Step 2

We now faced the reality of the project

Having won the contract, we now found ourselves in the position of having to turn an ambitious concept into reality. As anticipated, there was far more to the project than initially conveyed. But, what I didn't anticipate was that they did not know what they wanted beyond a basic directive (get R&D lined up with business). Furthermore, we lacked access to people who would be using this software. I would have to architect the software around a theoretical understanding of the business processes it would facilitate, instead of responding to the immediate needs of users. The above image shows a few of the many PowerPoint presentations I parsed and spliced together into a coherent picture of the department's workings.


Board games beat card sorting any day

I encountered a lot of contradictory information that made it hard to create a single version of the truth. Siloing of information was one cause of this, but so too was the state of flux of the organization which meant that certain things were simply not settled and there was no single truth. To address this, I actually devised a sort of board game and brought in a cross-section of stakeholders to "play" this game, moving virtual money and information around an organization to tease out how they saw things working on a practical level. The approach was very successful at building a clear picture, good enough to start building around.


Created flowcharts of organizational function

The above is one example of a map of the business processes we mapped out and helped the client to understand for themselves. My goal throughout this project was to build an internal expertise for our consultancy that would make them invaluable to Boeing in the future. The point was to "know the company better than they know themselves".