How to connect the dots between your work and your organisation’s mission

This article was written by Basil J. White and Beth A. Martin. Basil is a policy analyst for a U.S. Federal Cabinet agency; Beth is an adjunct instructor and user experience (UX) practitioner.

Take a moment to think about all the things you’ve done so far today. Which of the items have you crossed off the to-do list would you say added most value to the organisation? Is there something that didn’t add value at all?

Understanding how different activities add value to each is critical to any organisation’s success. But this understanding can be hard to acquire.

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Organisations develop policies to solve problems, but they often do not integrate solutions to achieve shared outcomes. As public servants, we can make policies more useful by providing smarter context for the problems they were intended to solve, and the questions they can answer. Here is an example.

Discovering Relationships

Say you want to save money for a holiday. What are all the ways you can save money? You decide to ride your bike and bring lunch each day. What impact do these activities have?

Riding your bike not only saves money on transportation, but also burns extra calories to and from work. Bringing your lunch every day enables you to save money and eat healthier meals. You could say that saving money and losing weight depends on bringing your lunch. You can draw a line from the actions of riding your bike and bringing lunch to saving money for your holiday. You can see the direct impact of your activities towards saving money, but now you are also able to see that they have other impacts.

Table 1: The relationship between activities and results.

Notice in Table 1 that the dependent activity of saving money is also an enabling activity to help you afford your holiday. This value stream moves left to right, from enabling to dependent activity. Furthermore, unintended – or secondary – effects also result in healthier outcomes with increased physical activity and portion control. You can easily track the savings in money, but other benefits, such as losing weight, obtained by these changes may not be so readily discovered until you start tracking them. Each of these activities can be, and should be, tied together and thus they are interdependent, meaning riding your bike and packing healthy lunches work to support saving money towards the holiday and also losing weight, therefore moving towards a healthier lifestyle.

Now, imagine that as a public servant, you meet a colleague who works in another part of your agency. You share news and learn this colleague works on a similar scheme that your office initiated. How much more effective could your work be if you combined efforts? What if you wanted to invite stakeholders and potential service recipients to participate in a roundtable or workshop to provide on new schemes that would impact them? Who might you reach out to who is not already at the table? Or perhaps you want to improve your career prospects. Are you able to demonstrate how your achievements help your office meet its mission? Now imagine you have a tool that would help answer those — and many other — questions.

Table 2: How performance measures, policies, and goals add value to each other as well as to priorities outside the organisation.

Mapping the value streams across performance, policies, and plans shows a more complete picture of the value that each component adds and the inter-dependencies across these elements. For example, your Performance Measure 1 affects your colleague’s Strategic Goal 2 and Policy 3. Their Policy 3 is also an enabling activity for your Strategic Goal 2. You can use these value streams to inform decisions about what policies, plans, and programmes to add, edit, delete, or reorganise. Seeing all the ways in which a component activity inherits value from across the enterprise can also help prioritise these disparate elements to reflect the heightened priority of a strategic goal.

Finding Impact and minding your five Ps and three Qs

Now that we have established that being aware of the work of others around you can help you become more productive and deliver more effectively on the goals of your organisation, the next obvious question is how to do it in practice. This is where value mapping comes in. Value mapping can help you to communicate, manage, and change your organisation holistically, by maintaining situational awareness of all the elements in your organisation that work together for singular goals.

The Integrated Value Model (IVM) as a method and a tool identifies how an organisation’s “five Ps” — policies, plans, programmes, priorities, and performance measures — relate and share scope. This consequential relationship allows you to answer three high-level, strategic questions (“three Qs”):

1. What work adds value to other work?
2. What relationships among various sets of work need to be reviewed or changed to affect the organisation’s outcomes or mission?
3. How do you want performance to drive the design of work and sets of work?

The function of the model is to show how policies, plans, and programmes add value to each other to achieve goals. These goals can be inherent, or they can serve a super-ordinate goal across multiple offices or organisations.

While we have placed some emphasis on building the model, the important thing, however, is not the tool, but how you track performance, justify the existence of a new project or programme, or identify orphan projects. You can uncover inter-dependencies by mapping their relationships. This can help you prevent reorganising resources in a way that unintentionally breaks these inter-dependencies and reduces overall value added to a strategic goal. For example, a hospital might consider transferring money from the parking budget to increase hospital beds, when in fact the availability of parking is a performance measure that influences whether patients choose that hospital for care. Therefore, the parking department deserves some of the credit for an increase in new patients.

Designing your analysis

When you are ready to ask your questions, use the IVM method as in the table above to organise your enabling and dependent activities. Let’s refer to Table 2.

• Performance Measure 1 adds value to, or contributes to the success of, Policy 3.
• Policy 3 adds value to Strategic Goal 2.
• Strategic Goal 2 adds value to External Priority 5.

You can infer that Performance Measure 1 would have a second-order effect of adding value indirectly to External Priority 5. Does Performance Measure 1 actually contribute to the success of External Priority 5?  If not, you may want to change your performance measures or goals (or create new ones) that more accurately reflect the strategic outcomes you want.

There are other analytical questions you can ask to create stronger integration and value across your activities:

1. Which policies, plans, objectives, goals and programmes help each other succeed?  This helps map elements to each other and identify inter-dependencies and value streams across the organisation.
2. How do the elements in your organisation contribute to the strategic agendas of specific stakeholders? These agendas could be the strategies or agendas of the parent organisation, major partners, or influential interest groups. This kind of mapping allows you to show everything your organisation does to contribute to the agenda of a stakeholder.
3. What would be the loss to the organisation if it lost a policy, plan, objective, goal, or programme, and how would you objectively measure that loss? This identifies performance measures to attach to each of these elements, including performance measures that may influence an element that are outside the control of that element.

In a series of upcoming articles, we will discuss the kinds of documents that comprise these elements and how they enable and depend on each other to deliver value.

In the meantime, you can download your own sample IVM to get started, which you can use as a template to populate with your own data. — Basil J. White and Beth A. Martin

(Picture credit: Unsplash)