by Craig Jones-Stanley, BigPicZap Specialist
BigPicZap (or Zap as it’s known amongst Practitioners) is to business people what Trello (kanban board) is to software developers. It engages and focuses individuals as part of a team to contribute to the needs of the organisation they represent. What makes Big Picture work is that it provides the business context and tools for collaboration in and remote to the workplace; to connect people through a visual representation of the business, and provides aligned thinking and common sense of purpose.
It can be used to describe your business, or your client’s business by its component parts in a single view through a framework in the form of a template, path and symbols. Rather than being prescriptive or assume that every business takes on a standard form, it can be tailored to a specific organisation by framing and naming the different functions or departments and identifying the key people, processes, technology and measures as appropriate to the purpose of your exploration in order to derive challenges and opportunities.
Most importantly however, it aligns these functions along a customer journey and places people at the heart of the business.
As a Practitioner of Big Picture, I use the Zap tool in support of my work with client’s businesses in my role as a Business Architect and Transformation specialist, helping them derive clarity and organisational focus to identify challenges and opportunities, and to be able to share knowledge and insight to harness and leverage benefit from these. What was previously a consulting role, has changed to become more of a facilitation role.
Of key importance to me, and valued by my clients is that the understanding and learning that is uncovered through the use of Zap is retained within the organisation which in turn allows the people and organisation to develop, and engage staff and stakeholders alike in identifying and contributing towards achieving the improvement focus that has been agreed.
Furthermore, unlike traditional change projects, where an organisation is expected to transition from one state to another, BigPic supports organisation agility in terms of representing a visual management information tool that represents a moving picture of an organisations state and focus for continued business improvement. It is no surprise therefore that Big Picture’s mission statement is to be the ‘Huddle Point’ for performing organisations everywhere.
As Zap Specialist, I provide training for existing and new practitioners on the BigPicZap application, and recognise that each Practitioner has a different focus. Whether they are a business owner, leader, executive, trainer, coach, consultant or facilitator, Zap offers them a framework to explore or understand the business/organisation in question, and that they can all use the tool to achieve different outcomes, outcomes that are relevant to them.
Whilst the functionality as described is powerful in itself for driving an innovative approach to engagement and collaboration, there are some killer features that really enrich the experience:
- Enriched Context: The ability to add further visual and information context to symbols or peripheral information such as images, webshots, pdfs, or just to add a weblink to a symbol to refer outwards to more detailed or relevant supporting information
- Shareability & Zapsourcing: Whilst some information maybe sensitive and is to be shared within a closed network, Zap provides the ability to share boards with an open community and through social channels, either as an embedded object in a blog post or link on twitter for example. The functionality allows Practitioners to share with others their content – enabling collaborative crowdsourcing of information around a specific area of interest, or placing a context around the solutions and benefits of the services that they provide for example.
- Ease of Use and Less documentation: Intuitive and user-friendly interface that even non-technical people grasp easily and are able to participate. The application has been designed in such a way as to ensure that technology has been used as an enabler to remote collaboration rather than a barrier. Meeting minutes are a thing of the past, individuals contributions are made and captured to form part of the Big Picture.
To learn more about the product ‘Zap In’ to the application or train to become part of a network of Practitioners. Contact Craig@AstuteFocus.co.uk or Martin.Johnson@YourBigPic.com.
