DoView

1. Download DoView outcomes and visual strategic planning software. Get comfortable using DoView in front of your strategic planning group (first practice on your own and with family and friends). In contrast to other software, DoView has been designed to be used in real-time in front of a strategic planning group (simple options, clean interface etc.). It will not take you long to get good at using it.

2. Build your basic visual model of what you are trying to do in your organization or project. This model should set out all of the steps you think are necessary to achieve the high-level outcomes you are trying to achieve. For instance, look at an example of such a visual model for a school.  

3. Once the strategic planning team and any other important stakeholders are happy that the visual model represents what it is that you are trying to do, put in a set of new boxes for all of the 'activities' (you might want to call them something else - e.g. projects) you are wanting to do in the coming planning period. 

4. Drag a link between each of the boxes which represent the activities (or projects) and the steps in the visual model that you are wanting to influence with that activity. You will then be able to see visually if there are any important steps in the visual model which do not have activities linked to them. This may suggest that maybe you should identify a new activity (project) which would be designed to influence that particular step, or that you should modify an existing activity (project) so that it is not directed at also influencing the articular step. In addition, you may find that there are steps which have a lot of activities (projects) focused on them. Sometimes this may be appropriate, given the importance of the step. However, in other cases, this may reveal that some of these activities are unnecessary, or that they should be redirected so that they will influence different steps in the model. 

5. Produce your strategic plan in whatever format works for your particular audiences. For example: printed out on letter-sized page; as a larger poster; or as a web page version of your strategic plan.

Practice using DoView in front of a group. Look at the DoView Quick Start Videos and try out the Tutorial Example File in DoView (Help > Tutorial Example File). If you have any problems, look at the DoView Online Help system (also available within DoView, Help > DoView Help). Or post a question up on the DoView Forums if you have things you are wanting to figure out.   

Step 2. Build your visual outcomes model. When building your visual model, you are trying to draw a rich model of what you think are all of the important steps which need to occur to achieve the high-level outcomes your institution, organization or project is trying to influence. Such models are called visual 'outcomes models' and there is a set of rules for drawing them in a way which means that they will be suitable for your strategic planning work. The main thing to remember is that you should put into your model everything you think is needed to achieve high-level outcomes. It does not matter whether or not you are able to measure these steps at this stage, or whether or not you will be able to prove that your institution, organization or project changed them. You can even include steps which need to happen for you to be successful but which are determined by others. What you should be trying to get to is a comprehensive visual model of all of the important steps needed to achieve high-level outcomes. A set of 13 Tips for drawing such visual outcomes models are available. Hand this one page tip sheet out to your strategic planning team. Many examples of such outcomes models are available at OutcomesModels.org. If you have DoView installed you can immediately download these from that site and start amending them to suit your own organization or project. Look at this short video on building an outcomes model in front of a group. It shows a bottom-to-top model being built, but you can just as easily build you DoView model from left-to-right (in DoView select View > Model Direction > Left-to-right. 

Step 3. Break your model up into a set of viewable compact pages. Usually, your visual model will be larger than can be seen on a single dataprojected screen. This is where DoView's particular design features come in. In the past, people have been able to draw large visual models if they want to, using standard drawing software. However, these are unmanageable when you dataproject them because the writing in the individual boxes will usually end up too small for the members of the strategic planning team to read. This problem has effectively stymied the use of visual models for strategic planning in many situations in the past. In contrast, DoView encourages you to build your visual model as a series of 'compact' pages which you can then rapidly click between. These are called 1 x 1 pages in DoView and are the standard pages which you create.  When building your model, if you are building it in front of a group, use standard-sized 1 x 1 pages. You can use as many of these as you like. When you run out of room on one page, click on a box and do a Right-click  > Drill down to new page. This will create a new 1 x 1 page in DoView with the step you created it from on the new page. The step on the new page is a 'clone' of the step which you created the page from. That means that if you edit the name of the step it will change on both pages. Have a look at the example of a school visual outcomes model to see how the model can be broken up into a set of small 1 x 1 pages. Look at this short video on breaking a outcomes large model up into sub-pages. 

Step 4. Map activities (projects) onto your visual model. Once you have built your visual model and you, and your strategic planning group, are happy with it, then create a new page on which you put all of your activities (you may prefer to call them projects - call them whatever works for you, your strategic planning team and your stakeholders). Start the name of each of these activities with a bracket and the letter A and then another bracket (e.g. [A], or [P] if you are thinking in terms of projects rather than activities). Then click on an activity and immediately go to the first page of the visual model. Hold down the Alt Key. If the activity you click on is still selected this will show a grayed out version of the activity box. While continuing to hold Alt down, drag you mouse over any steps in the visual model which you believe that activity will influence and do a Left-click. This will make a link between the activity you selected on the other page and the step within the visual model. Remember at this stage that you don't have to worry whether or not you will be able to prove that the activity changed them. All that we are trying to get at at the moment is whether or not the activity is aimed at trying to achieve that particular step in the visual model. Once you have made links to all of the steps on that page of the visual model you think the activity in question will influence, move onto another page within the visual model and make similar links from the activity to any steps on the other page which you believe the activity will influence. When doing this process you may find that it makes you think of some steps which you have not yet got in your model. Amend the visual model to include these and continue with the process of mapping activities onto the main visual model showing all the steps you believe are necessary to achieved high-level outcomes. At some point as you move up the model towards the very highest-level outcomes you are likely to find that it is unnecessary to map activities (projects) onto such high-level outcomes because you have already mapped them onto the lower level steps which contribute to these outcomes. In other words, you would expect that every activity (project) would map onto the highest-level outcome in a model which had a single high-level outcome (e.g. an excellent school). Look at this short video on linking multiple projects to a common outcomes model. 

Step 5. (Optional). List the number of activities (projects) mapped onto each step in the visual model. Once you have completed your process of 'mapping' activities (projects) onto your visual model. Go through the model and do a Right-click > This is the result of. This will give you a list of all of the activities (projects) which it is believed are likely to influence that particular step or outcome. Count up the number of activities (projects) and put that number in the box. Remember to update it if you add new activities in the future. (For a very simple model where it is obvious which steps and outcomes the activities (projects) map onto, you may not need to do the step of entering the number into each step box in the visual model.

Step 6. Hold your strategic discussion against the model. You are now in position to have your strategic planning discussion against the visual model. If it is a simple model, the whole team can go through the whole model looking at each step and identifying those cases where there are either no (or very few) activities (projects) mapping onto the step, or where there are large numbers mapping onto the step. This then can spark a strategic discussion as to the priority of the various activities in terms of them influencing the key steps in the visual model. If the visual model is large and you are working with a larger strategic planning group. First go through the model yourself and identify those steps where there seems to be an issue (e.g. either not enough, or too many activities (projects) mapping onto them). Put something like *T* in each of the boxes, indicating that you want to talk with the strategic planning group about that particular box. Then in the actual strategic planning meeting you would just focus on the boxes you had marked as needing to be talked about.

Step 7. Representing your model in different formats. Up until now we have presumed that you will work with your model as a set of smaller compact pages. This approach means that you can always dataproject your model in a strategic planning meeting. However, you may want, in addition, to provide various printed overviews for your strategic planning or other stakeholder groups. The way you do this is to create a larger page (click on the small downwards arrow on the right of the New Page icon at the bottom of the Page List on the right-hand side of the DoView screen). Select the page size which will be able to hold all of the sub-pages in your model. E.g. if you have four sub-pages you may want to create a 2 x 2 page (which will be large enough to hold the contents of four of your sub-pages). Then click on New 2 x 2 Page to create the page. Note you can tell that this is a larger than normal page because of the larger block on the left of the page name in the Page List. Now go to each of the smaller pages on which your model has been created and click Edit > Select All then Edit > Copy (alternatively hold down CTRL-A and then CTRL-C). Then go to the larger page you have created and do a Right-click > Paste as Clone. This will paste the contents of your smaller page onto the larger page as 'clones'. Clones are steps which if you edit them in one place, will be edited where ever they appear in the model. Continue to do this until you have all of your model on the one page. If you wish you can put all of your activities (projects) on the model also (for instance, along the bottom of the model). 

Now, if you wish you can make all of the link lines between activities (projects) and steps in the visual model appear. First check that on the Menu Bar at the top of the DoView screen the Link Icon shows a straight line connection (a straight arrow). If it does not, then select Insert Link, and Draw Straight Line from the small down arrow next to the Link Icon. 

Now click on the clone of each activity on your large page and do a Right-click > Draw every link line. This will make any links that you have created earlier (in Step 4) be drawn as straight-line links on the large page. 

Step 8. Creating a web page model of your visual strategic plan. If you wish, you can create a webpage version of your DoView visual strategic plan. You do this by making sure that you have in your model only those pages you want to be published as a web page model. It is useful to save your file with a simple short file name (e.g. schoolplan) as the name will end up in the name of the URL of the website where your strategic plan will be published. Click on File > Create Web Page Model. You will then be given various options (these include deciding if you want a PDF and a copy of the original DoView file to be available for download when people look at the webpage version of your model). You also have the option of including a logo with the your model (this will appear at the top of the Page List in the webpage version of your model). When you click Save, an HTML file plus two subdirectories will be created. All you need to do now is to put these three up on the internet. Talk to someone who knows about IT as to how to do this - it is easy to do, you just use what is called FTP to get them up on the internet. If someone sets you up to do this it can be as easy as copying files between directories on your own computer. You can find many examples of DoView webpage versions of models at OutcomesModels.org. 

Step 9. Using your model for other purposes. One of the great advantages of working in this visual way with a DoView visual strategic plan is that if you are asked to do a range of other organization activities you can use the same outcomes model you have developed for strategic planning. There are a series of short videos on how to do this. For instance, you can use it for identifying performance indicators; identifying evaluation questions; for evidence-based practice if you have to prove that you are doing that; for sharing best practice between projects where similar projects are being implemented in different settings; and for results-based (outcomes-focused) contracting. 

[DoView White Paper - Using a DoView Visual Strategic Plan for Smarter Strategic Planning - http://www.doview.com/whitepapers/doview-visual-strategic-plan.html V1-0]