CNSR SCI 555

The Implementation Log Form

1. A loose form - written notes in free form with plenty of detail - Advantage: Easier to capture whatever you are seeing or thinking without having to fit into a pre-existing set of columns - Disadvantage: May forget some of the details you need to record and will eventually have to put into one format 2. A preset format - notes under specific column headings with at least one column devoted to "General Notes" - Advantage: Encourages detail in recording and keeps you from having to assimilate into one format later (saves time) - Disadvantage: May not be able to anticipate everything you need up front and may limit thinking to just those columns (hence importance of "General Notes")

putting the implementation plan together

1. Define key milestones that will make or break you being successful 2. List activities required for each milestone (go back to Activity Hedgehog, if helpful) 3. Identify what data you will collect for evaluation and when that needs to happen 4. For each activity, list the resources required (money, collaborators, approvals, etc.) noting where you do not have the resources you need 5. Determine any weak spots in your plan and discuss contingencies for failure at those points

Implementation Plan

A. Overall, what will make or break your plan? B. What are the major activities involved in implementing your plan? C. What resources are required in terms of people and money? D. What is your budget - amount needed and how you will invest it? E. What is the timeline for your implementation? F. Do you foresee any obstacles? How will you handle unexpected events?

Evaluation Plan

A. What type of evaluation will you be conducting? B. How will you define success? C. What is your measure of success? D. What is your comparison, benchmark or target? E. What are your anticipated recommendations given possible outcomes of your evaluation?

Your Final Report

Based on these results, our recommendation for future action is Y

The Written Plan

Bottom line: describe your plan in sufficient detail that someone else could replicate what you did

Temporal Order

Can we eliminate the possibility that Y causes X?

The Situation Analysis Tools

- 5C Analysis - SWOT Analysis

Elements of a Good Pitch

- A creative idea clearly stated - Meaningful insights - Clear process know-how - Recognition of audience perspective

The Concept of Parking Lots

- A parking lot is a list of ideas, things to do or anything else that does not relate to the task at hand - Valuable tool for capturing things that emerge AND for getting people to get back on task

The Activity Hedgehog

- A tool to help identify the activities and sub-activities required to implement your idea Step 1: Review your ultimate outcome, intermediate outcome and big idea (write it on the board) Step 2: Write your idea in the center of a board Step 3: Identify the largest buckets of activities required to implement your idea Step 4: Identify the sub-activities for each activity

The Imagined Future

- A useful exercise in defining opportunity is the Imagined Future - Close your eyes (literally or figuratively) and visualize how your situation would be different if you were able to achieve the opportunity(ies) you've laid out - use a collage or mood board

The Laddering Technique

- Connecting the attributes of products to the personal values of the end user

Tools for Critical Thinking

- Cull -> remove questions that are really answers in disguise - Cluster -> group similar questions together - Combine -> add clustered questions together to get to more comprehensive questions - Clarify -> name the theme of each cluster - Choose -> examine patterns and relationships among the clusters, select the questions/clusters that you feel really get to the heart of the matter

The Goal

- Develop a strong, tangible and inspiring mental picture of what could be

Interim Tracking

- Examining the initial trail of your program and its impact - Anticipating the likely outcomes and how well they fit with your intentions. should start as you are implementing your plan. - The idea is that you are tracking data now as you begin implementation, before your treatment has had a real chance to work so that by the time it "should" be working, you'll know how well it's working

The Deliverables

- Executive Committee Proposal - Final Report

evaluation

- Executive Committee: We gave you X in resources. What were you able to do with it? - The outcome(s) of your action(s) compared to what would have happened had you done nothing. - need data to support it from surveys, reports, observation, and redemption - Be very clear in what you intended to do - how you thought things would work and exactly what impact you would have - Have a means of measuring your impact - and controlling for other possible explanations - Know Your Possible Recommendations

Idea and Impact

- For your presentation, end with a high-level recap of WHAT you want to do and what you need them to do, WHY they should fund it and HOW you will deliver a return on their investment

Situation Analysis

- In this section, you should put your idea in a broader context, although the proper context depends on your idea - For example, if you decided to try to raise awareness, your context may be all of the messages consumers receive today and how to break through - If you decided to market a new or existing product in a different way, your context may be eating trends - If your emphasis is a frequency-building campaign, your context might be trends such as gamification

Field or In-Market Experiment

- Involves establishing test and control groups, applying treatment to the test and no treatment to the control and reading the results - Has less control over the conditions of the test and control groups than a lab study - Offers the advantage of a natural setting

The Evaluation Report

- Making your report specific enough that someone could pick it up years from now and do exactly what you did - Anticipating how you will USE the evaluation to make larger recommendations about future actions - Challenging your thinking (perhaps by asking someone outside of the project to react)

Matched Time Period

- Maybe if your measure (for the evaluation) was observation, you plan to observe on Tuesday and Wednesday of each week

3rd Variable

- Must rule out (or at least acknowledge) alternative explanations for the covariation - Your Program Caused Your Observed Outcomes vs Something Else Produced It - Something different about your treatment period or group (vs. comparison period) - Two ways a 3rd variable can be a factor: Spurious correlations or a third factor that causes both variables - if theres like another variable, z, that causes x so something else besides x and y is causing the correlation

Path of Least Resistance

- Not looking for the easy way out, but for the most effective actions that require the least resources Step 1: Assign ease and impact scores to each activity thread - Identify any sub-activities that are especially difficult or impactful - Are they critical? Are there alternatives? Step 2: Plot your activities in the ease and impact matrix Step 3: Select your specific list of activities Step 4: Describe your plan

Perception of Future Time

- Research shows that, in general, people expect slack for time to be greater in the future than in the present. - Make your requests during planning and pre-implementation be as specific as possible. - Encourage your collaborators to tell you why it WON'T work and to think about what will be on their schedule at that time

What's an Idea Pitch?

- Sharing your idea with an audience who can make it happen (in our case, the Executive Committee)

desirability, feasibility, viability thinking chart (material)

- Simple questions designed to assess your most comfortable thinking style. Honest answers without overthinking will give you a pretty good sense.

intermediate outcome

- Something you can cause to happen in the short-term - Based on your unique insights into the situation, define the outcome(s) you feel will have the greatest impact and are the most doable with the time and resources available - intermediate outcomes are the opportunities

idea generation

- Start with Your Intermediate Outcome(s) and phrase them as questions - GENERATE as many potential questions as possible related to your intermediate outcome. - EVALUATE those possible questions critically to refine and select the one(s) you will pursue - ________ needs a way to _________ - Use your intermediate outcomes and imagined futures to get to the how might we questions - Find creative ways to reframe the questions - Use your imaginations to come up with the answers to your questions

Spurious Relationships

- Strong, Positive Correlation

Framing the Evaluation

- The comparison - The alternative explanations - The statistics to guide interpretation

Hypothesis Testing

- The determination of whether the expectations that a hypothesis represents are, indeed, found to exist in the real world 1. You believe something is true 2. You acquire/collect data from the "real world" 3. You assess how likely it is that your hypothesis is true given the data (how well it "fits" the real world)

Ideal or Imagined Future

- The key here is to have a realistic and compelling description of the possible or desired future state - Requires some scenario creation that is supported by your knowledge of the situation - You don't want to set this imagined or ideal state too low or too high - You also need ideas for how you will assess what actually happened - Sometimes a "breakeven" target (what it would take to generate a return on the cost of the program) can be a useful ideal or imagined target

Business/Idea Description

- This section should be an overview of your idea and how it will address opportunities in the underlying business - The audience should have a very clear picture of WHAT you are proposing and your expected impact, WHY it will have the expected impact and HOW you will implement and evaluate your actions

The SWOT Analysis

- Tool to help you evaluate your current position and compare it to future opportunities and risks. 1. strengths (Internal) 2. weaknesses (internal) 3. opportunities (External) 4. threats (External)

impact assessment

- We are going to ______________________ because it will lead to __________________________ which will __________________________ - Be sure you understand why the idea works - Be prepared to "sell" your idea to others - Connect to the people involved - Focus in on the Idea - Intermediate Outcome connection

T-Shaped People

- When diverse individuals work together on a common challenge from different perspectives - When individuals with DEPTH of knowledge can relate what they know to the broader, interrelated context that includes other individuals with DEPTH of knowledge from different fields

Covariation

- Whether Y changes when X is present (or at a certain level) - Presence of our program --> Change in Intermediate Outcome? -

Prototypes

- a visual representation of your idea - should be interactive, meaning that the audience can walk through how the world will be different when the idea is brought to life - Can be physical or digital

Field notes

- best data collection approach during observation - Contain your account of what you observed firsthand - Important as they allow you to return to study your notes, identify gaps in understanding and uncover themes/insights in your experiences

defining the opportunity list

- build awareness and trial - increase consideration --> If they know you, but choose not to use you, there may be a delivery problem - expand customer base - increase frequency of visit - grow register ring --> encourage more money spent at register sustainable - increase efficiency - optimize investment - remove dead weight --> Identify products, promotions or actions that do not add value to the bottom line - increase margin

The Process of Productive Thinking

- combination of creative and critical thinking - Develop the ideas that will address the opportunity you have defined which will lead to a your ultimate outcome - Begin with a Clear Vision of What Could Be, then Identify the Right Questions, then Generate Answers (how might we...we could...)

design thinking steps

- empathize --> learning about the audience for whom you are designing - situation analysis - (re)define --> focusing your question based on your insights - opportunity definition - ideate --> brainstorming and coming up with creative solutions - productive thinking - prototype --> building a representation of one/ more of your ideas to show to others - implementation - test --> returning to your original user group and testing your ideas for feedback - evaluation

Executive Summary

- it should provide a concise overview of the complete plan - Often a lender or prospective investor may read only this section and the financial plan - This section should be written only after the rest of the plan is finished

evaluation plan 4 ingredients

- measures - comparison - treatment - by variables

An Iterative Process

- repeating a cycle of operations over and over again to get closer to your desired results. An example in my store is sending out email newsletters every month to my customer base. By repeating this every month, I get improved results (ie. more people coming into my store to shop) than if I just sent the email one time - Where re-definition may (or may not) come into your process

Empathy

- the ability to sense, anticipate or imagine someone else's emotions, thoughts and feelings - The ability to see the world or the situation through the eyes of the end user - get it through conversation, observation, and participation

Create the Time & Action Plan

- used to keep you on track during implemention. Think of it as a "to do" list that specifies every detail of what needs to be done, in what order, and by who in order to achieve the desired results - Start with key milestones - Add in activities - Highlight weak links

empathy matrix

- used to reflect on what they said, what they did, what they are thinking, what they are feeling

implementation log

- where you RECORD absolutely everything that happens (esp what is beyond your control) - alternative explanations can be found here

Defining and Prioritizing the Opportunity

Defining - This is where you brainstorm the outcomes you believe you could bring about (not ideas for actions to achieve them. That comes next.) - Use the need statement to help connect your possible outcomes to the needs of your end users: _____[INSERT END USER OR CLIENT] _____ needs a way to ____[INSERT DESIRED OUTCOME]______________ because ___[INSERT CORE INSIGHT(S) THAT LED YOU TO THIS]________. Prioritizing - Throw out intermediate outcomes that are difficult to explain or to implement. - Select the one(s) that seem reasonable and important. - Try to refine the statements further

Executive Committee Proposal

1. Executive Summary - Tell them what you are going to tell them - Sell the idea right up front 2. The Idea - Put the idea in the context of today's situation (as everyone understands it) - Share your imagined future - Describe how your idea will get you there 3. Why It Will Work - Explain why this idea is doable and why it will have the desired impact - Be sure to indicate WHAT the impact is likely to be - Share your unique perspective/insight into today's situation and how that led you to this idea 4. Evaluation Plan - How will you know whether it worked? 5. Your Request - What funding or other support are you requesting - You MUST include a budget or an "ask" 6. Close/Recap - End with a brief and impactful recap of your idea, your request, and why it should be approved

4 casualty questions

1. Is there a credible causal mechanism that connects X to Y? 2. Can we eliminate the possibility that Y causes X? 3. Is there covariation between X and Y? 4. Is there some Z related to both X and Y that makes an observed relationship between X and Y spurious?

Interim Tracking: what if nothing happens? the solution

1. Just the Facts - Results for each of your measures 2. be objective- did your program work 3. consider the learnings 4. focus on implications - Should the idea be tried again with some changes? or Is it just not an idea that will work in this situation and for what reasons?

Treatment and Comparison

1. TREATMENT --> The period of time when your program was in place. Your program is the "treatment" being applied 2. COMPARISON --> Something that demonstrates what would have happened had you done nothing - need data

2 components of evaluation

1. What you intended or imagined 2. What actually happened what portion of that can you claim

business/idea plan

1. executive summary 2. business/idea description 3. situation analysis 4. the opportunity or market/customer analysis 5. implementation plan 6. evaluation plan 7. idea and impact

Interim Tracking Three Areas to Assess

1. pan versus actual 2. reactions 3. impact

evaluation planning

1. start with your identified opportunity and definition of success 2. Identify how you will gather data on your measure 3. Decide on your "compared to what." 4. Be sure you understand what possible outcomes could mean 5. Develop a detailed plan of when and how you will gather your information and then analyze your information 6. Prepare a single slide (or no more than 2) to share your evaluation plan with the Executive Committee.

Design Thinking

A collaborative optimistic method for identifying innovative solutions to complex problems via reframing and T-Shaped People - Starts with a solution (not with a problem) - Eliminates fear of risks - human-centered

The Opportunity(ies) or Market/Customer Analysis

A. Describe your imagined future and how it is different from the current situation B. What is required to achieve your imagined future C. How large is the opportunity? D. Describe the market and identify your target markets E. Describe customer buying practices F. Describe market trends and growth potential

Naming Your Objective

Have an estimate of what impact you can have or will need to have to generate a reasonable return on the investment

5 C analysis

It is useful in understanding the existing and potential problems with the company's business 1. customer --> what needs from which customer - Formal or informal research, existing knowledge 2. company --> assets, liabilities, current performance - Sales reports, business plan, internal research, analyst reports, etc. 3. competition --> how needs are being met today (as well as emerging option) - Currently known competitors, broader thinking around options 4. collaborators --> any resources or relationships to help - Brainstorming/general awareness/"I wonder" 5. context --> political, regulatory, physical location, costs, social context, technology - Information on the setting, traditions, rituals, general environment, etc.

The Third Third Exercise

Third Third - potential breakthroughs, new connections Second Third - still constrained, starting to stretch boundaries First Third - what everyone knows and thinks today

Confirm

To establish the correctness of something previously believed

Matched Location

location 1: business as usual location 2: your plan 1) finding a matched location (or averaging a few somewhat perfect options) and then 2) acquiring data on that location as well.

the process

situation analysis --> defining opportunities --> idea generation --> impact assessment --> implementation plan --> evaluation plan --> exec committee presentation