 Welcome to Parsons TKO's May webinar turning your strategic plan into tactical reality where we are going to find the treasure buried in your process technology and your team as I'm just going to go reiterate the housekeeping items to get us started. Everyone's on mute. Please make sure that you're using the chat for the general conversation and please go ahead and let us know your pirate name. We're going to do a little pirate theming today and use the key way button to ask your questions. We're going to email the recording of the presentation out so don't worry if you missed something you're going to you're going to get it in your inbox so take a look out for that. It'll come in the next few days or so. All right, so, John Nate ready to get started john has his pirate hat on he is ready to go. Okay, and here all are. Okay, I'm Jamie aka Molly scallywag plunder of the archipelago and I am here with my shipmates Nate and john. I'm Parsons Parsons TKO chief growth officer and I'm very new to my role. My background is in nonprofit program management capacity building and nonprofit technology. My job here is to help grow our Parsons TKO practice and the services that we are providing to our clients. I'm also also known as the quirky one who likes to make Nate and john do silly things like dresses pirates on webinars to make sure we are thoroughly driving our own our analogy for today. So Nate are Johnny brought red locks, Greek over to you for an infection. Well, thank you very much. I'm one of the co founders here at Parsons TKO and you know my background is in technology I was developer for 10 years. My switch sides of the house to do user experience design and I've been doing a lot of like enterprise consulting for the last 1215 years something like that. And yeah I'm really excited here to be with y'all today and to look for a little, you know buried engagement treasure with you all with my wonderful colleague here, confusingly john Harrison, even though I'm Johnny red locks. Hi everybody I'm john Harrison. My pirate name is bird cell evil Turner. I love that. I am the solutions producer at Parsons TKO I've been with PT KO about two years. So I have a background and marketing and mar tech digital production, helping to connect CRM systems to websites and I've also interest in accessibility user experience design and of course change management, which is really what this is all about. And I helped build practical road maps for PT KO as clients, both large and small and I think I'm on my fifth or six one at this point so I have a lot of things to talk about. And that's good, because this is a deep topic and we can go in many different directions with it but we're going to get the basics down today and really get everyone familiar with what road maps are and also why this analogy is so fitting. Before we dive into that though I did want to just take a moment to introduce Parsons TKO. We're a diverse team of experts who focus on evolving how our clients work by unlocking their team and technology. Their organizations can achieve their transformational wins that they're looking for our approach really helps our clients accelerate their progress and increase their impact by bringing focus to their work through their data, their change management and improving the use of the technology and talent inside their organizations. Which is something we call the engagement architecture, and this is a method methodology that addresses your stakeholder functions as holistic ecosystems. I as a social worker love this because this is exactly how systems theory is all set up so writing my fellow social workers I see a few of you on here. You know what I'm talking about but it's really the interconnected set of the people the processes strategies data and systems that are all working together to make things happen when inside an organization that are helping you engage your stakeholders effectively. And all of our work stems from this foundation, recognizing that when you change one piece such as your team structure it impacts and is impacted by the other components inside your organization. And this is the approach that helps us design and steward, a thoughtful plan that really helps you unlock the capabilities and advances your mission and this is really what is behind our, our approach to road mapping inside organizations and that's why we're here to talk to you today. And because what you see before you are the components of our roadmap. And that's really to get you from where you are to where you want to be. And so, you know, on on analogy bar are in respect to our pirate theme what we're looking at here is, you know, it's a pirate map. But you know, X marks the spot you know where that treasure is. The question is, is how do you effectively get there. And what are the pitfalls, the treacherous journeys that you have to take the challenges, the milestones along the way that are going to tell you you're headed in the right direction, and make sure you get there safely with all of your shipmates and crew. I don't belabor the analogy anymore but that's why we're here and so we're going to get started and I can't think of any two people better than Nate and john to kind of give us a lay of the land and help us understand how roadmaps work and how we approach this work together. I'm going to turn it over to you Nate for this first question. What is the difference between a strategic plan and a roadmap, and how do you all see these two things working together. Thank you. Yeah, so one of the things that I think is really important to think about when you think about what a roadmap is is that it doesn't really tell you why you're going somewhere. You know it helps you get there effectively, you know but the strategic plan in an organization is the destination setting piece and you know that's something that, you know, I think is really useful for organizations to separate out even in the planning process is to say like, Hey, we as an organization really want to move from where we are today to this new place, and that new place may involve like you know delivering more services or better services to our constituents it could be having greater influence within you know legislative bodies whatever things are, but you know knowing that you want to do that then helps you ask the question well how are we going to get there and you know that's where the roadmap is really valuable because a lot of organizations, there's sort of a strategic planning operation and then every department is sort of for themselves trying to help operate on the strategic plan. And you know that's less effective than a roadmap planning process where everyone coordinates your activities figures out the you know proper plan of attack and make sure that activities from one department does disrupt the activities another department and in fact are additive. And you know another sort of truism of you know change is that what you know really is effective is what you do routinely and what you do constantly, and you know the roadmap helps you not just plan how to get to a new place but actually change the way your behaviors in your organization work so that they're sustainable and that you're doing those consistently valuable things again and again, as you change because that's really where the whole point of going to a new place is is that you're doing something different in a better way once you're there. Thank you Nate anything you to add john anything that you want to touch on before we move to the next question. Yeah, I mean I think a story I can think of that sort of exemplifies what we're talking about here is you know if you've worked in a nonprofit you know that a strategic plan, an organizational strategic strategic plan can be like a five, four or five year process right. It's very future state it's very ideal and like Nate said it's not really telling the departments, how to work together it's not really telling the systems how they need to function. Cohesively across your ecosystems it's not really talking about how your workflows might need to change. So like an example I can think of you know I worked with a nonprofit that had one of their strategic goals was to create affordable housing opportunities for veterans and to increase the number of active resident advisory councils. I'm not making this up this is for real that a representative of community demographics within their affordable housing properties. And I think you have to think you have to take a step back and say do you have ways to collect on how many of your properties even have councils you know who's on those councils what's the demographic makeup of those councils. What's the expected progress that the folks who manage those properties what do they need to make you know in regards to those community demographics, what are the staff KPIs for meeting some of those goals. You know and what are the internal communications planning that's happening for reaching those property managers. So there's lots of like considerations that sort of come out of strategic plans to get there that involve your systems your processes your KPIs that you have with your staff. So I think the roadmap like we're talking about, it's definitely focused on getting you to the destination but it's focusing on all the things that happen along the way like the stops you want to make the things the improvements that you want to make, and also putting it in a way that's respectful of your staff times it's respectful of events that are happening within your organization, busy times you know if you're a fundraising organization and you've got quarter for reporting you've got quarter for campaigns that are wrapping up giving Tuesday those kinds of things. The roadmap should work around those things pretty efficiently so I think that's something to be aware of as well as the strategic plans not going to take those things into considerations necessarily a campaign is not going to take those things into consideration. But the roadmap can work around those those hurdles or those barriers along the way and get you over the mountain maybe in a more efficient way if that makes sense. Thank you Nate and john that was excellent and I really appreciate that example you know it's, it is so true that you. I think when we're making these big grandiose five year plans we get very swept up in the vision and what is, what is possible right and we want to make those big audacious Harry goals we want that are big Harry that you know are going to shock and all our funders and our donors and our board and show how courageous we are and how much we want and how dedicated we are to our mission right. But along the way we seem to sometimes forget the people that have to make that happen and the tools they need to do that and so this is the this is the, it sounds like this is the accountability side of a strategic plan this is the. What are we going to need to commit to on a daily basis to make this vision five year vision become a reality, and that takes a lot of work so I'm really curious to learn how you all go about doing this with folks because sounds like a really big process that it is critical to even get started before you even launch your strategic plan in some cases so that you can answer some of these big questions that might come up along the way. Go ahead Nate sorry go ahead. There's a lot to that I mean we'll dive into it as we go through here as well but um, you know one thing just to say quickly is that you know, change is a team sport, you know, and that you know one of the key parts of the roadmap is consensus building and listening and that's where everyone feels heard and included in that change plan because the number one reason organizations don't change is they don't want to like you know it sounds silly but it's true like if everyone doesn't want to change you don't have a process that incentivizes and builds that change as a positive piece of the plan that it's going to be resisted along the way. And I think another piece of it is is the organizational honesty and bravery to say, change also requires learning and experimenting and some things we're going to do at a sort of less than ideal level while we learn how to do them better. And that's another part of the road mapping processes not to say like, Oh, you know, after this three month project will now be doing this new capability or this new system perfectly that's not really how things work right like, you know, you start out, you walk, you run, you know, you eventually fly. And I think that's part of the road mapping process as well as the, you know, set everyone's expectations to an honest and real level, you know about where things are going to be. Yeah, sure. So, tell me how does a roadmap build on the strategic plan in like in practical terms and john you gave us one example but maybe y'all can expand on that a little bit and tell us how this looks in in the real world. Yeah, I think built so building on your strategic plan you know you've got, you've got these lofty goals you know you've got the lofty goals within your organization that you're trying to meet. What we try to do is we try to come in and like Nate was saying, we listen, you know, we interview people, we do system tours so we try to understand are your systems like foundationally capable of meeting some of the goals in your strategic plan. Right, so you may have, perhaps a CRM system or a website that has some challenges like meeting some of the goals. For usability or meeting some of the tactics that you need for capturing grants or scholarships or anything that's related to your strategic plan. We can unearth those things and basically the roadmap helps identify those foundational things the quick ones that you can do to sort of build a foundation that will allow you to meet the strategic goals, a little bit faster. The roadmap also helps to sort of put those things in phases which we'll talk about I know in a minute. But really just thinking about what are the things you need to do first, what are the things you can do to build momentum once you have a good foundation. And that's when those really those long term goals those systems those interconnections can start happening because you've got a basis to build upon right I think that's really important. One of the things that our roadmap builds on the strategic plan is is us listening us building in those phases and being very careful about the things that you should do first right to get to your future state. Yeah, and if I could just add on to that I think one other valuable part of the roadmap for building on the strategic plan is that it helps you get a sense of the initial like effort sizing and budget sizing of operating the strategic plan because I think that's, you know, the strategic plan is to some extent an unfunded mandate when it comes out you know it's like hey we're going to do all five years going to be great. Yeah, but okay well we only have this much budget okay well what can we do with that budget, this staff time and this goal. And that's really where the roadmap starts to shine because for a lot of organizations that's the trickiest bit is sort of saying this is the right amount of time and money to put towards this effort, you know, and I think that, you know, the other thing is it can be even the boards and people when you say well if you want to get here that really looks like at a professional level, and you can go up or down from that but you know I think that's really valuable so that everyone's expectations again are sort of in the right place because, you know it's often the case to that strategic plans are never achieved and that's not necessarily terrible that you have ambitious goals but it depends on how far you get if you're 10% towards the goal that's a lot worse than if you're 70%. And so a lot of this is helping organizations understand how the strategic plan plays out into their fiscal and you know staff time realities. Yeah, I mean I can think of an example. If, if you imagine if you're one of your strategic playing goals is to award $25 million worth of grants you know to 100 grantees across a three year time period. There's, there's some tactical things you need to think about there's some system implications and people implications some technology implications. You know, can your systems for instance you know can they track potential outreach to grantees you know encouraging them to apply you know what needs to happen there to make that outreach effective and possible. I mean, can you do marketing and advertising to reach potential grantee channels of interest. How are you going to assemble questions that you're getting from grantee applicants you know how are you going to build a roster of frequently asked questions for your website. So people know the answers to the questions that are commonly coming up. But is a grant application system that you're using to capture your, your interest is it siloed or is it connected to other systems in your tech stack you know wouldn't it be great to have your grantees, even the ones that necessarily don't get awarded the grant you know to have a record that they've applied for a grant in the past and your CRM so that you can use that information in the future. The roadmap I think really looks into a lot of these kinds of things like, have you considered the time and opportunity costs for extracting, you know your needed data out of the system that you're using so that your grant reviewers can review the applications you have and we also look at opportunities for efficiency like are there opportunities to leverage automations to help save time, you know with some of these processes and some of these workflows around around assembling grants and awarding the grantees, you know the money that you've been given. And then what do you do, once you're seeing your grants distributed you know how are you amplifying the success of those grants and, and sort of putting the word out and getting a lot of excitement around the work. And then, you know, Lassie is your CRM flexible enough to build up your organization's network of like minded practitioners so, like I said if you're going to do a grant in the future you know you want to have a record of the people that you've interacted with in the past you and you can really apply this thinking to grants to scholarships, you can apply this to marketing for your programs, communications about your programs. It can be work you do with other foundations, you know there's lots of different lenses and intersections to look at this from. Yep. So two things that kind of just struck me as you all were talking is one they're going back john to the, to the low hanging fruit or the early wins. What that really gives your staff and I'll just speak to the leaders that are on our that are listening today right that those early wins are what is going to build trust that you really are willing to commit to what it's going to take to make this strategic plan of reality, and that you're going to provide those resources that are needed to make that strategic plan of reality otherwise why are you, why are you even doing it, you know, in the first place. So those early wins are just critical but knowing where you can get them. John is, and Nate is to your other point right is, there has to be some level of inventory that's done across the organization and so Nate when you were talking about the assessments and the audits and the interviews that you're doing. There should be a piece that that that folks miss a lot in their organization is there's a strategic plan that's built and then it's broadcasted to all departments and everyone says go forth and create your KPIs and your objectives and your strategies for how you're going to get there in your assignments. And there's, but really this is an organization wide strategy and it requires an organization wide solution and plan or roadmap to get there. And so you have to be breaking down those silos and looking at, well what assets does this department have and, and what talent does this department have that we can leverage for this plan and so I'll go back to the pirate analogy, but we're all on a ship and we have, you know, machetes for the jungle and we have water for the desert and if we pull everything together we're going to be able to get to that where that treasure is but we, if we don't take stock of everything that's available on our ship first and understand what we have available for our journey. You know it's going to be a lot harder to get there to reach that treasure so really great points and John a great example through the grant, the grant makers you know and how they might see this play out. And just one other point I might add or another good example. Yeah, John was involved in this example as well as we worked with the community foundation in Wyoming. And, you know, they kind of knew that they had some tattered sales and the ship wasn't totally ready to set sale and either some things that are very high effort. You know, by going through this process they were able to go to their board and to some of their funders and actually interest them in helping them achieve their mission more successfully you know and I think that's a really valuable part of the roadmap to is that because it's sort of an honest assessment of your starting place and where you are to where you need to get to your goals. It's really much easier conversation with, you know, your potential investors or donors to say, Hey, and if we fix these things we're a lot more likely to be successful and here's why and it's very tactical and practical and grounded in the real. And I think that's a much, you know, easier conversation to have with people to, you know, open their, their checkbooks and that's a really valuable part that the roadmap provides through those assessments and those conversations with people and a real, you know, honest and objective assessment of your starting place where you're starting your journey from. Great point Nate and you actually got me thinking is, can you also be looking out of your organization for assets and resources and talent that might be supportive like your board your volunteers or even your community in some cases to support your strategic plan or your strategic plan so I think that's a really great point Nate is like how can you engage your board and it helps to have that roadmap to be able to communicate what exactly you need and when in your journey as well so that none of their efforts are wasted. Okay, so we have a pull up how many of you feel prepared to pursue your strategic plan do you have this roadmap do you do you know how you're going to get to your treasure. We'll let everyone vote on that real quick and hopefully Mickey or somebody will give me a flag that we're ready to move on and close it in one second. Great. Awesome. All right, so this is really great so we have the majority feel unblocked and equipped to pursue this strategic plan that's awesome we're so glad to hear it. The second 31% say they do feel blocked and unsure what's the next step to take in. We have a few that don't have a strategic plan and that's okay to you don't always need a big, you know strategic plan to develop a roadmap, it can be just annual goals and how you're going to reach those so this is really great thank you all. And feel free to elaborate on your answers in the comments as well and you know what do you, what is it that's allowing you to feel unblocked, do you have a roadmap. You know, for those that do feel blocked what is standing in your way what are the components that you're finding so we'd love to hear those conversations in the chat as well. All right, so how, how do you get started right so they, you know, the board and the executive team have come and they've said okay this is our grand plan this is this is the acts that were were headed towards. And how do we get to a place where we're creating a roadmap for how we're going to get there and how do you know you're ready to do that. John you want to start us off. Sure, I think it's important, you know, first of all, to if you know, as a leader in an organization that there are hurdles or friction or challenges. Like, for instance, if you know you have multiple systems and multiple technologies that kind of serve the same purposes. If you're trying to align across departments or across teams, you know, on things like a project management system, or an email system, you know, to manage your newsletters. And you've got folks in your programs using one system and you have your marketing team using another system. And you have teams who have very clearly defined processes for, you know, attaining some of the goals that have been outlined in the strategic plan and others don't, you know, I think that's also an important step for you to say, my organization could a vendor like Parsons DKO to come in and really take a take an agnostic lens to your processes and to your technologies. Oftentimes it's not that you need to necessarily change systems entirely or retool everything you're doing. You know, a third party like us can come in, look at the systems you're using look at the processes and identify, you know, opportunities to make things run a little more smoother, a little more smoothly. We can also identify potential misconfigurations or things that could be set up differently, you know, so that perhaps the fences are a little lower for cross team collaboration. You know, we've worked with organizations where the fundraising CRM and the marketing CRM are completely disconnected right and that makes it really difficult to track to track activities. When you've got two different teams of people using two different systems that that have no true connection in place you know so these are the kinds of things that that point to a roadmap right where you, you can look at your organization and say, All right, we don't have this but I feel like we're going to need this and I, and a lot of leaders have a good sense of this you know from talking to their teams. And talking to your teams is also really important you know talk to your directors talk to your practitioners that are doing the work. What I think is leaders it's really important for for you to be aware that you know that report that you got for the board meeting, you know, on the, the number of website visitors you had or the number of people that downloaded your member welcome packet. The number of people that are logging into your association system, you know, that stuff is not easy for a lot of organizations to pull together right and so I think it's, it's very important for leaders to be aware of the work that went into something. And if there's an opportunity there to make that process a little bit easier, make a little more streamlined. That's, you know that's where the red mapping process can can really help out. Thank you dad. I'm going to move to this slide because it seems like it's an important one for us. Yeah, indeed, I mean yeah john made so many good points but one thing I'll just mention is that there's, there's always a change moment or there often are change moments that if you're better prepared for them things will go well, you know and I know that sounds, you know, again sort of silly but you know in the technology world especially as you start to rely on certain tools like CRM systems or data collection systems or things and you built out a lot of custom reporting and business process around them. When those tools have a major change whether it's they get bought by another vendor and the commitment to that tool changes or their pricing model changes and it's not advantageous to you anymore, or you know that business itself is just you know not maintaining that software that needs to work on, you know, like when lumenate was end of life recently there are a lot of organizations who are scrambling around that. You know I think when you, if you had, if you are keeping tabs on your technology portfolio, you're going to have a sense of what the lifespan of each of your major tools are, and if you can foresee a change moment coming. And even if you just want to be prepared for it that's another good place for the the road mapping process is really helpful because you know if you're like most organizations, there's not a good inventory of all the business processes and tactics and things around those things they've all been built organically over time and they're kind of handed to each person as they come into their role. And you know the road mapping process one of its side effects is that it creates a great deal of sort of visibility and sunlight onto your process and how things actually work so that if there's something needs to be changed out. All the pieces are in place to kind of manage that change in an effective way and you know it's really important if it's a critical system where, you know, the data integration effort could be just as big as the, you know, software training or software licensing cost for an organization or something like that and, you know, I mean, just to dive in its graphic little and john can speak more since he actually made this graphic but look at, you know what we have on the left side are sort of major themes, you know that's what those different sort of rows represent, and then the columns are sort of the time span of it. One important thing to think about a roadmap is that it's really sort of like a hurricane track if you're watching the weather channel or something and a hurricane is coming in where it's very precise for the short term like these are the things you should really do in the short term because we know the data is very accurate, very reliable. And as you go farther out into the long term it needs to be more flexible because just like a hurricane track, the strategic focus and needs of the organization and four or five years are going to be dictated by a lot of regional forces, and the roadmap can't be perfect and define that future. It needs to adjust and be practical to, you know, sort of flow with the futures that really exist and so just know the road mapping plan here looks very solid, you know, it's the same colored line on the right side is on the left side, but really it's sort of a hurricane track where the foundational and short term things are extremely well defined the mid medium term things are, you know, very likely to be the right things. That we think we'll build on those other ones but you're going to need to reassess as the long term becomes the medium and short term. Yeah, thanks, Nate. And I mean one thing about this graphic to is one of the trends that I'm seeing and doing, you know, these red maps with several organizations is typically there's less cost, you know involved in the foundational and short short term activities that's really mostly around getting things ready for the medium term and long term, you know, it's like the data migration prep, you know, as you can see, and sort of the Gantt chart view of some of these different swim lanes you know it's like really, it's getting the processes tightened up it's getting people to talk to one another it's getting like collaboration in place you know where maybe where there wasn't collaboration now there is collaboration. Where there was stewardship of a system or maybe just perceived disinvestment of a system now we're looking at that system and sort of assessing where it is in the life cycle for the organization, and sort of planning for what's coming next and I think, you know, these roadmaps typically start off, you know, from from a cost and budgeting perspective, like a little less impactful to you know organizational budgets out of the starting gate, because you're doing all the things to prep for the more long term things like actually shifting your CRM platform you know if you're on a CRM platform that's had data breaches constant data breaches or has security issues, or you're concerned about, you know that the data hygiene or the ability to keep the data clean. Those are some things that the foundational and short term phases sort of plan for so that you can do those big things later. And also, you know something that we really like to call out with organizations is where in the past, you know if you've done projects like talk a little bit about capacity for change in a minute but where you've done projects where something might have fallen off the card or been neglected so to speak like potentially training or giving people the ability to sort of kick the tires with this new tool or understand this new process and how it works with this new department. We will call that out in a roadmap and we'll say this is something you really need to focus on it shouldn't get buried within these other swim lanes you know so that's why this one in particular has that training adoption and enablements section at the bottom because it's such an important part of why projects in the past were successful at this organization, and we think this roadmap is going to be successful because we're actually calling it out we're extracting it from the rest of the swim lanes and saying, let's make a, you know, commitment to this let's make a commitment to training adoption and enablements so your org might be different, your org might be different in terms of you need something else call it out but as part of the road mapping process, you know we definitely try to identify those swim lanes that are unique and discrete and try to call out those, those foundational steps that build to success. Absolutely. It, you know, it seems, it makes a lot of sense what you're saying as far as it having a lot less resource impact upfront because probably in strategic plans as well that first year or two. We're more confident in what the future looks like and they're they're working within a reality that they're familiar with at that moment and so everything seems to be more in alignment at that moment in time and but then you get to year three or four and you're like we didn't set aside budget for this or we didn't actually do anything to plan for that next step or that next scalable moment that will take us from our present reality to our future state. And so having something like this so that you can clearly identify those moments of shift and change and where you're going to need to mentally bring your organization into a new way of thinking is going to be a critical component I love the fact that training and adoption right here and I was also thinking, you know, you could also be bringing in things like, you know, your, your finance department and what is your, how's your financing, and the way that your CFO is thinking about your organization going to need to shift or maybe it's legal in some cases maybe you all are going to take on a different program that's going to require some level of new ways of governing the organization and ensuring that you're mitigating risk. It's going to be brought into this roadmap process so that everyone has a clear understanding of where you all are going and at what point you're going to need those new resources or that new way of thinking or that change management opportunity is going to be needing to be put into place. Yeah I mean that just to build on that a little bit. You know one of the other key pieces of the roadmap is accountability, you know and I think that kind of comes into like when is a roadmap unsuccessful here as well and one of the things that's really, you know, I think everyone again all knows this but it's hard for organizations which is when you change a major piece of technology and an organization you need to change the business processes and the data analysis and all the other things that go along with it. And you need to say like we're actually going to move in from a comfortable place of knowing and having well defined business processes to an uncomfortable place of experimenting and developing and modifying those processes. And you know the roadmap really helps you kind of have a forcing mechanism on that with like dates and times and expectations for those, you know, little small example from my past I used to work for a commercial consulting agency, and we were rebuilding one of the major cities of the Bay Area San Francisco Bay Area websites platforms you know they had a whole bunch of websites, and they were so scared of retraining that they wanted to spend an amount of taxpayers money rebuilding the interface to their CMS their website management system, so it looked like the old one, so they wouldn't have to retrain anyone. But it's sort of beg the question then why were they changing the technology if they were going to abandon all the advantages and new features and capabilities of the new system, simply to sort of make it look like the old one. Yeah, that was a really crazy and extreme example and you know probably some tax holder malfeasance it went on there but like you know they were, they were so afraid of that change that they didn't even want to tackle it even when they were spending money on their strategic plan and I think that's just something you have to embrace is that the change has to be accountable and there has to be points in time or you're actually pushing for that change. Absolutely. So make money, any other thoughts on like what is or john either one of you, what, what is some other examples of what makes a roadmap unsuccessful when the road maps fail to get you to your treasure. Trying to do too much all at once, you know I think that's important, not having the flexibility to adapt to busy times within your organization. And I think if you're operating within a siloed organization, you know, these investigative interviews that we do, you know, can unearth a lot of these sort of siloed time considerations like with different departments you know, like we, if we're doing a fundraising roadmap we, we have a general sense that quarter four is going to be tough for most fundraising teams. But if you're doing a roadmap that's more organizational, you know, the rest of the organization might not know that so I think it's important to keep in mind that you know the impacted departments that are contributing to the success of the roadmap, you know, have points in time during the year points in time during, you know, your roadmap planning that they're going to have less availability to contribute to the success of the project so I think setting the foundation for success, you know, like we've talked about is really important. I worked at a nonprofit for for quite a few years and you know when I came on board the, the programs, the policy team the advocacy team. We also had a 501C for part of the organization as well we're all using different email platforms, right. They're, you know, they're using salsa labs they're using MailChimp they're using Marketo, and probably a few others that I've forgotten about but one of you know one of the goals was to have like unified communications in a sort of federated and distributed way across the organization and that was some of the marching orders from from our chief marketing officer and from our operations team and I think it was to save money but it was also to protect the, the risk, you know, of the sort of can spam risk of sending multiple emails from multiple different systems across a large organization. And so that you know that foundational step you know really we had to take inventory of stock of all these systems and who is managing the systems you know who is paying the bills for these systems. And we had to do some convincing you know we had to convince them that you know I understand you're using the system for X, Y and Z but we're moving to this we're planning to move to this system and we want your participation right and selecting the system and selecting a set up and and have a say in how we're managing lists and those kinds of things. And that's, you know, that's the building momentum phase you know and then actually doing the change you know you've given people across teams across programs across the policy team the advocacy team. They really have a say in their use cases have a say and what they need the system to do what the templates are supposed to look like you know, even like meeting with designers to design a custom template for you know their newsletter things like that. And that's when you know you start moving into the medium term. The term is really, you know, making that switch you know getting everybody on that platform and running running the systems that way so that's like one email focused focused example but you know, I think, if you don't take into account some of these considerations that I'm talking about that's when, you know, your roadmap can fall apart. So, just taking into account all the things that need to happen in the right time and just being considerate of the, the staff events, the staff timing, you know their busy times those kinds of things like we've been talking about are really important. And just to say one other thing there I think another thing that can make a roadmap unsuccessful is not engaging like reluctant or seemingly resistive stakeholders early on in the process and really understanding what's making them anxious or not want to be involved or feel like movement is bad at this time. I think, you know, sometimes those people are left out or pushed out of processes to like help things go faster but really they make things go slower because there's always a point where they're brought in and then things come to a halt where plans have been developed without their needs and concerns, and things would help them get on board included in that. And you know I think a lot of people who have those concerns actually have really legitimate and useful things that can improve a roadmap to say you know I think it's not that you know they're going to block all progress but you know I think it's just human nature sometimes when we want to make progress that you know the people who seemingly are blocking it or creating gravel on the road are people that you don't want to engage with as much but I think that they're important to engage with if you want the roadmap to be successful. So this the slide we're looking at now. We do a workshop with many of our nonprofits you know this is a an optional workshop for our road maps but it's definitely one we recommend and it's a one I love to facilitate. It's called our capacity for change workshop. And what we typically do in this workshop is you know we get together leadership, we get together practitioners, you know for doing a data strategy roadmap it might be people who are actually pulling reports together data scientists, business analysts those kinds of people. If it's a technology roadmap, you know we might pull together the people that are the technical contacts that we've identified, you know during the inventory process. At any given organization, you know pull them together and talk about like the projects that you've done at the organization, and to really get a sense of what made them successful right. Did the success happen because of the effort around planning around procurement of the system. Did you talk to a lot of vendors and you had your your use cases lined up those kinds of things, or was it a success because of how well it was implemented right so this gives organizations a chance to sort of talk about things that went well in a project and what phase of that project and the life cycle of that project those things have been and the things that people stopped doing I think that's really important as well like you know we all know of of systems that have been stood up right or process that's changed but people are scratching their heads wondering well what am I supposed to do with this old thing. And so it's also really important to have those conversations in a workshop setting to really get a sense of what are the things you stopped doing that made this new thing a success right. This is a great activity for us and it's also educational for people that may maybe have not worked very long at an organization as well. In fact, I did this with a lot large organization where I think one of the people had only been at the organization a month and so she came into it a little apprehensive and I was saying I'm not really quite sure I want to be part of this because I don't really know how they do change here at this organization. And I convinced her to stay and I think it was really educational for her as well it was really educational for her to understand, you know how her team or how she can contribute to the red map and can work around some of those successes and wins and some of those different approaches that maybe have frustrated staff you know related to change management and you know we spend a little bit of time like you know lessons learned like what does this tell us you know and how is this going to help inform the roadmap so that it's practical and actionable and easier to implement as opposed to like something that feels really hard right so this is a really excellent add on that we provide as part of our road mapping activities. The person cover some of the like sort of hidden or shadow change playbook that is in the organization like, you know, sometimes in these workshops will uncover subtle but important things like, Oh, this project was very successful because the person who is the sort of executive had a one on one meeting with the, you know, executive director of the organization and was able to kind of give them information and educate them on the value of this over a course of time. This next project looks really similar and all other respects except that the executive sponsor doesn't have that one on one with the executive director. And that kind of stuff is really subtle and hard to capture unless you look for it if you're just looking at a project plan and thinking yep we got the whole, you know, training and adoption and system roll out all figured you know actually the executive support isn't there. That's the kind of stuff that can often be uncovered in this which would be unseen but very important otherwise. So, I've been in a very similar experience without going through this process and you know you'd hear things like, we've done this before. And it's failed. So why are we doing it again or, you know, and, or if this isn't going to work, because it's happening the exact same way as it did last time. So, the way doing this first or before you're embarking on a new roadmap is so important you're, you're absolutely right because you have to be able to look back and you know hindsight is 2020 right and that's a really good way of looking at this is how are, how did we do this last time that either worked or did not work that we need to make sure we put into practice or leave out of this practice this time, in order for it to be successful and I really wish my one of my organizations had had done that because we ended up replicating the same problems we had had the last time. And everyone went back and said, Well, what did you expect it we had we did exactly the same thing we did the time before that and have we known that we could have done something different. So I think this is a really, really great exercise and something that you know, everyone should, whether you're working with Parsons TKO or not should should make sure to do and is before you're embarking on a big project is taking stock of what made these projects successful and what kept them from being successful successful as well so great. Alright, so we're running up on time and I want to make sure we leave room for questions so I know that we kind of talked a lot about what you can do with a roadmap in hand what does that look like is there anything, John or Nate that you would add rather quickly to just inspire in thinking about what are motivate them to pursue creating a roadmap that you've seen happen at other organizations. Yeah, I think one big one is that it really helps you have cross departmental and cross functional conversations that otherwise would be sort of fiefdom oriented or uncomfortable. And there's a joint plan of success in hand people want to work together and it creates an avenue for it and that's extremely valuable in a world where most people are sort of sharing systems or you know they're linearly linked like if you do this in this system then it has this downstream impact and you know we see that all the time especially around brand and you know it's more communications teams and fundraising teams are merged together this is going to be you know more and more important for them to sort of figure out how to work on this two different points together so I'll just leave you with that one point but that's a really valuable piece of the roadmap. John anything else you'd add in. Yeah I think if you if you think of some of your channels on some of your engagement channels like your website or your social media your email outreach. If you think of those you know if you think of those channels as kind of. This word for it. Yeah if you think of so if you think of those channels as outreach opportunities as products right you're thinking of it like product marketing or think of products change all the time right and how can you best communicate the change of those products and sort of share the staff and your customers or your supporters if you're in a nonprofit for those changes so I think that's when you can start thinking of a few product ties your channels, your engagement. Touchpoints you know if you think of those as products and they're they're evolving right so the roadmap can help set the stage for those changes a little bit better. Absolutely. So, if anybody has any questions now would be your moment in time to ask them. Yeah, so I think we had one from Peter who said, you know this is great information and loving the breakdown between strategic plans and robots. We can talk about high level steps and actions to creating a strategic plan so that's really that's a great topic Peter and I think we definitely could do that. For sure is talking about how to create a strategic plan because I think that that isn't really important thing to be able to do and I think, you know, Nate and john, what are your thoughts about. Can you create a strategic plan and a roadmap at the same time in your opinion or does one have to happen before the other. Do you have an opinion on that. Yeah, I mean I would say the roadmap is definitely less valuable without the strategic plan I mean there's no ifs or buts about that you can do some things in with the roadmap without a strategic plan and I think those are where you already have goals and in the sense that you feel like you're achieving them as well as you could like it's really common for us to do sort of a less than organizational roadmap like a departmental level roadmap, where they already have like departmentals, you know maybe annual goals or things like that, but they just know there's a lot of friction or there's something really not working great or they're really having a hard time managing something and you know we've it's usually be when they've held on to technology too long like we worked with one organization think tank and DC that had been using a C event a big enterprise like events management system for really long time but the way they manage their events and what they were doing with them had really radically changed since they purchased it and like it just was becoming a worse and worse fit and it was just so painful to watch them use that system. And so we knew we could help them with that we were like yes, and so that wasn't a grand you know strategic plan kind of thing, but they still needed a roadmap because again, they had it for so long they built up a huge amount of business processes expectations, you know, ways they communicated with their stakeholders about it all their visual assets all this junk was tied into it, and they needed a plan to get from where they were to a better place and so you totally can have a roadmap without a strategic plan. I would just say that as soon as it becomes an organizational roadmap becomes much more tricky to have a roadmap without the strategic plan because the strategic plan should be an executive buy in process where all of the major people who can prevent their map for being successful are already on board with the strategic goal and if you don't have that you're going to be fighting that battle in the roadmap. That's a great point made is so it just to sum up you can have a you can, as long as you have a destination that you're headed to you can have a roadmap, but if it's really organization wide you really need or if it requires a great deal of collaboration between organizations, the organization having that strategic plan and everyone being glued into the destination that you're headed towards is really critical to develop that roadmap. Awesome. And john a question for you can you speak to how accessibility shows up in the creation of a roadmap I work for a disability rights organization and one of our challenges is finding tools and workflows that are accessible to our team members and our partners. Yeah, that's that's a great question, not a silver bullet answer that I can I can think of but I think it's about incremental steps. I think it's about identifying opportunities, like I'll take for instance, like brand, you know your brand your nonprofits brand like you could look at your brand guide and start with that from and look at it from an accessibility lens like are you using, you know, fonts colors that have color contrasts that are accessible for people with vision impairments. Are you using, you know, captioning correctly, are you using hashtag camel case on your social media outlets like in a way that screen readers can can, you know, understand that content better. These are tactical examples but I think if you take it from sort of like what you're saying workflow lens and think about what are some things that we can build into these workflows you know, have these systems been looked at from an accessibility lens could a could a disabled person on our staff use our content management system. That's a huge one, you know, like, I had a vision issue a few years ago and I had to, you know, I luckily was using a content management system that was accessible. It was in a situation where it wasn't I would have a difficult time doing my job right so I think it's, it's important to, to think about those things. You know it's also important to ask people, you know if you have, if you have staff with disabilities, you know you can ask them, what are some things that you would need for the system to do. What are some things that you would like to see you know it could be something as simple as the lighting above someone's desk in their office you know is it like set up in a way that that they can can, you know, function on their computer effectively. That could be something very operational right but there's also lots of systems implications lots lots of workflow implemented. As well so yeah. Well, I know that we could keep going for a very long time and thank you so much for all the great questions and commentary I really appreciate it but we are at the top of the hour we want to make sure that you all get to your next meetings or maybe a late lunch but please feel free to connect with us we have so many different ways of doing it we have lots of resources on our website. Tony does an amazing podcast we do great community gatherings around the country. There's lots of videos to take advantage of on this topic and many others. And then in addition to that Nate and john have graciously offered to schedule free consultation so if you want to book 30 minutes with Nate or john and talk about where you are in your journey with your strategic plan or if you're needing to develop a roadmap or if you're stuck please feel free to reach out the link was put into the chat box and we'll also send it over via email as well. Thank you. Thank you, Luke. Thank you everybody for attending this afternoon. Happy Wednesday to you all and we look forward to seeing you next month for our next webinar. Have a great day.