Finding Outcomes and Initiatives in Documents

Part of the Realisor methodology for BRM involves breaking documents down into benefits maps, and I thought it might be useful to break down a small piece of text, partially to show the process being done with UK Government documents rather than our documents as shown in Jennys blog, but also to focus on what is missing when you do this.

The following text is part of the UK Government ICT Strategy

11. The Government is committed to improving the way it delivers ICT-enabled business change so that investments in ICT support business needs and deliver expected benefits. To do this, government will adopt the right methods and policies and develop a skilled workforce in order to improve and exploit its ICT. By reforming its approach to ICT, government will also help to stimulate economic growth by creating a fairer and more competitive marketplace, with greater direct opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

We will keep our definitions simple and say we are looking for what the Government is hoping to get, and what they are intending to do (outcomes and initiatives respectively).  We should also be looking for assumptions, risks, capabilities, projects and processes etc, but here will will just focus on outcomes and initiatives.

The section consists of three sentences and we will consider the first two of them.  When Jenny suggested coffee and post it notes she wasn’t kidding, in this blog post we are looking at part of one section out of 63 sections in this document, and of course the document is related to numerous other documents…

The Government is committed to improving the way it delivers ICT-enabled business change so that investments in ICT support business needs and deliver expected benefits

I’ve picked three things out from the first sentence.  If we remember the definition of an outcome according to OutcomeJogger, an outcome is where we are changing an attribute of something.  What we have isolated here is

1. Improve delivery of ICT-Enabled business change
2. So that investments in ICT support business needs
3. Investments in ICT deliver expected benefits

Now we wouldn’t write these up as outcomes at this point.  For a start we don’t know that they are separate outcomes, or if when we go through the rest of the documents overlapping post it notes will be created.  What we do need to do though is note where these came from on the three separate post it notes (I use GICT for this document, o for them being potential outcomes, and then number them according to section and number in that section), and also that there is a belief implied in the document that 1 leads to 2, leads to 3, or GICTo1.11.1 -> GICTo1.11.2 -> GICTo1.11.3.

Another reason to not write them up as outcomes is that the wording is not what we’d want it to be.  For number 1 the word improved is quite generic, improved can mean different things to different people.  When we classify the post it notes at the end of the process there will be numerous “outcomes” that are very similar.  These should be put together where possible and well named outcomes used to represent the groups.

To do this, government will adopt the right methods and policies and develop a skilled workforce in order to improve and exploit its ICT.

Now we could view these as outcomes (Increase adoption of policies, workforce skill increased, exploitation of ICT raised), however the wording suggests that these first two are things the Government is going to do to achieve the three proto outcomes from the first sentence.  As such I’d write these up as initiatives, but when pulling the post it notes together at the end if it seems that there is no support for the idea that there are things we are going to do I’d change them into outcomes and flag that up for a workshop.

So now we have 4 outcomes and two initiatives.  If we link them the way that the document suggests (note I’ve tidied the names up a bit, they should be cleaned up by the stakeholders in a workshop)

When you look at this map it doesn’t seem to make sense.  Increasing the success of business change doesn’t align investment with business need, however investing where there is a real business need increases the chance of success.  Moving this around gives us

And I’m fairly happy with this.  Our strategic outcome is a placeholder, we don't really know what it should be from the bit of the document we've processed.  The next step is to take this set of assumptions into a stakeholder workshop and beat it up, assuming that you've done the whole set of documents of course.