The importance of good discovery..

The perils of failing to plan properly before starting a project are well-documented (and relevant in all walks of life - just ask anyone who’s had building work done on their house). Any number of smart people have waxed lyrical about the importance of rigorous preparation and careful planning but my favourite quote on the subject comes from the great Yogi Berra, late of the New York Yankees baseball team.

"You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."

At youdo we’ve developed a light-touch discovery process to help organisations get their Sustainability and ESG programmes up and running. Our process starts with scoping the ‘HQ requirement’. What is the problem our client  is looking to address, how are we going to solve it and what are the key milestones and measurement criteria for our engagement? 

This involves discussions with relevant members of the senior management team, sustainability and HR representatives. We provide an initial questionnaire and then follow up with individual meetings (F2F or via webex).

The output is a written presentation which includes;

• objective & requirement definition

• required communications & collateral

• youdo product design

• project plan to launch

• highlight of key issues/roadblocks

The 2nd stage of the process  is ‘Company buy-in’. We develop a top-line presentation for senior leadership and set up webexes to present direction and gather feedback which is collated into a report. If the feedback requires changes to the ‘HQ requirement’ - and it usually does - we provide a revised presentation for sign-off.

The whole process is structured around 40 hours of work conducted over 2-3 weeks. (And generally-speaking, we end up getting to where we were going).

If you’d like to learn more about our discovery process and how it can help your organsation, please get in touch

PS. For anyone interested, here are some more great Yogi-isms.