Denkplan © – from strategy to action

Strategy is hip again. From the ones creating customer value, up the line to the CEO – a collaborative developed and agreed strategy is a success factors of customer oriented, agile and flexible companies. Well, that isn’t surprising latest since the agile manifesto. Nevertheless, the real success stories are rare. This requires a new approach. The Denkplan© methodology offers you a chance. 

It is strategy time again!

Do you know that scenario? Many workshops pinned into your schedule. Nice offsite locations you rather wanted to spend a weekend with your girlfriend. Walls full of post-its, trend decisions, market researches. A design freak, body of the head marketing, with frilly glasses and cool statements joined. Forecast figures always going up except opex costs. Budget discussions take place and the CFO demands cost saving initiatives. Powerpoint is heavily (ab)used. In the end the management succeeds. The new strategy is born. Two hundred powerpoint slides, the summary version for the investors is twenty pages, the employee version streamlined to fifty insignificant pages presented proudly at the annual companies Christmas event.

And now? What’s next? Department heads have the responsibility to break the strategy down and bring it to action, meeting nailed down milestones. But wait: Don’t we have an agile development organization? Just a year ago the company implemented SAFe – or was that LeSS? Anyhow, the development organization should scale tremendously because it is agile and flexible. The department heads pushed the new strategy into the agile development organization. And wow: now they say, they had not been asked to participate in the strategy and they need three months to adopt during the next PI – whatever PI is! And they call themselves agile and flexible?

Do you know that scenario?

We do. We are convinced that strategy must be an intrinsic part of the overall flow in the company. Transparency, communication, a feedback culture and focus we identified as important factors to bring strategy to action. If everybody participates, understands and agrees, a company continuously develops the right products and services, but develops as well the right strategy – that is our vision. With this vision in mind, based on years of good 🙂  and bad 🙁 experience in many organizations from small to really big we identified the concept of Denkplan.

Denkplan, that is a lightweight, communication-based methodology using complementing physical instruments with the typical widley used collaboration tools, such as Jira. Denkplan offers the chance to close the gap between strategy and getting things done on the shop floor. Denkplan is a smart combination of well- established techniques and methods to engage people all over the company to participate. Denkplan is a natural next step for companies that invested heavily into scaled agility and got stuck anyhow. Companies that recognize that there is still a gap between business and the agile development organization.

This blog starts my blog seqience about our ideas what Denkplan is. We, the core team, that is Christoph Jordi from DoD!fferent, Philipp Stalder from Saraes Media and me.

 Denkplan © and the concepts behind is a registered trademark of DoD!fferent GmbH, Saraes Media GmbH and Juropera GmbH.