Making a Map-sterpiece

 Like the creator of the iconic London Underground map, Harry Beck, we are going to create a map. Like Beck’s map, the aim of this map is to show us our final destination, where we will have to go to get there and the best route to follow.

In the previous blog entry ‘Document Deconstruction: A Working Example’, we discussed how to pull a document apart to gather our Objectives, Outcomes and Initiatives. Here, like Humpty Dumpty (only hopefully more successfully), we are going to try and put them all back together again. Using Realisor’s node import template functionality, we have created our list of Objectives, Outcomes and Initiatives in MS Excel and imported it into Realisor. Now we need to order and link these nodes in an attempt to bring some cohesion and clarity to the program. 

As discussed in Kevin’s Benefits Unmasked blog post ‘Terminology, what’s in a name?’, there are many different BRM methodologies – we are going to be using the Realisor default names of Initiative, Outcome and Objective (which can be changed within the tool to customise yours or your customers preferred modelling preference) and we will be mapping with Outcomes and Objectives to the right of the screen. This is where we will go first. 

The first stage here is to place our Objectives at the far right of the screen – this is the ultimate destination of our benefits road map. On the far left, we will have our Initiatives – the actions we will need to do to begin our journey and between these we will have the Outcomes that are achieved from undertaking our Initiatives and that will lead to meeting our Objectives.

Now we need to link our Initiatives, Outcomes and Objectives to form a map - to see what Initiatives contribute to achieving the Outcomes, if there are initiatives that make no contribution at all and if there are Outcomes that have nothing contributing to them to enable them to be achieved. It may be worth revisiting the documentation at this point to see if any obvious links have been noted, i.e. ‘we are doing X to achieve Y’ and there is an element of using your own judgement to decide what would contribution links would exist. 

In document ‘Providing Realisor Education, for example, it is noted that team members should commit to setting up and contributing to blog (Initiative – Establish Blogs). This is stated that it will help raise the profile of the blogger (Outcome – Raise Personal Profile of Blogger) and we can then use our judgement to say that if the profile of the blogger has been raised through the provision of an established good quality blog on BRM, this will surely contribute to the Outcomes ‘Increased Value of Consultancy Services’, ‘Increase Company Reputation’ and ‘Increase standing of BRM Fusion & Realisor brands in community’. 

Looking at the diagrams in the ‘Providing Realisor Education’ document, we can see other Outcomes that are connected to the Objectives, with ‘Trust’, ‘Expertise’ and ‘Exposure’ leading into the Objective of ‘Increase BRM Product and Shareholder Value’. 

As you go through the model, you may need to do some tidying up - for example you may find that you have some Outcomes duplicate. Now that your ‘straw man’ model is complete, the next stage would be to demonstrate the model in a stakeholder workshop. The next post will consider what a stakeholder actually is, why they are so important in the BRM process and how to identify them.