In February of 2021, we were sent on a mission to address a process for our Human Resources department's Employee Update and Personnel Requisition forms. These form's processes are vital to ensuring that new employees can be hired; current employees can retire, and any other employment status changes can be processed in an accurate and timely manner. We calculated that our Human Resources and Budget Departments processed around 700 of these forms annually.
This project moved through 4 major phases over the last year: Discovery, Solution Development, Implementation, and Review. Phases in a project help us to break out the steps and work to be done for each project into manageable chunks. In this blog post, we will examine these project phases and milestones, why each of these milestones adds value to the overall project, and the specific methods and tools we used to execute each milestone.
Discovery
The discovery phase is the time and space we use to better understand the processes we are looking to improve and unearth challenges to success. Our milestones for Discovery included the following
Understanding the processes & challenges
What is this milestone: This is where all the project team members take the time to learn or relearn from multiple perspectives what the processes look and feel like in their current state.
Why it adds value: This is a critical step in the project as it gives us the opportunity to learn and document the processes in their current state, talk with users and paint a full picture of what we are looking to address within the scope of the project. Here we can begin to collect insights that will inform us as to what challenges we are faced with.
How we accomplished this milestone: We conducted interviews with the two main departments responsible for processing our Personnel Requisition and Employee Update forms as well as 4 other city departments that use the forms. We also did some process mapping for the current state of the processes with an individual mapping activity for some of our project team members as well as a group effort to validate the completed map.
Problem Identification
What is this milestone: During this milestone, we use insights collected through our interviews and initial conversations to define our challenges.
Why it adds value: This step allows us to slow down and sift through the information we’ve uncovered. We want to ensure that no stone has been left unturned and that we have a clear understanding of what challenges we will be addressing with our solutions.
How we accomplished this milestone: We took our collective notes and pulled quotes and data points from them to collect insights. Once we had our collection of insights we began grouping them together to get to the “bigger” problem or challenges. Once we had these challenges we then began pulling suggestions and ideas from our interviews and conversations that gave a number of ideas that we could work from for our solution development phase.
Solution Development
The Solution Development phase is used to take those insights that we developed into challenges and then begin thinking about how to address them with the right solutions. Some of the challenges we identified in the previous phase were fairly straightforward so we used this as an opportunity to provide recommendations in addition to the collection of ideas that were pulled from our interviews and conversations in Discovery. The sub-phases for Solution Development included the following
Brainstorming
What is this milestone: This is time we take to examine our challenges and develop ideas and ways that we can address each of them. How are we going to fix the problem, what needs to be changed?
Why it adds value: We all know that two heads are better than one and eight heads are better than two. Facilitating a brainstorming activity with our entire project team allowed us to think through solutions that came from multiple perspectives when thinking about the challenges at hand.
How we accomplished this milestone: We facilitated a workshop with our project team where we used a “How Might We” activity to mine ideas for solutions to address our challenges.
Recommendation bucket list
What is this milestone: Some of our identified challenges were fairly straightforward, so we took a moment to put together some recommendations that we could present to the group along with our list of solutions mined from our brainstorming activity.
Why it adds value: This can be valuable in a project because as project managers we don’t live in the processes every day we were looking to improve like the departments that facilitate them. Oftentimes those who sit so close to a process have a hard time seeing past the everyday. Here we are able to provide a fresh perspective.
How we accomplished this milestone: We read through our notes and documentation again from Discovery and did some desk research to learn from others. We then started a list of solutions we thought would be best to implement. Our next step was to present these recommendations to the group and prioritize them alongside other solutions identified in our brainstorming activity.
Prioritization
What is this milestone: Here we took a moment to review the large list of solutions identified for implementation and aligned the team's thoughts around how they would prioritize the implementation of each. This helps us to see which solutions can be quick wins and which solutions will be heavier lifts as well as identify if any of our solutions might be missing the mark on what we are looking to accomplish.
Why it adds value: This effort is valuable in aligning project goals across team members and gaining trust and buy-in from those individuals as well. When moving through a process improvement project having trust and buy-in is critical, without them, implementation and sustainability of the implemented solutions could be at risk.
How we accomplished this milestone: We facilitated a workshop where we used an Impact/Effort Matrix to identify both the effort it would take to implement the solution and the impact the solution would have on the process itself.
Implementation
The Implementation phase is the time and space we use to take our solutions and make them a reality. During implementation is where the heavy lifting happens and change is set in motion. Our sub-phases for Implementation included the following:
Work Stream Focus
What is this milestone: Through implementation, we maintained our collaborative approach to this project by breaking our solutions into five different workstreams that we could progress simultaneously.
Why it adds value: This helped us to communicate to the project team what work needed to be done in more manageable chunks and by whom. This was also helpful in allowing us to implement our solutions not one at a time but collectively through our Implementation Phase.
How we accomplished this milestone: We broke our solutions into 5 workstreams including DocuSign workstream which was the configuration, testing, and implementation of our digital signature tool; Standard Operating Procedures, Educational Documents, Communications and Setting Expectations, and Metrics and Reporting.
Deliverable hand-off
What is this milestone: We were intentional about handing over the resources and tools that came from this project. We were careful to provide training, expectations, and recommendations for them once our involvement ended.
Why it adds value: Being thoughtful and intentional in handing off tools and resources produced through the life of the project ensures that we are not assuming responsibilities we might have to own for all of eternity or until we actually hand them off. This gave us the time and space to help prepare our Departments responsible for these tools and resources and set them up for success to sustainably use and maintain what we left them with.
How we accomplished this milestone: We put together a document that outlines in detail the resources and tools, who they are intended for, and how/when to maintain them. We presented this document to our Human Resources Department with expectations for any next steps.
Review
The Review phase is our opportunity to step back from all the conversations we had, and the work we completed and collect feedback from our team members about the project life itself. This phase is where we synthesize qualitative and quantitative data to inform us how impactful our work was on the processes themselves. We also aim to learn from our successes and failures within the project life and look to identify what we could do better next time. Our sub-phases for Implementation included the following
Exit Interviews
What is this milestone: These interviews were crafted to gather quantitative data about the project in general.
Why it adds value: This did two things for us, it baked in a feedback loop on our work and provided us with some really good insights around project successes and failures that we can leverage to do better the next time and identified that there was still a root cause for some inefficiencies in the process that were not addressed. With this information, we were able to share with our stakeholders' the risks that remain.
How we accomplished this milestone: We interviewed 7 project team members and project stakeholders of varying levels and participation within our organization.
Project Retro
What is this milestone: We offered time and space to all of our project team members to participate in a workshop where we facilitated a project retro activity. We focused on three buckets for feedback; I like, I Wish, I Wonder. The intent of this workshop was to collect qualitative data about the project in general.
Why it adds value: The value added here is the same as our exit interviews, however rather than targeting a select few this provided the opportunity for all project team members to participate and share their thoughts.
How we accomplished this milestone: We conducted and retro activity using a Miro board to collect this information for our project team members. We took some time in this workshop to revisit the phases and milestones of the project and then asked our team members to be honest and genuine in sharing their thoughts by asking them to add to 3 categories, what “I liked”, what “I Wish” and what “I Wonder”.
Data Synthesis & Analysis
What is this milestone: Here we sift through all the qualitative and quantitative data we collected from our interviews and group activity. Through this work, we were able to gain a clear picture of what the project's impact was.
Why it adds value: Who doesn’t want to show proof of their work? We do!
How we accomplished this milestone: We pulled individual data points from our interview notes and retro activity, and we were also able to begin looking at new data points from our digital signature tool. Once we had all this qualitative and quantitative data in hand we began analysis and went through 2 rounds of synthesis, which brought us to 7 key takeaways for this project.
Final Presentation
What is this milestone: For this, we have put together a presentation that talks about the project phases and milestones, process changes made, tools we’ve left our departments with, recommendations we’ve made for future implementation, what worked well, and what we learned, and an impact analysis of the project and what we didn’t have time for during the project life.
Why it adds value: Our final presentation helps us to loop in all of our stakeholders at the end of the project and provide a full overview of the work done through the life of this project. We are able to demonstrate our approach and showcase our wins as well as some of our struggles.
How we accomplished this milestone: We put together a slide deck that we used to facilitate our conversation and show our work. We presented this to 10 people or so including Senior Staff members and a number of Department Heads.
Project phases and milestones do change from one project to the next depending on the project and the stakeholders involved. These factors and others help the project manager determine how much time should be spent in each phase and what milestones should be included.
Stay tuned, to follow this post we will be writing about our key takeaways from this project and some of the lessons we learned along the way.