true?” and assessing the likelihood of these enabling conditions.
With the possibilities evaluated for each scenario, update the project Vision. If there is debate over which future is preferred, drive a deliberative Decision to weigh the choices with a set of stakeholders.
Lastly, once a preferred scenario is selected as the vision, the extended team can articulate the Risks of their ideal future, to drive planning efforts. For example, the program leaders can hold a pre-mortem exercise to create the psychological safety needed to surface risks.
Set Direction
With a vision of the preferred, ideal future in hand, program leaders can document the active set of Assumptions about their vision into the strategy definition that follows. These assumptions should make the leaders’ probabilistic views or predictions (around the uncertainty that surfaced during the dialogs to craft the vision) transparent, to spark dialog.
Next, translate the vision into concrete program objectives or Goals that will be achieved within, and upon completion of, the program. Restate the improved performance of the targeted business capabilities as the Desired Results to be achieved by the program. Also review the KPIs that measure program performance (against the context’s capabilities) and set acceptable performance limits as additional Key Results.
Review the current state of the business capability (including the user experience, if applicable) and identify areas where changes can drive the goals. These areas are called Levers (as in “levers to pull”) and this exercise seeks to explore the levers, as possible paths.
Levers can refine the “where-to-play” and “how-to-win” choices from the parent context, and clarify them for the scope of the project, in terms of changes to assets, enhanced training, or practice/process changes. For program leaders, the levers could be different pain points expressed by consumers of the business capability, for example. Levers are then mapped with the goals, to show how pulling the levers can yield results that, in turn, might achieve the goals. These causal relationships are loaded with uncertainty, so the purpose here is to create transparency in the logic, to drive great dialog across the extended leadership team.
Visual representations of these causal relationships can be created with tools like the Causal Decision Diagram, Opportunity Trees, or Outcome Trees. The intent is to streamline the dialog to make choices on the best path(s) to prioritize for project planning.
As a program leader, levers can represent different kinds of changes: to assets (IT systems), to people (i.e. training), or to processes (i.e. the practice around the business capability). When multiple, viable paths surface (i.e. levers that chase the same program goal that cannot all be pursued, given the budget), program leaders can facilitate nominal collaborative groups to make Decisions.
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