Restarting a university hospital's digital transformation project

The context in which Map & Match was used

Our partner MyDevPro was supporting the digital transformation programme of one of its clients, a French university hospital (CHU). The project had been suspended since the start of the Covid-19 crisis, when every resource in the hospital was pulled into patient care and emergency management. In that context, MyDevPro's support and the Map & Match platform were what made it possible to bring the IT department back onto the digital transformation project.

What was the Map & Match platform used for?

The team faced three challenges:

• Choosing its priority objectives, for the project and for the way the team works.
• Acting on those priorities.
• Preparing the IT department for the new needs the crisis had brought to the surface.

The first priority in re-engaging the team was to strengthen the way people work together and to start redistributing roles. MyDevPro's support therefore focused on the behaviours that build trust and the behaviours that destroy it, across the three dimensions of trust — competence, communication and the relational contract.

How MyDevPro used Map & Match on the project

Step 1: alongside the 360° diagnosis carried out in 2019 for the manager in their environment, the first task was to rebuild trust by sharing that diagnosis with the whole team.

Step 2: the aim here was to re-engage people and strengthen collaborative working. Every team member discovered their T5 Profile^TM and was debriefed individually. A diagnosis of how the team works was first shared with the manager, then with everyone, to build a plan for success. A team seminar followed, to align everyone around a shared roadmap.

Step 3: working from the standard map of key agile roles offered by Map & Match, the leadership team redistributed some roles and put dedicated support in place for others. That reallocation is what made the agile processes stick in the way the project ran.

Step 4: the final step is follow-up — a review point that makes the results and the new ways of working last.

What Map & Match added to the diagnosis and the support

1) On how the team works

Reading the team as a whole through Map Team showed that:

• The team has real potential for complementarity: all five dynamics that any system needs in order to function are active.
• Its natural appetites for delivering and finishing projects (Black), its management capability (Red) and its taste for a challenge (Green) are exactly what an IT department needs to succeed.
• The gaps it revealed were what kept the team from working at its best. The Regulators family (Yellow) was barely represented, which explains the team's tendency to work in silos and to neglect the links that keep understanding and coherence alive on a project. The absence of Scouts*, for instance, shows how little the team spontaneously looks ahead, anticipates risks in the project or puts itself in a user's shoes. The absence of Conceptors* explains why the team rushes into software development without taking the time to formalise the stages of a project or to build the book of processes and methods that would let it industrialise each phase of a new development. And the absence of a Mediator* confirmed the risk of the group losing trust in itself.

2) On the redistribution of roles

With an analysis that is constructive and free of judgement, the manager was able to redistribute roles by matching natural talents to what the digital transformation project actually required.

The map of key agile roles showed objectively why some people were barely engaged in their work. Acting on that — and staying constructive throughout — the manager redistributed roles to fit natural talents to the work at hand, which led to the creation of a new Scrum Master position (see below).

What the client saw three months later

At the follow-up review, four months after the engagement, the manager shared the following benefits with MyDevPro, and attributed them to Map & Match:

• Renewed engagement from the people who were repositioned, who also expressed relief and confidence.
• Lower turnover across the digital transformation teams.
• A team that works effectively on continuously improving its agile practice.
• Shorter development lead times, thanks to a stronger ability to anticipate needs and design solutions within the team.

Using Map & Match turned the health crisis into an opportunity, by embedding the principles of agility in the way the IT department works.

*Scout: the challenge of the unknown is what drives them. They can project themselves, and project actions or plans, without being held back by consequences or obstacles. Anticipation is one of their defining traits.

*Conceptor: giving an idea its shape is what drives them. They are the ones who anchor innovation in the life of a business, and they enjoy turning an idea into a plan of action.

*Mediator: keeping a group together is what drives them. They know how to move people or a project forward while preserving a form of balance. They value cohesion.