You have engineers on the left of you, logisticians on the right, technical writers reporting to you, and customers looking for a delivery.
And all of them are dissatisfied. The Analysis Workshop gives you the opportunity to bring them all together, to herd all the cats to get a holistic view of your what you’re doing right and what you could be doing better.
Armed with a workshop agenda in advance, you schedule the meetings, rotating the attendees based on the topics.
The opening sessions are high-level, full of introductions and concepts to the executives and department heads.
Then the meetings change into deep-dive sessions, focused on each individual group.
We ask engineering how they are managing and storing their CAD data, ask Logistics how they maintain their maintenance task analysis and sparing information, ask Technical Publications about their processes for revising files and releasing updated manuals, ask how customer feedback is collected, ask how change management is governed.
Then we start asking the hardest question: why?
Why are these things done in these ways? We might just tell you that you have been doing the wrong thing just because it’s the way it has always been done.
After we find out where each group is, we talk about the touch points between, how information and accountability is transmitted down the chain. How do you all work together? Or, rather, how are you not working together when you should be?
We talk about where you want to go. We give everyone the opportunity to make a “wish list” of all the functionality they need in the future solution…and all the functionality they want too.
Before the workshop ends, solutionizing begins a bit. While the problems aren’t solved in this session, we put the online whiteboard to work so we can provide an idea of what we are thinking or potential solutions we will later flesh out in the Analysis Report.
We want to leave the workshop giving you a good idea of our intentions for the implementation project.