In my last article, I introduced the idea of the Five Lenses – a new framework for helping teams unearth pain points, expedite projects and create more collaborative work environments.
As a quick refresher, the Five Lenses include People & Culture, Strategy, Operations, Governance and Technology. Each of these lenses should be accounted for in order to successfully setup future teams, projects and programs.
In the article ahead, I’ll discuss a few examples of how we’ve applied the Five Lenses to date and how to strategically apply our framework to your teams and organizations moving forward.
At Epigen, the team and I are regularly working with Federal, State and Local governments across a number of key initiatives. These agencies don’t traditionally measure projects based on cost, schedule and scope; but rely on a “stoplight” system designed to track trends, associated risks and specific project elements.
Working closely with key stakeholders across the agencies, we found a strong disconnect between the “green lights” we’d receive and a lack of overall satisfaction with completed project elements by portfolio managers (PMs).
Through further discussions and review, we realized that we we’re missing the Strategy lens with each project that incentivized the “strategic thinking” behaviors that PMs would be rewarded for.
The portfolio manager needed a reporting system or framework that shifted their focus away from the positive color combinations on stoplight charts to more substantive, meaningful, and measurable activities. These were efforts that could be openly edified and rewarded as evidence of their “strategic approach to their programs”.
We needed to address the issue of using overly simplistic stoplight performance charts, where PMs felt they were being measured (judged) by whether their charts were “green,” versus being rewarded for the appropriate management behaviors.
In some of the organizations we’ve collaborated with, we’ve witnessed funding and budget approvals tied to a customer’s personal preferences, goals and objectives.
These new mandates forced project managers to consider criteria outside of what their program was initially intended to address. Measuring customer satisfaction was a fairly subjective activity, with customers evaluating a project based on how many of their personal requests had been accommodated.
Applying the Five Lenses at the start of each project ensures a more organized way to help categorize activities and ultimately meet “mission” objectives, while better evaluating and prioritizing customer “requirements” as they are submitted.
As you start to think about applying the Five Lenses to your own organization and projects, here are some of the key questions you should consider:
People & Culture
- Who are the key people that should be a part of this initiative?
- What are their roles and responsibilities?
- How do they interact with one another?
- What motivates them?
- How do we recognize, incentivize and reward these team members?
Strategy
- What are the overarching goals and objectives that we need to achieve?
- What planning functions are in place?
- What’s our proposed strategy for the project/organization?
Operations
- What’s the process for accomplishing tasks and objectives?
- What stakeholders, teams and departments are required to ensure success?
Governance
- How are decisions made?
- Who are the key decision makers within the process?
- What policies do we need to account for when making decisions?
Technology
- What tools are required to accomplish the necessary objectives?
- What technology can be used to manage, assess and measure the initiatives?
The framework is broad and agile enough to be applied to any project, organization or team. The lenses can be used to setup and structure new initiatives, or as a way to evaluate projects upon completion.
In my next article, I’ll dig into how we score and weight the Five Lenses in order to obtain a more objective understanding of a project’s performance. The ability to weight and score each lens is essential for determining a programs overall success, unearthing key insights in the process for structuring future initiatives.
