Creating an Improvement Roadmap with Amplio's Diagnostic System

Amplio is an expert system that includes how to run a diagnosis of your team or organization to determine what would help it be more effective.

Amplio emulates the decision-making of hundreds of top consultants by integrating what they have found to be successful from the team to the organization. It was mostly created by Al Shalloway’s research and experience over almost two decades in conversations with 10,000 practitioners and consultants regarding what worked and what didn’t. It continues to be improved (both in depth and scope) at Amplio University in conjunction with its participants.

One part of this expert system is how to run an organization's diagnosis at scale and create an improvement backlog using it. This involves the following steps, which are done by a consultant leading a group of executives and managers in an organization. It is a faster method than deep value stream analysis. If more detail is needed, value stream analysis on particular parts of the organization can be done.

Running a diagnostic and creating an improvement backlog provides the following value:

1. Without running a diagnostic, you are just imposing what worked elsewhere on your organization. This is akin to going to a doctor and getting medications without knowing the underlying problem.

2. A few key insights get presented in the context of the company. This enables executives and managers to use their own experience to understand some of the key concepts required to be effective.

3. The process creates alignment among the people involved, both regarding what’s going wrong and what to do about it.

4. Confidence is created by having a plan, even though we know it will change as we go forward. Having a vision on what to do and changing it provides comfort than just taking an attitude we will figure it out as we go will.

The 5-step collaborative process is as follows:

Step 1. Discuss the capabilities needed by the organization.

Capabilities are descriptions of something that must be achieved from an objective point of view. How to implement it will be determined later by attending to how it can best be implemented in the organization. The base capabilities set is listed at the top of this post. This is not a complete list. Companies having government regulation, special security needs, or involving hardware (to name a few) should add those capabilities as well. Going over these can be done in a PowerPoint where the picture shown is animated from left to right. Each capability has a linked to slide that explains it a little more if needed.

Step 2. Prepare for identifying where an organization’s challenges are taking place.

This is the same set of capabilities shown before, just laid out to enable the next step: collaboratively identifying the organization's challenges. It is shown on a Lucid virtual collaboration board.

Step 3. At this point the consultant guides the other participants in seeing what challenges they have.

The idea is to use the listed capabilities to evoke what’s going poorly. The following diagram shows the aftermath of a session in which people identified their challenges.?

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Step 4: An opportunity to discuss why these are taking place is now set.

Using the collaboration board, everyone discusses what might be causing the challenges. Many challenges emanate from a capability that is not being achieved. Here is a screen capture of this process when it is about 70% done.

Step 5: Creating the improvement backlog.

Not everything can or should be set up for improvement at once. Several guidelines are presented. Factors such as who is sponsoring the improvement initiative, the maturity of the organization, its culture, and several other issues are used by the consultant in guiding what to do in what order.

While there is no set order in which to do things, we’ve seen that these 8 capabilities are often the best places to start:

1. We need wise guidance.?? Without this, things will be missed and people will resist change.

2. You must understand the critical vision of your critical stakeholders, including their success criteria and constraints. Not doing so, courts failure by not enabling alignment and creating things of lesser value.

3: ?People must have clarity on what is expected of them, and they must provide this clarity to others. Lack of clarity leads to waste, risk, and failure.

4: Learn to deliver value quickly by working on smaller items of highest value. This creates credibility, capability, and profitability.

5: Plan across teams with dependencies so you can avoid delays in the workflow while keeping workload levels steady. Without identifying dependencies and managing for them, you won’t have the skills necessary to get releases out in a timely manner.

?6: You must avoid overloading teams with too much work. Otherwise, multi-tasking will kill productivity, and delays in feedback will create waste and risk.

?7. Make simple rearrangements of the people doing the work to reduce handoffs and delays. If you don’t do this, individuals with specialized skills will become blockers of getting things done.

?8. Provide some basic training to management so they understand why the above is so critical, and they can work on improving the environment people are working in. Without this, management will inadvertently sabotage improvements.

All these actions are straightforward and can usually be implemented right away.

Step 6: Implementing the improvement backlog

Amplio also includes a set of factors for effective value streams, which enable people to determine which particular implementations of the capabilities would work best for their situation.

In summary

While you don't want to follow a framework that comes with predetermined solutions, you don't need to start out on your own without an understanding of what's needed. Amplio shifts from providing practices to providing needed capabilities, a way to see which ones are not being done, and a way for you to see how to best implement them for your situation. The process of determining how to do this is useful on its own. But it also creates alignment at the start and provides alignment as the improvement initiative proceeds.

This approach can be used to build your own workflow or it can be used to improve the work you've already started with a framework or on your own.

If you want to learn how to do this process, contact me. I train in it and provide consulting services, doing it with you while training your own consultants in it.

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