Following a long stint at one of our largest clients, mainly working on Service Management transformation and a review of their Enterprise Architecture capability, I moved into the role of Business Design Authority at a smaller, more dynamic client in October last year.
This is a great opportunity for me to use all of the experience I have gained in my 15 year career to help the client develop a more structured approach to understanding and documenting strategy, processes, structures and requirements. The client has clear business objectives including significant growth within current markets, entry to new markets, improving consistency and effectiveness of their processes and doing all of this in a controlled and sustainable manner.
We could have come in and tried to impose a rigid top-down architectural approach. We could have focused on the lowest level requirements for their new core business system and worked bottom-up. But neither of those would have worked in isolation.
So we’ve taken a middle-out approach. Sort of. What we have actually done is to be pragmatic in helping to make sure that progress is being made against key business milestones and deliverables, whilst bringing in more rigour and structure to the way that things are done. For example…
We’ve confirmed that the strategy, principles and business objectives for the next 5 years are clearly understood and communicated.
We’ve worked with key stakeholders to define and document a new product that will allow the client to enter their key new market segment. We’ve taken this product definition and assessed it for impacts throughout the organisation – what changes to areas such as people, processes, information and technology are needed in order to sell and service the product? And now we’re delving into the detail of each of these areas to ensure that there will be “just enough” capability in place to be able to meet the immediate needs of the business – but in a way that can be scaled quickly as demand for the product increases.
We’re looking at existing processes and have brought in a method and templates for process documentation from “Level 1″ right down to “work instructions” where necessary.
We’ve mapped the entire Application Landscape – a few larger/core systems in a sea of Access databases and Excel spreadsheets. And we’re working on a strategy that will gradually bring more of the “sea” under tighter control, whilst keeping some of the existing flexibility and adaptability. We’re also looking at how and where the applications can be hosted to best meet the needs of the business.
And yes, we’re also keeping a careful eye on the detailed requirements for the new core business system and elsewhere – because, as we all know, the devil is always in the detail.
I could go on. But you get the idea. It’s about doing whatever adds value NOW, but with an eye on a more structured, sustainable, strategic future. It’s about saying what you’ll do and doing it. It’s about keeping the communications channels open so that the whole organisation can find out what’s going on, how this programme of change will help them and how they can help the success of the programme.
And it’s about having some fun along the way!
Slainte!
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