DoView Planning

How Different People Use DoView Planning

For Any Type of Planning and Implementation

DoView planning and DoView strategy/outcomes diagrams can be used for planning and implementation in any type of organization or sector. It can be used for individual organizations and initiatives. It is also particularly useful for collaborations, joint ventures and sector collaborations where you need to coordinate and focus the activities of a number of parties focused on a common set of outcomes, and you need to work out who is accountable for what.

DoView diagrams are used to identify and communicate outcomes, and the steps believed necessary to achieve them. They are used to identify priorities and make sure that projects/activities are fully aligned with those priorities. In addition, they can be used to identify indicators and evaluation questions and show what level they are being struck at. They also help to clarify accountability when you are delegating and contracting. Lastly, they can be used to report indicators, impact and other evaluation results back onto the boxes in the DoView diagram that they relate to so that such results can easily be fed back for improving performance.

In addition to using DoView Planning for generic planning in any organization, here are some examples of how DoView Planning can be used in particular settings. See the Method page for more details on how to use DoView Planning with any type of organization or initiative.

For Whole-of-Government and Large Corporation Planning

Governments and very large corporations face similar planning and implementation challenges due to their size and complexity. DoView Planning can be used for whole-of-government planning. In the case of large corporations, this area of planning is often referred to as enterprise portfolio management. (It’s worth noting that the DoView legacy app won Gartner Research Cool Vendor status in the enterprise portfolio management category).

In the case of government, DoView Planning can be used for each stage in the Government Planning, Implementation and Reporting Cycle. Large corporations have their own detailed planning cycles, but the same principles apply as for government. Using DoView Planning, each stage in the government or corporate planning process can be made more efficient through the use of DoView Planning’s visual planning approach.

DoView Planning overcomes a major planning and implementation problem faced by large organizations. This is that their size means that there is plenty of opportunity for ‘strategic slippage’ to occur. This happens with traditional planning approaches when they are used to attempt to communicate priorities and strategic intentions down through the different layers of a government bureaucracy or levels within a corporation. It also occurs when either governments or large corporations contract with external suppliers. In DoView Planning, the use of the same DoView strategy/outcomes diagram at all levels in the system prevents strategic slippage. This is because everyone is working off the same page.

A second problem with large organizations is that they can easily become swamped by a large number of KPIs and indicators. It is invaluable to use DoView Planning’s technique of always mapping indicators onto the organization’s DoView diagram. If this is not done, it is very difficult for anyone to check that what is being measured, and hence driving the government or corporation, is the most strategically important things to measure rather than simply being things that are relatively easy to measure. Having the wrong set of indicators exposes you to unknown patches of strategic blindness. See the Government Page under Uses for more details on how to use DoView Planning for government and large organizations.

How Private or Public Sector Purchasers/Funders Can Use DoViews

Purchasers/funders can potentially use DoViews diagrams to quickly understand what suppliers/providers are proposing to do. By using the AI DoView Drawing Prompt, they could pilot using automatically generated DoView diagrams from incoming grant applications, proposals or tenders. By doing this, funders could get a clearer picture of what suppliers/providers are offering and how their offerings connect to the purchasers/funders’ priority outcomes. This could potentially make it faster and easier for them to compare different suppliers/providers’ offerings.

If piloting this approach using typical supplier/provider applications showed that it was useful, they could require suppliers/providers to include a DoView with their applications. Having to draw a DoView of their proposals/tenders would encourage suppliers/providers to think deeply about exactly what they are offering. Suppliers/providers could also use the free AI DoView Drawing Prompt to easily create PowerPoint DoViews of their offerings.

Once grants are awarded or contracts signed, purchasers/funders could integrate all the DoViews of successful proposals/tenders into an overall purchaser/funder-level DoView, showing how what they have funded contributes to the broader outcomes they are seeking. The same DoViews of supplier/provider initiatives could also be used as part of outcomes-focused contracting to ensure that suppliers/providers’ implementation follows what was in their tenders or proposals.

How Researchers Can Use DoViews

Researchers can potentially use DoView diagrams when submitting grant applications, and therefore helping funders see at a glance what their research aims to achieve. This is especially valuable as funders increasingly expect research to have clear links to real-world outcomes. Given the nature of research, doing this is complex and using a DoView diagram can make it much easier to communicate the research’s possible connections to outcomes.

Researchers can also use DoViews to present findings, as many research results are essentially ‘This-Then’ claims. From a broader perspective, creating a DoView of an entire research area would enable easy identification of the focus of different research projects within the larger context of the various research endeavors taking place around a particular topic or sector. See the detailed discussion of using DoView for research planning.

Sharing Best Practice and Benchmarking

DoViews facilitate the rapid sharing and benchmarking of best practice across organizations. Their modular subpage structure allows similar activities or approaches to be identified and compared, even between very different organizations, as long as they have some subparts of their DoView diagram that are similar. AI can help create or adapt sub-pages for benchmarking, allowing comparison of indicators and KPIs to assess performance.

Monitoring and Evaluation Plans

DoView diagrams can serve as the foundation for monitoring and evaluation plans, clearly indicating what is proposed to be measured at each level. This is a much clearer way of communicating monitoring and evaluation plans than traditional text-based plans. If desired, a purchaser or funder could require monitoring and evaluation plans to be presented in a standardised DoView Monitoring and Evaluation plan format, which would speed the process of assessing such plans.

AI Explainability and Management

DoViews can potentially enhance AI explainability and management by visually outlining an AI system’s goals, actions, and risk strategies in a standardized and transparent format. This supports both planning and implementation for AI systems themselves, as well as initiatives involving humans and AI agents collaborating. In addition, there is the potential for AI agents to take prompts users have fed them using everyday language and translate them into a DoView diagram to feed back to the user how they have interpreted their instructions. The user could then interact with the AI system via the DoView diagram to, for instance, communicate the user’s priorities. The AI system could then report back to the user about what progress is being made in regard to different boxes in the DoView diagram. For more information on this, see the relevant DoView Tool.