Over the course of the semester, I have been discussing different approaches to what amounts to artifact creation. For the last two postings, I thought I would focus on the next step in the cycle and discuss solution delivery. In week 3 I briefly touch on some of these items, but it is worth highlighting that again for this discussion.
In my business, we found we needed to build a strong team, establish guiding principles, and adopt a shared environment (people, process, and tools) when deploying new solutions for our clients. This need became more critical than what they were currently doing or how they wanted to evolve their processes and supporting solutions. Once a delivery framework is established, these principles and methods can be applied to individual business unit initiatives and projects across the enterprise. The role of EA is to facilitate the movement from current to future state. That change is managed by adopting a common delivery framework and supporting toolkit. This adoption, in turn, tends to reduce complexity and provides a means to deal with the diversity inherent in most business units. This framework should provide the ability to respond to changing business needs rapidly and efficiently.
In essence, the delivery process should facilitate the ability to
- Understanding the objective and key initiatives
- Align those key initiatives and objectives
- Execute activities
- Evaluate output for performance and ongoing improvement.
Given this let's take the rollout of a CRM system as an example.
The following picture depicts this rollout on a swimlane. As you can see the swim lanes show participation from functional groups the last two are the continuous improvement/refinement steps.
Looking at the diagram, I hope it becomes clear why the artifacts discussed in my previous posts become so critical to the actual delivery process, look at the touchpoints across the organization. Even at this high-level one can begin to see the challenges if, for instance, we did not have our SWOT storyboard to refer the group back to during this process.
WEEK 11
What about in the improvement/refinement steps? What if we lacked the GQM output I discussed last week?
WEEK 13
The Gartner article "Advancing the Common Requirements Vision Deliverable" Retrieved April 23, 2016, from
https://online.ist.psu.edu/sites/ea872fusco/files/advancing_the_common_requirements.pdf
directly speaks of the need for an anchor model and using the business requirements to drive common solutions. It also talks about identifying core value adding processes improvement which tied to the improvement refinement step notated in the swimlane.
As I have mentioned the last couple of weeks, I hope this starts to tie together my past posts into a more useful and bigger picture.
As always your comments are welcomed! I look forward to your thoughts on how you have seen project and solution delivery occur in your career.
Hi Joe,
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your experience on creating the artifacts that explain the process that is being taken to achieve a certain goal. I like the way in which you have used the swim lanes diagram to depict the key people across the different phases (understand, align, execute, improve) and explain the work for the CRM rollout. These swim lane diagrams are very effective in communicating roles and responsibilities. I have used swim lanes across phases while creating IT Governance processes to show the roles and responsibilities for getting the work done right. Thanks for tying in your previous posts and sharing the bigger picture.
Veena.
Veena,
DeleteThanks for commenting! No problem, I am a visual person as you might have guessed! I have found the swim-lane approach to work well in communicating back to those involved at the different levels of a project as well. I'm glad you have liked it!
JC
Hi,
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing insights on your experience w.r.t to delivery processes. I like the diagram with the four phases defined as Understand, Align, Execute and Improve. I actually use one that is very similar but with different titles: Define, Train, Execute, and Improve. Defining what is the use case and what we are trying to achieve is important so that everyone can agree on what is the expected result down the road. With Train, I'm more implying investment in training all resources and personas that relate to the project/initiative starting from business and functionality expectations for the business sponsor all the way down to the nitty-gritty hands on training for the resources doing the actual implementation (ex. administrators).