State Your Overall Aim

It is vital to understand what you want your project to achieve. Get together with your key team members and your sponsor to produce an overall vision statement towards which everyone can strive.

Define the Change You Want to Make

The aims of the project should be summarized so that everyone involved knows what it is expected to achieve. Create a statement that describes the project’s vision. For the statement to explain your proposal properly it must ask, “What are we going to change and how?” Show the statement to your customers, who may refine it by describing what they would expect from it. If the project aims include something of real value to your customers that will be a good indicator of its desirability: a revamping of your sales order processing system might include an objective to reduce the amount of time customers spend correcting invoicing errors. Express this element of value to the customer in the vision statement. Meet with the key members of the team to outline the changes you wish to make. Tell them how achievable you think these changes will be. The statement should be stretching, but it should be realistic if people are to believe in the project.

Strive to Achieve the Ideal

You are much more likely to get the vision statement right if you try to define the ideal outcome of the project. Real innovation takes place when someone decides that things could be different and much better. Ask your team members to describe what the project should change in an ideal world. Tell them that although they should remain rooted in reality, they should still think creatively. Do not allow the fact that you have been doing things in the same way for a long time to deter you from coming up with alternatives. Be careful when dealing with customers at this time. Explain that what you are describing is not how the world will definitely be, but how you would like it to be. Determine how feasible it is to attain your ideal. If you set yourself stretching objectives at the outset the project will deliver as much value as possible.

5 Minute Fix

If your team is short of time to define the ideal identify an easily pleased and a difficult customer.

• Make one telephone call to each customer to get their version of the ideal.

• Let the team read and assess the responses of each customer and use this information to make adjustments to the plan.

Achieve Your Vision

High Impact

• Allowing for compromise with the ideal in order to arrive at a feasible vision

• A clear and unambiguous statement that everyone can understand and strive towards

• Involving your customers so that they can make a contribution

Negative Impact

• Ignoring major obstacles in setting the vision

• Some key team members being sceptical about the feasibility of the vision

• Involving too many people so that you are required to make too many compromises