This post is by Elisa Miller and Mariam Ibrahim Chahine, ITK Facilitators at MITRE.
Organizational change is always a challenge because most teams perceive that change will be difficult, costly and weird. We were tasked with figuring out how to integrate a functional enterprise information technology (EIT) team into a larger acquisition team for one of our sponsors. The goal of the three-day workshop was to restructure EIT and the Acquisition teams into an efficient service-orientated team. During the workshop we realized organizational changes would be required to make this a success. The challenge of this workshop was to help the participants not only embrace change, more so to lead it and own it.
We led the teams through a series of exercises over the three days including:
- Challenge Discovery Exercises – to make sure all the participants were on the same page as to why they were there.
- Pre-mortem Exercise – to look at what the outcomes would be if this program was not successful.
- Eco-system Mapping Exercises – to identify strengths and uncover opportunities for growth within the organization.
- Defining the Customer Session – to discuss how the organization defines who their end customer is.
- Service Design Blueprinting Introduction and Initial discussion–to understand how these blueprints can be used to aid their upcoming ServiceNow implementation.
As facilitators we remained flexible during the workshops. Each afternoon, we met with the team’s leadership to discuss the next day’s activities. These discussions helped us reshape the next day’s plans and exercises to better meet the team’s goals.
The team expressed their enthusiasm about the potential benefits of service blueprinting; now they have a clearer and more structured understanding of their services and customers.
The plan going forward is for them to work on their organizational evolution and re-engage with the ITK team to create more Service Blueprints in preparation for their ServiceNow implementation.