Visualization Tool

Challenge:

I was faced with the challenge of helping a large global technology organization  understand how fragmented their engineering operating model was and then  conceptualize a consolidation solution. The operating model as it stood was quite  broken with many internal teams and suppliers spread across various sites and  locations, leading to much higher operational cost and slower speed of product  innovation and engineering.

Creating a shared understanding of this problem among various levels of executive  and senior leadership stakeholders was the first major battle before attempting to  identify and define any possible consolidation solutions. Although availability of data  and various performance reports were not the challenge, there was no consensus on  how deep the fragmentation problem was rooted the operating model, where the  boundaries lay, various drivers to the problem and their causal relationships.

Selection:

I chose the Visualization tool for addressing these challenges so that I could create a  shared powerful understanding of the problem space first and its boundaries across  different stakeholders.

Visualization tool helps transform scattered ideas and data into compelling story in the  form of pictures and diagrams that can generate vivid mental images and consensus  without any ambiguities. Visualization creates am imagery which then becomes  powerful enabler of action as well as empathy.

Application:

I started by first studying and assessing organization charts, supplier procurement  records, spend and financial information. Subsequently I conducted interviews with  key engineering leads and subject matter experts to fill the gaps in my study and gather  further insights.

Using Microsoft PowerPoint software, I then drew the overall engineering operating  model as a high-level block diagram and then broke the overall model into various key  component functions for visualization – design, development, testing, deployment and  support. For each component, the visualization storyboarded four panels or  dimensions – people, process, partners and sites – to demonstrate complexity and  duplication of the component from the perspective of those four dimensions.

My visualization approach primarily used diverse types of diagrams and color-coding  schemes (think of heat maps) – block diagram, actor icon, company logo and site  landmarks. So each panel for a component depicted a particular dimension and clearly  showed scope boundary, fragmented elements and inter-relationships to in order to  visually demonstrate the complexity of the fragmented operating model and point to  causes or drivers to the problems. This led to summary visualization pack of 22 slides  – 1 exec summary, 1 overall visualization and 20 different visualization panels.

Insight:

When I presented the visualization of the overall engineering models – by functional  components and four dimensions within each component – it quickly started dawning  on the various stakeholders that the operating model had indeed become quite  complex over time and key reason behind rising operational expenditure and slower  speed. Visualization and different color transitions made a complex landscape quite  simple for a lot of stakeholders to understand and moved some of them from the  position of denying the problem earlier to acknowledging it now to then constructively  uncovering details about it and contributing to the dialog.

Whilst the tool greatly helped in addressing the challenges I started out with, I realized  that I could have kept the visualizations even more simpler and less voluminous. Some  stakeholders found the deck to have too many slides and sometimes lost the bigger  picture in going through the granular details. I had to sometimes take the efforts to  clarify some of the inter-connections which should have been intuitive in the first place.  So keeping visualizations simple and limited to a few top panels which could potentially  communicate majority of what I wanted to communicate was my key insight from this  exercise.

Approach:

For such challenges, I will still use the visualization tool since the tool possess the  power to quickly create shared understanding and enable empathy and action.  However, as I learned through this exercise, simplicity is critical for not only creating  common understanding but also enabling contribution of ideas and insights. So next  time I will use slightly different approach in such cases and limit the tool to key  functional components with most critical dimension to help visualize the most critical  aspect what is driving fragmentation and complexity in the engineering model.

