Enterprise Scan
A simple tool to improve understanding and alignment around your Enterprise Design challenge.
Phase: Focus | Explore | Co-Create | Invest | Realise | Sustain
Scope: Identity | Architecture | Experience
Level: Strategy | Coordination | Operational
Author: Helgi Björgvinsson, Intersection Group
The Enterprise Scan consists of nineteen questions spanning the Enterprise Design Facets and Intersections. The survey helps to bring all relevant co-creators on board, foster a shared understanding of the enterprise, identify an initial focus, guide collaboration and reduce the time needed to achieve a balanced, holistic and sustainable Enterprise Design.
Why and when to use
Most disciplines focus on a few Enterprise Elements only, using mostly discipline-specific mental model(s) and language. This leads to linguistic confusion and unsolvable arguments about the primacy of one perspective or element over another, which makes it hard for people from different disciplines to collaborate.
The Enterprise Scan facilitates cross-disciplinary discussion and collaboration by using a unifying language that ensures all perspectives and mental models are treated as equally valid. It can be performed individually by an enterprise designer, but for the optimum result, it should be conducted with all co-creators needed to address the design challenge. The Enterprise Scan methodically guides you through all the Enterprise Elements, which helps foster a holistic understanding of the design challenge you and your team are working on. The scan helps focus and orient your explorations and discussions, keeping you on track and ensuring you don't miss relevant design elements. It facilitates a constructive conversation amongst team members, ensuring team alignment around their design challenge, intended outcomes, and steps to be taken to achieve those outcomes.
The benefits of performing an Enterprise Scan are:
- bringing in people from multiple disciplines to make conflicting interests visible early in the process
- expanding each team member's knowledge of the design challenge from the collective perspective of the entire team.
- the identification of focus areas, helping the team to select the elements most relevant and most in need of further work.
Example outputs from an Enterprise Scan are:
- An agreed-upon description of the design challenge under consideration;
- An agreed-upon definition of scope and context for the design challenge;
- A list of questions, issues and items of concern associated with the design challenge;
- Some success criteria to measure the results of the design against;
- A list of stakeholders involved;
- An action list with actions, actors, time-frames, and expected outcomes.
The Enterprise Scan can be conducted for any design challenge.
This leads to a more holistic understanding and team alignment around the design challenge, which is a prerequisite for later design, decision-making, and realisation activities.
How to use
Resources
There are multiple ways to deploy the scan. The simplest way is using Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. This is an Excel Template ready to be used as is. There is also a simple template to summarise the results from all participants in a single document:
- EDGY Enterprise Scan v1.0.xlsx (Excel)
- EDGY Enterprise Scan - Summary template.xlsx (Excel)
- EDGY Enterprise Scan - Documentation (PDF)
- EDGY Enterprise Scan - The questions to copy into a tool of your choice
Download the Enterprise Scan resources here:
Related tools
You can document the results of an Enterprise Scan using EDGY Maps such as primitive maps, EDGY statements, blueprints or a Milky Way map. Stay tuned as we add more tools to EDGY, or create your own EDGY tool.
Related Patterns
Enterprise Design Patterns relevant to performing an Enterprise Scan:
- Coalition building: Facilitate the dialogue between people across disciplines
- Executive buy-in: Scope the design challenge and ensure a holistic understanding
- Safe negotiation space: Ensure that everybody involved is heard
- Listening to understand: Challenge your mental model by raising unclarities and misunderstandings to the surface
- Focus, shift, refocus: Ensure that you go through all relevant elements and be open to different perspectives
- Unintended consequences: With a holistic perspective you minimise the risk of unintended consequences