Unit 2
How David Eaves teaches Unit 2 (part 2)
Wardley Mapping
What is this page?
This is a detailed breakdown of how David Eaves, a Lecturer at the University College London's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (UCL IIPP), teaches the contents of Unit 2 of the open access syllabus developed by Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age. Read how part one of Unit 2 is taught here.
This page is part of a series of twenty-five classes that David developed originally for the Harvard Kennedy School's master and executive education programs, where he taught for eight years, and are now taught at UCL's master and applied learning programs.
We believe presenting diverse ways to teach the syllabus will help others adopt and teach the material in a range of contexts. See here how Konstanz University's Prof Ines Mergel teaches the same unit.
Who is this page for?
This page was developed for university faculty who teach public administrators or master's levels students in public policy and public administration. This material may also be suitable for teaching to upper year undergraduates.
Class Overview
When should an organization invest in new technologies? How does this choice change as technologies evolve? What processes or technologies should be outsourced? Questions like these are hard for managers to answer - particularly as they will frequently not be expert in the specific technologies themselves - leaving them dependent on experts' views. In this class, a new tool is introduced - Wardley Mapping - which breaks down a service into its component pieces to create a representation of the landscape in which an organization operates. Wardley Mapping has proven particularly helpful in bridging the gap between generalist decision makers and technical experts around questions involving digital technologies and practices. In addition to presenting the tool, other applications of the Wardley mapping are discussed, such as helping understand which digital skills an organization needs and why it is hard to innovate in government.
This Class' Learning Objectives
By the end of this lecture students should be able to:
Explain that digital systems are made of components which are connected together to solve problems.
Understand that components are of different qualities and maturities, and that governments and public servants have to make choices about which ones to deploy.
How this class relates to the Digital Era Competencies
💡This class touches upon each of the eight competencies, but has a specific focus on four of them:
Assigned Reading and Practical Resources
As they work through the readings in advance, students should have in mind the following questions to help them prepare for class:
Can you think of a technology that, during your lifetime, has moved from custom build to commodity? What was it? How has the way that technology is described and used changed over that time?
Think of employees or colleagues you have worked with in the past. Can you identify one who was a pioneer? One that was a settler? One that was a planner? What traits did each one has that causes you to identify them as such? What made them effective on a project? What made them ineffective
Can you think of a government project where a custom built technology was adopted where a commodity or product might have worked just as well? Why - in your mind - was the wrong decision made? How would you use a Wardley map to persuade a decision maker otherwise in the future?
Core Reading (Required)
“Finding a Path” [Chapter 2] (2016), Chapter of a series of Articles by Simon Wardley
Situation Normal, Everything Must Change (2015), Keynote Video by Simon Wardley
Optional Reading
Technological revolutions and techno-economic paradigms (2009), Academic Article by Carlota Perez
Detailed Class Breakdown
Class plan: 75 minutes
See David's slides for this class.
The sections below describe the suggested dynamics of each part of the class. The videos were edited to only display the most relevant parts of each section:
The sections below describe the dynamics of each part of the class:
The traditional way of mapping systems – 20'
The goal of this section is to highlight the limits of traditional technical schemas and how we ask decisions makers to make decisions about technology.
Purpose
When important decisions around systems have to be made, such as what to outsource or migrate to a new technology, decision makers are often presented with a visual representation of the system - a schema of some form. Most often, however, such schemas are of little use to those without sufficient technical expertise leaving many managers confused or beholden to their technical experts.
Exercise
To illustrate this point, David invites students to reflect on moments they'd been involved in the updating of a service or system and what assets the technical experts shared to explain both what was happening and why it was necessary.
The purpose of this exercise is surface:
how often the students, and more senior decision makers struggle to make well informed decisions about technology
reinforce how reliant they are on experts
that they have little or low capacity to challenge experts or see how proposals fit into a strategic landscape
how to allocate limited resources to improve and manage technology in a way that will maximize its impact on the organization
Video of David teaching this segment
Simon Wardley's Vision - 25'
This section's goal is to outline a different way of visualizing technological components or processes, the Wardley Mapping, and to discuss what is so innovative behind Wardley's two-axis diagram.
Purpose
A better way of visualizing systems to improve decision making by non-experts is Wardley Mapping. Wardley mapping is similar to more traditional technical schemas in that in breaks down a system into its subcomponents. However, it is novel in that it arranges those components along two axis: the y axis places them according to their "visibility" to the end user (value chain) and the y axis looks at the component's maturity. In this section, David explains what is behind the choice for each axis and why this new approach allows for better decision making.
The purpose of this section is to highlight how the model works - ideally be mapping an example system. And how this Wardley Mapping allows for better decision making because it makes it easier to visualize the maturity of a component or product and what value it generates for the users.
Discussion
In an ideal class, students would "map" a system they are familiar with. For example, when not virtual, David often has the students break into groups and first brainstorm the components that might make up Canvas (the student learning platform used in their class) and then to map those components on a Wardley Map.
Video of David teaching this segment
The Map and Skill Sets - 10'
This section explains how to use the Wardley Map to understand the different skill sets an organization needs.
Purpose
As a technological component or process matures, the skills required in to develop or maintain it change. In the early stages of ideation, there often exits a high degree of uncertainty which makes 'agile' methodologies more appropriate. As both the technology and the practices around it evolve and become more standardized more structured management methodologies - such as waterfall or SixSigma - become more appropriate. Wardley mapping becomes a helpful tool to ascertain what skills are needed for different projects across an organization, or even within different parts of a single project.
Discussion
Citing Wardley, David explains this relationship and presents three types of workers and their associated skill sets:
Pioneers: good at creating and iterating fast, work with agile-like methodologies.
Settlers: help scale and formalize the new technologies, ideas and practices.
Town planners: who document and standardize practices and enable incremental improvements.
This discussion's goal is to have students recognize that no one approach is universally appropriate. It is also to let students see and place themselves, their colleagues and the projects they have worked on, on this map. Finally, by the end of this section, David reflects on how governments are used to working with town planners, even in new projects, and the consequences that follow.
Video of David teaching this segment
Other applications of the Wardley Mapping - 15'
This section's goal is twofold: to explore other scenarios and practices in which the Wardley framework can be applied to and discuss why it is hard to innovate in governments.
Discussion
In this first part of this section In this section, David uses Wardley Mapping to analyze the adoption of both technologies and practices such as "cloud computing", "agile development", "blockchain" and "procurement and budgeting." The purpose is twofold. First is to let student gain further familiarity with Wardley Mapping. The second is to highlight how a map will differ from organization to organization even when discussion the same technology.
Wardley Map's can also be used to assess more than technology. Beyond analyzing products, features and practices, the Wardley's framework can be insightful to understand why it is hard for bureaucracies to adopt new practices. To make this clear, David asks students to think about a good practice in government and reflect on the cumulative capital (social, monetary and other) that was spent in establishing it. New ideas or practices that threaten to displace an established practice are not just scary because they are new, but because they make all that accumulated capital obsolete. The purpose is to outline why resistance to change may be rational from an institutional perspective and how mapping the maturity of practices can help inform a strategy to speed up their adoption.
Video of David teaching this segment
Final Reflections - 15'
This section's goal is to bring everything together and reflect on how the Wardley Map can help in the decision making process about digital technologies.
Discussion
In this class's opening section, David posed a question about outsourcing parts of a hypothetical system. To illustrate the benefits of the Wardley map, he returns to this example and ask for student feedback based on using the new framework.
A Wardley Map of a system highlights traits the instructor can reference during the discussion, such as:
When technologies are more standardized it's usually easier to outsource them;
The number of connections a component has can be a window into the complexity of outsourcing it;
The closer a component is too close to the user, the more it may be customized to meet their specific needs;
Components lower down in the value chain are not necessarily less important, they are just less visible to customers.
Wardley Mapping will not provide a definitive answer to every question about outsourcing, but it will enable a generalist unfamiliar with the specifics of the technology to be better positioned to ask good questions and make a strategic assessments of the options.
Video of David teaching this segment
Common questions from students faculty could prepare for:
- What is technology stack?
- Does a company's stage affect the distribution of planners and town planners that are needed?
Next Classes
How David Eaves Teaches Unit 3 (part one)
How David Eaves teaches Unit 3 (part two)
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Acknowledgements
David Eaves would like to note that this material was made possible by numerous practitioners and other faculty who have generously shared stories, pedagogy and their practices. David is also grateful to the students of DPI 662 at the Harvard Kennedy School for enriching the course and providing consent to have the material and questions shared. Finally, an enormous thank you must be given to Beatriz Vasconcellos, who helped assemble and organize the content on this page.