Denkplan – from strategy to action

Success factors of flexible and customer oriented companies driving strategy to action are transparency and involvement consistent through the organization. Not new – unluckily hard to achieve. Typically a deep gap exists between strategy definition and strategy implementation.

Denkplan is a lean and agile approach to close this gap. Denkplan incorporates simple methods and instruments around a smart conversation and collaboration culture. Denkplan is the missing link between strategy and scaled agile frameworks like SAFe and LeSS.

Denkplan uses well-known instruments like a morphological box, a story map, Kanban. A smart evolution to the next level.

Lean Roadmapping & Portfolio Management

Many organizations complain a gap between business organization and delivery organization. A root cause of this gap are communication flaws through the organizational hierarchy, missing cadence & synchronization and meeting culture

Alignment of strategy, vision and mission throughout the organization is the result of collaboration and fast feedback cycles. Cadence and synchronization implemented as a lean decision & meeting culture foster a valuable dialog between business and delivery.

Identification & Definition of “Business Value”

Value creation is a topical issue in every aspect. We all agree that value creation is essential for successful companies. Focussed on customer value companies often neglect that internal value needs to be addressed as well to sustain competence, capabilities and growth.

Many companies struggle to define value. What creates more value for the company: the new customer feature or the process efficiency measure. Factorizing and normalizing business value for example based on KPI´s of a lean balanced score card is a complex but essential topic in lean organizations.

Prioritization of strategic themes and initiatives

Given a company has a strategy and lean roadmap. Next step is to prioritize work packages in the lean system. Strategic initiatives as well as enabler and organizational hygiene initiatives compete for resources.

Kanban systems using business value, weightest shortest job first principles and work in progress limits create transparency. Combined with appropriate feedback cycles, a cadence base meeting culture and a clear decision responsibility and delegation a fast, flexible and continuous development flow will evolve.

Value Stream Optimization

The famous German designer Luigi Colani cultivated the “form follows function” principle in his biomorphic designs of products. Lean organizations cultivate this principle with the company’s values stream and ecosystem as its biosphere.

Lean organization design reflects the value stream and the product development flow. Autonomous teams are core building blocks. The organization serves teams in alignment, communication and the product development flow. The capability to adopt to changes in value stream or ecosystem is an intrinsic attribute of a lean & agile organization.

Lean Organization Design

Lean organization design respects the unique nature of every single enterprise and its embedding in the market and ecosystem.

Carefully selected lean principles and good practices combined and aligned towards an esthetical organization design build the heart of a lean organization. This design includes the natural capability to adopt and emerge for future challenges in our fast changing world of uncertainty.

Employee & Leadership Development

The well know saying “it’s all about people” is one of the key values in a lean & agile system. The real source of inspiring innovations, the desire for customer value creation and sustainable quality are energized and motivated teams and individuals.

Growing these values requires leadership providing examples for behavior to meet the needs for a human work system. Additionally, any non-trivial organization requires structures und rules that ensure collaboration and safety on one hand and on the other hand motivate people to unfold their full potential.

Company wide Digital Asset Repository

The agile manifest states: “working software over comprehensive documentation”. Company wide this transforms to “the working system over comprehensive documentation.

Following lean principles the digital asset repository is a hyperlinked system of information units with stricts constraints: the information unit is of high or constant value for a target group of the organization; has a relevant halftime period; is not permanent present as continuous knowledge in the employees heads; and ideally emerges as part of the daily work with minimal extra effort.