Transformation Preparation – Planning and Scheduling 101

Introduction

Agile and the “Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise” (SAFe) have introduced many innovative approaches to planning and managing transformations. However, most enterprise transformations have failed because the respective combined leadership, including the client organizational and system integrator (SI) executives and their designated transformation leaders, choose to partially leverage elements of agile, SAFe, product, and project management practices.

One key issue in transformation planning and schedule management is the need for a coordinated and disciplined approach. While there are numerous “User Stories” in the form of Issue Types (JIRA) and actual stories in Azure DevOps (ADO), there is often no comprehensive plan and schedule for planning, sequencing, and managing these stories and the resources performing the work.

There are numerous reasons why numerous planning, scheduling, and management gaps occur in these transformations. From my own experience, observations, and assessments, there is often a significant knowledge, experience, and skill gap with the transformation leadership and team in planning and scheduling these stories as part of the transformation.

The result is often chaos as the transformation approaches the solution integration testing phase for reasons that include the following:

• The transformation process scope was not adequately planned and sequenced out at an optimally managed level.
• Value stream team members can choose which stories they feel most appropriate to work on without referencing an overall strategy or plan.
• There are gaps in the end-to-end solution validation as the transformation evolves over the planned increments or waves, etc.

The result of chaos is often delays in transformation delivery, budget overruns, and lower solution quality than users expected. The solution to this simple but critical management gap is ensuring that the leadership possesses the maturity, experience, knowledge, and skill required for planning and schedule management.

Before the Planning and Scheduling - Breaking Down Transformation Scope

Before any transformation team can plan and schedule the transformation work scope, the initial and most essential step is to break it down into discreet, manageable work products represented by a user story, issue type, etc. Many commercial off-the-shelf enterprise applications offer this breakdown by value stream down to a level three or four business process.

Value stream breakdown into a level four process flow involves a detailed and structured approach to dissecting the transformation scope into smaller, more manageable components. This breakdown is crucial for ensuring that each part of the transformation is clearly defined, planned, and executed to achieve the desired outcomes. Here’s how a value stream can be broken down into discreet processes:

• Level One: Value Streams representing the overarching processes and activities that deliver value to the customer. The “record to report” (R2R) value stream is a simple example.
• Level Two: Major process groups representing significant stages or phases of the workflow that contribute to delivering the final product or service. As with the prior example of the R2R value stream, level two can be financial accounting.
• Level Three: Sub-processes are more specific activities supporting larger process groups. Sub-processes ensure that each aspect of the process group is addressed and managed effectively. Following the prior example, a sub-process in financial accounting would be accounts payable (AP).
• Level Four: Detailed process steps are the most granular level of breakdown is the detailed process steps. Each sub-process is decomposed into tasks, activities, or variants of this level's three process steps. Within AP, variants can include AP for milestone-fee-based invoices, time and material-based invoices, etc.

Level three is the most common place to stop the breakdown for variant work product planning. Those work products were discussed in a previous article (published last week) entitled “Transformation Preparation—Minimal Viable Requirements & Work Products.”

Your SI should provide a basis of estimate (BoE) for sizing and estimating the duration, resource skills, and effort required by the work product. You can always refer to a prior article, “A Basis of Estimate (BoE) Standards for the IT Industry,” to obtain the SI BoE or contact me if the SI cannot provide one.

Planning and Scheduling the Transformation – The Most Basic Failures

After the transformation work scope is broken down by value stream, process, and process work products, and those work products have an associated BoE (at least duration), the sequencing of the processes and work products can be initiated for planning and scheduling purposes.

A prior article, “Transformation Methodologies—Just WagileIT!”, addressed how those processes and respective work products should be grouped for program increment or wave planning purposes. Leveraging an enterprise COTS solution's logical architecture, structure, and processes can make planning more efficient and effective. Yet detailed planning and scheduling work can begin once the increments or waves are defined and laid out in a high-level overview.

Yet, most organizations and their SI partners fail to plan, sequence, and schedule processes and work products in detail. In my experience, the reason is simply the lack of knowledge, skill, and experience in basic schedule engineering and the tools that provide the schedule engineering capability.

What often results from this failure are plans and schedules are many and can include the following:

• Delivery schedules are too high to be meaningful to any transformation team member or executive leadership.
• Skill demand and demand timing are often absent or vague to ensure work products are delivered on time.
• Status of delivery is often ad-hoc with ‘guesstimates’ of progress, which are not supported by any substantive data.
• Forecasting time to deliver and complete becomes highly subjective and can vary significantly from week to week, etc.

A critical aspect of this planning and scheduling failure is that the work scope was often fully captured and documented. The work products, per process, were reported in various execution systems such as JIRA, ADO, and others. Yet JIRA, ADO, etc., are execution systems, not planning and scheduling systems. None of these process groups, processes, or process work products were planned and scheduled in a logical and natural sequence that would expedite the work efficiently and reduce the risk of rework due to performing work out of sequence.

Planning and Scheduling – Schedule Engineering 101

Schedule Engineering is the discipline of deliberately planning, sequencing, and scheduling tasks and work products within a project to ensure efficient and timely completion. Fundamentally, Schedule Engineering requires a comprehensive understanding of the transformation solution’s logical architecture and structure and the tools and methodologies that aid in planning and executing processes.

The primary goal of Schedule Engineering is to create a coherent plan that provides clear, actionable schedules. This includes identifying the necessary skills and resources, accurately forecasting timelines, and maintaining a data-supported progress status. This meticulous planning ensures that transformation programs and enabling projects do not rely on vague estimations but on concrete, predictable schedules that can be adjusted as needed. Effective Schedule Engineering can transform the approach to transformation program, product, and project management, making it more proactive and less reactive.

Consider schedule engineering skills and enabling tools as a variant of manufacturing “Materials Requirements Planning” (MRP) skills and systems. MRP systems are designed to ensure that manufacturing processes are efficient and effective. These systems help companies manage manufacturing processes by calculating the materials and components needed to produce a product.

Transformation programs and project management planning and scheduling are similar to MRP systems. The only additional skill set and understanding required for schedule engineering is work product dependency sequencing within and across value streams. Dependency sequencing is understanding and managing the relationships between work products to effectively and efficiently plan and prioritize the work for the respective execution systems (JIRA, ADO, etc.) rather than relying on manual date constraints often maintained manually in the execution systems.

The dependent relationships between work products can be the following:

• Finish to Start
• Start to Start
• Finish to Finish
• Start to Finish

Leveraging these relationships into a dynamic plan and schedule reduces the manual processes, effort, and risk in assessing and forecasting transformation delivery performance. Yet, to fully leverage this capability and significantly improve the probability of transformation success, transformation leadership knowledge, skill, experience, and commitment are required in this area of transformation management.

Wrap-Up – A Failure to Plan is a Plan to Fail

We have established transformation methodologies, product and project management techniques, tools, resources, resource skills, etc., to successfully plan, execute, and deliver enterprise transformations. However, most of these transformations fail to meet their original ROI, schedule milestones, budget goals, and business value realization. The reason is simple: the time and effort required to prepare, plan, and schedule the transformation is not perceived as valuable.

Preparation is often not well planned and managed. Adequate time and effort are insufficient to ensure a valuable plan and schedule to deliver the desired KROs. The excuses for not having proper quality time for an integrated plan and schedule are numerous, vary, and include all levels of management. A book solely dedicated to that subject would be required.

However, ask any following role the importance of preparation planning and scheduling:

• Manufacturing controller for any discrete industry
• Production scheduler for the aerospace or automotive industries
• Global program manager overseeing the design, build, and implementation of multi-million subsea surface wellheads, manifolds, etc.

They will most often refer to the importance of detailed planning and scheduling, which is not only in the preparation phase but also an absolute necessity for successful delivery management throughout the program’s lifecycle. These roles are all aware that while initial scheduling is a critical input to managing expectations, it is the dynamic week-to-week execution that communicates risks, forecasts, and actions required to keep the overall program on track.

If you feel that the clarity and fidelity of your transformation program plan and schedules need to align with stakeholder expectations, each week becomes a challenge to understand the status, what the forecast completion is, what elements are pushing the critical path further to the right, etc. Please feel free to DM me or comment on this post. Thank you