Project War Room

Abstract

This project has explored concepts of alignment and product strategy to meet Ultimaker’s needs. Insights were gathered from multiple sources to analyse the project’s brief and explore its facets. The company’s intention is to create a space in which alignment on product strategy will take place.

Through interviewing employees, a number of problems were identified that could form the focus of this process. The three main frustrations around alignment were: the abstraction of product strategy information, the complexity of product strategy systems, and the top-down communication of product strategy.

Although alignment is a very broad and abstract subject, an image of what it entails could be defined. Alignment is considered to exist out of two aspects: knowledge of interrelations and a shared goal. Between people there needs to be consensus on these two aspects to effectively work as a group. To become aware of the interrelations and the shared goal, communication needs to be organised in a structured way. It was found that many forms and places of communication exist within the company. Literature showed that, although verbal and visual communication are most used in daily routines, physical communication offers collaborative means as well.

Another part of this project’s explorations was that of product strategy. Most companies have their own way of developing and managing product strategy, though those practices are still being explored and instituted at Ultimaker. To establish a structured product strategy a company has to create a clear overview of the systems model. A systems model is the congruence of components and their connections (Wujec, 2015). Ultimaker is currently feeding product strategy components through the product management department to the project teams with tools such as personas, applications, user values, etcetera. Information is gathered internally and externally to setup new projects and continue to feed information to projects under development. In between the product management department and project teams is where the alignment processes are most stressed because of differences in priorities between the groups.

Merging the two concepts of alignment and product strategy resulted in several ideas to create an organised method. The outcome of the ideation phase proposed a physical systems modeling tool to create overviews of projects which can be stored in a War room. The tool enables product management and project leads to define project compositions. Besides, the project compositions can be used as a reference to the projects’ essence throughout the product lifecycle.

The tool aims to increase project awareness, structure discussions, and allow for collaborations on project compositions. Employees are to use a pre-developed, magnetic whiteboard, template and building blocks to create an overview of a project. This can be attached to the wall in the War room where it can be reviewed by interested stakeholders.