Chapter 5
In This Chapter
Understanding why a Vision is vital for your programme
Incorporating all the key elements in a Vision
Striking the appropriate tone in a Vision
Getting the right people involved in your Vision
Most programmes are long – three to five years is typical. Some may be substantially longer; I've worked on one that's planned to last for a century! Their length or the fact that they're being carried out in an uncertain environment means that most programmes can't be planned from start to finish. Therefore, all you can say about a conventional plan for a programme – in other words, a schedule showing activities and timescales – is that it won't happen. The difficulty is working out what will happen.
You and the other stakeholders in your programme can't know the nature of the entire journey. You know only a portion of it: perhaps what's going to happen in the next year. So in order to keep on track, you need to have a clear picture of the destination. In MSP, this picture is called the Vision.
As well as describing the characteristics of a good Vision in this chapter, I talk about developing and maintaining a Vision Statement and where the Vision sits within the life-cycle of your programme – what MSP calls the transformational flow. (You can find out more about the transformational flow in Chapter 1.) You can refer to the ‘Vision’ or the ‘Vision Statement’, they're the same thing.
The Vision is a picture of a better future; its focus is on outcomes and benefits. If the future isn't going to be better than today, you don't need to do the programme.
Instead of being a plan, the purpose of the Vision is to be a way of encouraging and maintaining the commitment and enthusiasm of all those involved and ensuring everyone is on the same page. The Vision is a summarised expression of the desired future state.
If you need to sacrifice detail in your Vision in order to achieve impact, that's absolutely fine. You can include the necessary detail in the Blueprint (which I describe in Chapter 6). Many things in a programme are going to be unstable and volatile, but your aim is to keep the Vision itself as stable as possible to help maintain stakeholder credibility and to signal strategic alignment. Indeed, some people go further and say that if the Vision has to change, you have to question whether the programme has remained the same.
If the Vision is a compelling, high-level description of the future state, it can act as an effective focal point for the programme.
A programme without a Vision is like a country singer without a sob story. Your programme needs a Vision for two reasons:
The Vision is one of the key concepts within programme management, as well as one of the governance themes in MSP.
The composition of the Vision is pretty straightforward and very brief. It's a clear statement of the end goal of the programme, something short and memorable. It may well need to include any imposed constraints on the programme – the situation in which the programme is being undertaken.
You can expand on this external view by setting the context for the programme, perhaps including relevant information to help set expectations. Your aim is to put the context of the programme into the broader business context.
Here are a few pointers on making your Vision effective:
The purpose of the Vision Statement is to communicate the end goal to all stakeholders, so write it in language and terms that customers can understand.
Don't get lost in the language of customers, however. Imagine a person in each of your stakeholder groups. Think of them as someone you're providing a service to – a customer. The Vision needs to describe the service you'll eventually be providing to them.
As an example, think about how you'd write a Vision about reducing the number of staff in the company in a way that's acceptable to those staff. That's the type of challenge you face. The answer's probably something like ‘achieving industry standards of productivity’.
Don't worry if you find that you write something more like a plan than a Vision and with too much detail. That's quite normal, and practice makes perfect.
To start, the Vision is drafted during the Identifying a Programme process by the Senior Responsible Owner (see the later section ‘Taking overall responsibility: Senior Responsible Owner’) and key stakeholders. You can refine it in the Defining a Programme process, but after that it is kept as stable as possible. If it's changed you run the risk of confusing stakeholders or even undermining the credibility of the programme, as well as of indicating that the current programme is no longer strategically aligned (in other words, it isn't helping achieve the longer term direction of the organization) and so a different programme is required.
In this section I also convey what it feels like when you get the right people contributing in the right way. I use the formal terms for the different roles in programmes, which I describe in Chapter 9.
In the Identifying a Programme process, you want to have a brief session with the Sponsoring Group to flesh out the Programme Brief. The Brief contains an outline Business Case and outline Vision. All you need to do at this point is get them describing the future – the destination – not the plan for getting there.
In Defining the Programme, one of your first actions is to carry out stakeholder analysis. (I talk more about this subject in Chapter 14.) In an ideal world you want to have someone from each of the main stakeholder groups present while you do more work on the Vision. At the beginning of a programme, people are usually nervous about engaging with stakeholders.
I talk more about how to deal with this attitude in Chapter 14, but as far as the Vision is concerned, your aim is to get as many stakeholder groups as possible present when working on the Vision. If a stakeholder group is so sensitive that you feel you can't invite them, ask someone who you're more comfortable with and who knows this tricky stakeholder group to represent the views of that group.
Don't worry if your little working group spends hours trying to get the wording of the Vision absolutely right: that's a great thing. It means that they're engaged and that your stakeholder engagement with them is working! The one thing you have to guard against is the Vision becoming a camel: in other words, a clumsy compromise. A camel is a horse designed by a committee, remember?
The Vision needs an inner voice and passion about it to make it compelling. If the Senior Responsible Owner takes hold of the Vision and expresses it in his own words, that's great. It means that when he stands up to champion the programme, he can read the Vision and speak from the heart.
As you go through Defining a Programme and more detail is put onto the programme, expect to have to go back to your Vision working group several times. However, by the end of Defining a Programme, you should have a very stable Vision.
I look at tranche boundaries in Chapters 10 and 18.
In this section I describe what each of the members of the programme management team may do to contribute to the Vision or how they may use it. To discover more about each of these roles, have a look in Chapter 9.
The Senior Responsible Owner is the senior individual who's accountable for the success of the programme: the head honcho, the big Kahuna. This person is responsible for the following:
The Programme Manager operates the programme on a daily basis and is responsible for:
Business Change Managers bed down the changes in their particular part of the business. They're responsible for:
The Programme Office looks after the administration of the programme and is responsible for the configuration management of the Vision Statement. (I explain configuration management in Chapter 12. For now, think of it as being good version control.)
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