DoView

Introduction

A DoView outcomes model is the new, more effective way of doing all of our thinking and planning about our projects, organizations, collaborations or coalitions. In the past, if we were planning a project, doing organizational planning, or working on a collaboration amongst multiple projects or organizations, we would have a number of separate jobs we would need to do. These would include: strategic planning, working out our priorities, identifying gaps and overlaps in our activities (or projects), working out who should be doing what, tracking how we're progressing, thinking about how we should evaluate what we're doing, thinking about how to discuss what we're accountable for with our funders, and trying to quickly explain what we're trying to do to our busy and overloaded stakeholders. For most of us, this is a dauntingly long list of time-consuming jobs cluttering up our already busy to-do lists. Often, it's so overwhelming that we just don't know where to start. And, remember, this is all before we actually get to do any of our day-to-day work delivering whatever it is that our project or organization is meant to be delivering!

Enter the DoView outcomes model

Using a DoView outcomes model is the brand new way of doing all of these things for our project or organization, but doing them much less painfully and doing them much faster. Because we can now do them all against exactly the same visual DoView outcomes model we save ourselves heaps of time. Not only this, but because we use a fully visual approach, stakeholders find it much more accessible that the boring old planning documents we used to sweat over. (And, let's be honest, regardless of what they pretend, most stakeholders don't ever read such documents!).

What's the easier and smarter DoView way of doing it?

We just follow the steps below:

1. Draw a DoView visual outcomes model of the high-level outcomes we want to achieve and all of the lower-level steps we need to do to achieve them. 

2. Use the model to do all of the things we need to do in our project or organization regarding high-level planning. E.g. create a 'visual strategic plan; list activities or projects visually and show which steps and outcomes they're aimed at influencing by visually mapping them onto the relevant steps and outcomes; use this mapping to visually work out where there're gaps and overlaps in our activities (we can use exactly the same approach when dealing with discrete 'projects' rather than activities either within a single organization or amongst a number of organizations); list who should be doing what and map them onto the activities or projects; insert indicators (measures of what we're doing) onto the visual outcomes model to track how we're going; insert evaluation questions onto our model asking questions about how effective we are; use the outcomes model in all discussions with our funders so that we can clearly describe the things that it's sensible for us to be held accountable for; and use the outcomes model to quickly explain to our stakeholders exactly what it is that we're trying to do ('a picture is worth a thousand words').

Below is an example of a DoView model with projects (they could be activities) mapped onto it. 

  

Why use the approach?

DoView not only lets us quickly draw our models, it's much more than drawing software in that it automatically stores all the information about the links between boxes in our models (e.g. steps, activities and organizations). It's the world's first true outcomes processor. A word processor lets us efficiently deal with words, DoView lets us efficiently deal with our outcomes and helps us do all the things we need to do in our projects and organizations related to planning, outcomes and results. Once you've built your DoView outcomes model, you can work with it in a range of convenient formats: compact formats which can always be dataprojected and amended in a meeting; letter-sized printed formats; larger poster-sized printed formats; and web page versions of your model you can put up on your project or organization website. 

DoView has deliberately been kept very affordable so all organizations can use it, think of it as the now indispensable Swiss-Army Pocket Knife for doing outcomes work in projects or organizations. Download DoView now, start building your visual outcomes model and using it to make your project or organizational life much easier. 

For a How-To Guide on the way you can build a DoView visual strategic plan see Doing Strategic Planning Better by Using a DoView Visual Strategic Plan.