The following is a summary of good practices to follow when creating benefit maps with Wovex.
It will help you model your portfolios in terms of value and engage different groups. Run multiple workshops and have important discussions.
Recommended Steps
Start by developing the 'Main View' with all the items that you can think of included.
This may include, Initiatives (Projects or programmes), Benefits (This includes outcomes and benefits, anything that you may want to track and report on) and Measures (What you will expect to see go up or down to show delivery of the benefits) and Goals (Strategic aims)
If you want to do this collectively with others, such as in workshops, it helps to create a new view for each workstream or business area on the map before you start the session. This can help break down the discussion into areas that are well understood by each subject matter expert in turn.
Adding goals to each workstream view is important so that you can align the ideas from the workshop to something that everyone should recognise.
Add new items that are discussed and link them together to show the flow of value from one item to another. Build the visual story of what needs to be achieved and how to get it.
This builds a picture of what is important to the attendees, aligned to the common goals.
After the workshops, you can add the newly created items to the Main View using '+ Existing' to ensure you have one overall picture to refer to for yourself.
Go to +Existing, sort by the 'Created' column to identify the items most recently created, and select which items to show on the main view easily. You'll notice that links will be shown automatically when you do this.
Using views effectively for different perspectives
The following are suggestions for using different types of views and layouts.
There are many valuable ways to use views:
- Main View that contains all items, with the goals in the middle and departments all around them. This creates a view similar to a mind map. What is important at the centre.
- A view for each Workstream/area/value-stream. Useful for each workshop to have its own view. Then add new items to the Main View, to maintain the complete picture.
- A view for each goal. Show everything that is important for that goal in one view. You can centre the goals and have all the benefits around it like a mindmap if you like. Useful for strategic sessions reviewing the contribution and weightings.
- A view for each category of outcome, For example, all the urgent outcomes together so you can easily review what contributes to them.
- A view for each stakeholder, e.g., CFO. To give them a view of what may be important to them, and they can spot issues or opportunities.
Checking all item links from other views
When using views on a map, an item can be on many views and it's not always easy to understand all the items that link to and from it. The information is across many views.
There are two ways to see this.
1) Use Show Summary to see all the visual links to and from an item in all views.
2) Use the Mapping Tab in the Workspace items details. Here you can review and edit the links that will then show in your map.
You can see all the 'before' items that link to an item, and all the 'after' items that it links to.
Find this by:
- Right-clicking 'Edit' the item> 'Open in new tab' from the Map
- Or going to your Workspace and the particular item details and find the 'Mapping' tab on the far right.
Here you will see a list of all the input and output relationships the item has on the Map.
