Add value to your Wardley Maps with SharpCloud

Craig Wallace — Global Head — Strategic Offerings & Partnerships at CGI, talks to us about the value his clients are seeing from visualizing Wardley Maps in SharpCloud.

At CGI, we have a dynamic way of looking at organizations — their strategy and their operating model. We have been digitizing how we help organizations over the past 5 years, moving from the static post-it on a wall to a dynamic, relationship-driven experience that allows organizations to connect the dots.

This really proved invaluable during COVID and continues to be so as organizations adopt more hybrid ways of working.

Strategic transformation

Wardley Maps are one of the key methods we use as part of our wider strategic transformation approach at CGI.

Our Anchor in the Wardley Map are the Business Imperatives the organization wants to improve, these are the things they have to do really well to win. These Business Imperatives are mapped to the value drivers of the organization and the critical information required to make the big decisions, we call this our Value Framework.

The way we use Wardley Maps is to first position the Business Imperative in terms of the type of change we are thinking of making and where it sits in the movement access. Once done we start to break down the components needed to achieve that change, positioning them in terms of value, movement and relationship.

Once done we can start to ask questions about the best methodology to use (Agile, Lean, Six Sigma, etc) and the best resourcing strategy (co-design, in-house, partner, outsource).

The information used, like the business imperatives, comes from previous work and the value, movement, and components created go on to form the basis of the planning process. What we have done is embed the Wardley Maps into a bigger information flow, integrating it into how we strategize and plan.

Wardley Maps with SharpCloud

What SharpCloud helps us to do is take this Wardley Map and position and connect all the items together; we can build up the outcomes and expectations, the leadership actions, and the next steps in the work to be done. The outcomes may end up in a plan, we use the data and information to drive how we think about our best approach with the senior leaders.

Visualize the connections

We can see what imperatives are linked to, for instance, the outcomes or the ideas people are having. We have access to lots of information at the WardleyMap stage for each of the identified imperatives. We can discuss it and use that backup information for the decision and can also record why we reached those decisions.

Manage change effectively

Seeing the relationships — not just a plan of activities — means we can also manage the amount of change we deliver into different parts of the organization at different times. Business areas can see what is coming when and we don’t overload them with change, or we manage disruption and how we work across transformation.

See the impact in time

Seeing relationships and business areas affected in SharpCloud lets us understand where impact might be too big, change too hard — and we can react and change accordingly.

Find the gaps

We can see where innovation is mapped into the organization and the areas where change is happening — and importantly in areas where there isn’t anything happening, we can also see what’s missing.

Realize the value

When we design our portfolio’s we use the Wardley Map to help us understand the organization, making our roadmaps better and giving us a much better chance of releasing value.