Monitoring everything we’re doing, on one page
Last month i shared how we put our business plan on one page. A number of people asked, great, what’s next? How do you use it in practice?
I had no real plan for how we’d use it, but in mid-August, 1/8th through the year, i thought i’d start playing. How are things going, and how would i represent that? Couple of things in my mind:
- I’d try it alone, and then with Board members, before involving staff. I didn’t want to risk wasting people’s time.
- Visually legible, easily digested
- A language that could be repeated
- Staying on one page
So i went back to dashboard reporting, and added green/amber/red dots to each activity. I did it without much rigour, just how it felt and then added a key that forced me to think through the colours more deeply and justify them a bit more. I also realised, many activities weren’t even planned to have started in our calendar yet, so they weren’t any colour. So i tagged those white. It looked like this:
I felt really good after this — just because it showed that while there were some reds that i needed to think about, there was lots of green. Pretty good, but a bit superficial.
Then I thought about how someone else would read it. What would a Board member’s first question be? Why is that red? I also thought about what it didn’t show, and that was changes in activity since the Plan was developed. As everyone knows, things do change, and how would i show that without it getting messy?
So I added some arrows, and some additional text boxes below. Trusting that the diagram was simple enough, and familiar enough to my stakeholders, led me to think that a little more clutter — to go from a 1-minute read to a 2-minute read — was OK. And now it looked like this:
A couple of Board members liked it so i took it to a subcommittee meeting. They liked it, so i took it to the Board. In the meantime I talked my management team trough it, caveating that i know it was just my perspective on how we were doing, and it was a bit experimental.
Everyone liked it, specifically saying,
- easy to read, simple
- continuity with previous document (this is SO underrated in corporate docs)
- can you use this in each Board report?
It’s worth noting that each Board meeting has a written update, including detailed facts such as ticket sales, magazine contents and so on. So this isn’t going up alone. But as a talking point, a way to frame everything, it’s useful.
It also really helps me have a strategic focus. It is really easy to get drawn in to details of one element of one department, activity or project. And that’s OK up to a point. But this is a great visual reminder not to spend half a Board meeting on one of the boxes, but to see the big picture.
And in practice, I’m going to use the infinite scroll of MIRO to just keep laying these out side-by-side. Partly for ease of copy-and-paste, but also because over time i’ll be able to see whether the reds proliferate, or shift about, or diminish. I know which one i would rather, but it’s also important to deal in facts!
My next plan is to do this with our management team prior to the next Board meeting, so it is more representative — i am sure i missed some things this time — and also becomes embedded in how we speak about our work. Eventually I would like all staff to see themselves in here, that their work is alongside and harmonised with other activities.
I’ll share that too :)
Comments always welcome.
(It seems i’m ending this post like a zoom call, just kinda uncertain and then boom it’s gone!)
