Aligning internal teams into a beneficial and cohesive process

Challenge

How might we quickly and easily understand the process and timing for each team so that information can be gathered in a logical order and reduce time needed from requesting teams?

Results

In the final process, we clarified the information required during each phase. After finishing, the teams merged their Service Level Agreements to align with the unified process and its timeline. This information enabled us to efficiently handle information requests and ensure that each team was included. Moreover, our improved ability to gather upfront information significantly reduced the number of meeting requests.

The details

Bringing a large group of people together takes some planning. It’s important to make sure you’re prepared and ensure people get the most out of their time. So we sure the entire activity was structured to be completed in two hours.

Workshop

We asked each team to pick their own color post-it to represent their team this allowed us to visually see each team. Once they had selected their color each team went about documenting their process with each post-it representing a single step. Once complete each team went about putting their post it’s in the appropriate swim-lane.

Once all the post-its were on the board each team was given time to walk the other threw their process. During the presentations team were able to update and move their post-its around as they continued to refine their work.

Seeing the processes side by side allowed for “bucketing” the information needed at each step providing an outline of what and when information needed to be gathered and which teams needed to be included in necessary meetings.

Once the workshop was complete the results were aggregated in Miro. You can see the first draft below. There was some follow-up work done asynchronously.