Quick Summary
Bronson delivered an Enterprise Dashboard Portal strategy for Canadian Blood Services (CBS), completing the engagement within a compressed 6-week schedule.
The work produced 5 to 6 analytics storyboards, each representing a distinct reporting use case aligned to CBS operations and administration.
Bronson engaged CBS executives, business leads, and up to 10 subject matter experts across the organization through structured discovery interviews and virtual workshops.
A four-phase delivery approach (Initiation, Discovery, Analysis, Recommendation) structured the engagement from kickoff through final deliverable acceptance.
Up to 5 virtual workshops were conducted during the Analysis phase, each structured across two focused sessions to maximize participant engagement and minimize fatigue.
Project Overview
Canadian Blood Services (CBS) is a non-profit organization responsible for managing the blood supply across Canada, operating within a complex regulated environment with a broad set of operational and administrative functions. To support data-driven decision making across the organization, CBS was developing an Enterprise Dashboard Portal to serve internal clients with analytics and reporting capabilities. The initiative required a strategic alignment effort to define the portal’s scope, identify priority use cases, and produce analytics storyboards that would guide the portal’s development.
CBS engaged Bronson to serve as the strategy consultant for this initiative, bringing structured discovery, facilitation, and analytical capabilities to a project with a firm deadline: final deliverables were required no later than the week of 18 September 2023. Bronson structured the engagement as a compressed six-week program, deploying a senior strategy consultant supported by subject matter expertise from across the Bronson team to deliver within the accelerated timeline without compromising the depth of stakeholder engagement required.
The engagement was oriented around a clear output: a set of analytics storyboards that translated CBS stakeholder knowledge and operational context into structured, actionable use cases for the Enterprise Dashboard Portal. These storyboards were designed to reflect the needs of key CBS internal clients and the existing analytics capabilities of the organization, providing a practical and defensible foundation for the portal’s continued development.
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The Challenge
Developing an analytics storyboard strategy for a large, complex health organization within a six-week window required disciplined scope management, structured stakeholder engagement, and careful integration of existing CBS knowledge assets alongside new analysis.
- Compressed timeline with a firm deadline. CBS required the completed strategic alignment deliverable no later than the week of 18 September 2023. The six-week schedule left no margin for extended review cycles or unstructured discovery, requiring Bronson to build a delivery approach capable of absorbing ambiguity without slowing progress.
- Translating operational complexity into analytics use cases. CBS operates across multiple lines of business spanning blood supply management, donor services, laboratory operations, logistics, and administration. Identifying and scoping the highest-value reporting use cases across this range of functions required rapid but rigorous stakeholder engagement.
- Building on prior CBS discovery work. CBS had already conducted earlier stakeholder interviews before Bronson’s engagement. The approach required Bronson to absorb, validate, and build on this existing material rather than starting from scratch, adding a layer of knowledge management complexity to an already compressed timeline.
- Multi-stakeholder alignment across business and technical domains. The portal serves internal clients with distinct information needs, from executives requiring high-level operational visibility to operational staff requiring detailed process-level reporting. Aligning these diverse needs into a coherent set of storyboards required structured facilitation capable of surfacing both consensus and areas requiring further definition.
- Virtual workshop format across a distributed participant group. With up to ten subject matter experts involved across the Analysis phase, maintaining engagement quality across a fully virtual format demanded careful workshop design. Poorly structured virtual sessions risk participant fatigue and incomplete findings, both of which would have undermined the storyboard outputs.
- Defining storyboard scope and format in parallel with discovery. The deliverable structure and acceptance criteria were not pre-defined before contract award. Bronson needed to formalize the scope and format of the storyboards during the Initiation phase while simultaneously beginning documentation review, ensuring the discovery work was already generating usable content before the analysis workshops began.
- Balancing “meta” and sub-level storyboard architecture. The engagement needed to produce both a high-level “meta story” representing the overall dashboard portal vision and four to five supporting sub-stories representing individual use cases, requiring coherent narrative architecture across all deliverables rather than a loose collection of independent outputs.
CBS needed a strategy consultant capable of managing a fast-moving, multi-stakeholder engagement and translating diverse organizational knowledge into a clear and actionable analytics vision.
Our Solution
Bronson structured the engagement across four sequential phases, ensuring that scope, discovery, analysis, and recommendations were each given dedicated time while keeping the overall timeline within the six-week constraint.
1. Initiation Phase
Bronson convened a project kickoff with CBS leadership to establish reporting relationships, project communications, and the cadence of regular touchpoints. During this phase Bronson and CBS jointly defined the final deliverable structure and acceptance criteria, ensuring both teams were aligned on what a successful storyboard looked like before analysis began. Bronson also initiated a documentation review of CBS materials in preparation for the Discovery phase, using corporate strategy documents, investment plans, technology governance materials, and existing capability documentation to begin developing a contextual understanding of the CBS analytics environment.
2. Discovery Phase
Bronson reviewed recordings, transcripts, and documentation from CBS’s earlier stakeholder interviews and supplemented this material with additional business context documentation covering operational processes, policies, and strategies. From this review Bronson developed a structured summary of preliminary findings, identifying the degree of consensus on key strategic elements and producing draft storyboard concepts. The Discovery phase outputs included a context diagram of CBS’s current dashboarding capabilities, preliminary content for each storyboard element (vision, scope, priorities, people, process, technology, and resources), and a proposed approach to the Analysis phase for CBS approval. Bronson identified and validated candidate subject areas for the five to six analytics storyboards during this phase.
3. Analysis Phase
The Analysis phase was the core of the engagement, structured around up to five virtual workshops each addressing a distinct storyboard theme. Each workshop followed a structured two-session format: a first session that walked participants through the draft storyboard content developed during Discovery and generated a round-table review with a facilitated discussion; and a second session that built on individual participant review and reflection to finalize the storyboard structure and confirm, clarify, or escalate unresolved elements. Workshop materials were distributed one to two days in advance to orient participants and enable focused discussion. Between sessions, Bronson consolidated participant feedback and identified any items requiring follow-up or escalation to CBS project leadership. The two-session structure was deliberately chosen to prevent the fatigue associated with lengthy virtual meetings while still providing the depth of engagement necessary to produce defensible storyboard outputs.
4. Recommendation Phase
Bronson consolidated all Analysis phase findings and storyboard content into an initial draft deliverable, which was reviewed jointly with CBS to confirm structure and content. Bronson incorporated CBS feedback into the final version of the deliverable, which was accepted by the CBS project authority prior to the target deadline.
Key Deliverables
- Enterprise Dashboard Portal Storyboard Set (5 to 6 Storyboards) – A complete set of analytics storyboards, each presenting a structured reporting use case aligned to CBS operations or administration, covering vision, scope, data requirements, and intended audience for each dashboard theme.
- Meta Story: Enterprise Dashboard Portal Vision – A single overarching context document presenting the strategic vision for the CBS Enterprise Dashboard Portal, summarizing the scope, priorities, and architecture of the full storyboard set in a format suitable for executive review.
- Summary of Preliminary Findings – A structured discovery output documenting the degree of stakeholder consensus on key strategic elements, identified gaps, and a context diagram of existing CBS dashboarding capabilities.
- Proposed Approach to Analysis Phase – A presentation-format document summarizing Discovery phase activities and proposing the detailed structure, themes, and schedule for the Analysis phase workshops, developed for review and approval by CBS before analysis began.
- Virtual Workshop Materials (up to 5 themes) – Pre-workshop materials distributed to participants for each of the five analysis workshops, including participant expectations, draft storyboard content, and relevant summaries for advance review.
- Workshop Findings and Consolidated Storyboard Content – A structured consolidation of outcomes from all Analysis phase sessions, capturing confirmed, undecided, and unresolved storyboard elements with recommended resolutions.
The Impact
Bronson’s engagement delivered a structured, stakeholder-validated analytics storyboard strategy for the CBS Enterprise Dashboard Portal on schedule and within the compressed six-week timeline.
- The 5 to 6 analytics storyboards gave the CBS portal development team a clear, validated set of reporting use cases grounded in actual stakeholder needs rather than assumptions, reducing the risk of building dashboards that do not serve their intended audiences.
- The meta story provided CBS leadership with a consolidated, executive-ready vision for the portal that could be used to align organizational stakeholders and communicate the portal’s strategic value.
- The structured workshop format ensured that up to 10 subject matter experts across business and technical domains contributed meaningfully to the storyboard content without the participant fatigue that often compromises the quality of extended virtual engagements.
- Bronson’s ability to build directly on CBS’s prior discovery materials accelerated the engagement and reduced the burden on CBS stakeholders, allowing the six-week schedule to be met without sacrificing analytical depth.
- The iterative, two-session workshop structure produced storyboard outputs with a higher degree of stakeholder buy-in than a single-session approach would have achieved, as participants had structured time for reflection and individual review between sessions.
- The final deliverable provided CBS with an auditable record of stakeholder input, areas of consensus, and resolved decision points, supporting accountability and providing a defensible foundation for portal investment decisions.
The engagement reflects Bronson’s capacity to structure and execute fast-moving strategic alignment initiatives in complex, multi-stakeholder environments. By combining rigorous discovery methodology with disciplined facilitation and a clear deliverable architecture, Bronson gave Canadian Blood Services a practical and actionable foundation for one of its most visible internal analytics initiatives.
