Enterprise Services Planning (ESP) is a framework of tools that leaders of 21st Century knowledge-work enterprises can apply to their strategic and capacity planning. ESP is often described as the equivalent of MRP for a professional services business. Such businesses employ many educated professionals, who think for a living, perform largely invisible work, and deliver mostly intangible products and services to customers. 

Such businesses are increasingly exposed to VUCA - the conditions of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. It is often futile, under such conditions, to plan specific results, deliverables, and milestones. The VUCA reality quickly tosses such plans out of the window. Does this sound like your enterprise? ESP can help! What you can do is, plan the capacity of your services to sense, respond and deliver the right levels of service that meet customers' purpose. You can plan the mechanisms of feedback to keep your network of services balanced and capable to execute your strategy. You can plan to avoid risks your enterprise can't take and manage the risks it chooses to take. That's what we mean by "planning."

ESP complements the delivery capabilities generated by Kanban "from the middle" and agile approaches "from the bottom up"  and connects them "at the top" with the models and tools you need to manage on an enterprise level.

What will I learn in each track?

Executive Track (4 half-days)

• Overview of strategy
• Organizational risk
• Fitness for purpose
• Custom risk assessment frameworks
• Alignment of strategy and capability
• Survivability assessment

Sample takeaways:

• "Our strategy reviews are dominated by competitive analysis. Fit-for-Purpose gives us a strategic opportunity"
• "Love the risk assessment frameworks. We should implement them right away"
• "Strategy-capability alignment is very powerful. We now see what capabilities we need to invest in to do better in the business we're in"

Product Manager Track (7 half-days)

Executive Track material plus:

• Cost of delay
• Real options
• Demand shaping
• Capacity allocation
• Risk hedging
• Portfolio Kanban

Sample takeaways:

• "I didn't realize there are so many options for managing demand and risks"
• "Our "portfolio" is just a large collection of projects and work-in-process. We can now turn it  into a tool to help us decide which risks to take and how to manage those risks."

Expert Track (10 half-days)

Executive Track and Product Manager's Track material plus:

• Delivery and project forecasting
• Liquidity and volatility
• Scaling
• Working with irrefutable demand
• Managing dependencies
• Dynamic capacity reservation systems

Sample takeaways:

• "Dependencies are a big problem in our large enterprise. Wishing they'd go away isn't helpful. We've learned at least a dozen new options how to manage them better"
• "It was extremely helpful to learn about forecasting and dynamic reservation systems"