Philosophy

Denkplan is a method to visualise the complexity of the company in a  simple and the strategy in a tangible way, to prioritise projects in strategic fields of action and ultimately to break these down to the task at hand for the teams and employees. If focal points shift, the market or the company changes, the roadmap can be easily adapted. Denkplan helps you to maintain an overview, to track progress and to take the employees along as participants on the company’s journey.

Standing together in front of the impact map, the management and the employees work out an overall picture of the organisation. What are our strengths? Where do we still need to catch up? What are the most important strategic fields of action? They identify previously hidden connections and interdependencies. They determine the value-creating strategic fields of action and derive the most important action items for the near future from these. In this way, the employees change from being affected to being involved.

The jointly defined strategic fields of action and projects from the impact map are visualised on the portfolio board. For each strategic field of action, the individual action steps – so-called initiatives – are formulated. The higher an initiative is placed, the more urgent it is. The priority of the initiatives can be indicated so that there is a consensus on what should be achieved in the short, medium and long term. This creates an overarching transparency that increases focus and flexibility.

The portfolio kanban with the identified initiatives supports the pull into implementation, prioritises and fine-tunes dependencies and capacity. It also acts as a feedback tool for the pull system. In a pull system, teams get their tasks instead of being assigned them. In this way, the teams take initiative for their initiatives.

The kanban board allows you to visualise the current status of all initiatives. The goal of the kanban board is to set focus, ensure flow, avoid waiting times and minimise the lead time of initiatives. This way of tracking progress is applicable and traceable on all levels of abstraction – from strategy to team and back again.

Employees and teams help shape the initiatives and thus understand the meaningfulness of the tasks. How does their activity contribute to our journey as an organisation? How does the piece of the puzzle fit into the overall picture? What is my personal contribution? Why is my work valuable? In this way, everyone is actively part of the change and strategy implementation. Denkplan creates the overview that shows progress in the strategic fields of action as well as initiatives and enables flexible action.