Business Design: Getting your horse on the course.
Why do I need to build a Business Design Capability?
I’ve heard the phrase “we’re quite unique” many times, generally regarding the perceived “bad things” an organisation is doing. In my experience, all organisations are doing some things badly but most things well. Perhaps a “glass half full” perspective but when I’ve seen things going wrong, it’s normally down to a lack of consensus about the Who, What, Where, When clouding the Why and How. Too much siloed evolution as a consequence of not enough shared understanding. Having a dedicated “design thinking” or business design/architecture capability can help to join up the dots.
In summary, if you have a need to know or explain how your organisation works compared to how you want it to work, then you probably need some help to “do the maths”. Some people call this “Architecture” but I prefer the term “business design” because it more accurately describes the desired outcome.
The following sections provide perspectives I’ve found to be beneficial for building greenfield business design/architecture capabilities and/or maturing or pivoting existing ones. There’s no particular order to follow and I’m not trying to say I have all the answers because, frankly, no one does. These are my observations from a thirty-year business design/architecture career working alongside talented people, for many different clients, all at different levels of maturity.
Know Your Business
Create a list of your stakeholders with a clear understanding, at the highest level, of what the motivation for each side of the relationship is. Discover their challenges top down and bottom up. Find out what the customers of your business need you to do for them. Find out what the regulatory authorities need the business to do and how you can help them do it. Find out what’s happening in the environments that surround the business and how it affects everything. Open a dialogue with the people on the ground who deliver. Write down what they tell you.
Take Aim
Write down the things you think a business design/architecture capability can do to mitigate the challenges your stakeholders have described. I’m not talking about Tolstoy here, summarise and prioritise what you’ve heard is important to your stakeholders. Use this to establish the aims and motivation of the capability by aligning the things you’ve discovered with outcomes valuable to your stakeholders. Socialise, refine and iterate your output with your stakeholders. Gain consensus.
Using RAID (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies) here can be helpful to couch everything in commonly understood business terms. It’ll also help you with rationalising the mitigation for each challenge and establishing the real priorities. Make sure you keep the language focused on tangible outcomes.
Don’t Re-invent the Wheel – Make it Better
Put together a rough idea of how you think a business design/architecture capability will benefit your organisation. Take on board opinions but only use the approaches other organisations are taking, what “frameworks” and so- called best practice say if it’s appropriate to your organisation, your stakeholders and the way they operate. There’s a lot of great reference thinking to get you started e.g.
- TOGAF Part VI – Architecture Capability Framework – https://pubs.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf9-doc/arch/
- The Business Architecture Guild – https://www.businessarchitectureguild.org/
- Sam Holcman at the Enterprise/Business Architecture Centre of Excellence – https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuel-holcman-45a0a023/
- Wolfgang Goebl – https://www.linkedin.com/in/wolfgang-goebl/ Architectural Thinking Framework
Harmonise “best practice” with what you know about your organisation to build a capability that serves the needs of your stakeholders. If you take an “out of the box” approach there’s a risk it will be seen to be, or worse, become, a bottleneck.
Take a “Community of Practice” Approach
When it comes to the Who, it’s more than likely there’s likeminded people in your business, factor this into your approach! They may not have the job title of “Architect” or “Business Designer” but there’ll be plenty of “thinkers”, that have valuable knowledge and experience of your organisation, and the environment it operates in. Utilising this know-how using a “Community of Practice” approach to business design/architecture can be a significant accelerator for achieving successful outcomes. More on that to come later in the series.
Consider the Outside In View
To cover the full picture, make sure you include the perspective of the external environments that surround and influence your organisation.
It’s easy to say “listen to the voice of the customer” but it can’t be overemphasised how important it is to factor why your organisation exists in the first place, into everything you do.
Ensuring the regulatory viewpoint is at the heart of your operations is also essential. This voice can come via good relations with your compliance focused teams, a community of practice approach can assist here, but ensuring you have communication channels open with the relevant external authorities and/or SME’s will also provide significant value to your organisation.
Last, but not least, the relationships you build with your supply chain are crucial to business design/architecture. There’s a lot of “marketecture” out there and your stakeholders will have been bombarded with it. There’s massive value in being able to cut through the crap and provide balanced, market savvy viewpoints, particularly in the technology and regulatory spaces.
Formalise Your Leadership Mandate
This might sound obvious and you may already have been given the spark of an idea to create a business design/architecture capability, or inherited one, but all that aside, in my opinion, formalising the mandate for exactly what outcomes you need to focus on is the number one most important thing you need to do. It’s also the number one thing missing from dysfunctional capabilities I’ve observed.
How do you do it? Quite simply, take a summary of your thinking to the most senior leadership stakeholders in your organisation and ask them if:
- the challenges you’ve identified resonate
- they have other challenges they want to prioritise
- a capability to help resolve them is a good idea
- they agree with the mitigation approaches you propose
Document what you’ve agreed and use this to inform everything you do. Having a mandate helps you to get “above the argument level”. It is the foundation of everything you do. Don’t stop there, agree a schedule and/or mechanism for iterating the knowledge you’ve exchanged and include this in your operating model.
With effective deployment of a leadership mandate, business design/architecture capabilities will enable a “bridge” between leadership and operations.
Use your leadership mandate to establish a set of high-level principles to guide and inform how the business design/architecture capability operates. You can do this before or after you have your mandate but make sure that your principles are built into the motivations of your operating model, cover all of them. Look closely at the outcomes you and your stakeholders want to achieve and make sure they’re reflected in the motivations of the relationships of everything the business design/architecture capability does.
Oop, oop, that’s the Sound of the Police!
In my opinion, business design/architecture should never be about “governance”! Policing approaches are not always appreciated within organisations and without careful management can end up stifling progress and innovation. In my opinion, the word “governance” is both overused and misused in organisations. “Governance” can only be provided by those with the appropriate authority. In business, this is the board of directors, in government this will likely be Ministers/Councillors etc. (very UK based view 😊). Establishing a leadership mandate for business design/architecture could include being granted a veto in organisational decisions given certain criteria, but without the appropriate delegated authority, your opinion on what is right or wrong is equal to everyone’s. Attempting to assert authority in this circumstance drags you into the “argument level” and risks casting you as a “blocker” to your stakeholders.
My advice? The raison d’être of a business design/architecture capability is:
“to ensure your organisation has all the information it needs to be successful”
Place business design/architecture firmly in the domain of assurance, make it a core enabler in your organisation, not the “old bill”.
Conclusion
- Get “above the argument” with a leadership mandate
- Horses for courses – build to suit the culture and maturity of your organisation as well as the needs of your stakeholders
- One size does NOT fit all!!
- Focusing on success facilitates better outcomes
- Collaboration gets more effective results
This is the first part of a series of Café Intelligence posts on Business Design / Architecture capabilities from the Café Community. The next topics we’ll explore will be around:
- Getting the right tooling
- Resourcing options
- Focusing on the “right stuff”
- Data driven business design
- Business design for Mergers, Acquisitions & Divestiture (MAD)
Mark founded Café with the vision to re-invent the freelance business design/architecture supply chain by changing the focus from pseudo “employment contracts” focused on extensions, to “on-demand practices” focused on successful delivery of client’s priority outcomes.
mark.mccomish@cafeassociates.co.uk www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccomish-CafeAssociates