Transformation Day – How do you fit a square peg in a round hole?
Imagine walking into a room with a problem that has stalled progress for months, and walking out a few hours later with a solution in hand and clear on next steps. That’s the power of Transformation Day.
I love the movie Apollo 13. Overcoming the challenges of keeping a spacecraft flying, with bits falling off it and a long way from any help, is often an apt metaphor for working in Government IT. There’s a famous scene where they learn that two systems, each fit for their specific purpose, don’t work together. Gene Kranz challenges his engineers to find a way to fit a square peg into a round hole. Cut to an engineer emptying a load of items on a table and saying “We gotta find a way to make this [square filter], fit into the hole for this [round filter], using nothing but that [miscellaneous items found on the spacecraft].”
Much like in Apollo 13, organisations today often face complex, seemingly unsolvable problems. It is not uncommon to find legacy systems and processes that were never designed to “talk” to one another but now have to.
Like those engineers in Houston 50 years ago, we’ve found one of the best ways of gaining traction is to get the stakeholders in a room, lay the problems and components out on the table, and collectively see what we can come up with. If we can get the people talking, getting the systems to talk is a lot more straightforward.
The same spirit of collaboration, innovation and resourcefulness that brought those three astronauts home, against all odds, sits at the centre of what we do with Transformation Days.
What is a Transformation Day?
A Transformation Day is a short, intense effort focussed on unsticking a particular problem. We’ll usually invite stakeholders from the client/user community, along with Zaizi solutions architects and designers, and we’ll get around the table and whiteboard together to work through it.
Transformation Days are deliberately short; not only does a little bit of stress get the creative juices flowing, but it’s about gaining traction and getting things moving. They are very time efficient for the clients, many of whom have extremely busy operational day jobs. Transformation Days are intense but enjoyable too.
Typical format of a Transformation Day:
Setting the context:
- Understanding of the end-to-end business process that is being looked at.
- Who are the stakeholders involved and what might their perspectives be?
- What are the pain points?
Imagining the future state:
- Design exercises, to gain a shared understanding of what a future solution could look like. What looks good from a technical or compliance perspective does not always look good to a user.
- Key risks and dependencies, so we can agree on appropriate next steps to mitigate them.
- Immediate next steps. Transformation Days are all about moving forward after all.
We then take away the day’s output and do some further research and refinement to ensure that we’re offering feasible concept solutions.
Our report will contain the learnings of the day, alongside a concept architecture and screenshots, high level road map and some rough order of magnitude costs. It won’t be reams and reams of indecipherable technical jargon. Usually diagrams and visuals, interspersed with the pertinent information in an accessible way.
Transformation Day: Get rapid consensus and develop a business case to solve your digital government problems
What’s in it for me?
The clients at least then know what to ask for when approaching the market, can consider the most appropriate route to market, and have an idea of how much they should plan to set aside for the work. The outputs of the day, especially prototype screenshots, often prove useful for getting stakeholders engaged early. There’s also as much coffee as you can drink, and a pretty good lunch too!
For Zaizi, it’s a great opportunity to gain a deeper insight into how our client’s organisations actually work. They’re also good fun, and a chance to get creative outside of the normal day- to-day project execution.
Successes
The nature of our client relationships means that we can’t go into too much detail. Of the seven Transformation Days I’ve been involved in recently, five have gone onto further development (not all with Zaizi), and two have endorsed our suggestions with clients seeking funding internally. One of our biggest successes unstuck a problem that had multiple failed attempts at solving in the past, in the end resulting in an award winning service for that particular client.
I therefore think it’s fair to say that Transformation Day is a tried and tested format for getting unstuck and figuring out how to fit a seemingly square peg into a round hole.
Are you dealing with a sticky problem that feels impossible to solve? Let’s change that, together. Reach out today for a quick chat with me to see how we can help you get unstuck.
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