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Hey Richard,

Virtually non-existent planning – that does sound very challenging!

I think I see what you mean, if the org develops an appreciation of good performance measurement to reach goals, maybe they’ll see that more hard, focused work is needed for pure strategic planning.

On the other hand, at times our team has found that steps 2 and 3 are quite challenging, since the foundation of good strategic planning is not really there!

I also find it hard to communicate just how unbelievably fundamental these ideas are. This means people say absurd things like:

“These XmR charts look great, they will help us find particular weeks where we are declining a lot year-over-year!”

“Maybe the PuMP process can help us brainstorm out what the 3rd team KPI should be”

“This seems like a lot of effort for something that only matters at the end of financial year!”

Sure Richard, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenneth-van-der-walt-7b97609a/

Hi David,

I know nothing about PLOM’s, but in general it makes sense to pick the low hanging fruit for the PuMP Pilot. Then I guess from there, build out more results maps in order of strategic importance. The “number of results maps built out” is less important than how much “benefit each results map delivers once it goes through all the steps”.

Cheers,
Ken

Hi Richard!

It sounds epic, great that something so ambitious has got buy in from executive leadership (in my case, it’s more the other way round).

Admittedly, most of our detailed planning was articulated in step 2 of PuMP (with the exception of the vision and mission).

So far it seems ok, but I’d say it’s pretty sub-optimal, I think we’d be in a way better position if we’d dedicated much more time to strategic planning. (I think it’s a very good idea moving forward too).

I guess you’ve read this article?

Is the PuMP Results Map a Good Strategic Planning Tool?

Happy to discuss ideas and experiences with you Richard, I’m very committed too!

Hi Michelle,

Our measures team are currently on steps 3 & 4, your use case sounds promising – too bad about the bad timing with a management change!

Normally, results describe a state of performance, without actually implying a target of sorts. For example, contrast “suppliers deliver in full, on-time” (there is a full spectrum of a potential state of performance) with “Spending is close to budget” (the target is already pretty hard baked into the result).

In general, our measures team has found that whenever discussion goes round in circles, it means one of two things:

1) Move on to the next step, trusting that future steps will make your work better (nothing wrong with making changes to step 2, after realizing something that’s revealed in steps 3 or 4)!

2) You need to go back to the planning phase, and more specifically the “why” of what makes these results the most relevant? We had a few “starts” as we got a better understanding of things, and totally changed our scope, I think it’s all part of the process.

Lastly in terms of fatigue, Stacey mentioned that the “80% good enough” ethos is important, again because future steps will continue to make the results better. So if there’s some gridlock, try to help people remember that nothing is “locked in”. It’s constantly evolving , so feeling fatigue actually means “proceed”, rather than “pause”.

Hope that helps Michelle, curious to hear how you go!

Hi Iain,

That’s great to hear, how are things travelling along now?

So far I’m up to step 3 with my immediate team (of 3). I agree with you that in step 2, it was revealing just how little strategic goals had actually been fleshed out.

The conversations so far though seem to be getting people out of the “day to day rut” of work.

G’day Iain and Mark!