Prioritization Learning Launch   Ernesto Young                    3 April 2021

Challenge   I am a member of my organization’s operating model transformation department and my team’s  challenge is to improve how the organization prioritizes work –to become more efficient as the  corporation changes its business strategy.   The entire project scope includes about 15,000 people.  However, the project is limited in budget and  the initial rollout will be pitched to approximately, 1,000 leaders across the organization (and the globe).  The rollout will not exceed 60 business days and the solution should include feedback from over 50% of  the initial population of the 1,000 participants.    Our focus will be to understand which strategies the initial population consider to be the most effective  with regard to our proposed prioritization workflows.     Selection   Our Transformation team has already gone through some design thinking activities/scoping, so we are  ready to try to launch the learning activity.  This launch will be the experiment that will quickly test our  key prioritization concepts and help us high-grade the main prioritization initiatives.  This will inform the  path toward full implementation across the larger population.    Application   For our first learning launch, we produced several video modules.  Each video delved into the various  aspects of our proposed prioritization techniques, focusing on the structure, process, governance, and  behaviors inherent in our proposed models.  The participants had several days to watch the collection of  videos at their own pace.  An interactive survey section at the end of each video allowed the participants  to provide feedback or submit new ideas, based on the video content and their own experience.  This  tested our assumption that we had not missed important aspects within our proposed prioritization  models.  While the survey population was not as high as we would have liked, we were able to use the  feedback to improve on some of the prioritization models and were able to create a list of the most  preferred prioritization techniques.  For our second learning launch our team took our updated information (from the first launch) to  conduct multiple live question and answer (Q&A) feedback sessions over the course of three-days.   Overall, these Q&A sessions reached over 80% of the participants.   In this second session, we focused  more on methodology details and discussed prioritization challenges that individual leaders were having  in their teams; challenges that had arisen since the corporate strategy change.   While his learning  opportunity allowed us access to a larger population, it also helped us further refine our workflows and  scope of each of the high-graded prioritization techniques.    Again, at the end of these Q&A sessions we  had the participants take a survey, focusing on what their ‘go-to’ best practices were, and asked for  specific examples.  This allowed us to further clarify our assumptions about prioritization and helped  identify some possible unforeseen challenges that could arise during the larger rollout.     Insight   By conducting these launches, our Transformation team were able to define our assumptions and  designed multiple learning pathways to test hypotheses.  Additionally, we were able to gain a broader  insight into the prioritization mindset across the organization, which helped us refine our models,  identify missing components, and discover some challenges that lay ahead.   By pursuing this type of  faceted learning approach, our Transformation team and the key stakeholders (participants) were open

to sharing experience and insight.  Based on all the feedback, we were able to high-grade and  recommend multiple prioritization models.  Each model would have a specific use and would be an  important prioritization process for different sets of business activities.  However, the team also learned  that, depending on the business function, the prioritization methodologies would need to be rolled-out  according to specific guidelines –unique to certain functions.  This insight will need to be incorporated  into future launch designs.  The next step will be to test the prioritization models within the larger  population.    Approach   At this stage in the timeline, the learning launch appears to have been the appropriate tool.  The first  two learning launches have brought much insight into our prioritization design.  The upcoming, larger  launch design will reflect all the insight gained, will have stakeholder support, and will provide a range of  prioritization processes to a much larger part of the business.  Through a well-developed prioritization  system, the corporation will be able to adopt its new strategy more efficiently.

