Why Model Business Motivation?

Why do we care about modeling business motivation? As you will recall from Chapter 1, business models in general are used for eight purposes. Six apply to business motivation modeling: communication, persuasion and selling, training and learning, analysis, managing compliance, and knowledge management and reuse.

Some businesses build motivation models of their strategy and then use those models to communicate their strategy across their organization and to stakeholders outside. Sometimes that communication involves persuasion of reluctant parties: for example, employees who are skeptical of the new strategy, or suppliers who are concerned about what the new strategy means for them. Sometimes the models are used to train new employees in the business strategy.

Motivation models are often analyzed. One potential strategy is compared with others, to see which is best. (In fact, motivation models should be analyzed more often than they are today. It is difficult to envision a situation in which a motivation model is built and no analysis is needed.) Sometimes this analysis involves simulation, to understand the implications of a strategy in the evolving business environment. Motivation model simulation is covered in Chapter 11.

Motivation models are essential for managing compliance against policy. The policies themselves are part of the business rule model, described in Chapter 6. But the policies can be traced to business motivations, the strategies and tactics that the policies govern, and to the goals and objectives that they support.

In some organizations, knowledge about an initiative today is carefully captured for the benefit of other initiatives in the future. This knowledge management sometimes includes business motivations, explaining the purpose of the initiative and the strategies that were followed. When someone else finds the details of this captured initiative, they can study the motivation model and understand why the initiative was executed the way it was.

Motivation Modeling and Strategy Creation

Business motivation modeling can play a role in creating a new strategy, although the details depend on how the business works with strategy in general. Different businesses use different techniques to create strategy.¹ Some businesses see strategy as something to be periodically designed, and they convene the leadership team annually in offsite workshops to create multi-year plans that are intended to be implemented by the rest of the organization. Models can be created in these workshops; capturing the strategy as models directly in the workshops supports a different kind of offsite conversation. The leadership team can discuss alternatives by pointing to alternative models. They can see the impact of the choices they are making. Model-based workshops are described in Chapters 8 and 9.

Other businesses approach strategy very differently—as something that is learned as the result of ongoing conversations throughout the organization during the day-to-day work. These businesses don’t design their strategy so much as incrementally refine it in response to what they are seeing in their environment. For these incrementally learning organizations, business models can be created as needed as part of the communication process, e.g., whenever someone recognizes a new trend and wants to explain to his or her colleagues how that new trend can be exploited as a new opportunity.

In creating strategy, modeling serves to legitimize differences of opinion around what the organization should do. It is a curious but widespread fact of organizational life that differences of opinion about operational matters—such as business processes—are considered to be harmless, but differences of opinion about strategic matters—such as goals—are forbidden. “Don’t say that—it’s against the company strategy,” they warn, or “We all need to march in the same direction.”

By modeling alternative strategies, the content of the opinion can be separated from the authority of the person who said it. The alternative strategies can be analyzed, maybe even simulated, and the results compared objectively.

Motivation modeling is useful in creating strategy, but model-based strategy creation is still pretty rare, in our experience. Usually strategy is created using some other, older processes that do not involve modeling. Modeling is then used to capture the strategy once it is created. When strategy is created first and modeled later, it doesn’t matter how the strategy was created; the modeling simply focuses on what the strategy is. While a strategy first model later approach is not as good as using modeling to create a strategy, it is still valuable to capture what others created.

Goals

Motivation modeling is about the achievement of goals. Organizations have goals. For example, Apple tries to create consumer electronics products that are beautiful and easy to use. Nike tries to create the best shoes for both serious and occasional athletes. Closer to home, Portia tries to serve innovative and satisfying food.

So what is a goal? A goal is simply something an organization is trying to achieve. For example, the employees of Portia are working on increasing the variety of the food offered. We could model this as the goal Expand Menu Variety.

A goal is an end result, something an organization is trying to achieve for its own sake, rather than a means to some other end. For example, Portia is trying to achieve greater menu variety by offering daily specials. Expand Menu Variety is a goal, whereas Offer Daily Specials is not a goal since Portia does not care about offering daily specials except to the extent that they expand the menu variety. Offer Daily Specials is a strategy. Strategies are attempted to achieve goals, not for their own sake. Strategies are described later in this chapter.

Objectives

Goals are not enough by themselves. Goals are vague about timing, about when a goal should be achieved. Consider the Cora Group goal Expand to Other Cities. Are they opening restaurants in other cities this month, next year, or within the next 10 years? Goals are also vague about measurement. At what point has Cora Group succeeded in expanding to other cities—When they open one restaurant outside metro DC? Three restaurants? 20?

Goals are complemented by objectives. Objectives are desired end results like goals, but they are specific about both timing and measurement. The goal Expand to Other Cities is complemented by an objective to open restaurants in three cities outside of Metro DC by the end of the year. This 3 City Openings objective quantifies the goal Expand to Other Cities: It specifies a measurement—three cities outside metro DC—and a timing—by the end of the year.

A single goal can be quantified by more than one objective. For example, Expand to Other Cities is quantified by both the 3 City Openings objective and by a subsequent 7 City Openings objective, to open restaurants in seven cities outside of metro DC by the end of next year. Both objectives quantify the same goal.

Desired Results and Courses of Action

Objectives and goals are similar in that they are both desired results. A desired result is something an organization is trying to do for its own sake, not as a means to some other end. For example, suppose the restaurant Nola adds two goat dishes to the menu. If the head chef does this because he always wanted to serve goat, then Add Goat Dishes is a desired result. But suppose he added the goat dishes in an effort to attract press attention, to have some new newspaper articles written about Nola. Then Add Goat Dishes is a means to a larger end, the goal Increase Media Coverage. In that case, Add Goat Dishes is not a desired result and not a goal. It is instead a course of action.

Courses of action are similar to desired results (goals and objectives) in that both courses of action and desired results are things the organization is trying to accomplish. But courses of action are the means to other ends. They are the ways that organizations achieve their goals and objectives, the stepping stones to the success instead of the success itself. The difference between courses of action and desired results is the difference between journeys and destinations. A course of action is a journey, and a desired result is a destination.

In practice, how can you tell if an attempted thing is a desired result or a course of action? The key question is: What happens if it doesn’t work? Suppose Nola’s head chef is unable to secure a reliable supply of good goat meat and so cannot introduce goat dishes on the menu. If Add Goat Dishes is a desired result, then the failure to get goat meat is the end of the story. Nola pursues other goals. But if Add Goat Dishes is a means to achieving the goal Increase Media Coverage, then failure to secure supplies of goat will lead to a search for other ways of getting media coverage.

In practice, things can get messy. The head chef might have personally always wanted to serve goat, and Add Goat Dishes might have been his personal goal. But to achieve this goal, he had to convince his general manager. In selling the idea, he stressed the advantages of increased media coverage and demoted his goal to a course of action to achieve the newly minted goal of increasing the media coverage. Once he fails to secure supplies of goat, he is left with a commitment to a goal he doesn’t want, and he must search for another course of action to attain that goal.

Strategies and Tactics

Courses of action come in two varieties: strategies and tactics. The difference between the two is a matter of size and commitment. Strategies are larger and harder to change. Tactics are smaller and easier to change.

Consider Nola’s goal of establishing regular customers. One approach to that goal is to establish seasonal menus—to introduce a winter menu in December, a spring menu in April, and so on. The idea is that someone who enjoyed a dinner in February might be tempted to return in the spring to see what new dishes are offered, and then return again in the summer. The strategy Offer Seasonal Menus is one way of achieving the goal Establish Regular Customers.

Another approach to the same goal is to give a discount coupon to customers as they settle their bills. The coupon, discounting a future visit to Nola, will induce some customers to return. The tactic Offer Discount Coupon also attempts to achieve the goal Establish Regular Customers.

The two approaches are quite different in size. The strategy of launching a new menu every season requires hundreds of hours of effort. The tactic of creating a discount coupon is much less work. The two approaches also represent different levels of commitment. Once a seasonal menu is established, customers will come to expect it. If the restaurant decides to drop the seasonal menu plan, some customers could be disappointed. By contrast the restaurant has made no commitments by implementing a one-time discount coupon—no commitment beyond the financial one of honoring the coupon for some limited duration.

Strategies channel efforts toward desired results. Figure 3.5 shows the strategy Offer Seasonal Menus channeling effort toward the goal Establish Regular Customers. Channeling effort toward a goal means that the strategy or tactic is attempting to achieve the goal, but it also means more. The whole purpose of the strategy is the goal on the other side of the channels effort toward link. Once the goal is accomplished, the strategy should be reexamined.

But strategies are hard to change. Once the restaurant has regular customers, it might want to retain the strategy of offering seasonal menus, channeling effort now toward other goals, such as keeping the regular customers or earning praise from restaurant critics.

Tactics also channel efforts toward goals. Figure 3.5 shows the tactic Offer Discount Coupon channeling effort toward establishing regular customers. And certainly once Nola has a base of regular customers, it should look closely at whether discount coupons are still useful.

Organization units establish strategies and tactics, just as they define goals or objectives. Figure 3.5 shows Nola establishing both the strategy Offer Seasonal Menus and the tactic Offer Discount Coupon.

Influencers

In everyday business language, people speak of trends—things that are happening in the environment of a business that might have an impact. For example, Cora Group derives more than half its revenue from business spending: entertaining clients, dinners while on travel to DC, company parties, and other events that cause businesspeople to spend company money for food and drink at good restaurants like Portia. Suppose companies started cutting expense account budgets and applying more scrutiny to the business value of expense account expenses. This is a trend, and this trend would have an impact on the Cora Group.

In business motivation modeling, trends are modeled as influencers. Some examples of influencers for Portia are:

Influencers also include some things that are not trends, including competitors, assets, and company habits. An influencer is anything that can have an effect on an organization, anything that can potentially hinder it or assist it. Some examples of influencers that are not trends include:

The category of influences is huge and astonishingly inclusive. Every business will have hundreds of potential influencers. There will always be too many influencers to model. Some kind of criterion is needed to determine what to model and what to ignore.

In practice we model the influencers that affect our strategies and tactics. If Portia’s competitor introduces a radically expanded menu, the new menu will affect Portia’s strategies about what to do with its own menu. The competitor is important enough to model. The declining readership of newspaper restaurant reviews will affect Portia’s strategy to get good newspaper reviews, so this influencer is also important enough to model.

We also model the influencers that affect the achievement of our goals and objectives. If the economy of metropolitan Philadelphia continues to decline, that will affect Cora Group’s objective of opening a restaurant there by November.

Opportunities

An opportunity is a favorable situation to a business for achieving its goals. Often someone will judge that an influencer presents an opportunity. For example, the shortage of innovative restaurants in the western suburbs of DC presents an opportunity—an opportunity to open a new restaurant there to fill the need. Figure 3.7 shows the relationship between the opportunity and the influencer. The opportunity Western Portia Branch Would Be Successful is said to “judge” the influencer Innovative Restaurant Shortage in Western Suburbs, using the association judges. The influencer is a simple statement of the situation: that there is a shortage of innovative restaurants there. The opportunity is a claim that the situation can be exploited by the Cora Group for business advantage. The influencer is neither good nor bad by itself; it does not judge the situation. It only becomes a potential for good when it is judged to be an opportunity.

Who does the judging? As shown in Figure 3.7, Cora Group recognizes the influencer and makes an assessment that the influencer presents an opportunity. And Cora Group only recognizes it as presenting an opportunity because the opportunity affects the achievement of one of the Cora Group’s goals, Open More Restaurants in Metro DC.

Threats

Not every influencer that affects an organization’s goals or strategies can be exploited as an opportunity. For example, consider the trend of customers increasingly eating ethnic food when they dine out. Cora Group recognizes that trend as the influencer Increasing Public Interest in Ethnic Fare, shown in Figure 3.10, and judges it to be a threat to Nola, that Nola may lose customers to Thai, Peruvian, and other more ethnic restaurants.

A threat is modeled like an opportunity: a threat judges an influencer. A threat is an assessment of how the influencer will affect the business. An organization recognizes the influencer and makes an assessment that the influencer is a threat. Threats are just like opportunities except they’re negative instead of positive. Whereas an opportunity can lead to a business advantage, a threat can lead to a disadvantage.

Like an opportunity, a threat can affect a goal. Figure 3.10 shows the threat Potential to Lose Business to Ethnic Fare to be a threat to the achievement of the goal Establish Regular Customers. Note that the organizations involved are different in this case. Cora Group makes the assessment, recognizing the influencer as a threat to another organization—to Nola and its goal of establishing regular customers.

Assessments

Threats and opportunities are very similar; they are both assessments. An assessment is an evaluation of an influencer’s potential effect on a business. If the influencer is both external to the organization—about a competitor, a market trend, or something else outside the organization itself—and judged to be favorable, it is an opportunity. If the influencer is external to the organization and judged as unfavorable, it is a threat.

Influencers can be internal to an organization, and an internal influencer can have an assessment, also positive or negative. A positive assessment of an internal influencer is a strength, and a negative assessment of an internal influencer is a weakness. Table 3.1 shows the four varieties of assessments.

You may be familiar with the four varieties of assessment from their acronym: SWOT, for strength, weakness, opportunity, threat. SWOT analysis is a popular method of creating business strategy by identifying and analyzing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of a business and using those identified assessments to create a strategy.

Motivation modeling does not prescribe SWOT analysis. Instead, motivation modeling is agnostic to the method by which strategy is formed. Strategies can be created through a formal SWOT analysis process and then modeled. Or, more commonly in our experience, strategies can be formed, refined, and rethought in a series of informal conversations among key leaders over a period of months and years. Or strategies can be created in the modeling process itself, in a series of model-based workshops, as described in Chapters 8 and 9. Modeling can be applied at any step of the way, to make explicit the current discussion and show the current disagreements.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Some influencers are internal to the organization. An internal influencer can be judged as either a strength, if it helps the organization achieve its goals and strategies, or as a weakness, if it inhibits the organization from such achievement.

For example, Adelina is a fairly new restaurant in the Cora Group with a small space—only eight tables. They have exploited the intimate setting of their small space by focusing on romance, by becoming the Cora Group restaurant that couples go to for a romantic evening. By catering to couples focused on romance instead of business dinners or larger parties, Adelina has prospered.

Figure 3.12 shows a model of this situation. The influencer Small Space is a simple statement of the fact that Adelina has only eight tables. (The description attribute of this model element would no doubt include details about the small space, including the dimensions and layout of the dining room and how it is usually configured for eight two-person tables.) The strength Intimate Setting represents how Adelina uses the small space to its advantage in setting a romantic mood. This strength affects the employment of Adelina’s strategy Attract Romance-Seeking Customers.

Unfortunately Adelina’s success is also limited by its space; they turn away many people every night because they have only eight tables and they have become very popular. If they had a larger space, they could do more business. But moving is always risky. What if their customers don’t move with them or they don’t find the new larger space as charming as the existing one?

Figure 3.12 also shows this limitation on their success. The same small space that leads to the strength Intimate Setting is also judged to be a weakness, Small Space Limits Growth. This weakness affects Adelina’s objective, Double Revenues by Next December.

In this example there is a single influencer that is judged to be both a strength and a weakness. This is common. Often factors that help our businesses succeed later inhibit further success. Models are useful for spotting these subtle, counterintuitive relationships. They are sometimes hard to notice when talking or thinking about a situation but easy to identify when creating a visual model.

Comparing Alternatives

Motivation models are most often used for strategy capture. Someone creates the strategy in a process that does not involve modeling. Modelers are called in later to capture that strategy after it is created. The model represents the strategy that is already agreed, and the purpose of the model is to support the communication of the strategy, or its analysis, or one of the other purposes discussed earlier.

But sometimes motivation models are used to help create the strategy. As part of the process of deciding what strategy is best, modelers create models of the alternatives and then analyze them. For example, suppose the management team is trying to decide how to increase Adelina’s revenue. Three alternatives are discussed: Adelina could move to a new location, Adelina could cater to business events that rent the whole restaurant for an evening, or Adelina could raise prices, attempting to capture new revenue from the existing business. For the most part, these alternatives are mutually exclusive. If Adelina moved, it would be a risky time to raise prices or to cater to a new audience.

Figure 3.13 shows the first alternative: moving to a new location. The influencer Restaurant Moves Often Strand Customers is a reflection of the reality of the restaurant business. Many customers remember a restaurant by its location. Moving the restaurant will lead some customers to show up at the old place and others to forget about the restaurant entirely. Some customers will be lost.

This influencer is evoked by the strategy Move to New Location. The influencers we have seen so far are all observations about the world—trends, competitors, etc.—or observations about our business. This one is different; it is a potential observation, something that is not happening yet but that we expect to happen if we adopt this strategy. It is related to the strategy by the association evokes.

If the restaurant move does strand some customers, Adelina will see a revenue trough—a decline in revenue for some time until existing customers learn about the new location and new customers discover the restaurant. This potential revenue shortfall is modeled by the threat Restaurant Move May Lead to Revenue Trough. The threat in turn affects achievement of the objective Double Revenues by Next December that is the original motivation for the restaurant move strategy.

Causal Loop Diagrams

Influencers are connected to opportunities and other assessments through the judges relationship and the evokes relationship, as described earlier in this chapter. Influencers also support another relationship—at least some influencers do. Some influencers can be connected to other influencers to show cause and effect. These special influencers that can be connected to each other are called actuators. An actuator is an influencer that represents a quantity, something that is large or small, growing or declining. Portia’s competitor is an influencer for Portia, as it could be a threat (or even an opportunity), but it is not an actuator since it is not a quantity. But the competitor’s annual revenue is an actuator; it’s a quantity that has an effect on Portia’s world. Similarly, the competitor’s critic ratings are an actuator, as is their customer reputation.

Note that an actuator may be easy to measure—like annual revenues—or difficult to measure—like critic ratings. How do you average a good rating in a newspaper with a middling rating in Zagat’s™? Some actuators, such as customer reputation, are perhaps not even measurable. An influencer can be an actuator without being measurable. An actuator need only be inherently a quantity, even if it can’t actually be measured.

A network of actuators connected together is called a causal loop diagram. A causal loop diagram shows how potential business actions lead to complex dynamic effects. For example, consider neighborhoods that become restaurant districts, with dozens of restaurants all within a few blocks. How does this happen? Initially, a couple of restaurants are located in the neighborhood. In an effort to be noticed, another new one opens nearby. The neighborhood gets the reputation as a minor restaurant district, and some customers travel to the neighborhood and then walk around to decide where to eat. More restaurants open there, and the reputation of the restaurant district increases.

Figure 3.17 shows a model of this situation. The actuator Neighborhood Is Known for Restaurants increases, and that actuator causes increases in the actuator Restaurant Customers Dine in Neighborhood. That in turn causes increases in the actuator Neighborhood Attractiveness to Restaurant Owners. Greater attractiveness of the neighborhood to restaurant owners causes increases in the actuator Restaurants Locate in Neighborhood, which in turn causes increases in the original actuator Neighborhood Is Known for Restaurants. The neighborhood becomes increasingly concentrated with restaurants.

The BMM Standard

In 2006, the Object Management Group adopted a standard for business motivation modeling: the Business Motivation Model (BMM). Prior to BMM, there was much variety. In practice, business analysts used many different techniques to model business goals and strategies. There was little agreement among all the variety of techniques, and people had difficulty translating models from one technique to another. Also, some modeling tools supported the modeling of goals and strategies, but different tools supported it in different ways with different kinds of model elements. Again there was little agreement among all the tool variety, and people had difficulty porting models built in one tool to another. The OMG stepped in to fix this problem with the BMM standard.⁴

The motivation models described in this chapter are largely consistent with the BMM. As with all the standards described in this book, we have not endeavored to be complete. There are several corners of the BMM that are not covered in this chapter. For example, the BMM describes a rather elaborate categorization of influencers, including suppliers, infrastructure, implicit corporate values and management prerogatives. (For more details you can read the specification [OMG 2007]. For a standards specification, it is remarkably clear and readable.) Instead of providing complete coverage, we have covered the parts of the BMM standard that are (in our opinion) the most useful for everyday business modeling, endeavoring always to keep the discussion simple and useful.

In addition to goals, strategies, and influencers, the BMM also specifies business policies and business rules as well as the way policies and rules are related to goals and strategies. Rather than describing business rules and business policies in this chapter, we describe them in Chapter 6. Similarly, the BMM specifies the way business processes are related to strategies. We cover that topic in Chapter 5, when we describe business processes.

As we write this book, BMM is a new standard: BMM 1.0 was adopted in 2006. In our view the standard is good but incomplete. One shortcoming of BMM 1.0 is that it does not specify a graphical look for BMM diagrams. The standard says how goals and strategies are related but is silent on how a diagram showing goals and strategies should be drawn. But in our experience, business motivation models are inherently visual. It is not enough to read how their goals and strategies relate; people like to see how they relate in a diagram.

We created our own graphical look for BMM diagrams and used that look for the diagrams in this chapter. This look is meant only to be a stopgap, an attempt to show diagrams in the absence of a standard. Hopefully a future edition of the book will be able to use the BMM graphical standard when it is developed in a future version of the BMM.

We also took the liberty of changing the cardinality of one of the relationships. In the BMM each assessment judges a single influencer. But we have found that the same assessment is sometimes convenient for more than one influencer—for example, as in Figure 3.14. So we changed the cardinality of judges, to allow an assessment to judge more than one influencer.

The BMM was developed to model a single strategy for a business: either today’s strategy or a desired strategy described in a business plan. The BMM is silent on alternative strategies, on supporting the sometimes messy process of deciding which influencers are important and which tactics to employ. In our use of the BMM to model strategy alternatives, we found a need for a couple of extensions. One extension is the relationship evokes between a course of action and an influencer. As described earlier in the chapter, a potential course of action evokes an influencer when someone believes that the course of action will lead to the influencer. Figures 3.13, 3.14, 3.15, and 3.16 all use this new relationship.

Figure 3.16 shows a second extension for modeling strategy alternatives. As discussed earlier, when several course-of-action alternatives are shown in the same diagram, we use a symbol to show that the relationships are mutually exclusive. This approach to modeling mutually exclusive relationships is adapted from Terry Halpin’s work with Object Role Modeling [Halpin 2001].

BMM 1.0 does not support modeling of causality networks among influencers. You simply cannot create a causal loop diagram in BMM. To support causal loops, we added the influencer subclass actuator and the four causality relationships among actuators shown in Table 3.2. Our notation for these causal relationships was adapted from the standard notation for causal loop modeling in system dynamics [Sterman 2000], modified to be more consistent with the form of model elements and relationships in BMM.

Evidence Collection Subgoals

As they discussed it further, the evidence team uncovered three subgoals of Collect Evidence to Support Sales—goals that were important to achieve as part of supporting proposals to new clients. Prospective clients must make the business case inside their own companies; they must persuade various internal client stakeholders of both the wisdom of outsourcing and the merits of outsourcing to Unisys. The evidence team thought it was important to collect the kinds of metrics that would help their clients make those internal cases. This was modeled as the goal Help Clients Make Internal Case, a subgoal of Collect Evidence to Support Sales.

Unisys has many successful client engagements. There was not time enough to collect detailed evidence from every success. The evidence team knew they must focus. But which client engagements should they focus on? The team decided that they should focus on the markets in which the company wanted to grow and pay less attention to the other markets. This market focus for the evidence was modeled as the goal Support Sales in Markets We Want To Be In, another subgoal of Collect Evidence to Support Sales.

The kinds of evidence needed to sell new clients changes from year to year. Last year cost saving was important. This year, clients are interested in improving their time to market. Next year, supporting growth will overshadow other concerns. The evidence team realized that new evidence must be available quickly to support new sales needs as they arise. This realization was modeled by the third subgoal of Collect Evidence to Support Sales: Make New Evidence Available Quickly.

The evidence team turned from discussing goals to discussing how these goals could be achieved. Who should collect the evidence from an engagement? Should it be the existing engagement delivery personnel, already working with the client? Or should it be someone else, perhaps an “evidence squad” whose sole purpose is to dive in, collect evidence from an engagement, and then leave? The evidence team decided it would be easier and simpler for the existing engagement delivery personnel to collect the evidence. This decision was modeled as the strategy Evidence Collected by Delivery Team, shown in Figure 3.22.

Challenges with Relying on Delivery Personnel

But there are some drawbacks with using the delivery personnel to collect evidence. The field managers described a hidden costs of providing numeric evidence: the engagement team and the client that provides the evidence have to field many subsequent requests by other interested clients—clients who want to verify that the evidence is real and ask questions about how it was achieved. These requests can be a burden on both the Unisys team and the client. This is a significant disincentive to those field managers who collect evidence from their engagements and a reason for them to avoid collecting evidence, everything else being equal. This drawback is modeled as the influencer Many Requests on Evidenced Engagements and the weakness Delivery Teams May Avoid Collecting Evidence, a judgment of the influencer by the evidence team.

The existing delivery incentives also work against the strategy. The delivery personnel are incented to perform well on their engagement: to keep their client happy and satisfied, to deliver the contracted services, and to perform this work within budget and on time. Collecting evidence takes time and effort but does not help the people who are expending this time and effort. All this work is for the benefit of unknown others sometime in the future. In most organizations, such work is usually avoided, shortchanged, or performed superficially. This misalignment between who pays for evidence collection and who benefits is modeled as the influencer Collected Evidence Only Benefits Others. The weakness Delivery Teams May Avoid Collecting Evidence is also a judgment of this influencer.

The evidence team decided they needed to tackle this weakness. They decided on three strategies. First, they tackled the misalignment of incentives by deciding to incorporate evidence collection into performance evaluation. The engagement manager, the leader of the delivery personnel for a client, will be measured on how well he or she collects evidence of success as well as the other measures, such as engagement profitability and client satisfaction. This decision is modeled as the strategy Incorporate Evidence into Delivery Perf Evaluations, shown in Figure 3.23 as a sub-strategy of Evidence Collected by Delivery Team.

Second, they decided to make evidence collection easy, to reduce the avoidance by lowering its cost. This approach is modeled as the strategy Streamline Evidence Capture.

Third, they reasoned that creating a lot of evidence references from existing engagements would spread out the burden of fielding requests. No one delivery team would have to field too many requests if everyone fielded some. This decision was modeled as the strategy Back Up Evidence With Many References.

The Value of the Motivation Model

With their motivation model, the evidence team now had a clear understanding of what they were trying to do and a consensus on how to do it. They proceeded to decide what metrics to collect and how to change the engagement delivery business processes to collect those metrics. This work was also performed via business modeling, using a business process model of the engagement delivery process. But business process models are not the focus of this chapter; instead they are described in Chapter 5. So our description of this case study ends here, with the completed motivation model.

How did the motivation model help the Unisys evidence team? The motivation model helped organize the discussion as it was happening. Meetings of large cross-functional groups often wander. By constructing a motivation model along the way, the team focused their attention on what they were trying to do.

The motivation model served as a record of their discussion later. Too often teams make decisions in workshops and then the members later cannot recall the logic behind the decision. Why did we decide that? What were we thinking? The motivation model is a record of the goals, strategies, and influencers that led to their decisions.

As the evidence team crafted business process activities to collect evidence, they traced these activities back to goals and strategies. For example, early in an engagement, a delivery manager decides whether to try to collect evidence from that engagement. This decision is driven by whether the evidence is likely to help sell other work that Unisys wants to win. So the new activity Decide Whether to Collect Evidence is traced back to the goal Support Sales in Markets We Want To Be In.

Finally, the motivation model was useful for communicating the evidence collection strategy to others. Many other people would have to understand what the evidence team has done. The many engagement delivery managers across Unisys who will become responsible for collecting evidence metrics need to understand what needs to be done and why. The evidence team used the motivation model to explain these metrics to the engagement delivery managers.

The motivation model built by the evidence team is not concerned with the corporate strategy of Unisys as a whole nor with the strategy of a Unisys business unit. Instead, the motivation model is narrowly focused on the strategy for achieving one goal: collecting evidence from delivery work to support future sales. This is strategy-in-the-small, the strategy for a single project. While strategy-in-the-large gets much attention, strategy-in-the-small pervades all organizations. Only a few people in any organization perform strategy-in-the-large, but everyone performs strategy-in-the-small.

Motivation models are just as useful for modeling strategy-in-the-small as for modeling strategy-in-the-large. Both involve goals, objectives, influencers, assessments, strategies, and tactics.