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Driving Implementation—From Blueprint to Impact • 245

and Booz Allen colleagues, the hope was that new hires would be happier
working at the firm, and therefore perform better, provide more value to
clients, and ultimately drive business growth.
It’s one thing to come up with clear program objectives, but quite another
to implement change. The latter requires a solid project management effort
that addresses the business case created during the diagnostic phase, trans-
lates it into a coherent blueprint, and executes on this blueprint. As we have
discussed throughout this book, onboarding can only attain the Onboarding
Margin if it’s fully systemic rather than a series of standalone tools and
programs. The complexity of changing and integrating business processes
while still maintaining business operations requires thoughtful blueprinting
and an ongoing effort to gain organizational buy-in around the blueprint.
Just as an architect tasked with redesigning an entire building drafts formal
plans to help organize all the changes that renovation will require—while
simultaneously gaining stakeholder and building owners’ support for those
changes—so too must change agents within an organization execute a
formal and detailed plan. This is critical to identifying the key issues and
achieving success. This chapter offers some general advice for bringing
onboarding redesign efforts to fruition, using Booz Allen and its award-
winning onboarding redesign as an illustrative example.

Creating a Blueprint

In Booz Allen’s case, development of a blueprint took place after a criti-
cal second phase of the diagnostic process: Stakeholder Analysis. Upon
gaining consensus around program opportunities and objectives, the team
began work documenting the requirements of each stakeholder group
mapped as essential for Booz Allen to more successfully onboard new
hires. Given the organization’s size and complexity—the firm has more
than 45 regional offices across the United States that serve three markets
and span more than 15 different business areas—the list of requirements
reached into the hundreds. It quickly became apparent that most of these
line items didn’t actually drive new hire excitement or create new strate-
gic value for the business. Rather, many of them were administrative items
that merely needed to be addressed—important tasks, but not the essence
of what makes onboarding desirable for a business.