It would have been so cool to test the myriad of features on the Starship Enterprise, not least the Transporter Room. I would have loved to be the first Tester to say "Beam me up Scotty". Unfortunately, I never got that gig, but I did do plenty of other exciting things that often involved taking risks. When your life revolves around risk you quickly learn to develop tools to help you identify, manage and mitigate those risks and my favourite tool for doing this is the Model Office.
An agile organisation requires a current state (baseline) upon which to anchor its future. It also requires an environment within which to reflect this current state. Fundamentally, this environment has the ability to design, model and test each and every future state, not just from a technology perspective but from a whole of business viewpoint. A Model Office provides such an environment and perspective.
Put simply, a Model Office is a physical manifestation and working model of a business (or some designated part thereof). I have been designing and building Model Offices for almost 20 years and I will privide a snapshot of my story during this presentation.
We build and maintain Model Offices to support Change initiatives so that both the business (and technology) can have a shared vision of how a business looks and functions today and how it will look and function once change has been implemented. We built one for a (startup) online supermarket in the U.K. and used it to show everyone from the Board of Directors down to the cleaning staff what their new business would look like and how that would fit into it. It allowed them to "feel" how their business would function and operate before it was created. The Board of this business were so excited about this concept that they held several shareholder events in the room where we built the Model Office. It later became the hub for all their onsite training program.
I will present a Case Study in order to highlight the benefits of a Model Office approach across all phases of the Change Lifecycle.