Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ)

Background

To make best use of funds, the NAZ has a strategic multi-year business plan, with goals to mark tangible achievements. The NAZ wants to track progress towards these goals on a yearly basis. This helps to identify bottlenecks, and discover what processes work well, and where improvements need to be made.

Currently, there is heavy use of PDFs and spreadsheets, and this makes reporting a laborious and manual challenge. Lots of updates are required, and this also means that the reports are not as dynamic or as visible as they could be.

As well as improving visibility, the NAZ also wanted to improve collaboration - the overall point being that everyone can work towards the common goals, and the progress towards these can be easily tracked.

Finally, the business plan gets refreshed every three years. With spreadsheets, it could feel like “we were reinventing the wheel every time.” With Asana, this process would be easier.

Solution

Workshops were held to identify the detailed requirements. BDQ designed and use an Agile inspired whiteboard and prototyping approach to minimise the amount of time that customers need to spend on requirements gathering.

“The whiteboards were really helpful - we quickly came to an agreement on what the requirements were.”

The goals were already understood - there were manually created PDF documents, in an agreed format that made it easy for stakeholders to see goals and progress. It was agreed that a key requirements was to deliver the same outcome in terms of goal reporting, which was already in place, along with the other benefits.

In terms of progressing towards goals, the culture at NAZ is for autonomy - highly structured workflows and processes were not required, the main emphasis was that everyone would understand what the goals were, and what progress was being made towards them.

BDQ took these requirements on board and created goal structures and reports which provided the same outcomes as the existing documents: “The BDQ consultant translated our structures really well, and we found the whiteboard discovery workshops worked great” whilst adding value by allowing for a streamlined reporting process.

Outcome

There is now a visible and comprehensive set of goals and subgoals in the system. The NAZ can now dynamically track progress towards these goals, along with tracking work and improved collaboration. It is now easier to benchmark and refresh the business plans, and through this, the NAZ can act dynamically, and also make sure that the best use of stakeholders funds is being achieved.

“It was more efficient, and cost effective to replicate and clone things in Asana, than rework in spreadsheets.”

The NAZ now has “a unified tool, internal champions, people are using it to manage their work, and there is a visible goal structure”.

As NAZ improves its work management processes, the next steps in the journey will be to implement objectives and key results, along with some process standardisation to enhance reporting capabilities where appropriate.