Make the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis

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  • It can be difficult to secure alignment between the many lines of business, IT included, in your organization.
  • Historically, we have drawn a dividing line between IT and "the business.”
  • The reality of organizational politics and stakeholder bias means that, with selection and prioritization, sometimes the highest value option is dismissed to make way for the loudest voice’s option.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Enterprise business analysis can help you stop the debate between IT and “the business,” as it sees everyone as part of the business. It can effectively break down silos, support the development of holistic strategies to address internal and external risks, and remove the bias and politics in decision making all too common in organizations.
  • The business analyst is the only role that can connect the strategic with the tactical, the systems, and the operations and do so objectively. It is the one source to show how people, process, and technology connect and relate, and the most skilled can remove bias and politics from their lens of view.
  • Maturity can’t be rushed. Build your enterprise business analysis program on a solid foundation of leading and consistent business analysis practices to secure buy-in and have a program that is sustainable in the long term.

Impact and Result

Let’s make the case for enterprise business analysis!

  • Organizations that have higher business analysis maturity and deploy enterprise analysis deliver better quality outcomes, with higher value, lower cost, and higher user satisfaction.
  • Business analysts should be contributing at the strategic level, as they need to understand multiple horizons simultaneously and be able to zoom in and out as the context calls for it. Business analysts aren’t only for projects.

Make the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis Research & Tools

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

1. Make the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis Storyboard – Take your business analysis from tactics to strategy.

  • Make the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis Storyboard

2. Communicate the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis Template – Make the case for enterprise business analysis.

  • Communicate the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis
[infographic]

Further reading

Make the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis

Putting the strategic and tactical puzzle together.

Analyst Perspective

We commonly recognize the value of effective business analysis at a project or tactical level. A good business analysis professional can support the business by identifying its needs and recommending solutions to address them.
Now, wouldn't it be great if we could do the same thing at a higher level?
Enterprise (or strategic) business analysis is all about seeing that bigger picture, an approach that makes any business analysis professional a highly valuable contributor to their organization. It focuses on the enterprise, not a specific project or line of business.
Leading the business analysis effort at an enterprise level ensures that your business is not only doing things right, but also doing the right things; aligned with the strategic vision of your organization to improve the way decisions are made, options are analyzed, and successful results are realized.

Vincent Mirabelli

Vincent Mirabelli
Principal Research Director, Applications Delivery and Management
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

  • Difficulty properly aligning between the many lines of business in your organization.
  • Historically, we have drawn a dividing line between IT and the business.
  • The reality of organizational politics and stakeholder bias means that, with selection and prioritization, sometimes the highest value option is dismissed in favor of the loudest voice.

Common Obstacles

  • Difficulty aligning an ever-changing backlog of projects, products, and services while simultaneously managing risks, external threats, and stakeholder expectations.
  • Many organizations have never heard of enterprise business analysis and only see the importance of business analysts at the project and delivery level.
  • Business analysis professionals rarely do enough to advocate for a seat at the strategic tables in their organizations.

Info-Tech's Approach

Let's make the case for enterprise business analysis!

  • Organizations that have higher business analysis maturity and deploy enterprise business analysis deliver better quality outcomes with higher value, lower cost, and higher user satisfaction.
  • Business analysts aren't only for projects. They should contribute at the strategic level, since they need to understand multiple horizons simultaneously and be able to zoom in and out as the context requires.

Info-Tech Insight

Enterprise business analysis can help you reframe the debate between IT and the business, since it sees everyone as part of the business. It can effectively break down silos, support the development of holistic strategies to address internal and external risks, and remove bias and politics from decision making.

Phase 1

Build the case for enterprise business analysis

Phase 1

Phase 2

1.1 Define enterprise business analysis

1.2 Identify your pains and opportunities

2.1 Set your vision

2.2 Define your roadmap and next steps

2.3 Complete your executive communications deck

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

  • 1.1.1 Discuss how business analysis is used in our organization
  • 1.1.2 Discuss your disconnects between strategy and tactics
  • 1.2.1 Identify your pains and opportunities

This phase involves the following participants:

  • Business analyst(s)
  • Organizational business leaders
  • Any other relevant stakeholders

How business analysis supports our success today

Delivering value at the tactical level

Effective business analysis helps guide an organization through improvements to processes, products, and services. Business analysts "straddle the line between IT and the business to help bridge the gap and improve efficiency" in an organization (CIO, 2019).
They are most heavily involved in:

  • Defining needs
  • Modeling concepts, processes, and solutions
  • Conducting analysis
  • Maintaining and managing requirements
  • Managing stakeholders
  • Monitoring progress
  • Doing business analysis planning
  • Conducting elicitation

In a survey, business analysts indicated that of their total working time, they spend 31% performing business analysis planning and 41% performing elicitation and analysis (PMI, 2017).

By including a business analyst in a project, organizations benefit by:
(IAG, 2009)

87%

Reduced time overspending

75%

Prevented budget overspending

78%

Reduction in missed functionality

1.1.1 Discuss how business analysis is used in your organization

15-30 minutes

  1. Gather the appropriate stakeholders to discuss their knowledge, experience, and perspectives on business analysis. This should relate to their experience and not a future or aspirational usage.
  2. Have a team member facilitate the session.
  3. Brainstorm and document all shared thoughts and perspectives.
  4. Synthesize those thoughts and perspectives and record the results for the group to review and discuss.
  5. Transfer the results to the Communicate the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis template

Input

  • Stakeholder knowledge and experience

Output

  • A shared understanding of how your organization leverages its business analysis function

Materials

  • Whiteboard/Flip charts
  • Collaborative whiteboard
  • Communicate the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis template

Participants

  • Business analyst(s)
  • Organizational business leaders
  • Any other relevant stakeholders

Download the Communicate the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis template

Executives and leadership are satisfied with IT when there is alignment between tactics and goals

Info-Tech's CIO Business Vision Survey data highlights the importance of IT projects in supporting the business to achieve its strategic goals.

However, Info-Tech's CEO-CIO Alignment Survey (N=124) data indicates that CEOs perceive IT as poorly aligned with the business' strategic goals.

Info-Tech's CIO-CEO Alignment Diagnostics

43%

of CEOs believe that business goals are going unsupported by IT.

60%

of CEOs believe that IT must improve understanding of business goals.

80%

of CIOs/CEOs are misaligned on the target role of IT.

30%

of business stakeholders support their IT departments.

Addressing problems solely with tactics does not always have the desired effect

94%

Source: "Out of the Crisis", Deming (via Harvard Business Review)

According to famed management and quality thought leader and pioneer W. Edwards Deming, 94% of issues in the workplace are systemic cause significant organizational pain.

Yet we continue to address them on the surface, rather than acknowledge how ingrained they are in our culture, systems, and processes.

For example, we:

  • Create workarounds to address process and solution constraints
  • Expect that poor (or lack of ) leadership can be addressed in a course or seminar
  • Expect that "going Agile" will resolve our problems, and that decision making, governance, and organizational alignment will happen organically.

Band-aid solutions rarely have the desired effect, particularly in the long-term.

Our solutions should likewise focus on the systemic/macro environment. We can do this via projects, products and services, but those don't always address the larger issues.

If we take the work our business analysis currently does in defining needs and solutions, and elevate this to the strategic level, the results can be impactful.

Many organizations would benefit from enhancing their business analysis maturity

The often-overlooked strategic value of the role comes with maturing your practices.

Only 18% of organizations have mature (optimized or established) business analysis practices.

With that higher level of maturity comes increased levels of capability, efficiency, and effectiveness in delivering value to people, processes, and technology. Through such efforts, they're better equipped and able to connect the strategy of their organization to the projects, processes, and products they deliver.

They shift focus from "figuring business analysis out" to truly unleashing its potential, with business analysts contributing in strategic and tactical ways.

an image showing the following data: Optimized- 5; Established- 13; Improving- 37; Starting- 25; Ad hoc- 21

(Adapted from PMI, 2017)

Info-Tech Insight

Business analysts are best suited to connect the strategic with the tactical, the systems, and the operations. They maintain the most objective lens regarding how people, process, and technology connect and relate, and the most skilled of them can remove bias and politics from their perspective.

1.1.2 Discuss your disconnects between strategy and tactics

30-60 minutes

    1. Gather the appropriate stakeholders to discuss their knowledge, experience, and perspectives regarding failures that resulted from disconnects between strategy and tactics.
    2. Have a team member facilitate the session.
    3. Brainstorm and document all shared thoughts and perspectives.
    4. Synthesize those thoughts and perspectives and record the results.
    5. Transfer the results to the Communicate the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis template.

Input

  • Stakeholder knowledge and experience

Output

  • A shared understanding and list of failures due to disconnects between strategy and tactics

Materials

  • Whiteboard/Flip charts
  • Collaborative whiteboard
  • Communicate the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis template

Participants

  • Business analyst(s)
  • Organizational business leaders
  • Any other relevant stakeholders

Download the Communicate the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis template

Defining enterprise business analysis

Terms may change, but the function remains the same.

Enterprise business analysis (sometimes referred to as strategy analysis) "…focuses on defining the future and transition states needed to address the business need, and the work required is defined both by that need and the scope of the solution space. It covers strategic thinking in business analysis, as well as the discovery or imagining of possible solutions that will enable the enterprise to create greater value for stakeholders and/or capture more value for itself."
(Source: "Business Analysis Body of Knowledge," v3)

Define the function of enterprise business analysis

This is a competitive advantage for mature organizations.

Organizations with high-performing business analysis programs experience an enhanced alignment between strategy and operations. This contributes to improved organizational performance. We see this in financial (69% vs. 45%) and strategic performance (66% vs. 21%), also organizational agility (40% vs. 14%) and management of operational projects (62% vs. 29%). (PMI, 2017)

When comparing enterprise with traditional business analysis, we see stark differences in the size and scope of their view, where they operate, and the role they play in organizational decision making.

Enterprise Traditional
Decision making Guides and influences Executes
Time horizon 2-10 years 0-2 years
Focus Strategy, connecting the strategic to the operational Operational, optimizing how business is done, and keeping the lights on
Domain

Whole organization

Broader marketplace

Only stakeholder lines of business relevant to the current project, product or service
Organizational Level Executive/Leadership Project

(Adapted from Schulich School of Business)

Info-Tech Insight

Maturity can't be rushed. Build your enterprise business analysis program on a solid foundation of leading and consistent business analysis practices to secure buy-in and have a program that is sustainable in the long term.

An image showing the percentages of high- and low- maturity organizations, for the following categories: Financial performance; Strategy implementation; Organizational agility; Management of projects.

(Adapted from PMI, 2017)

How enterprise business analysis is used to improve organizations

The biggest sources of project failure include:

  • Wrong (or poor) requirements
  • Unrealistic (or incomplete) business case
  • Lack of appropriate governance and oversight
  • Poor implementation
  • Poor benefits management
  • Environmental changes

Source: MindTools.com, 2023.

Enterprise business analysis addresses these sources and more.

It brings a holistic view of the organization, improving collaboration and decision making across the many lines of business, effectively breaking down silos.

In addition to ensuring we're doing the right things, not just doing things right in the form of improved requirements and more accurate business cases, or ensuring return on investment (ROI) and monitoring the broader landscape, enterprise business analysis also supports:

  • Reduced rework and waste
  • Understanding and improving operations
  • Making well-informed decisions through improved objectivity/reduced bias
  • Identifying new opportunities for growth and expansion
  • Identifying and mitigating risk
  • Eliminating projects and initiatives that do not support organizational goals or objectives
  • A career-pathing option for business analysts

Identify your pains and opportunities

There are many considerations in enterprise business analysis.

Pains, gains, threats, and opportunities can come at your organization from anywhere. Be it a new product launch, an international expansion, or a new competitor, it can be challenging to keep up.

This is where an enterprise business analyst can be the most helpful.

By keeping a pulse on the external and internal environments, they can support growth, manage risks, and view your organization through multiple lenses and perspectives to get a single, complete picture.

External

Internal

Identifying competitive forces

In the global environment

Organizational strengths and weaknesses

  • Monitoring and maintaining your competitive advantage.
  • Understanding trends, risks and threats in your business domain, and how they affect your organization.
  • Benchmarking performance against like and unlike organizations, to realize where you stand and set a baseline for continuous improvement and business development.
  • Leveraging tools and techniques to scan the broader landscape on an ongoing basis. Using PESTLE analysis, they can monitor the political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental factors that impact when, where, how, and with who you conduct your business and IT operations.
  • Supporting alignment between a portfolio or program of projects and initiatives.
  • Improving alignment between the various lines of business, who often lack full visibility outside of their silo, and can find themselves clashing over time, resources, and attention from leaders.
  • Improving solutions and outcomes through objective option selection.

1.2.1 Identify your pains and opportunities

30-60 minutes

  1. As a group, generate a list of the current pains and opportunities facing your organization. You can focus on a particular type (competitive, market, or internal) or leave it open. You can also focus on pains or opportunities separately, or simultaneously.
  2. Have a team member facilitate the session.
  3. Record the results for the group to review, discuss, and prioritize.
    1. Discuss the impact and likelihood of each item. This can be formally ranked and quantified if there is data to support the item or leveraging the wisdom of the group.
    2. Prioritize the top three to five items of each type, as agreed by the group, and document the results.
  4. Transfer the results to the Communicate the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis template.

Download the Communicate the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis template

Input

  • Attendee knowledge
  • Supporting data, if available

Output

  • A list of identified organizational pains and opportunities that has been prioritized by the group

Materials

  • Whiteboard/Flip charts
  • Collaborative whiteboard
  • Communicate the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis template

Participants

  • Business analyst(s)
  • Organizational business leaders
  • Any other relevant stakeholders

Phase 2

Prepare the foundations for your enterprise business analysis program

Phase 1

Phase 2

1.1 Define enterprise business analysis

1.2 Identify your pains and opportunities

2.1 Set your vision

2.2 Define your roadmap and next steps

2.3 Complete your executive communications deck

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

  • 2.1.1 Define your vision and goals
  • 2.1.2 Identify your enterprise business analysis inventory
  • 2.2.1 Now, Next, Later

This phase involves the following participants:

  • Business analyst(s)
  • Organizational business leaders
  • Any other relevant stakeholders

Set your vision

Your vision becomes your "north star," guiding your journey and decisions.

When thinking about a vision statement for enterprise business analysis, think about:

  • Who are we doing this for? Who will benefit?
  • What do our business partners need? What do our customers need?
  • What value do we provide them? How can we best support them?
  • Why is this special/different from how we usually do business?

Always remember: Your goal is not your vision!

Not knowing the difference will prevent you from both dreaming big and achieving your dream.

Your vision represents where you want to go. It's what you want to do.

Your goals represent how you want to achieve your vision.

  • They are a key element of operationalizing your vision.
  • Your strategy, initiatives, and features will align with one or more goals.

Info-Tech Best Practice

Your vision shouldn't be so far out that it doesn't feel real, nor so short term that it gets bogged down in details. Finding balance will take some trial and error and will be different depending on your organization.

2.1.1 Define your vision and goals

1-2 hours

  1. Gather the appropriate stakeholders to discuss their vision for enterprise business analysis. It should address the questions used in framing your vision statement.
  2. Have a team member facilitate the session.
  3. Review your current organizational vision and goals.
  4. Discuss and document all shared thoughts and perspectives on how enterprise business analysis can align with the organizational vision.
  5. Synthesize those thoughts and perspectives to create a vision statement.
  6. Transfer the results to the Communicate the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis template.

Download the Communicate the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis template

Input

  • Stakeholder vision, knowledge, and experience
  • Current organizational vision and goals

Output

  • A documented vision and goals for your enterprise business analysis program

Materials

  • Whiteboard/Flip charts
  • Collaborative whiteboard
  • Communicate the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis template

Participants

  • Business analyst(s)
  • Organizational business leaders
  • Any other relevant stakeholders

Components of successful enterprise business analysis programs

Ensure you're off to the best start by examining where you are and where you want to go.

Training

  • Do the current team members have the right level of training?
  • Can we easily obtain training to close any gaps?

Competencies and capabilities

  • Do our business analysts have the right skills, attributes, and behaviors to be successful?

Structure and alignment

  • Would the organizational culture support enterprise business analysis (EBA)?
  • How might we structure the EBA unit to maximize effectiveness?
  • How can we best support the organization's goals and objectives?

Methods and processes

  • How do we plan on managing the work to be done?
  • Can we define our processes and workflows?

Tools, techniques, and templates

  • Do we have the most effective tools, techniques, and templates?

Governance

  • How will we make decisions?
  • How will the program be managed?

2.1.2 Identify your enterprise business analysis inventory

30-60 minutes

  1. Gather the appropriate stakeholders to discuss the current business analysis assets, which could be leveraged for enterprise business analysis. This includes people, processes, and technologies which cover skills, knowledge, resources, experience, knowledge, and competencies. Focus on what the organization currently has, and not what it needs.
  2. Have a team member facilitate the session.
  3. Record the results for the group to review and discuss.
  4. Transfer the results to the Communicate the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis template.

Download the Communicate the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis template

Input

  • Your current business analysis assets and resources Stakeholder knowledge and experience

Output

  • A list of assets and resources to enable enterprise business analysis

Materials

  • Whiteboard/Flip charts
  • Collaborative whiteboard
  • Communicate the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis template

Participants

  • Business analyst(s)
  • Organizational business leaders
  • Any other relevant stakeholders

Define your roadmap and next steps

What do we have? What do we need?

From completing the enterprise business analysis inventory, you will have a comprehensive list of all available assets.

The next question is, how can this be leveraged to start building for the future?

To operationalize enterprise business analysis, consider:

  • What do we still need to do?
  • How important are the identified gaps? Can we still operate?
  • What decisions do we need to make?
  • What stakeholders do we need to involve? Have we engaged them all?

Lay out your roadmap

Taking steps to mature your enterprise business analysis practice.

The Now, Next, Later technique is a method for prioritizing and planning improvements or tasks. This involves breaking down a list of tasks or improvements into three categories:

  • Now tasks are those that must be completed immediately. These tasks are usually urgent or critical, and they must be completed to keep the project or organization running smoothly.
  • Next tasks are those that should be completed soon. These tasks are not as critical as Now tasks, but they are still important and should be tackled relatively soon.
  • Later tasks are those that can be completed later. These tasks are less critical and can be deferred without causing major problems.

By using this technique, you can prioritize and plan the most important tasks, while allowing the flexibility to adjust as necessary.

This technique also helps clarify what must be done first vs. what can wait. This prioritizes the most important things while keeping track of what must be done next, maintaining a smooth development/improvement process.

An image of the now - next - later roadmap technique.

2.2.1 Now, Next, Later

1-2 hours

  1. Use the list of items created in 2.1.2 (Identify your enterprise business analysis inventory). Add any you feel are missing during this exercise.
  2. Have a team member facilitate the session.
  3. In the Communicate the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis template, categorize these items according to Now, Next and Later, where:
    1. Now = Critically important items that may require little effort to complete. These must be done within the next six months.
    2. Next = Important items that may require more effort or depend on other factors. These must be done in six to twelve months.
    3. Later = Less important items that may require significant effort to complete. These must be done at some point within twelve months.

Ultimately, the choice of priority and timing is yours. Recognize that items may change categories as new information arises.

Download the Communicate the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis template

Input

  • Your enterprise business analysis inventory and gaps
  • Stakeholder knowledge and experience

Output

  • A prioritized list of items to enable enterprise business analysis

Materials

  • Whiteboard/Flip charts
  • Collaborative whiteboard
  • Communicate the Case for Enterprise Business Analysis template

Participants

  • Business analyst(s)
  • Organizational business leaders
  • Any other relevant stakeholders

2.3 Complete your executive communication deck

Use the results of your completed exercises to build your executive communication slide deck, to make the case for enterprise business analysis

Slide Header Associated Exercise Rationale
Pains and opportunities

1.1.2 Discuss your disconnects between strategy and tactics

1.2.1 Identify your pains and opportunities

This helps build the case for enterprise business analysis (EBA), leveraging the existing pains felt in the organization. This will draw the connection for your stakeholders.
Our vision and goals 2.1.1 Define your vision and goals Defines where you want to go and what effort will be required.
What is enterprise business analysis

1.1.1 How is BA being used in our organization today?
Pre-populated supporting content

Defines the discipline of EBA and how it can support and mature your organization.
Expected benefits Pre-populated supporting content What's in it for us? This section helps answer that question. What benefits can we expect, and is this worth the investment of time and effort?
Making this a reality 2.1.2 Identify your EBA inventory Identifies what the organization presently has that makes the effort easier. It doesn't feel as daunting if there are existing people, processes, and technologies in place and in use today.
Next steps 2.2.1 Now, Next, Later A prioritized list of action items. This will demonstrate the work involved, but broken down over time, into smaller, more manageable pieces.

Track metrics

Track metrics throughout the project to keep stakeholders informed.

As the project nears completion:

  1. You will have better-aligned and more satisfied stakeholders.
  2. You will see fewer projects and initiatives that don't align with the organizational goals and objectives.
  3. There will be a reduction in costs attributed to misaligned projects and initiatives (as mentioned in #2) and the opportunity to allocate valuable time and resources to other, higher-value work.
Metric Description Target Improvement/Reduction
Improved stakeholder satisfaction Lines of business and previously siloed departments/divisions will be more satisfied with time spent on solution involvement and outcomes. 10% year 1, 20% year 2
Reduction in misaligned/non-priority project work Reduction in projects, products, and services with no clear alignment to organizational goals. With that, resource costs can be allocated to other, higher-value solutions. 10% year 1, 25% year 2
Improved delivery agility/lead time With improved alignment comes reduced conflict and political infighting. As a result, the velocity of solution delivery will increase. 10%

Bibliography

Bossert, Oliver and Björn Münstermann. "Business's 'It's not my problem' IT problem." McKinsey Digital. 30 March, 2023.
Brule, Glenn R. "The Lay of the Land: Enterprise Analysis." Modern Analyst.
"Business Analysis: Leading Organizations to Better Outcomes." Project Management Institute (PMI), 2017
Corporate Finance Institute. "Strategic Analysis." Updated 14 March 2023
IAG Consulting. Business Analysis Benchmark Report, 2009.
International Institute of Business Analysis. "A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge" (BABOK Guide) version 3.
Mirabelli, Vincent. "Business Analysis Foundations: Enterprise" LinkedIn Learning, February 2022.
- - "Essential Techniques in Enterprise Analysis" LinkedIn Learning, September 2022.
- - "The Essentials of Enterprise Analysis" Love the Process Academy. May 2020.
- - "The Value of Enterprise Analysis." VincentMirabelli.com
Praslova, Ludmila N. "Today's Most Critical Workplace Challenges Are About Systems." Harvard Business Review. 10 January 2023.
Pratt, Mary K. and Sarah K. White. "What is a business analyst? A key role for business-IT efficiency." CIO. 17 April, 2019.
Project Management Institute. "Business Analysis: Leading Organizations to Better Outcomes." October 2017.
Sali, Sema. "The Importance of Strategic Business Analysis in Successful Project Outcomes." International Institute of Business Analysis. 26 May 2022.
- - "What Does Enterprise Analysis Look Like? Objectives and Key Results." International Institute of Business Analysis. 02 June 2022.
Shaker, Kareem. "Why do projects really fail?" Project Management Institute, PM Network. July 2010.
"Strategic Analysis: Definition, Types and Benefits" Voxco. 25 February 2022.
"The Difference Between Enterprise Analysis and Business Analysis." Schulich School of Business, Executive Education Center. 24 September 2018 (Updated June 2022)
"Why Do Projects Fail: Learning How to Avoid Project Failure." MindTools.com. Accessed 24 April 2023.

Enterprise Network Design Considerations

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Security, risk, and trust models play into how networks are designed and deployed. If these models are not considered during network design, band-aids and workarounds will be deployed to achieve the needed goals, potentially bypassing network controls.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

The cloud “gold rush” has made it attractive for many enterprises to migrate services off the traditional network and into the cloud. These services are now outside of the traditional network and associated controls. This shifts the split of east-west vs. north-south traffic patterns, as well as extending the network to encompass services outside of enterprise IT’s locus of control.

Impact and Result

Where users access enterprise data or services and from which devices dictate the connectivity needed. With the increasing shift of work that the business is completing remotely, not all devices and data paths will be under the control of IT. This shift does not allow IT to abdicate from the responsibility to provide a secure network.

Enterprise Network Design Considerations Research & Tools

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

1. Enterprise Network Design Considerations Deck – A brief deck that outlines key trusts and archetypes when considering enterprise network designs.

This blueprint will help you:

  • Enterprise Network Design Considerations Storyboard

2. Enterprise Network Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool – Build an infrastructure assessment in an hour.

Dispense with detailed analysis and customizations to present a quick snapshot of the road ahead.

  • Enterprise Network Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool
[infographic]

Further reading

Enterprise Network Design Considerations

It is not just about connectivity.

Executive Summary

Info-Tech Insight

Connectivity and security are tightly coupled

Security, risk, and trust models play into how networks are designed and deployed. If these models are not considered during network design, band-aids and workarounds will be deployed to achieve the needed goals, potentially bypassing network controls.

Many services are no longer within the network

The cloud “gold rush” has made it attractive for many enterprises to migrate services off the traditional network and into the cloud. These services are now outside of the traditional network and associated controls. This shifts the split of east-west vs. north-south traffic patterns, as well as extending the network to encompass services outside of enterprise IT’s locus of control.

Users are demanding an anywhere, any device access model

Where users access enterprise data or services and from which devices dictate the connectivity needed. With the increasing shift of work that the business is completing remotely, not all devices and data paths will be under the control of IT. This shift does not allow IT to abdicate from the responsibility to provide a secure network.

Enterprise networks are changing

The new network reality

The enterprise network of 2020 and beyond is changing:

  • Services are becoming more distributed.
  • The number of services provided “off network” is growing.
  • Users are more often remote.
  • Security threats are rapidly escalating.

The above statements are all accurate for enterprise networks, though each potentially to differing levels depending on the business being supported by the network. Depending on how affected the network in question currently is and will be in the near future, there are different common network archetypes that are best able to address these concerns while delivering business value at an appropriate price point.

High-Level Design Considerations

  1. Understand Business Needs
  2. Understand what the business needs are and where users and resources are located.

  3. Define Your Trust Model
  4. Trust is a spectrum and tied tightly to security.

  5. Align With an Archetype
  6. How will the network be deployed?

  7. Understand Available Tooling
  8. What tools are in the market to help achieve design principles?

Understand business needs

Mission

Never ignore the basics. Start with revisiting the mission and vision of the business to address relevant needs.

Users

Identify where users will be accessing services from. Remote vs. “on net” is a design consideration now more than ever.

Resources

Identify required resources and their locations, on net vs. cloud.

Controls

Identify required controls in order to define control points and solutions.

Define a trust model

Trust is a spectrum

  • There is a spectrum of trust, from fully trusted to not trusted at all. Each organization must decide for their network (or each area thereof) the appropriate level of trust to assign.
  • The ease of network design and deployment is directly proportional to the trust spectrum.
  • When resources and users are outside of direct IT control, the level of appropriate trust should be examined closely.

Implicit

Trust everything within the network. Security is perimeter based and designed to stop external actors from entering the large trusted zone.

Controlled

Multiple zones of trust within the network. Segmentation is a standard practice to separate areas of higher and lower trust.

Zero

Verify trust. The network is set up to recognize and support the principle of least privilege where only required access is supported.

Align with an archetype

Archetypes are a good guide

  • Using a defined archetype as a guiding principle in network design can help clarify appropriate tools or network structures.
  • Different aspects of a network can have different archetypes where appropriate (e.g. IT vs. OT [operational technology] networks).

Traditional

Services are provided from within the traditional network boundaries and security is provided at the network edge.

Hybrid

Services are provided both externally and from within the traditional network boundaries, and security is primarily at the network edge.

Inverted

Services are provided primarily externally, and security is cloud centric.

Traditional networks

Resources within network boundaries

Moat and castle security perimeter

Abstract

A traditional network is one in which there are clear boundaries defined by a security perimeter. Trust can be applied within the network boundaries as appropriate, and traffic is generally routed through internally deployed control points that may be centralized. Traditional networks commonly include large firewalls and other “big iron” security and control devices.

Network Design Tenets

  • The full network path from resource to user is designed, deployed, and controlled by IT.
  • Users external to the network must first connect to the network to gain access to resources.
  • Security, risk, and trust controls will be implemented by internal enterprise hardware/software devices.

Control

In the traditional network, it is assumed that all required control points can be adequately deployed across hardware/software that is “on prem” and under the control of central IT.

Info-Tech Insight

With increased cloud services provided to end users, this network is now more commonly used in data centers or OT networks.

Traditional networks

The image contains an example of what traditional networks look like, as described in the text below.

Defining Characteristics

  • Traffic flows in a defined path under the control of IT to and from central IT resources.
  • Due to visibility into, and the control of, the traffic between the end user and resources, IT can relatively simply implement the required security controls on owned hardware.

Common Components

  • Traditional offices
  • Remote users/road warriors
  • Private data center/colocation space

Hybrid networks

Resources internal and external to network

Network security perimeter combined with cloud protection

Abstract

A hybrid network is one that combines elements of a traditional network with cloud resources. As some of these resources are not fully under the control of IT and may be completely “offnet” or loosely coupled to the on-premises network, the security boundaries and control points are less likely to be centralized. Hybrid networks allow the flexibility and speed of cloud deployment without leaving behind traditional network constructs. This generally makes them expensive to secure and maintain.

Network Design Tenets

  • The network path from resource to user may not be in IT’s locus of control.
  • Users external to the network must first connect to the network to gain access to internal resources but may directly access publicly hosted ones.
  • Security, risk, and trust controls may potentially be implemented by a mixture of internal enterprise hardware/software devices and external control points.

Control

The hallmark of a hybrid network is the blending of public and private resources. This blending tends to necessitate both public and private points of control that may not be homogenous.

Info-Tech Insight

With multiple control points to address, take care in simplifying designs while addressing all concerns to ease operational load.

Hybrid networks

The image contains an example of what hybrid networks look like, as described in the text below.

Defining Characteristics

  • Traffic flows to central resources across a defined path under the control of IT.
  • Traffic to cloud assets may be partially under the control of IT.
  • For central resources, the traffic to and from the end user can have the required security controls relatively simply implemented on owned hardware.
  • For public cloud assets, IT may or may not have some control over part of the path.

Common Components

  • Traditional offices
  • Remote users/road warriors
  • Private data center/colocation space
  • Public cloud assets (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS)

Inverted perimeter

Resources primarily external to the network

Security control points are cloud centric

Abstract

An inverted perimeter network is one in which security and control points cover the entire workflow, on or off net, from the consumer of services through to the services themselves with zero trust. Since the control plane is designed to encompass the workflow in a secure manner, much of the underlying connectivity can be abstracted. In an extreme version of this deployment, IT would abstract end-user access, and any cloud-based or on-premises resources would be securely published through the control plane with context-aware precision access.

Network Design Tenets

  • The network path from resource to user is abstracted and controlled by IT through services like secure access service edge (SASE).
  • Users only need internet access and appropriate credentials to gain access to resources.
  • Security, risk, and trust controls will be implemented through external cloud based services.

Control

An inverted network abstracts the lower-layer connectivity away and focuses on implementing a cloud-based zero trust control plane.

Info-Tech Insight

This model is extremely attractive for organizations that consume primarily cloud services and have a large remote work force.

Inverted networks

The image contains an example of what inverted networks look like, as described in the text below.

Defining Characteristics

  • The end user does not have to be in a defined location.
  • All central resources that are to be accessed are hosted on cloud resources.
  • IT has little to no control of the path between the end user and central resources.

Common Components

  • Traditional offices
  • Regent offices/shared workspaces
  • Remote users/road warriors
  • Public cloud assets (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS)

Understand available tooling

Don’t buy a hammer and go looking for nails

  • A network archetype must be defined in order to understand what tools (hardware or software) are appropriate for consideration in a network build or refresh.
  • Tools are purpose built and generally designed to solve specific problems if implemented and operated correctly. Choose the tools to align with the challenges that you are solving as opposed to choosing tools and then trying to use those purchases to overcome challenges.
  • The purchase of a tool does not allow for abdication of proper design. Tools must be chosen appropriately and integrated properly to orchestrate the best solutions. Purchasing a tool and expecting the tool to solve all your issues rarely succeeds.

“It is essential to have good tools, but it is also essential that the tools should be used in the right way.” — Wallace D. Wattles

Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN)

Simplified branch office connectivity

Archetype Value: Traditional Networks

What It Is Not

SD-WAN is generally not a way to slash spending by lowering WAN circuit costs. Though it is traditionally deployed across lower cost access, to minimize risk and realize the most benefits from the platform many organizations install multiple circuits with greater bandwidths at each endpoint when replacing the more costly traditional circuits. Though this maximizes the value of the technology investment, it will result in the end cost being similar to the traditional cost plus or minus a small percentage.

What It Is

SD-WAN is a subset of software-defined networking (SDN) designed specifically to deploy a secure, centrally managed, connectivity agnostic, overlay network connecting multiple office locations. This technology can be used to replace, work in concert with, or augment more traditional costly connectivity such as MPLS or private point to point (PtP) circuits. In addition to the secure overlay, SD-WAN usually also enables policy-based, intelligent controls, based on traffic and circuit intelligence.

Why Use It

You have multiple endpoint locations connected by expensive lower bandwidth traditional circuits. Your target is to increase visibility and control while controlling costs if and where possible. Ease of centralized management and the ability to more rapidly turn up new locations are attractive.

Cloud access security broker (CASB)

Inline policy enforcement placed between users and cloud services

Archetype Value: Hybrid Networks

What It Is Not

CASBs do not provide network protection; they are designed to provide compliance and enforcement of rules. Though CASBs are designed to give visibility and control into cloud traffic, they have limits to the data that they generally ingest and utilize. A CASB does not gather or report on cloud usage details, licencing information, financial costing, or whether the cloud resource usage is aligned with the deployment purpose.

What It Is

A CASB is designed to establish security controls beyond a company’s environment. It is commonly deployed to augment traditional solutions to extend visibility and control into the cloud. To protect assets in the cloud, CASBs are designed to provide central policy control and apply services primarily in the areas of visibility, data security, threat protection, and compliance.

Why Use It

You a mixture of on-premises and cloud assets. In moving assets out to the cloud, you have lost the traditional controls that were implemented in the data center. You now need to have visibility and apply controls to the usage of these cloud assets.

Secure access service edge (SASE)

Convergence of security and service access in the cloud

Archetype Value: Inverted Networks

What It Is Not

Though the service will consist of many service offerings, SASE is not multiple services strung together. To present the value proposed by this platform, all functionality proposed must be provided by a single platform under a “single pane of glass.” SASE is not a mature and well-established service. The market is still solidifying, and the full-service definition remains somewhat fluid.

What It Is

SASE exists at the intersection of network-as-a-service and network-security-as-a-service. It is a superset of many network and security cloud offerings such as CASB, secure web gateway, SD-WAN, and WAN optimization. Any services offered by a SASE provider will be cloud hosted, presented in a single stack, and controlled through a single pane of glass.

Why Use It

Your network is inverting, and services are provided primarily as cloud assets. In a full realization of this deployment’s value, you would abstract how and where users gain initial network access yet remain in control of the communications and data flow.

Activity

Understand your enterprise network options

Activity: Network assessment in an hour

  • Learn about the Enterprise Network Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool
  • Complete the Enterprise Network Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool

This activity involves the following participants:

  • IT strategic direction decision makers.
  • IT managers responsible for network.
  • Organizations evaluating platforms for mission critical applications.

Outcomes of this step:

  • Completed Enterprise Network Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool

Info-Tech Insight

Review your design options with security and compliance in mind. Infrastructure is no longer a standalone entity and now tightly integrates with software-defined networks and security solutions.

Build an assessment in an hour

Learn about the Enterprise Network Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool.

This workbook provides a high-level analysis of a technology’s readiness for adoption based on your organization’s needs.

  • The workbook then places the technology on a graph that measures both the readiness and fit for your organization. In addition, it provides warnings for specific issues and lets you know if you have considerable uncertainty in your answers.
  • At a glance you can now communicate what you are doing to help the company:
    • Grow
    • Save money
    • Reduce risk
  • Regardless of your specific audience, these are important stories to be able to tell.
The image contains three screenshots from the Enterprise Network Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool.

Build an assessment in an hour

Complete the Enterprise Network Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool.

Dispense with detailed analysis and customizations to present a quick snapshot of the road ahead.

  1. Weightings: Adjust the Weighting tab to meet organizational needs. The provided weightings for the overall solution areas are based on a generic firm; individual firms will have different needs.
  2. Data Entry: For each category, answer the questions for the technology you are considering. When you have completed the questionnaire, go to the next tab for the results.
  3. Results: The Enterprise Network Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool provides a value versus readiness assessment of your chosen technology customized to your organization.

The image contains three screenshots from the Enterprise Network Roadmap Technology Assessment Tool. It has a screenshot for each step as described in the text above.

Related Info-Tech Research

Effectively Acquire Infrastructure Services

Acquiring a service is like buying an experience. Don’t confuse the simplicity of buying hardware with buying an experience.

Outsource IT Infrastructure to Improve System Availability, Reliability, and Recovery

There are very few IT infrastructure components you should be housing internally – outsource everything else.

Build Your Infrastructure Roadmap

Move beyond alignment: Put yourself in the driver’s seat for true business value.

Drive Successful Sourcing Outcomes With a Robust RFP Process

Leverage your vendor sourcing process to get better results.

Research Authors

The image contains a photo of Scott Young.

Scott Young, Principal Research Advisor, Info-Tech Research Group

Scott Young is a Director of Infrastructure Research at Info-Tech Research Group. Scott has worked in the technology field for over 17 years, with a strong focus on telecommunications and enterprise infrastructure architecture. He brings extensive practical experience in these areas of specialization, including IP networks, server hardware and OS, storage, and virtualization.

The image contains a photo of Troy Cheeseman.

Troy Cheeseman, Practice Lead, Info-Tech Research Group

Troy has over 24 years of experience and has championed large enterprise-wide technology transformation programs, remote/home office collaboration and remote work strategies, BCP, IT DRP, IT operations and expense management programs, international right placement initiatives, and large technology transformation initiatives (M&A). Additionally, he has deep experience working with IT solution providers and technology (cloud) startups.

Bibliography

Ahlgren, Bengt. “Design considerations for a network of information.” ACM Digital Library, 21 Dec. 2008.

Cox Business. “Digital transformation is here. Is your business ready to upgrade your mobile work equation?” BizJournals, 1 April 2022. Accessed April 2022.

Elmore, Ed. “Benefits of integrating security and networking with SASE.” Tech Radar, 1 April 2022. Web.

Greenfield, Dave. “From SD-WAN to SASE: How the WAN Evolution is Progressing.” Cato Networks, 19 May 2020. Web

Korolov, Maria. “What is SASE? A cloud service that marries SD-WAN with security.” Network World, 7 Sept. 2020. Web.

Korzeniowski, Paul, “CASB tools evolve to meet broader set of cloud security needs.” TechTarget, 26 July 2019. Accessed March 2022.

Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market

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Your challenge:

  • Rising supplier costs and inflation are eroding margins and impacting customers' budgets.
  • There is pressure from management to make a gut-feeling decision because of time, lack of skills, and process limitations.
  • You must navigate competing pricing-related priorities among product, sales, and finance teams.
  • Product price increases fail because discovery lacks understanding of costs, price/value equation, and competitive price points.
  • Customers can react negatively, and results are seen much later (more than 12 months) after the price decision.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Product leaders will price products based on a deep understanding of the buyer price/value equation and alignment with financial and competitive pricing strategies, and make ongoing adjustments based on an ability to monitor buyer, competitor, and product cost changes.

Impact and Result

  • Success for many SaaS product managers requires a reorganization and modernization of pricing tools, techniques, and assumptions. Leaders will develop the science of tailored price changes versus across-the-board price actions and account for inflation exposure and the customers’ willingness to pay.
  • This will build skills on how to price new products or adjust pricing for existing products. The disciplines using our pricing strategy methodology will strengthen efforts to develop repeatable pricing models and processes and build credibility with senior management.

Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Research & Tools

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

1. Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Executive Brief - A deck to build your skills on how to price new products or adjust pricing for existing products.

This Executive Brief will build your skills on how to price new products or adjust pricing for existing products.

  • Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Executive Brief

2. Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Storyboard – A deck that provides key steps to complete the project.

This blueprint will build your skills on how to price new products or adjust pricing for existing products with documented key steps to complete the pricing project and use the Excel workbook and customer presentation.

  • Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market – Phases 1-3

3. Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook – A tool that enables product managers to simplify the organization and collection of customer and competitor information for pricing decisions.

These five organizational workbooks for product pricing priorities, interview tracking, sample questions, and critical competitive information will enable the price team to validate price change data through researching the three pricing schemes (competitor, customer, and cost-based).

  • Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook

4. Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template – A template that serves as a guide to communicating the Optimize Pricing Strategy team's results for a product or product line.

This template includes the business case to justify product repricing, contract modifications, and packaging rebuild or removal for launch. This template calls for the critical summarized results from the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market blueprint and the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook to complete.

  • Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

Infographic

Further reading

SoftwareReviews — A Division of INFO~TECH RESEARCH GROUP

Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market

Leading SaaS product managers align pricing strategy to company financial goals and refresh the customer price/value equation to avoid leaving revenues uncaptured.

Table of Contents

Section Title Section Title
1 Executive Brief 2 Key Steps
3 Concluding Slides

Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market

Leading SaaS product managers align pricing strategy to company financial goals and refresh the customer price/value equation to avoid leaving revenues uncaptured.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Analyst Perspective

Optimized Pricing Strategy

Product managers without well-documented and repeatable pricing management processes often experience pressure from “Agile” management to make gut-feel pricing decisions, resulting in poor product revenue results. When combined with a lack of customer, competitor, and internal cost understanding, these process and timing limitations drive most product managers into suboptimal software pricing decisions. And, adding insult to injury, the poor financial results from bad pricing decisions aren’t fully measured for months, which further compounds the negative effects of poor decision making.

A successful product pricing strategy aligns finance, marketing, product management, and sales to optimize pricing using a solid understanding of the customer perception of price/value, competitive pricing, and software production costs.

Success for many SaaS product managers requires a reorganization and modernization of pricing tools, techniques, and data. Leaders will develop the science of tailored price changes versus across-the-board price actions and account for inflation exposure and the customers’ willingness to pay.

This blueprint will build your skills on how to price new products or adjust pricing for existing products. The discipline you build using our pricing strategy methodology will strengthen your team’s ability to develop repeatable pricing and will build credibility with senior management and colleagues in marketing and sales.

Photo of Joanne Morin Correia, Principal Research Director, SoftwareReviews.

Joanne Morin Correia
Principal Research Director
SoftwareReviews

Executive Summary

Organizations struggle to build repeatable pricing processes:
  • A lack of alignment and collaboration among finance, marketing, product development, and sales.
  • A lack of understanding of customers, competitors, and market pricing.
  • Inability to stay ahead of complex and shifting software pricing models.
  • Time is wasted without a deep understanding of pricing issues and opportunities, and revenue opportunities go unrealized.
Obstacles add friction to the pricing management process:
  • Pressure from management to make quick decisions results in a gut-driven approach to pricing.
  • A lack of pricing skills and management processes limits sound decision making.
  • Price changes fail because discovery often lacks competitive intelligence and buyer value to price point understanding. Customers’ reactions are often observed much later, after the decision is made.
  • Economic disruptions, supplier price hikes, and higher employee salaries/benefits are driving costs higher.
Use SoftwareReviews’ approach for more successful pricing:
  • Organize for a more effective pricing project including roles & responsibilities as well as an aligned pricing approach.
  • Work with CFO/finance partner to establish target price based on margins and key factors affecting costs.
  • Perform a competitive price assessment and understand the buyer price/value equation.
  • Arrive at a target price based on the above and seek buy-in and approvals.

SoftwareReviews Insight

Product leaders will price products based on a deep understanding of the buyer price/value equation and alignment with financial and competitive pricing strategies, and they will make ongoing adjustments based on an ability to monitor buyers, competitors, and product cost changes.

What is an optimized price strategy?

“Customer discovery interviews help reduce the chance of failure by testing your hypotheses. Quality customer interviews go beyond answering product development and pricing questions.” (Pricing Strategies, Growth Ramp, March 2022)

Most product managers just research their direct competitors when launching a new SaaS product. While this is essential, competitive pricing intel is insufficient to create a long-term optimized pricing strategy. Leaders will also understand buyer TCO.

Your customers are constantly comparing prices and weighing the total cost of ownership as they consider your competition. Why?

Implementing a SaaS solution creates a significant time burden as buyers spend days learning new software, making sure tools communicate with each other, configuring settings, contacting support, etc. It is not just the cost of the product or service.

Optimized Price Strategy Is…
  • An integral part of any product plan and business strategy.
  • Essential to improving and maintaining high levels of margins and customer satisfaction.
  • Focused on delivering the product price to your customer’s business value.
  • Understanding customer price-value for your software segment.
  • Monitoring your product pricing with real-time data to ensure support for competitive strategy.
Price Strategy Is Not…
  • Increasing or decreasing price on a gut feeling.
  • Changing price for short-term gain.
  • Being wary of asking customers pricing-related questions.
  • Haphazardly focusing entirely on profit.
  • Just covering product costs.
  • Only researching direct competitors.
  • Focusing on yourself or company satisfaction but your target customers.
  • Picking the first strategy you see.

SoftwareReviews Insight

An optimized pricing strategy establishes the “best” price for a product or service that maximizes profits and shareholder value while considering customer business value vs. the cost to purchase and implement – the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Challenging environment

Product managers are currently experiencing the following:
  • Supplier costs and inflation are rising, eroding product margins and impacting customers’ budgets.
  • Pressure from management to make a gut-feeling decision because of time, lack of skills, and process limitations.
  • Navigating competing pricing-related priorities among product, sales, and finance.
  • Product price increases that fail because discovery lacks understanding of costs, price/value equation, and competitive price points.
  • Slowing customer demand due to poorly priced offerings may not be fully measured for many months following the price decision.
Doing nothing is NOT an option!
Offense Double Down

Benefit: Leverage long-term financial and market assets

Risk: Market may not value those assets in the future
Fight Back

Benefit: Move quickly

Risk: Hard to execute and easy to get pricing wrong
Defense Retrench

Benefit: Reduce threats from new entrants through scale and marketing

Risk: Causes managed decline and is hard to sell to leadership
Move Away

Benefit: Seize opportunities for new revenue sources

Risk: Diversification is challenging to pull off
Existing Markets and Customers New Markets and Customers

Pricing skills are declining

Among product managers, limited pricing skills are big obstacles that make pricing difficult and under-optimized.

Visual of a bar chart with descending values, each bar has written on it: 'Limited - Limits in understanding of engineering, marketing, and sales expectations or few processes for pricing and/or cost', 'Inexperienced - Inexperience in pricing project skills and corporate training', 'Lagging - Financial lag indicators (marketing ROI, revenue, profitability, COGs)', 'Lacking - Lack of relevant competitive pricing/packaging information', 'Shifting - Shift to cloud subscription-based revenue models is challenging'.

The top three weakest product management skills have remained constant over the past five years:
  • Competitive analysis
  • Pricing
  • End of life
Pricing is the weakest skill and has been declining the most among surveyed product professionals every year. (Adapted from 280 Group, 2022)

Key considerations for more effective pricing decisions

Pricing teams can improve software product profitability by:
  • Optimizing software profit with four critical elements: properly pricing your product, giving complete and accurate quotations, choosing the terms of the sale, and selecting the payment method.
  • Implementing tailored price changes (versus across-the-board price actions) to help account for inflation exposure, customer willingness to pay, and product attribute changes.
  • Accelerating ongoing pricing decision-making with a dedicated cross-functional team ready to act quickly.
  • Resetting discounting and promotion, and revisiting service-level agreements.
Software pricing leaders will regularly assess:

Has it been over a year since prices were updated?

Have customers told you to raise your prices?

Do you have the right mix of customers in each pricing plan?

Do 40% of your customers say they would be very disappointed if your product disappeared? (Adapted from Growth Ramp, 2021)

Case Study

Middleware Vendor

INDUSTRY
Technology Middleware
SOURCE
SoftwareReviews Custom Pricing Strategy Project
A large middleware vendor, who is running on Microsoft Azure, known for quality development and website tools, needed to react strategically to the March 2022 Microsoft price increase.

Key Initiative: Optimize New Pricing Strategy

The program’s core objective was to determine if the vendor should implement a price increase and how the product should be packaged within the new pricing model.

For this initiative, the company interviewed buyers using three key questions: What are the core capabilities to focus on building/selling? What are the optimal features and capabilities valued by customers that should be sold together? And should they be charging more for their products?

Results
This middleware vendor saw buyer support for a 10% price increase to their product line and restructuring of vertical contract terms. This enabled them to retain customers over multi-year subscription contracts, and the price increase enabled them to protect margins after the Microsoft price increase.

The Optimize New Pricing Strategy included the following components:

Components: 'Product Feature Importance & Satisfaction', 'Correlation of Features and Value Drivers', 'Fair Cost to Value Average for Category', 'Average Discounting for Category', 'Customer Value Is an Acceptable Multiple of Price'. First four: 'Component fails into the scope of optimizing price strategy to value'; last one: 'They are optimizing their price strategy decisions'.

New product price approach

As a collaborative team across product management, marketing, and finance, we see leaders taking a simple yet well-researched approach when setting product pricing.

Iterating to a final price point is best done with research into how product pricing:

  • Delivers target margins.
  • Is positioned vs. key competitors.
  • Delivers customer value at a fair price/value ratio.
To arrive at our new product price, we suggest iterating among 3 different views:

New Target Price:

  • Buyer Price vs. Value
  • Cost - Plus
  • Vs. Key Competitors
We analyzed:
  • Customer price/value equation interviews
  • Impacts of Supplier cost increases
  • Competitive pricing research
  • How product pricing delivers target margins

Who should care about optimized pricing?

Product managers and marketers who:

  • Support the mandate for optimizing pricing and revenue generation.
  • Need a more scientific way to plan and implement new pricing processes and methods to optimize revenues and profits.
  • Want a way to better apply customer and competitive insights to product pricing.
  • Are evaluating current pricing and cost control to support a refreshed pricing strategy.

Finance, sales, and marketing professionals who are pricing stakeholders in:

  • Finding alternatives to current pricing and packaging approaches.
  • Looking for ways to optimize price within the shifting market momentum.

How will they benefit from this research?

  • Refine the ability to effectively target pricing to specific market demands and customer segments.
  • Strengthen product team’s reputation for reliable and repeatable price-management capabilities among senior leadership.
  • Recognize and plan for new revenue opportunities or cost increases.
  • Allow for faster, more accurate intake of customer and competitive data. 
  • Improve pricing skills for professional development and business outcomes.
  • Create new product price, packaging, or market opportunities. 
  • Reduce financial costs and mistakes associated with manual efforts and uneducated guessing.
  • Price software products that better achieve financial goals optimizing revenue, margins, or market share.
  • Enhance the product development and sales processes with real competitive and customer expectations.

Is Your Pricing Strategy Optimized?

With the right pricing strategy, you can invest more money into your product, service, or growth. A 1% price increase will improv revenues by:

Three bars: 'Customer acquisition, 3.32%', 'Customer retention, 6.71%', 'Price monetization, 12.7%'.

Price monetization will almost double the revenue increases over customer acquisition and retention. (Pricing Strategies, Growth Ramp, March 2022)

DIAGNOSE PRICE CHALLENGES

Prices of today's cloud-based services/products are often misaligned against competition and customers' perceived value, leaving more revenues on the table.
  • Do you struggle to price new products with confidence?
  • Do you really know your SaaS product's costs?
  • Have you lost pricing power to stronger competitors?
  • Has cost focus eclipsed customer value focus?
If so, you are likely skipping steps and missing key outputs in your pricing strategy.

OPTIMIZE THESE STEPS

ALIGNMENT
  1. Assign Team Responsibilities
  2. Set Timing for Project Deliverables
  3. Clarify Financial Expectations
  4. Collect Customer Contacts
  5. Determine Competitors
  6. BEFORE RESEARCH, HAVE YOU
    Documented your executive's financial expectations? If "No," return.

RESEARCH & VALIDATE
  1. Research Competitors
  2. Interview Customers
  3. Test Pricing vs. Financials
  4. Create Pricing Presentation
  5. BEFORE PRESENTING, HAVE YOU:
    Clarified your customer and competitive positioning to validate pricing? If "No," return.

BUY-IN
  1. Executive Pricing Presentation
  2. Post-Mortem of Presentation
  3. Document New Processes
  4. Monitor the Pricing Changes
  5. BEFORE RESEARCH, HAVE YOU:
    Documented your executive's financial expectations? If "No," return.

DELIVER KEY OUTPUTS

Sponsoring executive(s) signs-offs require a well-articulated pricing plan and business case for investment that includes:
  • Competitive features and pricing financial templates
  • Customer validation of price value
  • Optimized price presentation
  • Repeatable pricing processes to monitor changes

REAP THE REWARDS

  • Product pricing is better aligned to achieve financial goals
  • Improved pricing skills or professional development
  • Stronger team reputation for reliable price management

Key Insights

  1. Gain a competitive edge by using market and customer information to optimize product financials, refine pricing, and speed up decisions.
  2. Product leaders will best set software product price based on a deep understanding of buyer/price value equation, alignment with financial strategy, and an ongoing ability to monitor buyer, competitor, and product costs.

SoftwareReviews’ methodology for optimizing your pricing strategy

Steps

1.1 Establish the Team and Responsibilities
1.2 Educate/Align Team on Pricing Strategy
1.2 Document Portfolio & Target Product(s) for Pricing Updates
1.3 Clarify Product Target Margins
1.4 Establish Customer Price/Value
1.5 Identify Competitive Pricing
1.6 Establish New Price and Gain Buy-In

Outcomes

  1. Well-organized project
  2. Clarified product pricing strategy
  3. Customer value vs. price equation
  4. Competitive price points
  5. Approvals

Insight summary

Modernize your price planning

Product leaders will price products based on a deep understanding of the buyer price/value equation and alignment with financial and competitive pricing strategies, and make ongoing adjustments based on an ability to monitor buyer, competitor, and product cost changes.

Ground pricing against financials

Meet and align with financial stakeholders.
  • Give finance a heads-up that you want to work with them.
  • Find out the CFO’s expectations for pricing and margins.
  • Ask for a dedicated finance team member.

Align on pricing strategy

Lead stakeholders in SaaS product pricing decisions to optimize pricing based on four drivers:
  • Customer’s price/value
  • Competitive strategy
  • Reflective of costs
  • Alignment with financial goals

Decrease time for approval

Drive price decisions, with the support of the CFO, to the business value of the suggested change:
  • Reference current product pricing guidelines
  • Compare to the competition and our strategy and weigh results against our customer’s price/value
  • Compare against the equation to business value for the suggested change
Develop the skill of pricing products

Increase product revenues and margins by enhancing modern processes and data monetization. Shift from intuitive to information-based pricing decisions.

Look at other options for revenue

Adjust product design, features, packaging, and contract terms while maintaining the functionality customers find valuable to their business.

Blueprint deliverables

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:
Key deliverable:

New Pricing Strategy Presentation Template

Capture key findings for your price strategy with the Optimize Your Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Strategy Presentation Template

Sample of the 'Acme Corp New Product Pricing' blueprint.

Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Executive Brief

This executive brief will build your knowledge on how to price new products or adjust pricing for existing products.

Sample of the 'Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market' blueprint.

Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook

This workbook will help you prioritize which products require repricing, hold customer interviews, and capture competitive insights.

Sample of the 'Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market' workbook.

Guided Implementation

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with a SoftwareReviews analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is 4 to 8 calls over the course of 2 to 4 months.

What does a typical GI on optimizing software pricing look like?

Alignment

Research & Reprice

Buy-in

Call #1: Share the pricing team vision and outline activities for the pricing strategy process. Plan next call – 1 week.

Call #2: Outline products that require a new pricing approach and steps with finance. Plan next call – 1 week.

Call #3: Discuss the customer interview process. Plan next call – 1 week.

Call #4 Outline competitive analysis. Plan next call – 1 week.

Call #5: Review customer and competitive results for initial new pricing business case with finance for alignment. Plan next call – 3 weeks.

Call #6: Review the initial business case against financial plans across marketing, sales, and product development. Plan next call – 1 week.

Call #7 Review the draft executive pricing presentation. Plan next call – 1 week.

Call #8: Discuss gaps in executive presentation. Plan next call – 3 days.

SoftwareReviews Offers Various Levels of Support to Meet Your Needs

Included in Advisory Membership Optional add-ons

DIY Toolkit

Guided Implementation

Workshop

Consulting

"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful." "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track." "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place." "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

Desire a Guided Implementation?

  • A GI is where your SoftwareReviews engagement manager and executive advisor/counselor will work with SoftwareReviews research team members to craft with you a Custom Key Initiative Plan (CKIP).
  • A CKIP guides your team through each of the major steps, outlines responsibilities between members of your team and SoftwareReviews, describes expected outcomes, and captures actual value delivered.
  • A CKIP also provides you and your team with analyst/advisor/counselor feedback on project outputs, helps you communicate key principles and concepts to your team, and helps you stay on project timelines.
  • If Guided Implementation assistance is desired, contact your engagement manager.

Workshop overview

Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com1-888-670-8889
Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5
Align Team, Identify Customers, and Document Current Knowledge
Validate Initial Insights and Identify Competitors and Market View
Schedule and Hold Buyer Interviews
Summarize Findings and Provide Actionable Guidance to Stakeholders
Present, Go Forward, and Measure Impact and Results
Activities

1.1 Identify Team Members, roles, and responsibilities

1.2 Establish timelines and project workflow

1.3 Gather current product and future financial margin expectations

1.4 Review the Optimize Software Executive Brief and Workbook Templates

1.4 Build prioritized pricing candidates hypothesis

2.1 Identify customer interviewee types by segment, region, etc.

2.2 Hear from industry analysts their perspectives on the competitors, buyer expectations, and price trends

2.3 Research competitors for pricing, contract type, and product attributes

3.2 Review pricing and attributes survey and interview questionnaires

3.2 Hold interviews and use interview guides (over four weeks)

A gap of up to 4 weeks for scheduling of interviews.

3.3 Hold review session after initial 3-4 interviews to make adjustments

4.1 Review all draft price findings against the market view

4.2 Review Draft Executive Presentation

5.1 Review finalized pricing strategy plan with analyst for market view

5.2 Review for comments on the final implementation plan

Deliverables
  1. Documented steering committee and working team
  2. Current and initial new pricing targets for strategy
  3. Documented team knowledge
  1. Understanding of market and potential target interviewee types
  2. Objective competitive research
  1. Initial review – “Are we going in the right direction with surveys?”
  2. Validate or adjust the pricing surveys to what you hear in the market
  1. Complete findings and compare to the market
  2. Review and finish drafting the Optimize Software Pricing Strategy presentation
  1. Final impute on strategy
  2. Review of suggested next steps and implementation plan

Our process

Align team, perform research, and gain executive buy-in on updated price points

  1. Establish the team and responsibilities
  2. Educate/align team on pricing strategy
  3. Document portfolio & target product(s) for pricing updates
  4. Clarify product target margins
  5. Establish customer price/value
  6. Identify competitive pricing
  7. Establish new price and gain buy-in

Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market

Our process will help you deliver the following outcomes:

  • Well-organized project
  • Clarified product pricing strategy
  • Customer value vs. price equation
  • Competitive price points
  • Approvals

This project involves the following participants:

  • Product management
  • Program leadership
  • Product marketing
  • CFO or finance representative/partner
  • Others
  • Representative(s) from Sales

1.0 Assign team responsibilities

Input: Steering committee roles and responsibilities, Steering committee interest and role

Output: List of new pricing strategy steering committee and workstream members, roles, and timelines, Updated Software Pricing Strategy presentation

Materials: Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

Participants: CFO, sponsoring executive, Functional leads – development, product marketing, product management, marketing, sales, customer success/support

1-2 hours
  1. The product manager/member running this pricing/repricing program should review the entire Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market blueprint and each blueprint attachment.
  2. The product manager should also refer to slide 19 of the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market blueprint and decide if help via a Guided Implementation (GI) is of value. If desired, alert your SoftwareReviews engagement manager.
1-2 hours
  1. The product manager should meet with the chief product officer/CPO and functional leaders, and set the meeting agenda to:
    1. Nominate steering committee members.
    2. Nominate work-stream leads.
    3. Establish key pricing project milestones.
    4. Schedule both the steering committee (suggest monthly) and workstream lead meetings (suggest weekly) through the duration of the project.
    5. Ask the CPO to craft, outside this meeting, his/her version of the "Message from the chief product officer.”
    6. If a Guided Implementation is selected, inform the meeting attendees that a SoftwareReviews analyst will join the next meeting to share his/her Executive Brief on Pricing Strategy.
  2. Record all above findings in the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template.

Download the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

SoftwareReviews Advisory Insight:

Pricing steering committees are needed to steer overall product, pricing, and packaging decisions. Some companies include the CEO and CFO on this committee and designate it as a permanent body that meets monthly to give go/no-go decisions to “all things product and pricing related” across all products and business units.

2.0 Educate the team

1 hour

Input: Typically, a joint recognition that pricing strategies need upgrading and have not been fully documented, Steering committee and working team members

Output: Communication of team members involved and the makeup of the steering committee and working team, Alignment of team members on a shared vision of “why a new price strategy is critical” and what key attributes define both the need and impact on business

Materials: Optimize Your Software Strategy Executive Brief PowerPoint presentation

Participants: Initiative manager – individual leading the new pricing strategy, CFO/sponsoring executive, Working team – typically representatives in product marketing, product management, and sales, SoftwareReviews marketing analyst (optional)

  1. Walk the team through the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Executive Brief PowerPoint presentation.
  2. Optional – Have the SoftwareReviews Advisory (SRA) analyst walk the team through the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Executive Brief PowerPoint presentation as part of your session. Contact your engagement manager to schedule.
  3. Walk the team through the current version of the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template outlining project goals, steering committee and workstream make-up and responsibilities, project timeline and key milestones, and approach to arriving at new product pricing.
  4. Set expectations among team members of their specific roles and responsibilities for this project, review the frequency of steering committee and workstream meetings to set expectations of key milestones and deliverable due dates.

Download the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Executive Brief

3.0 Document portfolio and target products for pricing update

1-3 Hours

Input: List of entire product portfolio

Output: Prioritized list of product candidates that should be repriced

Materials: Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Executive Brief presentation, Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook

Participants: Initiative manager – individual leading the new pricing strategy, CFO/sponsoring executive, Working team – typically representatives in product marketing, product management, and sales

  1. Walk the team through the current version of Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market workbook, tab 2: “Product Portfolio Organizer.” Modify sample attributes to match your product line where necessary.
  2. As a group, record the product attributes for your entire portfolio.
  3. Prioritize the product price optimization candidates for repricing with the understanding that it might change after meeting with finance.

Download the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook

4.0 Clarify product target margins

2-3 sessions of 1 Hour each

Input: Finance partner/CFO knowledge of target product current and future margins, Finance partner/CFO who has information on underlying costs with details that illustrate supplier contributions

Output: Product finance markup target percentage margins and revenues

Materials: Finance data on the product family, Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook, Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

Participants: Initiative manager, Finance partner/CFO

  1. Schedule a meeting with your finance partner/CFO to validate expectations for product margins. The goal is to understand the detail of underlying costs/margins and if the impacts of supplier costs affect the product family. The information will be placed into the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook on tab 2, Product Portfolio Organizer under the “Unit Margins” heading.
  2. Arrive at a final “Cost-Plus New Price” based on underlying costs and target margins for each of the products. Record results in the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook, tab 2, under the “Cost-Plus New Price” heading.
  3. Record product target finance markup price under “Cost-Plus” in Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template, slide 9, and details in Appendix, “Cost-Plus Analysis,” slide 11.
  4. Repeat this process for any other products to be repriced.

Download the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook

Download the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

5.0 Establish customer price to value

1-4 weeks

Input: Identify segments within which you require price-to-value information, Understand your persona insight gaps, Review Sample Interview Guide using the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile, Competitive Market Workbook, Tab 4. Interview Guide.

Output: List of interviewees, Updated Interview Guide

Materials: Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook, Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

Participants: Initiative manager, Customer success to help identify interviewees, Customers, prospects

  1. Identify a list of customers and prospects that best represent your target persona when interviewed. Choose interviewees who will inform key differences among key segments (geographies, company size, a mix of customers and prospects, etc.) and who are decision makers and can best inform insights on price/value and competitors.
  2. Recruit interviewees and schedule 30-minute interviews.
  3. Keep track of interviewees using the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook, tab 3: “Interviewee Tracking.”
  4. Review the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook, tab 4: “Interview Guide,” and modify/update it where appropriate.
  5. Record interviewee perspectives on the “price they are willing to pay for the value received” (price/value equation) using the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook, tab 4: “Interview Guide.”
  6. Summarize findings to result in an average “customer’s value price.” Record product target ”customer’s value price” in Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template, slide 9 and supporting details in Appendix, “Customer Pricing Analysis,” slide 12.

Download the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook

Download the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

6.0 Identify competitive pricing

1-2 weeks

Input: Identify price candidate competitors, Your product pricing, contract type, and product attribute information to compare against, Knowledge of existing competitor information, websites, and technology research sites to guide questions

Output: Competitive product average pricing

Materials: Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook, Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

Participants: Initiative manager, Customers, prospects

  1. Identify the top 3-5 competitors’ products that you most frequently compete against with your selected product.
  2. Perform competitive intelligence research on deals won or lost that contain competitive pricing insights by speaking with your sales force.
  3. Use the interviews with key customers to also inform competitive pricing insights. Include companies which you may have lost to a competitor in your customer interviewee list.
  4. Modify and add key competitive pricing, contract, or product attributes in the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook, tab 5: “Competitive Information.”
  5. Place your product’s information into the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook, tab 5: “Competitive Information.”
  6. Research your competitors’ summarized pricing and product attribute insights into the workbook.
  7. Record research in the Summarize research on competitors to arrive at an average “Competitors Avg. Price”. Record in ”Customer’s Value Price” in Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template, slide 9, and details in Appendix, “Competitor Pricing Analysis,” slide 13.

Download the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Workbook

Download the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

7.0 Establish new price and gain buy-in

2-3 hours

Input: Findings from competitive, cost-plus, and customer price/value analysis

Output: Approvals for price change

Materials: Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

Participants: Initiative manager, Steering committee, Working team – typically representatives in product marketing, product management, sales

  1. Using prior recorded findings of Customer’s Value Price, Competitors’ Avg. Price, and Finance Markup Price, arrive at a recommended “New Price” and record in Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template, slide 9 and the Appendix for Project Analysis Details.
  2. Present findings to steering committee. Be prepared to show customer interviews and competitive analysis results to support your recommendation.
  3. Plan internal and external communications and discuss the timing of when to “go live” with new pricing. Discuss issues related to migration to a new price, how to handle currently low-priced customers, and how to migrate them over time to the new pricing.
  4. Identify if it makes sense to target a date to launch the new pricing in the future, so customers can be alerted in advance and therefore take advantage of “current pricing” to drive added revenues.
  5. Confer with IT to assess times required to implement within CPQ systems and with product marketing for time to change sales proposals, slide decks, and any other affected assets and systems.

Download the Optimize Software Pricing in a Volatile Competitive Market Presentation Template

Summary of Accomplishment

Problem Solved

With the help of this blueprint, you have deepened your and your company’s understanding of how to look at new pricing opportunities and what the market and the buyer will pay for your product. You are among the minority of product and marketing leaders that have thoroughly documented their new pricing strategy and processes – congratulations!

The benefits of having led your team through the process are significant and include the following:

  • Allow for faster, more accurate intake of customer and competitive data 
  • Refine the ability to effectively target pricing to specific market demands and customer segments 
  • Understand the association between the value proposition of products and services
  • Reduce financial costs and mistakes associated with manual efforts & uneducated guessing
  • Recognize and plan for new revenue opportunities or cost increases
  • Create new market or product packaging opportunities
And finally, by bringing your team along with you in this process, you have also led your team to become more customer-focused while pricing your products – a strategic shift that all organizations should pursue.

If you would like additional support, contact us and we’ll make sure you get the professional expertise you need.

Contact your account representative for more information.

info@softwarereviews.com
1-888-670-8889

Bibliography

“Chapter 4 Reasons for Project Failure.” Kissflow's Guide to Project Management. Kissflow, n.d. Web.

Edie, Naomi. “Microsoft Is Raising SaaS Prices, and Other Vendors Will, Too.” CIO Dive, 8 December 2021. Web.

Gruman, Galen, Alan S. Morrison, and Terril A. Retter. “Software Pricing Trends.” PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2018. Web.

Hargrave, Marshall. “Example of Economic Exposure.” Investopedia, 12 April 2022. Web.

Heaslip, Emily. “7 Smart Pricing Strategies to Attract Customers.” CO—, 17 November 2021. Web.

Higgins, Sean. “How to Price a Product That Your Sales Team Can Sell.” HubSpot, 4 April 2022. Web.

“Pricing Strategies.” Growth Ramp, March 2022. Web.

“Product Management Skills Benchmark Report 2021.” 280 Group, 9 November 2021. Web.

Quey, Jason. “Price Increase: How to Do a SaaS Pricing Change in 8 Steps.” Growth Ramp, 22 March 2021. Web.

Steenburg, Thomas, and Jill Avery. “Marketing Analysis Toolkit: Pricing and Profitability Analysis.” Harvard Business School, 16 July 2010. Web.

“2021 State of Competitive Intelligence.” Crayon and SCIO, n.d. Web.

Valchev, Konstantin. “Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Business.” OpenView Venture Partners, OV Blog, 20 April 2020. Web.

“What Is Price Elasticity?” Market Business News, n.d. Web.

Optimize the IT Operations Center

  • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}449|cart{/j2store}
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  • Parent Category Name: Operations Management
  • Parent Category Link: /i-and-o-process-management
  • Your team’s time is burned up by incident response.
  • Manual repetitive work uses up expensive resources.
  • You don’t have the visibility to ensure the availability the business demands.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Sell the project to the business.
  • Leverage the Operations Center to improve IT Operations.

Impact and Result

  • Clarify lines of accountability and metrics for success.
  • Implement targeted initiatives and track key metrics for continual improvement.

Optimize the IT Operations Center Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should Optimize the IT Operations Center, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

1. Lightning Phase: Pluck Low-Hanging Fruit for Quick Wins

Get quick wins to demonstrate early value for investments in IT Operations.

  • Optimize the IT Operations Center – Lightning Phase: Pluck Low-Hanging Fruit for Quick Wins

2. Get buy-in

Get buy-in from business stakeholders by speaking their language.

  • Optimize the IT Operations Center – Phase 1: Get Buy-In
  • IT Operations Center Prerequisites Assessment Tool
  • IT Operations Center Stakeholder Buy-In Presentation
  • IT Operations Center Continual Improvement Tracker

3. Define accountability and metrics

Formalize process and task accountability and develop targeted metrics.

  • Optimize the IT Operations Center – Phase 2: Define Accountability and Metrics
  • IT Operations Center RACI Charts Template

4. Assess gaps and prioritize initiatives

Identify pain points and determine the top solutions.

  • Optimize the IT Operations Center – Phase 3: Assess Gaps and Prioritize Initiatives
  • IT Operations Center Gap and Initiative Tracker
  • IT Operations Center Initiative Prioritization Tool

5. Launch initiatives and track metrics

Lay the foundation for implementation and continual improvement.

  • Optimize the IT Operations Center – Phase 4: Launch Initiatives and Track Metrics
[infographic]

Workshop: Optimize the IT Operations Center

Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

1 Check Foundation

The Purpose

Ensure base maturity in IT Operations processes.

Key Benefits Achieved

Verify that foundation is in place to proceed with Operations Center project.

Activities

1.1 Evaluate base maturity.

Outputs

IT Operations Center Prerequisites Assessment Tool

2 Define Accountabilities

The Purpose

Define accountabilities for Operations processes and tasks.

Key Benefits Achieved

Documented accountabilities.

Activities

2.1 Pluck low-hanging fruit for quick wins.

2.2 Complete process RACI.

2.3 Complete task RACI.

Outputs

Project plan

Process RACI

Task RACI

3 Map the Challenge

The Purpose

Define metrics and identify accountabilities and gaps.

Key Benefits Achieved

List of initiatives to address pain points.

Activities

3.1 Define metrics.

3.2 Define accountabilities.

3.3 Identify gaps.

Outputs

IT Operations Center Gap and Initiative Tracker

4 Build Action Plan

The Purpose

Develop an action plan to boost KPIs.

Key Benefits Achieved

Action plan and success criteria.

Activities

4.1 Prioritize initiatives.

Outputs

IT Operations Center Initiative Prioritization Tool

5 Map Out Implementation

The Purpose

Build an implementation plan for continual improvement.

Key Benefits Achieved

Continual improvement against identified metrics and KPIs.

Activities

5.1 Build implementation plan.

Outputs

IT Operations Center Continual Improvement Tracker

Further reading

Optimize the IT Operations Center

Stop burning budget on non-value-adding activities.

ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

The Network Operations Center is not in Kansas anymore.

"The old-school Network Operations Center of the telecom world was heavily peopled and reactionary. Now, the IT Operations Center is about more than network monitoring. An effective Operations Center provides visibility across the entire stack, generates actionable alerts, resolves a host of different incidents, and drives continual improvement in the delivery of high-quality services.
IT’s traditional siloed approach cannot provide the value the business demands. The modern Operations Center breaks down these silos for the end-to-end view required for a service-focused approach."

Derek Shank,
Research Analyst, Infrastructure & Operations
Info-Tech Research Group

Our understanding of the problem

This Research Is Designed For:

  • IT Operations Managers
  • IT Infrastructure Managers
  • CIOs

This Research Will Help You:

  • Improve reliability of services.
  • Reduce the cost of incident response.
  • Reduce the cost of manual repetitive work (MRW).

This Research Will Also Assist

  • Business Analysts
  • Project Managers
  • Business Relationship Managers

This Research Will Help Them

  • Develop appropriate non-functional requirements.
  • Integrate non-functional requirements into solution design and project implementation.

Executive Summary

Situation

  • Your team’s time is burned up by incident response.
  • MRW burns up expensive resources.
  • You don’t have the visibility to ensure the availability the business demands.

Complication

  • The increasing complexity of technology has resulted in siloed teams of specialists.
  • The business views IT Operations as a cost center and doesn’t want to provide resources to support improvement initiatives.

Resolution

  • Pluck low-hanging fruit for quick wins.
  • Obtain buy-in from business stakeholders by speaking their language.
  • Clarify lines of accountability and metrics for success.
  • Implement targeted initiatives and track key metrics for continual improvement.

Info-Tech Insight

  1. Sell the project to the business. Your first job is a sales job because executive sponsorship is key to project success.
  2. Worship the holy trinity of metrics: impact of downtime, cost of incident response, and time spent on manual repetitive work (MRW).
  3. Invest in order to profit. Improving the Operations Center takes time and money. Expect short-term pain to realize long-term gain.

The role of the Network Operations Center has changed

  • The old approach was technology siloed and the Network Operations Center (NOC) only cared about the network.
  • The modern Operations Center is about ensuring high availability of end-user services, and requires cross-functional expertise and visibility across all the layers of the technology stack.
A pie chart is depicted. The data displayed on the chart, in decreasing order of size, include: Applications; Servers; LAN; WAN; Security; Storage. Source: Metzler, n.d.

Most organizations lack adequate visibility

  • The rise of hybrid cloud has made environments more complex, not less.
  • The increasing complexity makes monitoring and incident response more difficult than ever.
  • Only 31% of organizations use advanced monitoring beyond what is offered by cloud providers.
  • 69% perform no monitoring, basic monitoring, or rely entirely on the cloud provider’s monitoring tools.
A Pie chart is depicted. Two data are represented on the chart. The first, representing 69% of the chart, is: Using no monitoring, basic monitoring, or relying only on the cloud vendor's monitoring. the second, representing 31% of the chart, is Using advanced monitoring beyond what cloud vendors provide. Source: InterOp ITX, 2018

Siloed service level agreements cannot ensure availability

You can meet high service level agreements (SLAs) for functional silos, but still miss the mark for service availability. The business just wants things to work!

this image contains Info-Tech's SLA-compliance rating chart, which displays the categories: Available, behaving as expected; Slow/degraded; and Unavailable, for each of: Webserver; Database; Storage; Network; Application; and, Business Service

The cost of downtime is massive

Increasing reliance on IT makes downtime hurt more than ever.
98% of enterprises lose $100,000+.
81% of enterprises lose $300,000+ per hour of downtime.

This is a bar graph, showing the cost per hour of downtime, against the percentage of enterprises.

Source: ITIC, 2016

IT is asked to do more with less

Most IT budgets are staying flat or shrinking.

57% of IT departments expect their budget to stay flat or to shrink from 2018 to 2019.

This image contains a pie chart with two data, one is labeled: Increase; representing 43% of the chart. The other datum is labeled: Shrink or stay flat, and represents 57% of the chart.

Unify and streamline IT Operations

A well-run Operations Center ensures high availability at reasonable cost. Improving your Operations Center results in:

  • Higher availability
  • Increased reliability
  • Improved project capacity
  • Higher business satisfaction

Measure success with the holy trinity of metrics

Focus on reducing downtime, cost of incident response, and MRW.

This image contains a Funnel Chart showing the inputs: Downtime; Cost of Incident Response; MRW; and the output: Reduce for continual improvement

Start from the top and employ a targeted approach

Analyze data to get buy-in from stakeholders, and use our tools and templates to follow the process for continual improvement in IT Operations.

This image depicts a cycle, which includes: Data analysis; Executive Sponsorship; Success Criteria; Gap Assessment; Initiatives; Tracking & Measurement

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

Guided Implementation

“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

Workshop

"We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

Consulting

"Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Optimize the IT Operations Center – project overview

Launch the Project

Identify Enterprise Services

Identify Line of Business Services

Complete Service Definitions

Best-Practice Toolkit

🗲 Pluck Low-Hanging Fruit for Quick Wins

1.1 Ensure Base Maturity Is in Place

1.2 Make the Case

2.1 Define Accountabilities

2.2 Define Metrics

3.1 Assess Gaps

3.2 Plan Initiatives

4.1 Lay Foundation

4.2 Launch and Measure

Guided Implementations

Discuss current state.

Review stakeholder presentation.

Review RACIs.

Review metrics.

Discuss gaps.

Discuss initiatives.

Review plan and metric schedule.

Onsite Workshop Module 1:

Clear understanding of project objectives and support obtained from the business.

Module 2:

Enterprise services defined and categorized.

Module 3:

LOB services defined based on user perspective.

Module 4:

Service record designed according to how IT wishes to communicate to the business.

Phase 1 Results:

Stakeholder presentation

Phase 2 Results:
  • RACIs
  • Metrics
Phase 3 Results:
  • Gaps list
  • Prioritized list of initiatives
Phase 4 Results:
  • Implementation plan
  • Continual improvement tracker

Workshop overview

Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

Pre-Workshop Workshop Day 1 Workshop Day 2 Workshop Day 3 Workshop Day 4
Activities

Check Foundation

Define Accountabilities

Map the Challenge

Build Action Plan

Map Out Implementation

1.1 Ensure base maturity.

🗲 Pluck low-hanging fruit for quick wins.

2.1 Complete process RACI.

2.2 Complete task RACI.

3.1 Define metrics.

3.2 Define accountabilities.

3.2 Identify gaps.

4.1 Prioritize initiatives.

5.1 Build implementation plan.

Deliverables
  1. IT Operations Center Prerequisites Assessment Tool
  1. IT Operations Center RACI Charts Template
  1. IT Operations Center Gap and Initiative Tracker
  1. IT Operations Center Initiative Prioritization Tool
  1. IT Operations Center Continual Improvement Tracker

PHASE 🗲

Pluck Low-Hanging Fruit for Quick Wins

Optimize the IT Operations Center

Conduct a ticket-trend analysis

Generate reports on tickets from your IT service management (ITSM) tool. Look for areas that consume the most resources, such as:

  • Recurring tickets.
  • Tickets that have taken a long time to resolve.
  • Tickets that could have been resolved at a lower tier.
  • Tickets that were unnecessarily or improperly escalated.

Identify issues

Analyze the tickets:

  • Look for recurring tickets that may indicate underlying problems.
  • Ask tier 2 and 3 technicians to flag tickets that could have been resolved at a lower tier.
  • Identify painful and/or time consuming service requests.
  • Flag any manual repetitive work.

Write the issues on a whiteboard.

Oil & Gas IT reduces manual repetitive maintenance work

CASE STUDY
Industry Oil & Gas
Source Interview

Challenge

The company used a webserver to collect data from field stations for analytics. The server’s version did not clear its cache – it filled up its own memory and would not overwrite, so it would just lock up and have to be rebooted manually.

Solution

The team found out that the volumes and units of data would cause the memory to fill at a certain time of the month. They wrote a script to reboot the machine and set up a planned outage during the appropriate weekend each month.

Results

The team never had to do manual reboots again – though they did have to tweak their reboot script not to rely on their calendar, after a shift in production broke the pattern between memory consumption and the calendar.

Rank the issues

🗲.1.1 10 minutes

  1. Assign each participant five sticky dots to use for voting.
  2. Have each participant place any number of dots beside the issue(s) of their choice.
  3. Count the dots and rank the top three most important issues.

INPUT

  • List of issues

OUTPUT

  • Top three issues

Materials

  • Whiteboard
  • Markers
  • Sticky dots

Participants

  • Operations Manager
  • Infrastructure Manager
  • I&O team members

Brainstorm solutions

🗲.1.2 10 minutes

  1. Write the three issues at the top of a whiteboard, each at the head of its own column.
  2. Focusing on one issue at a time, brainstorm potential solutions for each issue. Have one person write all the proposed solutions on the board beneath the issue.

Info-Tech Best Practice

Do not censor or evaluate the proposed solutions at this time. During brainstorming, focus on coming up with as many potential solutions as possible, no matter how infeasible or outlandish.

INPUT

  • Top three issues

OUTPUT

  • Potential solutions

Materials

  • Whiteboard
  • Markers

Participants

  • Operations Manager
  • Infrastructure Manager
  • I&O team members

Evaluate and rank potential solutions

🗲.1.3 30 minutes

  1. Score the solutions from 1-5 on each of the two dimensions:
  • Attainability
  • Probable efficacy
  • Identify the top scoring solution for each issue. In the event of a tie, vote to determine the winner.
  • Info-Tech Insight

    Quick wins are the best of both worlds. To get a quick win, pick a solution that is both readily attainable and likely to have high impact.

    INPUT

    • Potential solutions

    OUTPUT

    • Ranked list of solutions

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Markers

    Participants

    • Operations Manager
    • Infrastructure Manager
    • I&O team members

    Develop metrics to measure the effectiveness of solutions

    You should now have a top potential solution for each pain point.

    For each pain point and proposed solution, identify the metric that would indicate whether the solution had been effective or not. For example:

    • Pain point: Too many unnecessary escalations for SharePoint issues.
    • Solution: Train tier 1 staff to resolve SharePoint tickets.
    • Metric: % of SharePoint tickets resolved at tier 1.

    Design solutions

    • Some solutions explain themselves. E.g., hire an extra service desk person.
    • Others require more planning and design, as they involve a bespoke solution. E.g., improve asset management process or automate onboarding of new users.
    • For the solutions that require planning, take the time to design each solution fully before rushing to implement it.

    Build solutions

    • Build any of the solutions that require building. For example, any scripting for automations requires the writing of those scripts, and any automated ticket routing requires configuration of your ITSM tool.
    • Part of the build phase for many solutions should also involve designing the tests of those solutions.

    Test solutions – refine and iterate

    • Think about the expected outcome and results of the solutions that require testing.
    • Test each solution under production-like circumstances to see if the results and behavior are as expected.
    • Refine and iterate upon the solutions as necessary, and test again.

    Implement solutions and measure results

    • Before implementing each solution, take a baseline measurement of the metric that will measure success.
    • Implement the solutions using your change management process.
    • After implementation, measure the success of the solution using the appropriate metric.
    • Document the results and judge whether the solution has been effective.

    Use the top result as a case study to obtain buy-in

    Your most effective solution will make a great case study.

    Write up the results and input the case study into the IT Operations Center Stakeholder Buy-In Presentation.

    This image contains a screenshot of info-tech's default format for presenting case studies.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts

    this is a picture of an Info-Tech Analyst
    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
    • Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.
    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:
    🗲.1.2 This image contains a screenshot from section 🗲.1.2 of this blueprint.

    Identify issues

    Look for areas that aren’t working optimally.

    🗲.1.3 this image contains a screenshot from section 🗲.1.3 of this blueprint.

    Evaluate and rank potential solutions

    Sort the wheat from the chaff and plan for quick wins.

    PHASE 1

    Get Buy-In

    Optimize the IT Operations Center

    Step 1.1: Ensure Base Maturity Is in Place

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Assess maturity of base IT Operations processes.

    Outcomes of this step

    • Completed IT Operations Center Prerequisites Assessment Tool

    Base processes underpin the Operations Center

    • Before you optimize your Operations Center, you should have foundational ITSM processes in place: service desk, and incident, problem, and change management.
    • Attempting to optimize Operations before it rests on a solid foundation can only lead to frustration.

    IT Operations Center

    • Service Desk
    • Incident Management
    • Problem Management
    • Change Management

    Info-Tech Insight

    ITIL isn’t dead. New technology such as cloud solutions and advanced monitoring tools have transformed how ITSM processes are implemented, but have not obviated them.

    Assess maturity of prerequisite processes

    1.1.1 IT Operations Center Prerequisites Assessment Tool

    • Don’t try to prematurely optimize your Operations Center.
    • Before undertaking this project, you should already have a base level of maturity in the four foundational IT Operations processes.
    • Complete the IT Operations Center Prerequisites Assessment Tool to assess your current level in service desk, incident management, problem management, and change management.
    this image contains a screenshot from Info-Tech's IT Operations Center Prerequisite Assessment

    Make targeted improvements on prerequisite processes if necessary

    If there are deficiencies in any of your foundational processes, take the time to remedy those first before proceeding with Optimize the IT Operations Center. See Info-Tech’s other blueprints:

    Standardize the Service Desk

    Strengthen your service desk to build a strong ITSM foundation.

    Incident and Problem Management

    Don’t let persistent problems govern your department.

    Optimize Change Management

    Turn and face the change with a right-sized change management process.

    Step 1.2: Make the Case

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Estimate the impact of downtime for top five applications.
    • Estimate the cost of incident response.
    • Estimate the cost of MRW.
    • Set success metrics and estimate the ROI of the Operations Center project.
    • IT Operations Center Stakeholder Buy-In Presentation

    Obtaining buy-in is critical

    Buy-in from top-level stakeholders is critical to the success of the project.

    Before jumping into your initiatives, take the time to make the case and bring the business on board.

    Factors that “prevent us from improving the NOC”

    This image contains a graph of factors that prevent us from improving the NOC. In decreasing order, they include: Lack of strategic guidance from our vendors; The unwillingness of our management to accept new risk; Lack of adequate software tools; Our internal processes; Lack of management vision; Lack of funding; and Lack of personnel resources. There is a red circle drawn around the last three entries, with the words: Getting Buy-in Removes the Top Three Roadblocks to Improvement!. Source: Metzier, n.d

    List your top five applications

    List your top five applications for business criticality.

    Don’t agonize over decisions at this point.

    Generally, the top applications will be customer facing, end-user facing for the most critical business units, or critical for health and safety.

    Estimate impact of downtime

    • Come up with a rough, back-of-the-napkin estimate of the hourly cost of downtime for each application.
    • Complete page two of the IT Operations Center Stakeholder Buy-In Presentation.
    • Estimate loss of revenue per hour, loss of productivity per hour, and IT cost per incident resolution hour.
    • Pull a report on incident hours/outages in the past year from your ITSM tool. Multiply the total cost per incident hour by the incident hours per year to determine the current cost per year of service disruptions for each service.
    • Add up the cost for each of the top five services.
    • Now you can show the business a hard value number that quantifies your availability issues.

    Estimate salary cost of non-value-adding work

    Complete page three of the IT Operations Center Stakeholder Buy-In Presentation.

    • Estimate annual wage cost of incident response: multiply incident response hours per year (take from your ITSM tool) by the average hourly wage of incident responders.
    • Estimate annual cost of MRW: multiply MRW hours per year (take from ITSM tool or from time-keeping tool, or use best guess based on talking to staff members) by the average hourly wage of IT staff performing MRW.
    • Add the two numbers together to calculate the non-value-adding IT salary cost per year.
    • Express the previous number as a percentage of total IT salary. Everything that is not incident response or MRW is value-adding work.

    Now you have the holy trinity of metrics: set some targets

    The holy trinity of metrics:

    • Cost of downtime
    • % of salary on incident response
    • % of salary on MRW

    You want to reduce the above numbers. Set some back-of-the-napkin targets for percentage reductions for each of these areas. These are high-level metrics that business stakeholders will care about.

    Take your best guess at targets. Higher maturity organizations will have less potential for reduction from a percentage point of view (eventually you hit diminishing returns), while organizations just beginning to optimize their Operations Center have the potential for huge gains.

    Calculate the potential gains of targets

    Complete page five of the IT Operations Center Stakeholder Buy-In Presentation.

    • Multiply the targeted/estimated % reductions of the costs by your current costs to determine the potential savings/benefits.
    • Do a back-of-the napkin estimate of the cost of the Operations Center improvement project. Use reasonable numbers for cost of personnel time and cost of tools, and be sure to include ongoing personnel time costs – your time isn’t free and continual improvement takes work and effort.
    • Calculate the ROI.

    Fill out the case study

    • Complete page six of the IT Operations Center Stakeholder Buy-In Presentation. If you completed the lightning phase, use the results of your own quick win project(s) as an example of feasibility.
    • If you did not complete the lightning phase, delete this slide, or use an example of what other organizations have achieved to demonstrate feasibility.
    This image contains a screenshot of info-tech's default format for presenting case studies.

    Present to stakeholders

    • Deliver the presentation to key stakeholders.
    • Focus on the high-level story that the current state is costing real dollars and wages, and that these losses can be minimized through process improvements.
    • Be up front that many of the numbers are based on estimates, but be prepared to defend the reasonableness of the estimates.

    Gain buy-in and identify project sponsor

    • If the business is on board with the project, determine one person to be the executive sponsor for the project. This person should have a strong desire to see the project succeed, and should have some skin in the game.

    Formalize communication with the project sponsor

    • Establish how you will communicate with the sponsor throughout the project (e.g. weekly or monthly e-mail updates, bi-weekly meetings).
    • Set up a regular/recurring cadence and stick to it, so it can be put on auto-pilot. Be clear about who is responsible for initiating communication and sticking to the reporting schedule.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Tailor communication to the sponsor. The project sponsor is not the project manager. The sponsor’s role is to drive the project forward by allocating appropriate resources and demonstrating highly visible support to the broader organization. The sponsor should be kept in the loop, but not bothered with minutiae.

    Note the starting numbers for the holy trinity

    Use the IT Operations Center Continual Improvement Tracker:

    • Enter your starting numbers for the holy trinity of metrics.
    • After planning and implementing initiatives, this tracker will be used to update against the holy trinity to assess the success of the project on an ongoing basis and to drive continual improvement.

    PHASE 2

    Define Accountability and Metrics

    Optimize the IT Operations Center

    Step 2.1: Define Accountabilities

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Formalize RACI for key processes.
    • Formalize RACI for key tasks.

    Outcomes of this step

    • Completed RACIs

    List key Operations Center processes

    Compile a list of processes that are key for the Operations Center.

    These processes should include the four foundational processes:

    • Service Desk
    • Incident Management
    • Problem Management
    • Change Management

    You may also want to include processes such as the following:

    • Event Management
    • Configuration Management

    Avoid listing processes you have yet to develop – stick with those already playing a role in your current state.

    Formalize RACI for key processes

    Use the IT Operations Center RACI Charts Template. Complete a RACI for each of the key processes involved in the IT Operations Center.

    RACI:

    • Responsible (does the work on a day-to-day basis)
    • Accountable (reviews, signs off, and is held accountable for outcomes)
    • Consulted (input is sought to feed into decision making)
    • Informed (is given notification of outcomes)

    As a best practice, no more than one person should be responsible or accountable for any given process. The same person can be both responsible and accountable for a given process, or it could be two different people.

    Avoid making someone accountable for a process if they do not have full visibility into the process for appropriate oversight, or do not have time to give the process sufficient attention.

    Formalize RACI for IT tasks

    Now think about the actual tasks or work that goes on in IT. Which roles and individuals are accountable for which tasks or pieces of work?

    In this case, more than one role/person can be listed as responsible or accountable in the RACI because we’re talking about types or categories of work. No conflict will occur because these individuals will be responsible or accountable for different pieces of work or individual tasks of the same type. (e.g. all service desk staff are responsible for answering phones and inputting tickets into the ITSM tool, but no more than one staff member is responsible for the input of any given ticket from a specific phone call).

    Step 2.2: Define Metrics

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Cascade operational metrics from the holy trinity.
    • Evaluate metrics and identify key performance indicators (KPIs).
    • Cascade performance assessment (PA) metrics to support KPIs.
    • Build feedback loop for PA metrics.

    Outcomes of this step

    • KPIs
    • PA metrics

    Metrics must span across silos for shared accountability

    To adequately support the business goals of the organization, IT metrics should span across functional silos.

    Metrics that span across silos foster shared accountability across the IT organization.

    Metrics supported by all groups

    three grain silos are depicted. below, are the words IT Groups, with arrows pointing from the words to each of the three silos.

    Cascade operational metrics from the holy trinity

    Focus on the holy trinity of metrics.

    From these, cascade down to operational metrics that contribute to the holy trinity. It is possible that an operational metric may support more than one trinity metric. For example:

    a flow chart is depicted. two input circles point toward a central circle, and two output circles point away. the input circles include: Cost of Downtime; Cost of Incident Response. The central circle reads: Mean time to restore service. the output circles include the words: Tier 1 Resolution Rate; %% of Known Errors Captured in ITSM Tool.

    Evaluate metrics and identify KPIs

      • Evaluate your operational metrics and determine which ones are likely to have the largest impact on the holy trinity of metrics.
      • Identify the ten metrics likely to have the most impact: these will be your KPIs moving forward.
      • Enter these KPIs into the IT Operations Center Continual Improvement Tracker.
      this image depicts a cycle around the term KPI. The cycle includes: Objective; Measurement; optimization; strategy; performance; evaluation

    Beware how changing variables/context can affect metrics

    • Changes in context can affect metrics drastically. It’s important to keep the overall context in mind to avoid being led astray by certain numbers taken in isolation.
    • For example, a huge hiring spree might exhaust the stock of end-user devices, requiring time to procure hardware before the onboarding tickets can be completely fulfilled. You may have improved your onboarding process through automation, but see a large increase in average time to onboard a new user. Keep an eye out for such anomalies or fluctuations, and avoid putting too much stock in any single operational KPI.
    • Remember, operational KPIs are just a heuristic tool to support the holy trinity of metrics.

    Determine accountability for KPIs

    • For each operational KPI, assign one person to be accountable for that KPI.
    • Be sure the person in charge has the necessary authority and oversight over the processes and personnel that most affect that KPI – otherwise it makes little sense to hold the individual accountable.
    • Consulting your process RACIs is a good place to start.
    • Record the accountable person for each KPI in the IT Operations Center Continual Improvement Tracker.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Match accountability with authority. The person accountable for each KPI should be the one who has the closet and most direct control over the work and processes that most heavily impact that KPI.

    Cascade PA metrics to support KPIs

    KPIs are ultimately driven by how IT does its work, and how individuals work is driven by how their performance is assessed and evaluated.

    For the top KPIs, be sure there are individual PA metrics in place that support the KPI, and if not, develop the appropriate PA metrics.

    For example:

    • KPI: Mean time to resolve incidents
    • PA metric: % of escalations that followed SOP (e.g. not holding onto a ticket longer than supposed to)
    • KPI: Number of knowledge base articles written
    • PA metric: Number of knowledge base articles written/contributed to

    Communicate key changes in PA metrics

    Any changes from the previous step will take time and effort to implement and make stick.

    Changing people’s way of working is extremely difficult.

    Build a communication and implementation plan about rolling out these changes, emphasize the benefits for everyone involved, and get buy-in from the affected staff members.

    Build feedback loops for PA metrics

    Now that PA metrics support your Operations Center’s KPIs, you should create frequent feedback loops to drive and boost those PA metrics.

    Once per year or once per quarter is not frequent enough. Managers should meet with their direct reports at least monthly and review their reports’ performance against PA metrics.

    Use a “set it and forget it” implementation, such as a recurring task or meeting in your calendar.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts

    this is a picture of an Info-Tech Analyst

    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
    • Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.
    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:
    2.2.1 This image contains a screenshot from section 2.2.1 of this blueprint.

    Cascade operational metrics from the holy trinity

    Rank goals based on business impact and stakeholder pecking order.

    2.2.2 this image contains a screenshot from section 2.2.2 of this blueprint.

    Determine accountability for KPIs

    Craft a concise and compelling elevator pitch that will drive the project forward.

    PHASE 3

    Assess Gaps and Prioritize Initiatives

    Optimize the IT Operations Center

    Step 3.1: Assess Gaps

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Assess visibility provided by monitoring.
    • Assess process workflows and identify areas for automation.
    • Assess requests and identify potential for automation.
    • Assess Operations Center staff capabilities.
    • Conduct a root cause analysis on the gaps/pain points.

    Outcomes of this step

    • List of gaps
    • List of root causes

    Measure current state of KPIs and identify lagging ones

    Take a baseline measurement of each operational KPI.

    If historical data is available, compare the present state measurement to data points collected over the last year or so.

    Review the measured KPIs.

    Identify any KPIs that seem lagging or low, or that may be particularly important to influence.

    Record lagging KPIs in the IT Operations Center Gap and Initiative Tracker tool.

    Assess visibility provided by monitoring

    List the top five most critical business services supported by IT.
    Assess the current state of your monitoring tools.

    For each business service, rate the level of visibility your monitoring tools allow from the following options:

    1. We have no visibility into the service, or lack visibility into crucial elements.
    2. We have basic visibility (up/down) into all the IT components that support the service.
    3. We have basic visibility (up/down) into the end service itself, in addition to all the IT components that make it up.
    4. We have some advanced visibility into some aspects of the service and/or its IT components.
    5. We have a full, end-to-end view of performance across all the layers of the stack, as well as the end business service itself.

    Identify where more visibility may be necessary

    For most organizations it isn’t practical to have complete visibility into everything. For the areas in which visibility is lacking into key services, think about whether more visibility is actually required or not. Consider some of the following questions:

    • How great is the impact of this service being unavailable?
    • Would greater visibility into the service significantly reduce the mean time to restore the service in the event of incidents?

    Record any deficiencies in the IT Operations CenterGap and Initiative Tracker tool.

    Assess alerting

    Assess alerting for your most critical services.

    Consider whether any of the following problems occur:

    • Often receive no alert(s) in the event of critical outages of key services (we find out about critical outages from the service desk).
    • We are regularly overwhelmed with too many alerts to investigate properly.
    • Our alerts are rarely actionable.
    • We often receive many false alerts.

    Identify areas for potential improvement in the managing of alerts. Record any deficiencies in the IT Operations Center Gap and Initiative Tracker tool.

    Assess process workflows and identify areas for automation

    Review your process flows for base processes such as Service Desk, Incident Management, Problem Management, and Change Management.

    Identify areas in the workflows where there may be defects, inefficiencies, or potential for improvement or automation.

    Record any deficiencies in the IT Operations Center Gap and Initiative Tracker tool.

    See the blueprint Prepare for Cognitive Service Management for process workflows and areas to look for automation possibilities.

    Prepare for Cognitive Service Management

    Make ready for AI-assisted IT operations.

    Assess requests and identify potential for automation

    • Assess the most common work orders or requests handled by the Operations Center group (i.e. this does not include requests fulfilled by the help desk).
    • Which work orders are the most painful? That is, what common work orders involve the greatest effort or the most manual work to fulfill?
    • Fulfillment of common, recurring work orders is MRW, and should be reduced or removed if possible.
    • Consider automation of certain work orders, or self-service delivery.
    • Record any deficiencies in the IT Operations Center Gap and Initiative Tracker tool.

    Assess Operations Center staff capabilities

    • Assess the skills and expertise of your team members.
    • Consider some of the following:
      • Are there team members who could perform their job more effectively by picking up certain skills or proficiencies?
      • Are there team members who have the potential to shift into more valuable or useful roles, given the appropriate training?
      • Are there individual team members whose knowledge is crucial for operations, and whose function cannot be taken up by others?

    Record any deficiencies in the IT Operations Center Gap and Initiative Tracker tool.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Train to avoid pain. All too often organizations expose themselves to significant key person risk by relying on the specialized skills and knowledge of one team member. Use cross training to remedy such single points of failure before the risk materializes.

    Brainstorm pain points

    Brainstorm any pain points not discussed in the previous areas.

    Pain points can be specific operational issues that have not yet been considered. For example:

    • Tom is overwhelmed with tickets.
    • Our MSP often breaches SLA.
    • We don’t have a training budget.

    Record any deficiencies in the IT Operations CenterGap and Initiative Tracker tool.

    Conduct a root cause analysis on the gaps/pain points

    • Pain points can often be symptoms of other deficiencies, or somewhat removed from the actual problem.
    • Using the 5 Whys, conduct a root cause analysis on the pain points for which the causes are not obvious.
    • For each pain point, ask “why” for a sequence of five times, attempting to proceed to the root cause of the issue. This root cause is the true gap that needs to be remedied to resolve the pain point.
    • For example:
      • The Wi-Fi network often goes down in the afternoon.
        • Why?: Its bandwidth gets overloaded.
        • Why?: Many people are streaming video.
        • Why?: There’s a live broadcast of a football game at that time.
      • Possible solutions:
        • Block access to the streaming services.
        • Project the game on a screen in a large conference room and encourage everyone to watch it there.

    Step 3.2: Plan Initiatives

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Brainstorm initiatives to boost KPIs and address gaps.
    • Prioritize potential initiatives.
    • Decide which initiatives to include on the roadmap.

    Outcomes of this step

    • Targeted improvement roadmap

    Brainstorm initiatives to boost KPIs and address gaps

    Prioritize potential initiatives

    3.2.1 IT Operations Center Initiative Prioritization Tool

    • Use the IT Operations Center Initiative Prioritization Tool.
    • Enter the initiatives into the tool.
    • For each initiative, input the following ranking criteria:
      • The metric/KPI’s estimated degree of impact on the holy trinity.
      • The gap or pain point’s estimated degree of impact on the metric/KPI.
      • The initiative’s estimated degree of positive impact on the gap or pain point
      • The initiative’s attainability.
    • Estimate the resourcing capacity required for each initiative.
    • For accurate capacity assessment, input as “force include” all current in-flight projects handled by the Operations Center group (including those unrelated to the Operations Center project).

    Decide which initiatives to include on the roadmap

    • Not all initiatives will be worth pursuing – and especially not all at once.
    • Consider the results displayed on the final tab of the IT Operations CenterInitiative Prioritization Tool.
    • Based on the prioritization and taking capacity into account, decide which initiatives to include on your roadmap.
    • Sometimes, for operational or logistical reasons, it may make sense to schedule an initiative at a time other than its priority might dictate. Make such exceptions on a case-by-case basis.

    Assign an owner to each initiative, and provide resourcing

    • For each initiative, assign one person to be the owner of that initiative.
    • Be sure that person has the authority and the bandwidth necessary to drive the initiative forward.
    • Secure additional resourcing for any initiatives you want to include on your roadmap that are lacking capacity.

    Info-Tech Insight

    You must invest resources in order to reduce the time spent on non-value-adding work.

    "The SRE model of working – and all of the benefits that come with it – depends on teams having ample capacity for engineering work. If toil eats up that capacity, the SRE model can’t be launched or sustained. An SRE perpetually buried under toil isn’t an SRE, they are just a traditional long-suffering SysAdmin with a new title."– David N. Blank-Edelman

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts

    this is a picture of an Info-Tech Analyst

    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
    • Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.
    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:
    3.1.1 This image contains a screenshot from section 3.1.1 of this blueprint.

    Conduct a root cause analysis on the gaps/pain points

    Find out the cause, so you can come up with solutions.

    3.2.1 this image contains a screenshot from section 3.2.1 of this blueprint.

    Prioritize potential initiatives

    Don’t try to boil the ocean. Target what’s manageable and what will have the most impact.

    PHASE 4

    Launch Initiatives and Track Metrics

    Optimize the IT Operations Center

    Step 4.1: Lay Foundation

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Build initiative communication plan.
    • Develop a testing plan for each technical initiative.

    Outcomes of this step

    • Communication plan
    • Testing plan(s)

    Expect resistance to change

    • It’s not as simple as rolling out what you’ve designed.
    • Anything that affects people’s way of working will inevitably be met with suspicion and pushback.
    • Be prepared to fight the battle.
    • "The hardest part is culture. You must get people to see the value of automation. Their first response is ‘We've been doing it this way for 10 years, why do we need to do it another way?’ It's hard to get someone out of their comfort zone to learn something new, especially when they've been at an organization for 20 years. You need to give them incentives."– Cyrus Kalatbari, Senior IT Architect, Infrastructure/Cloud

    Communicate changes in advance, along with their benefits!

    • Communicate changes well in advance of the date(s) of implementation.
    • Emphasize the benefits of the changes – not just for the organization, but for employees and staff members.
    • Advance communication of changes helps make them more palatable, and builds trust in employees by making them feel informed of what’s going on.

    Involve IT staff in design and implementation of changes

    • As you communicate the coming changes, take the opportunity to involve any affected staff members who have not yet participated in the project.
    • Solicit their feedback and get them to help design and implement the initiatives that involve significant changes to their roles.

    Develop a testing plan for each technical initiative

    • Some initiatives, such as appointing a new change manager or hiring a new staff member, do not make sense to test.
    • On the other hand, technical initiatives such as automation scripts, new monitoring tools or dashboards, and changed alert thresholds should be tested thoroughly before implementation.
    • For each technical initiative, think about the expected results and performance if it were to run in production, and build a test plan to ensure it behaves as expected and there are no corner cases.

    Test technology initiatives and iterate if necessary

    • Test each technical initiative under a variety of circumstances, with as close an environment to production as possible.
    • Try to develop corner cases or unusual or unexpected situations, and see if any of these will break the functionality or produce unintended or unexpected results.
    • Document the results of the testing, and iterate on the initiative and test again if necessary.

    "The most important things – and the things that people miss – are prerequisites and expected results. People jump out and build scripts, then the scripts go into the ditch, and they end up debugging in production." – Darin Stahl, Research Director, Infrastructure & Operations

    Step 4.2: Launch and Measure

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Launch initiatives and track adoption and effectiveness.
    • Investigate initiatives that appear ineffective.
    • Measure success with the holy trinity.

    Outcomes of this step

    • Continual improvement roadmap

    Establish a review cycle for each metric

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Don’t measure what doesn’t matter. If a metric is not going to be reviewed or reported on for informational or decision-making purposes, it should not be tracked.

    Launch initiatives and track adoption and effectiveness

    • Launch the initiatives.
    • Some initiatives will need to proceed through your change management process in order to roll out, but others will not.
    • Track the adoption of initiatives that require it.
      • Some initiatives will require tracking of adoption, whereas others will not.
      • For example, hiring a new service desk staff member does not require tracking of adoption, but implementing a new process for ticket handling does.
      • The implementation plan should include a way to measure the adoption of such initiatives, and regularly review the numbers to see if the implementation has been successful.
    • For all initiatives, measure their effectiveness by continuing to track the KPI/metric that the initiative is intended to influence.

    Assess metrics according to review cycle for continual improvement

    • Assess metrics according to the review cycle.
    • Note whether metrics are improving in the right direction or not.
    • Correlate changes in the metrics with measures of the adoption of the initiatives – see whether initiatives that have been adopted are moving the needle on the KPIs they are intended to.

    Investigate initiatives that appear ineffective

    • If the adoption of an initiative has succeeded, but the expected impact of that initiative on the KPI has not taken place, investigate further and conduct a root causes analysis to determine why this is the case.
    • Sometimes, anomalies or fluctuations will occur that cause the KPI not to move in accordance with the success of the initiative. In this case, it’s just a fluke and the initiative can still be successful in influencing the KPI over the long term.
    • Other times, the initiative may prove mostly or entirely ineffective, either due to misdesign of the initiative itself, a change of circumstances, or other compounding factors or complexities. If the initiative proves ineffective, consider iterating modifications of the initiative and continuing to measure the effect on KPIs – or perhaps killing the initiative altogether.
    • Remember that experimentation is not a bad thing – it’s okay that not every initiative will always prove worthwhile.

    Measure success with the holy trinity

    • Report to business stakeholders on the effect on the holy trinity of metrics at least annually.
    • Calculate the ROI of the project after two years and compare the results to the targeted ROI you initially presented in the IT Operations Center Stakeholder Buy-In Presentation.
    This image contains a Funnel Chart showing the inputs: Downtime; Cost of Incident Response; MRW; and the output: Reduce for continual improvement

    Iterate on the Operations Center process for continual improvement

    This image depicts a cycle, which includes: Data analysis; Executive Sponsorship; Success Criteria; Gap Assessment; Initiatives; Tracking & Measurement

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts

    this is a picture of an Info-Tech Analyst

    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
    • Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.
    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:
    4.1.1This image contains a screenshot from section 3.1.1 of this blueprint.

    Communicate changes in advance, along with their benefits!

    Rank goals based on business impact and stakeholder pecking order.

    4.1.2 this image contains a screenshot from section 3.2.1 of this blueprint.

    Develop a testing plan for each technical initiative

    Craft a concise and compelling elevator pitch that will drive the project forward.

    Research contributors and experts
    This is a picture of Cyrus Kalatbari, IT infrastructure/cloud architect

    Cyrus Kalatbari, IT Infrastructure/Cloud Architect

    Cyrus’ in-depth knowledge cutting across I&O and service delivery has enhanced the IT operations of multiple enterprise-class clients.

    This is a picture of Derek Cullen, Chief Technology Officer

    Derek Cullen, Chief Technology Officer

    Derek is a proven leader in managing enterprise-scale development, deployment, and integration of applications, platforms, and systems, with a sharp focus on organizational transformation and corporate change.

    This is a picture of Phil Webb, Senior Manager

    Phil Webb, Senior Manager – Unified Messaging and Mobility

    Phil specializes in service delivery for cloud-based and hybrid technology solutions, spanning requirements gathering, solution design, new technology introduction, development, integration, deployment, production support, change/release delivery, maintenance, and continuous improvement.

    This is a picture of Richie Mendoza, IT Services Delivery Consultant

    Richie Mendoza, IT Services Delivery Consultant

    Ritchie’s accomplishments include pioneering a cloud capacity management process and presenting to the Operations team and to higher management, while providing a high level of technical leadership in all phases of capacity management activities.

    This is a picture of Rob Thompson, Solutions Architect

    Rob Thomson, Solutions Architect

    Rob is an IT leader with a track record of creating and executing digital transformation initiatives to achieve the desired outcomes by integrating people, process, and technology into an efficient and effective operating model.

    Related Info-Tech research

    Create a Configuration Management Roadmap

    Right-size your CMDB to improve IT operations.

    Harness Configuration Management Superpowers

    Build a CMDB around the IT services that are most important to the organization.

    Develop an IT Infrastructure Services Playbook

    Automation, SDI, and DevOps – build a cheat sheet to manage a changing Infrastructure & Operations environment.

    Develop an Availability and Capacity Management Plan

    Manage capacity to increase uptime and reduce costs.

    Establish a Program to Enable Effective Performance Monitoring

    Maximize the benefits of infrastructure monitoring investments by diagnosing and assessing transaction performance, from network to server to end-user interface.

    Bibliography

    Baker, Dan, and Hal Baylor. “How Benchmarking & Streamlining NOC Operations Can Lower Costs & Boost Effectiveness.” Top Operator, Mar. 2017. Web.

    Blank-Edelman, David. Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale. O'Reilly, 2018. Web.

    CA Technologies. “IT Transformation to Next-Generation Operations Centers: Assure Business Service Reliability by Optimizing IT Operations.” CA Technologies, 2014. Web.

    Ditmore, Jim. “Improving Availability: Where to Start.” Recipes for IT, n.d. Web.

    Ennis, Shawn. “A Phased Approach for Building a Next-Generation Network Operations Center.” Monolith Software, 2009. Web.

    Faraclas, Matt. “Why Does Infrastructure Operations Still Suck?” Ideni, 25 Feb. 2016. Web.

    InterOp ITX. “2018 State of the Cloud.” InterOp ITX, Feb. 2018. Web.

    ITIC. “Cost of Hourly Downtime Soars: 81% of Enterprises Say it Exceeds $300K On Average.” ITIC, 2 Aug. 2016. Web.

    Joe the IT Guy. “Availability Management Is Harder Than it Looks.” Joe the IT Guy, 10 Feb. 2016. Web.

    ---. “Do Quick Wins Exist for Availability Management?” Joe the IT Guy, 15 May 2014. Web.

    Lawless, Steve. “11 Top Tips for Availability Management.” Purple Griffon, 4 Jan. 2019. Web.

    Metzler, Jim. “The Next Generation Network Operations Center: How the Focus on Application Delivery is Redefining the NOC.” Ashton, Metzler & Associates, n.d. Web.

    Nilekar, Shirish. “Beyond Redundancy: Improving IT Availability.” Network Computing, 28 Aug. 2015. Web.

    Slocum, Mac. “Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): A Simple Overview.” O’Reilly, 16 Aug. 2018. Web.

    Spiceworks. “The 2019 State of IT.” Spiceworks, 2019. Web

    Maintain an Organized Portfolio

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    • Parent Category Name: Portfolio Management
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    • All too often, the portfolio of programs and projects looks more like a random heap than a strategically organized and balanced collection of investments that will drive the business forward.
    • Portfolio managers know that with the right kind of information and the right level of process maturity they can get better results through the portfolio; however, organizations often assume (falsely) that the required level of maturity is out of reach from their current state and perpetually delay improvements.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • The information needed to define clear and usable criteria for organizing the portfolio of programs and projects already exists. Portfolio managers only need to identify the sources of that information and institute processes for regularly reviewing that information in order to define those criteria.
    • Once a portfolio manager has a clear idea of the goals and constraints that shape what ought to be included (or removed) from the portfolio and once these have been translated into clear and usable portfolio criteria, basic portfolio management processes can be instituted to ensure that these criteria are used consistently throughout the various stages of the project lifecycle.
    • Portfolio management frameworks and processes do not need to be built from scratch. Well-known frameworks – such as the one outlined in COBIT 5 APO05 – can be instituted in a way that will allow even low-maturity organizations to start organizing their portfolio.
    • Organizations do not need to grow into portfolio management frameworks to get the benefits of an organized portfolio; instead, they can grow within such frameworks.

    Impact and Result

    • An organized portfolio will ensure that the projects and programs included in it are strategically aligned and can actually be executed within the finite constraints of budgetary and human resource capacity.
    • Portfolio managers are better empowered to make decisions about which projects should be included in the portfolio (and when) and are better empowered to make the very tough decisions about which projects should be removed from the portfolio (i.e. cancelled).
    • Building and maturing a portfolio management framework will more fully integrate the PMO into the broader IT management and governance frameworks, making it a more integral part of strategic decisions and a better business partner in the long run.

    Maintain an Organized Portfolio Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should maintain an organized portfolio of programs and projects, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Assess the current state of the portfolio and PPM processes

    Analyze the current mix of programs and projects in your portfolio and assess the maturity of your current PPM processes.

    • Maintain an Organized Portfolio – Phase 1: Assess the Current State of the Portfolio and PPM Processes
    • Project Portfolio Organizer
    • COBIT APO05 (Manage Portfolio) Alignment Workbook

    2. Enhance portfolio organization through improved PPM criteria and processes

    Enhance and optimize your portfolio management processes to ensure portfolio criteria are clearly defined and consistently applied across the project lifecycle when making decisions about which projects to include or remove from the portfolio.

    • Maintain an Organized Portfolio – Phase 2: Enhance Portfolio Organization Through Improved PPM Criteria and Processes
    • Portfolio Management Standard Operating Procedures

    3. Implement improved portfolio management practices

    Implement your portfolio management improvement initiatives to ensure long-term sustainable adoption of new PPM practices.

    • Maintain an Organized Portfolio – Phase 3: Implement Improved Portfolio Management Practices
    • Portfolio Management Improvement Roadmap Tool
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Maintain an Organized Portfolio

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Assess Portfolio Mix and Portfolio Process Current State

    The Purpose

    Analyze the current mix of the portfolio to determine how to better organize it according to organizational goals and constraints.

    Assess which PPM processes need to be enhanced to better organize the portfolio.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    An analysis of the existing portfolio of projects (highlighting areas of concern).

    An analysis of the maturity of current PPM processes and their ability to support the maintenance of an organized portfolio.

    Activities

    1.1 Pre-work: Prepare a complete project list.

    1.2 Define existing portfolio categories, criteria, and targets.

    1.3 Analyze the current portfolio mix.

    1.4 Identify areas of concern with current portfolio mix.

    1.5 Review the six COBIT sub-processes for portfolio management (APO05.01-06).

    1.6 Assess the degree to which these sub-processes have been currently achieved at the organization.

    1.7 Assess the degree to which portfolio-supporting IT governance and management processes exist.

    1.8 Perform a gap analysis.

    Outputs

    Analysis of the current portfolio mix

    Assessment of COBIT alignment and gap analysis.

    2 Define Portfolio Target Mix, Criteria, and Roadmap

    The Purpose

    Define clear and usable portfolio criteria.

    Record/design portfolio management processes that will support the consistent use of portfolio criteria at all stages of the project lifecycle.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Clearly defined and usable portfolio criteria.

    A portfolio management framework that supports the consistent use of the portfolio criteria across all stages of the project lifecycle.

    Activities

    2.1 Identify determinants of the portfolio mix, criteria, and constraints.

    2.2 Define the target mix, portfolio criteria, and portfolio metrics.

    2.3 Identify sources of funding and resourcing.

    2.4 Review and record the portfolio criteria based upon the goals and constraints.

    2.5 Create a PPM improvement roadmap.

    Outputs

    Portfolio criteria

    Portfolio metrics for intake, monitoring, closure, termination, reprioritization, and benefits tracking

    Portfolio Management Improvement Roadmap

    3 Design Improved Portfolio Sub-Processes

    The Purpose

    Ensure that the portfolio criteria are used to guide decision making at each stage of the project lifecycle when making decisions about which projects to include or remove from the portfolio.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Processes that support decision making based upon the portfolio criteria.

    Processes that ensure the portfolio remains consistently organized according to the portfolio criteria.

    Activities

    3.1 Ensure that the metrics used for each sub-process are based upon the standard portfolio criteria.

    3.2 Establish the roles, accountabilities, and responsibilities for each sub-process needing improvement.

    3.3 Outline the workflow for each sub-process needing improvement.

    Outputs

    A RACI chart for each sub-process

    A workflow for each sub-process

    4 Change Impact Analysis and Stakeholder Engagement Plan

    The Purpose

    Ensure that the portfolio management improvement initiatives are sustainably adopted in the long term.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Stakeholder engagement.

    Sustainable long-term adoption of the improved portfolio management practices.

    Activities

    4.1 Conduct a change impact analysis.

    4.2 Create a stakeholder engagement plan.

    Outputs

    Change Impact Analysis

    Stakeholder Engagement Plan

    Completed Portfolio Management SOP

    Leading Through Uncertainty Workshop Overview

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    • Parent Category Name: Leadership Development Programs
    • Parent Category Link: /leadership-development-programs

    As the world around us changes there is a higher risk that IT productivity and planned priorities will be derailed.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    To meet the challenges of uncertainty head on IT leaders must adapt so their employees are supported and IT departments continue to operate successfully.

    Impact and Result

    • Clearly define and articulate the current and future priorities to provide direction and cultivate hope for the future.
    • Recognize and manage your own reactions to be conscious of how you are showing up and the perceptions others may have.
    • Incorporate the 4Cs of Leading Through Uncertainty into your leadership practice to make sense of the situation and lead others through it.
    • Build tactics to connect with your employees that will ensure employee engagement and productivity.

    Leading Through Uncertainty Workshop Overview Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Workshop Overview

    Read our concise Workshop Overview to find out how this program can support IT leaders when managing teams through uncertain times.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    • Leading Through Uncertainty (LTU) Workshop Overview
    [infographic]

    Build an Application Integration Strategy

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    • Parent Category Name: Enterprise Integration
    • Parent Category Link: /enterprise-integration
    • Even though organizations are now planning for Application Integration (AI) in their projects, very few have developed a holistic approach to their integration problems resulting in each project deploying different tactical solutions.
    • Point-to-point and ad hoc integration solutions won’t cut it anymore: the cloud, big data, mobile, social, and new regulations require more sophisticated integration tooling.
    • Loosely defined AI strategies result in point solutions, overlaps in technology capabilities, and increased maintenance costs; the correlation between business drivers and technical solutions is lost.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Involving the business in strategy development will keep them engaged and align business drivers with technical initiatives.
    • An architectural approach to AI strategy is critical to making appropriate technology decisions and promoting consistency across AI solutions through the use of common patterns.
    • Get control of your AI environment with an appropriate architecture, including policies and procedures, before end users start adding bring-your-own-integration (BYOI) capabilities to the office.

    Impact and Result

    • Engage in a formal AI strategy and involve the business when aligning business goals with AI value; each double the AI success rate.
    • Benefits from a formal AI strategy largely depend on how gaps will be filled.
    • Create an Integration Center of Competency for maintaining architectural standards and guidelines.
    • AI strategies are continuously updated as new business drivers emerge from changing business environments and/or essential technologies.

    Build an Application Integration Strategy Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Make the Case for AI Strategy

    Obtain organizational buy-in and build a standardized and formal AI blueprint.

    • Storyboard: Build an Application Integration Strategy

    2. Assess the organization's readiness for AI

    Assess your people, process, and technology for AI readiness and realize areas for improvement.

    • Application Integration Readiness Assessment Tool

    3. Develop a Vision

    Fill the required AI-related roles to meet business requirements

    • Application Integration Architect
    • Application Integration Specialist

    4. Perform a Gap Analysis

    Assess the appropriateness of AI in your organization and identify gaps in people, processes, and technology as it relates to AI.

    • Application Integration Appropriateness Assessment Tool

    5. Build an AI Roadmap

    Compile the important information and artifacts to include in the AI blueprint.

    • Application Integration Strategy Template

    6. Build the Integration Blueprint

    Keep a record of services and interfaces to reduce waste.

    • Integration Service Catalog Template

    Infographic

    Workshop: Build an Application Integration Strategy

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Make the Case for AI Strategy

    The Purpose

    Uncover current and future AI business drivers, and assess current capabilities.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Perform a current state assessment and create a future vision.

    Activities

    1.1 Identify Current and Future Business Drivers

    1.2 AI Readiness Assessment

    1.3 Integration Service Catalog Template

    Outputs

    High-level groupings of AI strategy business drivers.

    Determine the organization’s readiness for AI, and identify areas for improvement.

    Create a record of services and interfaces to reduce waste.

    2 Know Current Environment

    The Purpose

    Identify building blocks, common patterns, and decompose them.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Develop an AI Architecture.

    Activities

    2.1 Integration Principles

    2.2 High-level Patterns

    2.3 Pattern decomposition and recomposition

    Outputs

    Set general AI architecture principles.

    Categorize future and existing interactions by pattern to establish your integration framework.

    Identification of common functional components across patterns.

    3 Perform a Gap Analysis

    The Purpose

    Analyze the gaps between the current and future environment in people, process, and technology.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Uncover gaps between current and future capabilities and determine if your ideal environment is feasible.

    Activities

    3.1 Gap Analysis

    Outputs

    Identify gaps between the current environment and future AI vision.

    4 Build a Roadmap for Application Integration

    The Purpose

    Define strategic initiatives, know your resource constraints, and use a timeline for planning AI.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Create a plan of strategic initiatives required to close gaps.

    Activities

    4.1 Identify and prioritize strategic initiatives

    4.2 Distribute initiatives on a timeline

    Outputs

    Use strategic initiatives to build the AI strategy roadmap.

    Establish when initiatives are going to take place.

    Initiate Digital Accessibility for IT

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    • Parent Category Name: Lead
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    • Determining IT requirements (legal and business needs) is overwhelming.
    • Prioritizing people in the process is often overlooked.
    • Mandating changes instead of motivating change isn’t sustainable.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Compliance is the minimum; the people and behavior changes are the harder part and have the largest impact on accessibility. Preparing for and building awareness of the reasons for accessibility makes the necessary behavior changes easier. Communicate, communicate, and communicate some more.
    • Accessibility is a practice, not a project. Therefore, accessibility is an organizational initiative, however, IT support is critical. Use change management theory to guide the new behaviors, processes, and thinking to adopt accessibility beyond compliance. Determining where to start is challenging, the tendency is to start with tech or compliance, however, starting with the people is key. It must be culture.
    • Think about accessibility like you think about IT security. Use IT security concepts that you and your team are already familiar with to initiate the accessibility program.

    Impact and Result

    • Take away the overwhelm that many feel when they hear ‘accessibility’ and make the steps for your organization approachable.
    • Clearly communicate why accessibility is critical and how it supports the organization’s key objectives and initiatives.
    • Understand your current state related to accessibility and identify areas for key initiatives to become part of the IT strategic roadmap.
    • Build your accessibility plan while prioritizing the necessary culture change
    • Use change management and communication practices to elicit the behavior shift needed to sustain accessibility.

    Initiate Digital Accessibility for IT Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Initiate Digital Accessibility for IT – Use this blueprint to narrow down the requirements for your organization and team while also clearly communicating why accessibility is critical and how it supports the organization’s key objectives and initiatives.

    A step-by-step approach to walk you through understanding the IT accessibility compliance requirements, building your roadmap, and communicating with your department. This storyboard will help you figure out what’s needed from IT to support the business and launch accessibility with your team.

    • Initiate Digital Accessibility for IT – Phases 1-2

    2. IT Manager Meeting Template – A clear, concise, and compelling communication to introduce accessibility for your organization to IT managers and to facilitate their participation in building the roadmap.

    Accessibility compliance can be overwhelming at first. Use this template to simplify the requirements for the IT managers and build out a roadmap.

    • IT Manager Meeting Template

    3. Accessibility Compliance Tracking Tool – This tool helps to decrease the overwhelm of accessibility compliance. Narrow down the list of controls needed to the ones that apply to your organization and to IT.

    Using the EN 301 549 V3.2.1 (2021-03) as a basis for digital accessibility conformance. Use this tool to build a priorities list of requirements that are applicable to your organization.

    • Accessibility Compliance Tracking Tool

    4. Departmental Meeting Template – Cascade your communication down to the IT department with this facilitation guide for introducing accessibility and the roadmap to the entire IT team.

    Use this pre-built slide deck to customize your accessibility communication to the IT department. It will help you build a shared vision for accessibility, a current state picture, and plans to build to the target future state.

    • Departmental Meeting Template
    • Accessibility Quick Cards

    Infographic

    Further reading

    Initiate Digital Accessibility For IT

    Make accessibility accessible.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    Accessibility is a practice, not a project.

    Accessibility is an organizational directive; however, IT plays a fundamental role in its success. As business partners require support and expertise to assist with their accessibility requirements IT needs to be ready to respond. Even if your organization hasn't fully committed to an accessibility standard, you can proactively get ready by planting the seeds to change the culture. By building understanding and awareness of the significant impact technology has on accessibility, you can start to change behaviors.

    Implementing an accessibility program requires many considerations: legal requirements; international guidelines, such as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG); training for staff; ongoing improvement; and collaborating with accessibility experts and people with disabilities. It can be overwhelming to know where to start. The tendency is to start with compliance, which is a fantastic first step. For a sustained program use, change management practices are needed to change behaviors and build inclusion for people with disabilities.

    15% of the world's population identify as having some form of a disability (not including others that are impacted, e.g. caretakers, family). Why would anyone want to alienate over 1.1 billion people?

    This is a picture of Heather Leier-Murray

    Heather Leier-Murray
    Senior Research Analyst, People & Leadership
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Disability is part of being human

    Merriam-Webster defines disability as a "physical, mental, cognitive, or developmental condition that impairs, interferes with, or limits a person's ability to engage in certain tasks or actions or participate in typical daily activities and interactions."(1)

    The World Health Organization points out that a crucial part of the definition of disability is that it's not just a health problem, but the environment impacts the experience and extent of disability. Inaccessibility creates barriers for full participation in society.(2)

    The likelihood of you experiencing a disability at some point in your life is very high, whether a physical or mental disability, seen or unseen, temporary or permanent, severe or mild.(2)

    Many people acquire disabilities as they age yet may not identify as "a person with a disability."3 Where life expectancies are over 70 years of age, 11.5% of life is spent living with a disability. (4)

    "Extreme personalization is becoming the primary difference in business success, and everyone wants to be a stakeholder in a company that provides processes, products, and services to employees and customers with equitable, person-centered experiences and allows for full participation where no one is left out."
    – Paudie Healy, CEO, Universal Access

    (1.) Merriam-Webster
    (2.) World Health Organization, 2022
    (3.) Digital Leaders, as cited in WAI, 2018
    (4.) Disabled World, as cited in WAI, 2018

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    You know the push for accessibility is coming in your organization. You might even have a program started or approval to build one. But you're not sure if you and your team are ready to support and enable the organization on its accessibility journey.

    Common Obstacles

    Understanding where to start, where accessibility lives, and if or when you're done can be overwhelmingly difficult. Accessibility is an organizational initiative that IT enables; being able to support the organization requires a level of understanding of common obstacles.

    • Determining IT requirements (legal and business needs) is overwhelming.
    • Prioritizing people in the process is often overlooked.
    • Mandating changes instead of motivating change isn't sustainable.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    Prepare your people for accessibility and inclusion, even if your organization doesn't have a formal standard yet. Take your accessibility from mandate to movement, i.e. from Phase 1 - focused on compliance to Phase 2 - driven by experience for sustained change.

    • Use this blueprint to build your accessibility plan while prioritizing the necessary culture change.
    • Use change management and communication practices to elicit the behavior shift needed to sustain accessibility.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Accessibility is a practice, not a project. Therefore, accessibility is an organizational initiative; however, IT support is critical. Use change management theory to guide the new behaviors, processes, and thinking to adopt accessibility beyond compliance. Determining where to start is challenging because the tendency is to start with tech or compliance; however, starting with the people is key. It must be a change in organizational culture.

    Your challenge

    This research is designed to help IT leaders who are looking to:

    • Determine accessibility requirements of IT based on the business' needs and priorities, and the existing standards and regulations.
    • Prepare the IT leaders to implement and sustain accessibility and prepare for the behavior shift that is necessary.
    • Build the plan for IT as it pertains to accessibility, including a list of business needs and priorities, and prioritization of accessibility initiatives that IT is responsible for.
    • Ensure that accessibility is sustained in the IT department by following phase 2 of this blueprint on using change management and communication to impact behavior and change the culture.

    90% of companies claim to prioritize diversity.
    Source: Harvard Business Review, 2020

    Over 30% of those that claim to prioritize diversity are focused on compliance.
    Source: Harvard Business Review, 2022

    Accessibility is an organizational initiative

    Is IT ready and capable to enable it?

    • With increasing rates of lawsuits related to digital accessibility, more organizations are prioritizing initiatives to support increased accessibility. About 68% of Applause's survey respondents indicated that digital accessibility is a higher priority for their organization than it was last year.
    • This increase in priority will trickle into IT's tasks – get ahead and start working toward accessibility proactively so you're ready when business requests start coming in.

    A survey of nearly 1,800 respondents conducted by Applause found that:

    • 79% of respondents rated digital accessibility either a top priority or important for their organizations.
    • 42% of respondents indicated they have limited or no in-house expertise or resources to test accessibility.
      Source: Business Wire, May 2022

    How organizations prioritize digital accessibility

    • 43% rated accessibility as a top priority.
    • 36% rated accessibility as important.
    • Fewer than 5% rated accessibility as either low priority or not even on the radar.
    • More than 65% agreed or strongly agreed that accessibility is a higher priority than last year.

    Source: Angel Business Communications, 2022

    Why organizations address accessibility

    Top three reasons:

    1. 61% To comply with laws
    2. 62% To provide the best user experience
    3. 78% To include people with disabilities
      Source: Level Access, 2022

    Still, most businesses aren't meeting compliance standards. Even though legislation has been in place for over 30 years, a 2022 study by WebAIM of 1,000,000 homepages returned a 96.8% WCAG 2.0 failure rate.

    Source: Institute for Disability Research, Policy, and Practice, 2022

    Info-Tech's approach to Initiate Digital Accessibility

    An image of the Business Case for Accessibility

    The Info-Tech difference:

    1. Phase 1 of this blueprint gets you started and helps you build a plan to get you to the initial compliance driven maturity level. It's focused more on standards and regulations than on the user and employee experience.
    2. Phase 2 takes you further in maturity and helps you become experience driven in your efforts. It focuses on building your accessibility maturity into the developing, defined, and managed levels, as well as balancing mandate and movement of the accessibility maturity continuum.

    Determining conformance seems overwhelming

    Unfortunately, it's the easier part.

    • Focus on local regulations and what corporate leaders are setting as accessibility standards for the organization. This will narrow down the scope of what compliance looks like for your team.
    • Look to best practices like WCAG guidelines to ensure digital assets are accessible and usable for all users. WCAG's international guideline outlines principles that can also aid in scoping.
    • In phase 1 of this blueprint, use the Accessibility Compliance Tracking Toolto prioritize criteria and legislation for which IT is responsible.
    • Engage with business partners and other areas of the organization to figure out what is needed from IT. Accessibility is an organizational initiative; it shouldn't be on IT to figure it all out. Determine what your team is specifically responsible for before tackling it all.

    Motivating behavior change

    This is the hard part.

    Changing behaviors and mindsets is necessary to be experience driven and sustain accessibility.

    • Compliance is the minimum when it comes to accessibility, much like employment or labor regulations.
    • Making accessibility an organizational imperative is an iterative process. Managing the change is hard. People, culture, and behavior change matures accessibility from compliance driven to experience driven, increasing the benefits of accessibility.
    • Focus accessibility initiatives on improving the experience of everyone and improving engagement (customer and employee).
    • Being people focused and experience driven enables the organization to provide the best user experience and realize the benefits of accessibility.

    A picture of Jordyn Zimmerman

    "Compliance is the minimum. And when we look at web tech, people are still arguing about their positioning on the standards that need to be enforced in order to comply, forgetting that it isn't enough to comply."
    -- Jordyn Zimmerman, M.Ed., Director of Professional Development, The Nora Project, and Appointee, President's Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities.

    This is an image of the Info-Tech Accessibility Maturity Framework Table.

    To see more on the Info-Tech Accessibility Maturity Framework:

    The Accessibility Business Case for IT

    Think of accessibility like you think of IT security

    Use IT security concepts to build your accessibility program.

    • Risk management: identify and prioritize accessibility risks and implement controls to mitigate those risks.
    • Compliance: use an IT security-style compliance approach to ensure that the accessibility program is compliant with the many accessibility regulations and standards.
    • Defense in depth: implement multiple layers of accessibility controls to address different types of accessibility risks and issues.
    • Response and recovery: quickly and effectively respond to accessibility issues, minimizing the potential impact on the organization and its users.
    • End-user education: educate end users about accessibility best practices, such as how to use assistive technologies and how to report accessibility issues.
    • Monitor and audit: use monitoring and auditing tools to ensure that accessibility remains over time and to identify and address issues that arise.
    • Collaboration: ensure the accessibility program is effective and addresses the needs of all users by collaborating with accessibility experts and people with disabilities.

    "As an organization matures, the impact of accessibility shifts. A good company will think of security at the very beginning. The same needs to be applied to accessibility thinking. At the peak of accessibility maturity an organization will have people with disabilities involved at the outset."
    -- Cam Beaudoin, Owner, Accelerated Accessibility

    This is a picture of Cam Beaudoin

    Info-Tech's methodology for Initiate Digital Accessibility for IT

    1. Planning IT's accessibility requirements

    2. Change enablement of accessibility

    Phase Steps

    1. Determine accessibility requirements of IT
    2. Build the IT accessibility plan
    1. Build awareness
    2. Support new behaviors
    3. Continuous reinforcement

    Phase Outcomes

    List of business needs and priorities related to accessibility

    IT accessibility requirements for conformance

    Assessment of state of accessibility conformance

    Prioritization of accessibility initiatives for IT

    Remediation plan for IT related to accessibility conformance

    Accessibility commitment statement

    Team understanding of what, why, and how

    Accessibility Quick Cards

    Sustainment plan

    Insight summary

    Overarching insight

    Accessibility is a practice, not a project. Therefore, accessibility is an organizational initiative; however, IT support is critical. Use change management theory to guide the new behaviors, processes, and thinking to adopt accessibility beyond compliance. Determining where to start is challenging. The tendency is to start with tech or compliance; however, starting with the people is key. It must be a change in organizational culture.

    Insight 1

    Compliance is the minimum; people and behavior changes are the hardest part and have the largest impact on accessibility. Preparing for and building awareness of the reasons for accessibility makes the necessary behavior changes easier. Communicate, communicate, and communicate some more.

    Insight 2

    Think about accessibility like you think about IT security. Use IT security concepts that you and your team are already familiar with to initiate the accessibility program.

    Insight 3

    People are learning a new way to behave and think; this can be an unsettling period. Patience, education, communication, support, and time are keys for success of the implementation of accessibility. There is a transition period needed; people will gradually change their practices and attitudes. Celebrate small successes as they arise.

    Insight 4

    Accessibility isn't a project as there is no end. Effective planning and continuous reinforcement of "the new way of doing things" is necessary to enable accessibility as the new status quo.

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals.

    IT Manager Meeting Template

    IT Manager Meeting Template
    Use this meeting slide deck to work with IT managers to build out the accessibility remediation plan and commitment statement.

    Departmental Meeting Template

    Departmental Meeting Template
    Use this meeting slide deck to introduce the concept of accessibility and communicate IT goals and objectives.

    Accessibility Quick Cards

    Accessibility Quick Cards
    Using the Info-Tech IT Management and Governance Framework to identify key activities to help improve and maintain the accessibility of your organization and your core IT processes.

    Key deliverable:

    Accessibility Compliance Tracking Tool

    Accessibility Compliance Tracking Tool
    This tool will assist you in identifying remediation priorities applicable to your organization.

    Blueprint benefits

    IT Benefits

    Business Benefits

    • Know and understand your role and responsibility in accessibility implementation within the organization.
    • Provide effective support and excellent business service experience to internal stakeholders related to accessibility.
    • You will be set up to effectively support your team through the necessary behavior, process, and thinking changes.
    • Proactively prepare for accessibility requests that will be coming in.
    • Move beyond compliance to support your organization's sustainment of accessibility.
    • Don't lose out on a trillion-dollar market.
    • Don't miss opportunities to work with organizations because you're not accessible.
    • Enable and empower current employees with disabilities.
    • Minimize potential for negative brand reputation due to a lack of consideration for people with disabilities.
    • Decrease the risk of legal action being brought upon the organization.

    Measure the value of this blueprint

    Improve IT effectiveness and employee buy-in to change.

    Measuring the effectiveness of your program helps contribute to a culture of continuous improvement. Having consistent measures in place helps to inform decisions and enables your plan to be iterative to take advantage of emerging opportunities.

    Monitor employee engagement, overall stakeholder satisfaction with IT, and the overall end-customer satisfaction.

    Remember, accessibility is not a project – just because measures are positive does not mean your work is done.

    In phase 1 of this blueprint, we will help you establish metrics for your organization.
    In phase 2, we will help you develop a sustainment for achieving those metrics.

    A screenshot of the slide titled Establish Baseline Metrics.

    Suggested Metrics
    • Overall end-customer satisfaction
    • Requests for accommodation or assistive technology fulfilled
    • Employee engagement
    • Overall compliance status

    Info-Tech's IT Metrics Library

    Executive brief case study

    INDUSTRY: Technology


    SOURCE: Microsoft.com
    https://blogs.microsoft.com/accessibility/accessib...

    Microsoft

    Microsoft's accessibility journey starts with the goal of building a culture of accessibility and disability inclusion. They recognize that the starting point for the magnitude of organizational change is People.

    "Accessibility in Action Badge"

    Every employee at Microsoft is trained on accessibility to build understanding of why and how to be inclusive using accessibility. The program entails 90 minutes of virtual content.

    Microsoft treats accessibility and inclusion like a business, managing and measuring it to ensure sustained growth and success. They have worked over the years to bust systemic bias company-wide and to build a program with accessibility criteria that works for their business.

    Results

    The program Microsoft has built allows them to shift the accessibility lens earlier in their processes and listen to its users' needs. This allows them to continuously mature their accessibility program, which means continuously improving its users' experience.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    “Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

    Guided Implementation

    “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

    Workshop

    “We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

    Consulting

    “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Guided implementation

    What does a typical guided implementation (GI) on this topic look like?

    Phase 1 Phase 2

    Call #1: Discuss motivation for the initiative and foundational knowledge requirements.
    Call #2: Discuss stakeholder analysis and business needs of IT.

    Call #3: Identify current maturity and IT accountabilities.
    Call #4: Discuss introduction to senior IT leaders and drivers.
    Call #5: Discuss manager meeting outline and slides.

    Call #6: Review key messages and next steps to prepare for departmental meeting.
    Call #7: Discuss post-meetings next steps and timelines.

    Call #8: Review sustainment plan and plan next steps.

    A GI is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    A typical GI is eight to ten calls over the course of four to six months.

    Workshop overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Pre-Work

    Day 1

    Day 2

    Day 3

    Day 4

    Day 5

    Understand Your Legislative Environment

    Understand Your Current State

    Define the
    IT Target State

    Build the IT Accessibility Plan

    Prepare for Change Enablement

    Next Steps and
    Wrap-Up

    Activities

    0.1 Make a list of the legislation you need to comply with
    0.2 Seek legal counsel or and/or professional services' input on compliance
    0.3 Complete the Accessibility Maturity Assessment
    0.4 Conduct stakeholder analysis

    1.1 Define the risks of inaction
    1.2 Review maturity assessment
    1.3 Conduct stakeholder focus group

    2.1 Define IT compliance accountabilities
    2.2 Define IT accessibility goals/objectives/ metrics
    2.3 Indicate the target-state maturity

    3.1 Assess current accessibility compliance and mitigation
    3.2 Decide on priorities
    3.3 Write an IT accessibility commitment statement

    4.1 Prepare the roadmap
    4.2 Prepare the communication plan

    5.1 Complete in-progress deliverables from previous four days
    5.2 Set up review time for workshop deliverables and to discuss next steps

    Deliverables

    1. Legislative requirements for your organization
    2. List of stakeholders
    3. Completed maturity assessment.
    1. Defined risks of inaction
    2. Stakeholder analysis completed with business needs identified
    1. IT accessibility goals/objectives
    2. Target maturity
    1. Accessibility Compliance Tracking Tool completed
    2. Accessibility commitment statement
    3. Current compliance and mitigation assessed
    1. IT accessibility roadmap
    2. Communication plan
    1. IT accessibility roadmap
    2. Communication plan

    Phase 1

    Planning IT's Accessibility Requirements.

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    1.1 Determine accessibility requirements of IT

    1.2 Build IT accessibility plan

    2.1 Build awareness

    2.2 Support new behaviors

    2.3 Continuous reinforcement

    Initiate Digital Accessibility For IT

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Analyzing stakeholders to determine accessibility needs of business for IT.
    • Determining accessibility compliance requirements of IT.
    • Build a manager communication deck.
    • Assess current accessibility compliance and mitigation.
    • Prioritize and assign timelines.
    • Build a sunrise diagram to visualize your accessibility roadmap.
    • Write an IT accessibility commitment statement.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT leadership team
    • Business partners in other areas of the organization (e.g., HR, finance, communications)

    Step 1.1

    Determine the accessibility requirements of IT.

    Activities

    1.1.1 Determine what the business needs from IT
    1.1.2 Complete the Accessibility Maturity Assessment (optional)
    1.1.3 Determine IT compliance requirements
    1.1.4 Define target state
    1.1.5 Create a list of goals and objectives
    1.1.6 Finalize key metrics
    1.1.7 Prepare a meeting for IT managers

    Prepare to support the organization with accessibility

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT senior leaders
    • IT managers
    • Business partners in other areas of the organization (e.g., HR, finance, communications)

    Outcomes of this step

    • Stakeholder analysis with business needs listed
    • Defined target future state
    • List of goals and objectives
    • Key metrics
    • Communication deck for IT management rollout meeting

    While defining future state, consider your drivers

    The Info-Tech Accessibility Maturity Framework identifies three key strategic drivers: compliance, experience, and incorporation.

    • Over 30% of organizations are focused on compliance, according to a 2022 survey by Harvard Business Review and Slack's Future Forum. The survey asked more than 10,000 workers in six countries about their organizations' approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).(2)
    • Even though 90% of companies claim to prioritize diversity, over 30% are focused on compliance.(1)

    1. Harvard Business Review, 2020
    2. Harvard Business Review, 2022

    31.6% of companies remain in the compliant stage where they are focused on DEI compliance and not on integrating DEI throughout the organization or on creating continual improvement, from Harvard Business Review 2022.

    Info-Tech accessibility maturity framework

    This is an image of Info-Tech's accessibility maturity framework

    Info-Tech Insight

    IT typically works through maturity frameworks from the bottom to the top, progressing at each level until they reach the end. When it comes to IT accessibility initiatives, being especially thorough, thoughtful, and collaborative is critical to success. This will mean spending more time in the Developing, Defined, and Managed levels of maturity rather than trying to reach Optimized as quickly as you can. This may feel contrary to what IT historically considers as a successful implementation.

    After initially ensuring your organization is compliant with regulations and standards, you will progress to building disciplined process and consistent standardized processes. Eventually you will build the ability for predictable process, and lastly, you'll optimize by continuously improving.

    Depending on the level of maturity you are trying to achieve, it could take months or even years to implement. The important thing to understand, however, is that accessibility work is never done.

    At all levels of the maturity framework, you must consider the interconnected aspects of people, process, and technology. However, as the organization progresses, the impact will shift from largely being focused on process and technology improvement to being focused on people.

    Align the benefits of program drivers to organizational goals or outcomes

    Although there will be various motivating factors, aligning the drivers of your accessibility program provides direction to the program. Connecting the advantages of program drivers to organizational goals builds the confidence of senior leaders and decision makers, increasing the continued commitment to invest in accessibility programming.

    This is an image of a table describing the maturity level; Description; Advantages, and Disadvantages for the three drivers: Compliance; Experience; and Incorporation.

    Accessibility maturity levels

    Driver Description Benefits
    Initial Compliance
    • Accessibility processes are mostly undocumented.
    • Accessibility happens mostly on a reactive or ad hoc basis.
    • No one is aware of who is responsible for accessibility or what role they play.
    • Heavily focused on complying with regulations and standards to decrease legal risk.
    • The organization is aware of the need for accessibility.
    • Legal risk is decreased.
    Developing Experience
    • The organization is starting to take steps to increase accessibility beyond compliance.
    • Lots of opportunity for improvement.
    • Defining and refining processes.
    • Working toward building a library of assistive tools.
    • Awareness of the need for accessibility is growing.
    • Process review for accessibility increases process efficiency through avoiding rework.
    Defined Experience
    • Accessibility processes are repeatable.
    • There is a tendency to resort to old habits under stress.
    • Tools are in place to facilitate accommodation.
    • Employees know accommodations are available to them.
    • Accessibility is becoming part of daily work.
    Managed Experience
    • Defined by effective accessibility controls, processes, and metrics.
    • Mostly anticipating preferences.
    • Roles and responsibilities are defined.
    • Disability is included as part of DEI.
    • Employees understand their role in accessibility.
    • Engagement is positively impacted.
    • Attraction and retention are positively impacted.
    Optimized Incorporation
    • Not the goal for every organization.
    • Characterized by a dramatic shift in organizational culture and a feeling of belonging.
    • Ongoing continuous improvement.
    • Seamless interactions with the organization for everyone.
    • Using feedback to inform future initiatives.
    • More likely to be innovative and inclusive, reach more people positively, and meet emerging global legal requirements.
    • Better equipped for success.

    Cheat sheet: Identify stakeholders

    Ask stakeholders, "Who else should I be talking to?" to discover additional stakeholders and ensure you don't miss anyone.

    Identify stakeholders through the following questions:

    Take a 360-degree view of potential internal and external stakeholders who might be impacted by the initiative.

    • Who in areas of influence will be adversely affected by potential environmental and social impacts of what you are doing?
    • At which stage will stakeholders be most affected (e.g. procurement, implementation, operations, decommissioning)?
    • Will other stakeholders emerge as the phases are started and completed?
    • Who is sponsoring the initiative?
    • Who benefits from the initiative?
    • Who is negatively impacted by the initiative?
    • Who can make approvals?
    • Who controls resources?
    • Who has specialist skills?
    • Who implements the changes?
    • Who are the owners, governors, customers, and suppliers of impacted capabilities or functions?
    • Executives
    • Peers
    • Direct reports
    • Partners
    • Customers
    • Subcontractors
    • Suppliers
    • Contractors
    • Lobby groups
    • Regulatory agencies

    Categorize your stakeholders with a stakeholder prioritization map

    A stakeholder prioritization map help teams categorize their stakeholders by their level of influence and ownership.

    There are four areas in the map, and the stakeholders within each area should be treated differently.

    This is an image of a quadrant analysis for mediators; players; spectators; and noisemakers.
    • Players – Players have a high interest in the initiative and high influence to affect change over the initiative. Their support is critical, and a lack of support can cause significant impediment to the objectives.
    • Mediators – Mediators have a low interest but significant influence over the initiative. They can help to provide balance and objective opinions to issues that arise.
    • Noisemakers – Noisemakers have low influence but high interest. They tend to be very vocal and engaged, either positively or negatively, but have little ability to enact their wishes.
    • Spectators – Generally, spectators are apathetic and have little influence over or interest in the initiative.

    Strategize to engage stakeholders by type

    Each group of stakeholders draws attention and resources away from critical tasks.

    By properly identifying your stakeholder groups, you can develop corresponding actions to manage stakeholders in each group. This can dramatically reduce wasted effort trying to satisfy spectators and noisemakers while ensuring the needs of the mediators and players are met.

    Type Quadrant Actions
    Players High influence, high interest Actively Engage
    Keep them engaged through continuous involvement. Maintain their interest by demonstrating their value to its success.
    Mediators High influence, low interest Keep Satisfied
    They can be the game changers in groups of stakeholders. Turn them into supporters by gaining their confidence and trust, and include them in important decision-making steps. In turn, they can help you influence other stakeholders.
    Noisemakers Low influence, high interest Keep InformedTry to increase their influence (or decrease it if they are detractors) by providing them with key information, supporting them in meetings, and using mediators to help them.
    Spectators Low influence, low interest MonitorThey are followers. Keep them in the loop by providing clarity on objectives and status updates.

    1.1.1 Determine what the business needs from IT (stakeholder analysis)

    1.5 hours

    1. Consider all the potential individuals or groups of individuals who will be impacted or influence the accessibility needs of IT.
    2. List each of the stakeholders you identify. If in person, use sticky notes to define the target audiences. The individuals or group of individuals that potentially have needs from IT related to accessibility before, during, or after the initiative.
    3. As you list each stakeholder, consider how they perceive IT. This perception could impact how you choose to interact with them.
    4. For each stakeholder identified as potentially having a business need requirement for IT related to accessibility, conduct an analysis to understand their degree of influence or impact.
    5. Based on the stakeholder, the influence or impact of the business need can inform the interaction and prioritization of IT requirements.
    6. Update slide 9 of the IT Manager Meeting Template.

    Input

    • The change
    • Why the change is needed
    • Key stakeholder map from activity 2.1.1 of The Accessibility Business Case for IT (optional)

    Output

    • The degree of influence or impact each stakeholder has on accessibility needs from IT

    Materials

    • Stakeholder Management Analysis Tool (optional)

    Participants

    • CIO/ head of IT/ initiative lead
    • Business partners

    Proactively consider how accessibility could be received

    Think about the positive and negative reactions you could face about implementing accessibility.

    It's likely individuals will have an emotional reaction to change and may have different emotions at different times during the change process.
    Plan for how to leverage support and deal with resistance to change by assessing people's emotional responses:

    • What are possible questions, objections, suggestions, and concerns that might arise.
    • How will you respond to the possible questions and concerns.
    • Include proactive messaging in your communications that address possible objections.
    • Express an understanding for others point of views by re-positioning objections and suggestions as questions.

    This is an image of the 10 change chakras

    Determine your level of maturity

    Use Info-Tech's Accessibility Maturity Assessment.

    On the accessibility questionnaire, tab 2, choose the amount you agree or disagree with each statement. Answer the questions based on your knowledge of your current state organizationally.

    Once you've answered all the questions, see the results on the tab 3, Accessibility Results. You can see your overall maturity level and the maturity level for each of six dimensions that are necessary to increase the success of an accessibility program.

    Click through to tab 4, Recommendations, to see specific recommendations based on your results and proven research to progress through the maturity levels. Keep in mind that not all organizations will or should aspire to the "Optimize" maturity level.

    A series of three screenshots from the Accessibility Maturity Assessment

    Download the Accessibility Maturity Assessment

    1.1.2 Complete the Accessibility Maturity Assessment (optional)

    1. Download the Accessibility Maturity Assessment and save it with the date so that as you work on your accessibility program, you can reassess later and track your progress.
    2. Once you have saved the assessment, select the appropriate answer for each statement on tab 2, Accessibility Questions, based on your knowledge of the organization's approach.
    3. After reviewing all the accessibility statements, see your maturity level results on tab 3, Accessibility Results. Then see tab 4, Recommendations, for suggestions based on your answers.
    4. Document your accessibility maturity results on slides 12 and 13 of the IT Manager Meeting Template and slide 17 of the Departmental Meeting Template.
    5. Use the maturity assessment results in activity 1.1.3.

    Input

    • Assess your current state of accessibility by choosing all the statements that apply to your organization

    Output

    • Identified accessibility maturity level

    Materials

    • Accessibility Maturity Assessment
    • Accessibility Business Case Template

    Participants

    • Project leader/sponsor
    • IT leadership team

    1.1.3 Determine IT compliance responsibilities

    1-3 hours

    Before you start this activity, you may need to discuss with your organization's legal counsel to determine the legislation that applies to your organization.

    1. Determine which controls apply to your organization based on your knowledge of the organization goals, stakeholders, and accessibility maturity target. If you haven't determined your current and future state maturity model, use the Info-Tech resource from the Accessibility Business Case for IT(see previous two slides).
    2. Using the drop down in column J – Applies to My Org., select "Yes" or "No" for each control on each of the data entry tabs of the Accessibility Compliance Tracking Tool.
    3. For each control you have selected "Yes" for in column J, identify the control owner in column I.
    4. Update slide 10 in the IT Manager Meeting Template and slide 13 in the IT Departmental Meeting Template.

    Input

    • Local, regional, and/or global legislation and guidelines applicable to your organization
    • Organizational accessibility standard
    • Business needs list
    • Completed Accessibility Maturity Assessment (optional)

    Output

    • List of legislation and standards requirements that are narrowed based on organization need

    Materials

    • Accessibility Maturity Assessment
    • Accessibility Business Case Template

    Participants

    • CIO/ head of IT/ CAO/ initiative leader
    • Legal counsel

    Download the Accessibility Compliance Tracking Tool

    1.1.4 Conduct future-state analysis*

    Identify your target state of maturity.

      1. Provide the group with the accessibility maturity levels to review as well as the slides on the framework and drivers (slides 27-29).
      2. Ask the group to brainstorm pain points created by inaccessibility (e.g. challenges related to stakeholders, process issues).
      3. Next, discuss opportunities to be gained from improving these practices.
      4. Then, have everyone look at the accessibility maturity levels and, based on the descriptions, determine as a group the current maturity level of accessibility in your organization .
      5. Next, review the benefits listed on the accessibility maturity levels slide to those that you named in step 3 and determine which maturity level best describes your target state. Discuss as a group and agree on one desired maturity level to reach.
      6. Document your current and target states on slide 14 of the IT Manager Meeting Template.

    *Note: If you've completed the Accessibility Business Case for IT blueprint you may already have this information compiled. Refer to activities 2.1.2 and 2.1.3.

    Input

    • Accessibility maturity levels chart, framework, and drivers slides
    • Maturity level assessment results (optional)

    Output

    • Target maturity level documented

    Materials

    • Paper and pens
    • Handouts of maturity levels

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT senior leaders

    What does a good goal look like?

    SMART is a common framework for setting effective goals. Make sure your goals satisfy these criteria to ensure you can achieve real results.

    Use the SMART framework to build effective goals.

    S

    Specific: Is the goal clear, concrete, and well defined?

    M

    Measurable: How will you know when the goal is met?

    A

    Achievable: Is the goal possible to achieve in a reasonable time?

    R

    Relevant: Does this goal align with your responsibilities and with departmental and organizational goals?

    T

    Time-based: Have you specified a time frame in which you aim to achieve the goal?

    1.1.5 Create a list of goals and objectives*

    Use the outcomes from activity 1.2.1.

    1. Using the information from activity 1.2.1, develop goals.
    2. Remember to use the SMART goal framework to build out each goal (see the previous slide for more information on SMART goals).
    3. Ensure each goal supports departmental and organizational goals to ensure it is meaningful.
    4. Document your goals and objectives on slides 6 and 9 in your IT Manager Meeting Template.

    *Note: If you've completed the Accessibility Business Case for IT blueprint you may already have this information compiled. Refer to activity 2.2.1.

    Input

    • Outcomes of activity 1.2.1
    • Organizational and departmental goals

    Output

    • Accessibility goals and objectives identified

    Materials

    • n/a

    Participants

    • CIO/ head of IT/ initiative lead
    • IT senior leaders

    Establish baseline metrics

    Baseline metrics will be improved through:

    1. Progressing through the accessibility maturity model.
    2. Addressing accessibility earlier in processes with input from people with disabilities.
    3. Motivating behavior changes and culture that supports accessibility and disability inclusion.
    4. Ensuring compliance with regulations and standards.
    5. Focusing on experience and building a disability inclusive culture.
    Metric Definition Calculation
    Overall end-customer satisfaction The percentage of end customers who are satisfied with the IT department. Number of end customers who are satisfied / Total number of end customers
    Requests for accommodation or assistive technology fulfilled The percentage of accommodation/assistive technology requests fulfilled by the IT department. Number of requests fulfilled / Total number of requests
    Employee engagement The percentage of employees who are engaged within an organization. Number of employees who are engaged / Total number of employees
    Overall compliance status The percentage of accessibility controls in place in the IT department. The number of compliance controls in place / Total number of applicable accessibility controls

    1.1.6 Finalize key metrics*

    Finalize key metrics the organization will use to measure accessibility success.

    1. Brainstorm how you will measure the success of each goal you identified in the previous activity, based on the benefits, challenges, and risks you previously identified.
    2. Write each of the metric ideas down and finalize three to five key metrics which you will track. The metrics you choose should relate to the key challenges or risks you have identified and match your desired maturity level and driver.
    3. Document your key metrics on slide 15 of your IT Manager Meeting Templateand slide 23 of the Departmental Meeting Template.

    Input

    • Accessibility challenges and benefits
    • Goals from activity 1.2.2

    Output

    • Three to five key metrics to track

    Materials

    • n/a

    Participants

    • IT leadership team
    • Project lead/sponsor

    *Note: If you've completed the Accessibility Business Case for IT blueprint you may already have this information compiled. Refer to activity 2.2.2.

    Use Info-Tech's template to communicate with IT managers

    Cascade messages down to IT managers next. This ensures they will have time to internalize the change before communicating it to others.

    Communicate with and build the accessibility plan with IT managers by customizing Info-Tech's IT Manager Meeting Template, which is designed to effectively convey your key messages. Tailor the template to suit your needs.

    It includes:

    • Project scope and objectives
    • Current state analysis
    • Compliance planning
    • Commitment statement drafting

    IT Manager Meeting Template

    Download the IT Manager Meeting Template

    Info-Tech Insight

    Preparing for and building awareness of the reasons for accessibility make the necessary behavior changes easier.

    1.1.7 Prepare a meeting for IT managers

    Now that you understand your current and desired accessibility maturity, the next step is to communicate with IT managers and begin planning your initiatives.

    Know your audience:

    1. Consider who will be included in your presentation audience.
    2. You want your presentation to be succinct and hard-hitting. Managers are under huge demands and time is tight, they will lose interest if you drag out the delivery.
    3. Contain the presentation and planning activities to no more than an afternoon. You want to ensure adequate time for questions and answers, as well as the planning activities necessary to inform the roll out to the larger IT department later.
    4. Schedule a meeting with the IT managers.

    Download the IT Manager Meeting Template

    Input

    • Activity results

    Output

    • A completed presentation to communicate your accessibility initiatives to IT managers

    Materials

    • IT Manager Meeting Template

    Participants

    • CIO/ head of IT/ initiative lead
    • IT senior leaders
    • IT managers

    Step 1.2

    Build the IT accessibility action plan.

    Activities

    1.2.1 Assess current accessibility compliance and mitigation

    1.2.2 Decide on your priorities

    1.2.3 Add priorities to the roadmap

    1.2.4 Write an IT accessibility commitment statement

    Planning IT's accessibility requirements

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO/ head of IT/ initiative lead
    • IT senior leaders
    • IT managers

    Outcomes of this step

    • Priority controls and mitigation list with identified control owners.
    • IT accessibility commitment statement.
    • Draft visualization of roadmap/sunrise diagram.

    Involve managers in assessing current compliance

    To know what work needs to happen you need to know what's already happening.

    Use the spreadsheet from activity 1.1.3 where you identified which controls apply to your organization.

    Have managers work in groups to identify which controls (of the applicable ones) are currently being met and which ones have an existing mitigation plan.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Based on EN 301 549 V3.2.1 (2021-03) as a basis for digital accessibility conformance. This tool is designed to assist you in building a priorities list of requirements that are applicable to your organization. EN 301 549 is currently the most robust accessibility regulation and encompasses other regulations within it. Although EN 301 549 is the European Standard, other countries are leaning on it as the standard they aspire to as well.

    This is an image of the Compliance Tracing Tool, with a green box drawn around the columns for Current Compliance, and Mitigation.

    1.2.1 Assess current accessibility compliance and mitigation

    1-3 hours

    1. Share the Accessibility Compliance Tracking Tool with the IT leaders and managers during the meeting with IT management that you scheduled in activity 1.1.7.
    2. Break into smaller groups (or if too small, continue as a single group):
      1. Divide up the controls between the small groups to work on assessing current compliance and mitigation plans.
      2. For each control that is identified as applying to your organization, identify if there currently is compliance by selecting "yes" from the drop-down. For controls where the organization is not compliant, select "no" and identify if there is a mitigation plan in place by selecting "yes" or "no" in column L.
      3. Use the comments column to add any pertinent information regarding the control.

    Input

    • List of IT compliance requirements applicable to the org. from activities 1.1.2 and 1.1.3

    Output

    • List of IT compliance requirements that have current compliance or mitigation plans

    Materials

    • Accessibility Compliance Tracking Tool

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT senior leaders
    • IT managers

    Download the Accessibility Compliance Tracking Tool

    Involve managers in building accountability into the accessibility plan

    Building accountability into your compliance tracking will help ensure accessibility is prioritized.

    Use the spreadsheet from activity 1.3.1.

    Have managers work in the same groups to prioritize controls by assigning a quarterly timeline for compliance.

    An image of the Compliance Tracking tool, with the timeline column highlighted in green.

    1.2.2 Decide on your priorities

    1-3 hours

    1. In the same groups used in activity 1.2.1, prioritize the list of controls that have no compliance and no mitigation plan.
    2. As you work through the spreadsheet again, assign a timeline using the drop-down menu in column M for each control that applies to the organization and has no current compliance. Consider the following in your prioritization:
      1. Does the control impact customers or is it public-facing?
      2. What are the business needs related to accessibility?
      3. Does the team currently have the skills and knowledge needed to address the control?
      4. What future state accessibility maturity are you targeting?
    3. Be prepared to review with the larger group.

    Input

    • List from activity 1.2.1
    • Business needs from activity 1.1.1

    Output

    • List of IT compliance requirements with accountability timelines

    Materials

    • Accessibility Compliance Tracking Tool

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT senior leaders
    • IT managers

    Download the Accessibility Compliance Tracking Tool

    Review your timeline

    Don't overload your team. Make sure the timelines assigned in the breakout groups make sense and are realistic.

    A screenshot of the Accessibility Compliance Dashboard.

    Download the Accessibility Compliance Tracking Tool

    Empty roadmap template

    An image of an empty Roadmap Template.

    1.2.3 Add priorities to the roadmap

    1 hour

    1. Using the information entered in the compliance tracking spreadsheet during activities 1.2.1 and 1.2.2, build a visual representation to capture your strategic initiatives over time, using themes and timelines. Consider group initiatives in four categories, technology, people, process, and other.
    2. Copy and paste the controls onto the roadmap from the Accessibility Compliance Tracking Toolto the desired time quadrant on the roadmap.
    3. Set your desired timelines by changing the Q1-Q4 blocks (set the timelines that make sense for your situation).

    Input

    • Output of activity 1.2.2
    • Roadmap template
    • Other departmental project plans and timelines

    Output

    • Visual roadmap of accessibility compliance controls

    Materials

    • n/a

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT senior leaders
    • IT managers

    Communicate commitment

    Support people leaders in leading by example with an accessibility commitment statement.

    A commitment statement communicates why accessibility and disability inclusion are important and guides behaviors toward the ideal state. The statement will guide and align work, build accountability, and acknowledge the dedication of the leadership team to accessibility and disability inclusion. The statement will:

    • Publicly commit the team to fostering disability inclusivity.
    • Highlight related values and goals of the team or organization.
    • Set expectations.
    • Help build trust and increase feelings of belonging.
    • Connect the necessary changes (people, process, and technology related) to organization strategy.

    Take action! Writing the statement is only the first step. It takes more than words to build accessibility and make your work environment more disability inclusive.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Preparing for and building awareness of the reasons for accessibility make the necessary behavior changes easier.

    Sample accessibility commitment statements

    theScore

    "theScore strives to provide products and services in a way that respects the dignity and independence of persons with disabilities. We are committed to giving persons with disabilities the same opportunity to access our products and services and allowing them to benefit from the same services, in the same place and in a similar way as other clients. We are also committed to meeting the needs of persons with disabilities in a timely manner, and we will meet applicable legislative requirements for preventing and removing barriers."(1)

    Apple Canada

    "Apple Canada is committed to ensuring equal access and participation for people with disabilities. Apple Canada is committed to treating people with disabilities in a way that allows them to maintain their dignity and independence. Apple Canada believes in integration and is committed to meeting the needs of people with disabilities in a timely manner. Apple Canada will do so by removing and preventing barriers to accessibility and meeting accessibility requirements under the AODA and provincial and federal laws across Canada." (2)

    Google Canada

    "We are committed to meeting the accessibility needs of people with disabilities in a timely manner, and will do so by identifying, preventing and removing barriers to accessibility, and by meeting the accessibility requirements under the AODA." (3)

    Source 1: theScore
    Source 2: Apple Canada
    Source 3: Google Canada.

    1.2.4 Write an IT accessibility commitment statement

    45 minutes

    1. As a group, brainstorm the key reasons and necessity for disability inclusion and accessibility for your organization, and the drivers and behaviors required. Record the ideas brainstormed by the group.
    2. Break into smaller groups or pairs (or if too small, continue as a single group):
      • Each group uses the brainstormed ideas to draft an accessibility commitment statement.
    3. Each smaller group shares their statement with the larger group and receives feedback. Smaller groups redraft their statements based on the feedback.
    4. Post each redrafted statement and provide each person two dot stickers to place on the two statements that resonate the most with them.
    5. Using the two statements with the highest number of dot votes, write the final accessibility commitment statement.
    6. Add the commitment statement to slide 18 of the Departmental Meeting Template.

    Input

    • Business objectives
    • Risks related to accessibility
    • Target future accessibility maturity

    Output

    • IT accessibility commitment statement

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Dot stickers or other voting mechanism

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT senior leaders
    • IT managers

    Phase 2

    Change Enablement for Accessibility.

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    1.1 Determine accessibility requirements of IT

    1.2 Build IT accessibility plan

    2.1 Build awareness

    2.2 Support new behaviors

    2.3 Continuous reinforcement

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Clarifying key messages
    • IT department accessibility presentation
    • Establishing a frequency and timeframe for communications
    • Obtaining feedback
    • Sustainment plan

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT senior leaders
    • IT managers
    • Other key business stakeholders
    • Marketing and communications team

    Be experience driven

    Building awareness and focusing on experience helps move along the accessibility maturity framework. Shifting from mandate to movement.

    In this phase, start to move beyond compliance. Build the IT team's understanding of accessibility, disability inclusion, and their role.
    Communicate the following messages to your team:

    • The motivation behind the change.
    • The reasons for the change.
    • And encourage feedback.

    Info-Tech Accessibility Maturity Framework

    an image of the Info-Tech Accessibility Maturity Framework

    Info-Tech Insight

    Compliance is the minimum; the people and behavior changes are the harder part and have the largest impact on accessibility. Preparing for and building awareness of the reasons for accessibility make the necessary behavior changes easier. Communicate, communicate, and communicate some more.

    What is an organizational change?

    Before communicating, understand the degree of change.

    Incremental Change:

    • Changes made to improve current processes or systems (e.g. optimizing current technology).

    Transitional Change:

    • Changes that involve dismantling old systems and/or processes in favor of new ones (e.g. new product or services added).

    Transformational Change:

    • Significant change in organizational strategy or culture resulting in substantial shift in direction.

    Examples:

    • New or changed policy
    • Switching from on-premises to cloud-first infrastructure
    • Implementing ransomware risk controls
    • Implementing a Learning and Development Plan

    Examples:

    • Moving to an insourced or outsourced service desk
    • Developing a BI and analytics function
    • Integrating risk into organization risk
    • Developing a strategy (technology, architecture, security, data, service, infrastructure, application)

    Examples:

    • Organizational redesign
    • Acquisition or merger of another organization
    • Implementing a digital strategy
    • A new CEO or board taking over the organization's direction

    Consider the various impacts of the change

    Invest time at the start to develop a detailed understanding of the impact of the change. This will help to create a plan that will simplify the change and save time. Evaluate the impact from a people, process, and technology perspective.

    Leverage a design thinking principle: Empathize with the stakeholder – what will change?

    People

    Process Technology
    • Team structure
    • Reporting structure
    • Career paths
    • Job skills
    • Responsibilities
    • Company vision/mission
    • Number of FTE
    • Culture
    • Training required
    • Budget
    • Work location
    • Daily workflow
    • Working conditions
    • Work hours
    • Reward structure
    • Required number of completed tasks
    • Training required
    • Required tools
    • Required policies
    • Required systems
    • Training required

    Change depends on how well people understand it

    Help people internalize what they can do to make the organization more inclusive.

    Anticipate responses to change:

    1. Emotional reaction – different people require different styles of management to guide them through the change. Individual's may have different emotions at different times during the change process. The more easily you can identify persona characteristics, the better you can manage them.
    2. Level of impact – the higher level of change on an individual's day-to-day, the more difficult it will be to adjust to the change. The more impactful the change, the more time focused on people management.

    an image showing staff personas at different stages through the change process.

    Quickly assess the size of change by answering these questions:

    1. Will the change affect your staff's daily work?
    2. Is the change high urgency?
    3. Is there a change in reporting relationships?
    4. Is there a change in skills required for staff to be successful?
    5. Will the change modify entrenched cultural practices?
    6. Is there a change in the mission or vision of the role?

    If you answered "Yes" to two or more questions, the change is bigger than you think. Your staff will feel the impact.

    Ensure effective communication by focusing on four key elements

    1. Audience
    • Stakeholders (either groups or individuals) who will receive the communication.
  • Message
    • Information communicated to impacted stakeholders. Must be rooted in a purpose or intent.
  • Messenger
    • Person who delivers the communication to the audience. The communicator and owner are two different things.
  • Channel
    • Method or channel used to communicate to the audience.
  • Step 2.1

    Build awareness and define key messages for IT.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT leadership team
    • Marketing/communications (optional)

    Outcomes of this step

    • Key accessibility messages

    Determine the desired outcome of communicating within IT

    This phase is focused on communicating within IT. All communication has an overall goal. This outcome or purpose of communicating is often dependent on the type of influence the stakeholder wields within the organization as well as the type of impact the change will have on them. Consider each of the communication outcomes listed below.

    Communicating within IT

    • Obtain buy-in
    • Inform about the IT change
    • Create a training plan
    • Inform about department changes
    • Inform about organization changes
    • Inform about a crisis
    • Obtain adoption related to the change
    • Distribute key messages to change agents

    Departmental Meeting Template

    Departmental Meeting Template

    Accessibility Quick Cards

    Accessibility Quick Cards

    Establish and define key messages based on organizational objectives

    What are key messages?

    1. Key messages guide all internal communications to ensure they are consistent, unified, and straightforward.
    2. Distill key messages down from organizational objectives and use them to reinforce the organization's strategic direction. Key messages should inspire employees to act in a way that will help the organization reach its objectives.

    How to establish key messages

    Ground key messages in organizational strategy and culture. These should be the first places you look to determine the organization's key messages:

    • Refer to organizational strategy documents. What needs to be reinforced in internal communications to ensure the organization can achieve its strategy? This is a key message.
    • Look at the organization's values. How do values guide how work should be done? Do employees need to behave in a certain way or keep a certain value top of mind? This is a key message.

    The intent of key messages is to convey important information in a way that is relatable and memorable, to promote reinforcement, and ultimately, to drive action.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Empathizing with the audience is key to anticipating and addressing objections as well as identifying benefits. Customize messaging based on audience attributes such as work model (e.g. hybrid), anticipated objections, what's in it for me?, and specific expectations.

    2.1.1 Clarify the key messages

    30 minutes

    1. Brainstorm the key stakeholders and target audiences you will likely need to communicate with to sustain the accessibility initiative (depending on the size of your group, you might break into pairs or smaller groups and each work on one target audience).
    2. Based on the outcome expected from engaging the target audience in communications, define one to five key messages that should be expressed about accessibility.
    3. The key messages should highlight benefits anticipated, concerns anticipated, details about the change, plan of action, or next steps. The goal here is to ensure the target audience is included in the communication process.
    4. The key messages should be focused on how the target audience receives a consistent message, especially if different communication messengers are involved.
    5. Document the key messages on Tab 3 of the Communications Planner Tool.

    Download the Communications Planner Tool

    Input

    • The change
    • Target audience
    • Communication outcomes

    Output

    • Key messages to support a consistent approach

    Materials

    • Communications Planner Tool
    • Sticky notes
    • Whiteboard

    Participants

    • IT leadership team
    • Marketing/communications partner (optional)

    Step 2.2

    Support new behaviors.

    Activities

    2.2.1 Prepare for IT department meeting

    2.2.2 Practice delivery of your presentation

    2.2.3 Hold department meeting

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Entire IT department

    Outcomes of this step

    • IT departmental meeting slides
    • Accessibility quick cards
    • Task list of how each IT team will support the accessibility roadmap

    Key questions to answer with change communication

    To effectively communicate change, answer questions before they're asked, whenever possible. To do this, outline at each stage of the change process what's happening next for the audience, as well as answer other anticipated questions. Pair key questions with core messages.

    Examples of key questions by change stage include:

    The outline for each stage of the change process, showing what happens next.

    2.2.1 Prepare for the IT departmental meeting

    2 hours

    1. Download the IT Department Presentation Template and follow the instructions on each slide to update for your organization.
    2. Insert information on the current accessibility maturity level. If you haven't determined your current and future state maturity level, use the Info-Tech resource from The Accessibility Business Case for IT.
    3. Review the presentation with the information added.
    4. Consider what could be done to make the presentation better:
      1. Concise: Identify opportunities to remove unnecessary information.
      2. Clear: It uses only terms or language the target audience would understand.
      3. Relevant: It matters to the target audience and the problems they face.
      4. Consistent: The message could be repeated across audiences.
    5. Schedule a departmental meeting or add the presentation to an existing departmental meeting.

    Download the Departmental Presentation Template

    Input

    • Organizational accessibility risks
    • Accessibility maturity current state
    • Outputs from manager presentation
    • Key messages

    Output

    • Prepared presentation to introduce accessibility to the entire IT department

    Materials

    • Departmental Presentation Template

    Participants

    • CIO/ head of IT/ CAO/ initiative leader

    Hone presentation skills before meeting with key stakeholders

    Using voice and body

    Think about the message you are trying to convey and how your body can support that delivery. Hands, stance, frame – all have an impact on what might be conveyed.

    If you want your audience to lean in and be eager about your next point, consider using a pause or softer voice and volume.

    Be professional and confident

    State the main points of your presentation confidently. While this should be obvious, it is essential. Your audience should be able to clearly see that you believe the points you are stating.

    Present in a way that is genuine to you and your voice. Whether you have an energetic personality or calm and composed personality, the presentation should be authentic to you.

    Connect with your audience

    Look each member of the audience in the eye at least once during your presentation. Avoid looking at the ceiling, the back wall, or the floor. Your audience should feel engaged – this is essential to keeping their attention.

    Avoid reading from your slides. If there is text on a slide, paraphrase it while maintaining eye contact.

    Info-Tech Insight

    You are responsible for the response of your audience. If they aren't engaged, it is on you as the communicator.

    2.2.2 Practice delivery of your presentation and schedule department meeting

    45 minutes

    1. Take ten minutes to think about how to deliver your presentation. Where will you emphasize words, speak louder, softer, lean in, stand tall, make eye contact, etc.?
    2. Set a timer on your phone or watch. Record yourself if possible.
    3. Take a few seconds to center yourself and prepare to deliver your pitch.
    4. Practice delivery of your presentation out loud. Don't forget to use your body language and your voice to deliver.
    5. Listen to the recording. Are the ideas communicated correctly? Are you convinced?
    6. Review and repeat.

    Input

    • Presentation deck from activity 2.2.1
    • Best practices for delivering

    Output

    • An ability to deliver the presentation in a clear and concise manner that creates understanding

    Materials

    • Recorder
    • Timer

    Participants

    • CIO/ head of IT/ initiative leader

    2.2.3 Lead the IT department meeting

    1–2 hours

    1. Gather the IT department in a manner appropriate for your organization and facilitate the meeting prepared in activity 2.2.1.
    2. Within the meeting, capture all key action items and outcomes from the Quick Cards Development and Roadmap Planning.
    3. Following the meeting, review the quick cards that everyone built and share these with all IT participants.
    4. Update your sunrise diagram to include any initiatives that came up in the team meetings to support moving to experiential.

    Input

    • Presentation deck from activity 2.2.1

    Output

    • A shared understanding of accessibility at your organization and everyone's role
    • Area task list (including behavior change needs)
    • Accessibility quick cards

    Materials

    Participants

    • CIO/ head of IT/ initiative leader

    Download the Accessibility Quick Cards template

    Step 2.3

    Continuous reinforcement – keep the conversation going – sustain the change.

    Activities

    2.3.1 Establish a frequency and timeframe for communications

    2.3.2 Obtain feedback and improve

    2.3.3 Sustainment plan

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO/ head of IT/ initiative lead
    • IT leadership team

    Outcomes of this step

    • Assigned roles for ongoing program monitoring
    • Communication plan
    • Accessibility maturity monitoring plan
    • Program evaluation

    Communication is ongoing before, during, and after implementing a change initiative

    Just because you've rolled out the plan doesn't mean you can stop talking about it.

    An image of the five steps, with steps four and five highlighted in a green box. The five headings are: Identify and Prioritize; Prepare for initiative; Create a communication plan; Implement change; Sustain the desired outcome

    Don't forget: Cascade messages down through the organization to ensure those who need to deliver messages have time to internalize the change before communicating it to others. Include a mix of personal and organizational messages, but where possible, separate personal and organizational content into different communications.

    2.3.1 Establish a frequency and timeframe

    30 minutes

    1. For each row in Tab 3, determine how frequently that communication needs to take place and when that communication needs to be completed by.
      • Frequency: How often the communication will be delivered to the audience (e.g. one-time, monthly, as needed).
      • Timeframe: When the communication will be delivered to the audience (e.g. a planned period or a specific date).
    2. When selecting the timeframe, consider what dependencies need to take place prior to that communication. For example, IT employees should not be communicated with on anything that has not yet been approved by the CEO. Also consider when other communications might be taking place so that the message is not lost in the noise.
    3. For frequency, the only time that a communication needs to take place once is when presenting up to senior leaders of the organizations. And even then, it will sometimes require more than one conversation. Be mindful of this.

    Input

    • The change
    • Target audience
    • Communication outcome
    • Communication channel

    Output

    • Frequency and timeframe of the communication

    Materials

    • Communications Planner Tool
    • Sticky notes
    • Whiteboard

    Participants

    • Changes based on those who would be relevant to your initiative

    Download the Communications Planner Tool

    Ensure feedback mechanisms are in place

    Soliciting and acting on feedback involves employees in the decision-making process and demonstrates to them that their contributions matter.

    Make sure you have established feedback mechanisms to collect feedback on both the messages delivered and how they were delivered. Some ways to collect feedback include:

    • Evaluating intranet comments and interactions (e.g. likes, etc.) if this function is enabled.
    • Measuring comprehension and satisfaction through surveys and polls.
    • Looking for themes in the feedback and questions employees bring forward to managers during in-person briefings.

    Feedback Mechanisms:

    • CIO business vision survey
    • Engagement surveys
    • Focus groups
    • Suggestion boxes
    • Team meetings
    • Random sampling
    • Informal feedback
    • Direct feedback
    • Audience body language
    • Repeating the message back

    Gather feedback on plan and iterate

    Who

    The project team gathers feedback from:

    • As many members of impacted groups as possible, as it helps build broad buy-in for the plan.
    • All levels (e.g. frontline employees, managers, directors).

    What

    Gather feedback on:

    • How to implement tactics successfully.
    • The timing of implementation (helps inform the next slide).
    • The resources required (helps inform the next slide).
    • Potential unforeseen impacts, questions, and concerns.

    How

    • Use focus groups to gather feedback.
    • Adjust sustainment plan based on feedback.

    Use Info-Tech's Standard Focus Group Guide

    2.3.2 Obtain feedback and improve

    20 minutes

    1. Evenly distribute the number of rows in the communication plan to all those involved. Consider a metric that would help inform whether the communication outcome was achieved.
    2. For each row, identify a feedback mechanism (slide 75) that could be used to enable the collection and confirm a successful outcome.
    3. Come back as a group and validate the feedback mechanisms selected.
    4. The important aspect here is not just to measure if the desired outcome was achieved. If the desired outcome is not achieved, consider what you might do to change or enable better communication to that target audience.
    5. Every communication can be better. Feedback, whether it be tactical or strategic, will help inform methods to improve future communication activities.

    Input

    • Communication outcome
    • Target audience
    • Communication channel

    Output

    • A mechanism to measure communication feedback and adjust future communications when necessary

    Materials

    • Communications Planner Tool
    • Sticky notes
    • Whiteboard

    Participants

    • Changes based on those who would be relevant to your initiative

    Download the Communications Planner Tool

    Identify owners and assign other roles

    • Eventually there needs to be a hand off to leaders to sustain accessibility. Senior leaders continue to play the role of guide and facilitator, helping the team identify owners and transfer ownership.
    • Guide the team to work with owners to assign roles to other stakeholders. Spread responsibility across multiple people to avoid overload.

    R

    Responsible
    Carries out the work to implement the component (e.g. payroll manager).

    A

    Accountable
    Owner of the component and held accountable for its implementation (e.g. VP of finance).

    C

    Consulted
    Asked for feedback and input to modify sustainment tactics (e.g. sustainment planning team).

    I

    Informed
    Told about progress of implementation (senior leadership team, impacted staff).

    Identify required resources and secure budget

    Sustainment is critical to success of accessibility

    • This step (i.e. sustainment) often gets overlooked because leaders are focused on the implementation. It takes resources and budget to sustain a plan and change as well.
    • Resorting to the old way is more likely to occur when you don't plan to support sustainment with ongoing resources and budget that's required.

    Resources

    Identify resources required for sustainment components using metrics and input from implementation owners, subject matter experts, and frontline managers.

    For example:

    • Inventory
    • Collateral for communications
    • Technology
    • Physical space
    • People resources (FTE)

    Budget

    Estimate the budget required for resources based on past projects that used similar resources, and then estimate the time it will take until the change evolves into "business as usual" (e.g. 6 months, 12 months).

    Monitor accessibility maturity

    If you haven't already performed the Accessibility Maturity Assessment, complete it in the wake of the accessibility initiative to assess improvements and progress toward target future accessibility maturity.
    As your accessibility program starts to scale out over a range of projects, revisit the assessment on a quarterly or bi-annual basis to help focus your improvement efforts across the six accessibility categories.

    • Vendor relations
    • Products and services
    • Policy and process
    • Support and accommodation
    • Communication
    • People and culture

    Info-Tech Insight

    To drive continual improvement of your organizational accessibility and disability inclusion, continue to share progress, wins, challenges, feedback, and other accessibility related concerns with stakeholders. At the end of the day, IT's efforts to become a change leader and support organizational accessibility will come down to stakeholder perceptions based upon employee morale and benefits realized.

    Download the Accessibility Maturity Assessment

    An image of the maturity level bar graph.

    Evaluate and iterate the program on an ongoing basis

    1. Continually monitor the results of project metrics.
      • Track progress toward goals and metrics set at the beginning of the initiative to gauge the success of the program.
      • Analyze metrics at the work-unit level to highlight successes and challenges in accessibility and disability inclusion and the parameters around it for each impacted unit.
    2. Regularly gather feedback on program effectiveness using questions such as:
      • Has the desired culture been effectively communicated and leveraged, or has the culture changed?
      • Collect feedback through regular channels (e.g. manager check-ins) and set up a cadence to survey employees on the program (e.g. three months after rollout and then annually).
    3. Determine if changes to the program structure are needed.
      • Revisit the accessibility maturity framework and the compliance requirements of IT. Understand what is being experienced; it may be necessary to select a different target or adjust the parameters to mitigate the common challenges.
      • Evaluate the effectiveness of current internal processes to determine if the program would benefit from a dedicated resource.

    2.3.3 Sustain the change

    1. Identify who will own what pieces of the program going forward and assign roles to transition the initiative from implementation to the new normal.
    2. Continue to communicate with stakeholders about accessibility and disability inclusion initiatives, controls, and requirements.
    3. Identify required resources and secure any budget that will be needed to support the accessibility program. Think about employee training, consulting needs, assistive technology requirements, human resources (FTE), etc.
    4. Continue to monitor your accessibility maturity. Use the Accessibility Maturity Assessment tool to periodically evaluate progress on goals and targets. Also, use this tool to communicate progress with senior leaders and executives.
    5. Strive for continuous improvement by evaluating and iterating the program on an ongoing basis.

    Input

    • Activity outputs from this blueprint

    Output

    • Ongoing continuous improvement and progress related to accessibility
    • Demonstrable results

    Materials

    • n/a

    Participants

    • CIO/ head of IT/ initiative Lead
    • IT senior leaders
    • IT managers

    Related Info-Tech Research

    The Accessibility Business Case for IT

    • Take away the overwhelm that many feel when they hear "accessibility" and make the steps for your organization approachable.
    • Clearly communicate why accessibility is critical and how it supports the organization's key objectives and initiatives.
    • Understand your current state related to accessibility and identify areas for key initiatives to become part of the IT strategic roadmap.

    Lead Staff through Change

    • Anticipate and respond to staff questions about the change in order to keep messages consistent, organized, and clear.
    • Manage staff based on their specific concerns and change personas to get the best out of your team during the transition through change.
    • Maintain a feedback loop between staff, executives, and other departments in order to maintain the change momentum and reduce angst throughout the process.

    IT Diversity and Inclusion Tactics

    • Although inclusion is key to the success of a diversity and inclusion (D&I) strategy, the complexity of the concept makes it a daunting pursuit.
    • This is further complicated by the fact that creating inclusion is not a one-and-done exercise. Rather, it requires the ongoing commitment of employees and managers to reassess their own behaviors and to drive a cultural shift.

    Implement and Mature Your User Experience Design Practice

    • Create a practice that is focused on human outcomes; it starts and ends with the people you are designing for. This includes:
      • Establishing a practice with a common vision.
      • Enhancing the practice through four design factors.
      • Communicating a roadmap to improve your business through design.

    Works cited

    "2021 State of Digital Accessibility." Level Access, n.d. Accessed 10 Aug. 2022
    "Apple Canada Accessibility Policy & Plan." Apple Canada, 11 March 2019. .
    Casey, Caroline. "Do Your D&I Efforts Include People With Disabilities?" Harvard Business Review, 19 March 2020. Accessed 28 July 2022.
    Digitalisation World. "Organisations failing to meet digital accessibility standards." Angel Business Communications, 19 May 2022. Accessed Oct. 2022.
    "disability." Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, . Accessed 10 Aug. 2022.
    "Disability." World Health Organization, 2022. Accessed 10 Aug 2022.
    "Google Canada Corporation Accessibility Policy and Multi Year Plan." Google Canada, June 2020. .
    Hypercontext. "The State of High Performing Teams in Tech 2022." Hypercontext. 2022..
    Lay-Flurrie, Jenny. "Accessibility Evolution Model: Creating Clarity in your Accessibility Journey." Microsoft, 2023. <https://blogs.microsoft.com/accessibility/accessibility-evolution-model/>.
    Maguire, Jennifer. "Applause 2022 Global Accessibility Survey Reveals Organizations Prioritize Digital Accessibility but Fall Short of Conformance with WCAG 2.1 Standards." Business Wire, 19 May 2022. . Accessed 2 January 2023.
    "The Business Case for Digital Accessibility." W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), 9 Nov. 2018. Accessed 4 Aug. 2022.
    "THESCORE's Commitment to Accessibility." theScore, May 2021. .
    "The WebAIM Million." Web AIM, 31 March 2022. Accessed 28 Jul. 2022.
    Washington, Ella F. "The Five Stages of DEI Maturity." Harvard Business Review, November - December 2022. Accessed 7 Nov. 2022.
    Web AIM. "The WebAIM Million." Institute for Disability Research, Policy, and Practice, 31 March 2022. Accessed 28 Jul. 2022.

    Develop a Use Case for Smart Contracts

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    • Parent Category Name: Innovation
    • Parent Category Link: /innovation
    • Organizations today continue to use traditional and often archaic methods of manual processing with physical paper documents.
    • These error-prone methods introduce cumbersome administrative work, causing businesses to struggle with payments and contract disputes.
    • The increasing scale and complexity of business processes has led to many third parties, middlemen, and paper hand-offs.
    • Companies remain bogged down by expensive and inefficient processes while losing sight of their ultimate stakeholder: the customer. A failure to focus on the customer is a failure to do business.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Simplify, automate, secure. Smart contracts enable businesses to simplify, automate, and secure traditionally complex transactions.
    • Focus on the customer. Smart contracts provide a frictionless experience for customers by removing unnecessary middlemen and increasing the speed of transactions.
    • New business models. Smart contracts enable the redesign of your organization and business-to-business relationships and transactions.

    Impact and Result

    • Simplify and optimize your business processes by using Info-Tech’s methodology to select processes with inefficient transactions, unnecessary middlemen, and excessive manual paperwork.
    • Use Info-Tech’s template to generate a smart contract use case customized for your business.
    • Customize Info-Tech’s stakeholder presentation template to articulate the goals and benefits of the project and get buy-in from business executives.

    Develop a Use Case for Smart Contracts Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should leverage smart contracts in your business, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    • Develop a Use Case for Smart Contracts – Phases 1-2

    1. Understand smart contracts

    Understand the fundamental concepts of smart contract technology and get buy-in from stakeholders.

    • Develop a Use Case for Smart Contracts – Phase 1: Understand Smart Contracts
    • Smart Contracts Executive Buy-in Presentation Template

    2. Develop a smart contract use case

    Select a business process, create a smart contract logic diagram, and complete a smart contract use-case deliverable.

    • Develop a Use Case for Smart Contracts – Phase 2: Develop the Smart Contract Use Case
    • Smart Contracts Use-Case Template

    [infographic]

    Workshop: Develop a Use Case for Smart Contracts

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Understand Smart Contracts

    The Purpose

    Review blockchain basics.

    Understand the fundamental concepts of smart contracts.

    Develop smart contract use-case executive buy-in presentation.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understanding of blockchain basics.

    Understanding the fundamentals of smart contracts.

    Development of an executive buy-in presentation.

    Activities

    1.1 Review blockchain basics.

    1.2 Understand smart contract fundamentals.

    1.3 Identify business challenges and smart contract benefits.

    1.4 Create executive buy-in presentation.

    Outputs

    Executive buy-in presentation

    2 Smart Contract Logic Diagram

    The Purpose

    Brainstorm and select a business process to develop a smart contract use case around.

    Generate a smart contract logic diagram.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Selected a business process.

    Developed a smart contract logic diagram for the selected business process.

    Activities

    2.1 Brainstorm candidate business processes.

    2.2 Select a business process.

    2.3 Identify phases, actors, events, and transactions.

    2.4 Create the smart contract logic diagram.

    Outputs

    Smart contract logic diagram

    3 Smart Contract Use Case

    The Purpose

    Develop smart contract use-case diagrams for each business process phase.

    Complete a smart contract use-case deliverable.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Smart contract use-case diagrams.

    Smart contract use-case deliverable.

    Activities

    3.1 Build smart contract use-case diagrams for each phase of the business process.

    3.2 Create a smart contract use-case summary diagram.

    3.3 Complete smart contract use-case deliverable.

    Outputs

    Smart contract use case

    4 Next Steps and Action Plan

    The Purpose

    Review workshop week and lessons learned.

    Develop an action plan to follow through with next steps for the project.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Reviewed workshop week with common understanding of lessons learned.

    Completed an action plan for the project.

    Activities

    4.1 Review workshop deliverables.

    4.2 Create action plan.

    Outputs

    Smart contract action plan

     

    Make Your IT Governance Adaptable

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    • Parent Category Name: IT Governance, Risk & Compliance
    • Parent Category Link: /it-governance-risk-and-compliance
    • People don’t understand the value of governance, seeing it as a hindrance to productivity and efficiency.
    • Governance is delegated to people and practices that don’t have the ability or authority to make these decisions.
    • Decisions are made within committees that don’t meet frequently enough to support business velocity.
    • It is difficult to allocate time and resources to build or execute governance effectively.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • IT governance applies not just to the IT department but to all uses of information and technology.
    • IT governance works against you if it no longer aligns with or supports your organizational direction, goals, and work practices.
    • Governance doesn’t have to be bureaucratic or control based.
    • Your governance model should be able to adapt to changes in the organization’s strategy and goals, your industry, and your ways of working.
    • Governance can be embedded and automated into your practices.

    Impact and Result

    • You will produce more value from IT by developing a governance framework optimized for your current needs and context, with the ability to adapt as your needs shift.
    • You will create the foundation and ability to delegate and empower governance to enable agile delivery.
    • You will identify areas where governance does not require manual oversight and can be embedded into the way you work.

    Make Your IT Governance Adaptable Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Make Your IT Governance Adaptable Deck – A document that walks you through how to design and implement governance that fits the context of your organization and can adapt to change.

    Our dynamic, flexible, and embedded approach to governance will help drive organizational success. The three-phase methodology will help you identify your governance needs, select and refine your governance model, and embed and automate governance decisions.

    • Make Your IT Governance Adaptable – Phases 1-3

    2. Adaptive and Controlled Governance Model Templates and Workbook – Documents that gather context information about your organization to identify the best approach for governance.

    Use these templates and workbook to identify the criteria and design factors for your organization and the design triggers to maintain fit. Upon completion this will be your new governance framework model.

    • Controlled Governance Models Template
    • IT Governance Program Overview
    • Governance Workbook

    3. Implementation Plan and Workbook – Tools that help you build and finalize your approach to implement your new or revised governance model.

    Upon completion you will have a finalized implementation plan and a visual roadmap.

    • Governance Implementation Plan
    • Governance Roadmap Workbook

    4. Governance Committee Charter Templates – Base charters that can be adapted for communication.

    Customize these templates to create the committee charters or terms of reference for the committees developed in your governance model.

    • IT PMO Committee Charter
    • IT Risk Committee Charter for Controlled Governance
    • IT Steering Committee Charter for Controlled Governance
    • Program Governance Committee Charter
    • Architecture Review Board Charter
    • Data Governance Committee Charter
    • Digital Governance Committee Charter

    5. Governance Automation Criteria Checklist and Worksheet – Tools that help you determine which governance decisions can be automated and work through the required logic and rules.

    The checklist is a starting point for confirming which activities and decisions should be considered for automation or embedding. Use the worksheet to develop decision logic by defining the steps and information inputs involved in making decisions.

    • Governance Automation Criteria Checklist
    • Governance Automation Worksheet

    Infographic

    Workshop: Make Your IT Governance Adaptable

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Develop Your Guiding Star

    The Purpose

    Establish the context for your governance model.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Core understanding of the context that will enable us to build an optimal model

    Activities

    1.1 Confirm mission, vision, and goals.

    1.2 Define scope and principles.

    1.3 Adjust for culture and finalize context.

    Outputs

    Governance principles

    Governance context and goals

    2 Define the Governance Model

    The Purpose

    To select and adapt a governance model based on your context.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A selected and optimized governance model

    Activities

    2.1 Select and refine governance model.

    2.2 Confirm and adjust the structure.

    2.3 Review and adapt governance responsibilities and activities.

    2.4 Validate governance mandates and membership.

    Outputs

    IT governance model and adjustment triggers

    IT governance structure, responsibilities, membership, and cadence

    Governance committee charters

    3 Build Governance Process and Policy

    The Purpose

    Refine your governance practices and associate policies properly.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A completed governance model that can be implemented with clear update triggers and review timing

    Policy alignment with the right levels of authority

    Activities

    3.1 Update your governance process.

    3.2 Align policies to mandate.

    3.3 Adjust and confirm your model.

    3.4 Identify and document update triggers and embed into review cycle.

    Outputs

    IT governance process and information flow

    IT governance policies

    Finalized governance model

    4 Embed and Automate Governance

    The Purpose

    Identify options to automate and embed governance activities and decisions.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Simply more consistent governance activities and automate them to enhance speed and support governance delegation and empowerment

    Activities

    4.1 Identify decisions and standards that can be automated. Develop decision logic.

    4.2 Plan verification and validation approach.

    4.3 Build implementation plan.

    4.4 Develop communication strategy and messaging.

    Outputs

    Selected automation options, decision logic, and business rules

    Implementation and communication plan

    Further reading

    Make Your IT Governance Adaptable

    Governance isn't optional, so keep it simple and make it flexible.

    Table of Contents

    4 Analyst Perspective

    5 Executive Summary

    13 Governance Stages

    14 Info-Tech’s IT Governance Thought Model

    19 Info-Tech’s Approach

    23 Insight Summary

    30 Phase 1: Identify Your Governance Needs

    54 Phase 2: Select and Refine Your Governance Model

    76 Phase 3: Embed and Automate

    94 Summary of Accomplishment

    95 Additional Support

    97 Contributors

    98 Bibliography

    Make Your IT Governance Adaptable

    Governance isn't optional, so keep it simple and make it flexible.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    Governance will always be part of the fabric of your organization. Make it adaptable so it doesn’t constrain your success.

    Photo of Valence Howden, Principal Research Director, Info-Tech Research Group

    Far too often, the purpose of information and technology (I&T) governance is misunderstood. Instead of being seen as a way to align the organization’s vision to its investment in information and technology, it has become so synonymous with compliance and control that even mentioning the word “governance” elicits a negative reaction.

    Success in modern digital organizations depends on their ability to adjust for velocity and uncertainty, requiring a dynamic and responsive approach to governance – one that is embedded and automated in your organization to enable new ways of working, innovation, and change.

    Evolutionary theory describes adaptability as the way an organism adjusts to fit a new environment, or changes to its existing environment, to survive. Applied to organizations, adaptable governance is critical to the ability to survive and succeed.

    If your governance doesn’t adjust to enable your changing business environment and customer needs, it will quickly become misaligned with your goals and drive you to failure.

    It is critical that people build an approach to governance that is effective and relevant today while building in adaptability to keep it relevant tomorrow.

    Valence Howden
    Principal Research Director, Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    • People don’t understand the value of governance, seeing it as a hindrance to productivity and efficiency.
    • Governance is delegated to people and practices that don’t have the ability or authority to make decisions.
    • Decisions are made within committees that don’t meet frequently enough to support business velocity.
    • It is difficult to allocate time and resources to build or execute governance effectively

    Common Obstacles

    • You are unable to clearly communicate how governance adds value to your organization.
    • Your IT governance approach no longer aligns with or supports your organizational direction, goals, and work practices.
    • Governance is seen and performed as a bureaucratic control-based exercise.
    • Governance activities are not transparent.
    • The governance committee gets too deeply involved with project deep dives and daily management, derailing its effectiveness and ability to produce value.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    • Use Info-Tech’s IT governance models to identify a base model similar to the way you are organized. Confirm your current and future placement in governance execution.
    • Adjust the model based on industry needs, your principles, regulatory requirements, and your future direction.
    • Identify where to embed or automate decision making and compliance and what is required to do so effectively.
    • Implement your governance model for success.

    Info-Tech Insight

    IT governance must be embedded and automated, where possible, to effectively meet the needs and velocity of digital organizations and modern practices and to drive success and value.

    What is governance?

    IT governance is a critical and embedded practice that ensures that information and technology investments, risks, and resources are aligned in the best interests of the organization and produce business value.

    Effective governance ensures that the right technology investments are made at the right time to support and enable your organization’s mission, vision, and goals.

    5 KEY OUTCOMES OF GOOD GOVERNANCE

    STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT

    Technology investments and portfolios are aligned with the organization's strategic objectives.

    RISK OPTIMIZATION

    Organizational risks are understood and addressed to minimize impact and optimize opportunities.

    VALUE DELIVERY

    IT investments and initiatives deliver their expected benefits.

    RESOURCE OPTIMIZATION

    Resources (people, finances, time) are appropriately allocated across the organization to optimal organizational benefit.

    PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT

    The performance of technology investments is monitored and used to determine future courses of action and to confirm achievement of success.

    ‹–EVALUATE–DIRECT–MONITOR–›

    Why is this necessary?

    • Governance is not simply a committee or an activity that you perform at a specific point in time; it is a critical and continuously active practice that drives the success of your organization. It is part of your organization’s DNA and is just as unique, with some attributes common to all (IT governance elements), some specific to your family (industry refinements), and some specific to you (individual organization).
    • Your approach to governance needs to change over time in order to remain relevant and continue to enable value and success, but organizations rarely want to change governance once it’s in place.
    • To meet the speed and flow of practices like Lean, DevOps, and Agile, your IT governance needs to be done differently and become embedded into the way your organization works. You must adjust your governance model based on key moments of change – organizational triggers – to maintain the effectiveness of your model.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Build an optimal model quickly and implement the core elements using an iterative approach to ensure the changes provide the most value.

    The Technology Value Trinity

    Delivery of Business Value & Strategic Needs

    • DIGITAL & TECHNOLOGY STRATEGY
      The identification of objectives and initiatives necessary to achieve business goals.
    • IT OPERATING MODEL
      The model for how IT is organized to deliver on business needs and strategies.
    • INFORMATION & TECHNOLOGY GOVERNANCE
      The governance to ensure the organization and its customers get maximum value from the use of information and technology.

    All three elements of the Technology Value Trinity work in harmony to deliver business value and meet strategic needs. As one changes, the others need to change as well.

    • Digital and IT Strategy tells you what you need to achieve to be successful.
    • IT Operating Model and Organizational Design is the alignment of resources to deliver on your strategy and priorities.
    • Information & Technology Governance is the confirmation that IT’s goals and strategy align with the business’ strategy. It is the mechanism by which you continuously prioritize work to ensure that what you deliver is in line with the strategy. This oversight involves evaluating, directing, and monitoring the delivery of outcomes to ensure that the use of resources results in achieving the organization’s goals.

    Too often strategy, operating model and organizational design, and governance are considered separate practices. As a result, “strategic documents” end up being wish lists, and projects continue to be prioritized based on who shouts the loudest rather than on what is in the best interest of the organization.

    Where information & technology governance fits within an organization

    An infographic illustrating where Governance fits within an organization. The main section is titled 'Enterprise Governance and Strategy' and contains 'Value Outcomes', 'Mission and Vision', 'Goals and Objectives', and 'Guiding Principles'. These all feed into the highlighted 'Information & Technology Governance', which then contributes to 'IT Strategy', which lies outside the main section.

    I&T governance hasn’t achieved its purpose

    Governance is the means by which IT ensures that information and technology delivery and spend is aligned to business goals and delivers business outcomes. However, most CEOs continue to perceive IT as being poorly aligned to the business’ strategic goals, which indicates that governance is not implemented or executed properly.

    For I&T governance to be effective you need a clear understanding of the things that drive your organization and its success. This understanding becomes your guiding star, which is critical for effective governance. It also requires participation by all parts of the organization, not just IT.

    Info-Tech CIO/CEO Alignment Diagnostics (N=124)

    43% of CEOs believe that business goals are going unsupported by IT.

    60% of CEOs believe that improvement is required around IT’s understanding of business goals.

    80% of CIOs/CEOs are misaligned on the target role for IT.

    30% of business stakeholders are supporters (N=32,536) of their IT departments

    Common causes of poor governance

    Key causes of poor or misaligned governance

    1. Governance and its value to your organization is not well understood, often being confused or integrated with more granular management activities.
    2. Business executives fail to understand that IT governance is a function of the business and not the IT department.
    3. Poor past experiences have made “governance” a bad word in the organization. People see it as a constraint and barrier that must be circumvented to get work done.
    4. There is misalignment between accountability and authority throughout the organization, and the wrong people are involved in governance practices.
    5. There is an unwillingness to change a governance approach that has served the organization well in the past, leading to challenges when the organization starts to change practices and speed of delivery.
    6. There is a lack of data and data-related capabilities required to support good decision making and the automation of governance decisions.
    7. The goals and strategy of the organization are not known or understood, leaving nothing for IT governance to orient around.

    Key symptoms of ineffective governance committees

    1. No actions or decisions are generated. The committee produces no value and makes no decisions after it meets. The lack of value output makes the usefulness of the committee questionable.
    2. Resources are overallocated. There is a lack of clear understanding of capacity and value in work to be done, leading to consistent underestimation of required resources and poor resource allocation.
    3. Decisions are changed outside of committee. Decisions made or initiatives approved by the committee are later changed when the proper decision makers are involved or the right information becomes available.
    4. Governance decisions conflict with organizational direction. This shows an obvious lack of alignment and behavioral disconnect that work against organizational success. It is often due to not accounting for where power really exists within the structure.
    5. Consistently poor outcomes are produced from governance direction. Committee members’ lack of business acumen, relevant data, or understanding of organizational goals results in decisions that fail to drive successful measured outcomes.

    Mature your governance by transitioning from ad hoc to automated

    Organizations should look to progress in their governance stages. Ad hoc and controlled governance practices tend to be more rigid, making these a poor fit for organizations requiring higher velocity delivery or using more agile and adaptive practices.

    The goal as you progress through these stages is to delegate governance and empower teams based on your fit and culture, enabling teams where needed to make optimal decisions in real time, ensuring that they are aligned with the best interests of the organization.

    Automate governance for optimal velocity while mitigating risks and driving value.

    This puts your organization in the best position to be adaptive, able to react effectively to volatility and uncertainty.

    A graph illustrating the transition from Ad Hoc to Automated. The y-axis is 'Process Integration' and x-axis is 'Trust & Empowerment'. 'Ad Hoc: Inconsistent Decision Making' lies close to the origin, ranking low on both axes' values. 'Controlled: Authoritarian, Highly Structured' ranks slightly higher on both axes. 'Agile: Distributed & Empowered' ranks 2nd highest on both axes. 'Automated: High Velocity, Embedded & Flexible' ranks highest on both axes.

    Stages of governance

    Adaptive
    Data-Centric


    ˆ


    ˆ


    ˆ


    ˆ


    ˆ
    Traditional
    (People- and Document-Centric)

    4

    Automated Governance
    • Entrenched into organizational processes and product/service design
    • Empowered and fully delegated to maintain fit and drive organizational success and survival

    3

    Agile Governance
    • Flexible enough to support different needs in the organization and respond quickly to change
    • Driven by principles and delegated throughout the company

    2

    Controlled Governance
    • Focused on compliance and hierarchy-based authority
    • Levels of authority defined and often driven by regulatory requirements

    1

    Ad Hoc Governance
    • Not well defined or understood within the organization
    • Occurs out of necessity but often not done by the right people or bodies

    Make Governance Adaptable and Automated to Drive Success and Value

    Governance adaptiveness ensures the success of digital organizations and modern practice implementation.

    THE PROBLEM

    • The wrong people are making decisions.
    • Organizations don't understand what governance is or why it's done.
    • Governance scope and design is a bad fit, damaging the organization.
    • People think governance is optional.

    THE SOLUTION

    ESTABLISH YOUR GUIDING PRINCIPLES

    Define and establish the guiding principle that drive your organization toward success.

    • Mission & Vision
    • Business Goals & Success Criteria
    • Operating Model & Work Practices
    • Governance Scope
    • Principles
    SELECT AND REFINE YOUR MODEL

    Use Info-Tech's IT Governance Models to identify a base model similar to the way you are organized. Confirm your current and future placement in governance execution.

    IDENTIFY MODEL UPDATE TRIGGERS

    Adjust the model based on industry needs, your principles, regulatory requirements, and future direction.

    • Principles
      Select principles that allow the organization to be adaptive while still ensuring the governance continues to stay on course with pursuing its guiding star.
    • Responsibilities
      Decide on the governance responsibilities related to Oversight Level, Strategic Alignment, Value Delivery, Risk Optimization, Resource Optimization, and Performance Management.
    • Structure
      Determine at which structured level governance is appropriate: Enterprise, Strategic, Tactical, or Operational.
    • Processes
      Establish processes that will enable governance to occur such as: Embed the processes required for successful governance.
    • Membership
      Identify the Responsibility & Accountability of those who should be involved in governance processes, policies, guidelines, and responsibilities.
    • Policies
      Confirm any governing policies that need to be adhered to and considered to manage risk.
    DETERMINE AUTOMATION OPTIONS AND DECISION RULES

    Identify where to embed or automate decision making and compliance and what is required to do so effectively.

    STAGES OF GOVERNANCE

      Traditional (People- and document-centric)
    1. AD HOC GOVERNANCE
      Governance that is not well defined or understood within the organization. It occurs out of necessity but often not by the right people or bodies.
    2. CONTROLLED GOVERNANCE
      Governance focused on compliance and hierarchy-based, authority-driven control of decisions. Levels of Authority are defined and often driven by regulatory requirements.
    3. Adaptive (Data Centric)
    4. AGILE GOVERNANCE
      Governance that is flexible to support different needs and quick responses in the organization. Driven by principles and delegated throughout the company.
    5. AUTOMATED GOVERNANCE
      Governance that is entrenched and automated into the organizational processes and product/service design. Empowered and fully delegated governance to maintain fit and drive organizational success and survival.

    KEY INSIGHT

    Governance must actively adapt to changes in your organization, environment, and practices or it will drive you to failure.

    Developing governance principles

    Governance principles support the move from controlled to automated governance by providing guardrails that guide your decisions. They provide the ethical boundaries and cultural perspectives that contextualize your decisions and keep you in line with organizational values. Determining principles are global in nature.

    CONTROLLED CHANGE ACTIONS AND RATIONALE AUTOMATED
    Disentangle governance and management Move from governance focused on evaluating, directing, and monitoring strategic decisions around information and technology toward defining and automating rules and principles for decision making into processes and practices, empowering the organization and driving adaptiveness. Delegate and empower
    Govern toward value Move from identifying the organization’s mission, goals, and key drivers toward orienting IT to align with those value outcomes and embedding value outcomes into design and delivery practices. Deliver to defined outcomes
    Make risk-informed decisions Move from governance bodies using risk information to manually make informed decisions based on their defined risk tolerance toward having risk information and attestation baked into decision making across all aspects and layers of the IT organization – from design to sustainment. Embed risk decision making into processes and practices
    Measure to drive improvement Move from static lagging metrics that validate that the work being done is meeting the organization’s needs and guide future decision making toward automated governance with more transparency driven by data-based decision making and real-time data insights. Trust through real-time reporting
    Enforce standards and behavior Move from enforcing standards and behavior and managing exceptions to ensure that there are consistent outcomes and quality toward automating standards and behavioral policies and embedding adherence and changes in behavior into the organization’s natural way of working. Automate standards through automated decision rules, verification, and validation

    Find your guiding star

    MISSION AND VISION –› GOALS AND OBJECTIVES –› GUIDING PRINCIPLES –›

    VALUE

    Why your organization exists and what value it aims to provide. The purpose you build a strategy to achieve. What your organization needs be successful at to fulfill its mission. Key propositions and guardrails that define and guide expected organizational behavior and beliefs.

    Your mission and vision define your goals and objectives. These are reinforced by your guiding principles, including ethical considerations, your culture, and expected behaviors. They provide the boundaries and guardrails for enabling adaptive governance, ensuring you continue to move in the right direction for organizational success.

    To paraphrase Lewis Carroll, “If you don't know where you want to get to, it doesn't much matter which way you go.” Once you know what matters, where value resides, and which considerations are necessary to make decisions, you have consistent directional alignment that allows you to delegate empowered governance throughout the organization, taking you to the places you want to go.

    Understand governance versus management

    Don’t blur the lines between governance and management; each has a unique role to play. Confusing them results in wasted time and confusion around ownership.

    Governance

    I&T governance defines WHAT should be done and sets direction through prioritization and decision making, monitoring overall IT performance.

    Governance aligns with the mission and vision of the organization to guide IT.

    A cycle of processes split into two halves, 'Governance Processes' and 'Management Processes'. Beginning on the Management side, the processes are 'Plan', 'Build', 'Run', 'Monitor', then to the Governance side, 'Evaluate', 'Direct', 'Monitor', and back to the beginning.

    Management

    Management focuses on HOW to do things to achieve the WHAT. It is responsible for executing on, operating, and monitoring activities as determined by I&T governance.

    Management makes decisions for implementation based on governance direction.

    Data is critical to automating governance

    Documents and subjective/non-transparent decisions do not create sufficient structure to allow for the true automation of governance. Data related to decisions and aggregated risk allow you to define decision logic and rules and algorithmically embed them into your organization.

    People- and Document-Centric

    Governance drives activities through specific actors (individuals/committees) and unstructured data in processes and documents that are manually executed, assessed, and revised. There are often constraints caused by gaps or lack of adequate and integrated information in support of good decisions.

    Data-Centric

    Governance actors provide principles, parameters, and decision logic that enable the creation of code, rulesets, and algorithms that leverage organizational data. Attestation is automatic – validated and managed within the process, product, or service.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    Define your context and build your model

    ESTABLISH YOUR GUIDING PRINCIPLES

    Define and establish the guiding principle that drive your organization toward success.

    • Mission & Vision
    • Business Goals & Success Criteria
    • Operating Model & Work Practices
    • Governance Scope
    • Principles
    SELECT AND REFINE YOUR MODEL

    Use Info-Tech's IT Governance Models to identify a base model similar to the way you are organized. Confirm your current and future placement in governance execution.

    MODEL UPDATE TRIGGERS

    Adjust the model based on industry needs, your principles, regulatory requirements, and future direction.

    • Principles
      Select principles that allow the organization to be adaptive while still ensuring the governance continues to stay on course with pursuing its guiding star.
    • Responsibilities
      Decide on the governance responsibilities related to Oversight Level, Strategic Alignment, Value Delivery, Risk Optimization, Resource Optimization, and Performance Management.
    • Structure
      Determine at which structured level governance is appropriate: Enterprise, Strategic, Tactical, or Operational.
    • Processes
      Establish processes that will enable governance to occur such as: Embed the processes required for successful governance.
    • Membership
      Identify the Responsibility & Accountability of those who should be involved in governance processes, policies, guidelines, and responsibilities.
    • Policies
      Confirm any governing policies that need to be adhered to and considered to manage risk.
    AUTOMATION OPTIONS AND DECISION RULES

    Identify where to embed or automate decision making and compliance and what is required to do so effectively.

    The Info-Tech Difference

    Define your context and build your model

    1. Quickly identify the organizational needs driving governance and your guiding star.
    2. Select and refine a base governance model based on our templates.
    3. Define and document the key changes in your organization that will trigger a need to update or revise your governance.
    4. Determine where you might be able to automate aspects of your governance.
    5. Design your decision rules where appropriate to support automated and adaptive governance.

    How to use this research

    Where are you in your governance optimization journey?

    MY GOVERNANCE IS AD HOC AND WE’RE STARTING FROM SCRATCH I NEED TO BUILD A NEW GOVERNANCE STRUCTURE OUR GOVERNANCE APPROACH IS INEFFECTIVE AND NEEDS IMPROVEMENT I NEED TO LOOK AT OPTIONS FOR AUTOMATING GOVERNANCE PRACTICES
    Step 1.1: Define Your Governance Context Step 1.2: Structure Your IT Governance Phase 2: Select and Refine Your Model Phase 3: Embed and Automate

    IT governance is about ensuring that the investment decisions made around information and technology drive the optimal organizational value, not about governing the IT department.

    In this section we will clarify your organizational context for governance and define your guiding star to orient your governance design and inform your structure.

    There is no need to start from scratch! Start with Info-Tech’s best-practice IT governance models and customize them based on your organizational context.

    The research in this section will help you to select the right base model to work from and provide guidance on how to refine it.

    Governance practices eventually stop being a good fit for a changing organization, and things that worked before become bottlenecks.

    Governing roles and committees don’t adjust well, don’t have consistent practices, and lack the right information to make good decisions.

    The research in this section will help you improve and realign your governance practices.

    Once your governance is controlled and optimized you are ready to investigate opportunities to automate.

    This phase of the blueprint will help you determine where it’s feasible to automate and embed governance, understand key governance automation practices, and develop governing business rules to move your journey forward.

    Related Research:

    If you are looking for details on specific associated practices, please see our related research:

    1. I need to establish data governance.
    2. I need to manage my project portfolio, from intake to confirmation of value.
    3. I need better risk information to support decision making.
    4. I need to ensure I am getting the expected outcomes and benefits from IT spend.
    5. I need to prioritize my product backlog or service portfolio.

    Info-Tech’s methodology for building and embedding adaptive governance

    1. Identify Your Governance Needs 2. Select and Refine Your Governance Model 3. Embed and Automate
    Phase Steps
    1. Confirm Mission, Vision, and Goals
    2. Define Scope and Principles
    3. Adjust for Culture and Finalize Context
    1. Select and Refine Your Governance Model
    2. Identify and Document Your Governance Triggers
    3. Build Your Implementation Plan
    1. Identify Decisions to Embed and Automate
    2. Plan Validation and Verification
    3. Update Implementation Plan
    Phase Outcomes
    • Governance context, guiding star, and principles
    • Completed governance model with associated decisions and policies
    • Implementation plan
    • List of automation options
    • Decision logic, rules, and rulesets
    • Validation and verification approach
    • Finalized implementation plan

    Insight summary

    Value

    To remain valuable, I&T governance must actively adapt to changes in your organization, environment, and practices, or it will drive you to failure instead of success.

    Focus

    I&T governance does not focus on the IT department. Rather, its intent is to ensure your organization makes sound decisions around investment in and use of information and technology.

    Maturity

    Your governance approach progresses in stages from ad hoc to automated as your organization matures. Your stage depends on your organizational needs and ways of working.

    Good governance

    Good governance does not equate to control and does not stifle innovation.

    Automation

    Automating governance must be done in stages, based on your capabilities, level of maturity, and amount of usable data.

    Strategy

    Establish the least amount of governance required to allow you to achieve your goals.

    Guiding star

    If you don’t establish a guiding star to align the different stakeholders in your organization, governance practices will create conflict and confusion.

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    Key Deliverable:
    Governance Framework Model

    The governance framework model provides the design of your new governance model and the organizational context to retain stakeholder alignment and organizational satisfaction with governance.

    The model includes the structures, practices, and responsibilities to drive effective governance in your organization.

    Sample of the key blueprint deliverable 'Governance Framework Model'.

    Governance Implementation Plan

    This roadmap lays out the changes required to implement the governance model, the cultural items that need to be addressed, and anticipated timing.

    Sample of the blueprint deliverable 'Governance Implementation Plan'.

    Governance Committee Charters

    Develop a detail governance charter or term of reference for each governing body. Outline the mandate, responsibilities, membership, process, and associated policies for each.

    Sample of the blueprint deliverable 'Governance Committee Charters'.

    Blueprint benefits

    IT Benefits

    • Stronger, traceable alignment of IT decisions and initiatives to business needs.
    • Improved ability for IT to meet the changing demands and velocity of the business.
    • Better support and enablement of innovation – removing constraints and barriers.
    • Optimized governance that supports and enables modern work practices.
    • Increased value generation from IT initiatives and optimal use of IT resources.
    • Designed adaptability to ensure you remain in alignment as your business and IT environments change.

    Business Benefits

    • Clear transparent focus of IT initiatives on generating strategic business value.
    • Improved ability to measure the value and contribution of IT to business goals.
    • Alignment and integration of business/IT strategy.
    • Optimized development and use of IT capabilities to meet business needs.
    • Improved integration with corporate/enterprise governance.

    Executive Brief Case Study

    INDUSTRY Manufacturing
    SOURCE Info-Tech analyst experience

    Improving the governance approach and delegating decision making to support a change in business operation

    Challenge

    The large, multi-national organization has locations across the world but has two primary headquarters, in Europe and the United States.

    Market shifts drove an organizational shift in strategy, leading to a change in operating models, a product focus, and new work approaches across the organization.

    Much of the implementation and execution was done in isolation, and effectiveness was slowed by poor integration and conflicting activities that worked against each other.

    The product owner role was not well defined.

    Solution

    After reviewing the organization’s challenges and governance approach, we redefined and realigned its organizational and regional goals and identified outcomes that needed to be driven into their strategies.

    We also reviewed their span of control and integration requirements and properly defined decisions that could be made regionally versus globally, so that decisions could be made to support new work practices.

    We defined the product and service owner roles and the decisions each needed to make.

    Results

    We saw an improvement in the alignment of organizational activities and the right people and bodies making decisions.

    Work and practices were aimed at the same key outcomes and alignment between teams toward organizational goal improved.

    Within one year, the success rate of the organization’s initiatives increased by 22%, and the percentage of product-related decisions made by product owners increased by 50%.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    Guided Implementation

    Workshop

    Consulting

    "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful." "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track." "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place." "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Guided Implementation

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    A typical GI is between 5 and 8 calls over the course of 2 to 3 months.

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

      Phase 1: Identify Your Governance Needs

    • Call #1: Confirm your organization’s mission and vision and review your strategy and goals.
    • Call #2: Identify considerations and governance needs. Develop your guiding star and governing principles.
    • Phase 2: Select and Refine Your Model

    • Call #3: Select your base model and optimize it to meet your governance needs.
    • Call #4: Define your adjustment triggers and develop your implementation plan.
    • Phase 3: Embed and Automate

    • Call #5: Identify decisions and standards you can automate and where to embed them.
    • Call #6: Confirm levels of authority and data requirements. Establish your approach and update the implementation plan.

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com1-888-670-8889

    Session 1 Session 2 Session 3 Session 4 Session 5
    Activities
    Develop Your Guiding Star

    1.1 Confirm mission, vision, and goals

    1.2 Define scope and principles

    1.3 Adjust for culture and finalize context

    Define the Governance Model

    2.1 Select and refine governance model

    2.2 Confirm and adjust the structure

    2.3 Review and adapt governance responsibilities and activities

    2.4 Validate governance mandates and membership

    Build Governance Process and Policy

    3.1 Update your governance process

    3.2 Align policies to mandate

    3.3 Adjust and confirm your governance model

    3.4 Identify and document your update triggers

    3.5 Embed triggers into review cycle

    Embed and Automate Governance

    4.1 Identify decisions and standards to automate

    4.2 Plan verification and validation approach

    4.3 Build implementation plan

    4.4 Develop communication strategy and messaging

    Next Steps and Wrap-Up

    5.1 Complete in-progress outputs from previous four sessions

    5.2 Set up review time for workshop outputs and to discuss next steps

    Outcomes
    1. Governance context and goals
    2. Governance principles
    1. IT governance model and adjustment triggers
    2. IT governance structure, responsibilities, membership, and cadence
    3. Governance committee charters
    1. IT governance process and information flow
    2. IT governance policies
    3. Finalized governance model
    1. Selected automation options, decision logic, and business rules
    2. Implementation and communication plan
    1. Governance context and principles
    2. Finalized governance model and charters
    3. Finalized implementation plan

    Make Your IT Governance Adaptable

    Phase 1

    Identify your Governance Needs

    Phase 1

    • 1.1 Define Your Guiding Star
    • 1.2 Define Scope and Principles
    • 1.3 Adjust for Culture and Finalize Context

    Phase 2

    • 2.1 Choose and Adapt Your Model
    • 2.2. Identify and Document Your Governance Triggers
    • 2.3 Build Your Implementation Approach

    Phase 3

    • 3.1 Identify Decisions to Embed and Automate
    • 3.2 Plan Validation and Verification
    • 3.3 Update Implementation Plan

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    Identify the organization’s goals, mission, and vision that will guide governance.

    Define the scope of your governance model and the principles that will guide how it works.

    Account for organizational attitudes, behaviors, and culture related to governance and finalize your context.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Governance leads

    Step 1.1

    Define Your Guiding Star

    Activities
    • 1.1.1 Document and interpret your strategy, mission, and vision
    • 1.1.2 Document and interpret the business and IT goals and outcomes
    • 1.1.3 Identify your operating model and work processes

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Review your business and IT strategy, mission, and vision to ensure understanding of organizational direction.

    Identify the business and IT goals that governance needs to align.

    Confirm your operating model and any work practices that need to be accounted for in your model.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Governance leads

    Outcomes of this step

    Identified guiding star outcomes to align governance outcomes with

    Defined operating model type and work style that impact governance design

    Identify Your Governance Needs

    Step 1.1 – Define your Guiding Star Step 1.2 – Define Scope and Principles Step 1.3 – Adjust for Culture and Finalize Context

    Govern by intent

    Find the balance for your designed governance approach

    Organic governance occurs during the formation of an organization and shifts with challenges, but it is rarely transparent and understood. It changes your culture in uncontrolled ways. Intentional governance is triggered by changes in organizational needs, working approaches, goals, and structures. It is deliberate and changes your culture to enable success.
    Stock photo of a weight scale.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your approach to governance needs to be designed, even if your execution of governance is adaptable and delegated.

    What is your guiding star?

    Your guiding star is a combination of your organization’s mission, vision, and strategy and the goals that have been defined to meet them.

    It provides you with a consistent focal point around which I&T-related activities and projects orbit, like planets around a star.

    It generates the gravity that governance uses to keep things from straying too far away from the goal of achieving relevant value.

    1. Mission & Vision
    2. Business Goals & Success Criteria
    3. Operating Model & Work Practices
    4. Governance Scope
    5. Principles

    1.1.1 Document and interpret your strategy, mission, and vision

    30 minutes

    Input: Business strategy, IT strategy, Mission and vision statements

    Output: Updated Governance Workbook, Documented strategic outcomes and organizational aims that governance needs to achieve

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts, Governance Workbook

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. Gather your available business, digital, and IT strategy, mission, and vision information and document everything in your Governance Workbook. It’s ok if you don’t have all of it.
    2. Review and your mission and vision as a group. Discuss and document key points, including:
      • Which activities do you perform as an organization that embody your vision?
      • What key decisions and behaviors are required to ensure that your mission and vision are achievable?
      • What do you require from leadership to enable you to govern effectively?
      • What are the implications of the mission and vision on how the organization needs to work? What are the implications on decisions around opportunities and risks?

    Download the Governance Workbook

    1.1.2 Document and interpret the business and IT goals and outcomes

    60 minutes

    Input: Business strategy, Business and IT goals and related initiatives

    Output: Required success outcomes for goals, Links between IT and business goals that governance needs to align

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. Document the business and IT goals that have been created to achieve the mission and vision.
    2. Discuss if there are any gaps between the goals and the mission and vision. Ask yourself – if we accomplish these goals will we have successfully achieved the mission?
    3. For each goal, define what successful achievement of the goal looks like. Starting with one goal or objective, ask:
      • How would I know I am on the right path and how will I know I have gotten there?
      • How would I know if I am not on the right path and what does a bad result look like?
    4. Document your success criteria.
    5. Brainstorm some examples of decisions that support or constrain the achievement of your goals.
    6. Repeat this exercise for your remaining goals.
    7. As a group, map IT goals to business goals.

    What is your operating model and why is it important?

    An IT operating model is a visual representation of the way your IT organization needs to be designed and the capabilities it requires to deliver on the business mission, strategic objectives, and technological ambitions.

    The model is critical in the optimization and alignment of the IT organization’s structure in order to deliver the capabilities required to achieve business goals. It is a key determinant of how governance needs to be designed and where it is implemented.

    Little visualizations of different operating models: 'Centralized', 'Decentralized', and 'Hybrid'.

    1.1.3 Identify your operating model and work practices

    60 minutes

    Input: Organizational structure, Operating model (if available)

    Output: Confirmed operating approach, Defined work practices

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. Identify the way your organization functions:
      • How do we currently operate? Are we centralized, decentralized or a hybrid? Are we focused on delivering products and services? Do we provide service ourselves or do we use vendors for delivery?
      • Can we achieve our mission, goals, and strategies, if we continue to operate this way? What would we have to change in how we operate to be successful in the future?
    2. Identify your governance needs. Do we need to be more structured or more flexible to support our future ways of working?
      • If you operate in a more traditional way, consider whether you are implementing or moving toward more modern practices (e.g. Agile, DevOps, enterprise service management). Do you need to make more frequent but lower-risk decisions?
      • Is your organization ready to delegate governance culturally and in terms of business understanding? Is there enough available information to support adaptive decisions and actions?
    3. Document your operating style, expected changes in work style, and cultural readiness. You will need to consider the implications on design.

    Step 1.2

    Define Scope and Principles

    Activities
    • 1.2.1 Determine the proper scope for your governance
    • 1.2.2 Confirm your determining governing principles
    • 1.2.3 Develop your specific governing principles

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Identify what is included and excluded within the scope of your governance.

    Develop the determining and specific principles that provide guardrails for governance activities and decisions.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Governance leads

    Outcomes of this step

    Documented governance scope and principles to apply

    Identify Your Governance Needs

    Step 1.1 – Define your Guiding Star Step 1.2 – Define Scope and Principles Step 1.3 – Adjust for Culture and Finalize Context

    Define the context for governance

    Based on the goals and principles you defined and the operating model you selected, confirm where oversight will be necessary and at what level. Focus on the necessity to expedite and clear barriers to the achievement of goals and on the ownership of risks and compliance. Some key considerations:

    • Where in the organization will you need to decide on work that needs to be done?
    • What type of work will you need to do?
    • In what areas could there be conflicts in prioritization/resource allocation to address?
    • Who is accountable for risks to the organization and its objectives?
    • Where are your regional or business-unit-specific concerns that require focused local attention?
    • Are we using more agile, rapid delivery methods to produce work?

    Understand your governance scope

    Your governance scope helps you define the boundaries of what your governance model and practices will cover. This includes key characteristics of your organization that impact what governance needs to address.

    Sample Considerations

    • Organizational Span
      • The geographical area the organization operates within. Regional laws and requirements will affect governance delegation and standards/policy development.
    • Level of Regulation
      • Higher levels of regulation create more standards and controls for risk and compliance, impacting how authority can be delegated or automated.
    • Sourcing Model
      • Changing technology sourcing introduces additional vendor governance requirements and may impact compliance and audit.
    • Risk Posture
      • The appetite for risk organizationally, and in pockets, impacts the level of uncertainty you are willing to work within and impact decision-making authority positioning.
    • Size
      • The size of your organization impacts the approach to governance, practice implementation, and delegation of authority.
    • What Is Working Today?
      • Which elements of your current governance approach should be retained, and what are the biggest pain points that need to be addressed?
    (Source: COBIT 2019)

    1.2.1 Determine the proper scope for your governance

    60 minutes

    Input: Context information from Activity 1.1, Scoping areas

    Output: Defined scope and span of control

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. Determine the scope/span of control required for your governance by:
      • Reviewing your key IT capabilities. Identify the ones where the responsibilities and decisions require oversight to ensure they meet the needs of the organization.
      • Identify what works well or poorly in your current governance approach.
      • Discuss and document the level and type of knowledge and business understanding required.
      • Identify and document any regulations, standards, or laws that apply to your organization/industry and how broadly they have to be applied.
      • Identify the organization’s risk appetite, where known, and areas where acceptable thresholds of risk have been defined. Where are key risk and opportunity decisions made? Who owns risk in your organization?
      • Identify and document the perceived role of the IT group in your organization (e.g. support, innovator, partner) and sourcing model (e.g. insource, outsource).
      • Is there sufficient information and data available in your organization to support effective decision making?

    How should your governance be structured?

    Organizations often have too many governance bodies, creating friction without value. Where that isn’t the case, the bodies are often inefficient, with gaps or overlaps in accountability and authority. Structure your governance to optimize its effectiveness, designing with the intent to have the fewest number of governing bodies to be effective, but no less than is necessary.

    Start with your operating model.

    • Understand what’s different about your governance based on whether your organization in centralized, distributed, or a different model (e.g. hybrid, product).
    • Identify and include governance structures that are mandatory due to regulation or industry.
    • Based on your context, identify how many of your governance activities should be performed together.

    Determine whether your governance should be controlled or adaptive.

    • Do you have the capability to distribute governance and is your organization empowered enough culturally?
    • Do you have sufficient standards and data to leverage? Do you have the tools and capabilities?
    • Identify governance structures that are required due to regulation or industry.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your approach to governance needs to be designed and structured, even if your execution of governance is adaptable and delegated.

    Identify and Refine your Principles

    Confirm your defining principles based on your selection of controlled or adaptive governance. Create specific principles to clarify boundaries or provide specific guidance for teams within the organization.

    Controlled Adaptive
    Disentangle governance and management Delegate and empower
    Govern toward value Deliver to defined outcomes
    Make risk-informed decisions Embed risk into decision making
    Measure to drive improvement Trust though real-time reporting
    Enforce standards and behavior Automate decision making though established standards

    Determining Principle: Delegate and empower.

    Specific Principle: Decisions should be made at the lowest reasonable level of the organization with clarity.

    Rationale: To govern effectively with the velocity required to address business needs, governance needs to be executed deeper into the organization and organizational goals need to be clearly understood everywhere.

    Implication: Decision making needs to be delegated throughout the organization, so information and data requirements need to be identified, decision-making approach and principles need to be shared, and authority needs to be delegated clearly.

    1.2.2 Confirm your determining governance principles

    30-45 minutes

    Input: Governance Framework Model– Governance Principles

    Output: Governance workbook - Finalized list of determining principles

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts, Governance Workbook

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. Review the IT governance principles in your Governance Workbook.
    2. Within your IT senior leadership team (or IT governance working group) assign one or two principles to teams of two to three participants. Have each team identify what this would mean for your organization. Answering the questions:
      • In what ways do our current governance practices support this?
      • What are some examples of changes that would need to be made to make this a reality?
      • How would applying this principle improve your governance?
    3. Have each team present their results and compile the findings and implications in the Governance Workbook to use for future communication of the change.

    Specific governing principles

    Specific governing principles are refined principles derived from a determining principle, when additional specificity and detail is necessary. It allows you to define an approach for specific behaviors and activities. Multiple specific principles may underpin the determining one.

    A visualization of a staircase with stairs labelled, bottom to top, 'Determining Principle', 'Rationale', 'Implications', 'Specific Principles'.

    Specific Principles – Related principles that may be required to ensure the implications of the determining principal are addressed within the organization. They may be specific to individual areas and may be addressed in policies.

    Implications – The implications of this principle on the organization, specific to how and where governance is executed and the level of information and authority that would be necessary.

    Rationale – The reason(s) driving the determining principle.

    Determining Principle – A core overarching principle – a defining aspect of your governance model.

    1.2.3 Develop your specific governing principles

    30 minutes

    Input: Updated determining principles

    Output: List of specific principles linked to determining principles

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts, Governance Workbook

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. Confirm the determining principles for your governance model based on your previous discussions.
    2. Identify where to apply the principles. This is based on:
      1. Your governance scope (how much is within your span of control)
      2. The amount of data you have available
      3. Your cultural readiness for delegation
    3. Create specific principles to support the determining principles:
      1. Document the rationale driving the determining principles.
      2. Identify the implications.
      3. Create specific principles that will support the success in achieving the goals of each determining principle.
    4. Document all information on the “Governance guiding star” slide in the Governance Workbook.

    Download the Governance Workbook

    Step 1.3

    Adjust for Culture and Finalize Context

    Activities
    • 1.3.1 Identify and address the impact of attitude, behavior, and culture
    • 1.3.2 Finalize your context

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Identify your organizational attitude, behavior, and culture related to governance.

    Identify positives that can be leveraged and develop means to address negatives.

    Finalize the context that your model will leverage and align to.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Governance leads

    Outcomes of this step

    Downloaded tool ready to select the base governance model for your organization

    Identify Your Governance Needs

    Step 1.1 – Define your Guiding Star Step 1.2 – Define Scope and Principles Step 1.3 – Adjust for Culture and Finalize Context

    Understanding attitude, behavior, and culture

    A

    ttitude

    What people think and feel. It can be seen in their demeanor and how they react to change initiatives, colleagues, and users. This manifests in the belief that governance is a constraint that needs to be avoided or ignored – often with unintended consequences.

    A stock photo of a lightbulb over a person's head and a blackboard behind them reading 'New Mindset - data-verified= New Results'.">

    Any form of organizational change involves adjusting people’s attitudes to create buy-in and commitment.

    You need to identify and address attitudes that can lead to negative behaviors and actions or that are counter-productive.

    Understanding attitude, behavior, and culture

    B

    ehavior

    What people do. This is influenced by attitude and the culture of the organization. In governance, this manifests as people’s willingness to be governed, who pushes back, and who tries to bypass it.

    A stock photo of someone walking up a set of stairs into the distant sunlight.

    To implement change within IT, especially at a tactical and strategic level, organizational behavior needs to change.

    This is relevant because people gravitate toward stability and will resist change in an active or passive way unless you can sell the need, value, and benefit of changing their behavior and way of working.

    Understanding attitude, behavior, and culture

    C

    ulture

    The accepted and understood ways of working in an organization. The values and standards that people find normal and what would be tacitly identified to new resources. In governance terms, this is how decisions are really made and where responsibility really exists rather than what is identified formally.

    A stock photo of a compass pointing to 'VALUES'.

    The impact of the organizational or corporate “attitude” on employee behavior and attitude is often not fully understood.

    Culture is an invisible element, which makes it difficult to identify, but it has a strong impact and must be addressed to successfully embed governance models. In the case of automating governance, cultural readiness for automation is a critical success factor.

    1.3.1 Identify and address the impact of attitude, behavior, and culture

    45 minutes

    Input: Senior leadership knowledge

    Output: Updated Governance Workbook

    Materials: Governance Workbook

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. Break into three groups. Each group will discuss and document the positive and negative aspects of one of attitude, behavior, or culture related to governance in your organization.
    2. Each group will present and explain their list to the group.
    3. Add any additional suggestions in each area that are identified by the other groups.
    4. Identify the positive elements of attitude, behavior, and culture that would help with changing or implementing your updated governance model.
    5. Identify any challenges that will need to be addressed for the change to be successful.
    6. As a group, brainstorm some mitigations or solutions to these challenges. Document them in the Governance Workbook to be incorporated into the implementation plan.

    Download the Governance Workbook

    Attitude, behavior, and culture

    Evaluate the organization across the three contexts. The positive items represent opportunities for leveraging these characteristics with the implementation of the governance model, while the negative items must be considered and/or mitigated.

    Attitude Behavior Culture
    Positive
    Negative
    Mitigation

    1.3.2 Finalize your governance context

    30 minutes

    Input: Documented governance principles and scope from previous exercises

    Output: Finalized governance context in the Governance Workbook

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts, Governance Workbook

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. Use the information that has been gathered throughout this section to update and finalize your IT governance context.
    2. Document it in your Governance Workbook.

    Download the Governance Workbook

    Make Your IT Governance Adaptable

    Phase 2

    Select and Refine Your Governance Model

    Phase 1

    • 1.1 Define Your Guiding Star
    • 1.2 Define Scope and Principles
    • 1.3 Adjust for Culture and Finalize Context

    Phase 2

    • 2.1 Choose and Adapt Your Model
    • 2.2. Identify and Document Your Governance Triggers
    • 2.3 Build Your Implementation Approach

    Phase 3

    • 3.1 Identify Decisions to Embed and Automate
    • 3.2 Plan Validation and Verification
    • 3.3 Update Implementation Plan

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    Select a base governance model and refine it to suit your organization.

    Identify scenarios and changes that will trigger updates to your governance model.

    Build your implementation plan.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Governance resources

    Step 2.1

    Choose and Adapt Your Model

    Activities
    • 2.1.1 Choose your base governance model
    • 2.1.2 Confirm and adjust the structure of your model
    • 2.1.3 Define the governance responsibilities
    • 2.1.4 Validate the governance mandates and membership
    • 2.1.5 Update your committee processes
    • 2.1.6 Adjust your associated policies
    • 2.1.7 Adjust and confirm your governance model

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Review and selecting your base governance model.

    Adjust the structure, responsibilities, policies, mandate, and membership to best support your organization.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Governance leads

    Outcomes of this step

    Downloaded tool ready to select the base governance model for your organization

    Select and Refine Your Governance Model

    Step 2.1 – Choose and Adapt Your Model Step 2.2 – Identify and Document Your Governance Triggers Step 2.3 – Build Implementation Approach

    Your governance framework has six key components

    GOVERNANCE FRAMEWORK

    • GUIDELINES
      The key behavioral factors that ground your governance framework
    • MEMBERSHIP
      Formalization of who has authority and accountability to make specific governance decisions
    • RESPONSIBILITIES
      The definition of which decisions and outcomes your governance structure and each governance body is accountable for
    • STRUCTURE
      Which governance bodies and roles are in place to articulate where decisions are made in the organization
    • PROCESS
      Identification of the how your governance will be executed, how decisions are made, and the inputs, outputs, and connections to related processes
    • POLICY
      Set of principles established to address risk and drive expected and required behavior

    4 layers of governance bodies

    There are traditionally 4 layers of governance in an enterprise, and organizations have governing bodies or individuals at each level

    RESPONSIBILITIES AND TYPICAL MEMBERSHIP
    ENTERPRISE Defines organizational goals. Directs or regulates the performance and behavior of the enterprise, ensuring it has the structure and capabilities to achieve its goals.

    Membership: Business executives, Board

    STRATEGIC Ensures IT initiatives, products, and services are aligned to organizational goals and strategy and provide expected value. Ensure adherence to key principles.

    Membership: Business executives, CIO, CDO

    TACTICAL Ensures key activities and planning are in place to execute strategic initiatives.

    Membership: Authorized division leadership, related IT leadership

    OPERATIONAL Ensures effective execution of day-to-day functions and practices to meet their key objectives.

    Membership: Service/product owners, process owners, architecture leadership, directors, managers

    2.1.1 Choose your base governance model

    30 minutes

    Input: Governance models templates

    Output: Selected governance model

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. Download Info-Tech’s base governance models (Controlled Governance Models Template and IT Governance Program Overview) and review them to find a template that most closely matches your context from Phase 1. You can start with a centralized, decentralized, or product/service hybrid IT organization. Remove unneeded models.
    2. If you do not have documented governance today, start with a controlled model as your foundation. Continue working through this phase if you have a documented governance framework you wish to optimize using our best practices or move to Phase 3 if you are looking to automate or embed your governance activities.

    Controlled Governance Models Template

    Adaptive Governance Models Template

    2.1.2 Confirm and adjust the structure of your model

    30-45 minutes

    Input: Selected base governance model, Governance context/scope

    Output: Updated governance bodies and relationships

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. Validate your selected governance body structural model.
      • Are there any governing bodies you must maintain that should replace the ones listed? In part or in full?
      • Are there any missing bodies? Look at alternative committees for examples.
      • Document the adjustments.
    2. Are there any governing bodies that are not required?
      • Based on your size and needs, can they be done within one committee?
      • Is the capability or data not in place to perform the work?
      • Document the required changes.

    There are five key areas of governance responsibility

    A cyclical visualization of the five keys areas of governance responsibility, 'Strategic Alignment', 'Value Delivery', 'Risk Management', 'Resource Management', and 'Performance Measurement'.

    STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT
    Ensures that technology investments and portfolios are aligned with the organization’s needs.

    VALUE DELIVERY
    Reviews the outcomes of technology investments and portfolios to ensure benefits realization.

    RISK MANAGEMENT
    Defines and owns the risk thresholds and register to ensure that decisions made are in line with the posture of the organization.

    RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
    Ensures that people, financial knowledge, and technology resources are appropriately allocated across the organization.

    PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT
    Monitors and directs the performance or technology investments to determine corrective actions and understand successes.

    2.1.3 Define the governance responsibilities

    Ensure you have the right responsibilities in the right place

    45-60 minutes

    Input: Selected governance base model, Governance context

    Output: Updated responsibilities and activities, Updated activities for selected governance bodies, New or removed governing bodies

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. Based on your context and model, review the responsibilities identified for each committee and confirm that they align with the mandate and the stated outcome.
    2. Identify and highlight any responsibilities and activities that would not be involved in informing and enabling the mandate of the committee.
    3. Adjust the wording of confirmed responsibilities and activities to reflect your organizational language.
    4. Review each highlighted “bad fit” activity and move it to a committee whose mandate it would support or remove it if it’s not performed in your organization.
    5. If an additional committee is required, define the mandate and scope, then include any additional responsibilities that might have been a bad fit elsewhere

    2.1.4 Validate the governance mandates and membership

    30 minutes

    Input: Selected governance base model, Updated structure and responsibilities

    Output: Adjusted mandates and refined committee membership

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. Review the mandate and membership slides in your selected governance model.
    2. Adjust the mandate to ensure that it aligns to and conveys:
      1. The outcome that the committee is meant to generate for the organization.
      2. Its scope/span of control.
    3. Discuss the type of information members would require for the committee to be successful in achieving its mandate.
    4. Document the member knowledge requirement in the mandate slide of the model template.

    Determine the right membership for your governance

    One of the biggest benefits of governance committees is the perspective provided by people from various parts of the organization, which helps to ensure technology investments are aligned with strategic goals. However, having too many people – or the wrong people – involved prevents the committee from being effective. Avoid this by following these principles.

    Three principles for selecting committee membership

    1. Determine membership based on responsibilities and required knowledge.
      Organizations often make the mistake of creating committees and selecting members before defining what they will do. This results in poor governance because members don’t have the knowledge required to make decisions. Define the mandate of the committee to determine which members are the right fit.
    2. Ensure members are accountable and authorized to make the decisions.
      Effective governance requires the members to have the authority and accountability to make decisions. This ensures meetings achieve their outcome and produce value, which improves the committee’s chances of survival.
    3. Select leaders who see the big picture.
      Often committee decisions and responsibilities become tangled in the web of organizational politics. Include people, often C-level, whose attendance is critical and who have the requisite knowledge, mindset, and understanding to put business needs ahead of their own.

    2.1.5 Update your committee processes

    20 minutes

    Input: Selected governance base model, Updated structure and responsibilities

    Output: Updated committee processes

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. Review the committee details based on the changes you have made in goals, mandate, and responsibilities.
    2. Identify and document changes required to the committee outputs (outcomes) and adjust the consumer of the outputs to match.
    3. Review the high-level process steps required to get to the modified output. Add required activities or remove unnecessary ones. Review the process flow. Does it make sense? Are there unnecessary steps?
    4. Review and update inputs required for the process steps and update the information/data sources.
    5. Adjust the detailed process steps to reflect the work that needs to be done to support each high-level process step that changed.

    2.1.6 Adjust your associated policies

    20 minutes

    Input: Selected governance base model, Updated structure and responsibilities

    Output: Adjusted mandates and refined committee membership

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. Review the policies associated with the governing bodies in your base model. Identify the policies that apply to your organization, those that are missing, and those that are not necessary.
    2. Confirm the policies that you require.
    3. Make sure the policies and policy purposes (or risks and related behaviors the policy addresses) are matched to the governance committee that has responsibilities in that area. Move policies to the right committee.

    2.1.7 Adjust and confirm your governance model

    1. Confirm the adjustment of governance bodies, structure, and input/output linkages.
    2. Confirm revisions to decisions and responsibilities.
    3. Confirm policy and regulation/standards associations.
    4. Select related governance committee charters from the provided set and revise the charters to reflect the elements defined in your updated model.
    5. Finalize your governance model.

    Samples of slides related to adjusting and confirming governance models in the Governance Workbook.

    Step 2.2

    Identify and Document Your Governance Triggers

    Activities
    • 2.2.1 Identify and document update triggers
    • 2.2.2 Embed triggers into the review cycle

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Identify scenarios that will create a need to review or change your governance model.

    Update your review/update approach to receiving trigger notifications.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Governance leads

    Outcomes of this step

    Downloaded tool ready to select the base governance model for your organization

    Select and Refine Your Governance Model

    Step 2.1 – Choose and Adapt Your Model Step 2.2 – Identify and Document Your Governance Triggers Step 2.3 – Build Implementation Approach

    What are governance triggers

    Governance triggers are organizational or environmental changes within or around an organization that are inflection points that start the review and revision of governance models to maintain their fit with the organization. This is the key to adaptive governance design.

    A target with five arrows sticking out of the bullseye, 'Operating Model', 'Business Strategy', 'Mandate Change', 'Management Practices', and 'Digital Transformation'.

    2.2.1 Identify and document update triggers

    30 minutes

    Input: Governance Workbook

    Output: Updated workbook with defined and documented governance triggers, points of origin, and integration

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. Open the Governance Workbook to the “Triggers” slides.
    2. Review the list of governance triggers. Retain the ones that apply to your organization, remove those you feel are unnecessary, and add any change scenarios you feel should be included.
    3. Identify where you would receive notifications of these changes and the related processes or activities that would generate these notifications, if applicable.
    4. Document any points of integration required between governance processes and the source process. Highlight any where the integration is not currently in place.

    Sample of the 'Triggers' slide in the Governance Workbook.

    2.2.2 Embed triggers into the review cycle

    30 minutes

    Input: Governance model

    Output: Review cycle update

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. Identify which triggers impact the entire governance model and which impact specific committees.
    2. Add an activity for triggered review of the impacted governance model into your governance committee process.

    Step 2.3

    Build Your Implementation Approach

    Activities
    • 2.3.1 Identify and document your implementation plan
    • 2.3.2 Build your roadmap
    • 2.3.3 Build your sunshine diagram

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Transfer changes to the Governance Implementation Plan Template.

    Determine the timing for the implementation phases.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership
    • Governance process owner

    Outcomes of this step

    Implementation plan for adaptive governance framework model

    Select and Refine Your Governance Model
    Step 2.1 – Choose and Adapt Your Model Step 2.2 – Identify and Document Your Governance Triggers Step 2.3 – Build Implementation Approach

    2.3.1 Identify and document your implementation plan

    60 minutes

    Input: Governance model, Guiding principles, Update triggers, Cultural factors and mitigations

    Output: Implementation roadmap

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. As a group, discuss the changes required to implement the governance model, the cultural items that need to be addressed, and the anticipated timing.
    2. Document the implementation activities and consolidate them into groupings/themes based on similarities or shared outcomes.
    3. Name the grouped themes for clarity and identify key dependencies between activities in each area and across themes.
    4. Identify and document your approach (e.g. continuous, phased) and high-level timeline for implementation.
    5. Document the themes and initiatives in the Governance Implementation Plan.

    Download the Governance Implementation Plan

    Illustrate the implementation plan using roadmaps

    Info-Tech recommends two different methods to roadmap the initiatives in your Governance Implementation Plan.

    Gantt Chart
    Sample of a Gantt Chart.

    This type of roadmap depicts themes, related initiatives, the associated goals, and exact start and end dates for each initiative. This diagram is useful for outlining a larger number of activities and initiatives and has an easily digestible and repeatable format.

    Sunshine Diagram
    Sample of a Sunshine Diagram.

    This type of roadmap depicts themes and their associated initiatives. The start and end dates for the initiatives are approximated based on years or phases. This diagram is useful for highlighting key initiatives on one page.

    2.3.2 Build your roadmap

    30 minutes

    Input: Governance themes and initiatives

    Output: roadmap visual

    Materials: Governance Roadmap Workbook, Governance Workbook

    Participants: CIO, IT senior leadership

    1. Open the Governance Implementation Plan and review themes and initiatives.
    2. Open the Governance Roadmap Workbook.
    3. Discuss whether the implementation roadmap should be developed as a Gantt chart, a sunshine diagram, or both.
      For the Gantt chart:
      • Input the roadmap start year and date.
      • Change the months and year in the Gantt chart to reflect the same roadmap start year.
      • Input and populate the planned start and end dates for the list of high-priority initiatives.

    Develop your Gantt chart in the Governance Roadmap Workbook

    2.3.3 Build your sunshine diagram

    30 minutes

    Input: Governance themes and initiatives

    Output: Sunshine diagram visual

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts, Markers, Governance Implementation Plan

    Participants: CIO, IT senior leadership

    1. Review your list of themes and initiatives.
    2. Build a model with “rays” radiating out from a central theme or objective.
    3. Using curved arcs, break the grid into timeline periods or phases.
    4. Complete your sunshine diagram in the Governance Implementation Plan.

    Customize your sunshine diagram in the Governance Implementation Plan

    Make Your IT Governance Adaptable

    Phase 3

    Embed and Automate

    Phase 1

    • 1.1 Define Your Guiding Star
    • 1.2 Define Scope and Principles
    • 1.3 Adjust for Culture and Finalize Context

    Phase 2

    • 2.1 Choose and Adapt Your Model
    • 2.2. Identify and Document Your Governance Triggers
    • 2.3 Build Your Implementation Approach

    Phase 3

    • 3.1 Identify Decisions to Embed and Automate
    • 3.2 Plan Validation and Verification
    • 3.3 Update Implementation Plan

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    Identify which decisions you are ready to automate.

    Identify standards and policies that can be embedded and automated.

    Identify integration points.

    Confirm data requirements to enable success.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • IT senior leadership
    • Governance process owner
    • Product and service owners
    • Policy owners

    Step 3.1

    Identify Decisions to Embed and Automate

    Activities
    • 3.1.1 Review governance decisions and standards and the required level of authority
    • 3.1.2 Build your decision logic
    • 3.1.3 identify constraints and mitigation approaches
    • 3.1.4 Develop decision rules and principles

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Identify your key decisions.

    Develop your decision logic.

    Confirm decisions that could be automated.

    Identify and address constraints.

    Develop decision rules and principles.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT senior leadership

    Outcomes of this step

    Developed decision rules, rulesets, and principles that can be leveraged to automate governance

    Defined integration points

    Embed and Automate

    Step 3.1 – Identify Decisions to Embed and Automate Step 3.2 – Plan Validation and Verification Step 3.3 – Update Implementation Plan

    What is decision automation?

    Decision automation is the codifying of rules that connect the logic of how decisions are made with the data required to make those decisions. This is then embedded and automated into processes and the design of products and services.

    • It is well suited to governance where the same types of decisions are made on a recurring basis, using the same set of data. It requires clean, high-quality data to be effective.
    • Improvements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have allowed the creation of scenarios where a hybrid of rules and learning can improve decision outcomes.

    Key Considerations

    • Data Availability
    • Legality
    • Contingencies
    • Decision Transparency
    • Data Quality
    • Auditability

    How complexity impacts decisions

    Decision complexity impacts the type of rule(s) you create and the amount of data required. It also helps define where or if decisions can be automated.

    1. SIMPLE
      Known and repeatable with consistent and familiar outcomes – structured, causal, and easy to standardize and automate.
    2. COMPLICATED
      Less known and outcomes are not consistently repeatable. Expertise can drive standards and guidelines that can be used to automate decisions.
    3. COMPLEX
      Unknown and new, highly uncertain in terms of outcomes, impact, and data. Requires more exploration and data. Difficult to automate but can be built into the design of products and services.
    4. CHAOTIC
      Unstructured and unknown situation. Requires adaptive and immediate action without active data – requires retained human governance
    5. (Based on Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework)

    Governance Automation Criteria Checklist

    The Governance Automation Criteria Checklist provides a view of key considerations for determining whether a governing activity or decision is a good candidate for automation.

    The criteria identify key qualifiers/disqualifiers to make it easier to identify eligibility.

    Sample of the Governance Automation Criteria Checklist.

    Download the Governance Automation Criteria Checklist

    Governance Automation Worksheet

    Sample of the Governance Automation Worksheet.

    The Governance Automation Worksheet provides a way to document your governance and systematically identify information about the decisions to help determine if automation is possible.

    From there, decision rules, logic, and rulesets can be designed in support of building a structure flow to allow for automation.

    Download the Governance Automation Worksheet

    3.1.1 Review governance decisions and standards and the required level of authority

    30 minutes

    Input: Automation Criteria Checklist, Governance Automation Worksheet, Updated governance model

    Output: Documented decisions and related authority, Selected options for automation, Updated Governance Automation Worksheet

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts, Governance Automation Worksheet

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. Identify the decisions that are made within each committee in your updated governance model and document them in the Governance Automation Worksheet.
    2. Confirm the level of authority required to make each decision.
    3. Review the automation checklist to confirm whether each decision is positioned well for automation.
    4. Select and document the decisions that are the strongest options for automation/embedding and document them in the Governance Automation Worksheet.

    What are decision rules?

    Decision rules provide specific instructions and constraints that must be considered in making decisions and are critical for automating governance.

    They provide the logical path to assess governance inputs to make effective decisions with positive business outputs.

    Inputs would include key information such as known risks, your defined prioritization matrix, portfolio value scoring, and compliance controls.

    Individual rules can be leveraged in different places.

    Some decision rule types are listed here.

    1. Statement Rules
      Natural expression of logical progression, written through logical elements
    2. Decision Tree Rules
      Decision tree with two axes that overlap to generate a decision
    3. Sequential Rules
      A sequence of decisions that move from one step to the next
    4. Expression Rule
      A particular set of rules triggered by a particular rule condition being met
    5. Truth table rules
      Combines many decision factors into one place; produces different outputs

    What are decision rulesets

    Rulesets are created to make complex decisions. Individual rule types are combined to create rulesets that are applied together to generate effective decisions. One rule will provide contextual information required for additional rules to execute in a Rule-Result-Rule-Result-Rule-Decision flow.

    A visualization of two separate rulesets made up of the decision rules on the previous slide. 'Ruleset 1' contains '1) Statement Rules', '2) Decision Tree Rules', and 5) Truth Table Rules'. 'Ruleset 2' contains '3) Sequential Rules' and '4) Expression Rule'.

    3.1.2 Build your decision logic

    30 minutes

    Input: Governance Automation Worksheet

    Output: Documented decision logic to support selected decision types and data requirements

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. For each selected decision, identify the principles that drive the considerations around the decision.
    2. For each decision, develop the decision logic by defining the steps and information inputs involved in making the decision and documenting the flow from beginning to end.
    3. Determine whether this is one specific decision or a combination of different decisions (in sequence or based on decisions).
    4. Name your decision rule.

    Sample of the Governance Automation Worksheet.

    3.1.3 Identify constraints and mitigation approaches

    60 minutes
    1. Document constraints to automation of decisions related to:
      • Availability of decision automation tools
      • Decision authority change requirements
      • Data constraints
      • Knowledge requirements
      • Process adjustment requirements
      • Product/service design levels
    2. Brainstorm and identify approaches to mitigate constraints and score based on likelihood of success.
    3. Identify mitigation owners and initial timeline expectations.
    4. Document the constraints and mitigations in the Governance Workbook on the constraints and mitigations slide.

    Sample of the 'Constraints and mitigations' slide of the 'Governance Workbook'.

    3.1.4 Develop decision rules and principles

    1.5-2 hours

    Input: Governance Automation Worksheet

    Output: Defined decision integration points, Confirmed data availability sets, Decision rules, rulesets, and principles with control indicators

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts, Governance Automation Worksheet

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. Review the decision logic for those decisions that you have confirmed for automation. Identify the processes where the decision should be executed.
    2. Associate each decision with specific process steps or stages or how it would be included in software/product design.
    3. For each selected decision, identify the availability of data required to support the decision logic and the level of complexity and apply governing principles.
    4. Create the decision rules and identify data gaps.
    5. Define the decision flow and create rulesets as needed.
    6. Confirm automation requirements and define control indicators.

    Step 3.2

    Plan Validation and Verification

    Activities
    • 3.2.1 Define verification approach for embedded and automated governance
    • 3.2.2 Define validation approach for embedded and automated governance

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Define how decision outcomes will be measured.

    Determine how the effectiveness of automated governance will be reported.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT senior leadership

    Outcomes of this step

    Tested and verified automation of decisions

    Embed and Automate

    Step 3.1 – Identify Decisions to Embed and Automate Step 3.2 – Plan Validation and Verification Step 3.3 – Update Implementation Plan

    Decision rule relationship through to verification

    1. Rules

    Focus on clear decision logic

    Often represented in simple statement types and supported by data:

    IF – THEN

    IF – AND – THEN

    IF – AND NOT – THEN

    2. Rulesets

    Aggregate rules for more complex decisions

    Integrated flows between different required rules:
    Rule 1:
    (Output 1) – Rule 2
    (Output 2) – Rule 6
    Rule 6: (Output 1) – Rule 7
    3. Rule Attestation

    Verify success of automated decisions

    Attestation of embedded and automated rules with key control indicators embedded within process and products.

    Principles embedded into automated software controls.

    3.2.1 Define verification approach for embedded and automated governance

    60 minutes

    Input: Governance rules and rulesets as defined in the Governance Automation Worksheet, Defined decision outcomes

    Output: A defined measurement of effective decision outcomes, Approach to automate and/or report the effectiveness of automated governance

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    Verify

    1. Confirm expected outcome of rules.
    2. Select a sampling of new required decisions or recently performed decisions related to areas of automation.
    3. Run the decisions through the decision rules or rule groupings that were developed and compare to parallel decisions made using the traditional approach. (These must be segregated activities.)
    4. Review the outcome of the rules and adjust based on the output. Identify areas of adjustment. Confirm that the automation meets your requirements.

    3.2.2 Define validation approach for embedded and automated governance

    60 minutes

    Input: Governance rules and rulesets as defined in the Governance Automation Worksheet, Defined decision outcomes

    Output: Defined assurance and attestation requirements, Key control indicators that can be automated

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    Validate

    1. Develop an approach to measure automated decisions. Align success criteria to current governance KPIs and metrics.
    2. If no such metrics exist, define expected outcome. Define key risk indicators based on the expected points of automation.
    3. Establish quality assurance checkpoints within the delivery lifecycles to adjust for variance.
    4. Create triggers back to rule owners to drive changes and improvements to rules and rule groupings.

    Step 3.3

    Update Implementation Plan

    Activities
    • 3.3.1 Finalize the implementation plan

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Review implications and mitigations to make sure all have been considered.

    Finalize the implementation plan and roadmap.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Senior IT leadership

    Outcomes of this step

    Completed Governance implementation plan and roadmap

    Embed and Automate

    Step 3.1 – Identify Decisions to Embed and Automate Step 3.2 – Plan Validation and Verification Step 3.3 – Update Implementation Plan

    3.3.1 Finalize the implementation plan

    30 minutes

    Input: Governance workbook, Updated governance model, Draft implementation plan and roadmap

    Output: Finalized implementation plan and roadmap

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts, Governance Implementation Plan

    Participants: IT senior leadership

    1. Document automation activities within phases in a governance automation theme in the Governance Implementation Plan.
    2. Review timelines in the implementation plan and where automation fits within the roadmap.
    3. Updated the implementation plan and roadmap.

    Governance Implementation Plan

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Problem Solved

    Through this project we have:

    • Improved your governance model to ensure a better fit for your organization, while creating adaptivity for the future.
    • Ensured your governance operates as an enabler of success with the proper bodies and levels of authority established.
    • Established triggers to ensure your governance model is actively adjusted to maintain its fit.
    • Developed a plan to embed and automate governance.
    • Created decision rules and principles and identified where to embed them within your practices.

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop.

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Additional Support

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop.

    Photo of Valence Howden.

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.

    Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Improve IT Governance to Drive Business Results

    Avoid bureaucracy and achieve alignment with a minimalist approach. Align with your organizational context.

    Establish Data Governance

    Establish data trust and accountability with strong governance.

    Maximize Business Value From IT Through Benefits Realization

    Embed value and alignment confirmation into your governance to ensure you optimize IT value achievement for resource spend.

    Build a Better Product Owner

    Strengthen the product/service owner role in your organization by focusing on core capabilities and proper alignment.

    Research contributors and experts

    Photo of Sidney Hodgson, Senior Director, Industry, Info-Tech Research Group. Sidney Hodgson
    Senior Director, Industry
    Info-Tech Research Group
    • Sidney has over 30 years of experience in IT leadership roles as CIO of three organizations in Canada and the US as well as international consulting experience in the US and Asia.
    • Sid has a breadth of knowledge in IT governance, project management, strategic and operational planning, enterprise architecture, business process re-engineering, IT cost reduction, and IT turnaround management.
    Photo of David Tomljenovic, Principal Research Advisor, Industry, Info-Tech Research Group. David Tomljenovic
    Principal Research Advisor, Industry
    Info-Tech Research Group
    • David brings extensive experience from the Financial Services sector, having worked 25 years on Bay Street. Most recently he was a Corporate Finance and Strategy Advisor for Infiniti Labs (Toronto/Hong Kong), Automotive, and Smart City Accelerator, where he provided financial and mergers & acquisitions advisory services to accelerator participants with a focus on early-stage fundraising activities.

    Research contributors and experts

    Photo of Cole Cioran, Practice Lead, Applications and Agile Development, Info-Tech Research Group. Cole Cioran
    Practice Lead, Applications and Agile Development
    Info-Tech Research Group
    • Over the past 25 years, Cole has developed software; designed data, infrastructure, and software solutions; defined systems and enterprise architectures; delivered enterprise-wide programs; and managed software development, infrastructure, and business systems analysis practices.
    Photo of Crystal Singh, Research Director, Applications – Data and Information Management, Info-Tech Research Group. Crystal Singh
    Research Director, Applications – Data and Information Management
    Info-Tech Research Group
    • Crystal brings a diverse and global perspective to her role, drawing from her professional experiences in various industries and locations. Prior to joining Info-Tech, Crystal led the Enterprise Data Services function at Rogers Communications, one of Canada’s leading telecommunications companies.

    Research contributors and experts

    Photo of Carlene McCubbin, Practice Lead, CIO, Info-Tech Research Group. Carlene McCubbin
    Practice Lead, CIO
    Info-Tech Research Group
    • Carlene covers key topics in organization and leadership and specializes in governance, organizational design, relationship management, and human capital development. She led the development of Info-Tech’s Organization and Leadership practice.
    Photo of Denis Goulet, Senior Workshop Director, Info-Tech Research Group. Denis Goulet
    Senior Workshop Director
    Info-Tech Research Group
    • Denis is a transformational leader and experienced strategist who focuses on helping clients communicate, relate, and adapt for success. Having developed Governance Model and IT strategies in organizations ranging from small to billion-dollar multi-nationals, he firmly believes in a collaborative value-driven approach to work.

    Bibliography

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    “COBIT 5: Enabling Processes.” ISACA, 2012. Web. Oct. 2016.

    COBIT 2019. ISACA, Dec. 2018. Web.

    Curtis, Blake. “The Value of IT Governance.” ISACA, 29 June 2020. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

    De Smet, Aaron. “Three Keys to Faster, Better Decisions.” McKinsey & Company, 1 May 2019. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

    “Decision Rules and Decision Analysis.” Navex Global, 2020. Web.

    “Decisions Automation with Business Rules Management Solution.” Sumerge, 4 Feb. 2020. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

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    Eisenstein, Lena. “IT Governance Checklist.” BoardEffect, 19 Feb. 2020. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

    “Establishing Effective IT and Data Governance.” Chartered Professional Accountants Canada, n.d. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

    Gandzeichuk, Ilya. “Augmented Analytics: From Decision Support To Intelligent Decision-Making.” Forbes, 8 Jan. 2020. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

    Georgescu, Vlad. “What Is IT Governance? Understanding From First Principles.” Plutora, 18 Oct. 2019. Web.

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    “Governance of IT, OT and IOT.” ISACA Journal, 2019. Web.

    Gritsenko, Daria, and Matthew Wood. “Algorithmic Governance: A Modes of Governance Approach.” Regulation & Governance, 10 Nov. 2020. Web.

    Hansert, Philipp. “Adaptive IT Governance with Clausmark’s Bee4IT.” Bee360, 25 Oct. 2019. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

    Havelock, Kylie. “What Does Good Product Governance Look Like?” Medium. 8 Jan. 2020. Web.

    Haven, Dolf van der. “Governance of IT with ISO 38500 - A More Detailed View” LinkedIn article, 24 Oct. 2016. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

    Hong, Sounman, and Sanghyun Lee. “Adaptive Governance and Decentralization: Evidence from Regulation of the Sharing Economy in Multi-Level Governance.” Government Information Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 2, April 2018, pp. 299–305. Web.

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    Jaffe, Dennis T. “Introducing the Seven Pillars of Governance.” Triple Pundit, 15 Nov. 2011. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

    Janssen, Marijn, and Haiko van der Voort. “Agile and Adaptive Governance in Crisis Response: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic.” International Journal of Information Management, vol. 55, December 2020. Web.

    Jodya, Tiffany. “Automating Enterprise Governance within Delivery Pipelines.” Harness.io, 14 May 2020. Web.

    Kumar, Sarvesh. “AI-Based Decision-Making Automation.” Singular Intelligence, 17 June 2019. Web.

    “Lean IT Governance.” Disciplined Agile, n.d. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

    Lerner, Mark. “Government Tech Projects Fail by Default. It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way.” Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 21 Oct. 2020. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

    Levstek, Aleš, Tomaž Hovelja, and Andreja Pucihar. “IT Governance Mechanisms and Contingency Factors: Towards an Adaptive IT Governance Model.” Organizacija, vol. 51, no. 4, Nov. 2018. Web.

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    Exploit Disruptive Infrastructure Technology

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}298|cart{/j2store}
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    • Parent Category Name: Disruptive & Emerging Technologies
    • Parent Category Link: /disruptive-emerging-technologies
    • New technology can hit like a meteor. Not only disruptive to IT, technology provides opportunities for organization-wide advantage.
    • Your role is endangered. If you don’t prepare for the most disruptive technologies, you could be overshadowed. Don’t let the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) set the technological innovation agenda
    • Predicting the future isn’t easy. Most IT leaders fail to realize how quickly technology increases in capability. Even for the tech savvy, predicting which specific technologies will become disruptive is difficult.
    • Communication is difficult when the sky is falling. Even forward-looking IT leaders struggle with convincing others to devote time and resources to monitoring technologies with a formal process.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Establish the core working group, select a leader, and select a group of visionaries to help brainstorm emerging technologies.
    • Brainstorm about creating a better future, begin brainstorming an initial longlist.
    • Train the group to think like futurists.
    • Evaluate the shortlist.
    • Define your PoC list and schedule.
    • Finalize, present the plan to stakeholders and repeat.

    Impact and Result

    • Create a disruptive technology working group.
    • Produce a longlist of disruptive technologies.
    • Evaluate the longlist to produce a shortlist of disruptive technologies.
    • Develop a plan for a proof-of-concept project for each shortlisted technology.

    Exploit Disruptive Infrastructure Technology Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Exploit Disruptive Infrastructure Technology – A guide to help IT leaders make the most of disruptive impacts.

    As a CIO, there is a need to move beyond day-to-day technology management with an ever-increasing need to forecast technology impacts. Not just from a technical perspective but to map out the technical understandings aligned to potential business impacts and improvements. Technology transformation and innovation is moving more quickly than ever before and as an innovation champion, the CIO or CTO should have foresight in specific technologies with the understanding of how the company could be disrupted in the near future.

    • Exploit Disruptive Infrastructure Technology – Phases 1-3

    2. Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template – A guide to develop the plan for exploiting disruptive technology.

    The Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template acts as an implementation plan for developing a long-term strategy for monitoring and implementing disruptive technologies.

    • Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template

    3. Disruptive Technology Look to the Past Tool – A tool to keep track of the missed technology disruption from previous opportunities.

    The Disruptive Technology Look to the Past Tool will assist you to collect reasonability test notes when evaluating potential disruptive technologies.

    • Disruptive Technology Look to the Past Tool

    4. Disruptive Technology Research Database Tool – A tool to keep track of the research conducted by members of the working group.

    The Disruptive Technology Research Database Tool will help you to keep track of the independent research that is conducted by members of the disruptive technology exploitation working group.

    • Disruptive Technology Research Database Tool

    5. Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool

    The Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool will help you to codify the results of the disruptive technology working group's longlist winnowing process.

    • Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool

    6. Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool – A tool to systematize notional evaluations of the value and readiness of potential disruptive technologies.

    The Disruptive Technology Value Readiness & SWOT Analysis Tool will assist you to systematize notional evaluations of the value and readiness of potential disruptive technologies.

    • Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    7. Proof of Concept Template – A handbook to serve as a reference when deciding how to proceed with your proposed solution.

    The Proof of Concept Template will guide you through the creation of a minimum-viable proof-of-concept project.

    • Proof of Concept Template

    8. Disruptive Technology Executive Presentation Template – A template to help you create a brief progress report presentation summarizing your project and program progress.

    The Disruptive Technology Executive Presentation Template will assist you to present an overview of the disruptive technology process, outlining the value to your company.

    • Disruptive Technology Executive Presentation Template

    Infographic

    Workshop: Exploit Disruptive Infrastructure Technology

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Pre-work: Establish the Disruptive Tech Process

    The Purpose

    Discuss the general overview of the disruptive technology exploitation process.

    Develop an initial disruptive technology exploitation plan.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Stakeholders are on board, the project’s goals are outlined, and the working group is selected.

    Activities

    1.1 Get execs and stakeholders on board.

    1.2 Review the process of analyzing disruptive tech.

    1.3 Select members for the working group.

    1.4 Choose a schedule and time commitment.

    1.5 Select a group of visionaries.

    Outputs

    Initialized disruptive tech exploitation plan

    Meeting agenda, schedule, and participants

    2 Hold the Initial Meeting

    The Purpose

    Understand how disruption will affect the organization, and develop an initial list of technologies to explore.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Knowledge of how to think like a futurist.

    Understanding of organizational processes vulnerable to disruption.

    Outline of potentially disruptive technologies.

    Activities

    2.1 Start the meeting with introductions.

    2.2 Train the group to think like futurists.

    2.3 Brainstorm about disruptive processes.

    2.4 Brainstorm a longlist.

    2.5 Research and brainstorm separate longlists.

    Outputs

    List of disruptive organizational processes

    Initial longlist of disruptive tech

    3 Create a Longlist and Assess Shortlist

    The Purpose

    Evaluate the specific value of longlisted technologies to the organization.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Defined list of the disruptive technologies worth escalating to the proof of concept stage.

    Activities

    3.1 Converge the longlists developed by the team.

    3.2 Narrow the longlist to a shortlist.

    3.3 Assess readiness and value.

    3.4 Perform a SWOT analysis.

    Outputs

    Finalized longlist of disruptive tech

    Shortlist of disruptive tech

    Value-readiness analysis

    SWOT analysis

    Candidate(s) for proof of concept charter

    4 Create an Action Plan

    The Purpose

    Understand how the technologies in question will impact the organization.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understanding of the specific effects of the new technology on the business processes it is intended to disrupt.

    Business case for the proof-of-concept project.

    Activities

    4.1 Build a problem canvas.

    4.2 Identify affected business units.

    4.3 Outline and map the business processes likely to be disrupted.

    4.4 Map disrupted business processes.

    4.5 Recognize how the new technology will impact business processes.

    4.6 Make the case.

    Outputs

    Problem canvas

    Map of business processes: current state

    Map of disrupted business processes

    Business case for each technology

    Further reading

    Analyst Perspective

    The key is in anticipation.

    “We all encounter unexpected changes and our responses are often determined by how we perceive and understand those changes. We react according to the unexpected occurrence. Business organizations are no different.

    When a company faces a major technology disruption in its markets – one that could fundamentally change the business or impact its processes and technology – the way its management perceive and understand the disruption influences how they describe and plan for it. In other words, the way management sets the context of a disruption – the way they frame it – shapes the strategy they adopt. Technology leaders can vastly influence business strategy by adopting a proactive approach to understanding disruptive and innovative technologies by simply adopting a process to review and evaluate technology impacts to the company’s lines of business.”

    This is a picture of Troy Cheeseman

    Troy Cheeseman
    Practice Lead, Infrastructure & Operations Research
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    • New technology can hit like a meteor. Not only disruptive to IT, technology provides opportunities for organization-wide advantage.
    • Your role is endangered. If you don’t prepare for the most disruptive technologies, you could be overshadowed. Don’t let the chief marketing officer (CMO) set the technological innovation agenda.

    Common Obstacles

    • Predicting the future isn’t easy. Most IT leaders fail to realize how quickly technology increases in capability. Even for the tech savvy, predicting which specific technologies will become disruptive is difficult.
    • Communication is difficult when the sky is falling. Even forward-looking IT leaders struggle with convincing others to devote time and resources to monitoring technologies with a formal process.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    • Identify, resolve, and evaluate. Use an annual process as described in this blueprint: a formal evaluation of new technology that turns analysis into action.
    • Lead the analysis from IT. Establish a team to carry out the annual process as a cure for the causes of “airline magazine syndrome” and to prevent it from happening in the future.
    • Train your team on the patterns of progress, track technology over time in a central database, and read Info-Tech’s analysis of upcoming technology.
    • Create your KPIs. Establish your success indicators to create measurable value when presenting to your executive.
    • Produce a comprehensive proof-of-concept plan that will allow your company to minimize risk and maximize reward when engaging with new technology.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Proactively monitoring, evaluating, and exploiting disruptive tech isn’t optional.
    This will protect your role, IT’s role, and the future of the organization.

    A diverse working group maximizes the insight brought to bear.
    An IT background is not a prerequisite.

    The best technology is only the best when it brings immediate value.
    Good technology might not be ready; ready technology might not be good.

    Review

    We help IT leaders make the most of disruptive impacts.

    This research is designed for:

    Target Audience: CIO, CTO, Head of Infrastructure

    This research will help you:

    • Develop a process for anticipating, analyzing, and exploiting disruptive technology.
    • Communicate the business case for investing in disruptive technology.
    • Categorize emerging technologies to decide what to do with them.
    • Develop a plan for taking action to exploit the technology that will most affect your organization.

    Problem statement:

    As a CIO, there is a need to move beyond day-to-day technology management with an ever-increasing need to forecast technology impacts. Not just from a technical perspective but to map out the technical understandings aligned to potential business impacts and improvements. Technology transformation and innovation is moving more quickly than ever before and as an innovation champion, the CIO or CTO should have foresight in specific technologies with the understanding of how the company could be disrupted in the near future. Foresight + Current Technology + Business Understanding = Understanding the Business Disruption. This should be a repeatable process, not an exception or reactionary response.

    Insight Summary

    Establish the core working group, select a leader, and select a group of visionaries to help brainstorm emerging technologies.

    The right team matters. A core working group will keep focus through the process and a leader will keep everyone accountable. Visionaries are out-of-the-box thinkers and once they understand how to think like a "futurists," they will drive the longlist and shortlist actions.

    Train the group to think like futurists

    To keep up with exponential technology growth you need to take a multi-threaded approach.

    Brainstorm about creating a better future; begin brainstorming an initial longlist

    Establish the longlist. The longlist helps create a holistic view of most technologies that could impact the business. Assigning values and quadrant scoring will shortlist the options and focus your PoC option.

    Converge everyone’s longlists

    Long to short...that's the short of it. Using SWOT, value readiness, and quadrant mapping review sessions will focus the longlist, creating a shortlist of potential POC candidates to review and consider.

    Evaluate the shortlist

    There is no such thing as a risk-free endeavor. Use a systematic process to ensure that the risks your organization takes have the potential to produce significant rewards.

    Define your PoC list and schedule

    Don’t be afraid to fail! Inevitably, some proof-of-concept projects will not benefit the organization. The projects that are successful will more than cover the costs of the failed projects. Roll out small scale and minimize losses.

    Finalize, present the plan to stakeholders, and repeat!

    Don't forget the C-suite. Effectively communicate and present the working group’s finding with a well-defined and succinct presentation. Start the process again!

    This is a screenshot of the Thought map for Exploit disruptive infrastructure Technology.
    1. Identify
      • Establish the core working group and select a leader; select a group of visionaries
      • Train the group to think like futurists
      • Hold your initial meeting
    2. Resolve
    • Create and winnow a longlist
    • Assess and create the shortlist
  • Evaluate
    • Create process maps
    • Develop proof of concept charter
  • The Key Is in Anticipation!

    Use Info-Tech’s approach for analyzing disruptive technology in your own disruptive tech working group

    Phase 1: Identify Phase 2: Resolve Phase 3: Evaluate

    Phase Steps

    1. Establish the disruptive technology working group
    2. Think like a futurist (Training)
    3. Hold initial meeting or create an agenda for the meeting
    1. Create and winnow a longlist
    2. Assess shortlist
    1. Create process maps
    2. Develop proof of concept charter

    Phase Outcomes

    • Establish a team of subject matter experts that will evaluate new, emerging, and potentially disruptive technologies.
    • Establish a process for including visionaries from outside of the working group who will provide insight and direction.
    • Introduce the core working group members.
    • Gain a better understanding of how technology advances.
    • Brainstorm a list of organizational processes.
    • Brainstorm an initial longlist.
    • Finalized longlist
    • Finalized shortlist
    • Initial analysis of each technology on the shortlist
    • Finalized shortlist
    • Initial analysis of each technology on the shortlist
    • Business process maps before and after disruption
    • Proof of concept charter
    • Key performance indicators
    • Estimation of required resources
    • Executive presentation

    Four key challenges make it essential for you to become a champion for exploiting disruptive technology

    1. New technology can hit like a meteor. It doesn’t only disrupt IT; technology provides opportunities for organization-wide advantage.
    2. Your role is endangered. If you don’t prepare for the most disruptive technologies, you could be overshadowed. Don’t let the CMO rule technological innovation.
    3. Predicting the future isn’t easy. Most IT leaders fail to realize how quickly technology increases in capability. Even for the tech savvy, predicting which specific technologies will become disruptive is difficult.
    4. Communication is difficult when the sky is falling. Even forward-looking IT leaders struggle with convincing others to devote time and resources to monitoring emerging technologies with a formal process.

    “Look, you have never had this amount of opportunity for innovation. Don’t forget to capitalize on it. If you do not capitalize on it, you will go the way of the dinosaur.”
    – Dave Evans, Co-Founder and CTO, Stringify

    Technology can hit like a meteor

    “ By 2025:

    • 38.6 billion smart devices will be collecting, analyzing, and sharing data.
    • The web hosting services market is to reach $77.8 billion in 2025.
    • 70% of all tech spending is expected to go for cloud solutions.
    • There are 1.35 million tech startups.
    • Global AI market is expected to reach $89.8 billion.”

    – Nick Gabov

    IT Disruption

    Technology disrupts IT by:

    • Affecting the infrastructure and applications that IT needs to use internally.
    • Affecting the technology of end users that IT needs to support and deploy, especially for technologies with a consumer focus.
    • Allowing IT to run more efficiently and to increase the efficiency of other business units.
    • Example: The rise of the smartphone required many organizations to rethink endpoint devices.

    Business Disruption

    Technology disrupts the business by:

    • Affecting the viability of the business.
    • Affecting the business’ standing in relation to competitors that better deal with disruptive technology.
    • Affecting efficiency and business strategy. IT should have a role in technology-related business decisions.
    • Example: BlackBerry failed to anticipate the rise of the apps ecosystem. The company struggled as it was unable to react with competitive products.

    Senior IT leaders are expected to predict disruptions to IT and the business, while tending to today’s needs

    You are expected to be both a firefighter and a forecaster

    • Anticipating upcoming disruptions is part of your job, and you will be blamed if you fail to anticipate future business disruptions because you are focusing on the present.
    • However, keeping IT running smoothly is also part of your job, and you will be blamed if today’s IT environment breaks down because you are focusing on the future.

    You’re caught between the present and the future

    • You don’t have a process that anticipates future disruptions but runs alongside and integrates with operations in the present.
    • You can’t do it alone. Tending to both the present and the future will require a team that can help you keep the process running.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Be prepared when disruptions start coming down, even though it isn’t easy. Use this research to reduce the effort to a simple process that can be performed alongside everyday firefighting.

    Make disruptive tech analysis and exploitation part of your innovation agenda

    A scatter plot graph is depicted, plotting IT Innovative Leadership (X axis), and Satisfaction with IT(Y axis). IT innovative leadership explains 75% of variation in satisfaction with IT

    Organizations without high satisfaction with IT innovation leadership are only 20% likely to be highly satisfied with IT

    “You rarely see a real-world correlation of .86!”
    – Mike Battista, Staff Scientist, Cambridge Brain Sciences, PhD in Measurement

    There is a clear relationship between satisfaction with IT and the IT department’s innovation leadership.

    Prevent “airline magazine syndrome” by proactively analyzing disruptive technologies

    “The last thing the CIO needs is an executive saying ‘I don’t what it is or what it does…but I want two of them!”
    – Tim Lalonde

    Airline magazine syndrome happens to IT leaders caught between the business and IT. It usually occurs in this manner:

    1. While on a flight, a senior executive reads about an emerging technology that has exciting implications for the business in an airline magazine.
    2. The executive returns and approaches IT, demanding that action be taken to address the disruptive technology – and that it should have been (ideally) completed already.

    Without a Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan:

    “I don’t know”

    With a Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan:

    “Here in IT, we have already considered that technology and decided it was overhyped. Let me show you our analysis and invite you to join our working group.”

    OR

    “We have already considered that technology and have started testing it. Let me show you our testing lab and invite you to join our working group.”

    Info-Tech Insight

    Airline magazine syndrome is a symptom of a wider problem: poor CEO-CIO alignment. Solve this problem with improved communication and documentation. Info-Tech’s disruptive tech iterative process will make airline magazine syndrome a thing of the past!

    IT leaders who do not keep up with disruptive technology will find their roles diminished

    “Today’s CIO dominion is in a decaying orbit with CIOs in existential threat mode.”
    – Ken Magee

    Protect your role within IT

    • IT is threatened by disruptive technology:
      • Trends like cloud services, increased automation, and consumerization reduce the need for IT to be involved in every aspect of deploying and using technology.
      • In the long term, machines will replace even intellectually demanding IT jobs, such as infrastructure admin and high-level planning.
    • Protect your role in IT by:
      • Anticipating new technology that will disrupt the IT department and your place within it.
      • Defining new IT roles and responsibilities that accurately reflect the reality of technology today.
      • Having a process for the above that does not diminish your ability to keep up with everyday operations that remain a priority today.

    Protect your role against other departments

    • Your role in the business is threatened by disruptive technology:
      • The trends that make IT less involved with technology allow other executives – such as the CMO – to make IT investments.
      • As the CMO gains the power and data necessary to embrace new trends, the CIO and IT managers have less pull.
    • Protect your role in the business by:
      • Being the individual to consult about new technology. It isn’t just a power play; IT leaders should be the ones who know technology thoroughly.
      • Becoming an indispensable part of the entire business’ innovation strategy through proposing and executing a process for exploiting disruptive technology.

    IT leaders who do keep up have an opportunity to solidify their roles as experts and aggregators

    “The IT department plays a critical role in [innovation]. What they can do is identify a technology that potentially might introduce improvements to the organization, whether it be through efficiency, or through additional services to constituents.”
    – Michael Maguire, Management Consultant

    The contemporary CIO is a conductor, ensuring that IT works in harmony with the rest of the business.

    The new CIO is a conductor, not a musician. The CIO is taking on the role of a business engineer, working with other executives to enable business innovation.

    The new CIO is an expert and an aggregator. Conductor CIOs increasingly need to keep up on the latest technologies. They will rely on experts in each area and provide strategic synthesis to decide if, and how, developments are relevant in order to tune their IT infrastructure.

    The pace of technological advances makes progress difficult to predict

    “An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense ‘intuitive linear’ view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century – it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).”
    – Ray Kurzweil

    Technology advances exponentially. Rather than improving by the same amount of capability each year, it multiplies in capability each year.

    Think like a futurist to anticipate technology before it goes mainstream.

    Exponential growth happens much faster than linear growth, especially when it hits the knee of the curve. Even those who acknowledge exponential growth underestimate how capabilities can improve.

    To predict new advances, turn innovation into a process

    “We spend 70 percent of our time on core search and ads. We spend 20 percent on adjacent businesses, ones related to the core businesses in some interesting way. Examples of that would be Google News, Google Earth, and Google Local. And then 10 percent of our time should be on things that are truly new.”
    – Eric Schmidt, Google

    • Don’t get caught in the trap of refining your core processes to the exclusion of innovation. You should always be looking for new processes to improve, new technology to pilot, and where possible, new businesses to get into.
    • Devote about 10% of your time and resources to exploring new technology: the potential rewards are huge.

    You and your team need to analyze technology every year to predict where it’s going.

    A bar graph is shown which depicts the proportion of technology use from 2018-2022. the included devices are: Tablets; PCs; TVs; Non-smartphones; Smartphones; M2M
    • Foundational technologies, such as computing power, storage, and networks, are improving exponentially.
    • Disruptive technologies are specific manifestations of foundational advancements. Advancements of greater magnitude give rise to more manifestations; therefore, there will be more disruptive technologies every year.
    • There is a lot of noise to cut through. Remember Google Glasses? As technology becomes ubiquitous and consumerization reigns, everybody is a technology expert. How do you decide which technologies to focus on?

    Protect IT and the business from disruption by implementing a simple, repeatable disruptive technology exploitation process

    “One of the most consistent patterns in business is the failure of leading companies to stay at the top of their industries when technologies or markets change […] Managers must beware of ignoring new technologies that can’t initially meet the needs of their mainstream customers.”
    – Joseph L. Bower and Clayton M. Christensen

    Challenge

    Solution

    New technology can hit like a meteor, but it doesn’t have to leave a crater:

    Use the annual process described in this blueprint to create a formal evaluation of new technology that turns analysis into action.

    Predicting the future isn’t easy, but it can be done:

    Lead the analysis from the office of the CIO. Establish a team to carry out the annual process as a cure for airline magazine syndrome.

    Your role is endangered, but you can survive:

    Train your team on the patterns of progress, track technology over time in a central database, and read Info-Tech’s analysis of upcoming technology.

    Communication is difficult when the sky is falling, so have a simple way to get the message across:

    Track metrics that communicate your progress, and summarize the results in a single, easy-to-read exploitation plan.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Use Info-Tech’s tools and templates, along with this storyboard, to walk you through creating and executing an exploitation process in six steps.

    Create measurable value by using Info-Tech’s process for evaluating the disruptive potential of technology

    This image contains a bar graph with the following Title: Which are the primary benefits you've either realized or expect to realize by deploying hyperconverged infrastructure in the near term.

    No business process is perfect.

    • Use Info-Tech’s Proof of Concept Template to create a disruptive technology proof of concept implementation plan.
    • Harness your company’s internal wisdom to systematically vet new technology. Engage only in calculated risk and maximize potential benefit.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Inevitably, some proof of concept projects will not benefit the organization. The projects that are successful will more than cover the costs of the failed projects. Roll out small scale and minimize losses.

    Establish your key performance indicators (KPIs)

    Key performance indicators allow for rigorous analysis, which generates insight into utilization by platform and consumption by business activity.

    • Brainstorm metrics that indicate when process improvement is actually taking place.
    • Have members of the group pitch KPIs; the facilitator should record each suggestion on a whiteboard.
    • Make sure to have everyone justify the inclusion of each metric: how does it relate to the improvement that the proof of concept project is intended to drive? How does it relate to the overall goals of the business?
    • Include a list of KPIs, along with a description and a target (ensuring that it aligns with SMART metrics).
    Key Performance Indicator Description Target Result

    Number of Longlist technologies

    Establish a range of Longlist technologies to evaluate 10-15
    Number of Shortlist technologies Establish a range of Shortlist technologies to evaluate 5-10
    number of "look to the past" likes/dislikes Minimum number of testing characteristics 6
    Number of POCs Total number of POCs Approved 3-5

    Communicate your plan with the Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template

    Use the Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template to summarize everything that the group does. Update the report continuously and use it to show others what is happening in the world of disruptive technology.

    Section Title Description
    1 Rationale and Summary of Exploitation Plan A summary of the current efforts that exist for exploring disruptive technology. A summary of the process for exploiting disruptive technology, the resources required, the team members, meeting schedules, and executive approval.
    2 Longlist of Potentially Disruptive Technologies A summary of the longlist of identified disruptive technologies that could affect the organization, shortened to six or less that have the largest potential impact based on Info-Tech’s Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool.
    3 Analysis of Shortlist Individually analyze each technology placed on the shortlist using Info-Tech’s Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool.
    4 Proof of Concept Plan Use the results from Section 3 to establish a plan for moving forward with the technologies on the shortlist. Determine the tasks required to implement the technologies and decide who will complete them and when.
    5 Hand-off Pass the project along to identified stakeholders with significant interest in its success. Continue to track metrics and prepare to repeat the disruptive technology exploitation process annually.

    Whether you need a process for exploiting disruptive technology, or an analysis of current trends, Info-Tech can help

    Two sets of research make up Info-Tech’s disruptive technology coverage:

    This image contains four screenshots from each of the following Info-Tech Blueprints: Exploit disruptive Infrastructure Technology; Infrastructure & operations priorities 2022

    This storyboard, and the associated tools and templates, will walk you through creating a disruptive technology working group of your own.

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    Key deliverable:

    Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template

    The Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template acts as an implementation plan for developing a long-term strategy for monitoring and implementing disruptive technologies.

    Proof of Concept Template

    The Proof of Concept Template will guide you through the creation of a minimum-viable proof-of-concept project.

    Executive Presentation

    The Disruptive Technology Executive Presentation Template will assist you to present an overview of the disruptive technology process, outlining the value to your company.

    Disruptive Technology Value Readiness & SWOT Analysis Tool

    The Disruptive Technology Value Readiness & SWOT Analysis Tool will assist you to systematize notional evaluations of the value and readiness of potential disruptive technologies.

    Disruptive Technology Research Database Tool

    The Disruptive Technology Research Database Tool will help you to keep track of the independent research that is conducted by members of the disruptive technology exploitation working group.

    Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool

    The Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool will help you to codify the results of the disruptive technology working group's longlist winnowing process.

    Disruptive Technology Look to the Past Tool

    The Disruptive Technology Look to the Past Tool will assist you to collect reasonability test notes when evaluating potential disruptive technologies.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    “Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

    Guided Implementation

    “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

    Workshop

    “We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

    Consulting

    “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3

    Call #1: Explore the need for a disruptive technology working group.

    Call #3: Review the agenda for the initial meeting.

    Call #5: Review how you’re brainstorming and your sources of information.

    Call #7: Review the final shortlist and assessment.

    Call #9: Review the progress of your team.

    Call #2: Review the team name, participants, and timeline.

    Call #4: Assess the results of the initial meeting.

    Call #6: Review the final longlist and begin narrowing it down.

    Call #8: Review the next steps.

    Call #10: Review the communication plan.

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    A typical GI is 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Pre-Work Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4
    Establish the Disruptive Tech Process Hold Your Initial Meeting Create a Longlist and Assess Shortlist Create Process Maps Develop a Proof of Concept Charter

    Activities

    1.1.a Get executives and stakeholders on board.

    1.1.b Review the process of analyzing disruptive tech.

    1.1.c Select members for the working group.

    1.1.d Choose a schedule and time commitment.

    1.1.e Select a group of visionaries.

    1.2.a Start the meeting with introductions.

    1.2.b Train the group to think like futurists.

    1.2.c Brainstorm about disruptable processes.

    1.2.d Brainstorm a longlist.

    1.2.e Research and brainstorm separate longlists.

    2.1.a Converge the longlists developed by the team.

    2.2.b Narrow the longlist to a shortlist.

    2.2.c Assess readiness and value.

    2.2.d Perform a SWOT analysis.

    3.1.a Build a problem canvas.

    3.1.b Identify affected business units.

    3.1.c Outline and map the business processes likely to be disrupted.

    3.1.d Map disrupted business processes.

    3.1.e Recognize how the new technology will impact business processes.

    3.1.f Make the case.

    3.2.a Develop key performance indicators (KPIs).

    3.2.b Identify key success factors.

    3.2.c Outline project scope.

    3.2.d Identify responsible team.

    3.2.e Complete resource estimation.

    Deliverables

    1. Initialized Disruptive Tech Exploitation Plan
    1. List of Disruptable Organizational Processes
    2. Initial Longlist of Disruptive Tech
    1. Finalized Longlist of Disruptive Tech
    2. Shortlist of Disruptive Tech
    3. Value-Readiness Analysis
    4. SWOT Analysis
    5. Candidate(s) for Proof of Concept Charter
    1. Problem Canvas
    2. Map of Business Processes: Current State
    3. Map of Disrupted Business Processes
    4. Business Case for Each Technology
    1. Completed Proof of Concept Charter

    Exploit Disruptive Infrastructure Technology

    Disrupt or be disrupted.

    Identify

    Create your working group.

    PHASE 1

    Use Info-Tech’s approach for analyzing disruptive technology in your own disruptive tech working group

    1. Identify
      1. Establish the core working group and select a leader; select a group of visionaries
      2. Train the group to think like futurists
      3. Hold your initial meeting
    2. Resolve
      1. Create and winnow a longlist
      2. Assess and create the shortlist
    3. Evaluate
      1. Create process maps
      2. Develop proof of concept charter

    The Key Is in Anticipation!

    Phase 1: Identify

    Create your working group.

    Activities:

    Step 1.1: Establish the core working group and select a leader; select a group of visionaries
    Step 1.2: Train the group to think like futurists
    Step 1.3: Hold the initial meeting

    This step involves the following participants:

    IT Infrastructure Manager

    CIO or CTO

    Potential members and visionaries of the working group

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Establish a team of subject matter experts that will evaluate new, emerging, and potentially disruptive technologies.
    • Establish a process for including visionaries from outside of the working group who will provide insight and direction.
    • Introduce the core working group members.
    • Gain a better understanding of how technology advances.
    • Brainstorm a list of organizational processes.
    • Brainstorm an initial longlist.

    Step 1.1

    Establish the core working group and select a leader; select a group of visionaries.

    Activities:

    • Articulate the long- and short-term benefits and costs to the entire organization
    • Gain support by articulating the long- and short-term benefits and costs to the IT department
    • Gain commitment from key stakeholders and executives
    • Help stakeholders understand what goes into formally exploiting disruptive tech by reviewing this process
    • Establish the core working group and select a leader
    • Create a schedule with a time commitment appropriate to your organization’s size; it doesn’t need to take long
    • Select a group of visionaries external to IT to help the working group brainstorm disruptive technologies

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Infrastructure Manager
    • CIO or CTO
    • Potential members and visionaries of the working group

    Outcomes of this step

    • Establish a team of subject matter experts that will evaluate new, emerging, and potentially disruptive technologies.
    • Establish a process for including visionaries from outside of the working group that will provide insight and direction.

    1.1.A Articulate the long- and short-term benefits and costs to the entire organization

    A cost/benefit analysis will give stakeholders a picture of how disruptive technology could affect the business. Use the chart as a starting point and customize it based on your organization.

    Disruptive Technology Affects the Organization

    Benefits Costs

    Short Term

    • First-mover advantage from implementing new technology in the business before competitors – and before start-ups.
    • Better brand image as an organization focused on innovation.
    • Increased overall employee satisfaction by implementing new technology that increases employee capabilities or lowers effort.
    • Possibility of increased IT budget for integrating new technology.
    • Potential for employees to reject wide-scale use of unfamiliar technology.
    • Potential for technology to fail in the organization if it is not sufficiently tested.
    • Executive time required for making decisions about technology recommended by the team.

    Long Term

    • Increased internal business efficiencies from the integration of new technology (e.g. energy efficiency, fewer employees needed due to automation).
    • Better services or products for customers, resulting in increased long-term revenue.
    • Lowered costs of services or products and potential to grow market share.
    • Continued relevance of established organizations in a world changed by disruptive technologies.
    • Technology may not reach the capabilities initially expected, requiring waiting for increased value or readiness.
    • Potential for customers to reject new products resulting from technology.
    • Lack of focus on current core capabilities if technology is massively disruptive.

    1.1.B Gain support by articulating the long- and short-term benefits and costs to the IT department

    A cost/benefit analysis will give stakeholders a picture of how disruptive technology could affect the business. Use the chart as a starting point and customize it based on your organization.

    Disruptive Technology Affects IT

    BenefitsCosts

    Short Term

    • Perception of IT as a core component of business practices.
    • Increase IT’s capabilities to better serve employees (e.g. faster network speeds, better uptime, and storage and compute capacity that meet demands).
    • Cost for acquiring or implementing new technology and updating infrastructure to integrate with it.
    • Cost for training IT staff and end users on new IT technology and processes.
    • Minor costs for initial setup of disruptive technology exploitation process and time taken by members.

    Long Term

    • More efficient and powerful IT infrastructure that capitalizes on emerging trends at the right time.
    • Lower help desk load due to self-service and automation technology.
    • Increased satisfaction with IT due to implementation of improved enterprise technology and visible IT influence on improvements.
    • Increased end-user satisfaction with IT due to understanding and support of consumer technology that affects their lives.
    • New technology may result in lower need for specific IT roles. Cultural disruptions due to changing role of IT.
    • Perception of failure if technology is tested and never implemented.
    • Expectation that IT will continue to implement the newest technology available, even when it has been dismissed as not having value.

    1.1.C Gain commitment from key stakeholders and executives

    Gaining approval from executives and key stakeholders is the final obstacle. Ensure that you cover the following items to have the best chance for project approval.

    • Use a sample deck similar to this section for gaining buy-in, ensuring that you add/remove information to make it specific to your organization. Cover this section, including:
      • Who: Who will lead the team and who will be on it (working group)?
      • What: What resources will be required by the team (costs)?
      • Where/When: How often and where will the team meet (meeting schedule)?
      • Why: Why is there a need to exploit disruptive technology (benefits and examples)?
      • How: How is the team going to exploit disruptive technology (the process)?
    • Go through this blueprint prior to presenting the plan to stakeholders so that you have a strong understanding of the details behind each process and tool.
    • Frame the first iteration of the cycle as a pilot program. Use the completed results of the pilot to establish exploiting disruptive technology as a necessary company initiative.

    Insert the resources required by the disruptive tech exploitation team into Section 1.5 of the Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template. Have executives sign-off on the project in Section 1.6.

    Disruption has undermined some of the most successful tech companies

    “The IT department plays a critical role in [innovation]. What they can do is identify a technology that potentially might introduce improvements to the organization, whether it be through efficiency or through additional services to constituents.”
    - Michael Maguire, Management Consultant

    VoIP’s transformative effects

    Disruptive technology:
    Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a modern means of making phone calls through the internet by sending voice packets using data, as opposed to the traditional circuit transmissions of the PSTN.

    Who won:
    Organizations that realized the cost savings that VoIP provided for businesses with a steady internet connection saved as much as 60% on telephony expenses. Even in the early stages, with a few more limitations, organizations were able to save a significant amount of money and the technology has continued to improve.

    Who lost?
    Telecom-related companies that failed to realize VoIP was a potential threat to their market, and organizations that lacked the ability to explore and implement the disruptive technology early.

    Digital photography — the new norm

    Disruptive technology:
    Digital photography refers to the storing of photographs in a digital format, as opposed to traditional photography, which exposes light to sensitive photographic film.

    Who won:
    Photography companies and new players that exploited the evolution of data storage and applied it to photography succeeded. Those that were able to balance providing traditional photography and exploiting and introducing digital photography, such as Nikon, left competitors behind. Smartphone manufacturers also benefited by integrating digital cameras.

    Who lost?
    Photography companies, such as Kodak, that failed to respond to the digital revolution found themselves outcompeted and insolvent.

    1.1.D Help stakeholders understand what goes into formally exploiting disruptive tech by reviewing this process

    There are five steps to formally exploiting disruptive technology, each with its own individual outputs and tools to take analysis to the next level.

    Step 1.2:
    Hold Initial Meeting

    Output:

    • Initial list of disruptable processes;
    • Initial longlist

    Step 2.1:

    Brainstorm Longlist

    Output:

    • Finalized longlist;
    • Shortlist

    Step 2.2:

    Assess Shortlist

    Output:

    • Final shortlist;
    • SWOT analysis;
    • Tech categorization

    Step 3.1:
    Create Process Maps

    Output:

    • Completed process maps

    Step 3.2:
    Develop a proof of concept charter

    Output:

    • Proof-of-concept template with KPIs

    Info-Tech Insight

    Before going to stakeholders, complete the entire blueprint to better understand the tools and outputs of the process.

    1.1.E Establish the core working group and select a leader

    • Selecting your core membership for the working group is a critical step to the group’s success. Ensure that you satisfy the following criteria:
      • This is a team of subject matter experts. They will be overseeing the learning and piloting of disruptive technologies. Their input will also be valuable for senior executives and for implementing these technologies.
      • Choose members that can take time away from firefighting tasks to dedicate time to meetings.
      • It may be necessary to reach outside of the organization now or in the future for expertise on certain technologies. Use Info-Tech as a source of information.
    Organization Size Working Group Size
    Small 02-Jan
    Medium 05-Mar
    Large 10-May
    • Once the team is established, you must decide who will lead the group. Ensure that you satisfy the following criteria:
      • A leader should be credible, creative, and savvy in both technology and business.
      • The leader should facilitate, acting as both an expert and an aggregator of the information gathered by the team.

    Choose a compelling name

    The working group needs a name. Be sure to select one with a positive connotation within your organization.

    Section 1.3 of the Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template

    1.1.F Create a schedule with a time commitment appropriate to your organization’s size; it doesn’t need to take long

    Time the disruptive technology working group’s meetings to coincide and integrate with your organization’s strategic planning — at least annually.

    Size Meeting Frequency Time per Meeting Example Meeting Activities
    Small Annually One day A one-day meeting to run through phase 2 of the project (SWOT analysis and shortlist analysis).
    Medium Two days A two-day meeting to run through the project. The additional meeting involves phase 3 of this deck, developing a proof-of-concept plan.
    Large Two+ days Two meetings, each two days. Two days to create and winnow the longlist (phase 2), and two further days to develop a proof of concept plan.

    “Regardless of size, it’s incumbent upon every organization to have some familiarity of what’s happening over the next few years, [and to try] to anticipate what some of those trends may be. […] These trends are going to accelerate IT’s importance in terms of driving business strategy.”
    – Vern Brownell, CEO, D-Wave

    Section 1.4 of the Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template

    1.1.G Select a group of visionaries external to IT to help the working group brainstorm disruptive technologies

    Selecting advisors for your group is an ongoing step, and the roster can change.

    Ensure that you satisfy the following criteria:

    • Look beyond IT to select a team representing several business units.
    • Check for self-professed “geeks” and fans of science fiction that may be happy to join.
    • Membership can be a reward for good performance.

    This group does not have to meet as regularly as the core working group. Input from external advisors can occur between meetings. You can also include them on every second or third iteration of the entire process.

    However, the more input you can get into the group, the more innovative it can become.

    “It is … important to develop design fictions based on engagement with directly or indirectly implicated publics and not to be designed by experts alone.”
    – Emmanuel Tsekleves, Senior Lecturer in Design Interactions, University of Lancaster

    Section 1.3 of the Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template

    The following case study illustrates the innovative potential that is created when you include a diverse group of people

    INDUSTRY - Chip Manufacturing
    SOURCE - Clayton Christensen, Intel

    To achieve insight, you need to collaborate with people from outside of your department.

    Challenge

    • Headquartered in California, through the 1990s, Intel was the largest microprocessor chip manufacturer in the world, with revenue of $25 billion in 1997.
    • All was not perfect, however. Intel faced a challenge from Cyrix, a manufacturer of low-end chips. In 18 months, Cyrix’s share of the low-margin entry-level chip manufacturing business mushroomed from 10% to 70%.

    Solution

    • Troubled by the potential for significant disruption of the microprocessor market, Intel brought in external consultants to hold workshops to educate managers about disruptive innovation.
    • Managers would break into groups and discuss ways Intel could facilitate the disruption of its competitors. In one year, Intel hosted 18 workshops, and 2,000 managers went through the process.

    Results

    • Intel launched the Celeron chip to serve the lower end of the PC market and win market share back from Cyrix (which no longer exists as an independent company) and other competitors like AMD.
    • Within one year, Intel had captured 35% of the market.

    “[The models presented in the workshops] gave us a common language and a common way to frame the problem so that we could reach a consensus around a counterintuitive course of action.” – Andy Grove, then-CEO, Intel Corporation

    Phase 1: Identify

    Create your working group.

    Activities:

    Step 1.1: Establish the core working group and select a leader; select a group of visionaries
    Step 1.2: Train the group to think like futurists
    Step 1.3: Hold the initial meeting

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Infrastructure Manager
    • CIO or CTO
    • Potential members and visionaries of the working group

    Outcomes of this phase:

    • Establish a team of subject matter experts that will evaluate new, emerging, and potentially disruptive technologies.
    • Establish a process for including visionaries from outside of the working group who will provide insight and direction.
    • Introduce the core working group members.
    • Gain a better understanding of how technology advances.
    • Brainstorm a list of organizational processes.
    • Brainstorm an initial longlist.

    Step 1.2

    Train the group to think like futurists

    Activities:

    1. Look to the past to predict the future:
      • Step 1: Review the technology opportunities you missed
      • Step 2: Review and record what you liked about the tech
      • Step 3: Review and record your dislikes
      • Step 4: Record and test the reasonability
    2. Crash course on futurology principles
    3. Peek into the future

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Infrastructure Manager
    • CIO or CTO
    • Core working group members
    • Visionaries

    Outcomes of this step

    • Team members thinking like futurists
    • Better understanding of how technology advances
    • List of past examples and characteristics

    Info-Tech Insight

    Business buy-in is essential. Manage your business partners by providing a summary of the EDIT methodology and process. Validate the process value, which will allow you create a team of IT and business representatives.

    1.2 Train the group to think like futurists

    1 hour

    Ensure the team understands how technology advances and how they can identify patterns in upcoming technologies.

    1. Lead the group through a brainstorming session.
    2. Follow the next phases and steps.
    3. This session should be led by someone who can facilitate a thought-provoking discussion.
    4. This training deck finishes with a video.

    Input

    • Facilitated creativity
    • Training deck [following slides]

    Output

    • Inspiration
    • Anonymous ideas

    Materials

    • Futurist training “steps”
    • Pen and paper

    Participants

    • Core working group
    • Visionaries
    • Facilitator

    1.2.A Look to the past to predict the future

    30 minutes

    Step 1

    Step 2 Step 3 Step 4

    Review what you missed.

    What did you like?

    What did you dislike?

    Test the reasonability.

    Think about a time you missed a technical disruptive opportunity.

    Start with a list of technologies that changed your business and processes.

    Consider those specifically you could have identified with a repeatable process.

    What were the most impactful points about the technology?

    Define a list of “characteristics” you liked.

    Create a shortlist of items.

    Itemize the impact to process, people, and technology.

    Why did you pass on the tech?

    Define a list of “characteristics” you did not like.

    Create a shortlist of items.

    Itemize the impact to process, people, and technology.

    Avoid the “arm chair quarterback” view.

    Refer to the six positive and negative points.

    Check against your data points at the end of each phase.

    Record the list of missed opportunities

    Record 6 characteristics

    Record 6 characteristics

    Completed “Think like a Futurists” tool

    Use the Disruptive Technology Research Look to the Past Tool to record your output.

    Input

    • Facilitated creativity
    • Speaker’s notes

    Output

    • Inspiration
    • Anonymous ideas
    • Recorded missed opportunities
    • Recorded positive points
    • Recorded dislikes
    • Reasonability test list

    Materials

    • Futurist training “steps”
    • Pen and paper
    • “Look to the Past” tool

    Participants

    • Core working group
    • Visionaries
    • Facilitator

    Understand how the difference between linear and exponential growth will completely transform many organizations in the next decade

    “The last ten years have seen exponential growth in research on disruptive technologies and their impact on industries, supply chains, resources, training, education and employment markets … The debate is still open on who will be the winners and losers of future industries, but what is certain is that change has picked up pace and we are now in a new technology revolution whose impact is potentially greater than the industrial revolution.”
    – Gary L. Evans

    Exponential advancement will ensure that life in the next decade will be very different from life today.

    • Linear growth happens one step at a time.
    • The difference between linear and exponential is hard to notice, at first.
    • We are now at the knee of the curve.

    What about email?

    • Consider the amount of email you get daily
    • Double it
    • Triple it

    Exponential growth happens much faster than linear growth, especially when it hits the knee of the curve. Technology grows exponentially, and we are approaching the knee of the curve.

    This graph is adapted from research by Ray Kurzweil.

    Growth: Linear vs. Exponential

    This image contains a graph demonstrating examples of exponential and linear trends.

    1.2.B Crash course on futurology principles

    1 hour

    “An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense ‘intuitive linear’ view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).”
    - Ray Kurzweil

    Review the differences between exponential and linear growth

    The pace of technological advances makes progress difficult to predict.

    Technology advances exponentially. Rather than improving by the same amount of capability each year, it multiplies in capability each year.

    Think like a futurist to anticipate technology before it goes mainstream.

    Exponential growth happens much faster than linear growth, especially when it hits the knee of the curve. Even those who acknowledge exponential growth underestimate how capabilities can improve.

    The following case study illustrates the rise of social media providers

    “There are 7.7 billion people in the world, with at least 3.5 billion of us online. This means social media platforms are used by one in three people in the world and more than two-thirds of all internet users.”
    – Esteban Ortiz-Ospina

    This graph depicts the trend of the number of people using social media platforms between 2005 and 2019

    The following case study illustrates the rapid growth of Machine to Machine (M2M) connections

    A bar graph is shown which depicts the proportion of technology use from 2018-2022. the included devices are: Tablets; PCs; TVs; Non-smartphones; Smartphones; M2M

    Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns

    “Ray Kurzweil has been described as ‘the restless genius’ by The Wall Street Journal, and ‘the ultimate thinking machine’ by Forbes. He was ranked #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States by Inc Magazine, calling him the ‘rightful heir to Thomas Edison,’ and PBS included Ray as one of 16 ‘revolutionaries who made America,’ along with other inventors of the past two centuries.”
    Source: KurzweilAI.net

    Growth is linear?

    “Information technology is growing exponentially. That’s really my main thesis, and our intuition about the future is not exponential, it’s really linear. People think things will go at the current pace …1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 30 steps later, you’re at 30.”

    Better IT strategy enables future business innovation

    “The reality of information technology like computers, like biological technologies now, is it goes exponentially … 2, 4, 8, 16. At step 30, you’re at a billion, and this is not an idle speculation about the future.” [emphasis added]

    “When I was a student at MIT, we all shared a computer that cost tens of millions of dollars. This computer [pulling his smartphone out of his pocket] is a million times cheaper, a thousand times more powerful — that’s a billion-fold increase in MIPS per dollar, bits per dollar… and we’ll do it again in 25 years.”
    Source: “IT growth and global change: A conversation with Ray Kurzweil,” McKinsey & Company

    1.2.C Peak into the future

    1 hour

    Leverage industry roundtables and trend reports to understand the art of the possible

    • Uncover important business and industry trends that can inform possibilities for technology disruption.
    • Market research is critical in identifying factors external to your organization and identifying technology innovation that will provide a competitive edge. It’s important to evaluate the impact each trend or opportunity will have in your organization and market.

    Visit Info-Tech’s Trends & Priorities Research Center

    Visit Info-Tech’s Industry Coverage Research to get started.

    Phase 1: Identify

    Create your working group

    Activities:

    Step 1.1: Establish the core working group and select a leader; select a group of visionaries
    Step 1.2: Train the group to think like futurists
    Step 1.3: Hold the initial meeting

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Infrastructure Manager
    • CIO or CTO
    • Potential members and visionaries of the working group

    Outcomes of this phase:

    • Establish a team of subject matter experts that will evaluate new, emerging, and potentially disruptive technologies.
    • Establish a process for including visionaries from outside of the working group who will provide insight and direction.
    • Introduce the core working group members.
    • Gain a better understanding of how technology advances.
    • Brainstorm a list of organizational processes.
    • Brainstorm an initial longlist.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Establish the longlist. The longlist help create a holistic view of most technologies that could impact the business. Assigning values and quadrant scoring will shortlist the options and focus your PoC option.

    Step 1.3

    Hold the initial meeting

    Activities:

    1. Create an agenda for the meeting
    2. Start the kick-off meeting with introductions and a recap
    3. Brainstorm about creating a better future
    4. Begin brainstorming an initial longlist
    5. Have team members develop separate longlists for their next meeting

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Infrastructure Manager
    • CIO or CTO
    • Core working group members
    • Visionaries

    Outcomes of this step

    • Introduce the core working group members
    • Gain a better understanding of how technology advances
    • Brainstorm a list of organizational processes
    • Brainstorm an initial longlist

    1.3.A Create an agenda for the meeting

    1 hour

    Kick-off this cycle of the disruptive technology process by welcoming your visionaries and introducing your core working group.

    The purpose of the initial meeting is to brainstorm where new technology will be the most disruptive within the organization. You’ll develop two longlists: one of business processes and one of disruptive technology. These longlists are in addition to the independent research your core working group will perform before Phase 2.

    • Find an outgoing facilitator. Sitting back will let you focus more on ideating, and an engaging presenter will help bring out ideas from your visionaries.
    • The training deck (see step 1.2c) includes presenting a video. We’ve included some of our top choices for you to choose from.
      • Feel free to find your own video or bring in a keynote speaker.
      • The object of the video is to get the group thinking about the future.
      • Customize the training deck as needed.
    • If a cycle has been completed, present your findings and all of the group’s completed deliverables in the first section.
    • This session is the only time you have with your visionaries. Get their ideas on what technologies will be disruptive to start forming a longlist.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The disruptive tech team is prestigious. If your organization is large enough or has the resources, consider having this meeting in an offsite location. This will drive excitement to join the working group if the opportunity arises and incentivize good work.

    Meeting Agenda (Sample)

    Time

    Activity

    8:00am-8:30am Introductions and previous meeting recap
    8:30am-9:30am Training deck
    9:30 AM-10:00am Brainstorming
    10:00am-10:15am Break
    10:15am-10:45am Develop good research techniques
    10:45am-12:00pm Begin compiling your longlist

    Info-Tech Insight

    The disruptive tech team is prestigious. If your organization is large enough or has the resources, consider having this meeting in an offsite location. This will drive excitement to join the working group if the opportunity arises and incentivize good work.

    1.3.B Start the kick-off meeting with introductions and a summary of what work has been done so far

    30 minutes

    1. Start the meeting off with an icebreaker activity. This isn’t an ordinary business meeting – or even group – so we recommend starting off with an activity that will emphasize this unique nature. To get the group in the right mindset, try this activity:
      1. Go around the group and have people present:
      2. Their names and roles
      3. Pose some or all of the following questions/prompts to the group:
        • “Tell me about something you have created.”
        • “Tell me about a time you created a process or program considered risky.”
        • “Tell me about a situation in which you had to come up with several new ideas in a hurry. Were they accepted? Were they successful?”
        • “Tell me about a time you took a risk.”
        • “Tell me about one of your greatest failures and what you learned from it.”
    2. Once everyone has been introduced, present any work that has already been completed.
      1. If you have already completed a cycle, give a summary of each technology that you investigated and the results from any piloting.
      2. If this is the first cycle for the working group, present the information decided in Step 1.1.

    Input

    • Disruptive technology exploitation plan

    Output

    • Networking
    • Brainstorming

    Materials

    • Meeting agenda

    Participants

    • Core working group
    • Visionaries
    • Facilitator

    1.3.C Brainstorm about creating a better future for the company, the stakeholders, and the employees

    30 minutes

    Three sticky notes are depicted, at the top of each note are the following titles: What can we do better; How can we make a better future; How can we continue being successful

    1. Have everyone put up at least two ideas for each chart paper.
    2. Go around the room and discuss their ideas. You may generate some new ideas here.

    These generated ideas are organizational processes that can be improved or disrupted with emerging technologies. This list will be referenced throughout Phases 2 and 3.

    Input

    • Inspiration
    • Anonymous ideas

    Output

    • List of processes

    Materials

    • Chart paper and markers
    • Pen and paper

    Participants

    • Core working group
    • Visionaries

    1.3.D Begin brainstorming a longlist of future technology, and discuss how these technologies will impact the business

    30 minutes

    • Use the Disruptive Technology Research Database Tool to organize technologies and ideas. Longstanding working groups can track technologies here over the course of several years, updating the tool between meetings.
    • Guide the discussion with the following questions, and make sure to focus on the processes generated from Step 1.2.d.

    Focus on

    The Technology

    • What is the technology and what does it do?
    • What processes can it support?

    Experts and Other Organizations

    • What are the vendors saying about the technology?
    • Are similar organizations implementing the technology?

    Your Organization

    • Is the technology ready for wide-scale distribution?
    • Can the technology be tested and implemented now?

    The Technology’s Value

    • Is there any indication of the cost of the technology?
    • How much value will the technology bring?

    Download the Disruptive Technology Database Tool

    Input

    • Inspiration
    • List of processes

    Output

    • Initial longlist

    Materials

    • Chart paper and markers
    • Pen and paper
    • Disruptive Technology Research Database Tool

    Participants

    • Core working group
    • Visionaries

    1.3.E Explore these sources to generate your disruptive technology longlist for the next meeting

    30 Minutes

    There are many sources of information on new and emerging technology. Explore as many sources as you can.

    Science fiction is a valid source of learning. It drives and is influenced by disruptive technology.

    “…the inventor of the first liquid-fuelled rocket … was inspired by H.G. Wells’ science fiction novel War of the Worlds (1898). More recent examples include the 3D gesture-based user interface used by Tom Cruise’s character in Minority Report (2002), which is found today in most touch screens and the motion sensing capability of Microsoft’s Kinect. Similarly, the tablet computer actually first appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the communicator – which we’ve come to refer today as the mobile phone – was first used by Captain Kirk in Star Trek (1966).”
    – Emmanuel Tsekleves, senior lecturer, University of Lancaster

    Right sources: blogs, tech news sites, tech magazines, the tech section of business sites, popular science books about technology, conferences, trade publications, and vendor announcements

    Quantity over quality: early research is not the time to dismiss ideas.

    Discuss with your peers: spark new and innovative ideas

    Insert a brief summary of how independent research is conducted in Section 2.1 of the Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template.

    1.3.E (Cont.) Explore these sources to generate your disruptive technology longlist for the next meeting

    30 Minutes

    There are many sources of information on new and emerging technology. Use this list to kick-start your search.

    Connect with practitioners that are worth their weight in Reddit gold. Check out topic-based LinkedIn groups and subreddits such as r/sysadmin and r/tech. People experienced with technology frequent these groups.

    YouTube is for more than cat videos. Many vendors use YouTube for distributing their previous webinars. There are also videos showcasing various technologies that are uploaded by lecturers, geeks, researchers, and other technology enthusiasts.

    Test your reasonability. Check your “Think Like a Futurist” Tool

    Resolve

    Evaluate Disruptive Technologies

    PHASE 2

    Phase 2: Resolve

    Evaluate disrupted technologies

    Activities:

    Step 2.1: Create and Winnow a Longlist
    Step 2.2: Assess Shortlist

    Info-Tech Insight

    Long to short … that’s the short of it. Using SWOT, value readiness, and quadrant mapping review sessions will focus the longlist, creating a shortlist of potential PoC candidates to review and consider.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group
    • Infrastructure Management

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Finalized longlist
    • Finalized shortlist
    • Initial analysis of each technology on the shortlist

    Step 2.1

    Create and winnow a longlist

    Activities:

    1. Converge everyone’s longlists
    2. Narrow technologies from the longlist down to a shortlist using Info-Tech’s Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool
    3. Use the shortlisting tool to help participants visualize the potential
    4. Input the technologies on your longlist into the Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool to produce a shortlist

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group members

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Finalized longlist
    • Finalized shortlist
    • Initial analysis of each technology on the shortlist

    2.1 Organize a meeting with the core working group to combine your longlists and create a shortlist

    1 hour

    Plan enough time to talk about each technology on the list. Each technology was included for a reason.

    • Start with the longlist. Review the longlist compiled at the initial meeting, and then have everyone present the lists that they independently researched.
    • Focus on the company’s context. Make sure that the working group analyzes these disruptive technologies in the context of the organization.
    • Start to compile the shortlist. Begin narrowing down the longlist by excluding technologies that are not relevant.

    Meeting Agenda (Sample)

    TimeActivity
    8:00am-9:30amConverge longlists
    9:30am-10:00amBreak
    10:00am-10:45amDiscuss tech in organizational context
    10:45am-11:15amBegin compiling the shortlist

    Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template

    2.1.A Converge the longlists developed by your team

    90 minutes

    • Start with the longlist developed at the initial meeting. Write this list on the whiteboard.
    • If applicable, have a member present the longlist that was created in the last cycle. Remove technologies that:
      • Are no longer disruptive (e.g. have been implemented or rejected).
      • Have become foundational.
    • Eliminate redundancy: remove items that are very similar.
    • Have members “pitch” items on their lists:
      • Explain why their technologies will be disruptive (2-5 minutes maximum)
      • Add new technologies to the whiteboard
    • Record the following for metrics:
      • Each presented technology
      • Reasons the technology could be disruptive
      • Source of the information
    • Use Info-Tech’s Disruptive Technology Research Database Tool as a starting point.

    Insert the final longlist into Section 2.2 of your Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template.

    Input

    • Longlist developed at first meeting
    • Independent research
    • Previous longlist

    Output

    • Finalized longlist

    Materials

    • Disruptive Technology Research Database Tool
    • Whiteboard and markers
    • Virtual whiteboard

    Participants

    • Core working group

    Review the list of processes that were brainstormed by the visionary group, and ask for input from others

    • IT innovation is most highly valued by the C-suite when it improves business processes, reduces costs, and improves core products and services.
    • By incorporating this insight into your working group’s analysis, you help to attract the attention of senior management and reinforce the group’s necessity.
    • Any input you can get from outside of IT will help your group understand how technology can be disruptive.
      • Visionaries consulted in Phase 1 are a great source for this insight.
    • The list of processes that they helped to brainstorm in Step 1.2 reflects processes that can be impacted by technology.
    • Info-Tech’s research has shown time and again that both CEOs and CIOs want IT to innovate around:
      • Improving business processes
      • Improving core products and services
      • Reducing costs

    Improved business processes

    80%

    Core product and service improvement

    48%

    Reduced costs

    48%

    Increased revenues

    23%

    Penetration into new markets

    21%

    N=364 CXOs & CIOs from the CEO-CIO Alignment Diagnostic Questions were asked on a 7-point scale of 1 = Not at all to 7 = Very strongly. Results are displayed as percentage of respondents selecting 6 or 7.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The disruptive tech team is prestigious. If your organization is large enough or has the resources, consider having this meeting in an offsite location. This will drive excitement to join the working group if the opportunity arises and incentivize good work.

    2.1.B Narrow technologies from the longlist down to a shortlist using Info-Tech’s Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool

    90 minutes

    To decide which technology has potential for your organization, have the working group or workshop participants evaluate each technology:

    1. Record each potentially disruptive technology in the longlist on a whiteboard.
    2. Making sure to carefully consider the meaning of the terms, have each member of the group evaluate each technology as “high” or “low” along each of the axes, innovation and transformation, on a piece of paper.
    3. The facilitator collects each piece of paper and inputs the results by technology into the Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool.
    Technology Innovation Transformation
    Conversational Commerce High High

    Insert the final shortlist into Section 2.2 of your Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template.

    Input

    • Longlist
    • Futurist brainstorming

    Output

    • Shortlist

    Materials

    • Disruptive Technology Research Database Tool
    • Whiteboard and markers
    • Virtual whiteboard

    Participants

    • Core working group

    Disruptive technologies are innovative and transformational

    Innovation

    Transformation

    • Elements:
      • Creative solution to a problem that is relatively new on the scene.
      • It is different, counterintuitive, or insightful or has any combination of these qualities.
    • Questions to Ask:
      • How new is the technology?
      • How different is the technology?
      • Have you seen anything like it before? Is it counterintuitive?
      • Does it offer an insightful solution to a persistent problem?
    • Example:
      • The sharing economy: Today, simple platforms allow people to share rides and lodgings cheaply and have disrupted traditional services.
    • Elements:
      • Positive change to the business process.
      • Highly impactful: impacts a wide variety of roles in a company in a nontrivial way or impacts a smaller number of roles more significantly.
    • Questions to Ask:
      • Will this technology have a big impact on business operations?
      • Will it add substantial value? Will it change the structure of the company?
      • Will it impact a significant number of employees in the organization?
    • Example:
      • Flash memory improved storage technology incrementally by building on an existing foundation.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Technology can be transformational but not innovative. Not every new technology is disruptive. Even where technology has improved the efficiency of the business, if it does this in an incremental way, it might not be worth exploring using this storyboard.

    2.1.C Use the shortlisting tool to help participants visualize the potential

    1 hour

    Use the Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool, tabs 2 and 3.

    Assign quadrants

    • Input group members’ names and the entire longlist (up to 30 technologies) into tab 2 of the Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool.
    • On tab 3 of the Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool, input the quadrant number that corresponds to the innovation and transformation scores each participant has assigned to each technology.

    Note

    This is an assessment meant to serve as a guide. Use discretion when moving forward with a proof-of-concept project for any potentially disruptive technology.

    Participant Evaluation Quadrant
    High Innovation, High Transformation 1
    High Innovation, Low Transformation 2
    Low Innovation, Low Transformation 3
    Low Innovation, High Transformation 4

    four quadrants are depicted, labeled 1-4. The quadrants are coloured as follows: 1- green; 2- yellow; 3; red; 4; yellow

    2.1.D Use the Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool to produce a shortlist

    1 hour

    Use the Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool, tabs 3 and 4.

    Use the populated matrix and the discussion list to arrive at a shortlist of four to six potentially disruptive technologies.

    • The tool populates each quadrant based on how many votes it received in the voting exercise.
    • Technologies selected for a particular quadrant by a majority of participants are placed in the quadrant on the graph. Where there was no consensus, the technology is placed in the discussion list.
    • Technologies in the upper right quadrant – high transformation and high innovation – are more likely to be good candidates for a proof-of-concept project. Those in the bottom left are likely to be poor candidates, while those in the remaining quadrants are strong on one of the axes and are unlikely candidates for further systematic evaluation.

    This image contains a screenshot from tab 3 of the Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool.

    Input the results of the vote into tab 3 of the Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool.

    This image contains a screenshot from tab 4 of the Disruptive Technology Shortlisting Tool.

    View the results on tab 4.

    Phase 2: Resolve

    Evaluate disrupted technologies

    Activities:

    Step 2.1: Create and Winnow a Longlist
    Step 2.2:- Assess Shortlist

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group
    • Infrastructure Management

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Finalized longlist
    • Finalized shortlist
    • Initial analysis of each technology on the shortlist

    Assess Shortlist

    Activities:

    1. Assess the value of each technology to your organization by breaking it down into quality and cost
    2. Investigate the overall readiness of the technologies on the shortlist
    3. Interpret each technology’s value score
    4. Conduct a SWOT analysis for each technology on the shortlist
    5. Use Info-Tech’s disruptive technology shortlist analysis to visualize the tool’s outputs
    6. Select the shortlisted technologies you would like to move forward with

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group members
    • IT Management

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Finalized shortlist
    • Initial analysis of each technology on the shortlist

    2.2 Evaluate technologies based on their value and readiness, and conduct a SWOT analysis for each one

    Use the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    • A technology monitor diagram prioritizes investment in technology by analyzing its readiness and value.
      • Readiness: how close the technology is to being practical and implementable in your industry and organization.
      • Value: how worthwhile the technology is, in terms of its quality and its cost.
    • Value and readiness questionnaires are included in the tool to help determine current and future values for each, and the next four slides explain the ratings further.
    • Categorize technology by its value-readiness score, and evaluate how much potential value each technology has and how soon your company can realize that value.
    • Use a SWOT analysis to qualitatively evaluate the potential that each technology has for your organization in each of the four categories (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats).

    The technology monitor diagram appears in tab 9 of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    This image depicts tab 9 of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    2.2.A Assess the value of each technology to your organization by breaking it down into quality and cost

    1 hour

    Update the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool, tab 4.

    Populate the chart to produce a score for each technology’s overall value to the company conceptualized as the interaction of quality and cost.

    Overall Value

    Quality Cost

    Each technology, if it has a product associated with it, can be evaluated along eight dimensions of quality. Consider how well the product performs, its features, its reliability, its conformance, its durability, its serviceability, its aesthetics, and its perceived quality.

    IT budgets are broken down into capital and operating expenditures. A technology that requires a significant investment along either of these lines is unlikely to produce a positive return. Also consider how much time it will take to implement and operate each technology.

    The value assessment is part of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    This image contains a screenshot from tab 4 of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Watch your costs: Technology that seems cheap at first can actually be expensive over time. Be sure to account for operational and opportunity costs as well.

    2.2.B Investigate the overall readiness of the technologies on the shortlist

    1 hour

    Update the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool, tab 4.

    Overall Readiness

    Age

    How much time has the technology had to mature? Older technology is more likely to be ready for adoption.

    Venture Capital

    The amount of venture capital gathered by important firms in the space is an indicator of market faith.

    Market Size

    How big is the market for the technology? It is more difficult to break into a giant market than a niche market.

    Market Players

    Have any established vendors (Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc.) thrown their weight behind the technology?

    Fragmentation

    A large number of small companies in the space indicates that the market has yet to reach equilibrium.

    The readiness assessment is part of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    This image contains a screenshot of the Readiness Scoring tab of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool.

    Use a variety of sources to populate the chart

    Google is your friend: search each shortlisted technology to find details about its development and important vendors.

    Websites like Crunchbase, VentureBeat, and Mashable are useful sources for information on the companies involved in a space and the amount of money they have each raised.

    2.2.C Interpret each technology’s value score

    1 hour

    Insert the result of the SWOT analysis into tab 7 of Info-Tech’s Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool.

    Visualize the results of the quality-cost analysis

    • Quality and cost are independently significant; it is essential to understand how each technology stacks up on the axes.
    • Use tab 6 of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool for an illustration of how quality and cost interact to produce each technology’s final position on the tech monitor graph.
    • Remember: the score is notional and reflects the values that you have assigned. Be sure to treat it accordingly.

    This image contains a screenshot of the Value Analysis tab of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    Green represents a technology that scores extremely high on one axis or the other, or quite high on both. These technologies are the best candidates for proof-of-concept projects from a value perspective.

    Red represents a technology that has scored very low on both axes. These technologies will be expensive, time consuming, and of poor quality.

    Yellow represents the fuzzy middle ground. These technologies score moderately on both axes. Be especially careful when considering the SWOT analysis of these technologies.

    2.2.D Conduct a SWOT analysis for each technology on the shortlist

    1 hour

    Use tab 6 of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool.

    A formal process for analyzing disruptive technology is the only way to ensure that it is taken seriously.

    Write each technology as a heading on a whiteboard. Spend 10-15 minutes on each technology conducting a SWOT analysis together.

    Consider four categories for each technology:

    • Strengths: Current uses of the technology or supporting technology and ways in which it helps your organization.
    • Weaknesses: Current limitations of the technology and challenges or barriers to adopting it in your organization.
    • Opportunities: Potential uses of the technology, especially as it advances or improves.
    • Threats: Potential negative disruptions resulting from the technology, especially as it advances or improves.

    The list of processes generated at the cycle’s initial meeting is a great source for opportunities and threats.

    Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    This image contains screenshots of the technology tab of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool.

    2.2.E Use Info-Tech’s disruptive technology shortlist analysis to visualize the tool’s outputs

    1 hour

    Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool, tab 9

    The tool’s final tab displays the results of the value-readiness analysis and the SWOT analysis in a single location.

    This image contains a screenshot from tab 9 of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    Insert the shortlist analysis report into Section 3 of your Disruptive Technology Exploitation Plan Template.

    2.2.F Select the shortlisted technologies you would like to move forward with

    1 hour

    Present your findings to the working group.

    • The Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool aggregates your inputs in an easy-to-read, consistent way.
    • Present the tool’s outputs to members of the core working group.
    • Explain the scoring and present the graphic to the group. Go over each technology’s strengths and weaknesses as well as the opportunities and threats it presents/poses to the organization.
    • Go through the proof-of-concept planning phase before striking any technologies from the list.

    This image contains a screenshot of the disruptive technology shortlist analysis from the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool

    Info-Tech Insight

    A technology’s exceptional value and immediate usability make it the best. A technology can be promising and compelling, but it is unsuitable unless it can bring immediate and exceptional value to your organization. Don’t get caught up in the hype.

    Evaluate

    Create an Action Plan to Exploit Disruptive Technologies

    PHASE 3

    Phase 3: Evaluate

    Create an Action Plan to Exploit Disruptive Technologies

    Activities:

    Step 3.1: Create Process Maps
    Step 3.2: Develop Proof of Concept Charter

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group
    • Infrastructure Management
    • Working group leader
    • CIO

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Business process maps before and after disruption
    • Proof of concept charter
    • Key performance indicators
    • Estimation of required resources

    Step 3.1

    Create Process Maps

    Activities:

    1. Creating a problem canvas by identifying stakeholders, jobs, pains, and gains
    2. Clarify the problem the proof-of-concept project will solve
    3. Identify jobs and stakeholders
    4. Outline how disruptive technology will solve the problem
    5. Map business processes
    6. Identify affected business units
    7. Outline and map the business processes likely to be disrupted
    8. Recognize how the new technology will impact business processes
    9. Make the case: Outline why the new business process is superior to the old

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Working group leader
    • CIO

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Business process maps before and after disruption

    3.1 Create an action plan to exploit disruptive technologies

    Clarify the problem in order to make the case. Fill in section 1.1 of Info-Tech’s Proof of Concept Template to clearly outline the problem each proof of concept is designed to solve.

    Establish roles and responsibilities. Use section 1.2 of the template to outline the roles and responsibilities that fall to each member of the team. Ensure that clear lines of authority are delineated and that the list of stakeholders is exhaustive: include the executives whose input will be required for project approval, all the way to the technicians on the frontline responsible for implementing it.

    Outline the solution to the problem. Demonstrate how each proof-of-concept project provides a solution to the problem outlined in section 1.1. Be sure to clarify what makes the particular technology under investigation a potential solution and record the results in section 1.3.

    This image contains a screenshot of the Proof of concept project template

    Use the Proof of Concept Project Template to track the information you gather throughout Phase 3.

    3.1.A Creating a problem canvas by identifying stakeholders, jobs, pains, and gains

    2 hours

    Instructions:

    1. On a whiteboard, draw the visual canvas supplied below.
    2. Select your issue area, and list jobs, pains, and gains in the associated sections.
    3. Record the pains, jobs, and gains in sections 1.1-1.3 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    Gains

    1. More revenue

    2. Job security

    3. ……

    Jobs

    1. Moving product

    2. Per sale value

    3. ……

    Pains

    1. Clunky website

    2. Bad site navigation

    3. ……

    Input

    • Inspiration
    • Anonymous ideas

    Output

    • List of processes

    Materials

    • Chart paper and markers
    • Pen and paper

    Participants

    • Core working group
    • Visionaries

    3.1.B Clarify the problem the proof-of-concept project will solve

    2 hours

    What is the problem?

    • Every technology is designed to solve a problem faced by somebody somewhere. For each technology that your team has decided to move forward with, identify and clearly state the problem it would solve.
    • A clear problem statement is a crucial part of a new technology’s business case. It is impossible to earn buy-in from the rest of the organization without demonstrating the necessity of a solution.
    • Perfection is impossible to achieve: during the course of their work, everyone encounters pain points. Identify those pain points to arrive at the problem that needs to be solved.

    Example:

    List of pains addressed by conversational commerce:

    • Search functions can be clunky and unresponsive.
    • Corporate websites can be difficult to navigate.
    • Customers are uncomfortable in unfamiliar internet environments.
    • Customers do not like waiting in a long queue to engage with customer service representatives when they have concerns.

    “If I were given one hour to solve a problem, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.”
    – Albert Einstein

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 1.1 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    3.1.C Identify jobs and stakeholders

    1 hour

    Jobs

    Job: Anything that the “customer” (the target of the solution) needs to get done but that is complicated by a pain.

    Examples:
    The job of the conversational commerce interface is to make selling products easier for the company.
    From the customer perspective, the job of the conversational interface is to make the act of purchasing a product simpler and easier.

    Stakeholders

    Stakeholder: Anyone who is impacted by the new technology and who will end up using, approving, or implementing it.

    Examples:
    The executive is responsible for changing the company’s direction and approving investment in a new sales platform.
    The IT team is responsible for implementing the new technology.
    Marketing will be responsible for selling the change to customers.
    Customers, the end users, will be the ones using the conversational commerce user interface.

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 1.2 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Process deconstruction reveals strengths and weaknesses. Promising technology should improve stakeholders’ abilities to do jobs.

    3.1.D Outline how disruptive technology will solve the problem

    1 hour

    How will the technology in question make jobs easier?

    • How will the disruptive technology you have elected to move forward with create gains for the organization?
    • First, identify the gains that are supposed to come with the project. Consider the benefits that the various stakeholders expect to derive from the jobs identified.
    • Second, make note of how the technology in question facilitates the gains you have noted. Be sure to articulate the exclusive features of the new technology that make it an improvement over the current state.

    Note: The goal of this exercise is to make the case for a particular technology. Sell it!

    Expected Gain: Increase in sales.

    Conversational Commerce’s Contribution: Customers are more likely to purchase products using interfaces they are comfortable with.

    Expected Gain: Decrease in costs.

    Conversational Commerce’s Contribution: Customers who are satisfied with the conversational interface are less likely to interact with live agents, saving labor costs.

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 1.3 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    3.1.E Map business processes

    1 hour

    Map the specific business processes the new technology will impact.

    • Disruptive technologies will impact a wide variety of business processes.
    • Map business processes to visualize what parts of your organization (departments, silos, divisions) will be impacted by the new technology, should it be adopted after the proof of concept.
    • Identify how the disruption will take place.
    • Demonstrate the value of each technology by including the results of the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool with your process map.

    This image contains a screenshot of the Proof of concept project template

    Use the Proof of Concept Project Template to track the information you gather throughout Phase 3.

    3.1.F Identify affected business units

    30 minutes per technology

    Disruptive technology will impact business units.

    • Using the stakeholders identified earlier in the project, map each technology to the business units that will be affected.
    • Make your list exhaustive. While some technologies will have a limited impact on the business as a whole, others will have ripple effects throughout the organization.
    • Examine affected units at all scales: How will the technology impact operations at the team level? The department level? The division level?

    “The disruption is not just in the technology. Sometimes a good business model can be the disruptor.”
    – Jason Hong, Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon

    Example:

    • Customer service teams: Conversational commerce will replace some of the duties of the customer service representative. They will have to reorganize to account for this development.
    • IT department: The IT department will be responsible for building/maintaining the conversational interface (or, more likely, they will be responsible for managing the contract with the vendor).
    • Sales analytics: New data from customers in natural language might provide a unique opportunity for the analytics team to develop new initiatives to drive sales growth.

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 2.1 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    3.1.G Outline and map the business processes likely to be disrupted

    15 minutes per technology

    Leverage the insights of the diverse working group.

    • Processes are designed to transform inputs into outputs. All business activities can be mapped into processes.
    • A process map illustrates the sequence of actions and decisions that transform an input into an output.
    • Effective mapping gives managers an “aerial” view of the company’s processes, making it easier to identify inefficiencies, reduce waste, and ultimately, streamline operations.
    • To identify business processes, have group members familiar with the affected business units identify how jobs are typically accomplished within those units.

    “To truly understand a business process, we need information from both the top-down and bottom-up points of view. Informants higher in the organizational hierarchy with a strategic focus are less likely to know process details or problems. But they might advocate and clearly articulate an end-to-end, customer-oriented philosophy that describes the process in an idealized form. Conversely, the salespeople, customer service representatives, order processors, shipping clerks, and others who actually carry out the processes will be experts about the processes, their associated documents, and problems or exception cases they encounter.”
    – Robert J. Glushko, Professor at UC Berkeley and Tim McGrath, Business Consultant

    Info-Tech Insight

    Opinions gathered from a group that reflect the process in question are far more likely to align with your organization’s reality. If you have any questions about a particular process, do not be afraid to go outside of the working group to ask someone who might know.

    3.1.G Outline and map the business processes likely to be disrupted (continued)

    15 minutes per technology

    Create a simple diagram of identified processes.

    • Use different shapes to identify different points in the process.
    • Rectangles represent actions, diamonds represent decisions.
    • On a whiteboard, map out the actions and decisions that take place to transform an input into an output.
    • Input the result into section 2.2 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    This image contains a screenshot of the Software Service Cross-Function Process tab from Edraw Visualization Solutions.

    Source: Edraw Visualization Solutions

    Example: simplified process map

    1. User: visits company website
    2. User: engages search function or browses links
    3. User: selects and purchases product from a menu
    4. Company: ships product to customer

    3.1.H Recognize how the new technology will impact business processes

    15 minutes per technology

    Using the information gleaned from the previous activities, develop a new process map that takes the new technology into account.

    Identify the new actions or decisions that the new technology will affect.

    User: visits company website; User: engages conversational; commerce platform; User: engages search function or browses links; User: makes a natural language query; User: selects and purchases product from a menu</p data-verified=

    User: selects and purchases product from a menu; Company: ships product to customer; Company: ships product to customer">

    Info-Tech Insight

    It’s ok to fail! The only way to know you’re getting close to the “knee of curve" is from multiple failed PoC tests. The more PoC options you have, the more likely it will be that you will have two to three successful results.

    3.1.I Make the case: Outline why the new business process is superior to the old

    15 minutes per technology

    Articulate the main benefits of the new process.

    • Using the revised process map, make the case for each new action.
    • Questions to consider: How does the new technology relieve end-user/customer pains? How does the new technology contribute to the streamlining of the business process? Who will benefit from the new action? What are the implications of those benefits?
    • Record the results of this exercise in section 2.4 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    This image contains an example of an outline comparing the benefits of new and the old business processes.

    Info-Tech Insight

    If you cannot articulate how a new technology will benefit a business process, reconsider moving forward with the proof-of-concept project.

    Phase 3: Evaluate

    Create an Action Plan to Exploit Disruptive Technologies

    Activities:

    Step 3.1: Create Process Maps
    Step 3.2: Develop Proof of Concept Charter

    Develop Proof of Concept Charter

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Core working group
    • Infrastructure Management
    • Working group leader
    • CIO

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Business process maps before and after disruption
    • Proof of concept charter
    • Key performance indicators
    • Estimation of required resources

    Step 3.2

    Develop Proof of Concept Charter

    Activities:

    1. Use SMART success metrics to define your objectives
    2. Develop key performance indicators (KPIs)
    3. Identify key success factors for the project
    4. Outline the project’s scope
    5. Identify the structure of the team responsible for the proof-of-concept project
    6. Estimate the resources required by the project
    7. Be aware of common IT project concerns
    8. Communicate your working group’s findings and successes to a wide audience
    9. Hand off the completed proof-of-concept project plan
    10. Disruption is constant: Repeat the evaluation process regularly to protect the business

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Working group leader
    • CIO

    Outcomes of this step:

    • Proof of concept charter
    • Key performance indicators
    • Estimation of required resources

    3.2 Develop a proof of concept charter

    Keep your proof of concept on track by defining five key dimensions.

    1. Objective: Giving an overview of the planned proof of concept will help to focus and clarify the rest of this section. What must the proof of concept achieve? Objectives should be: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound. Outline and track key performance indicators.
    2. Key Success Factors: These are conditions that will positively impact the proof of concept’s success.
    3. Scope: High-level statement of scope. More specifically, state what is in scope and what is out of scope.
    4. Project Team: Identify the team’s structure, e.g. sponsors, subject-matter experts.
    5. Resource Estimation: Identify what resources (time, materials, space, tools, expertise, etc.) will be needed to build and socialize your prototype. How will they be secured?

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 3.0 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    3.2.A Use SMART success metrics to define your objectives

    Specific

    Measurable

    Actionable

    Realistic

    Time Bound

    Make sure the objective is clear and detailed.

    Objectives are measurable if there are specific metrics assigned to measure success. Metrics should be objective.

    Objectives become actionable when specific initiatives designed to achieve the objective are identified.

    Objectives must be achievable given your current resources or known available resources.

    An objective without a timeline can be put off indefinitely. Furthermore, measuring success is challenging without a timeline.

    Who, what, where, why?

    How will you measure the extent to which the goal is met?

    What is the action-oriented verb?

    Is this within my capabilities?

    By when: deadline, frequency?

    Examples:

    1. Increase in sales by $40,000 per month by the end of next quarter.
    2. Immediate increase in web traffic by 600 unique page views per day.
    3. Number of pilots approved per year.
    4. Number of successfully deployed solutions per year.

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 3.0 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    3.2.B Develop key performance indicators (KPIs)

    30 minutes per technology

    Key performance indicators allow for rigorous analysis, which generates insight into utilization by platform and consumption by business activity.

    • Use the process improvements identified in step 3.1 to brainstorm metrics that indicate when process improvement is actually taking place.
    • Have members of the group pitch KPIs; the facilitator should record each suggestion on a whiteboard.
    • Make sure to have everyone justify the inclusion of each metric: How does it relate to the improvement that the proof of concept project is intended to drive? How does it relate to the overall goals of the business?
    • Include a list of KPIs, along with a description and a target (ensuring that it aligns with SMART metrics) in section 3.1 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    “An estimated 70% of performance measurement systems fail after implementation. Carefully select your KPIs and avoid this trap!”
    Source: Collins et al. 2016

    Key Performance Indicator Description Target

    Result

    Conversion rate What percentage of customers who visit the site/open the conversational interface continue on to make a purchase? 40%
    Average order value

    How much does each customer spend per visit to the website?

    $212
    Repeat customer rate What percentage of customers have made more than one purchase over time? 65%
    Lifetime customer value Over the course of their interaction with the company, what is the typical value each customer brings? $1566

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 3.1 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    3.2.C Identify key success factors for the project

    30 minutes per technology

    Effective project management involves optimizing four key success factors (Clarke, 1999)

    • Communication: Communicate the expected changes to stakeholders, making sure that everyone who needs to know does know. Example: Make sure customer service representatives know their duties will be impacted by the conversational UI well before the proof-of-concept project begins.
    • Clarity: All involved in the project should be apprised of what the project is intended to accomplish and what the project is not intended to accomplish. Example: The conversational commerce project is not intended to be rolled out to the entire customer base all at once; it is not intended to disrupt normal online sales.
    • Compartmentalization: The working group should suggest some ways that the project can be broken down to facilitate its effective implementation. Example: Sales provides details of customers who might be amenable to a trial, IT secures a vendor, customer service writes a script.
    • Flexibility: The working group’s final output should not be treated as gospel. Ensure that the document can be altered to account for unexpected events. Example: The conversational commerce platform might drive sales of a particular product more than others, necessitating adjustments at the warehouse and shipping level.

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 3.0 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    3.2.D Outline the project’s scope

    10 minutes per technology

    Create a high-level outline of the project’s scope.

    • Questions to consider: Broadly speaking, what are the project’s goals? What is the desired future state? Where in the company will the project be rolled out? What are some of the company’s goals that the project is not designed to cover?
    • Be sure to avoid scope creep! Remember: The goal of the proof-of-concept project is to produce a minimum case for viability in a carefully defined area. Reserve a detailed accounting of costs and benefits for the post-proof-of-concept stage.
    • Example: The conversational user interface will only be rolled out in an e-commerce setting. Other business units (HR, for example) are beyond the scope of this particular project.

    “Although scope creep is not the only nemesis a project can have, it does tend to have the farthest reach. Without a properly defined project and/or allowing numerous changes along the way, a project can easily go over budget, miss the deadline, and wreak havoc on project success.”
    – University Alliance, Villanova University

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 3.0 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    3.2.E Identify the structure of the team responsible for the proof-of-concept project

    10 minutes per technology

    Brainstorm who will be involved in project implementation.

    • Refer back to the list of stakeholders identified in 3.1.a. Which stakeholders should be involved in implementing the proof-of-concept plan?
    • What business units do they represent?
    • Who should be accountable for the project? At a high level, sketch the roles of each of the participants. Who will be responsible for doing the work? Who will approve it? Who needs to be informed at every stage? Who are the company’s internal subject matter experts?

    Example

    Name/Title Role
    IT Manager Negotiate the contract for the software with vendor
    CMO Promote the conversational interface to customers

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 3.0 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    3.2.F Estimate the resources required by the project

    10 minutes per technology

    Time and Money

    • Recall: Costs can be operational, capital, or opportunity.
    • Revisit the Disruptive Technology Value-Readiness and SWOT Analysis Tool. Record the capital and operational expenses expected to be associated with each technology, and add detail where possible (use exact figures from particular vendors instead of percentages).
    • Write the names and titles of each expected participant in the project on a whiteboard. Next to each name, write the number of hours they are expected to devote to the project and include a rough estimate of the cost of their participation to the company. Use full-time employee equivalent (FTE measures) as a base.
    • Outline how other necessary resources (space, tools, expertise, etc.) will be secured.

    Example: Conversational Commerce

    • OpEx: $149/month + 2.9¢/transaction* (2,000 estimated transactions)
    • CapEx: $0!
    • IT Manager: 5 hours at $100/hour
    • IT Technician: 40 hours at $45/hour
    • CMO: 1 hour at $300/hour
    • Customer Service Representative: 10 hours at $35/hour
    • *Estimated total cost for a one-month proof-of-concept project: $3,157

    *This number is a sample taken from the vendor Rhombus

    Input the results of this exercise into Section 3.0 of the Proof of Concept Template.

    3.2.G Be aware of common IT project concerns

    Of projects that did not meet business expectations or were cancelled, how significant were the following issues?

    A bar graph is depicted, comparing small, medium, and large businesses for the following datasets: Over budget; Project failed to be delivered on time; Breach of scope; Low quality; Failed to deliver expected benefit or value

    This survey data did not specifically address innovation projects.

    • Disruptive technology projects will be under increased scrutiny in comparison to other projects.
    • Be sure to meet deadlines and stay within budget.
    • Be cognizant that your projects can go out of scope, and there will be projects that may have to be cancelled due to low quality. Remember: Even a failed test is a learning opportunity!

    Info-Tech’s CIO-CEO Alignment Survey, N=225

    Organization size was determined by the number of IT employees within the organization

    Small = 10 or fewer IT staff, medium = 11 to 25 IT staff, and large/enterprise = 26 or greater IT staff

    3.2.H Communicate your working group’s findings and successes to a wide audience

    Advertise the group’s successes and help prevent airline magazine syndrome from occurring.

    • Share your group’s results internally:
      • Run your own analysis by senior management and then share it across the organization.
      • Maintain a list of technologies that the working group has analyzed and solicit feedback from the wider organization.
      • Post summaries of the technologies in a publicly available repository. The C-suite may not read it right away, but it will be easy to provide when they ask.
      • If senior management has declined to proceed with a certain technology, avoid wasting time and resources on it. However, include notes about why the technology was rejected.
    • These postings will also act as an advertisement for the group. Use the garnered interest to attract visionaries for the next cycle.
    • These postings will help to reiterate the innovative value of the IT department and help bring you to the decision-making table.

    “Some CIOs will have to battle the bias that they belong in the back office and shouldn’t be included in product architecture planning. CIOs must ‘sell’ IT’s strength in information architecture.”
    – Chris Curran, Chief Technologist, PwC (Curran, 2014)

    Info-Tech Insight

    Cast a wide net. By sharing your results with as many people as possible within your organization, you’ll not only attract more attention to your working group, but you will also get more feedback and ideas.

    3.2.I Hand off the completed proof-of-concept project plan

    The proof of concept template is filled out – now what?

    • The core working group is responsible for producing a vision of the future and outlining new technology’s disruptive potential. The actual implementation of the proof of concept (purchasing the hardware, negotiating the SLA with the vendor) is beyond the working group’s responsibilities.
    • If the proof of concept goes ahead, the facilitator should block some time to evaluate the completed project against the key performance indicators identified in the initial plan.
    • A cure for airline magazine syndrome: Be prepared when executives ask about new technology. Present them with the results of the shortlist analysis and the proof-of-concept plan. A clear accounting of the value, readiness, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats posed by each technology, along with its impact on business processes, is an invaluable weapon against poor technology choices.

    Use section 3.2.b to identify the decision-making stakeholder who has the most to gain from a successful proof-of-concept project. Self-interest is a powerful motivator – the project is more likely to succeed in the hands of a passionate champion.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Set a date for the first meeting of the new iteration of the disruptive technology working group before the last meeting is done. Don’t risk pushing it back indefinitely.

    3.2.J Hand off the completed proof-of-concept project plan

    Record the results of the proof of concept. Keep track of what worked and what didn’t.

    Repeat the process regularly.

    • Finalize the proof of concept template, but don’t stop there: Keep your ear to the ground; follow tech developments using the sources identified in step 1.2.
    • Continue expanding the potential longlist with independent research: Be prepared to expand your longlist. Remember, the more technologies you have on the longlist, the more potential airline magazine syndrome cures you have access to.
    • Have the results of the previous session’s proof of concept plan on hand: At the start of each new iteration, conduct a review. What technologies were successful beyond the proof of concept phase? Which parts of the process worked? Which parts did not? How could they be improved?

    Info-Tech Insight

    The key is in anticipation. This is not a one-and-done exercise. Technology innovation operates at a faster pace than ever before, well below the Moores Law "18 month" timeline as an example. Success is in making EDIT a repeatable process.

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    Research contributors and experts

    Nitin Babel

    Nitin Babel, Co-Founder, niki.ai

    Nitin Babel, MSc, co-created conversational commerce platform niki.ai in early 2015. Since then, the technology has been featured on the front page of the Economic Times, and has secured the backing of Ratan Tata, former chairman of the Tata Group, one of the largest companies in the world.

    Mark Hubbard

    Mark Hubbard, Senior Vice President, FirstOnSite

    Mark is the SVP for Information Technology in Canada with FirstOnSite, a full service disaster recovery and property restoration company. Mark has over 25 years of technology leadership guiding global organizations through the development of strategic and tactical plans to strengthen their technology platforms and implement business aligned technology strategies.

    Chris Green

    Chris Green, Enterprise Architect, Boston Private
    Chris is an IT architect with over 15 years’ experience designing, building, and implementing solutions. He is a results-driven leader and contributor, skilled in a broad set of methods, tools, and platforms. He is experienced with mobile, web, enterprise application integration, business process, and data design.

    Andrew Kope

    Andrew Kope, Head of Data Analytics
    Big Blue Bubble
    Andrew Kope, MSc, oversees a team that develops and maintains a user acquisition tracking solution and a real-time metrics dashboard. He also provides actionable recommendations to the executive leadership of Big Blue Bubble – one of Canada’s largest independent mobile game development studios.

    Jason Hong

    Jason Hong, Associate Professor, School of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

    Jason Hong is a member of the faculty at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. His research focus lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction, privacy and security, and systems. He is a New America National Cyber Security Fellow (2015-2017) and is widely published in academic and industry journals.

    Tim Lalonde

    Tim Lalonde, Vice President, Mid-Range

    Tim Lalonde is the VP of Technical Operations at Mid-Range. He works with leading-edge companies to be more competitive and effective in their industries. He specializes in developing business roadmaps leveraging technology that create and support change from within — with a focus on business process re-engineering, architecture and design, business case development and problem-solving. With over 30 years of experience in IT, Tim’s guiding principle remains simple: See a problem, fix a problem.

    Jon Mavor

    Jon Mavor, Co-Founder and CTO, Envelop VR
    Jon Mavor is a programmer and entrepreneur, whose past work includes writing the graphics engine for the PC game Total Annihilation. As Chief Technology Officer of Envelop VR, a virtual reality start-up focused on software for the enterprise, Jon has overseen the launch of Envelop for Windows’s first public beta.

    Dan Pitt

    Dan Pitt, President, Palo Alto Innovation Advisors
    Dan Pitt is a network architect who has extensive experience in both the academy and industry. Over the course of his career, Dan has served as Executive Director of the Open Networking Foundation, Dean of Engineering at Santa Clara University, Vice President of Technology and Academic Partnerships at Nortel, Vice President of the Architecture Lab at Bay Networks, and, currently, as President of Palo Alto Innovation Advisors, where he advises and serves as an executive for technology start-ups in the Palo Alto area and around the world.

    Courtney Smith

    Courtney Smith, Co-Founder, Executive Creative Director
    PureMatter

    Courtney Smith is an accomplished creative strategist, storyteller, writer, and designer. Under her leadership, PureMatter has earned hundreds of creative awards and been featured in the PRINT International Design Annual. Courtney has juried over 30 creative competitions, including Creativity International. She is an invited member of the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts.

    Emmanuel Tsekleves

    Emmanuel Tsekleves, Senior Lecturer in Design Interactions, University of Lancaster
    Dr. Emmanuel Tsekleves is a senior lecturer and writer based out of the United Kingdom. Emmanuel designs interactions between people, places, and products by forging creative design methods along with digital technology. His design-led research in the areas of health, ageing, well-being, and defence has generated public interest and attracted media attention by the national press, such as the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Times, the Daily Mail, Discovery News, and several other international online media outlets.

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    Establish Data Governance

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    • Parent Category Name: Data Management
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    • Organizations are faced with challenges associated with changing data landscapes, evolving business models, industry disruptions, regulatory and compliance obligations, as well as changing and maturing user landscapes and demands for data.
    • Although the need for a data governance program is often evident, organizations often miss the mark.
    • Your data governance efforts should be directly aligned to delivering measurable business value by supporting key strategic initiatives, value streams, and underlying business capabilities.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Your organization’s value streams and their associated business capabilities require effectively governed data. Without this, you may experience elevated operational costs, missed opportunities, eroded stakeholder satisfaction, and exposure to increased business risk.
    • Ensure your data governance program delivers measurable business value by aligning the associated data governance initiatives with the business architecture.
    • Data governance must continuously align with the organization’s enterprise governance function. It should not be perceived as a pet project of IT, but rather as an enterprise-wide, business-driven initiative.

    Impact and Result

    Info-Tech’s approach to establishing and sustaining effective data governance is anchored in the strong alignment of organizational value streams and their business capabilities with key data governance dimensions and initiatives. Info-Tech's approach will help you:

    • Align your data governance with enterprise governance, business strategy, and the organizational value streams to ensure the program delivers measurable business value.
    • Understand your current data governance capabilities and build out a future state that is right-sized and relevant.
    • Define data governance leadership, accountability, and responsibility.
    • Ensure data governance is supported by an operating model that effectively manages change and communication and fosters a culture of data excellence.

    Establish Data Governance Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Data Governance Research – A step-by-step document to ensure that the people handling the data are involved in the decisions surrounding data usage, data quality, business processes, and change implementation.

    Data governance is a strategic program that will help your organization control data by managing the people, processes, and information technology needed to ensure that accurate and consistent data policies exist across varying lines of the business, enabling data-driven insight. This research will provide an overview of data governance and its importance to your organization, assist in making the case and securing buy-in for data governance, identify data governance best practices and the challenges associated with them, and provide guidance on how to implement data governance best practices for a successful launch.

    • Establish Data Governance – Phases 1-3

    2. Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook – A structured tool to assist with establishing effective data governance practices.

    This workbook will help your organization understand the business and user context by leveraging your business capability map and value streams, develop data use cases using Info-Tech's framework for building data use cases, and gauge the current state of your organization's data culture.

    • Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook

    3. Data Use Case Framework Template – An exemplar template to highlight and create relevant use cases around the organization’s data-related problems and opportunities.

    This business needs gathering activity will highlight and create relevant use cases around data-related problems or opportunities that are clear and contained and, if addressed, will deliver value to the organization. This template provides a framework for data requirements and a mapping methodology for creating use cases.

    • Data Use Case Framework Template

    4. Data Governance Initiative Planning and Roadmap Tool – A visual roadmapping tool to assist with establishing effective data governance practices.

    This tool will help your organization plan the sequence of activities, capture start dates and expected completion dates, and create a roadmap that can be effectively communicated to the organization.

    • Data Governance Initiative Planning and Roadmap Tool

    5. Business Data Catalog – A comprehensive template to help you to document the key data assets that are to be governed based on in-depth business unit interviews, data risk/value assessments, and a data flow diagram for the organization.

    Use this template to document information about key data assets such as data definition, source system, possible values, data sensitivity, data steward, and usage of the data.

    • Business Data Catalog

    6. Data Governance Program Charter Template – A program charter template to sell the importance of data governance to senior executives.

    This template will help get the backing required to get a data governance project rolling. The program charter will help communicate the project purpose, define the scope, and identify the project team, roles, and responsibilities.

    • Data Governance Program Charter Template

    7. Data Governance Policy

    This policy establishes uniform data governance standards and identifies the shared responsibilities for assuring the integrity of the data and that it efficiently and effectively serves the needs of your organization.

    • Data Governance Policy

    8. Data Governance Exemplar – An exemplar showing how you can plan and document your data governance outputs.

    Use this exemplar to understand how to establish data governance in your organization. Follow along with the sections of the blueprint Establish Data Governance and complete the document as you progress.

    • Data Governance Exemplar
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Establish Data Governance

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Establish Business Context and Value

    The Purpose

    Identify key business data assets that need to be governed.

    Create a unifying vision for the data governance program.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understand the value of data governance and how it can help the organization better leverage its data.

    Gain knowledge of how data governance can benefit both IT and the business.

    Activities

    1.1 Establish business context, value, and scope of data governance at the organization

    1.2 Introduction to Info-Tech’s data governance framework

    1.3 Discuss vision and mission for data governance

    1.4 Understand your business architecture, including your business capability map and value streams

    1.5 Build use cases aligned to core business capabilities

    Outputs

    Sample use cases (tied to the business capability map) and a repeatable use case framework

    Vision and mission for data governance

    2 Understand Current Data Governance Capabilities and Plot Target-State Levels

    The Purpose

    Assess which data contains value and/or risk and determine metrics that will determine how valuable the data is to the organization.

    Assess where the organization currently stands in data governance initiatives.

    Determine gaps between the current and future states of the data governance program.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Gain a holistic understanding of organizational data and how it flows through business units and systems.

    Identify which data should fall under the governance umbrella.

    Determine a practical starting point for the program.

    Activities

    2.1 Understand your current data governance capabilities and maturity

    2.2 Set target-state data governance capabilities

    Outputs

    Current state of data governance maturity

    Definition of target state

    3 Build Data Domain to Data Governance Role Mapping

    The Purpose

    Determine strategic initiatives and create a roadmap outlining key steps required to get the organization to start enabling data-driven insights.

    Determine timing of the initiatives.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Establish clear direction for the data governance program.

    Step-by-step outline of how to create effective data governance, with true business-IT collaboration.

    Activities

    3.1 Evaluate and prioritize performance gaps

    3.2 Develop and consolidate data governance target-state initiatives

    3.3 Define the role of data governance: data domain to data governance role mapping

    Outputs

    Target-state data governance initiatives

    Data domain to data governance role mapping

    4 Formulate a Plan to Get to Your Target State

    The Purpose

    Consolidate the roadmap and other strategies to determine the plan of action from Day One.

    Create the required policies, procedures, and positions for data governance to be sustainable and effective.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Prioritized initiatives with dependencies mapped out.

    A clearly communicated plan for data governance that will have full business backing.

    Activities

    4.1 Identify and prioritize next steps

    4.2 Define roles and responsibilities and complete a high-level RACI

    4.3 Wrap-up and discuss next steps and post-workshop support

    Outputs

    Initialized roadmap

    Initialized RACI

    Further reading

    Establish Data Governance

    Deliver measurable business value.

    Executive Brief

    Analyst Perspective

    Establish a data governance program that brings value to your organization.

    Picture of analyst

    Data governance does not sit as an island on its own in the organization – it must align with and be driven by your enterprise governance. As you build out data governance in your organization, it’s important to keep in mind that this program is meant to be an enabling framework of oversight and accountabilities for managing, handling, and protecting your company’s data assets. It should never be perceived as bureaucratic or inhibiting to your data users. It should deliver agreed-upon models that are conducive to your organization’s operating culture, offering clarity on who can do what with the data and via what means. Data governance is the key enabler for bringing high-quality, trusted, secure, and discoverable data to the right users across your organization. Promote and drive the responsible and ethical use of data while helping to build and foster an organizational culture of data excellence.

    Crystal Singh

    Director, Research & Advisory, Data & Analytics Practice

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    The amount of data within organizations is growing at an exponential rate, creating a need to adopt a formal approach to governing data. However, many organizations remain uninformed on how to effectively govern their data. Comprehensive data governance should define leadership, accountability, and responsibility related to data use and handling and be supported by a well-oiled operating model and relevant policies and procedures. This will help ensure the right data gets to the right people at the right time, using the right mechanisms.

    Common Obstacles

    Organizations are faced with challenges associated with changing data landscapes, evolving business models, industry disruptions, regulatory and compliance obligations, and changing and maturing user landscape and demand for data. Although the need for a data governance program is often evident, organizations miss the mark when their data governance efforts are not directly aligned to delivering measurable business value. Initiatives should support key strategic initiatives, as well as value streams and their underlying business capabilities.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    Info-Tech’s approach to establishing and sustaining effective data governance is anchored in the strong alignment of organizational value streams and their business capabilities with key data governance dimensions and initiatives. Organizations should:

    • Align their data governance with enterprise governance, business strategy and value streams to ensure the program delivers measurable business value.
    • Understand their current data governance capabilities so as to build out a future state that is right-sized and relevant.
    • Define data leadership, accountability, and responsibility. Support these with an operating model that effectively manages change and communication and fosters a culture of data excellence.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your organization’s value streams and the associated business capabilities require effectively governed data. Without this, you face elevated operating costs, missed opportunities, eroded stakeholder satisfaction, and increased business risk.

    Your challenge

    This research is designed to help organizations build and sustain an effective data governance program.

    • Your organization has recognized the need to treat data as a corporate asset for generating business value and/or managing and mitigating risk.
    • This has brought data governance to the forefront and highlighted the need to build a performance-driven enterprise program for delivering quality, trusted, and readily consumable data to users.
    • An effective data governance program is one that defines leadership, accountability, and responsibility related to data use and handling. It’s supported by a well-oiled operating model and relevant policies and procedures, all of which help build and foster a culture of data excellence where the right users get access to the right data at the right time via the right mechanisms.

    As you embark on establishing data governance in your organization, it’s vital to ensure from the get-go that you define the drivers and business context for the program. Data governance should never be attempted without direction on how the program will yield measurable business value.

    “Data processing and cleanup can consume more than half of an analytics team’s time, including that of highly paid data scientists, which limits scalability and frustrates employees.” – Petzold, et al., 2020

    Image is a circle graph and 30% of it is coloured with the number 30% in the middle of the graph

    “The productivity of employees across the organization can suffer.” – Petzold, et al., 2020

    Respondents to McKinsey’s 2019 Global Data Transformation Survey reported that an average of 30% of their total enterprise time was spent on non-value-added tasks because of poor data quality and availability. – Petzold, et al., 2020

    Common obstacles

    Some of the barriers that make data governance difficult to address for many organizations include:

    • Gaps in communicating the strategic value of data and data governance to the organization. This is vital for securing senior leadership buy-in and support, which, in turn, is crucial for sustained success of the data governance program.
    • Misinterpretation or a lack of understanding about data governance, including what it means for the organization and the individual data user.
    • A perception that data governance is inhibiting or an added layer of bureaucracy or complication rather than an enabling and empowering framework for stakeholders in their use and handling of data.
    • Embarking on data governance without firmly substantiating and understanding the organizational drivers for doing so. How is data governance going to support the organization’s value streams and their various business capabilities?
    • Neglecting to define and measure success and performance. Just as in any other enterprise initiative, you have to be able to demonstrate an ROI for time, resources and funding. These metrics must demonstrate the measurable business value that data governance brings to the organization.
    • Failure to align data governance with enterprise governance.
    Image is a circle graph and 78% of it is coloured with the number 78% in the middle of the graph

    78% of companies (and 92% of top-tier companies) have a corporate initiative to become more data-driven. – Alation, 2020

    Image is a circle graph and 58% of it is coloured with the number 58% in the middle of the graph

    But despite these ambitions, there appears to be a “data culture disconnect” – 58% of leaders overestimate the current data culture of their enterprises, giving a grade higher than the one produced by the study. – Fregoni, 2020

    The strategic value of data

    Power intelligent and transformative organizational performance through leveraging data.

    Respond to industry disruptors

    Optimize the way you serve your stakeholders and customers

    Develop products and services to meet ever-evolving needs

    Manage operations and mitigate risk

    Harness the value of your data

    The journey to being data-driven

    The journey to declaring that you are a data-driven organization requires a pit stop at data enablement.

    The Data Economy

    Data Disengaged

    You have a low appetite for data and rarely use data for decision making.

    Data Enabled

    Technology, data architecture, and people and processes are optimized and supported by data governance.

    Data Driven

    You are differentiating and competing on data and analytics; described as a “data first” organization. You’re collaborating through data. Data is an asset.

    Data governance is essential for any organization that makes decisions about how it uses its data.

    Data governance is an enabling framework of decision rights, responsibilities, and accountabilities for data assets across the enterprise.

    Data governance is:

    • Executed according to agreed-upon models that describe who can take what actions with what information, when, and using what methods (Olavsrud, 2021).
    • True business-IT collaboration that will lead to increased consistency and confidence in data to support decision making. This, in turn, helps fuel innovation and growth.

    If done correctly, data governance is not:

    • An annoying, finger-waving roadblock in the way of getting things done.
    • Meant to solve all data-related business or IT problems in an organization.
    • An inhibitor or impediment to using and sharing data.

    Info-Tech’s Data Governance Framework

    An image of Info-Tech's Data Governance Framework

    Create impactful data governance by embedding it within enterprise governance

    A model is depicted to show the relationship between enterprise governance and data governance.

    Organizational drivers for data governance

    Data governance personas:

    Conformance: Establishing data governance to meet regulations and compliance requirements.

    Performance: Establishing data governance to fuel data-driven decision making for driving business value and managing and mitigating business risk.

    Two images are depicted that show the difference between conformance and performance.

    Data Governance is not a one-person show

    • Data governance needs a leader and a home. Define who is going to be leading, driving, and steering data governance in your organization.
    • Senior executive leaders play a crucial role in championing and bringing visibility to the value of data and data governance. This is vital for building and fostering a culture of data excellence.
    • Effective data governance comes with business and IT alignment, collaboration, and formally defined roles around data leadership, ownership, and stewardship.
    Four circles are depicted. There is one person in the circle on the left and is labelled: Data Governance Leadership. The circle beside it has two people in it and labelled: Organizational Champions. The circle beside it has three people in it and labelled: Data Owners, Stewards & Custodians. The last circle has four people in it and labelled: The Organization & Data Storytellers.

    Traditional data governance organizational structure

    A traditional structure includes committees and roles that span across strategic, tactical, and operational duties. There is no one-size-fits-all data governance structure. However, most organizations follow a similar pattern when establishing committees, councils, and cross-functional groups. Most organizations strive to identify roles and responsibilities at a strategic and operational level. Several factors will influence the structure of the program, such as the focus of the data governance project and the maturity and size of the organization.

    A triangular model is depicted and is split into three tiers to show the traditional data governance organizational structure.

    A healthy data culture is key to amplifying the power of your data.

    “Albert Einstein is said to have remarked, ‘The world cannot be changed without changing our thinking.’ What is clear is that the greatest barrier to data success today is business culture, not lagging technology. “– Randy Bean, 2020

    What does it look like?

    • Everybody knows the data.
    • Everybody trusts the data.
    • Everybody talks about the data.

    “It is not enough for companies to embrace modern data architectures, agile methodologies, and integrated business-data teams, or to establish centers of excellence to accelerate data initiatives, when only about 1 in 4 executives reported that their organization has successfully forged a data culture.”– Randy Bean, 2020

    Data literacy is an essential part of a data-driven culture

    • In a data-driven culture, decisions are made based on data evidence, not on gut instinct.
    • Data often has untapped potential. A data-driven culture builds tools and skills, builds users’ trust in the condition and sources of data, and raises the data skills and understanding among their people on the front lines.
    • Building a data culture takes an ongoing investment of time, effort, and money. This investment will not achieve the transformation you want without data literacy at the grassroots level.

    Data-driven culture = “data matters to our company”

    Despite investments in data initiative, organizations are carrying high levels of data debt

    Data debt is “the accumulated cost that is associated with the sub-optimal governance of data assets in an enterprise, like technical debt.”

    Data debt is a problem for 78% of organizations.

    40% of organizations say individuals within the business do not trust data insights.

    66% of organizations say a backlog of data debt is impacting new data management initiatives.

    33% of organizations are not able to get value from a new system or technology investment.

    30% of organizations are unable to become data-driven.

    Source: Experian, 2020

    Absent or sub-optimal data governance leads to data debt

    Only 3% of companies’ data meets basic quality standards. (Source: Nagle, et al., 2017)

    Organizations suspect 28% of their customer and prospect data is inaccurate in some way. (Source: Experian, 2020)

    Only 51% of organizations consider the current state of their CRM or ERP data to be clean, allowing them to fully leverage it. (Source: Experian, 2020)

    35% of organizations say they’re not able to see a ROI for data management initiatives. (Source: Experian, 2020)

    Embrace the technology

    Make the available data governance tools and technology work for you:

    • Data catalog
    • Business data glossary
    • Data lineage
    • Metadata management

    While data governance tools and technologies are no panacea, leverage their automated and AI-enabled capabilities to augment your data governance program.

    Logos of data governance tools and technology.

    Measure success to demonstrate tangible business value

    Put data governance into the context of the business:

    • Tie the value of data governance and its initiatives back to the business capabilities that are enabled.
    • Leverage the KPIs of those business capabilities to demonstrate tangible and measurable value. Use terms and language that will resonate with senior leadership.

    Don’t let measurement be an afterthought:

    Start substantiating early on how you are going to measure success as your data governance program evolves.

    Build a right-sized roadmap

    Formulate an actionable roadmap that is right-sized to deliver value in your organization.

    Key considerations:

    • When building your data governance roadmap, ensure you do so through an enterprise lens. Be cognizant of other initiatives that might be coming down the pipeline that may require you to align your data governance milestones accordingly.
    • Apart from doing your planning with consideration for other big projects or launches that might be in-flight and require the time and attention of your data governance partners, also be mindful of the more routine yet still demanding initiatives.
    • When doing your roadmapping, consider factors like the organization’s fiscal cycle, typical or potential year-end demands, and monthly/quarterly reporting periods and audits. Initiatives such as these are likely to monopolize the time and focus of personnel key to delivering on your data governance milestones.

    Sample milestones:

    Data Governance Leadership & Org Structure Definition

    Define the home for data governance and other key roles around ownership and stewardship, as approved by senior leadership.

    Data Governance Charter and Policies

    Create a charter for your program and build/refresh associated policies.

    Data Culture Diagnostic

    Understand the organization’s current data culture, perception of data, value of data, and knowledge gaps.

    Use Case Build and Prioritization

    Build a use case that is tied to business capabilities. Prioritize accordingly.

    Business Data Glossary

    Build and/or refresh the business’ glossary for addressing data definitions and standardization issues.

    Tools & Technology

    Explore the tools and technology offering in the data governance space that would serve as an enabler to the program. (e.g. RFI, RFP).

    Key takeaways for effective business-driven data governance

    Data governance leadership and sponsorship is key.

    Ensure strategic business alignment.

    Build and foster a culture of data excellence.

    Evolve along the data journey.

    Make data governance an enabler, not a hindrance.

    Insight summary

    Overarching insight

    Your organization’s value streams and the associated business capabilities require effectively governed data. Without this, you face the impact of elevated operational costs, missed opportunities, eroded stakeholder satisfaction, and exposure to increased business risk.

    Insight 1

    Data governance should not sit as an island in your organization. It must continuously align with the organization’s enterprise governance function. It shouldn’t be perceived as a pet project of IT, but rather as an enterprise-wide, business-driven initiative.

    Insight 2

    Ensure your data governance program delivers measurable business value by aligning the associated data governance initiatives with the business architecture. Leverage the measures of success or KPIs of the underlying business capabilities to demonstrate the value data governance has yielded for the organization.

    Insight 3

    Data governance remains the foundation of all forms of reporting and analytics. Advanced capabilities such as AI and machine learning require effectively governed data to fuel their success.

    Tactical insight

    Tailor your data literacy program to meet your organization’s needs, filling your range of knowledge gaps and catering to your different levels of stakeholders. When it comes to rolling out a data literacy program, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Your data literacy program is intended to fill the knowledge gaps about data, as they exist in your organization. It should be targeted across the board – from your executive leadership and management through to the subject matter experts across different lines of the business in your organization.

    Info-Tech’s methodology for establishing data governance

    1. Build Business and User Context 2. Understand Your Current Data Governance Capabilities 3. Build a Target State Roadmap and Plan
    Phase Steps
    1. Substantiate Business Drivers
    2. Build High-Value Use Cases for Data Governance
    1. Understand the Key Components of Data Governance
    2. Gauge Your Organization’s Current Data Culture
    1. Formulate an Actionable Roadmap and Right-Sized Plan
    Phase Outcomes
    • Your organization’s business capabilities and value streams
    • A business capability map for your organization
    • Categorization of your organization’s key capabilities
    • A strategy map tied to data governance
    • High-value use cases for data governance
    • An understanding of the core components of an effective data governance program
    • An understanding your organization’s current data culture
    • A data governance roadmap and target-state plan comprising of prioritized initiatives

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    Screenshot of Info-Tech's Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook data-verified=

    Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook

    Use the Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook as you plan, build, roll-out, and scale data governance in your organization.

    Screenshot of Info-Tech's Data Use Case Framework Template

    Data Use Case Framework Template

    This template takes you through a business needs gathering activity to highlight and create relevant use cases around the organization’s data-related problems and opportunities.

    Screenshot of Info-Tech's Business Data Glossary data-verified=

    Business Data Glossary

    Use this template to document the key data assets that are to be governed and create a data flow diagram for your organization.

    Screenshot of Info-Tech's Data Culture Diagnostic and Scorecard data-verified=

    Data Culture Diagnostic and Scorecard

    Leverage Info-Tech’s Data Culture Diagnostic to understand how your organization scores across 10 areas relating to data culture.

    Key deliverable:

    Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook

    Measure the value of this blueprint

    Leverage this blueprint’s approach to ensure your data governance initiatives align and support your key value streams and their business capabilities.

    • Aligning your data governance program and its initiatives to your organization’s business capabilities is vital for tracing and demonstrating measurable business value for the program.
    • This alignment of data governance with value streams and business capabilities enables you to use business-defined KPIs and demonstrate tangible value.
    Screenshot from this blueprint on the Measurable Business Value

    In phases 1 and 2 of this blueprint, we will help you establish the business context, define your business drivers and KPIs, and understand your current data governance capabilities and strengths.

    In phase 3, we will help you develop a plan and a roadmap for addressing any gaps and improving the relevant data governance capabilities so that data is well positioned to deliver on those defined business metrics.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    "Our team, has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

    Guided Implementation

    "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keeps us on track."

    Workshop

    "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

    Consulting

    "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

    Establish Data Governance project overview

    Contact your account representative for more information. workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    1. Build Business and User context2. Understand Your Current Data Governance Capabilities3. Build a Target State Roadmap and Plan
    Best-Practice Toolkit
    1. Substantiate Business Drivers
    2. Build High-Value Use Cases for Data Governance
    1. Understand the Key Components of Data Governance
    2. Gauge Your Organization’s Current Data Culture
    1. Formulate an Actionable Roadmap and Right-Sized Plan
    Guided Implementation
    • Call 1
    • Call 2
    • Call 3
    • Call 4
    • Call 5
    • Call 6
    • Call 7
    • Call 8
    • Call 9
    Phase Outcomes
    • Your organization’s business capabilities and value streams
    • A business capability map for your organization
    • Categorization of your organization’s key capabilities
    • A strategy map tied to data governance
    • High-value use cases for data governance
    • An understanding of the core components of an effective data governance program
    • An understanding your organization’s current data culture
    • A data governance roadmap and target-state plan comprising of prioritized initiatives

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    An outline of what guided implementation looks like.

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization. A typical GI is between 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

    Workshop overview

    Contact your account representative for more information. workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4
    Establish Business Context and Value Understand Current Data Governance Capabilities and Plot Target-State Levels Build Data Domain to Data Governance Role Mapping Formulate a Plan to Get to Your Target State
    Activities
    • Establish business context, value, and scope of data governance at the organization
    • Introduction to Info-Tech’s data governance framework
    • Discuss vision and mission for data governance
    • Understand your business architecture, including your business capability map and value streams
    • Build use cases aligned to core business capabilities
    • Understand your current data governance capabilities and maturity
    • Set target state data governance capabilities
    • Evaluate and prioritize performance gaps
    • Develop and consolidate data governance target-state initiatives
    • Define the role of data governance: data domain to data governance role mapping
    • Identify and prioritize next steps
    • Define roles and responsibilities and complete a high-level RACI
    • Wrap-up and discuss next steps and post-workshop support
    Deliverables
    1. Sample use cases (tied to the business capability map) and a repeatable use case framework
    2. Vision and mission for data governance
    1. Current state of data governance maturity
    2. Definition of target state
    1. Target-state data governance initiatives
    2. Data domain to data governance role mapping
    1. Initialized roadmap
    2. Initialized RACI

    Phase 1

    Build Business and User Context

    Three circles are in the image that list the three phases and the main steps. Phase 1 is highlighted.

    “When business users are invited to participate in the conversation around data with data users and IT, it adds a fundamental dimension — business context. Without a real understanding of how data ties back to the business, the value of analysis and insights can get lost.” – Jason Lim, Alation

    This phase will guide you through the following activities:

    • Identify Your Business Capabilities
    • Define your Organization’s Key Business Capabilities
    • Develop a Strategy Map that Aligns Business Capabilities to Your Strategic Focus

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Data Governance Leader/Data Leader (CDO)
    • Senior Business Leaders
    • Business SMEs
    • Data Leadership, Data Owners, Data Stewards and Custodians

    Step 1.1

    Substantiate Business Drivers

    Activities

    1.1.1 Identify Your Business Capabilities

    1.1.2 Categorize Your Organization’s Key Business Capabilities

    1.1.3 Develop a Strategy Map Tied to Data Governance

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Leverage your organization’s existing business capability map or initiate the formulation of a business capability map, guided by info-Tech’s approach
    • Determine which business capabilities are considered high priority by your organization
    • Map your organization’s strategic objectives to value streams and capabilities to communicate how objectives are realized with the support of data

    Outcomes of this step

    • A foundation for data governance initiative planning that’s aligned with the organization’s business architecture: value streams, business capability map, and strategy map

    Info-Tech Insight

    Gaining a sound understanding of your business architecture (value streams and business capabilities) is a critical foundation for establishing and sustaining a data governance program that delivers measurable business value.

    1.1.1 Identify Your Business Capabilities

    Confirm your organization's existing business capability map or initiate the formulation of a business capability map:

    • If you have an existing business capability map, meet with the relevant business owners/stakeholders to confirm that the content is accurate and up to date. Confirm the value streams (how your organization creates and captures value) and their business capabilities are reflective of the organization’s current business environment.
    • If you do not have an existing business capability map, follow this activity to initiate the formulation of a map (value streams and related business capabilities):
      1. Define the organization’s value streams. Meet with senior leadership and other key business stakeholders to define how your organization creates and captures value.
      2. Define the relevant business capabilities. Meet with senior leadership and other key business stakeholders to define the business capabilities.

    Note: A business capability defines what a business does to enable value creation. Business capabilities are business terms defined using descriptive nouns such as “Marketing” or “Research and Development.” They represent stable business functions, are unique and independent of each other, and typically will have a defined business outcome.

    Input

    • List of confirmed value streams and their related business capabilities

    Output

    • Business capability map with value streams for your organization

    Materials

    • Your existing business capability map or the template provided in the Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook accompanying this blueprint

    Participants

    • Key business stakeholders
    • Data stewards
    • Data custodians
    • Data Governance Working Group

    For more information, refer to Info-Tech’s Document Your Business Architecture.

    Define or validate the organization’s value streams

    Value streams connect business goals to the organization’s value realization activities. These value realization activities, in turn, depend on data.

    If the organization does not have a business architecture function to conduct and guide Activity 1.1.1, you can leverage the following approach:

    • Meet with key stakeholders regarding this topic, then discuss and document your findings.
    • When trying to identify the right stakeholders, consider: Who are the decision makers and key influencers? Who will impact this piece of business architecture related work? Who has the relevant skills, competencies, experience, and knowledge about the organization?
    • Engage with these stakeholders to define and validate how the organization creates value.
    • Consider:
      • Who are your main stakeholders? This will depend on the industry in which you operate. For example, customers, residents, citizens, constituents, students, patients.
      • What are your stakeholders looking to accomplish?
      • How does your organization’s products and/or services help them accomplish that?
      • What are the benefits your organization delivers to them and how does your organization deliver those benefits?
      • How do your stakeholders receive those benefits?

    Align data governance to the organization's value realization activities.

    Value streams enable the organization to create or capture value in the market in which it operates by engaging in a set of interconnected activities.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your organization’s value streams and the associated business capabilities require effectively governed data. Without this, you face the possibilities of elevated operational costs, missed opportunities, eroded stakeholder satisfaction, negative impact to reputation and brand, and/or increased exposure to business risk.

    Example of value streams – Retail Banking

    Value streams connect business goals to the organization’s value realization activities.

    Example value stream descriptions for: Retail Banking

    Value streams enable the organization to create or capture value in the market in which it operates by engaging in a set of interconnected activities.

    Model example of value streams for retail banking.

    For this value stream, download Info-Tech’s Info-Tech’s Industry Reference Architecture for Retail Banking.

    Example of value streams – Higher Education

    Value streams connect business goals to the organization’s value realization activities.

    Example value stream descriptions for: Higher Education

    Value streams enable the organization to create or capture value in the market in which it operates by engaging in a set of interconnected activities.

    Model example of value streams for higher education

    For this value stream, download Info-Tech’s Industry Reference Architecture for Higher Education.

    Example of value streams – Local Government

    Value streams connect business goals to the organization’s value realization activities.

    Example value stream descriptions for: Local Government

    Value streams enable the organization to create or capture value in the market in which it operates by engaging in a set of interconnected activities.

    Model example of value streams for local government

    For this value stream, download Info-Tech’s Industry Reference Architecture for Local Government.

    Example of value streams – Manufacturing

    Value streams connect business goals to the organization’s value realization activities.

    Example value stream descriptions for: Manufacturing

    Value streams enable the organization to create or capture value in the market in which it operates by engaging in a set of interconnected activities.

    Model example of value streams for manufacturing

    For this value stream, download Info-Tech’s Industry Reference Architecture for Manufacturing.

    Example of value streams – Retail

    Value streams connect business goals to the organization’s value realization activities.

    Example value stream descriptions for: Retail

    Model example of value streams for retail

    Value streams enable the organization to create or capture value in the market in which it operates by engaging in a set of interconnected activities.

    For this value stream, download Info-Tech’s Industry Reference Architecture for Retail.

    Define the organization’s business capabilities in a business capability map

    A business capability defines what a business does to enable value creation. Business capabilities represent stable business functions and typically will have a defined business outcome.

    Business capabilities can be thought of as business terms defined using descriptive nouns such as “Marketing” or “Research and Development.”

    If your organization doesn’t already have a business capability map, you can leverage the following approach to build one. This initiative requires a good understanding of the business. By working with the right stakeholders, you can develop a business capability map that speaks a common language and accurately depicts your business.

    Working with the stakeholders as described above:

    • Analyze the value streams to identify and describe the organization’s capabilities that support them.
    • Consider: What is the objective of your value stream? (This can highlight which capabilities support which value stream.)
    • As you initiate your engagement with your stakeholders, don’t start a blank page. Leverage the examples on the next slides as a starting point for your business capability map.
    • When using these examples, consider: What are the activities that make up your particular business? Keep the ones that apply to your organization, remove the ones that don’t, and add any needed.

    Align data governance to the organization's value realization activities.

    Info-Tech Insight

    A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organization’s business capabilities and hence represents a view of what your data governance program must support.

    For more information, refer to Info-Tech’s Document Your Business Architecture.

    Example business capability map – Retail Banking

    A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organization’s business capabilities and hence represents a view of what your data governance program must support.

    Validate your business capability map with the right stakeholders, including your executive team, business unit leaders, and/or other key stakeholders.

    Info-Tech Tip:

    Leverage your business capability map verification session with these key stakeholders as a prime opportunity to share and explain the role of data and data governance in supporting the very value realization capabilities under discussion. This will help to build awareness and visibility of the data governance program.

    Example business capability map for: Retail Banking

    Model example business capability map for retail banking

    For this business capability map, download Info-Tech’s Industry Reference Architecture for Retail Banking.

    Example business capability map – Higher Education

    A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organization’s business capabilities and hence represents a view of what your data governance program must support.

    Validate your business capability map with the right stakeholders, including your executive team, business unit leaders, and/or other key stakeholders.

    Info-Tech Tip:

    Leverage your business capability map verification session with these key stakeholders as a prime opportunity to share and explain the role of data and data governance in supporting the very value realization capabilities under discussion. This will help to build awareness and visibility of the data governance program.

    Example business capability map for: Higher Education

    Model example business capability map for higher education

    For this business capability map, download Info-Tech’s Industry Reference Architecture for Higher Education.

    Example business capability map – Local Government

    A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organization’s business capabilities and hence represents a view of what your data governance program must support.

    Validate your business capability map with the right stakeholders, including your executive team, business unit leaders, and/or other key stakeholders.

    Info-Tech Tip:

    Leverage your business capability map verification session with these key stakeholders as a prime opportunity to share and explain the role of data and data governance in supporting the very value realization capabilities under discussion. This will help to build awareness and visibility of the data governance program.

    Example business capability map for: Local Government

    Model example business capability map for local government

    For this business capability map, download Info-Tech’s Industry Reference Architecture for Local Government.

    Example business capability map – Manufacturing

    A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organization’s business capabilities and hence represents a view of what your data governance program must support.

    Validate your business capability map with the right stakeholders, including your executive team, business unit leaders, and/or other key stakeholders.

    Info-Tech Tip:

    Leverage your business capability map verification session with these key stakeholders as a prime opportunity to share and explain the role of data and data governance in supporting the very value realization capabilities under discussion. This will help to build awareness and visibility of the data governance program.

    Example business capability map for: Manufacturing

    Model example business capability map for manufacturing

    For this business capability map, download Info-Tech’s Industry Reference Architecture for Manufacturing.

    Example business capability map - Retail

    A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organization’s business capabilities and hence represents a view of what your data governance program must support.

    Validate your business capability map with the right stakeholders, including your executive team, business unit leaders, and/or other key stakeholders.

    Info-Tech Tip:

    Leverage your business capability map verification session with these key stakeholders as a prime opportunity to share and explain the role of data and data governance in supporting the very value realization capabilities under discussion. This will help to build awareness and visibility of the data governance program.

    Example business capability map for: Retail

    Model example business capability map for retail

    For this business capability map, download Info-Tech’s Industry Reference Architecture for Retail.

    1.1.2 Categorize Your Organization’s Key Capabilities

    Determine which capabilities are considered high priority in your organization.

    1. Categorize or heatmap the organization’s key capabilities. Consult with senior and other key business stakeholders to categorize and prioritize the business’ capabilities. This will aid in ensuring your data governance future state planning is aligned with the mandate of the business. One approach to prioritizing capabilities with business stakeholders is to examine them through the lens of cost advantage creators, competitive advantage differentiators, and/or by high value/high risk.
    2. Identify cost advantage creators. Focus on capabilities that drive a cost advantage for your organization. Highlight these capabilities and prioritize programs that support them.
    3. Identify competitive advantage differentiators. Focus on capabilities that give your organization an edge over rivals or other players in your industry.

    This categorization/prioritization exercise helps highlight prime areas of opportunity for building use cases, determining prioritization, and the overall optimization of data and data governance.

    Input

    • Strategic insight from senior business stakeholders on the business capabilities that drive value for the organization

    Output

    • Business capabilities categorized and prioritized (e.g. cost advantage creators, competitive advantage differentiators, high value/high risk)

    Materials

    • Your existing business capability map or the business capability map derived in the previous activity

    Participants

    • Key business stakeholders
    • Data stewards
    • Data custodians
    • Data Governance Working Group

    For more information, refer to Info-Tech’s Document Your Business Architecture.

    Example of business capabilities categorization or heatmapping – Retail

    This exercise is useful in ensuring the data governance program is focused and aligned to support the priorities and direction of the business.

    • Depending on the mandate from the business, priority may be on developing cost advantage. Hence the capabilities that deliver efficiency gains are the ones considered to be cost advantage creators.
    • The business’ priority may be on maintaining or gaining a competitive advantage over its industry counterparts. Differentiation might be achieved in delivering unique or enhanced products, services, and/or experiences, and the focus will tend to be on the capabilities that are more end-stakeholder-facing (e.g. customer-, student-, patient,- and/or constituent-facing). These are the organization’s competitive advantage creators.

    Example: Retail

    Example of business capabilities categorization or heatmapping – Retail

    For this business capability map, download Info-Tech’s Industry Reference Architecture for Retail.

    1.1.3 Develop a Strategy Map Tied to Data Governance

    Identify the strategic objectives for the business. Knowing the key strategic objectives will drive business-data governance alignment. It’s important to make sure the right strategic objectives of the organization have been identified and are well understood.

    1. Meet with senior business leaders and other relevant stakeholders to help identify and document the key strategic objectives for the business.
    2. Leverage their knowledge of the organization’s business strategy and strategic priorities to visually represent how these map to value streams, business capabilities, and, ultimately, to data and data governance needs and initiatives. Tip: Your map is one way to visually communicate and link the business strategy to other levels of the organization.
    3. Confirm the strategy mapping with other relevant stakeholders.

    Guide to creating your map: Starting with strategic objectives, map the value streams that will ultimately drive them. Next, link the key capabilities that enable each value stream. Then map the data and data governance to initiatives that support those capabilities. This is one approach to help you prioritize the data initiatives that deliver the most value to the organization.

    Input

    • Strategic objectives as outlined by the organization’s business strategy and confirmed by senior leaders

    Output

    • A strategy map that maps your organizational strategic objectives to value streams, business capabilities, and, ultimately, to data program

    Materials

    Participants

    • Key business stakeholders
    • Data stewards
    • Data custodians
    • Data Governance Working Group

    Download Info-Tech’s Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook

    Example of a strategy map tied to data governance

    • Strategic objectives are the outcomes that the organization is looking to achieve.
    • Value streams enable an organization to create and capture value in the market through interconnected activities that support strategic objectives.
    • Business capabilities define what a business does to enable value creation in value streams.
    • Data capabilities and initiatives are descriptions of action items on the data and data governance roadmap and which will enable one or multiple business capabilities in its desired target state.

    Info-Tech Tip:

    Start with the strategic objectives, then map the value streams that will ultimately drive them. Next, link the key capabilities that enable each value stream. Then map the data and data governance initiatives that support those capabilities. This process will help you prioritize the data initiatives that deliver the most value to the organization.

    Example: Retail

    Example of a strategy map tied to data governance for retail

    For this strategy map, download Info-Tech’s Industry Reference Architecture for Retail.

    Step 1.2

    Build High-Value Use Cases for Data Governance

    Activities

    1.2.1 Build High-Value Use Cases

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Leveraging your categorized business capability map to conduct deep-dive sessions with key business stakeholders for creating high-value uses cases
    • Discussing current challenges, risks, and opportunities associated with the use of data across the lines of business
    • Exploring which other business capabilities, stakeholder groups, and business units will be impacted

    Outcomes of this step

    • Relevant use cases that articulate the data-related challenges, needs, or opportunities that are clear and contained and, if addressed ,will deliver value to the organization

    Info-Tech Tip

    One of the most important aspects when building use cases is to ensure you include KPIs or measures of success. You have to be able to demonstrate how the use case ties back to the organizational priorities or delivers measurable business value. Leverage the KPIs and success factors of the business capabilities tied to each particular use case.

    1.2.1 Build High-Value Use Cases

    This business needs-gathering activity will highlight and create relevant use cases around data-related problems or opportunities that are clear and contained and, if addressed, will deliver value to the organization.

    1. Bring together key business stakeholders (data owner, stewards, SMEs) from a particular line of business as well as the relevant data custodian(s) to build cases for their units. Leverage the business capability map you created for facilitating this act.
    2. Leverage Info-Tech’s framework for data requirements and methodology for creating use cases, as outlined in the Data Use Case Framework Template and seen on the next slide.
    3. Have the stakeholders move through each breakout session outlined in the Use Case Worksheet. Use flip charts or a whiteboard to brainstorm and document their thoughts.
    4. Debrief and document results in the Data Use Case Framework Template
    5. Repeat this exercise with as many lines of the business as possible, leveraging your business capability map to guide your progress and align with business value.

    Tip: Don’t conclude these use case discussions without substantiating what measures of success will be used to demonstrate the business value of the effort to produce the desired future state, as relevant to each particular use case.

    Input

    • Value streams and business capabilities as defined by business leaders
    • Business stakeholders’ subject area expertise
    • Data custodian systems, integration, and data knowledge

    Output

    • Use cases that articulate data-related challenges, needs or opportunities that are tied to defined business capabilities and hence if addressed will deliver measurable value to the organization.

    Materials

    • Your business capability map from activity 1.1.1
    • Info-Tech’s Data Use Case Framework Template
    • Whiteboard or flip charts (or shared screen if working remotely)
    • Markers/pens

    Participants

    • Key business stakeholders
    • Data stewards and business SMEs
    • Data custodians
    • Data Governance Working Group

    Download Info-Tech’s Data Use Case Framework Template

    Info-Tech’s Framework for Building Use Cases

    Objective: This business needs-gathering activity will highlight and create relevant use cases around data-related problems or opportunities that are clear and contained and, if addressed, will deliver value to the organization.

    Leveraging your business capability map, build use cases that align with the organization’s key business capabilities.

    Consider:

    • Is the business capability a cost advantage creator or an industry differentiator?
    • Is the business capability currently underserved by data?
    • Does this need to be addressed? If so, is this risk- or value-driven?

    Info-Tech’s Data Requirements and Mapping Methodology for Creating Use Cases

    1. What business capability (or capabilities) is this use case tied to for your business area(s)?
    2. What are your data-related challenges in performing this today?
    3. What are the steps in this process/activity today?
    4. What are the applications/systems used at each step today?
    5. What data domains are involved, created, used, and/or transformed at each step today?
    6. What does an ideal or improved state look like?
    7. What other business units, business capabilities, activities, and/or processes will be impacted or improved if this issue was solved?
    8. Who are the stakeholders impacted by these changes? Who needs to be consulted?
    9. What are the risks to the organization (business capability, revenue, reputation, customer loyalty, etc.) if this is not addressed?
    10. What compliance, regulatory, and/or policy concerns do we need to consider in any solution?
    11. What measures of success or change should we use to prove the value of the effort (such as KPIs, ROI)? What is the measurable business value of doing this?

    The resulting use cases are to be prioritized and leveraged for informing the business case and the data governance capabilities optimization plan.

    Taken from Info-Tech’s Data Use Case Framework Template

    Phase 2

    Understand Your Current Data Governance Capabilities

    Three circles are in the image that list the three phases and the main steps. Phase 2 is highlighted.

    This phase will guide you through the following activities:

    • Understand the Key Components of Data Governance
    • Gauge Your Organization’s Current Data Culture

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Data Leadership
    • Data Ownership & Stewardship
    • Policies & Procedures
    • Data Literacy & Culture
    • Operating Model
    • Data Management
    • Data Privacy & Security
    • Enterprise Projects & Services

    Step 2.1

    Understand the Key Components of Data Governance

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Understanding the core components of an effective data governance program and determining your organization’s current capabilities in these areas:
      • Data Leadership
      • Data Ownership & Stewardship
      • Policies & Procedures
      • Data Literacy & Culture
      • Operating Model
      • Data Management
      • Data Privacy & Security
      • Enterprise Projects & Services

    Outcomes of this step

    • An understanding the core components of an effective data governance program
    • An understanding your organization’s current data governance capabilities

    Review: Info-Tech’s Data Governance Framework

    An image of Info-Tech's Data Governance Framework

    Key components of data governance

    A well-defined data governance program will deliver:

    • Defined accountability and responsibility for data.
    • Improved knowledge and common understanding of the organization’s data assets.
    • Elevated trust and confidence in traceable data.
    • Improved data ROI and reduced data debt.
    • An enabling framework for supporting the ethical use and handling of data.
    • A foundation for building and fostering a data-driven and data-literate organizational culture.

    The key components of establishing sustainable enterprise data governance, taken from Info-Tech’s Data Governance Framework:

    • Data Leadership
    • Data Ownership & Stewardship
    • Operating Model
    • Policies & Procedures
    • Data Literacy & Culture
    • Data Management
    • Data Privacy & Security
    • Enterprise Projects & Services

    Data Leadership

    • Data governance needs a dedicated head or leader to steer the organization’s data governance program.
    • For organizations that do have a chief data officer (CDO), their office is the ideal and effective home for data governance.
    • Heads of data governance also have titles such as director of data governance, director of data quality, and director of analytics.
    • The head of your data governance program works with all stakeholders and partners to ensure there is continuous enterprise governance alignment and oversight and to drive the program’s direction.
    • While key stakeholders from the business and IT will play vital data governance roles, the head of data governance steers the various components, stakeholders, and initiatives, and provides oversight of the overall program.
    • Vital data governance roles include: data owners, data stewards, data custodians, data governance steering committee (or your organization’s equivalent), and any data governance working group(s).

    The role of the CDO: the voice of data

    The office of the chief data officer (CDO):

    • Has a cross-organizational vision and strategy for data.
    • Owns and drives the data strategy; ensures it supports the overall organizational strategic direction and business goals.
    • Leads the organizational data initiatives, including data governance
    • Is accountable for the policy, strategy, data standards, and data literacy necessary for the organization to operate effectively.
    • Educates users and leaders about what it means to be “data-driven.”
    • Builds and fosters a culture of data excellence.

    “Compared to most of their C-suite colleagues, the CDO is faced with a unique set of problems. The role is still being defined. The chief data officer is bringing a new dimension and focus to the organization: ‘data.’ ”

    – Carruthers and Jackson, 2020

    Who does the CDO report to?

    Example reporting structure.
    • The CDO should be a true C- level executive.
    • Where the organization places the CDO role in the structure sends an important signal to the business about how much it values data.

    “The title matters. In my opinion, you can’t have a CDO without executive authority. Otherwise no one will listen.”

    – Anonymous European CDO

    “The reporting structure depends on who’s the ‘glue’ that ties together all these uniquely skilled individuals.”

    – John Kemp, Senior Director, Executive Services, Info-Tech Research Group

    Data Ownership & Stewardship

    Who are best suited to be data owners?

    • Wherever they may sit in your organization, data owners will typically have the highest stake in that data.
    • Data owners need to be suitably senior and have the necessary decision-making power.
    • They have the highest interest in the related business data domain, whether they are the head of a business unit or the head of a line of business that produces data or consumes data (or both).
    • If they are neither of these, it’s unlikely they will have the interest in the data (in terms of its quality, protection, ethical use, and handling, for instance) necessary to undertake and adopt the role effectively.

    Data owners are typically senior business leaders with the following characteristics:

    • Positioned to accept accountability for their data domain.
    • Hold authority and influence to affect change, including across business processes and systems, needed to improve data quality, use, handling, integration, etc.
    • Have access to a budget and resources for data initiatives such as resolving data quality issues, data cleansing initiatives, business data catalog build, related tools and technology, policy management, etc.
    • Hold the influence needed to drive change in behavior and culture.
    • Act as ambassadors of data and its value as an organizational strategic asset.

    Right-size your data governance organizational structure

    • Most organizations strive to identify roles and responsibilities at a strategic and operational level. Several factors will influence the structure of the program such as the focus of the data governance project as well as the maturity and size of the organization.
    • Your data governance structure has to work for your organization, and it has to evolve as the organization evolves.
    • Formulate your blend of data governance roles, committees, councils, and cross-functional groups, that make sense for your organization.
    • Your data governance organizational structure should not add complexity or bureaucracy to your organization’s data landscape; it should support and enable your principle of treating data as an asset.

    There is no one-size-fits-all data governance organizational structure.

    Example of a Data Governance Organizational Structure

    Critical roles and responsibilities for data governance

    Data Governance Working Groups

    Data governance working groups:

    • Are cross-functional teams
    • Deliver on data governance projects, initiatives, and ad hoc review committees.

    Data Stewards

    Traditionally, data stewards:

    • Serve on an operational level addressing issues related to adherence to standards/procedures, monitoring data quality, raising issues identified, etc.
    • Are responsible for managing access, quality, escalating issues, etc.

    Data Custodians

    • Traditionally, data custodians:
    • Serve on an operational level addressing issues related to data and database administration.
    • Support the management of access, data quality, escalating issues, etc.
    • Are SMEs from IT and database administration.

    Example: Business capabilities to data owner and data stewards mapping for a selected data domain

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your organization’s value streams and the associated business capabilities require effectively governed data. Without this, you face elevated operational costs, missed opportunities, eroded stakeholder satisfaction, and exposure to increased business risk.

    Enabling business capabilities with data governance role definitions

    Example: Business capabilities to data owner and data stewards mapping for a selected data domain

    Operating Model

    Your operating model is the key to designing and operationalizing a form of data governance that delivers measurable business value to your organization.

    “Generate excitement for data: When people are excited and committed to the vision of data enablement, they’re more likely to help ensure that data is high quality and safe.” – Petzold, et al., 2020

    Operating Model

    Defining your data governance operating model will help create a well-oiled program that sustainably delivers value to the organization and manages risks while building and fostering a culture of data excellence along the way. Some organizations are able to establish a formal data governance office, whether independent or attached to the office of the chief data officer. Regardless of how you are organized, data governance requires a home, a leader, and an operating model to ensure its sustainability and evolution.

    Examples of focus areas for your operating model:

    • Delivery: While there are core tenets to every data governance program, there is a level of variability in the implementation of data governance programs across organizations, sectors, and industries. Every organization has its own particular drivers and mandates, so the level and rigor applied will also vary.
    • The key is to determine what style will work best in your organization, taking into consideration your organizational culture, executive leadership support (present and ongoing), catalysts such as other enterprise-wide transformative and modernization initiatives, and/or regulatory and compliances drivers.

    • Communication: Communication is vital across all levels and stakeholder groups. For instance, there needs to be communication from the data governance office up to senior leadership, as well as communication within the data governance organization, which is typically made up of the data governance steering committee, data governance council, executive sponsor/champion, data stewards, and data custodians and working groups.
    • Furthermore, communication with the wider organization of data producers, users, and consumers is one of the core elements of the overall data governance communications plan.

    Communication is vital for ensuring acceptance of new processes, rules, guidelines, and technologies by all data producers and users as well as for sharing success stories of the program.

    Operating Model

    Tie the value of data governance and its initiatives back to the business capabilities that are enabled.

    “Leading organizations invest in change management to build data supporters and convert the skeptics. This can be the most difficult part of the program, as it requires motivating employees to use data and encouraging producers to share it (and ideally improve its quality at the source)[.]” – Petzold, et al., 2020

    Operating Model

    Examples of focus areas for your operating model (continued):

    • Change management and issue resolution: Data governance initiatives will very likely bring about a level of organizational disruption, with governance recommendations and future state requiring potentially significant business change. This may include a redesign of a substantial number of data processes affecting various business units, which will require tweaking the organization’s culture, thought processes, and procedures surrounding its data.
    • Preparing people for change well in advance will allow them to take the steps necessary to adapt and reduce potential confrontation. By planning for and efficiently communicating any changes that a data governance initiative may bring, many initial issues can be resolved from the outset.

      Attempting to implement change without an effective communications plan can result in disagreements over data control and stalemates between stakeholder units. The recommendations of the governance group must reflect the needs of all stakeholders or there will be pushback.

    • Performance measuring, monitoring and reporting: Measuring and reporting on performance, successes, and realization of tangible business value are a must for sustaining, growing, and scaling your data governance program.
    • Aligning your data governance to the organization's value realization activities enables you to leverage the KPIs of those business capabilities to demonstrate tangible and measurable value. Use terms and language that will resonate with your senior business leadership.

    Info-Tech Tip:

    Launching a data governance program will bring with it a level of disruption to the culture of the organization. That disruption doesn’t have to be detrimental if you are prepared to manage the change proactively and effectively.

    Policies, Procedures & Standards

    “Data standards are the rules by which data are described and recorded. In order to share, exchange, and understand data, we must standardize the format as well as the meaning.” – U.S. Geological Survey

    Policies, Procedures & Standards

    • When defining, updating, or refreshing your data policies, procedures, and standards, ensure they are relevant, serve a purpose, and/or support the use of data in the organization.
    • Avoid the common pitfall of building out a host of policies, procedures, and standards that are never used or followed by users and therefore don’t bring value or serve to mitigate risk for the organization.
    • Data policies can be thought of as formal statements and are typically created, approved, and updated by the organization’s data decision-making body (such as a data governance steering committee).
    • Data standards and procedures function as actions, or rules, that support the policies and their statements.
    • Standards and procedures are designed to standardize the processes during the overall data lifecycle. Procedures are instructions to achieve the objectives of the policies. The procedures are iterative and will be updated with approval from your data governance committee as needed.
    • Your organization’s data policies, standards, and procedures should not bog down or inhibit users; rather, they should enable confident data use and handling across the overall data lifecycle. They should support more effective and seamless data capture, integration, aggregation, sharing, and retention of data in the organization.

    Examples of data policies:

    • Data Classification Policy
    • Data Retention Policy
    • Data Entry Policy
    • Data Backup Policy
    • Data Provenance Policy
    • Data Management Policy

    Data Domain Documentation

    Select the correct granularity for your business need

    Diagram of data domain documentation
    Sources: Dataversity; Atlan; Analytics8

    Data Domain Documentation Examples

    Data Domain Documentation Examples

    Data Culture

    “Organizational culture can accelerate the application of analytics, amplify its power, and steer companies away from risky outcomes.” – Petzold, et al., 2020

    A healthy data culture is key to amplifying the power of your data and to building and sustaining an effective data governance program.

    What does a healthy data culture look like?

    • Everybody knows the data.
    • Everybody trusts the data.
    • Everybody talks about the data.

    Building a culture of data excellence.

    Leverage Info-Tech’s Data Culture Diagnostic to understand your organization’s culture around data.

    Screenshot of Data Culture Scorecard

    Contact your Info-Tech Account Representative for more information on the Data Culture Diagnostic

    Cultivating a data-driven culture is not easy

    “People are at the heart of every culture, and one of the biggest challenges to creating a data culture is bringing everyone into the fold.” – Lim, Alation

    It cannot be purchased or manufactured,

    It must be nurtured and developed,

    And it must evolve as the business, user, and data landscapes evolve.

    “Companies that have succeeded in their data-driven efforts understand that forging a data culture is a relentless pursuit, and magic bullets and bromides do not deliver results.” – Randy Bean, 2020

    Hallmarks of a data-driven culture

    There is a trusted, single source of data the whole company can draw from.

    There’s a business glossary and data catalog and users know what the data fields mean.

    Users have access to data and analytics tools. Employees can leverage data immediately to resolve a situation, perform an activity, or make a decision – including frontline workers.

    Data literacy, the ability to collect, manage, evaluate, and apply data in a critical manner, is high.

    Data is used for decision making. The company encourages decisions based on objective data and the intelligent application of it.

    A data-driven culture requires a number of elements:

    • High-quality data
    • Broad access and data literacy
    • Data-driven decision-making processes
    • Effective communication

    Data Literacy

    Data literacy is an essential part of a data-driven culture.

    • Building a data-driven culture takes an ongoing investment of time, effort, and money.
    • This investment will not realize its full return without building up the organization’s data literacy.
    • Data literacy is about filling data knowledge gaps across all levels of the organization.
    • It’s about ensuring all users – senior leadership right through to core users – are equipped with appropriate levels of training, skills, understanding, and awareness around the organization’s data and the use of associated tools and technologies. Data literacy ensures users have the data they need and they know how to interpret and leverage it.
    • Data literacy drives the appetite, demand, and consumption for data.
    • A data-literate culture is one where the users feel confident and skilled in their use of data, leveraging it for making informed or evidence-based decisions and generating insights for the organization.

    Data Management

    • Data governance serves as an enabler to all of the core components that make up data management:
      • Data quality management
      • Data architecture management
      • Data platform
      • Data integration
      • Data operations management
      • Data risk management
      • Reference and master data management (MDM)
      • Document and content management
      • Metadata management
      • Business intelligence (BI), reporting, analytics and advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML)
    • Key tools such as the business data glossary and data catalog are vital for operationalizing data governance and in supporting data management disciplines such as data quality management, metadata management, and MDM as well as BI, reporting, and analytics.

    Enterprise Projects & Services

    • Data governance serves as an enabler to enterprise projects and services that require, use, share, sell, and/or rely on data for their viability and, ultimately, their success.
    • Folding or embedding data governance into the organization’s project management function or project management office (PMO) serves to ensure that, for any initiative, suitable consideration is given to how data is treated.
    • This may include defining parameters, following standards and procedures around bringing in new sources of data, integrating that data into the organization’s data ecosystem, using and sharing that data, and retaining that data post-project completion.
    • The data governance function helps to identify and manage any ethical issues, whether at the start of the project and/or throughout.
    • It provides a foundation for asking relevant questions as it relates to the use or incorporation of data in delivering the specific project or service. Do we know where the data obtained from? Do we have rights to use that data? Are there legislations, policies, or regulations that guide or dictate how that data can be used? What are the positive effects, negative impacts, and/or risks associated with our intended use of that data? Are we positioned to mitigate those risks?
    • Mature data governance creates organizations where the above considerations around data management and the ethical use and handling of data is routinely implemented across the business and in the rollout and delivery of projects and services.

    Data Privacy & Security

    • Data governance supports the organization’s data privacy and security functions.
    • Key tools include the data classification policy and standards and defined roles around data ownership and data stewardship. These are vital for operationalizing data governance and supporting data privacy, security, and the ethical use and handling of data.
    • While some organizations may have a dedicated data security and privacy group, data governance provides an added level of oversight in this regard.
    • Some of the typical checks and balances include ensuring:
      • There are policies and procedures in place to restrict and monitor staff’s access to data (one common way this is done is according to job descriptions and responsibilities) and that these comply with relevant laws and regulations.
      • There’s a data classification scheme in place where data has been classified on a hierarchy of sensitivity (e.g. top secret, confidential, internal, limited, public).
      • The organization has a comprehensive data security framework, including administrative, physical, and technical procedures for addressing data security issues (e.g. password management and regular training).
      • Risk assessments are conducted, including an evaluation of risks and vulnerabilities related to intentional and unintentional misuse of data.
      • Policies and procedures are in place to mitigate the risks associated with incidents such as data breaches.
      • The organization regularly audits and monitors its data security.

    Ethical Use & Handling of Data

    Data governance will support your organization’s ethical use and handling of data by facilitating definition around important factors, such as:

    • What are the various data assets in the organization and what purpose(s) can they be used for? Are there any limitations?
    • Who is the related data owner? Who holds accountability for that data? Who will be answerable?
    • Where was the data obtained from? What is the intended use of that data? Do you have rights to use that data? Are there legislations, policies, or regulations that guide or dictate how that data can be used?
    • What are the positive effects, negative impacts, and/or risks associated with the use of that data?

    Ethical Use & Handling of Data

    • Data governance serves as an enabler to the ethical use and handling of an organization’s data.
    • The Open Data Institute (ODI) defines data ethics as: “A branch of ethics that evaluates data practices with the potential to adversely impact on people and society – in data collection, sharing and use.”
    • Data ethics relates to good practice around how data is collected, used and shared. It’s especially relevant when data activities have the potential to impact people and society, whether directly or indirectly (Open Data Institute, 2019).
    • A failure to handle and use data ethically can negatively impact an organization’s direct stakeholders and/or the public at large, lead to a loss of trust and confidence in the organization's products and services, lead to financial loss, and impact the organization’s brand, reputation, and legal standing.
    • Data governance plays a vital role in building and managing your data assets, knowing what data you have, and knowing the limitations of that data. Data ownership, data stewardship, and your data governance decision-making body are key tenets and foundational components of your data governance. They enable an organization to define, categorize, and confidently make decisions about its data.

    Step 2.2

    Gauge Your Organization’s Current Data Culture

    Activities

    2.2.1 Gauge Your Organization’s Current Data Culture

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Conduct a data culture survey or leverage Info-Tech’s Data Culture Diagnostic to increase your understanding of your organization’s data culture

    Outcomes of this step

    • An understanding of your organizational data culture

    2.2.1 Gauge Your Organization’s Current Data Culture

    Conduct a Data Culture Survey or Diagnostic

    The objectives of conducting a data culture survey are to increase the understanding of the organization's data culture, your users’ appetite for data, and their appreciation for data in terms of governance, quality, accessibility, ownership, and stewardship. To perform a data culture survey:

    1. Identify members of the data user base, data consumers, and other key stakeholders for surveying.
    2. Conduct an information session to introduce Info-Tech’s Data Culture Diagnostic survey. Explain the objective and importance of the survey and its role in helping to understand the organization’s current data culture and inform the improvement of that culture.
    3. Roll out the Info-Tech Data Culture Diagnostic survey to the identified users and stakeholders.
    4. Debrief and document the results and scorecard in the Data Strategy Stakeholder Interview Guide and Findings document.

    Input

    • Email addresses of participants in your organization who should receive the survey

    Output

    • Your organization’s Data Culture Scorecard for understanding current data culture as it relates to the use and consumption of data
    • An understanding of whether data is currently perceived to be an asset to the organization

    Materials

    Screenshot of Data Culture Scorecard

    Participants

    • Participants include those at the senior leadership level through to middle management, as well as other business stakeholders at varying levels across the organization
    • Data owners, stewards, and custodians
    • Core data users and consumers

    Contact your Info-Tech Account Representative for details on launching a Data Culture Diagnostic.

    Phase 3

    Build a Target State Roadmap and Plan

    Three circles are in the image that list the three phases and the main steps. Phase 3 is highlighted.

    “Achieving data success is a journey, not a sprint.” Companies that set a clear course, with reasonable expectations and phased results over a period of time, get to the destination faster.” – Randy Bean, 2020

    This phase will guide you through the following activities:

    • Build your Data Governance Roadmap
    • Develop a target state plan comprising of prioritized initiatives

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Data Governance Leadership
    • Data Owners/Data Stewards
    • Data Custodians
    • Data Governance Working Group(s)

    Step 3.1

    Formulate an Actionable Roadmap and Right-Sized Plan

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Build your data governance roadmap
    • Develop a target state plan comprising of prioritized initiatives

    Outcomes of this step

    • A foundation for data governance initiative planning that’s aligned with the organization’s business architecture: value streams, business capability map, and strategy map

    Build a right-sized roadmap

    Formulate an actionable roadmap that is right sized to deliver value in your organization.

    Key considerations:

    • When building your data governance roadmap, ensure you do so through an enterprise lens. Be cognizant of other initiatives that might be coming down the pipeline that may require you to align your data governance milestones accordingly.
    • Apart from doing your planning with consideration for other big projects or launches that might be in-flight and require the time and attention of your data governance partners, also be mindful of the more routine yet still demanding initiatives.
    • When doing your roadmapping, consider factors like the organization’s fiscal cycle, typical or potential year-end demands, and monthly/quarterly reporting periods and audits. Initiatives such as these are likely to monopolize the time and focus of personnel key to delivering on your data governance milestones.

    Sample milestones:

    Data Governance Leadership & Org Structure Definition

    Define the home for data governance and other key roles around ownership and stewardship, as approved by senior leadership.

    Data Governance Charter and Policies

    Create a charter for your program and build/refresh associated policies.

    Data Culture Diagnostic

    Understand the organization’s current data culture, perception of data, value of data, and knowledge gaps.

    Use Case Build and Prioritization

    Build a use case that is tied to business capabilities. Prioritize accordingly.

    Business Data Glossary/Catalog

    Build and/or refresh the business’ glossary for addressing data definitions and standardization issues.

    Tools & Technology

    Explore the tools and technology offering in the data governance space that would serve as an enabler to the program. (e.g. RFI, RFP).

    Recall: Info-Tech’s Data Governance Framework

    An image of Info-Tech's Data Governance Framework

    Build an actionable roadmap

    Data Governance Leadership & Org Structure Division

    Define key roles for getting started.

    Use Case Build & Prioritization

    Start small and then scale – deliver early wins.

    Literacy Program

    Start understanding data knowledge gaps, building the program, and delivering.

    Tools & Technology

    Make the available data governance tools and technology work for you.

    Key components of your data governance roadmap

    By now, you have assessed current data governance environment and capabilities. Use this assessment, coupled with the driving needs of your business, to plot your data Governance roadmap accordingly.

    Sample data governance roadmap milestones:

    • Define data governance leadership.
    • Define and formalize data ownership and stewardship (as well as the role IT/data management will play as data custodians).
    • Build/confirm your business capability map and data domains.
    • Build business data use cases specific to business capabilities.
    • Define business measures/KPIs for the data governance program (i.e. metrics by use case that are relevant to business capabilities).
    • Data management:
      • Build your data glossary or catalog starting with identified and prioritized terms.
      • Define data domains.
    • Design and define the data governance operating model (oversight model definition, communication plan, internal marketing such as townhalls, formulate change management plan, RFP of data governance tool and technology options for supporting data governance and its administration).
    • Data policies and procedures:
      • Formulate, update, refresh, consolidate, rationalize, and/or retire data policies and procedures.
      • Define policy management and administration framework (i.e. roll-out, maintenance, updates, adherence, system to be used).
    • Conduct Info-Tech’s Data Culture Diagnostic or survey (across all levels of the organization).
    • Define and formalize the data literacy program (build modules, incorporate into LMS, plan lunch and learn sessions).
    • Data privacy and security: build data classification policy, define classification standards.
    • Enterprise projects and services: embed data governance in the organization’s PMO, conduct “Data Governance 101” for the PMO.

    Defining data governance roles and organizational structure at Organization

    The approach employed for defining the data governance roles and supporting organizational structure for .

    Key Considerations:

    • The data owner and data steward roles are formally defined and documented within the organization. Their involvement is clear, well-defined, and repeatable.
    • There are data owners and data stewards for each data domain within the organization. The data steward role is given to someone with a high degree of subject matter expertise.
    • Data owners and data stewards are effective in their roles by ensuring that their data domain is clean and free of errors and that they protect the organization against data loss.
    • Data owners and data stewards have the authority to make final decisions on data definitions, formats, and standard processes that apply to their respective data sets. Data owners and data stewards have authority regarding who has access to certain data.
    • Data owners and data stewards are not from the IT side of the organization. They understand the lifecycle of the data (how it is created, curated, retrieved, used, archived, and destroyed) and they are well-versed in any compliance requirements as it relates to their data.
    • The data custodian role is formally defined and is given to the relevant IT expert. This is an individual with technical administrative and/or operational responsibility over data (e.g. a DBA).
    • A data governance steering committee exists and is comprised of well-defined roles, responsibilities, executive sponsors, business representatives, and IT experts.
    • The data governance steering committee works to provide oversight and enforce policies, procedures, and standards for governing data.
    • The data governance working group has cross-functional representation. This comprises business and IT representation, as well as project management and change management where applicable: data stewards, data custodians, business subject matter experts, PM, etc.).
    • Data governance meetings are coordinated and communicated about. The meeting agenda is always clear and concise, and meetings review pressing data-related issues. Meeting minutes are consistently documented and communicated.

    Sample: Business capabilities to data owner and data stewards mapping for a selected data domain

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your organization’s value streams and the associated business capabilities require effectively governed data. Without this, you face elevated operational costs, missed opportunities, eroded stakeholder satisfaction, and exposure to increased business risk.

    Enable business capabilities with data governance role definitions.

    Sample: Business capabilities to data owner and data stewards mapping for a selected data domain

    Consider your technology options:

    Make the available data governance tools and technology work for you:

    • Data catalog
    • Business data glossary
    • Data lineage
    • Metadata management

    Logos of data governance tools and technology.

    These are some of the data governance tools and technology players. Check out SoftwareReviews for help making better software decisions.

    Make the data steward the catalyst for organizational change and driving data culture

    The data steward must be empowered and backed politically with decision-making authority, or the role becomes stale and powerless.

    Ensuring compliance can be difficult. Data stewards may experience pushback from stakeholders who must deliver on the policies, procedures, and processes that the data steward enforces.

    Because the data steward must enforce data processes and liaise with so many different people and departments within the organization, the data steward role should be their primary full-time job function – where possible.

    However, in circumstances where budget doesn’t allow a full-time data steward role, develop these skills within the organization by adding data steward responsibilities to individuals who are already managing data sets for their department or line of business.

    Info-Tech Tip

    A stewardship role is generally more about managing the cultural change that data governance brings. This requires the steward to have exceptional interpersonal skills that will assist in building relationships across departmental boundaries and ensuring that all stakeholders within the organization believe in the initiative, understand the anticipated outcomes, and take some level of responsibility for its success.

    Changes to organizational data processes are inevitable; have a communication plan in place to manage change

    Create awareness of your data governance program. Use knowledge transfer to get as many people on board as possible.

    Data governance initiatives must contain a strong organizational disruption component. A clear and concise communication strategy that conveys milestones and success stories will address the various concerns that business unit stakeholders may have.

    By planning for and efficiently communicating any changes that a data governance initiative may bring, many initial issues can be resolved from the outset.

    Governance recommendations will require significant business change. The redesign of a substantial number of data processes affecting various business units will require an overhaul of the organization’s culture, thought processes, and procedures surrounding its data. Preparing people for change well in advance will allow them to take the necessary steps to adapt and reduce potential confrontation.

    Because a data governance initiative will involve data-driven business units across the organization, the governance team must present a compelling case for data governance to ensure acceptance of new processes, rules, guidelines, and technologies by all data producers and users.

    Attempting to implement change without an effective communication plan can result in disagreements over data control and stalemates between stakeholder units. The recommendations of the governance group must reflect the needs of all stakeholders or there will be pushback.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Launching a data governance initiative is guaranteed to disrupt the culture of the organization. That disruption doesn’t have to be detrimental if you are prepared to manage the change proactively and effectively.

    Create a common data governance vision that is consistently communicated to the organization

    A data governance program should be an enterprise-wide initiative.

    To create a strong vision for data governance, there must be participation from the business and IT. A common vision will articulate the state the organization wishes to achieve and how it will reach that state. Visioning helps to develop long-term goals and direction.

    Once the vision is established, it must be effectively communicated to everyone, especially those who are involved in creating, managing, disposing, or archiving data.

    The data governance program should be periodically refined. This will ensure the organization continues to incorporate best methods and practices as the organization grows and data needs evolve.

    Info-Tech Tips

    • Use information from the stakeholder interviews to derive business goals and objectives.
    • Work to integrate different opinions and perspectives into the overall vision for data governance.
    • Brainstorm guiding principles for data and understand the overall value to the organization.

    Develop a compelling data governance communications plan to get all departmental lines of business on board

    A data governance program will impact all data-driven business units within the organization.

    A successful data governance communications plan involves making the initiative visible and promoting staff awareness. Educate the team on how data is collected, distributed, and used, what internal processes use data, and how that data is used across departmental boundaries.

    By demonstrating how data governance will affect staff directly, you create a deeper level of understanding across lines of business, and ultimately, a higher level of acceptance for new processes, rules, and guidelines.

    A clear and concise communications strategy will raise the profile of data governance within the organization, and staff will understand how the program will benefit them and how they can share in the success of the initiative. This will end up providing support for the initiative across the board.

    A proactive communications plan will:

    • Assist in overcoming issues with data control, stalemates between stakeholder units, and staff resistance.
    • Provide a formalized process for implementing new policies, rules, guidelines, and technologies, and managing organizational data.
    • Detail data ownership and accountability for decision making, and identify and resolve data issues throughout the organization.
    • Encourage acceptance and support of the initiative.

    Info-Tech Tip

    Focus on literacy and communication: include training in the communication plan. Providing training for data users on the correct procedures for updating and verifying the accuracy of data, data quality, and standardized data policies will help validate how data governance will benefit them and the organization.

    Leverage the data governance program to communicate and promote the value of data within the organization

    The data governance program is responsible for continuously promoting the value of data to the organization. The data governance program should seek a variety of ways to educate the organization and data stakeholders on the benefit of data management.

    Even if data policies and procedures are created, they will be highly ineffective if they are not properly communicated to the data producers and users alike.

    There needs to be a communication plan that highlights how the data producer and user will be affected, what their new responsibilities are, and the value of that change.

    To learn how to manage organizational change, refer to Info-Tech’s Master Organizational Change Management Practices.

    Understand what makes for an effective policy for data governance

    It can be difficult to understand what a policy is, and what it is not. Start by identifying the differences between a policy and standards, guidelines, and procedures.

    Diagram of an effective policy for data governance

    The following are key elements of a good policy:

    Heading Descriptions
    Purpose Describes the factors or circumstances that mandate the existence of the policy. Also states the policy’s basic objectives and what the policy is meant to achieve.
    Scope Defines to whom and to what systems this policy applies. Lists the employees required to comply or simply indicates “all” if all must comply. Also indicates any exclusions or exceptions, i.e. those people, elements, or situations that are not covered by this policy or where special consideration may be made.
    Definitions Define any key terms, acronyms, or concepts that will be used in the policy. A standard glossary approach is sufficient.
    Policy Statements Describe the rules that comprise the policy. This typically takes the form of a series of short prescriptive and proscriptive statements. Sub-dividing this section into sub-sections may be required depending on the length or complexity of the policy.
    Non-Compliance Clearly describe consequences (legal and/or disciplinary) for employee non-compliance with the policy. It may be pertinent to describe the escalation process for repeated non-compliance.
    Agreement Confirms understanding of the policy and provides a designated space to attest to the document.

    Leverage myPolicies, Info-Tech’s web-based application for managing your policies and procedures

    Most organizations have problems with policy management. These include:

    1. Policies are absent or out of date
    2. Employees largely unaware of policies in effect
    3. Policies are unmonitored and unenforced
    4. Policies are in multiple locations
    5. Multiple versions of the same policy exist
    6. Policies managed inconsistently across different silos
    7. Policies are written poorly by untrained authors
    8. Inadequate policy training program
    9. Draft policies stall and lose momentum
    10. Weak policy support from senior management

    Technology should be used as a means to solve these problems and effectively monitor, enforce, and communicate policies.

    Product Overview

    myPolicies is a web-based solution to create, distribute, and manage corporate policies, procedures, and forms. Our solution provides policy managers with the tools they need to mitigate the risk of sanctions and reduce the administrative burden of policy management. It also enables employees to find the documents relevant to them and build a culture of compliance.

    Some key success factors for policy management include:

    • Store policies in a central location that is well known and easy to find and access. A key way that technology can help communicate policies is by having them published on a centralized website.
    • Link this repository to other policies’ taxonomies of your organization. E.g. HR policies to provide a single interface for employees to access guidance across the organization.
    • Reassess policies annually at a minimum. myPolicies can remind you to update the organization’s policies at the appropriate time.
    • Make the repository searchable and easily navigable.
    • myPolicies helps you do all this and more.
    myPolicies logo myPolicies

    Enforce data policies to promote consistency of business processes

    Data policies are short statements that seek to manage the creation, acquisition, integrity, security, compliance, and quality of data. These policies vary amongst organizations, depending on your specific data needs.

    • Policies describe what to do, while standards and procedures describe how to do something.
    • There should be few data policies, and they should be brief and direct. Policies are living documents and should be continuously updated to respond to the organization’s data needs.
    • The data policies should highlight who is responsible for the data under various scenarios and rules around how to manage it effectively.

    Examples of Data Policies

    Trust

    • Data Cleansing and Quality Policy
    • Data Entry Policy

    Availability

    • Acceptable Use Policy
    • Data Backup Policy

    Security

    • Data Security Policy
    • Password Policy Template
    • User Authorization, Identification, and Authentication Policy Template
    • Data Protection Policy

    Compliance

    • Archiving Policy
    • Data Classification Policy
    • Data Retention Policy

    Leverage data management-related policies to standardize your data management practices

    Info-Tech’s Data Management Policy:

    This policy establishes uniform data management standards and identifies the shared responsibilities for assuring the integrity of the data and that it efficiently and effectively serves the needs of the organization. This policy applies to all critical data and to all staff who may be creators and/or users of such data.

    Info-Tech’s Data Entry Policy:

    The integrity and quality of data and evidence used to inform decision making is central to both the short-term and long-term health of an organization. It is essential that required data be sourced appropriately and entered into databases and applications in an accurate and complete manner to ensure the reliability and validity of the data and decisions made based on the data.

    Info-Tech’s Data Provenance Policy:

    Create policies to keep your data's value, such as:

    • Only allow entry of data from reliable sources.
    • Employees entering and accessing data must observe requirements for capturing/maintaining provenance metadata.
    • Provenance metadata will be used to track the lifecycle of data from creation through to disposal.

    Info-Tech’s Data Integration and Virtualization Policy:

    This policy aims to assure the organization, staff, and other interested parties that data integration, replication, and virtualization risks are taken seriously. Staff must use the policy (and supporting guidelines) when deciding whether to integrate, replicate, or virtualize data sets.

    Select the right mix of metrics to successfully supervise data policies and processes

    Policies are only as good as your level of compliance. Ensure supervision controls exist to oversee adherence to policies and procedures.

    Although they can be highly subjective, metrics are extremely important to data governance success.

    • Establishing metrics that measure the performance of a specific process or data set will:
      • Create a greater degree of ownership from data stewards and data owners.
      • Help identify underperforming individuals.
      • Allow the steering committee to easily communicate tailored objectives to individual data stewards and owners.
    • Be cautious when establishing metrics. The wrong metrics can have negative repercussions.
      • They will likely draw attention to an aspect of the process that doesn’t align with the initial strategy.
      • Employees will work hard and grow frustrated as their successes aren’t accurately captured.

    Policies are great to have from a legal perspective, but unless they are followed, they will not benefit the organization.

    • One of the most useful metrics for policies is currency. This tracks how up to date the policy is and how often employees are informed about the policy. Often, a policy will be introduced and then ignored. Policies must be continuously reviewed by management and employees.
    • Some other metrics include adherence (including performance in tests for adherence) and impacts from non-adherence.

    Review metrics on an ongoing basis with those data owners/stewards who are accountable, the data governance steering committee, and the executive sponsors.

    Establish data standards and procedures for use across all organizational lines of business

    A data governance program will impact all data-driven business units within the organization.

    • Data management procedures are the methods, techniques, and steps to accomplish a specific data objective. Creating standard data definitions should be one of the first tasks for a data governance steering committee.
    • Data moves across all departmental boundaries and lines of business within the organization. These definitions must be developed as a common set of standards that can be accepted and used enterprise wide.
    • Consistent data standards and definitions will improve data flow across departmental boundaries and between lines of business.
    • Ensure these standards and definitions are used uniformly throughout the organization to maintain reliable and useful data.

    Data standards and procedural guidelines will vary from company to company.

    Examples include:

    • Data modeling and architecture standards.
    • Metadata integration and usage procedures.
    • Data security standards and procedures.
    • Business intelligence standards and procedures.

    Info-Tech Tip

    Have a fundamental data definition model for the entire business to adhere to. Those in the positions that generate and produce data must follow the common set of standards developed by the steering committee and be accountable for the creation of valid, clean data.

    Changes to organizational data processes are inevitable; have a communications plan in place to manage change

    Create awareness of your data governance program, using knowledge transfer to get as many people on board as possible.

    By planning for and efficiently communicating any changes that a data governance initiative may bring, many initial issues can be resolved from the outset.

    Governance recommendations will require significant business change. The redesign of a substantial number of data processes affecting various business units will require an overhaul of the organization’s culture, thought processes, and procedures surrounding its data. Preparing people for change well in advance will allow them to take the necessary steps to adapt and reduce potential confrontation.

    Because a data governance initiative will involve data-driven business units across the organization, the governance team must present a compelling case for data governance to ensure acceptance of new processes, rules, guidelines, and technologies by all data producers and users.

    Attempting to implement change without an effective communications plan can result in disagreements over data control and stalemates between stakeholder units. The recommendations of the governance group must reflect the needs of all stakeholders or there will be pushback.

    Data governance initiatives will very likely bring about a level of organizational disruption. A clear and concise communications strategy that conveys milestones and success stories will address the various concerns that business unit stakeholders may have.

    Info-Tech Tip

    Launching a data governance program will bring with it a level of disruption to the culture of the organization. That disruption doesn’t have to be detrimental if you are prepared to manage the change proactively and effectively.

    Additional Support

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech Workshop.

    Picture of analyst

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team. Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.

    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

    Screenshot of example data governance strategy map.

    Build Your Business and User Context

    Work with your core team of stakeholders to build out your data governance strategy map, aligning data governance initiatives with business capabilities, value streams, and, ultimately, your strategic priorities.

    Screenshot of Data governance roadmap

    Formulate a Plan to Get to Your Target State

    Develop a data governance future state roadmap and plan based on an understanding of your current data governance capabilities, your operating environment, and the driving needs of your business.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Build a Robust and Comprehensive Data Strategy

    Key to building and fostering a data-driven culture.

    Create a Data Management Roadmap

    Streamline your data management program with our simplified framework.

    The First 100 Days as CDO

    Be the voice of data in a time of transformation.

    Research Contributors

    Name Position Company
    David N. Weber Executive Director - Planning, Research and Effectiveness Palm Beach State College
    Izabela Edmunds Information Architect Mott MacDonald
    Andy Neill Practice Lead, Data & Analytics Info-Tech Research Group
    Dirk Coetsee Research Director, Data & Analytics Info-Tech Research Group
    Graham Price Executive Advisor, Advisory Executive Services Info-Tech Research Group
    Igor Ikonnikov Research Director, Data & Analytics Info-Tech Research Group
    Jean Bujold Senior Workshop Delivery Director Info-Tech Research Group
    Rajesh Parab Research Director, Data & Analytics Info-Tech Research Group
    Reddy Doddipalli Senior Workshop Director Info-Tech Research Group
    Valence Howden Principal Research Director, CIO Info-Tech Research Group

    Bibliography

    Alation. “The Alation State of Data Culture Report – Q3 2020.” Alation, 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Allott, Joseph, et al. “Data: The next wave in forestry productivity.” McKinsey & Company, 27 Oct. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Bean, Randy. “Why Culture Is the Greatest Barrier to Data Success.” MIT Sloan Management Review, 30 Sept. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Brence, Thomas. “Overcoming the Operationalization Challenge with Data Governance at New York Life.” Informatica, 18 March 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Bullmore, Simon, and Stuart Coleman. “ODI Inside Business – a checklist for leaders.” Open Data Institute, 19 Oct. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Canadian Institute for Health Information. “Developing and implementing accurate national standards for Canadian health care information.” Canadian Institute for Health Information. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Carruthers, Caroline, and Peter Jackson. “The Secret Ingredients of the Successful CDO.” IRM UK Connects, 23 Feb. 2017.

    Dashboards. “Useful KPIs for Healthy Hospital Quality Management.” Dashboards. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Dashboards. “Why (and How) You Should Improve Data Literacy in Your Organization Today.” Dashboards. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Datapine. “Healthcare Key Performance Indicators and Metrics.” Datapine. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Datapine. “KPI Examples & Templates: Measure what matters the most and really impacts your success.” Datapine. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Diaz, Alejandro, et al. “Why data culture matters.” McKinsey Quarterly, Sept. 2018. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Everett, Dan. “Chief Data Officer (CDO): One Job, Four Roles.” Informatica, 9 Sept. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Experian. “10 signs you are sitting on a pile of data debt.” Experian. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Fregoni, Silvia. “New Research Reveals Why Some Business Leaders Still Ignore the Data.” Silicon Angle, 1 Oct. 2020.

    Informatica. Holistic Data Governance: A Framework for Competitive Advantage. Informatica, 2017. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Knight, Michelle. “What Is a Data Catalog?” Dataversity, 28 Dec. 2017. Web.

    Lim, Jason. “Alation 2020.3: Getting Business Users in the Game.” Alation, 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    McDonagh, Mariann. “Automating Data Governance.” Erwin, 29 Oct. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    NewVantage Partners. Data-Driven Business Transformation: Connecting Data/AI Investment to Business Outcomes. NewVantage Partners, 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Olavsrud, Thor. “What is data governance? A best practices framework for managing data assets.” CIO.com, 18 March 2021. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Open Data Institute. “Introduction to data ethics and the data ethics canvas.” Open Data Institute, 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Open Data Institute. “The UK National Data Strategy 2020: doing data ethically.” Open Data Institute, 17 Nov. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Open Data Institute. “What is the Data Ethics Canvas?” Open Data Institute, 3 July 2019. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Pathak, Rahul. “Becoming a Data-Driven Enterprise: Meeting the Challenges, Changing the Culture.” MIT Sloan Management Review, 28 Sept. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Redman, Thomas, et al. “Only 3% of Companies’ Data Meets Basic Quality Standards.” Harvard Business Review. 11 Sept 2017.

    Petzold, Bryan, et al. “Designing data governance that delivers value.” McKinsey & Company, 26 June 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Smaje, Kate. “How six companies are using technology and data to transform themselves.” McKinsey & Company, 12 Aug. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Talend. “The Definitive Guide to Data Governance.” Talend. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    “The Powerfully Simple Modern Data Catalog.” Atlan, 2021. Web.

    U.S. Geological Survey. “Data Management: Data Standards.” U.S. Geological Survey. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Waller, David. “10 Steps to Creating a Data-Driven Culture.” Harvard Business Review, 6 Feb. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    “What is the Difference Between A Business Glossary, A Data Dictionary, and A Data Catalog, and How Do They Play A Role In Modern Data Management?” Analytics8, 23 June 2021. Web.

    Wikipedia. “RFM (market research).” Wikipedia. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Windheuser, Christoph, and Nina Wainwright. “Data in a Modern Digital Business.” Thoughtworks, 12 May 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Wright, Tom. “Digital Marketing KPIs - The 12 Key Metrics You Should Be Tracking.” Cascade, 3 March 2021. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Enter Into Mobile Development Without Confusion and Frustration

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}282|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): N/A
    • member rating average dollars saved: N/A
    • member rating average days saved: N/A
    • Parent Category Name: Mobile Development
    • Parent Category Link: /mobile-development
    • IT managers don’t know where to start when initiating a mobile program.
    • IT has tried mobile development in the past but didn't achieve success.
    • IT must initiate a mobile program quickly based on business priorities and needs a roadmap based on best practices.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Form factors and mobile devices won't drive success – business alignment and user experience will. Don't get caught up with the latest features in mobile devices.
    • Software emulation testing is not true testing. Get on the device and run your tests.
    • Cross form-factor testing cannot be optimized to run in parallel. Therefore, anticipate longer testing cycles for cross form-factor testing.

    Impact and Result

    • Prepare your development, testing, and deployment teams for mobile development.
    • Get a realistic assessment of ROI for the launch of a mobile program.

    Enter Into Mobile Development Without Confusion and Frustration Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Make the Case for a Mobile Program

    Understand the current mobile ecosystem. Use this toolkit to help you initiate a mobile development program.

    • Storyboard: Enter Into Mobile Development Without Confusion and Frustration

    2. Assess Your Dev Process for Readiness

    Review and evaluate your current application development process.

    3. Prepare to Execute Your Mobile Program

    Prioritize your mobile program based on your organization’s prioritization profile.

    • Mobile Program Tool

    4. Communicate with Stakeholders

    Summarize the execution of the mobile program.

    • Project Status Communication Worksheet
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Enter Into Mobile Development Without Confusion and Frustration

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Build your Future Mobile Development State

    The Purpose

    Understand the alignment of stakeholder objectives and priorities to mobile dev IT drivers.

    Assess readiness of your organization for mobile dev.

    Understand how to build your ideal mobile dev process.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Identify and address the gaps in your existing app dev process.

    Build your future mobile dev state.

    Activities

    1.1 Getting started

    1.2 Assess your current state

    1.3 Establish your future state

    Outputs

    List of key stakeholders

    Stakeholder and IT driver mapping and assessment of current app dev process

    List of practices to accommodate mobile dev

    2 Prepare and Execute your Mobile Program

    The Purpose

    Assess the impact of mobile dev on your existing app dev process.

    Prioritize your mobile program.

    Understand the dev practice metrics to gauge success.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Properly prepare for the execution of your mobile program.

    Calculate the ROI of your mobile program.

    Prioritize your mobile program with dependencies in mind.

    Build a communication plan with stakeholders.

    Activities

    2.1 Conduct an impact analysis

    2.2 Prepare to execute

    2.3 Communicate with stakeholders

    Outputs

    Impact analysis of your mobile program and expected ROI

    Mobile program order of execution and project dependencies mapping

    List of dev practice metrics

    Collaborate Effectively in Microsoft Teams

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}63|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): N/A
    • member rating average dollars saved: N/A
    • member rating average days saved: N/A
    • Parent Category Name: End-User Computing Applications
    • Parent Category Link: /end-user-computing-applications

    Your organization has adopted Microsoft Teams, but users are not maximizing their use of it.

    • IT needs to support the business to get the best value out of Microsoft Teams: managing Teams effectively while also enabling end users to use Teams creatively.
    • IT must follow best practices for evaluation of new functionality when integrating Microsoft and third-party apps and also communicate changes to end users.
    • Due in part to the frequent addition of new features and lack of communication and training, many organizations don’t know which apps would benefit their users.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Collaboration is as much an art as a science. IT can help users collaborate more effectively in Teams by removing friction – while still maintaining guardrails – for users attempting to build out and experiment with features and capabilities.

    Impact and Result

    Use Info-Tech’s Collaborate Effectively in Microsoft Teams to help collaboration flourish:

    • Collate key organizational collaboration use cases.
    • Prioritize the most important Teams apps and features to support use cases.
    • Implement request process for new Teams apps.
    • Communicate new Teams collaboration functionality.

    Collaborate Effectively in Microsoft Teams Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Collaborate Effectively in Microsoft Teams Deck – Maximize the use of your chosen collaboration software solution.

    Set up your users for Teams collaboration success. Create a process that improves their ability to access, understand, and maximize their use of your chosen collaboration software solution.

    • Collaborate Effectively in Microsoft Teams Storyboard

    2. Microsoft Teams End-User Satisfaction Survey – Capture end-user feedback on their collaborative use of Microsoft Teams.

    The survey responses will inform your organization's collaboration use cases for Teams and help you to identify which features and apps to enable.

    • Microsoft Teams End-User Satisfaction Survey

    3. Microsoft Teams Planning Tool – A tool to help prioritize features to implement.

    Use this Excel tool to help you document the organization’s key collaboration use cases and prioritize which Teams apps to implement and encourage adoption on.

    • Microsoft Teams Planning Tool
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Collaborate Effectively in Microsoft Teams

    Empower your users to explore Teams collaboration beyond the basics.

    Analyst Perspective

    Life after Teams implementation

    You have adopted Teams, implemented it, and painted an early picture for your users on the basics. However, your organization is not yet maximizing its use of Teams' collaboration capabilities. Although web conferencing, channel-based collaboration, and chat are the most obvious ways Teams supports collaboration, users must explore Teams' functionality further to harness the application's full potential.

    You should enable your users to expand their collaboration use cases in Teams, but not at the risk of being flooded with app requests, nor user confusion or dissatisfaction. Instead, develop a process to evaluate and integrate new apps that will benefit the organization. Encourage your users to request new apps that will benefit them, while proactively planning for app integration that users should be alerted to.

    Photo of Emily Sugerman, Research Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations, Info-Tech Research Group. Emily Sugerman
    Research Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Your organization has adopted Microsoft Teams, but users are not getting the maximum benefit.

    • IT needs to support the business to get the best value out of Microsoft Teams: managing Teams effectively while enabling end-user creativity.
    • IT must follow best practices for evaluating new functionality when integrating Microsoft and third-party apps, while communicating changes to end users.
    • Due partly to the frequent addition of new features and lack of communication and training, many organizations don't know which apps would benefit their users.

    Common Obstacles

    • Users are unenthusiastic about exploring Teams further due to negative past experiences, preference for other applications, or indifference.
    • End users are unaware of the available range of features. When they become aware and try to add unapproved or unlicensed apps, they experience the frustration of being declined.
    • Users seek support from IT who are unfamiliar with new Teams features an apps, or with supporting Teams beyond the basics.
    • IT teams have no process to raise end-user awareness of these apps and functionality.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    Use Info-Tech's Collaborate Effectively in Microsoft Teams to help collaboration flourish:

    • Collate key organizational collaboration use cases
    • Prioritize the most important Teams apps and features to support use cases
    • Implement request process for new Teams apps
    • Communicate new Teams collaboration functionality

    Info-Tech Insight

    Collaboration is as much an art as a science. IT can help users collaborate more effectively in Teams by removing friction – while still maintaining guardrails – for users attempting to build out and experiment with features and capabilities.

    Are your users in a Teams rut?

    Are users failing to maximize their use of Teams to collaborate and get work done?

    Teams can do much more than chat, video conferencing, and document sharing. A fully-deployed Teams also lets users leverage apps and advanced collaboration features.

    However, IT must create a process for evaluating and approving Microsoft and third-party apps, and for communicating changes to end users.

    In the end, IT needs to support the business to get the best value out of Microsoft Teams: managing Teams effectively while also enabling end-user creativity.

    Third-party app use in Teams is rising:

    “Within Teams, the third-party apps with 10,000 users and above rose nearly 40% year-over-year.”
    Source: UC Today, 2023.

    Collaborate effectively in Microsoft Teams

    Set up your users for Teams collaboration success. Create a process that improves their ability to access, understand, and maximize their use of your chosen collaboration software solution.

    Challenges with Teams collaboration

    • Lack of motivation to explore available features
    • Scattered information
    • Lack of comfort using Teams beyond the basics
    • Blocked apps
    • Overlapping features
    • Confusing permissions

    Empowering Collaboration in Microsoft Teams

    1. Identify current collaboration challenges and use cases in Teams
    2. Create Teams app request workflows
    3. Set up communication hubs in Teams
    4. Empower end users to customize their Teams for effective collaboration

    Solution

    • Collate key organizational collaboration use cases
    • Prioritize the most important Teams apps and features to support use cases
    • Implement request process for new Teams apps
    • Communicate new Teams collaboration functionality

    Project deliverables

    Use these tools to develop your plan to enable effective collaboration in Microsoft Teams.

    Key deliverable:

    Microsoft Teams Planning Tool

    An Excel tool for documenting the organization's key collaboration use cases and prioritizing which Teams apps to implement and encourage adoption of.

    Sample of the Microsoft Teams Planning Tool deliverable.

    Additional support:

    Microsoft Teams End-User Satisfaction Survey

    Use or adapt this survey to capture user perception of how effectively Teams supports collaboration needs.

    Sample of the End-user satisfaction survey deliverable.

    Insight Summary

    Key Insight:

    Collaboration is as much an art as a science. IT can help users collaborate more effectively in Teams by removing friction – while still maintaining guardrails – for users attempting to build out and experiment with features and capabilities.

    Additional insights:

    Insight 1

    Users can browse the Teams app store and attempt to add unapproved apps, but they may not be able to distinguish between available and blocked apps. To avoid a bad user experience, communicate which apps they can add without additional approval and which they will need to send through an approval process.

    Insight 2

    Teams lets you customize the message users see when they request unapproved apps and/or redirect their request to your own URL. Review this step in the request process to ensure users are seeing the instructions that they need to see.

    Insight 3

    A Teams hub is where users can access a service catalog of approved Teams apps and submit service requests for new ones via the Make a Request button.

    Section 1: Collaborating Effectively in Teams for IT

    Section 1

    Collaborating Effectively in Teams for IT

    Section 2

    Collaborating Effectively in Teams for End Users

    Stop: Do you need the Teams Cookbook?

    If you:

    • are at the Teams implementation stage,
    • require IT best practices for initial governance of Teams creation, or
    • require end-user best practices for basic Teams functionality …

    Consult the Microsoft Teams Cookbook first.

    Understand the Microsoft vision of Teams collaboration

    Does it work for you?

    Microsoft's vision for Teams collaboration is to enable end-user freedom. For example, out of the box, users can create their own teams and channels unless IT restricts this ability.

    Teams is meant to be more than just chats and meetings. Microsoft is pushing Teams app integration so that Teams becomes, essentially, a landing page from which users can centralize their work and org updates.

    In partnership with the business, IT must determine which guardrails are necessary to balance end-user collaboration and creativity with the need for governance and control.

    Why is it difficult to increase the caliber of collaboration in Teams?

    Because collaboration is inherently messy, complex, and creative

    Schubert & Glitsch find that enterprise collaboration systems (such as Teams) have characteristics that reflect the unstructured and creative nature of collaboration. These systems “are designed to support joint work among people in the workplace. . . [They] contain, for the most part, unstructured content such as documents, blogs, or news posts,” and their implementations “are often reported to follow a ‘bottom up' and rather experimental introduction approach.” The open-endedness of the tool requires users to be able to creatively and voluntarily apply it, which in turn requires more enterprise effort to help increase adoption over time through trial and error.

    Source: Procedia Computer Science, 2015

    Info-Tech Insight

    Collaboration is as much an art as a science. IT can help users collaborate more effectively in Teams by removing friction – while still maintaining guardrails – for users attempting to build out and experiment with features and capabilities.

    Activity 1: Identify current challenges

    Input: Team input, Survey results
    Output: List of Teams challenges experienced by the organization
    Materials: Whiteboard (digital or physical)
    Participants: Teams collaboration working group

    First, identify what works and what doesn't for your users in Teams

    • Have users reported any challenges with Teams as their primary means of channel-based collaboration? Run a short survey to capture end-user sentiment on how Teams works for them. This survey can be set up and distributed through Microsoft Forms. Distribute either to the whole organization or a specific focus group. Gather feedback from users on the following: What are the major ways they need to collaborate to do their jobs? What IT-supported tools do they need to support this collaboration? What specific aspects of Teams do they want to better exploit?
    • If you send out transactional surveys on service desk tickets, run a report on Teams-related tickets to identify common complaints.
    • Brainstorm Teams challenges IT has experienced personally or have seen reported – especially difficulties with collaboration.
    • Once you have the data, group the challenges into themes. Are the challenges specifically related to collaboration? Data issues? Support issues? Access issues? Technical issues? Document them in tab 2 of the Microsoft Teams Planning Tool.

    Download the Microsoft Teams End-User Satisfaction Survey template

    Define your organization's key collaboration scenarios

    Next, identify what users need to do in Teams

    The term collaboration scenarios has been proposed to describe the types of collaboration behavior your software – in this case, Teams – must support (Schubert & Glitsch, 2015). A successful implementation of this kind of tool requires that you “identif[y] use cases and collaboration scenarios that best suit a specific company and the people working in it” (Schubert & Glitsch, 2016).

    Teams tends to support the following kinds of collaboration and productivity goals (see list).

    What types of collaboration scenarios arise in the user feedback in the previous activity? What do users most need to do?

    Be proactive: Configure Microsoft Teams to match collaboration scenarios/use cases your users must engage in. This will help prevent an increase in shadow IT, where users attempt to bring in unapproved/unreviewed software that might duplicate your existing service catalog and/or circumvent the proper review and procurement process.

    MS Teams Use Cases

    1. Gather feedback
    2. Collaboratively create content
    3. Improve project & task management
    4. Add media content
    5. Conduct knowledge management
    6. Increase meeting effectiveness
    7. Increase employee engagement
    8. Enhance professional development
    9. Provide or access support
    10. Add third-party apps

    Activity 2: Match your collaboration scenarios to Teams capabilities

    Input: Collaboration scenarios, Teams use cases
    Output: Ranked list of Teams features to implement and/or promote
    Materials: Microsoft Teams Planning Tool
    Participants: Teams collaboration working group

    Which features support the key collaboration use cases?

    1. Using the Microsoft Teams Planning Tool, list your organization's key collaboration scenarios. Draw on the data returned in the previous activity. List them in Tab 2.
    2. See the following slide for the types of collaboration use cases Teams is designed to support. In the planning tool, select use cases that best match your organizational collaboration scenarios.
    3. Dive into more specific features on Tab 3, which are categorized by collaboration use case. Where do users' collaboration needs align with Teams' inherent capabilities? Add lines in Tab C for the third-party apps that you are considering adding to Teams.
    4. In columns B and C of Tab 3, decide and prioritize the candidates for implementation. Review the list of prioritized features on tab 4.

    NB: Microsoft has introduced a Teams Premium offering, with additional capabilities for meetings and webinars (including customized banding, meeting watermarks, and virtual webinar green rooms) and will paywall some features previously available without Premium (live caption translations, meeting data on attendee departure/arrival times) (“What is Microsoft Teams Premium?”, n.d.)

    Download the Microsoft Teams Planning Tool

    MS Teams productivity & collab features

    Teams apps & collaboration features enable the following types of work. When designing collaboration use cases, identify which types of collaboration are necessary, then explore each category in depth.

    1. Gather feedback

      Solicit feedback and comments, and provide updates
    2. Collaboratively create content

      Compose as a group, with live-synced changes
    3. Improve project & task management

      Keep track of projects and tasks
    4. Add media content

      Enrich Teams conversations with media, and keep a library of video resources
    5. Knowledge management

      Pull together document libraries and make information easier to find
    6. Increase meeting effectiveness

      Facilitate interactions and document meeting outcomes
    7. Increase employee engagement

      Use features that enhance social interaction among Teams users
    8. Enhance professional development

      Find resources to help achieve professional goals
    9. Provide or access support

      IT and user-facing resources for accessing and/or providing support
    10. Add third-party apps

      Understand the availability/restrictions of the built-in Teams app catalog

    The Teams app store

    • The lure of the app store: Your users will encounter a mix of supported and unsupported applications, some of which they can access, some for which you have no licenses, some built by your organization, some built by Microsoft or third parties. However, the distinction between these categories may not be immediately apparent to users. Microsoft does not remove blocked apps from users' view.
    • Users may attempt to add unsupported apps and then receive error messages or prompts to send a request through Teams to IT for approval.
    • App add-ins are not limited to those built by Microsoft Corporation. The Teams app store also features a plethora of third-party apps that can provide value.
    • However, their third-party status introduces another set of complications.
    • Attempting to add third-party apps may expose users to sales pitches and encourage the implementation of shadow IT, circumventing the IT request process.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Users can browse and attempt to add unapproved apps in the Teams app store, but they may have difficulty distinguishing between available and blocked apps. To avoid a bad user experience, communicate to your users which apps they can add without additional approval, and which must be sent through an approval process.

    Decide how you will evaluate requests for new Teams apps

    • As you encourage users to explore and fully utilize Teams, you may see increased requests for admin approval for apps you do not currently support.
    • To prevent disorganized response and user dissatisfaction, build out a workflow for handling new/unapproved Teams app requests. Ensure the workflow accounts for Microsoft and third-party apps.
    • What must you consider when integrating third-party tools? You must have control over what users may add. These requests should follow, or build upon, your existing process for non-standard requests, including a process for communicating the change.
    • Track the fulfillment time for Teams app requests. The longer the user must wait for a response, the more their satisfaction will decline.

    icrosoft suggests that you regularly review the app usage report in the Teams admin center as “a signal about the demand for an app within your organization.” This will help you proactively determine which apps to evaluate for approval.

    Build request workflow for unsupported Teams apps

    What are the key steps?

    1. Request comes in
    2. Review by a technical review team
    3. Review by service desk or business analyst
    4. Additional operational technical reviews if necessary
    5. Procurement and installation
    6. Communication of result to requester
    7. App added to the catalog so it can be used by others

    Example workflow of a 'Non-Standard Software Request Process'.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Teams allows you to customize the message users see when they request an unapproved app and/or redirect their request to your own URL. Review this step in the request process to ensure your users are seeing the instructions that they need to see.

    Download the Service Request Workflow library

    Incorporate new approved service requests into a service request catalog

    Follow the process in Reduce Shadow IT With a Service Request Catalog to build out a robust request management process and service catalog to continuously incorporate new non-standard requests and advertise new Teams apps:

    • Design the service
    • Design the catalog
    • Build the catalog
    • Market the service

    Sample of the 'Reduce Shadow IT With a Service Request Catalog' blueprint.

    Add a company hub to Teams

    Use Teams to help users access the company intranet for organizational information that is relevant to their roles.

    This can be done in two ways:

    1. By adding a SharePoint home site to Teams.
    2. By leveraging Viva Connections: A hub to access other apps and Viva services. The user sees a personalized dashboard, feed, and resources.

    Venn diagram with two circles 'Viva Connections - App-based employee experience where individuals get their work done' and 'Home Sites - Portal that features organizational news, events, and supplemental resources'. The overlapping middle has a list: 'News, Shared navigation, Integrates with M365, Developer platforms & management, Audience targeting, Web parts, Permissions'. (Venn diagram recreated from Microsoft Learn, 2023.)

    Info-Tech Insight

    The hub is where users can access a service catalog of approved Teams apps and submit service requests for a new one via a Make a Request button.

    Communicate changes to Teams

    Let end users know what's available and how to add new productivity tools.

    Where will users find approved Teams apps? How will you inform people about what's available? Once a new app is available, how is this communicated?

    Options:

    • Communicate new Teams features in high-visibility places (e.g. the Hub).
    • Leverage the Power Apps Bulletins app in Teams to communicate regular announcements about new features.
    • Create a company-wide Team with a channel called “What's New in Teams.” Post updates on new features and integrations, and link to more detailed knowledgebase articles on how to use the new features.
    • Aim for the sweet spot of communication frequency: not too much nor too little.

    Measure your success

    Determine how you will evaluate the success of your efforts to improve the Teams collaboration experience

    Improved satisfaction with Teams: Increased net promoter score (NPS)

    Utilization of features: Increased daily average users on key features, apps, integrations

    Timeliness: % of SLAs met for service request fulfillment

    Improved communication to end users about Teams' functionality: Satisfaction with knowledgebase articles on Teams

    Satisfaction with communication from IT

    Section 2: Collaborating Effectively in Teams for End Users

    Section 1

    Collaborating Effectively in Teams for IT

    Section 2

    Collaborating Effectively in Teams for End Users

    For IT: Use this section to help users understand Teams collaboration features

    Share the collateral in this section with your users to support their deeper exploration of Teams collaboration.

    • Use the Microsoft Teams Planning Tool to prepare a simple service catalog of the features and apps available to your users.
    • Edit Tab 2 (MS Teams Collab Features & Apps) by deleting the blocked apps/features.
    • Share this document with your users by linking to it via this image on the following slides:
    Sample of the Microsoft Teams Planning Tool deliverable.

    Download the Microsoft Teams Planning Tool for an expanded list of features & apps

    End-user customization of Teams

    Consider how you want to set up your Teams view. Add the apps you already use to have them at your fingertips in Teams.

    You can . . .

    1. Customize your navigation bar by pinning your preferred apps and working with them within Teams (Microsoft calls these personal apps).
    2. Customize your message bar by adding the app extensions you find most useful. Screenshot of the message bar with the 3-dot highlighted.
    3. Customize chats and Teams by adding tabs with content your group needs frequent access to. Screenshot of MS Teams tabs with the plus sign highlighted.
    4. Set up connectors to send notifications from apps to a Team and bots to answer questions and automate simple tasks. Screenshot of the 'Set up a connector' button.

    Learn more from Microsoft here

    MS Teams productivity & collab features

    The Apps catalog includes a range of apps that users may add to channels, chat, or the navigation bar. Teams also possesses other collaboration features that may be underused in your organization.

    1. Gather feedback

      Solicit feedback and comments, and provide updates
    2. Collaboratively create content

      Compose as a group, with live-synced changes
    3. Improve project & task management

      Keep track of projects and tasks
    4. Add media content

      Enrich Teams conversations with media, and keep a library of video resources
    5. Knowledge management

      Pull together document libraries and make information easier to find
    6. Increase meeting effectiveness

      Facilitate interactions and document meeting outcomes
    7. Increase employee engagement

      Use features that enhance social interaction among Teams users
    8. Enhance professional development

      Find resources to help achieve professional goals
    9. Provide or access support

      IT and user-facing resources for accessing and/or providing support
    10. Add third-party apps

      Understand the availability/restrictions of the built-in Teams app catalog

    Samples of four features: 'Prioritize with a voting table', 'Launch a live meeting poll', 'Launch a survey', and 'Request an update'.

    Download the Microsoft Teams Collaboration Tool for an expanded list of features & apps

    Use integrated Teams features to gather feedback and provide updates

    • Vote: Create a list of items for teams to brainstorm pros and cons, and then tabulate votes on. This component can be edited inline by anyone with whom the component is shared. The edits will sync anywhere the component is shared.
    • Meeting polls: Capture instant feedback from teams, chat, and call participants. Participant anonymity can be set by the poll organizer. Results can be exported.
    • Create surveys and quizzes and share the results. Results can be exported.
    • Create, track, and review updates and progress reports from teams and individuals.

    Collaboratively create content

    Samples of four features: 'Add Office suite docs', 'Brainstorm in Whiteboard', 'Add Loop components', and 'Take notes in OneNote'.

    Download the Microsoft Teams Planning Tool for an expanded list of features & apps

    Use integrated Teams features composed as a group, with live-synced changes

    • Microsoft Office documents: Add/upload files to a chat or channel discussion. Find them again in the Files tab or add the file itself as a tab to a chat or channel and edit it within Teams.
    • Brainstorm with the Whiteboard application. Add a whiteboard to a tab or to a meeting.
    • Add Loop components to a chat: Create a list, checklist, paragraph, or table that can be edited in real time by anyone in the chat.
    • Add OneNote to a chat or channel tab or use during a meeting to take notes. Pin OneNote to your app bar if it's one of your most frequently-used apps.

    Improve project & task management

    Samples of four features: 'Request approvals and updates', 'Add & track tasks', 'Create a personal notespace', and 'Manage workflows'.

    Download the Microsoft Teams Planning Tool for an expanded list of features & apps

    Keep track of projects and tasks

    • Use the Approvals and Update apps to create, track, and respond to requests for approvals and progress reports within Teams.
    • Use Tasks by Planner & To Do to track both individual and team tasks. Pin the Tasks app to the app bar, add a plan as a tab to a Team, and turn any Teams message into a task by right-clicking on it.
    • Start a chat with yourself to maintain a private space to jot down quick notes.
    • Add Lists to a Teams channel.
    • Explore automation: Add pre-built Teams workflows from the Workflows app, or build new ones in PowerAutomate
    • IT teams may leverage Teams apps like Azure Boards, Pipelines, Repos, AD notifications, and GitHub.

    Add media content

    Samples of four features: 'Share news stories', 'Share YouTube videos', 'Share Stream content', and 'Add RSS feeds'.

    Download the Microsoft Teams Planning Tool for an expanded list of features & apps

    Enrich Teams conversations with media, and keep a library of video resources

    • Search for and add specific news stories to a chat or channel. See recent news stories in search.
    • Search, share, and watch YouTube videos.
    • Share video links from Microsoft Stream.
    • Add RSS feeds.

    Knowledge management

    Samples of four features: 'SharePoint Pages', 'SharePoint document library', 'SharePoint News', and 'Who'.

    Download the Microsoft Teams Planning Tool for an expanded list of features & apps

    Pull together document libraries and make information easier to find

    • Add a page from an existing SharePoint site to a Team as a tab.
    • Add a SharePoint document library to a Team as a tab.
    • Search names of members of your organization to learn about their role, place in the organizational structure, and contact information.

    Increase meeting effectiveness

    Samples of four features: 'Take meeting notes', 'Set up a Q&A', 'Use live captions', and 'Record and transcribe meetings'.

    Download the Microsoft Teams Planning Tool for an expanded list of features & apps

    Facilitate interactions and document meeting outcomes

    • Take simple notes during a meeting.
    • Start conversations and ask and answer questions in a dedicated Q&A space during the Teams meeting.
    • Turn on live captions during the meeting.
    • Record a meeting and automatically generate a transcript of the meeting.
    • Assign attendees to breakout rooms.
    • Track the effectiveness of the meeting by producing an attendance report with the number of attendees, the meeting start/end time, a list of the attendees, and participation in activities.

    Increase employee engagement

    Samples of four features: 'Send praise', 'Build an avatar', 'Add video effects', and 'Play games during meetings'.

    Download the Microsoft Teams Planning Tool for an expanded list of features & apps

    Use features that enhance social interaction among Teams users

    • Send supportive comments to colleagues using Praise.
    • Build out digital avatars to toggle on during meetings instead of your own video.
    • Apply different visual effects, filters, and backgrounds to your screen during meetings.
    • Games for Work: Launch icebreaker games during a meeting.
    • Translate a Teams message from another language to your default language.
    • Send emojis, GIFs, and stickers in messages or as reactions to others' messages. You can also send reactions live during meetings to increase meeting engagement.

    Enhance professional development

    Samples of four features: 'Launch Viva Learning', 'Turn on Speaker Coach', 'Viva Insights', and 'Viva Goals'.

    Download the Microsoft Teams Planning Tool for an expanded list of features & apps

    Connect with learning resources and apply data-driven feedback based on Teams usage

    • Add learning materials from various course catalogs in Viva Learning.
    • Speaker Coach: Receive AI feedback on your performance as a speaker during a meeting.
    • Receive automatically generated insights and suggestions from Viva Insights on work habits and time allocation to different work activities.
    • Viva Goals: Track organizational "objectives and key results"/manage organizational goals

    Provide or access support

    Samples of four features: 'Access MS Support', 'Manage Teams & M365', 'Deploy power virtual agents', and 'Consult MS resource center'.

    Download the Microsoft Teams Planning Tool for an expanded list of features & apps

    IT and user-facing resources for accessing or providing support

    • Admin: Carry out simple Teams management tasks (for IT).
    • Power Virtual Agents: Build out chatbots to answer user questions (can be built by IT and end users for their customers).
    • Resource Center: A combination of pre-built Microsoft resources (tips, templates) with resources provided by organizational IT.
    • Support: Access Microsoft self-serve knowledgebase articles (for IT).

    Add third-party apps

    Understand the availability/restrictions of the built-in Teams app catalog

    • App add-ins are not limited to those built by Microsoft Corporation. The Teams app store also features a plethora of third-party apps that may provide value.
    • However, being able to view an app in the app store does not necessarily mean it's supported or licensed by your organization.
    • Teams will allow users to request access to apps, which will then be evaluated by your IT support team. Follow your service desk's recommended request process for requesting and justifying the addition of a new Teams app that is not currently supported.
    • Before making the request, investigate existing Teams features to determine if the functionality is already available.

    Research contributors

    Mike Cavanagh
    Global Service Desk Manager
    Clearwater Seafoods LP

    Info-Tech contributors:

    Benedict Chang, Senior Advisory Analyst

    John Donovan, Principal Research Director

    Allison Kinnaird, Practice Lead

    P.J. Ryan, Research Director

    Natalie Sansone, Research Director

    Christine West, Managing Partner

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Sample of the 'Reduce Shadow IT with a Service Request Catalog' blueprint.

    Reduce Shadow IT With a Service Request Catalog

    Foster business relationships through sourcing-as-a-service. There is a direct correlation between service delivery dissatisfaction and increases in shadow IT. Whether the goal is to reduce shadow IT or gain control, improved customer service and fast delivery are key to making lasting changes.

    Sample of the 'Microsoft Teams Cookbook' blueprint.

    Microsoft Teams Cookbook

    Recipes for best practices and use cases for Teams. Microsoft Teams is not a standalone app. Successful utilization of Teams occurs when conceived in the broader context of how it integrates with M365. Understanding how information flows between Teams, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business, for instance, will aid governance with permissions, information storage, and file sharing.

    Sample of the 'Govern Office 365 (M365)' blueprint.

    Govern Office 365

    You bought it. Use it right. Map your organizational goals to the administration features available in the Office 365/M365 console. Your governance should reflect your requirements.

    Bibliography

    Mehta, Tejas. “The Home Site App for Microsoft Teams.” Microsoft Community Hub. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-sharepoint-blog/the-home-site-app-for-microsoft-teams/ba-p/1714255.

    Overview: Viva Connections. 7 Mar. 2023, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/connections/viva-connections-overview.

    Rogers, Laura. “SharePoint Home Site in Teams.” Wonderlaura, 24 Jun 2021. https://wonderlaura.com/2021/06/24/sharepoint-home...

    Schubert, Petra, and Johannes H. Glitsch. “Adding Structure to Enterprise Collaboration Systems: Identification of Use Cases and Collaboration Scenarios.” Procedia Computer Science, vol. 64, Jan. 2015, pp. 161–69. ScienceDirect, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2015.08.477.

    Schubert, Petra, and Johannes Glitsch. “Use Cases and Collaboration Scenarios: How Employees Use Socially-Enabled Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS).” International Journal of Information Systems and Project Management, vol. 4, no. 2, Jan. 2016, pp. 41–62.

    Thompson, Mark. “User Requests for Blocked Apps in the Teams Store.” Supersimple365, 5 Apr 2022, https://supersimple365.com/user-requests-for-apps-...

    “What is Microsoft Teams Premium?” Breakwater IT, n.d., https://breakwaterit.co.uk/guides/microsoft-teams-...

    Wills, Jonny. “Microsoft Teams Monthly Users Hits 280 Million.” UC Today, 25 Jan. 2023, https://www.uctoday.com/unified-communications/microsoft-teams-monthly-users-hits-280-million/.

    Master the Secrets of Adobe’s Creative Cloud Contracts to Right-Size Your Adobe Spend

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}139|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): 10.0/10 Overall Impact
    • member rating average dollars saved: $63,667 Average $ Saved
    • member rating average days saved: 110 Average Days Saved
    • Parent Category Name: Licensing
    • Parent Category Link: /licensing
    • Adobe operates in its own niche in the creative space, and Adobe users have grown accustomed to their products, making switching very difficult.
    • With Adobe’s transition to a cloud-based subscription model, it’s important for organizations to actively manage licenses, software provisioning, and consumption.
    • Without a detailed understanding of Adobe’s various purchasing models, overspending often occurs.
    • Organizations have experienced issues in identifying commercial licensed packages with their install files, making it difficult to track and assign licenses.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Focus on user needs first. Examine which products are truly needed versus nice to have to prevent overspending on the Creative Cloud suite.
    • Examine what has been deployed. Knowing what has been deployed and what is being used will greatly aid in completing your true-up.
    • Compliance is not automatic with products that are in the cloud. Shared logins or computers that have desktop installs that can be access by multiple users can cause noncompliance.

    Impact and Result

    • Visibility into license deployments and needs
    • Compliance with internal audits

    Master the Secrets of Adobe’s Creative Cloud Contracts to Right-Size Your Adobe Spend Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Procuring Adobe software is not the same game as it was just a few years ago. Adopt a comprehensive approach to understanding Adobe licensing to avoid overspending and to maximize negotiation leverage.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Manage your Adobe agreements

    Use Info-Tech’s licensing best practices to avoid overspending on Adobe licensing and to remain compliant in case of audit.

    • Adobe ETLA vs. VIP Pricing Table
    • Adobe ETLA Forecasted Costs and Benefits
    • Adobe ETLA Deployment Forecast
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Master the Secrets of Adobe’s Creative Cloud Contracts to Right-Size Your Adobe Spend

    Learn the essential steps to avoid overspending and to maximize negotiation leverage with Adobe.

    ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

    Only 18% of Adobe licenses are genuine copies: are yours?

    "Adobe has designed and executed the most comprehensive evolution to the subscription model of pre-cloud software publishers with Creative Cloud. Adobe's release of Document Cloud (replacement for the Acrobat series of software) is the final nail in the coffin for legacy licensing for Adobe. Technology procurement functions have run out of time in which to act while they still retain leverage, with the exception of some late adopter organizations that were able to run on legacy versions (e.g. CS6) for the past five years. Procuring Adobe software is not the same game as it was just a few years ago. Adopt a comprehensive approach to understanding Adobe licensing, contract, and delivery models in order to accurately forecast your software needs, transact against the optimal purchase plan, and maximize negotiation leverage. "

    Scott Bickley

    Research Lead, Vendor Practice

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Our understanding of the problem

    This Research is Designed For:

    • IT managers scoping their Adobe licensing requirements and compliance position.
    • CIOs, CTOs, CPOs, and IT directors negotiating licensing agreements in search of cost savings.
    • ITAM/Software asset managers responsible for tracking and managing Adobe licensing.
    • IT and business leaders seeking to better understand Adobe licensing options (Creative Cloud).
    • Vendor management offices in the process of a contract renewal.

    This Research Will Help You:

    • Understand and simplify licensing per product to help optimize spend.
    • Ensure agreement type is aligned to needs.
    • Navigate the purchase process to negotiate from a position of strength.
    • Manage licenses more effectively to avoid compliance issues, audits, and unnecessary purchases.

    This Research Will Also Assist:

    • CFOs and the finance department
    • Enterprise architects
    • ITAM/SAM team
    • Network and IT architects
    • Legal
    • Procurement and sourcing

    This Research Will Help Them:

    • Understand licensing methods in order to make educated and informed decisions.
    • Understand the future of the cloud in your Adobe licensing roadmap.

    Executive summary

    Situation

    • Adobe’s dominant market position and ownership of the creative software market is forcing customers to refocus the software acquisition process to ensure a positive ROI on every license.
    • In early 2017, Adobe announced it would stop selling perpetual Creative Suite 6 products, forcing future purchases to be transitioned to the cloud.

    Complication

    • Adobe operates in its own niche in the creative space, and Adobe users have grown accustomed to their products, making switching very difficult.
    • With transition to a cloud-based subscription model, organizations need to actively manage licenses, software provisioning, and consumption.
    • Without a detailed understanding of Adobe’s various purchasing models, overspending often occurs.
    • Organizations have experienced issues in identifying commercial licensed packages with their install files, making it difficult to track and assign licenses.

    Resolution

    • Gain visibility into license deployments and needs with a strong SAM program/tool; this will go a long way toward optimizing spend.
      • Number of users versus number of installs are not the same, and confusing the two can result in overspending. Device-based licensing historically would have required two licenses, but now only one may be required.
    • Ensure compliance with internal audits. Adobe has a very high rate of piracy stemming from issues such as license overuse, misunderstanding of contract language, using cracks/keygens, virtualized environments, indirect access, and sharing of accounts.
    • A handful of products are still sold as perpetual – Acrobat Standard/Pro, Captivate, ColdFusion, Photoshop, and Premiere Elements – but be aware of what is being purchased and used in the organization.
      • Beware of products deployed on server, where the number of users accessing that product cannot easily be counted.

    Info-Tech Insight

    1. Your user-need analysis has shifted in the new subscription-based model. Determine which products are needed versus nice to have to prevent overspending on the Creative Cloud suite.
    2. Examine what you need, not what you have. You can no longer mix and match applications.
    3. Compliance is not automatic with products that are in the cloud. Shared logins or computers with desktop installs that can be accessed by multiple users can cause noncompliance.

    The aim of this blueprint is to provide a foundational understanding of Adobe

    Why Adobe

    In 2011 Adobe took the strategic but radical move toward converting its legacy on-premises licensing to a cloud-based subscription model, in spite of material pushback from its customer base. While revenues initially dipped, Adobe’s resolve paid off; the transition is mostly complete and revenues have doubled. This was the first enterprise software offering to effect the transition to the cloud in a holistic manner. It now serves as a case study for those following suit, such as Microsoft, Autodesk, and Oracle.

    What to know

    Adobe elected to make this market pivot in a dramatic fashion, foregoing a gradual transition process. Enterprise clients were temporarily allowed to survive on legacy on-premises editions of Adobe software; however, as the Adobe Creative Cloud functionality was quickly enhanced and new applications were launched, customer capitulation to the new subscription model was assured.

    The Future

    Adobe is now leveraging the power of connected customers, the availability of massive data streams, and the ongoing digitalization trend globally to supplement the core Creative Cloud products with online services and analytics in the areas of Creative Cloud for content, Marketing Cloud for marketers, and Document Cloud for document management and workflows. This blueprint focuses on Adobe's Creative Cloud and Document Cloud solutions and the enterprise term license agreement (ETLA).

    Info-Tech Insight

    Beware of your contract being auto-renewed and getting locked into the quantities and product subset that you have in your current agreement. Determining the number of licenses you need is critical. If you overestimate, you're locked in for three years. If you underestimate, you have to pay a big premium in the true-up process.

    Learn the “Adobe way,” whether you are reviewing existing spend or considering the purchase of new products

    1. Legacy on-premises Adobe Creative Suite products used to be available in multiple package configurations, enabling right-sized spend with functionality. Adobe’s support for legacy Creative Suites CS6 products ended in May 2017.
    2. While early ETLAs allowed customer application packaging at a lower price than the full Creative Cloud suite, this practice has been discontinued. Now, the only purchasing options are the full suite or single-application subscriptions.
    3. Buyers must now assess alternative Adobe products as an option for non-power users. For example, QuarkXPress, Corel PaintShop Pro, CorelDRAW, Bloom, and Affinity Designer are possible replacements for some Creative Cloud applications.
    4. Document Cloud, Adobe’s latest step in creating an Acrobat-focused subscription model, limits the ability to reduce costs with an extended upgrade cycle. These changes go beyond the licensing model.
    5. Organizations need to perform a cost-benefit analysis of single app purchases vs. the full suite to right-size spend with functionality.

    As Adobe’s dominance continues to grow, organizations must find new ways to maintain a value-added relationship

    Adobe estimates the total addressable market for creative and document cloud to be $21 billion. With no sign of growth slowing down, Adobe customers must learn how to work within the current design monopoly.

    The image contains two pie graphs. The first is labelled FY2014 Revenue Mix, and the second graph is titled FY2017E Revenue Mix.

    Source: Adobe, 2017

    "Adobe is not only witnessing a steady increase in Creative Cloud subscriptions, but it also gained more visibility into customers’ product usage, which enables it to consistently push out software updates relevant to user needs. The company also successfully transformed its sales organization to support the recurring revenue model."

    – Omid Razavi, Global Head of Success, ServiceNow

    Consider your route forward

    Consider your route forward, as ETLA contract commitments, scope, and mechanisms differ in structure to the perpetual models previously utilized. The new model shortchanges technology procurement leaders in their expectations of cost-usage alignment and opex flexibility (White, 2016).

    ☑ Implement a user profile to assign licenses by version and limit expenditures. Alternatives can include existing legacy perpetual and Acrobat classic versions that may already be owned by the organization.

    ☑ Examine the suitability and/or dependency on Document Cloud functions, such as existing business workflows and e-signature integration.

    ☑ Involve stakeholders in the evaluation of alternate products for use cases where dependency on Acrobat-specific functionality is limited.

    ☑ Identify not just the installs and active use of the applications but also the depth and breadth of use across the various features so that the appropriate products can be selected.

    The image contains a screenshot of a diagram listing the adobe toolkit. The toolkit includes: Adobe ETLA Deployment Forecast Tool, Adobe ETLA Forecasted Cost and Benefits, Adobe ETLA vs. VIP Pricing Table.

    Use Info-Tech’s Adobe toolkit to prepare for your new purchases or contract renewal

    Info-Tech Insight

    IT asset management (ITAM) and software asset management (SAM) are critical! An error made in a true-up can cost the organization for the remaining years of the ETLA. Info-Tech worked with one client that incurred a $600k error in the true-up that they were not able to recoup from Adobe.

    Apply licensing best practices and examine the potential for cost savings through an unbiased third-party perspective

    Establish Licensing Requirements

    • Understand Adobe’s product landscape and transition to cloud.
    • Analyze users and match to correct Adobe SKU.
    • Conduct an internal software assessment.
    • Build an effective licensing position.

    Evaluate Licensing Options

    • Value Incentive Plan (VIP)
    • Cumulative Licensing Program (CLP)
    • Transactional Licensing Program (TLP)
    • Enterprise Term License Agreement (ETLA)

    Evaluate Agreement Options

    • Price
    • Discounts
    • Price protection
    • Terms and conditions

    Purchase and Manage Licenses

    • Learn negotiation tactics to enhance your current strategy.
    • Control the flow of communication.
    • Assign the right people to manage the environment.

    Preventive practices can help find measured value ($)

    Time and resource disruption to business if audited

    Lost estimated synergies in M&A

    Cost of new licensing

    Cost of software audit, penalties, and back support

    Lost resource allocation and time

    Third party, legal/SAM partners

    Cost of poor negotiation tactics

    Lost discount percentage

    Terms and conditions improved

    Explore Adobe licensing and optimize spend – project overview

    Establish Licensing Requirements

    Evaluate Licensing Options

    Evaluate Agreement Options

    Purchase and Manage Licenses

    Best-Practice Toolkit

    • Assess current state and align goals; review business feedback.
    • Interview key stakeholders to define business objectives and drivers.
    • Review licensing options.
    • Review licensing rules.
    • Determine the ideal contract type.
    • Review final contract.
    • Discuss negotiation points.
    • License management.
    • Future licensing strategy.

    Guided Implementations

    • Engage in a scoping call.
    • Assess the current state.
    • Determine licensing position.
    • Review product options.
    • Review licensing rules.
    • Review contract option types.
    • Determine negotiation points.
    • Finalize the contract.
    • Discuss license management.
    • Evaluate and develop a roadmap for future licensing.

    PHASE 1

    Manage Your Adobe Agreements

    Phase 1 outline

    Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

    Guided Implementation 1: Managing Adobe Contracts

    Proposed Time to Completion: 3-6 weeks

    Step 1.1: Establish Licensing Requirements

    Start with a kick-off call:

    • Assess the current state.
    • Determine licensing position.

    Then complete these activities…

    • Complete a deployment count, needs analysis, and internal audit.

    With these tools & templates:

    Adobe ETLA Deployment Forecast

    Step 1.2: Determine Licensing Options

    Review findings with analyst:

    • Review licensing options.
    • Review licensing rules.
    • Review contract option types.

    Then complete these activities…

    • Select licensing option.
    • Document forecasted costs and benefits.

    With these tools & templates:

    Adobe ETLA vs. VIP Pricing Table

    Adobe ETLA Forecasted Costs and Benefits

    Step 1.3: Purchase and Manage Licenses

    Review findings with analyst:

    • Review final contract.
    • Discuss negotiation points.
    • Plan a roadmap for SAM.

    Then complete these activities…

    • Negotiate final contract.
    • Evaluate and develop a roadmap for SAM.

    With these tools & templates:

    Adobe ETLA Deployment Forecast

    Adobe’s Cloud – Snapshot of what has changed

    1. Since Adobe has limited the procurement and licensing options with the introduction of Creative Cloud, there are three main choices:
      1. Direct online purchase at Adobe.com
      2. Value Incentive Plan (VIP): Creative Cloud for teams–based purchase with a volume discount (minimal, usually ~10%); may have some incentives or promotional pricing
      3. Enterprise Term License Agreement (ETLA): Creative Cloud for Enterprise (CCE)
    2. Adobe has discontinued support for legacy perpetual licenses, with the latest version being CS6, which is steering organizations to prioritize their options for products in the creative and document management space.
    3. Document Cloud (DC) is the cloud product replacing the Acrobat perpetual licensing model. DC extends the subscription-based model further and limits options to extend the lifespan of legacy on-premises licenses through a protracted upgrade process.
    4. The subscription model, coupled with limited discount options on transactional purchases, forces enterprises to consider the ETLA option. The ETLA brings with it unique term commitments, new pricing structures, and true-up mechanisms and inserts the "land and expand" model vs. license reassignment.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Adobe’s move from a perpetual license to a per-user subscription model can be positive in some scenarios for organizations that experienced challenges with deployment, management of named users vs. devices, and license tracking.

    Core concepts of Adobe agreements: Discounting, pricing, and bundling

    ETLA

    Adobe has been systematically reducing discounts on ETLAs as they enter the second renewal cycle of the original three-year terms.

    Adobe Cloud Bundling

    Adobe cloud services are being bundled with ETLAs with a mandate that companies that do not accept the services at the proposed cost have Adobe management’s approval to unbundle the deal, generally with no price relief.

    Custom Bundling

    The option for custom bundling of legacy Creative Suite component applications has been removed, effectively raising the price across the board for licensees that require more than two Adobe applications who must now purchase the full Creative Cloud suite.

    Higher and Public Education

    Higher education/public education agreements have been revamped over the past couple of years, increasing prices for campus-wide agreements by double-digit percentages (~10-30%+). While they still receive an 80% discount over list price, IT departments in this industry are not prepared to absorb the budget increase.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Adobe has moved to an all-or-one bundle model. If you need more than two application products, you will likely need to purchase the full Creative Cloud suite. Therefore, it is important to focus on creating accurate user profiles to identify usage needs.

    Use Info-Tech’s Adobe deployment tool for SAM: Track deployment and needs

    The image contains a screenshot of Info-Tech's Adobe deployment tool for SAM: Track deployment and needs.

    Use Info-Tech’s Adobe deployment tool for SAM: Audit

    The image contains a screenshot of the Adobe Deployment Tool for SAM, specifically the Audit tab.

    Use Info-Tech’s Adobe deployment tool for SAM: Cost

    The image contains a screenshot of the Adobe Deployment Tool for SAM, specifically the Cost tab.

    Use Info-Tech’s tools to compare ETLA vs. VIP and to document forecasted costs and benefits

    Is the ETLA or VIP option better for your organization?

    Use Info-Tech’s Adobe ETLA vs. VIP Pricing Table tool to compare ETLA costs against VIP costs.

    The image contains a screenshot of Info-Tech's Adobe ETLA vs. VIP Pricing Table.

    Your ETLA contains multiple products and is a multi-year agreement.

    Use Info-Tech’s ETLA Forecasted Costs and Benefits tool to forecast your ETLA costs and document benefits.

    The image contains a screenshot of Info-Tech's ETLA Forecasted Costs and Benefits.

    Adobe’s Creative Cloud Complete offering provides access to all Adobe creative products and ongoing upgrades

    Why subscription model?

    The subscription model forces customers to an annuity-based pricing model, so Adobe has recurring revenue from a subscription-based product. This increases customer lifetime value (CLTV) for Adobe while providing ongoing functionality updates that are not version/edition dependent.

    Key Characteristics:

    • Available as a month-to-month or annual subscription license
    • Can be purchased for one user, for a team, or for an enterprise
    • Subject to annual payment and true-up of license fees
    • Can only true-up during lifespan of contract; quantities cannot be reduced until renewal
    • May contain auto-renewal clauses – beware!

    Key things to know:

    1. Applications can be purchased individually if users require only one specific product. A few products continue to have on-premises licensing options, but most are offered by per-user subscriptions.
    2. At the end of the subscription period, the organization no longer has any rights to the software and would have to return to a previously owned version.
    3. True-downs are not possible (in contrast to Microsoft’s Office 365).
    4. Downgrade rights are not included or are limited by default.

    Which products are in the Creative Cloud bundle?

    Adobe Acrobat® XI Pro

    Adobe After Effects® CC

    Adobe Audition® CC

    Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition

    Adobe InDesign® CC

    Adobe Dreamweaver® CC

    Adobe Edge Animate

    Adobe Edge Code preview

    Adobe Edge Inspect

    Adobe Photoshop CC

    Adobe Edge Reflow preview

    Adobe Edge Web Fonts

    Adobe Extension Manager

    ExtendScript Toolkit

    Adobe Fireworks® CS6

    Adobe Flash® Builder® 4.7 Premium Edition

    Adobe Flash Professional CC

    Adobe Illustrator® CC

    Adobe Prelude® CC

    Adobe Premiere® Pro CC

    Adobe Scout

    Adobe SpeedGrade® CC

    Adobe Muse CC

    Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 6

    Adobe offers different solutions for teams vs. enterprise licensing

    Evaluate the various options for Creative Cloud, as they can be purchased individually, for teams, or for enterprise.

    Bundle Name

    Target Customer

    Included Applications

    Features

    CC (for Individuals)

    Individual users

    The individual chooses

    • Sync, store, and share assets
    • Adobe Portfolio website
    • Adobe Typekit font collection
    • Microsoft Teams integration
    • Can only be purchased through credit card

    CC for Teams (CCT)

    Small to midsize organizations with a small number of Adobe users who are all within the same team

    Depends on your team’s requirements. You can select all applications or specific applications.

    Everything that CC (for individuals) does, plus

    • One license per user; can reassign CC licenses
    • Web-based admin console
    • Centralized deployment
    • Usage tracking and reporting
    • 100GB of storage per user
    • Volume discounts for 10+ seats

    CC for Enterprise (CCE)

    Large organizations with users who regularly use multiple Adobe products on multiple machines

    All applications including Adobe Stock for images and Adobe Enterprise Dashboard for managing user accounts

    Everything that CCT does, plus

    • Employees can activate a second copy of software on another device (e.g. home computer) as long as they share the same Adobe ID and are not used simultaneously
    • Ability to reassign licenses from old users to new users
    • Custom storage options
    • Greater integration with other Adobe products
    • Larger volume discounts with more seats

    For further information on specific functionality differences, reference Adobe’s comparison table.

    A Cloud-ish solution: Considerations and implications for IT organizations

    ☑ True cloud products are typically service-based, scalable and elastic, shared resources, have usage metering, and rely upon internet technologies. Currently, Adobe’s Creative Cloud and Document Cloud products lack these characteristics. In fact, the core products are still downloaded and physically installed on endpoint devices, then anchored to the cloud provisioning system, where the software can be automatically updated and continuously verified for compliance by ensuring the subscription is active.

    ☑ Adobe Cloud allows Adobe to increase end-user productivity by releasing new features and products to market faster, but the customer will increase lock-in to the Adobe product suite. The fast-release approach poses a different challenge for IT departments, as they must prepare to test and support new functionality and ensure compatibility with endpoint devices.

    ☑ There are options at the enterprise level that enable IT to exert more granular control over new feature releases, but these are tied to the ETLA and the provided enterprise portal and are not available on other subscription plans. This is another mechanism by which Adobe has been able to spur ETLA adoption.

    Not all CIOs consider SaaS/subscription applications their first choice, but the Adobe’s dominant position in the content and document management marketplace is forcing the shift regardless. It is significant that Adobe bypassed the typical hybrid transition model by effectively disrupting the ability to continue with perpetual licensing without falling behind the functionality curve.

    VIP plans do allow for annual terms and payment, but you lose the price elasticity that comes with multi-year terms.

    Download Info-Tech’s Adobe ETLA vs. VIP Pricing Table tool to compare ETLA costs against VIP costs.

    When moving to Adobe cloud, validate that license requirements meet organizational needs, not a sales quota

    Follow these steps in your transition to Creative Cloud.

    Step 1: Make sure you have a software asset management (SAM) tool to determine Adobe installs and usage within your environment.

    Step 2: Look at the current Adobe install base and usage. We recommend reviewing three months’ worth of reliable usage data to decide which users should have which licenses going forward.

    Step 3: Understand the changes in Adobe packages for Creative Cloud (CC). Also, take into account that the license types are based on users, not devices.

    Step 4: Identify those users who only need a single license for a single application (e.g. Photoshop, InDesign, Muse).

    Step 5: Identify the users who require CC suites. Look at their usage of previous Adobe suites to get an idea of which CC suite they require. Did they have Design Suite Standard installed but only use one or two elements? This is a good way to ensure you do not overspend on Adobe licenses.

    Source: The ITAM Review

    Download Info-Tech’s Adobe ETLA Deployment Forecast tool to track Adobe installs within your environment and to determine usage needs.

    Acquiring Adobe Software

    Adobe offers four common licensing methods, which are reviewed in detail in the following slides.

    Most common purchasing models

    Points for consideration

    • Value Incentive Plan (VIP)
    • Cumulative Licensing Program (CLP)
    • Transactional Licensing Program (TLP)
    • Enterprise Term License Agreement (ETLA)
    • Adobe, as with many other large software providers, includes special benefits and rights when its products are purchased through volume licensing channels.
    • Businesses should typically refrain from purchasing individual OEM (shrink wrap) licenses or those meant for personal use.
    • Purchase record history is available online, making it easier for your organization to manage entitlements in the case of an audit.

    "Customers are not even obliged to manage all the licenses themselves. The reseller partners have access to the cloud console and can manage licenses on behalf of their customers. Even better, they can seize cross and upsell opportunities and provide good insight into the environment. Additionally, Adobe itself provides optimization services."

    B-lay

    CLP and TLP

    The CLP and TLP are transactional agreements generally used for the purchase of perpetual licenses. For example, they could be used for making Acrobat purchases if Creative Suite products are purchased on the ETLA.

    The image contains a screenshot of a table comparing CLP and TLP.

    Source: “Adobe Buying Programs Comparison Guide for Commercial and Government Organizations”

    VIP and ETLA

    The Value Incentive Plan is aimed at small- to medium-sized organizations with no minimum quantity required. However, there is limited flexibility to reduce licenses and limited price protection for future purchases. The ETLA is aimed at large organizations who wish to have new functionality as it comes out, license management portal, services, and security/IT control aspects.

    The image contains a screenshot of a table comparing VIP and ETLA.

    Source: “Adobe Buying Programs Comparison Guide for Commercial and Government Organizations”

    ETLA commitments risk creating “shelfware-as-a-service”

    The Adobe ETLA’s rigid contract parameters, true-up process, and unique deployment/provisioning mechanisms give technology/IT procurement leaders fewer options to maximize cost-usage alignment and to streamline opex costs.

    ☑ No ETLA price book is publicly published; pricing is controlled by the Adobe enterprise sales team.

    ☑ Adobe's retail pricing is a good starting point for negotiating discounted pricing.

    ☑ ETLA commitments are usually for three years, and the lack of a true-down option increases the risk involved in overbuying licenses should the organization encounter a business downturn or adverse event.

    ☑ Pricing discounts are the highest at the initial ETLA signing for the upfront volume commitment. The true-up pricing is discounted from retail but still higher than the signing cost per license.

    ☑ Technical support is included in the ETLA.

    ☑ While purchases typically go through value-added resellers (VARs), procurement can negotiate directly with Adobe.

    "For cloud products, it is less complex when it comes to purchasing and pricing. If larger quantities are purchased on a longer term, the discount may reach up to 15%. As soon as you enroll in the VIP program, you can control all your licenses from an ‘admin console’. Any updates or new functionalities are included in the original price. When the licenses expire, you may choose to renew your subscriptions or remove them. Partial renewal is also accepted. Of course, you can also re-negotiate your price if more subscriptions are added to your console."

    B-lay

    ETLA recommendations

    1. Assess the end-user requirements with a high degree of scrutiny. Perform an analysis that matches the licensee with the correct Adobe product SKU to reduce the risk of overspending.
    • Leverage metering data that identifies actual usage and lack thereof, match to user profile functional requirements, and then determine end users’ actual license requirements.
  • Build in time to evaluate alternative products where possible and position the organization to leverage a Plan B vendor to replace or mitigate growth on the Adobe platform. Re-evaluate options well in advance of the ETLA renewal.
  • Secure price protection through negotiating a price cap or an extended ETLA term beyond the standard three-year term. Short of obtaining an escalation cap, which Adobe is strongly resisting, build in price increases for the ETLA renewal years.
    • Demand price transparency and granularity in the proposal process.
    • Validate that volume discounts are appropriate and show through to the true-up line item pricing.
  • Negotiate a true-down mechanism upfront with Adobe if usage decline is inevitable or expected due to a merger or acquisition, divestiture, or material restructuring event.
  • INFO-TECH TIP: For further guidance on ETLAs and pricing, contact your Info-Tech representative to set up a call with an analyst.

    Use Info-Tech’s Adobe ETLA Deployment Forecast tool to match licensees with Adobe product SKUs.

    Prepare for Adobe’s true-up process

    How the true-up process works

    When adding a license, the true-up price will be prorated to 50% of the license cost for previous year’s usage plus 100% of the license cost for the next year. This back-charging adds up to 150% of the overall true-up license cost. In some rare cases, Adobe has provided an “unlimited” quantity for certain SKUs; these Unlimited ETLAs generally align with FTE counts and limit FTE increases to about 5%. Procurement must monitor and work with SAM/ITAM and stakeholder groups to restrain unnecessary growth during the term of an Unlimited ETLA to avoid the risk of cost escalation at renewal time.

    Higher-education specific

    Higher-education clients can license under the ETLA based on a prescribed number of user and classroom/lab devices and/or on a FTE basis. In these cases, the combination of Creative Cloud and Acrobat Pro volume must equal the FTE total, creating an enterprise footprint. FTE calculations establish the full-time faculty plus one-third of part-time faculty plus one-half of part-time staff.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Compliance takes a different form in terms of the ETLA true-up process. The completion of Adobe's transition to cloud-based licensing and verification has improved compliance rates via phone home telemetry such that pirated software is less available and more easily detected. Adobe has actually decommissioned its audit arm in the Americas and EMEA.

    Audits and software asset management with Adobe

    Watch out for:

    • Virtual desktops, freeware, and test and trial licenses
    • Adobe products that may be bundled into a suite; a manual check will be needed to ensure the suite isn’t recognized as a standalone license
    • Pirated licenses with a “crack” built into the software

    Simplify your process – from start to finish – with these steps:

    Determine License Entitlements

    Obtain documentation from internal records and Adobe to track licenses and upgrades to determine what licenses you own and have the right to use.

    Gather Deployment Information

    Leverage a software asset management tool or process to determine what software is deployed and what is/is not being used.

    Determine Effective License Position

    Compare license entitlements with deployment data to uncover surpluses and deficits in licensing. Look for opportunities.

    Plan Changes to License Position

    Meet with IT stakeholders to discuss the enterprise license program (ELP), short- and long-term project plans, and budget allocation. Plan and document licensing requirements.

    Adobe Genuine Software Integrity Service

    • This service was started in 2014 to combat non-genuine software sold by non-authorized resellers.
    • The service works hand in hand with the cloud movement to reduce piracy.
    • Every Adobe product now contains an executable file that will scan your machine for non-genuine software.
    • If non-genuine software is detected, the user will be notified and directed to the official Adobe website for next steps.

    Detailed list of Adobe licensing contract types

    The table below describes Adobe contract types beyond the four typical purchasing models explained in the previous slides:

    Option

    What is it?

    What’s included?

    For

    Term

    CLP (Cumulative Licensing Program)

    10,000 plus points, support and maintenance optional

    Select Adobe perpetual desktop products

    Business

    2 years

    EA (Adobe Enterprise Agreement)

    100 licenses plus maintenance and support for eligible Adobe products

    All applications

    100+ users requirement

    3 years

    EEA (Adobe Enterprise Education Agreement)

    Creative Cloud enterprise agreement for education establishments

    Creative Cloud applications without services

    Education

    1 or 2 years

    ETLA (Enterprise Term License Agreement)

    Licensing program designed for Adobe’s top commercial, government, and education customers

    All Creative Cloud applications

    Large enterprise companies

    3 years

    K-12 – Enterprise Agreement

    Enterprise agreement for primary and secondary schools

    Creative Cloud applications without services

    Education

    1 year

    K-12 – School Site License

    Allows a school to install a Creative Cloud on up to 500 school-owned computers regardless of school size

    Creative Cloud applications without services

    Education

    1 year

    TLP (Transactional Licensing Program)

    Agreement for SMBs that want volume licensing bonuses

    Perpetual desktop products only

    Aimed at SMBs, but Enterprise customers can use the TLP for smaller requirements

    N/A

    Upgrade Plan

    Insurance program for software purchased under a perpetual license program such as CLP or TLP for Creative Cloud upgrade

    Dependent on the existing perpetual estate

    Anyone

    N/A

    VIP (Value Incentive Plan)

    VIP allows customers to purchase, deploy, and manage software through a term-based subscription license model

    Creative Cloud of teams

    Business, government, and education

    Insight breakdown

    Insight 1

    Adobe operates in its own niche in the creative space, and Adobe users have grown accustomed to their products, making switching very difficult.

    Insight 2

    Adobe has transitioned the vast majority of its software offerings to the cloud-based subscription model. Active management of licenses, software provisioning, and consumption of cloud services is now an ongoing job.

    Insight 3

    With the vendor lock-in process nearly complete via the transition to a SaaS subscription model, Adobe is raising prices on an annual basis. Advance planning and strategic use of the ETLA is key to avoid budget-breaking surprises.

    Summary of accomplishment

    Knowledge Gained

    • The key pieces of licensing information that should be gathered about the current state of your own organization.
    • An in-depth understanding of the required licenses across all of your products.
    • Clear methodology for selecting the most effective contract type.
    • Development of measurable, relevant metrics to help track future project success and identify areas of strength and weakness within your licensing program.

    Processes Optimized

    • Understanding of the importance of licensing in relation to business objectives.
    • Understanding of the various licensing considerations that need to be made.
    • Contract negotiation.

    Deliverables Completed

    • Adobe ETLA Deployment Forecast
    • Adobe ETLA Forecasted Cost and Benefits
    • Adobe ETLA vs. VIP Pricing Table

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Take Control of Microsoft Licensing and Optimize Spend

    Create an Effective Plan to Implement IT Asset Management

    Establish an Effective System of Internal IT Controls to Mitigate Risks

    Optimize Software Asset Management

    Take Control of Compliance Improvement to Conquer Every Audit

    Cut PCI Compliance and Audit Costs in Half

    Bibliography

    “Adobe Buying Programs: At-a-glance comparison guide for Commercial and government organizations.” Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2014. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    “Adobe Buying Programs Comparison Guide for Commercial and Government Organizations.” Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2018. Web.

    “Adobe Buying Programs Comparison Guide for Education.” Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2018. Web. 1 Feb 2018.

    “Adobe Education Enterprise Agreement: Give your school access to the latest industry-leading creative tools.” Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2014. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    “Adobe Enterprise Term License Agreement for commercial and government organizations.” Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2016. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    Adobe Investor Presentation – October 2017. Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2017. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    Cabral, Amanda. “Students react to end of UConn-Adobe contract.” The Daily Campus (Uconn), 5 April 2017. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    de Veer, Patrick and Alecsandra Vintilescu. “Quick Guide to Adobe Licensing.” B-lay, Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    “Find the best program for your organization.” Adobe, Web. 1 Feb 2018.

    Foxen, David. “Adobe Upgrade Simplified.” Snow Software, 7 Oct. 2016. Web.

    Frazer, Bryant. “Adobe Stops Reporting Subscription Figures for Creative Cloud.” Studio Daily. Access Intelligence, LLC. 17 March 2016. Web.

    “Give your students the power to create bright futures.” Adobe, Web. 1 Feb 2018.

    Jones, Noah. “Adobe changes subscription prices, colleges forced to pay more.” BG Falcon Media. Bowling Green State University, 18 Feb. 2015. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    Mansfield, Adam. “Is Your Organization Prepared for Adobe’s Enterprise Term License Agreements (ETLA)?” UpperEdge,30 April 2013. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    Murray, Corey. “6 Things Every School Should Know About Adobe’s Move to Creative Cloud.” EdTech: Focus on K-12. CDW LLC, 10 June 2013. Web.

    “Navigating an Adobe Software Audit: Tips for Emerging Unscathed.” Nitro, Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    Razavi, Omid. “Challenges of Traditional Software Companies Transitioning to SaaS.” Sand Hill, 12 May 2015. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    Rivard, Ry. “Confusion in the Cloud.” Inside Higher Ed. 22 May 2013. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    Sharwood, Simon. “Adobe stops software licence audits in Americas, Europe.” The Register. Situation Publishing. 12 Aug. 2016. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

    “Software Licensing Challenges Faced In The Cloud: How Can The Cloud Benefit You?” The ITAM Review. Enterprise Opinions Limited. 20 Nov. 2015. Web.

    White, Stephen. “Understanding the Impacts of Adobe’s Cloud Strategy and Subscriptions Before Negotiating an ETLA.” Gartner, 22 Feb. 2016. Web.

    COVID-19 Work Status Tracking Guide

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}594|cart{/j2store}
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    • Parent Category Name: Manage & Coach
    • Parent Category Link: /manage-coach
    • Keeping track of the multiple and frequently changing work arrangements on your team.
    • Ensuring you have a fast and easy way to keep an up-to-date record of where and how employees are working.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • During these critical times, keeping track of employees’ work status doesn’t have to be complicated – the right tool is one that does the job.
    • Keeping track of your employees is a health and safety issue – deployed well, it is an aid in keeping the business running and an additional communication channel, not a sign of lack of trust.

    Impact and Result

    • An Excel spreadsheet is all you need to ensure you have a way to record work arrangements that can change by the day.
    • An easy-to-use tool means minimal administrative overhead to ensuring you have this critical information at hand.

    COVID-19 Work Status Tracking Guide Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Work Status Tracking Guide

    Read our recommendations and use the accompanying tool to quickly get a handle on your team’s work arrangements.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    • COVID-19 Work Status Tracking Guide Storyboard
    • COVID-19 Work Status Tracking Tool
    [infographic]

    Create an Agile-Friendly Project Gating and Governance Approach

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}162|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): 9.0/10 Overall Impact
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    • Parent Category Name: Development
    • Parent Category Link: /development
    • Organizations often apply gating and governance to IT projects to ensure resources are being used efficiently and effectively.
    • Agile project teams often complain that traditional project gating and governance interfere with their ability to delivery because traditional gating and governance were designed for Waterfall delivery methods.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Imposing a traditional gating and governance approach on an Agile project can eliminate the advantages that Agile delivery methods offer. Make sure to rework your traditional project gating and governance approach to be Agile friendly.

    Impact and Result

    • Create a project gating and governance approach that is Agile friendly and helps your organization realize the most benefit from its Agile transformation.
    • Oversee your Agile projects with confidence by adjusting the level of support and oversight they receive based on their Agilometer score.
    • Define a revised set of project gating artifacts that support Agile delivery methods.
    • Adopt a “trust but verify” approach to Agile project gating that will reduce risk and help ensure value delivery.

    Create an Agile-Friendly Project Gating and Governance Approach Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Create an Agile-Friendly Project Gating and Governance Approach Deck – A step-by-step guide to creating an Agile-friendly project gating and governance approach that will support Agile delivery methods in your organization.

    This deck is a guide to creating your own Agile-friendly project gating and governance approach using Info-Tech’s Agile Gating Framework.

    • Create an Agile-Friendly Project Gating and Governance Approach – Phases 1-3

    2. Your Gates 3 and 3A Checklists – The Gates 3 and 3A Checklists are used to determine when a project is ready to enter and exit the Risk Reduction & Value Confirmation phase.

    Modify Info-Tech’s Gates 3 and 3A Checklists to meet your organization’s needs, and then use them to determine when Agile projects are ready to enter and exit the RRVC phase.

    • Gates 3 and 3A Checklists

    3. Your Agilometer – The Agilometer is used to determine a project’s readiness to use an Agile delivery method.

    Modify Info-Tech’s Agilometer to meet your organization’s needs, and then use it to determine the level of support and oversight the project will need.

    • Agilometer

    4. Your Agile Project Status Report – An Agile Status Report will be used to monitor project progress.

    Modify Info-Tech’s Agile Project Status Report to meet your organization’s needs, and then use it to monitor in-flight Agile projects.

    • Agile Project Status Report

    5. Project Burndown Chart – A tool to let you monitor project burndown over time.

    Use Info-Tech’s Project Burndown Chart to monitor the progress of your in-flight Agile projects.

    • Project Burndown Chart

    6. Traditional to Agile Gating Artifact Mapping – A tool to help you rework your project gating artifacts to be Agile-friendly.

    Use Info-Tech’s Traditional to Agile Gating Artifact Mapping tool to modify your gating artifacts for Agile projects.

    • Traditional to Agile Gating Artifact Mapping
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Create an Agile-Friendly Project Gating and Governance Approach

    Use Info-Tech’s Agile Gating Framework as a guide to gating your Agile projects using a “trust but verify” approach.

    Table of Contents

    Analyst Perspective

    Executive Summary

    Phase 1: Establish Your Gating and Governance Purpose

    Phase 2: Understand and Adapt Info-Tech’s Agile Gating Framework

    Phase 3: Complete Your Agile Gating Framework

    Where Do I Go Next?

    Bibliography

    Facilitator Slides

    Analyst Perspective

    Make your gating and governance process Agile friendly by following a “trust but verify” approach

    Most project gating and governance approaches are designed for traditional (Waterfall) delivery methods. However, Agile delivery methods call for a different way of working that doesn’t align well with these approaches.

    Applying traditional project gating and governance to Agile projects is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Not only will it make Agile project delivery less efficient, but in the extreme, it can lead to outright project failure and even derail your organization’s Agile transformation.

    If you want Agile to successfully take root in your organization, be prepared to rethink your current gating and governance practices. This document presents a framework that you can use to rework your approach to provide both effective oversight and support for your Agile projects.

    Photo of Alex Ciraco, Principal Research Director, Application Delivery and Management, Info-Tech Research Group. Alex Ciraco
    Principal Research Director,
    Application Delivery and Management
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge
    • Many government organizations are adopting Agile project delivery methods because they have proven to be more effective than traditional delivery approaches at responding to today’s fast pace of change.
    • Government organizations have an obligation to govern projects to ensure effective use of public resources, regardless of the delivery method being used.
    Common Obstacles
    • Most government gating and governance frameworks were designed around traditional (often called “Waterfall”) delivery methods.
    • Agile and Waterfall work in completely different ways, so imposing traditional gating and governance frameworks on Agile projects will stifle progress and can even lead to project failure.
    • Government organizations must adjust their gating and governance frameworks to accommodate Agile delivery methods.
    Info-Tech’s Approach
    • Begin by understanding the fundamental purpose of project gating and governance.
    • Next, understand the major differences between Agile and Waterfall delivery methods.
    • Then, armed with this knowledge, use Info-Tech’s Agile Gating Framework to redefine your gating and governance approach to be Agile friendly.
    Info-Tech Insight

    Imposing a traditional governance approach on an Agile project can eliminate the advantages that Agile delivery methods offer. Make sure to rework your project gating and governance approach to be Agile friendly.

    Info-Tech’s methodology for Creating an Agile-Friendly Project Gating and Governance Approach

    1. Establish Your Gating and Governance Purpose 2. Understand and Adapt Info-Tech’s Agile Gating Framework 3. Complete your Agile Gating Framework
    Phase Steps

    1.1 Understand How We Gate and Govern Projects

    1.2 Compare Traditional to Agile Delivery

    1.3 Realize What Traditional Gating Looks Like and Why

    2.1 Understand How Agile Manages Risk and Ensures Value Delivery

    2.2 Introducing Info-Tech’s Agile Gating Framework

    2.3 Create Your Agilometer

    2.4 Create an Agile-Friendly Project Status Report

    2.5 Select Your Agile Health Check Tool

    3.1 Map Your Traditional Gating Artifacts to Agile Delivery

    3.2 Determine Your Now, Next, Later Roadmap for Implementation

    Phase Outcomes
    1. Your gating/governance purpose statement
    2. A fundamental understanding of the difference between traditional and Agile delivery methods.
    1. An understanding of Info-Tech’s Agile Gating Framework
    2. Your Gates 3 and 3A checklists
    3. Your Agilometer tool
    4. Your Agile project status report template
    5. Your Agile health check tool
    1. Artifact map for your Agile gating framework
    2. Roadmap for Agile gating implementation

    Key Deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals, including:

    Agilometer Tool

    Create your customized Agilometer tool to determine project support and oversight needs.
    Sample of the 'Agilometer Tool' deliverable.

    Gates 3 and 3A Checklists

    Create your customized checklists for projects at Gates 3 and 3A.
    Sample of the 'Gates 3 and 3A Checklists' deliverable.

    Agile-Friendly Project Status Report

    Create your Agile-friendly project status report to monitor progress.
    Sample of the 'Agile-Friendly Project Status Report' deliverable.

    Artifact Mapping Tool

    Map your traditional gating artifacts to their Agile replacements.
    Sample of the 'Artifact Mapping Tool' deliverable.

    Create an Agile-Friendly Project Gating and Governance Approach

    Phase 1

    Establish your gating and governance purpose

    Phase 1

    1.1 Understand How We Gate and Govern Projects

    1.2 Compare Traditional to Agile Delivery

    1.3 Realize What Traditional Gating Looks Like And Why

    Phase 2

    2.1 Understand How Agile Manages Risk and Ensures Value Delivery

    2.2 Introducing Info-Tech’s Agile Gating Framework

    2.3 Create Your Agilometer

    2.4 Create Your Agile-Friendly Project Status Report

    2.5 Select Your Agile Health Check Tool

    Phase 3

    3.1 Map Your Traditional Gating Artifacts to Agile Delivery

    3.2 Determine Your Now, Next, Later Roadmap for Implementation

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Understand why gating and governance are so important to your organization.
    • Compare and contrast traditional to Agile delivery.
    • Identify what form traditional gating takes in your organization.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • PMO/Gating Body
    • Delivery Managers
    • Delivery Teams
    • Other Interested Parties

    Agile gating–related facts and figures

    73% of organizations created their project gating framework before adopting or considering Agile delivery practices. (Athens Journal of Technology and Engineering)

    71% of survey respondents felt an Agile-friendly gating approach improves both productivity and product quality. (Athens Journal of Technology and Engineering)

    Moving to an Agile-friendly gating approach has many benefits:
    • Faster response to change
    • Improved productivity
    • Higher team morale
    • Better product quality
    • Faster releases
    (Journal of Product Innovation Management)

    Traditional gating approaches can undermine an Agile project

    • Most existing gating and governance frameworks (often referred to as phase-gate) impose requirements on projects that are anti-patterns to an Agile delivery approach
    • For example, any gating approach that requires a project to deliver a detailed requirements document before coding can begin will make it difficult or impossible for the project to use an Agile delivery method.
    • The same can be said for other common phase-gate requirements including:
      • Imposing a formal (and onerous) change control process on project requirements.
      • Requiring a detailed design document and/or detailed user acceptance test plan at the beginning of the project.
      • Asking the project to produce a detailed project plan.
    (DZone)
    Don’t make the mistake of asking an Agile project to follow a traditional phase-gate approach to project delivery!

    Before reworking your gating approach, you need to consider two important questions

    Answering these questions will help guide your new gating process to both be Agile friendly and meet your organization’s needs

    1. What is the fundamental purpose of gating? By examining the fundamental purpose of gating, you will be better able to adjust your approach to achieve the desired outcomes in an Agile context.
    2. How does Agile delivery differ from traditional? By understanding how Agile delivery differs from traditional, you will be better able to adjust your gating approach to support Agile delivery methods.

    Stock image of speech bubbles hanging on string with a question mark and lightbulb drawn on them.

    Build a Strategic IT Workforce Plan

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    • Parent Category Name: Organizational Design
    • Parent Category Link: /organizational-design
    • Talent has become a competitive differentiator. To 46% of business leaders, workforce planning is a top priority – yet only 13% do it effectively.
    • CIOs aren’t sure what they need to give the organization a competitive edge or how current staffing line-ups fall short.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • A well defined strategic workforce plan (SWP) isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have.
    • Integrate as much data as possible into your workforce plan to best prepare you for the future. Without knowledge of your future initiatives, you are filling hypothetical holes.
    • To be successful, you need to understand your strategic initiatives, workforce landscape, and external and internal trends.

    Impact and Result

    The workforce planning process does not need to be onerous, especially with help from Info-Tech’s solid planning tools. With the right people involved and enough time invested, developing an SWP will be easier than first thought and time well spent. Leverage Info-Tech’s client-tested 5-step process to build a strategic workforce plan:

    1. Build a project charter
    2. Assess workforce competency needs
    3. Identify impact of internal and external trends
    4. Identify the impact of strategic initiatives on roles
    5. Build and monitor the workforce plan

    Build a Strategic IT Workforce Plan Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should build a strategic workforce plan for IT, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Initiate the project

    Assess the value of a strategic workforce plan and the IT department’s fit for developing one, and then structure the workforce planning project.

    • Build a Strategic Workforce Plan – Phase 1: Initiate the Project
    • IT Strategic Workforce Planning Project Charter Template
    • IT Strategic Workforce Planning Project Plan Template

    2. Analyze workforce needs

    Gather and analyze workforce needs based on an understanding of the relevant internal and external trends, and then produce a prioritized plan of action.

    • Build a Strategic Workforce Plan – Phase 2: Analyze Workforce Needs
    • Workforce Planning Workbook

    3. Build the workforce plan

    Evaluate workforce priorities, plan specific projects to address them, and formalize and integrate strategic workforce planning into regular planning processes.

    • Build a Strategic Workforce Plan – Phase 3: Build and Monitor the SWP
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Build a Strategic IT Workforce Plan

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Identify Project Goals, Metrics, and Current State

    The Purpose

    Develop a shared understanding of the challenges your organization is facing with regards to talent and workforce planning.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    An informed understanding of whether or not you need to develop a strategic workforce plan for IT.

    Activities

    1.1 Identify goals, metrics, and opportunities

    1.2 Segment current roles

    1.3 Identify organizational culture

    1.4 Assign job competencies

    1.5 Assess current talent

    Outputs

    Identified goals, metrics, and opportunities

    Documented organizational culture

    Aligned competencies to roles

    Identified current talent competency levels

    2 Assess Workforce and Analyze Trends

    The Purpose

    Perform an in-depth analysis of how internal and external trends are impacting the workforce.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    An enhanced understanding of the current talent occupying the workforce.

    Activities

    2.1 Assess environmental trends

    2.2 Identify impact on workforce requirements

    2.3 Identify how trends are impacting critical roles

    2.4 Explore viable options

    Outputs

    Complete internal trends analysis

    Complete external trends analysis

    Identified internal and external trends on specific IT roles

    3 Perform Gap Analysis

    The Purpose

    Identify the changing competencies and workforce needs of the future IT organization, including shortages and surpluses.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Determined impact of strategic initiatives on workforce needs.

    Identification of roles required in the future organization, including surpluses and shortages.

    Identified projects to fill workforce gaps.

    Activities

    3.1 Identify strategic initiatives

    3.2 Identify impact of strategic initiatives on roles

    3.3 Determine workforce estimates

    3.4 Determine projects to address gaps

    Outputs

    Identified workforce estimates for the future

    List of potential projects to address workforce gaps

    4 Prioritize and Plan

    The Purpose

    Prepare an action plan to address the critical gaps identified.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A prioritized plan of action that will fill gaps and secure better workforce outcomes for the organization.

    Activities

    4.1 Determine and prioritize action items

    4.2 Determine a schedule for review of initiatives

    4.3 Integrate workforce planning into regular planning processes

    Outputs

    Prioritized list of projects

    Completed workforce plan

    Identified opportunities for integration

    Build a Strategy for Big Data Platforms

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    • Parent Category Name: Big Data
    • Parent Category Link: /big-data
    • The immaturity of the big data market means that organizations lack examples and best practices to follow, and they are often left trailblazing their own paths.
    • Experienced and knowledgeable big data professionals are limited and without creative resourcing; IT might struggle to fill big data positions.
    • The term NoSQL has become a catch-all phrase for big data technologies; however, the technologies falling under the umbrella of NoSQL are disparate and often misunderstood. Organizations are at risk of adopting incorrect technologies if they don’t take the time to learn the jargon.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • NoSQL plays a key role in the emergence of the big data market, but it has not made relational databases outdated. Successful big data strategies can be conducted using SQL, NoSQL, or a combination of the two.
    • Assign a Data Architect to oversee your initiative. Hire or dedicate someone who has the ability to develop both a short-term and long-term vision and that has hands-on experience with data management, mining and modeling. You will still need someone (like a database administrator) who understands the database, the schemas, and the structure.
    • Understand your data before you attempt to use it. Take a master data management approach to ensure there are rules and standards for managing your enterprise’s data, and take extra caution when integrating external sources.

    Impact and Result

    • Assess whether SQL, NoSQL, or a combination of both technologies will provide you with the appropriate capabilities to achieve your business objectives and gain value from your data.
    • Form a Big Data Team to bring together IT and the business in order to leave a successful initiative.
    • Conduct ongoing training with your personnel to ensure up-to-date skills and end-user understanding.
    • Frequently scan the big data market space to identify new technologies and opportunities to help optimize your big data strategy.

    Build a Strategy for Big Data Platforms Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Develop a big data strategy

    Know where to start and where to focus attention in the implementation of a big data strategy.

    • Storyboard: Build a Strategy for Big Data Platforms

    2. Assess the appropriateness of big data technologies

    Decide the most correct tools to use in order to solve enterprise data management problems.

    • Big Data Diagnostic Tool

    3. Determine the TCO of a scale out implementation

    Compare the TCO of a SQL (scale up) with a NoSQL (scale out) deployment to determine whether NoSQL will save costs.

    • Scale Up vs. Scale Out TCO Tool
    [infographic]

    Harness Configuration Management Superpowers

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    • Parent Category Name: Asset Management
    • Parent Category Link: /asset-management
    • Configuration management databases (CMDB) are a lot of work to build and maintain. Starting down this process without the right tools, processes, and buy-in is a lot of work with very little reward.
    • If you decide to just build it and expect they will come, you may find it difficult to articulate the value, and you will be disappointed by the lack of visitors.
    • Relying on manual entry or automated data collection without governance may result in data you can’t trust, and if no one trusts the data, they won’t use it.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • The right mindset is just as important as the right tools. By involving everyone early, you can ensure the right data is captured and validated and you can make maintenance part of the culture. This is critical to reaching early and continual value with a CMDB.

    Impact and Result

    • Define your use cases: Identify the use cases and prioritize those objectives into phases. Define what information will be needed to meet the use cases and how that information will be populated.
    • Understand and design the CMDB data model: Define services and undiscoverable configuration items (CI) and map them to the discoverable CIs.
    • Operationalize configuration record updates: Define data stewards and governance processes and integrate your configuration management practice with existing practices and lifecycles.

    Harness Configuration Management Superpowers Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Harness Configuration Management Superpowers Deck – A step-by-step document that walks you through creating a configuration management program.

    Use this blueprint to create a configuration management program that provides immediate value.

    • Harness Configuration Management Superpowers – Phases 1-4

    2. Configuration Management Project Charter Template – A project charter template to help you build a concise document for communicating appropriate project details to stakeholders.

    Use this template to create a project charter to launch the configuration management project.

    • Configuration Management Project Charter

    3. Configuration Control Board Charter Template – A board charter template to help you define the roles and responsibilities of the configuration control board.

    Use this template to create your board charter for your configuration control board (CCB). Define roles and responsibilities and mandates for the CCB.

    • Configuration Control Board Charter

    4. Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) Template – An SOP template to describe processes and procedures for ongoing maintenance of the CMDB under the configuration management program.

    Use this template to create and communicate your SOP to ensure ongoing maintenance of the CMDB under the configuration management program.

    • Configuration Management Standard Operation Procedures

    5. Configuration Management Audit and Validation Checklist Template – A template to be used as a starting point to meet audit requirements under NIST and ITIL programs.

    Use this template to assess capability to pass audits, adding to the template as needed to meet internal auditors’ requirements.

    • Configuration Management Audit and Validation Checklist

    6. Configuration Management Policy Template – A template to be used for building out a policy for governance over the configuration management program.

    Use this template to build a policy for your configuration management program.

    • Configuration Management Policy

    7. Use Cases and Data Worksheet – A template to be used for validating data requirements as you work through use cases.

    Use this template to determine data requirements to meet use cases.

    • Use Cases and Data Worksheet

    8. Configuration Management Diagram Template Library – Examples of process workflows and data modeling.

    Use this library to view sample workflows and a data model for the configuration management program.

    • Configuration Management Diagram Template Library (Visio)
    • Configuration Management Diagram Template Library (PDF)

    9. Configuration Manager Job Description – Roles and responsibilities for the job of Configuration Manager.

    Use this template as a starting point to create a job posting, identifying daily activities, responsibilities, and required skills as you create or expand your configuration management program.

    • Configuration Manager

    Infographic

    Workshop: Harness Configuration Management Superpowers

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Configuration Management Strategy

    The Purpose

    Define the scope of your service configuration management project.

    Design the program to meet specific stakeholders needs

    Identify project and operational roles and responsibilities.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Designed a sustainable approach to building a CMDB.

    Activities

    1.1 Introduction

    1.2 Define challenges and goals.

    1.3 Define and prioritize use cases.

    1.4 Identify data needs to meet these goals.

    1.5 Define roles and responsibilities.

    Outputs

    Data and reporting use cases based on stakeholder requirements

    Roles and responsibility matrix

    2 CMDB Data Structure

    The Purpose

    Build a data model around the desired use cases.

    Identify the data sources for populating the CMDB.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Identified which CIs and relationships will be captured in the CMDB.

    Activities

    2.1 Define and prioritize your services.

    2.2 Evaluate CMDB default classifications.

    2.3 Test configuration items against existing categories.

    2.4 Build a data model diagram.

    Outputs

    List of CI types and relationships to be added to default settings

    CMDB data model diagram

    3 Processes

    The Purpose

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Built a right-sized approach to configuration record updates and data validation.

    Activities

    3.1 Define processes for onboarding, offboarding, and maintaining data in the CMDB.

    3.2 Define practices for configuration baselines.

    3.3 Build a data validation and auditing plan.

    Outputs

    Documented processes and workflows

    Data validation and auditing plan

    4 Communications & Roadmap

    The Purpose

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Metrics program defined

    Communications designed

    Activities

    4.1 Define key metrics for configuration management.

    4.2 Define metrics for supporting services.

    4.3 Build configuration management policies.

    4.4 Create a communications plan.

    4.5 Build a roadmap

    Outputs

    Policy for configuration management

    Communications documents

    Roadmap for next steps

    Further reading

    Harness Configuration Management Superpowers

    Create a configuration management practice that will provide ongoing value to the organization.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    A robust configuration management database (CMDB) can provide value to the business and superpowers to IT. It's time to invest smartly to reap the rewards.

    IT environments are becoming more and more complex, and balancing demands for stability and demands for faster change requires visibility to make the right decisions. IT needs to know their environment intimately. They need to understand dependencies and integrations and feel confident they are making decisions with the most current and accurate view.

    Solutions for managing operations rely on the CMDB to bring visibility to issues, calculate impact, and use predictive analytics to fix performance issues before they become major incidents. AIOps solutions need accurate data, but they can also help identify configuration drift and flag changes or anomalies that need investigation.

    The days of relying entirely on manual entry and updates are all but gone, as the functionality of a robust configuration management system requires daily updates to provide value. We used to rely on that one hero to make sure information was up to date, but with the volume of changes we see in most environments today, it's time to improve the process and provide superpowers to the entire IT department.

    This is a picture of Sandi Conrad

    Sandi Conrad, ITIL Managing Professional
    Principal Research Director, IT Infrastructure & Operations, Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    • Build a configuration management database (CMDB): You need to implement a CMDB, populate it with records and relationships, and integrate it with discovery and management tools.
    • Identify the benefits of a CMDB: Too many CMDB projects fail because IT tries to collect everything. Base your data model on the desired use cases.
    • Define roles and responsibilities: Keeping data accurate and updated is difficult. Identify who will be responsible for helping

    Common Obstacles

    • Significant process maturity is required: Service configuration management (SCM) requires high maturity in change management, IT asset management, and service catalog practices.
    • Large investment: Building a CMDB takes a large amount of effort, process, and expertise.
    • Tough business case: Configuration management doesn't directly provide value to the business, but it requires a lot of investment from IT.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    • Define your scope and objectives: Identify the use cases for SCM and prioritize those objectives into phases.
    • Design the CMDB data model: Align with your existing configuration management system's data model.
    • Operationalize configuration record updates: Integrate your SCM practice with existing practices and lifecycles.

    Start small

    Scope creep is a serial killer of configuration management databases and service configuration management practices.

    Insight summary

    Many vendors are taking a CMDB-first approach to enable IT operations or sometimes asset management. It's important to ensure processes are in place immediately to ensure the data doesn't go stale as additional modules and features are activated.

    Define processes early to ensure success

    The right mindset is just as important as the right tools. By involving everyone early, you can ensure the right data is captured and validated and you can make maintenance part of the culture. This is critical to reaching early and continual value with a CMDB.

    Identify use cases

    The initial use case will be the driving force behind the first assessment of return on investment (ROI). If ROI can be realized early, momentum will increase, and the team can build on the initial successes.

    If you don't see value in the first year, momentum diminishes and it's possible the project will never see value.

    Keep the initial scope small and focused

    Discovery can collect a lot of data quickly, and it's possible to be completely overwhelmed early in the process.

    Build expertise and troubleshoot issues with a smaller scope, then build out the process.

    Minimize customizations

    Most CMDBs have classes and attributes defined as defaults. Use of the defaults will enable easier implementation and faster time to value, especially where automations and integrations depend on standard terms for field mapping.

    Automate as much as possible

    In large, complex environments, the data can quickly become unmanageable. Use automation as much as possible for discovery, dependency mapping, validation, and alerts. Minimize the amount of manual work but ensure everyone is aware of where and how these manual updates need to happen to see continual value.

    Info-Tech's Harness Configuration Management Superpowers.

    Configuration management will improve functionality of all surrounding processes

    A well-functioning CMDB empowers almost all other IT management and governance practices.

    Service configuration management is about:

    • Building a system of record about IT services and the components that support those services.
    • Continuously reconciling and validating information to ensure data accuracy.
    • Ensuring the data lifecycle is defined and well understood and can pass data and process audits.
    • Accessing information in a variety of ways to effectively serve IT and the business.
    An image of Info-Tech's CMDB Configuration Management tree, breaking down aspects into the following six categories: Strategic Partner; Service Provider; Proactive; Stabilize; Core; and Foundational.

    Configuration management most closely impacts these practices

    Info-Tech Research Group sees a clear relationship.

    When an IT department reports they are highly effective at configuration management, they are much more likely to report they are highly effective at these management and governance processes:

    The following management and governance processes are listed: Quality Management; Asset Management; Performance Measurement; Knowledge Management; Release Management; Incident and Problem Management; Service Management; Change Management.

    The data is clear

    Service configuration management is about more than just doing change management more effectively.

    Source: Info-Tech Research Group, IT Management and Governance Diagnostic; N=684 organizations, 2019 to July 2022.

    Make the case to use configuration management to improve IT operations

    Consider the impact of access to data for informing innovations, optimization efforts, and risk assessments.

    75% of Uptime's 2021 survey respondents who had an outage in the past three years said the outage would have been prevented if they'd had better management or processes.(1)

    75%

    75% of Uptime's 2021 survey respondents who had an outage in the past three years said the outage would have been prevented if they'd had better management or processes.(1)

    42%

    of publicly reported outages were due to software or configuration issues. (1)

    58%

    of networking-related IT outages were due to configuration and change management failure.(1)

    It doesn't have to be that way!

    Enterprise-grade IT service management (ITSM) tools require a CMDB for the different modules to work together and to enable IT operations management (ITOM), providing greater visibility.

    Decisions about changes can be made with accurate data, not guesses.

    The CMDB can give the service desk fast access to helpful information about the impacted components, including a history of similar incidents and resolutions and the relationship between the impacted components and other systems and components.

    Turn your team into IT superheroes.

    CMDB data makes it easier for IT Ops groups to:

    • Avoid change collisions.
    • Eliminate poor changes due to lack of visibility into complex systems.
    • Identify problematic equipment.
    • Troubleshoot incidents.
    • Expand the services provided by tier 1 and through automation.

    Benefits of configuration management

    For IT

    • Configuration management will supercharge processes that have relied on inherent knowledge of the IT environment to make decisions.
    • IT will more quickly analyze and understand issues and will be positioned to improve and automate issue identification and resolution.
    • Increase confidence and reduce risks for decisions involving release and change management with access to accurate data, regardless of the complexity of the environment.
    • Reduce or eliminate unplanned work related to poor outcomes due to decisions made with incorrect or incomplete data.

    For the Business

    • Improve strategic planning for business initiatives involving IT solutions, which may include integrations, development, or security concerns.
    • More quickly deploy new solutions or updates due to visibility into complex environments.
    • Enable business outcomes with reliable and stable IT systems.
    • Reduce disruptions caused by planning without accurate data and improve resolution times for service interruptions.
    • Improve access to reporting for budgeting, showbacks, and chargebacks as well as performance metrics.

    Measure the value of this blueprint

    Fast-track your planning and increase the success of a configuration management program with this blueprint

    Workshop feedback
    8.1/10

    $174,000 savings

    30 average days saved

    Guided Implementation feedback

    8.7/10

    $31,496 average savings

    41 average days saved

    "The workshop was well run, with good facilitation, and gained participation from even the most difficult parts of the audience. The best part of the experience was that if I were to find myself in the same position in the future, I would repeat the workshop."

    – University of Exeter

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    “Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

    Guided Implementation

    “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

    Workshop

    “We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

    Consulting

    “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4

    Call #1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges.

    Call #2: Prioritize services and use cases.

    Call #3: Identify data needed to meet goals.

    Call #4: Define roles and responsibilities.

    Call #5: Define and prioritize your services.

    Call #6: Evaluate and test CMDB default classifications.

    Call #7: Build a data model diagram.

    Call #8: Define processes for onboarding, offboarding, and maintaining data.

    Call #9: Discuss configuration baselines.

    Call #10: Build a data validation and audit plan.

    Call #11: Define key metrics.

    Call #12: Build a configuration management policy and communications plan.

    Call #13: Build a roadmap.

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    A typical GI is between 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 9 months.

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4

    Configuration Management Strategy

    CMDB Data Structure

    Process Design

    Communications & Roadmap

    Activities
    • Introduction
    • Define challenges and goals.
    • Define and prioritize use cases.
    • Identify data needed to meet goals.
    • Define roles and responsibilities.
    • Define and prioritize your services.
    • Evaluate CMDB default classifications.
    • Test configuration items against existing categories.
    • Build a data model diagram.
    • Define processes for onboarding, offboarding, and maintaining data in the CMDB.
    • Define practices for configuration baselines.
    • Build a data validation and auditing plan.
    • Define key metrics for configuration management.
    • Define metrics for supporting services.
    • Build configuration management policies.
    • Create a communications plan.
    • Build a roadmap.

    Deliverables

    • Roles and responsibility matrix
    • Data and reporting use cases based on stakeholder requirements
    • List of CI types and relationships to be added to default settings
    • CMDB data model diagram
    • Documented processes and workflows
    • Data validation and auditing plan
    • Policy for configuration management
    • Roadmap for next steps
    • Communications documents

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    Configuration Management Project Charter

    Detail your approach to building an SCM practice and a CMDB.

    Screenshot from the Configuration Management Project Charter

    Use Cases and Data Worksheet

    Capture the action items related to your SCM implementation project.

    Screenshot from the Use Cases and Data Worksheet

    Configuration Manager Job Description

    Use our template for a job posting or internal job description.

    Screenshot from the Configuration Manager Job Description

    Configuration Management Diagram Template Library

    Use these diagrams to simplify building your SOP.

    Screenshot from the Configuration Management Diagram Template Library

    Configuration Management Policy

    Set expectations for configuration control.

    screenshot from the Configuration Management Policy

    Configuration Management Audit and Validation Checklist

    Use this framework to validate controls.

    Screenshot from the Configuration Management Audit and Validation Checklist

    Configuration Control Board Charter

    Define the board's responsibilities and meeting protocols.

    Screenshot from the Configuration Management Audit and Validation Checklist

    Key deliverable:

    Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures Template

    Outlines SCM roles and responsibilities, the CMDB data model, when records are expected to change, and configuration baselines.

    Four Screenshots from the Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures Template

    Phase 1

    Configuration Management Strategy

    Strategy Data Structure Processes Roadmap
    • Challenges and Goals
    • Use Cases and Data
    • Roles and Responsibilities
    • Services
    • Classifications
    • Data Modeling
    • Lifecycle Processes
    • Baselines
    • Audit and Data Validation
    • Metrics
    • Communications Plan
    • Roadmap

    This phase will walk you through the following aspects of a configuration management system:

    • Scope
    • Use Cases
    • Reports and Analytics

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • IT and business service owners
    • Business/customer relationship managers
    • Enterprise architects
    • Practice owners and managers
    • SCM practice manager
    • SCM project manager
    • SCM project sponsor

    Harness Service Configuration Management Superpowers

    Establish clear definitions

    Ensure everyone is using the same terms.

    Term Definition
    Configuration Management

    The purpose of configuration management is to:

    • "Ensure that accurate and reliable information about the configuration of services, and the CIs that support them, is available when and where it is needed. This includes information on how CIs are configured and the relationships between them" (AXELOS).
    • "Provide sufficient information about service assets to enable the service to be effectively managed. Assess the impact of changes and deal with service incidents" (ISACA, 2018).
    Configuration Management System (CMS) A set of tools and databases used to manage, update, and present data about all configuration items and their relationships. A CMS may maintain multiple federated CMDBs and can include one or many discovery and dependency mapping tools.
    Configuration Management Database (CMDB) A repository of configuration records. It can be as simple as a spreadsheet or as complex as an integrated database populated through multiple autodiscovery tools.
    Configuration Record Detailed information about a configuration item.
    Configuration Item (CI)

    "Any component that needs to be managed in order to deliver an IT service" (AXELOS).

    These components can include everything from IT services and software to user devices, IT infrastructure components, and documents (e.g. maintenance agreements).
    Attributes Characteristics of a CI included in the configuration record. Common attributes include name, version, license expiry date, location, supplier, SLA, and owner.
    Relationships Information about the way CIs are linked. A CI can be part of another CI, connect to another CI, or use another CI. A CMDB is significantly more valuable when relationships are recorded. This information allows CMDB users to identify dependencies between components when investigating incidents, performing root-cause analysis, assessing the impact of changes before deployment, and much more.

    What is a configuration management database (CMDB)?

    The CMDB is a system of record of your services and includes a record for everything you need to track to effectively manage your IT services.

    Anything that is tracked in your CMDB is called a configuration item (CI). Examples of CIs include:

    • User-Facing Services
    • IT-Facing Services
    • Business Capabilities
    • Relationships
    • IT Infrastructure Components
    • Enterprise Software
    • End-User Devices
    • Documents

    Other systems of record can refer to CIs, such as:

    • Ticket database: Tickets can refer to which CI is impacted by an incident or provided as part of a service request.
    • Asset management database (AMDB): An IT asset is often also a CI. By associating asset records with CI records, you can leverage your IT asset data in your reporting.
    • Financial systems: If done well, the CMDB can supercharge your IT financial cost model.

    CMDBs can allow you to:

    • Query multiple databases simultaneously (so long as you have the CI name field in each database).
    • Build automated workflows and chatbots that interact with data across multiple databases.
    • More effectively identify the potential impact of changes and releases.

    Do not confuse asset with configuration

    Asset and configuration management look at the same world through different lenses

    • IT asset management (ITAM) tends to focus on each IT asset in its own right: assignment or ownership, lifecycle, and related financial obligations and entitlements.
    • Configuration management is focused on configuration items (CIs) that must be managed to deliver a service and the relationships and integrations with other CIs.
    • ITAM and configuration management teams and practices should work closely together. Though asset and configuration management focus on different outcomes, they may use overlapping tools and data sets. Each practice, when working effectively, can strengthen the other.
    • Many objects will exist in both the CMDB and AMDB, and the data on those shared objects will need to be kept in sync.

    A comparison between Asset and Configuration Management Databases

    *Discovery, dependency mapping, and data normalization are often features or modules of configuration management, asset management, or IT service management tools.

    Start with ITIL 4 guiding principles to make your configuration management project valuable and realistic

    Focus on where CMDB data will provide value and ensure the cost of bringing that data in will be reasonable for its purpose. Your end goal should be not just to build a CMDB but to use a CMDB to manage workload and workflows and manage services appropriately.

    Focus on value

    Include only the relevant information required by stakeholders.

    Start where you are

    Use available sources of information. Avoid adding new sources and tools unless they are justified.

    Progress iteratively with feedback

    Regularly review information use and confirm its relevance, adjusting the CMDB scope if needed.

    Collaborate and promote visibility

    Explain and promote available sources of configuration information and the best ways to use them, then provide hints and tips for more efficient use.

    Think and work holistically

    Consider other sources of data for decision making. Do not try to put everything in the CMDB.

    Keep it simple and practical

    Provide relevant information in the most convenient way; avoid complex interfaces and reports.

    Optimize and automate

    Continually optimize resource-consuming practice activities. Automate CDMB verification, data collection, relationship discovery, and other activities.

    ITIL 4 guiding principles as described by AXELOS

    Step 1.1

    Identify use cases and desired benefits for service configuration management

    Activities

    1.1.1 Brainstorm data collection challenges

    1.1.2 Define goals and how you plan to meet them

    1.1.3 Brainstorm and prioritize use cases

    1.1.4 Identify the data needed to reach your goals

    1.1.5 Record required data sources

    This step will walk you through the following aspects of a configuration management system:

    • Scope
    • Use cases

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • IT and business service owners
    • Business/customer relationship managers
    • Enterprise architects
    • Practice owners and managers
    • SCM practice manager
    • Project sponsor
    • Project manager

    Identify potential obstacles in your organization to building and maintaining a CMDB

    Often, we see multiple unsuccessful attempts to build out a CMDB, with teams eventually losing faith and going back to spreadsheets. These are common obstacles:

    • Significant manual data collection, which is rarely current and fully accurate.
    • Multiple discovery solutions creating duplicate records, with no clear path to deduplicate records.
    • Manual dependency mapping that isn't accurate because it's not regularly assessed and updated.
    • Hybrid cloud and on-premises environment with discovery solutions only partially collecting as the right discovery and dependency mapping solutions aren't in place.
    • Dynamic environments (virtual, cloud, or containers) that may exist for a very short time, but no one knows how they should be managed.
    • Lack of expertise to maintain and update the CMDB or lack of an assigned owner for the CMDB. If no one owns the process and is assigned as a steward of data, it will not be maintained.
    • Database that was designed with other purposes in mind and is heavily customized, making it difficult to use and maintain.

    Understanding the challenges to accessing and maintaining quality data will help define the risks created through lack of quality data.

    This knowledge can drive buy-in to create a configuration management practice that benefits the organization.

    1.1.1 Brainstorm data collection challenges

    Involve stakeholders.
    Allot 45 minutes for this discussion.

    1. As a group, brainstorm the challenges you have with data:
    2. Accuracy and trustworthiness: What challenges do you have with getting accurate data on IT services and systems?
      1. Access: Where do you have challenges with getting data to people when they need it?
      2. Manually created data: Where are you relying on data that could be automatically collected?
      3. Data integration: Where do you have issues with integrating data from multiple sources?
      4. Impact: What is the result of these challenges?
    3. Group together these challenges into similar issues and identify what goals would help overcome them.
    4. Record these challenges in the Configuration Management Project Charter, section 1.2: Project Purpose.

    Download the Configuration Management Project Charter

    Input

    Output

    • None
    • List of high-level desired benefits for SCM
    Materials Participants
    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Sticky notes
    • Markers/pens
    • Configuration Management Project Charter
    • IT and business service owners
    • Business/customer relationship managers
    • Practice owners and managers
    • SCM practice manager
    • SCM project sponsor

    Info-Tech Maturity Ladder

    Identify your current and target state

    INNOVATOR

    • Characteristics of business partner
    • Integration with orchestration tools

    BUSINESS PARTNER

    Data collection and validation is fully automated

    Integrated with several IT processes

    Meets the needs of IT and business use cases

    TRUSTED OPERATOR

    • Data collection and validation is partially or fully automated
    • Trust in data accuracy is high, meets the needs of several IT use cases

    FIREFIGHTER

    • Data collection is partially or fully automated, validation is ad hoc
    • Trust in data accuracy is variable, used for decision making

    UNSTABLE

    INNOVATOR

    • Characteristics of business partner
    • Integration with orchestration tools

    BUSINESS PARTNER

    • Data collection and validation is fully automated
    • Integrated with several IT processes
    • Meets the needs of IT and business use cases

    TRUSTED OPERATOR

    • Data collection and validation is partially or fully automated
    • Trust in data accuracy is high, meets the needs of several IT use cases

    FIREFIGHTER

    • Data collection is partially or fully automated, validation is ad hoc
    • Trust in data accuracy is variable, used for decision making

    UNSTABLE

    A tower is depicted, with arrows pointing to Current (orange) and Target(blue)

    Define goals for your CMDB to ensure alignment with all stakeholders

    • How are business or IT goals being hindered by not having the right data available?
    • If the business isn't currently asking for service-based reporting and accountability, start with IT goals. This will help to develop goals that will be most closely aligned to the IT teams' needs and may help incentivize the right behavior in data maintenance.
    • Configuration management succeeds by enabling its stakeholders to achieve their outcomes. Set goals for configuration management based on the most important outcomes expected from this project. Ask your stakeholders:
      1. What are the business' or IT's planned transformational initiatives?
      2. What are your highest priority goals?
      3. What should the priorities of the configuration management practice be?
    • The answers to these questions will shape your approach to configuration management. Direct input from your leadership and executives, or their delegates, will help ensure you're setting a solid foundation for your practice.
    • Identify which obstacles will need to be overcome to meet these goals.

    "[T]he CMDB System should be viewed as a 'system of relevance,' rather than a 'single source of truth.' The burdens of relevance are at once less onerous and far more meaningful in terms of action, analysis, and automation. While 'truth' implies something everlasting or at least stable, relevance suggests a far more dynamic universe."

    – CMDB Systems, Making Change Work in the Age of Cloud and Agile, Drogseth et al

    Identify stakeholders to discuss what they need from a CMDB; business and IT needs will likely differ

    Define your audience to determine who the CMDB will serve and invite them to these conversations. The CMDB can aid the business and IT and can be structured to provide dashboards and reports for both.

    Nondiscoverable configuration items will need to be created for both audiences to organize CIs in a way that makes sense for all uses.

    Integrations with other systems may be required to meet the needs of your audience. Note integrations for future planning.

    Business Services

    Within the data sets, service configuration models can be used for:

    • Impact analysis
    • Cause and effect analysis
    • Risk analysis
    • Cost allocation
    • Availability analysis and planning

    Technical Services

    Connect to IT Finance for:

    • Service-based consumption and costing
    • Financial awareness through showback
    • Financial recovery through chargeback
    • Support IT strategy through financial transparency
    • Cost optimization
    • Reporting for depreciation, location-related taxation, and capitalization (may also use asset management for these)

    Intersect with IT Processes to:

    • Reduce time to restore services through incident management
    • Improve stability through change management
    • Reduce outages through problem management
    • Optimize assets through IT asset management
    • Provide detailed reporting for audit/governance, risk, and compliance

    1.1.2 Define goals and how you plan to meet them

    Involve stakeholders.

    Allot 45 minutes for this discussion.

    As a group, identify current goals for building and using a CMDB.

    Why are we doing this?

    • How do you hope to use the data within the CMDB?
    • What processes will be improved through use of this data and what are the expected outcomes?

    How will we improve the process?

    • What processes will be put in place to ensure data integrity?
    • What tools will be put in place to improve the methods used to collect and maintain data?

    Record these goals in the Configuration Management Project Charter, section 1.3: Project Objectives.

    Input

    Output

    • None
    • List of high-level desired benefits for SCM
    Materials Participants
    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Sticky notes
    • Markers/pens
    • Configuration Management Project Charter
    • IT and business service owners
    • Business/customer relationship managers
    • Practice owners and managers
    • SCM practice manager
    • SCM project sponsor

    It's easy to think that if you build it, they will come, but CMDBs rarely succeed without solid use cases

    Set expectations for your organization that defined and fulfilled use cases will factor into prioritization exercises, functional plans, and project milestones to achieve ROI for your efforts.

    A good use case:

    • Justifies resource allocation
    • Gains funding for the right tools
    • Builds stakeholder support
    • Drives interest and excitement
    • Gains support from anyone in a position to help build out and validate the data
    • Helps to define success

    In the book CMDB Systems, Making Change Work in the Age of Cloud and Agile, authors Drogseth, Sturm, and Twing describe the secrets of success:

    A documented evaluation of CMDB System vendors showed that while most "best case" ROI fell between 6 and 9 months for CMDB deployments, one instance delivered ROI for a significant CMDB investment in as little as 2 weeks!

    If there's a simple formula for quick time to value for a CMDB System, it's the following:

    Mature levels of process awareness
    + Strong executive level support
    + A ready and willing team with strongly supportive stakeholders
    + Clearly defined and ready phase one use case
    + Carefully selected, appropriate technologies

    All this = Powerful early-phase CMDB System results

    Define and prioritize use cases for how the CMDB will be used to drive value

    The CMDB can support several use cases and may require integration with various modules within the ITSM solution and integration with other systems.

    Document the use cases that will drive your CMDB to relevance, including the expected benefits for each use case.

    Identify the dependencies that will need to be implemented to be successful.

    Define "done" so that once data is entered, verified, and mapped, these use cases can be realized.

    "Our consulting experience suggests that more than 75% of all strategic initiatives (CMDB or not) fail to meet at least initial expectations across IT organizations. This is often due more to inflated expectations than categorical failure."

    – CMDB Systems, Making Change Work in the Age of Cloud and Agile, Drogseth et al.

    This image demonstrates how CMBD will be used to drive value.

    After identifying use cases, determine the scope of configuration items required to feed the use cases

    On-premises software and equipment will be critical to many use cases as the IT team and partners work on network and data-center equipment, enterprise software, and integrations through various means, including APIs and middleware. Real-time and near real-time data collection and validation will ensure IT can act with confidence.

    Cloud use can include software as a service (SaaS) solutions as well as infrastructure and platform as a service (IaaS and PaaS), and this may be more challenging for data collection. Tools must be capable of connecting to cloud environments and feeding the information back into the CMDB. Where on-premises and cloud applications show dependencies, you might need to validate data if multiple discovery and dependency mapping solutions are used to get a complete picture. Tagging will be crucial to making sense of the data as it comes into the CMDB.

    In-house developed software would be beneficial to have in the CMDB but may require more manual work to identify and classify once discovered. A combination of discovery and tagging may be beneficial to input and classification.

    Highly dynamic environments may require data collection through integration with a variety of solutions to manage and record continuous deployment models and verifications, or they may rely on tags and activity logs to record historical activity. Work with a partner who specializes in CI/CD to help architect this use case.

    Containers will require an assessment of the level of detail required. Determine if the container is a CI and if the content will be described as attributes. If there is value to your use case to map the contents of each container as separate CIs within the container CI, then you can map to that level of detail, but don't map to that depth unless the use case calls for it.

    Internet of Things (IoT) devices and applications will need to match a use case as well. IoT device asset data will be useful to track within an asset database but may have limited value to add to a CMDB. If there are connections between IoT applications and data warehouses, the dependencies should likely be mapped to ensure continued dataflow.

    Out of scope

    A single source of data is highly beneficial, but don't make it a catchall for items that are not easily stored in a CMDB.

    Source code should be stored in a definitive media library (DML). Code can be linked to the CMDB but is generally too big to store in a CMDB and will reduce performance for data retrieval.

    Knowledge articles and maintenance checklists are better suited to a knowledge base. They can also be linked to the CDMB if needed but this can get messy where many-to-many relationships between articles and CIs exist.

    Fleet (transportation) assets and fixed assets should be in fleet management systems and accounting systems, respectively. Storing these types of data in the CMDB doesn't provide value to the support process.

    1.1.3 Brainstorm and prioritize use cases

    Which IT practices will you supercharge?

    Focus on improving both operations and strategy.

    1. Brainstorm the list of relevant use cases. What do you want to do with the data from the CMDB? Consider:
      1. ITSM management and governance practices
      2. IT operations, vendor orchestration, and service integration and management (SIAM) to improve vendor interactions
      3. IT finance and business service reporting needs
    2. Identify which use cases are part of your two- to three-year plan, including the purpose for adding configuration data into that process. Prioritize one or two of these use cases to accomplish in your first year.
    3. Identify dependencies to manage as part of the solution and define a realistic timeline for implementing integrations, modules, or data sources.
    4. Document this table in the Configuration Management Project Charter, section 2.2: Use Cases.
    Audience Use Case Goal/Purpose Project/Solution Dependencies Proposed Timeline Priority
    • IT
    • Change Management

    Stabilize the process by seeing:

    Change conflict reporting

    Reports of CI changes without change records

    System availability

    RFC mapping requires discovered CIs

    RFC review requires criticality, technical and business owners

    Conflict reporting requires dependency mapping

    • Discovery and manual information entered by October
    • Dependency mapping implemented by December

    High

    Determine what additional data will be needed to achieve your use cases

    Regardless of which use cases you are planning to fulfill with the CMDB, it is critical to not add data and complexity with the plan of resolving every possible inquiry. Ensure the cost and effort of bringing in the data and maintaining it is justified. The complexity of the environment will impact the complexity of data sources and integrations for discovery and dependency mapping.

    Before bringing in new data, consider:

    • Is this information available in other maintained databases now?
    • Will this data be critical for decision making? If it is nice to have or optional, can it be automatically moved into the database and maintained using existing integrations?
    • Is there a cost to bringing the data into the CMDB and maintaining it? Is that cost reasonable for its purpose?
    • How frequently will this information be accessed, and can it be updated in an adequate cadence to meet these needs?
    • When does this information need to be available?

    Info-Tech Insight

    If data will be used only occasionally upon request, determine if it will be more efficient to maintain it or to retrieve it from the CMDB or another data source as needed.

    Remember, within the data sets, service configuration models can be used for:

    • Impact analysis
    • Cause and effect analysis
    • Risk analysis
    • Cost allocation
    • Availability analysis and planning

    1.1.4 Expand your use cases by identifying the data needed to reach your goals

    Involve stakeholders.

    Allot 60 minutes for this discussion.

    Review use cases and their goals.

    Identify what data will be required to meet those goals and determine whether it will be mandatory or optional/nice-to-have information.

    Identify sources of data for each type of data. Color code or sort.

    Italicize data points that can be automatically discovered.

    Gain consensus on what information will be manually entered.

    Record the data in the Use Cases and Data Worksheet.

    Download the Use Cases and Data Worksheet

    Input

    Output

    • None
    • List of data requirements
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Sticky notes
    • Markers/pens
    • Use Cases and Data Worksheet
    • IT and business service owners
    • Business/customer relationship managers
    • Practice owners and managers
    • SCM practice manager
    • SCM project sponsor

    Use discovery and dependency mapping tools to automatically update the CMDB

    Avoid manual data entry whenever possible.

    Consider these features when looking at tools:

    • Application dependency mapping: Establishing and tracking the relationships and dependencies between system components, applications, and IT services. The ideal tool will be able to generate maps automatically.
    • Agentless and agent discovery: Scanning systems with both agent and agentless approaches. Agent-based scanning provides comprehensive information on applications used in individual endpoints, which is helpful in minimizing its IT footprint. However, agents require endpoint access. Agentless-based scanning provides a broader and holistic view of deployed applications without the need to install an agent on end devices, which can be good enough for inventory awareness.
    • Data export capability: Easy exporting of application inventory information to be used in reports and other tools.
    • Dashboards and chart visualization: Detailed list of the application inventory, including version number, number of users, licenses, deployment location, and other application details. These details will inform decision makers of each application's health and its candidacy for further rationalization activities.
    • Customizable scanning scripts: Tailor your application discovery approach by modifying the scripts used to scan your systems.
    • Integration with third-party tools: Easy integration with other systems with out-of-the-box plugins or customizable APIs.

    Determine which data collection methods will be used to populate the CMDB

    The effort-to-value ratio is an important factor in populating a CMDB. Manual efforts require a higher process focus, more intensive data validation, and a constant need to remind team members to act on every change.

    Real-Time Data AIOps continual scans Used for event and incident management
    Near Real-Time Data Discovery and dependency mapping run on a regular cycle Used for change and asset management
    Historical Data Activity log imports, manual data entry Used for IT finance, audit trail
    • Determine what amount of effort is appropriate for each data grouping and use case. As decisions are made to expand data within the CMDB, the effort-to-value ratio should always factor in. To be usable, data must be accurate, and every piece of data that needs to be manually entered runs the risk of becoming obsolete.
    • Identify which data sources will bring in each type of data. Where there is a possibility of duplicate records being created, one of the data sources will need to be identified as the primary.
    • If the decision is to manually enter configuration items early in the process, be aware that automation may create duplicates of the CIs that will need to be deduplicated at some point in the process to make the information more usable.
    • Typically, items are discovered, validated, then mapped, but there will be variations depending on the source.
    • Active Directory or LDAP may be used to bring users and technicians into the CMDB. Data may be imported from spreadsheets. Identify efforts where data cleanup may have to happen before transferring into the CMDB.
    • Identify how often manual imports will need to be conducted to make sure data is usable.

    Identify other nondiscoverable data that will need to be added to or accessed by the CMDB

    Foundational data, such as technicians, end users and approvers, roles, location, company, agency, department, building, or cost center, may be added to tables that are within or accessed by the CMDB. Work with your vendor to understand structure and where this information resides.

    • These records can be imported from CSV files manually, but this will require manual removal or edits as information changes.
    • Integration with the HRIS, Active Directory, or LDAP will enable automatic updates through synchronization or scheduled imports.
    • If synchronization is fully enabled, new data can be added and removed from the CMDB automatically.
    • Identify which nondiscoverable attributes will be needed, such as system criticality, support groups, groups it is managed by, location.
    • If partially automating the process, identify where manual updates will need to occur.
    • If fully automating the process, notifications will need to be set up when business owner or product or technical owner fields become empty to prompt defining a replacement within the CMDB.
    • Determine who will manage these updates.
    • Work with your CMDB implementation vendor to determine the best option for bringing this information in.

    1.1.5 Record required data sources

    Allot 15 minutes for this discussion.

    1. Where do you track the work involved in providing services? Typically, your ticket database tracks service requests and incidents. Additional data sources can include:
      • Enterprise resource planning tools for tracking purchase orders
      • Project management information system for tracking tasks
    2. What trusted data sources exist for the technology that supports these services? Examples include:
      • Management tools (e.g. Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager)
      • Architectural diagrams and network topology diagrams
      • IT asset management database
      • Spreadsheets
      • Other systems of record
    3. What other data sources can help you gather the data you identified in activity 1.1.4?
    4. Record the relevant data sources for each use case in the Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures, section 6: Data Collection and Updates.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Improve the trustworthiness of your CMDB as a system of record by relying on data that is already trusted.

    Input

    Output

    • Use cases
    • List of data requirements
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Use Cases and Data Worksheet
    • Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures
    • IT and business service owners
    • Practice owners and managers
    • SCM practice manager
    • SCM project sponsor

    Step 1.2

    Define roles and responsibilities

    Activities

    1.2.1 Record the project team and stakeholders

    1.2.2 Complete a RACI chart to define who will be accountable and responsible for configuration tasks

    This step will walk you through the following aspects of a configuration management system:

    • Roles and responsibilities

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • IT service owners
    • Enterprise architects
    • Practice owners and managers
    • SCM practice manager
    • Project manager

    Identify the roles you need in your SCM project

    Determine which roles will need to be involved in the initial project and how to source these roles.

    Leadership Roles
    Oversee the SCM implementation

    1. Configuration Manager – The practice owner for SCM. This is a long-term role.
    2. Configuration Control Board (CCB) Chair – An optional role that oversees proposed alterations to configuration plans. If a CCB is implemented, this is a long-term role.
    3. Project Sponsor or Program Sponsor – Provides the necessary resources for building the CMDB and SCM practices.
    4. Architecture Roles
      Plan the program to build strong foundation
      1. Configuration Management Architect – Technical leader who defines the overall CM solution, plans the scope, selects a tool, and leads the technical team that will implement the solution.
      2. Requirements Analyst – Gathers and manages the requirements for CM.
      3. Process Engineer – Defines, documents, and implements the entire process.

    Architecture Roles
    Plan the program to build strong foundation

    1. Configuration Management Architect – Technical leader who defines the overall CM solution, plans the scope, selects a tool, and leads the technical team that will implement the solution.
    2. Requirements Analyst – Gathers and manages the requirements for CM.
    3. Process Engineer – Defines, documents, and implements the entire process.

    Engineer Roles
    Implement the system

    1. Logical Database Analyst (DBA) Designs the structure to hold the configuration management data and oversees implementation.
    2. Communications and Trainer – Communicates the goals and functions of CM and teaches impacted users the how and why of the process and tools.

    Administrative Roles
    Permanent roles involving long-term ownership

    1. Technical Owner – The system administrator responsible for their system's uptime. These roles usually own the data quality for their system.
    2. Configuration Management Integrator – Oversees regular transfer of data into the CMDB.
    3. Configuration Management Tool Support – Selects, installs, and maintains the CM tool.
    4. Impact Manager – Analyzes configuration data to ensure relationships between CIs are accurate; conducts impact analysis.

    1.2.1 Record the project team and stakeholders

    Allocate 25 minutes to this discussion.

    1. Record the project team.
      1. Identify the project manager who will lead this project.
      2. Identify key personnel that will need to be involved in design of the configuration management system and processes.
      3. Identify where vendors/outsourcers may be required to assist with technical aspects.
      4. Document the project team in the Configuration Management Project Charter, section 1.1: Project Team.
    1. Record a list of stakeholders.
      1. Identify stakeholders internal and external to IT.
      2. Build the stakeholder profile. For each stakeholder, identify their role, interest in the project, and influence on project success. You can score these criteria high/medium/low or score them out of ten.
      3. If managed service providers will need to be part of the equation, determine who will be the liaison and how they will provide or access data.
    Input

    Output

    • Project team members
    • Project plan resources
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Configuration Management Project Charter
    • List of project stakeholders and participants
    • IT service owners
    • Practice owners and managers
    • SCM practice manager
    • SCM project sponsor

    Even with full automation, this cannot be a "set it and forget it" project if it is to be successful long-term

    Create a team to manage the process and data updates and to ensure data is always usable.

    • Services may be added and removed.
    • Technology will change as technical debt is reduced.
    • Vendors may change as contract needs develop.
    • Additional use cases may be introduced by IT and the business as approaches to management evolve.
    • AIOps can reduce the level of effort and improve visibility as configuration items change from the baseline and notifications are automated.
    • Changes can be checked against requests for changes through automated reconciliations, but changes will still need to be investigated where they do not meet expectations.
    • Manual data changes will need to be made regularly and verified.

    "We found that everyone wanted information from the CMDB, but no one wanted to pay to maintain it. People pointed to the configuration management team and said, 'It's their responsibility.'

    Configuration managers, however, cannot own the data because they have no way of knowing if the data is accurate. They can own the processes related to checking accuracy, but not the data itself."
    – Tim Mason, founding director at TRM Associates
    (Excerpt from Viewpoint: Focus on CMDB Leadership)

    Include these roles in your CMDB practice to ensure continued success and continual improvement

    These roles can make up the configuration control board (CCB) to make decisions on major changes to services, data models, processes, or policies. A CCB will be necessary in complex environments.

    Configuration Manager

    This role is focused on ensuring everyone works together to build the CMDB and keep it up to date. The configuration manager is responsible to:

    • Plan and manage the standards, processes, and procedures and communicate all updates to appropriate staff. Focused on continual improvement.
    • Plan and manage population of the CMDB and ensure data included meets criteria for cost effectiveness and reasonable effort for the value it brings.
    • Validate scope of services and CIs to be included and controlled within the CMDB and manage exceptions.
    • Audit data quality to ensure it is valid, is current, and meets defined standards.
    • Evaluate and recommend tools to support processes, data collection, and integrations.
    • Ensure configuration management processes interface with all other service and business management functions to meet use cases.
    • Report on configuration management performance and take appropriate action on process adherence and quality issues.

    Configuration Librarian

    This role is most important where manual data entry is prevalent and where many nonstandard configurations are in place. The librarian role is often held by the tool administrator. The librarian focuses specifically on data within the CMDB, including:

    • Manual updates to configuration data.
    • CMDB data verification on a regular schedule.
    • Processing ad hoc requests for data.

    Product/Service/Technical Owners

    The product or technical owner will validate information is correctly updating and reflects the existing data requirements as new systems are provisioned or as existing systems change.

    Interfacing Practice Owners

    All practice owners, such as change manager, incident manager, or problem manager, must work with the configuration team to ensure data is usable for each of the use cases they are responsible for.

    Download the Configuration Manager job description

    Assign configuration management responsibilities and accountabilities

    Align authority and accountability.

    • A RACI exercise will help you discuss and document accountability and responsibility for critical configuration management activities.
    • When responsibility and accountability are not well documented, it's often useful to invite a representative of the roles identified to participate in this alignment exercise. The discussion can uncover contrasting views on responsibility and governance, which can help you build a stronger management and governance model.
    • The RACI chart can help you identify who should be involved when making changes to a given activity. Clarify the variety of responsibilities assigned to each key role.
    • In the future, you may need to define roles in more detail as you change your configuration management procedures.

    Responsible: The person who actually gets the job done.
    Different roles may be responsible for different aspects of the activity relevant to their role.

    Accountable: The one role accountable for the activity (in terms of completion, quality, cost, etc.)
    Must have sufficient authority to be held accountable; responsible roles are often accountable to this role.

    Consulted: Those who need the opportunity to provide meaningful input at certain points in the activity; typically, subject matter experts or stakeholders. The more people you must consult, the more overhead and time you'll add to a process.

    Informed: Those who receive information regarding the task but do not need to provide feedback.
    Information might relate to process execution, changes, or quality.

    Complete a RACI chart to define who will be accountable and responsible for configuration tasks

    Determine what roles will be in place in your organization and who will fulfill them, and create your RACI chart to reflect what makes sense for your organization. Additional roles may be involved where there is complexity.

    R = responsible, A = accountable, C = consulted, I = informed CCB Configuration Manager Configuration Librarian Technical Owner(s) Interfacing Practice Owners Tool Administrator
    Plan and manage the standards, processes, and procedures and communicate all updates to appropriate staff. Focused on continual improvement. A R
    Plan and manage population of the CMDB and ensure data included meets criteria for cost effectiveness and reasonable effort for the value it brings. A R
    Validate scope of services and CIs to be included and controlled within the CMDB and manage exceptions. A R
    Audit data quality to ensure it is valid, is current, and meets defined standards. A,R
    Evaluate and recommend tools to support processes, data collection, and integrations. A,R
    Ensure configuration management processes interface with all other service and business management functions to meet use cases. A
    Report on configuration management performance and take appropriate action on process adherence and quality issues. A
    Make manual updates to configuration data. A
    Conduct CMDB data verification on a regular schedule. A
    Process ad hoc requests for data. A
    Enter new systems into the CMDB. A R
    Update CMDB as systems change. A R
    Identify new use cases for CMDB data. R A
    Validate data meets the needs for use cases and quality. R A
    Design reports to meet use cases. R
    Ensure integrations are configured as designed and are functional. R

    1.2.2 Complete a RACI chart to define who will be accountable and responsible for configuration tasks

    Allot 60 minutes for this discussion.

    1. Open the Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures, section 4.1: Responsibility Matrix. In the RACI chart, review the top row of roles. Smaller organizations may not need a configuration control board, in which case the configuration manager may have more authority.
    2. Modify or expand the process tasks in the left column as needed.
    3. For each role, identify what that person is responsible for, accountable for, consulted on, or informed of. Fill out each column.
    4. Document in the SOP. Schedule a time to share the results with organization leads.
    5. Distribute the chart among all teams in your organization.
    6. Describe additional roles as needed in the documentation.
    7. Add accountabilities and responsibilities for the CCB into the Configuration Control Board Charter.
    8. If appropriate, add auxiliary roles to the Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures, section 4.2: Configuration Management Auxiliary Role Definitions.

    Notes:

    1. Assign one Accountable for each task.
    2. Have one or more Responsible for each task.
    3. Avoid generic responsibilities such as "team meetings."
    4. Keep your RACI definitions in your documents for quick reference.

    Refer back to the RACI chart when building out the communications plan to ensure accountable and responsible team members are on board and consulted and informed people are aware of all changes.

    Input

    Output

    • Task assignments
    • RACI chart with roles and responsibilities
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures, RACI chart
    • Configuration Control Board Charter, Responsibilities section
    • IT service owners
    • Practice owners and managers
    • SCM practice manager
    • SCM project sponsor

    Phase 2

    Configuration Management Data Model

    StrategyData StructureProcessesRoadmap
    • Challenges and Goals
    • Use Cases and Data
    • Roles and Responsibilities
    • Services
    • Classifications
    • Data Modeling
    • Lifecycle Processes
    • Baselines
    • Audit and Data Validation
    • Metrics
    • Communications Plan
    • Roadmap

    This phase will walk you through the following aspects of a configuration management system:

    • Data Model
    • Customer-Facing and Supporting Services
    • Business Capabilities
    • Relationships
    • IT Infrastructure Components
    • Enterprise Software
    • End-User Devices
    • Documents

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • IT service owners
    • Enterprise architects
    • Practice owners and managers
    • CM practice manager
    • CM project manager

    Step 2.1

    Build a framework for CIs and relationships

    Activities

    Document services:

    2.1.1 Define and prioritize your services

    2.1.2 Test configuration items against existing categories

    2.1.3 Create a configuration control board charter to define the board's responsibilities and protocols

    This step will walk you through the following aspects of a configuration management system:

    • Data model
    • Configuration items
    • Relationships

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • IT service owners
    • Enterprise architects
    • Practice owners and managers
    • CM practice manager
    • Project manager

    Making sense of data daily will be key to maintaining it, starting with services

    As CIs are discovered and mapped, they will automatically map to each other based on integrations, APIs, queries, and transactions. However, CIs also need to be mapped to a conceptional model or service to present the service and its many layers in an easily consumable way.

    These services will need to be manually created or imported into the CMDB and manually connected to the application services. Services can be mapped to technical or business services or both.

    If business services reporting has been requested, talk to the business to develop a list of services that will be required. Use terms the business will be expecting and identify which applications and instances will be mapped to those services.

    If IT is using the CMDB to support service usage and reporting, develop the list of IT services and identify which applications and instances will be mapped to those services.

    This image show the relationship between Discoverable and Nondiscoverable CIs. The discoverable CIs are coloured in purple, and the nondiscoverables are blue.

    Work with your stakeholders to ensure catalog items make sense to them

    There isn't a definitive right or wrong way to define catalog items. For example, the business and IT could both reference application servers, but only IT may need to see technical services broken down by specific locations or device types.

    Refer back to your goals and use cases to think through how best to meet those objectives and determine how to categorize your services.

    Define the services that will be the top-level, nondiscoverable services, which will group together the CIs that make up the complete service. Identify which application(s) will connect into the technical service.

    When you are ready to start discovery, this list of services will be connected to the discovered data to organize it in a way that makes sense for how your stakeholders need to see the data.

    While working toward meeting the goals of the first few use cases, you will want to keep the structure simple. Once processes are in place and data is regularly validated, complexities of different service types and names can be integrated into the data.

    This image show the relationship between Discoverable and Nondiscoverable CIs. Both Discoverable and nondiscoverable CIs are blue.

    Application Service(blue); Technical Service(Purple); IT Shared Services(Orange); Billable Services(green); Service Portfolio(red)

    Define the service types to manage within the CMDB to logically group CIs

    Determine which method of service groupings will best serve your audience for your prioritized use cases. This will help to name your service categories. Service types can be added as the CMDB evolves and as the audience changes.

    Application Service

    Technical Service

    IT Shared Services

    Billable Services

    Service Portfolio

    A set of interconnected applications and hosts configured to offer a service to the organization.

    Example: Financial application service, which may include email, web server, application server, databases, and middleware.

    A logical grouping of CIs based on common criteria.

    Example: Toronto web services, which may include several servers, web applications, and databases.

    A logical grouping of IT and business services shared and used across the organization.

    Example: VoIP/phone services or networking or security services.

    A group of services that will be billed out to departments or customers and would require logical groupings to enable invoicing.

    A group of business and technical service offerings with specific performance reporting levels. This may include multiple service levels for different customer audiences for the same service.

    2.1.1 Define and prioritize your services

    Prioritize your starting point. If multiple audiences need to be accommodated, work with one group at a time.

    Timing: will vary depending on number of services, and starting point

    1. Create your list of services, referencing an existing service catalog, business continuity or disaster recovery plan, list of applications, or brainstorming sessions. Use the terminology that makes the most sense for the audience and their reporting requirements.
    2. If this list is already in place, assess for relevance and reduce the list to only those services that will be managed through the CMDB.
    3. Determine what data will be relevant for each service based on the exercises done in 1.1.4 and 1.1.5. For example, if priority was a required attribute for use case data, ensure each service lists the priority of that service.
    4. For each of these, identify the supporting services. These items can come from your technical service catalog or list of systems and software.
    5. Document this table in the Use Cases and Data Worksheet, tab 3: Service Catalog.

    Service Record Example

    Service: Email
    Supporting Services: M365, Authentication Services

    Service Attributes

    Availability: 24/7 (99.999%)
    Priority: Critical
    Users: All
    Used for: Collaboration
    Billable: Departmental
    Support: Unified Support Model, Account # 123456789

    The CMDB will be organized by services and will enable data analysis through multiple categorization schemes

    To extract maximum service management benefit from a CMDB, the highest level of CI type should be a service, as demonstrated below. While it is easier to start at the system or single-asset level, taking the service mapping approach will provide you with a useful and dynamic view of your IT environment as it relates to the services you offer, instead of a static inventory of components.

    Level 1: Services

    • Business Service Offering: A business service is an IT service that supports a business process, or a service that is delivered to business customers. Business service offerings typically are bound by service-level agreements.
    • IT Service Offering: An IT service supports the customer's business processes and is made up of people, processes, and technology. IT service offerings typically are bound by service-level agreements.

    Level 2: Infrastructure CIs

    • IT Component Set: An IT service offering consists of one of more sets of IT components. An IT component set allows you to group or bundle IT components with other components or groupings.
    • IT Component: An IT system is composed of one or more supporting components. Many components are shared between multiple IT systems.

    Level 3: Supporting CIs

    • IT Subcomponent: Any IT asset that is uniquely identifiable and a component of an IT system.
    • IT components can have subcomponents, and those components can have subcomponents, etc.

    Two charts, showing Enterprise Architect Model and Configuration Service Model. Each box represents a different CI.

    Assess your CMDB's standard category offerings against your environment, with a plan to minimize customization

    Standard categorization schemes will allow for easier integration with multiple tools and reporting and improve results if using machine learning to automate categorization. If the CMDB chosen includes structured categories, use that as your starting point and focus only on gaps that are not addressed for CIs unique to your environment.

    There is an important distinction between a class and a type. This concept is foundational for your configuration data model, so it is important that you understand it.

    • Types are general groupings, and the things within a type will have similarities. For attributes that you want to collect on a type, all children classes and CIs will have those attribute fields.
    • Classes are a more specific grouping within a type. All objects within a class will have specific similarities. You can also use subclasses to further differentiate between CIs.
    • Individual CIs are individual instances of a class or subclass. All objects in a class will have the same attribute fields and behave the same, although the values of their attributes will likely differ.
    • Attributes may be discovered or nondiscoverable and manually added to CIs. The attributes are properties of the CI such as serial number, version, memory, processor speed, or asset tag.

    Use inheritance structures to simplify your configuration data model.

    An example CM Data Model is depicted.

    Assess the list of classes of configuration items against your requirements

    Types are general groupings, and the things within a type will have similarities. Each type will have its own table within the CMDB. Classes within a type are a more specific grouping of configuration items and may include subclasses.

    Review your vendor's CMDB documentation. Find the list of CI types or classes. Most CMDBs will have a default set of classes, like this standard list. If you need to build your own, use the table below as a starting point. Define anything required for unique classes. Create a list and consult with your installation partner.

    Sample list of classes organized by type

    Types Services Network Hardware Storage Compute App Environment Documents
    Classes
    • Application Service
    • Technical Service
    • IT Shared Service
    • Billable Service
    • Service Portfolio
    • Switch
    • Router
    • Firewall
    • Modem
    • SD-WAN
    • Load Balancer
    • UPS
    • Computer
    • Laptop
    • Server
    • Tablet
    • Database
    • Network-Attached Storage
    • Storage Array Network
    • Blob
    • Operating System
    • Hypervisor
    • Virtual Server
    • Virtual Desktop
    • Appliance
    • Virtual Application
    • Enterprise Application
    • Line of Business Application Software
    • Development
    • Test
    • Production
    • Contract
    • Business Impact Analysis
    • Requirements

    Review relationships to determine which ones will be most appropriate to map your dependencies

    Your CMDB should include multiple relationship types. Determine which ones will be most effective for your environment and ensure everyone is trained on how to use them. As CIs are mapped, verify they are correct and only manually map what is incorrect or not mapping through automation.

    Manually mapping CMDB relationships may be time consuming and prone to error, but where manual mapping needs to take place, ensure the team has a common view of the dependency types available and what is important to map.

    Use automated mapping whenever possible to improve accuracy, provide functional visualizations, and enable dynamic updates as the environment changes.

    Where a dependency maps to external providers, determine where it makes sense to discover and map externally provided CIs.

    • Only connect where there is value in mapping to vendor-owned systems.
    • Only connect where data and connections can be trusted and verified.

    Most common dependency mapping types

    A list of the most common dependency mapping types.

    2.1.2 Test configuration items against existing categories

    Time to complete: 1-2 hours

    1. Select a service to test.
    2. Identify the various components that make up the service, focusing on configuration items, not attributes
    3. Categorize configuration items against types and classes in the default settings of the CMDB.
    4. Using the default relationships within the CMDB, identify the relationships between the configuration items.
    5. Identify types, classes, and relationships that do not fit within the default settings. Determine if there are common terms for these items or determine most appropriate name.
    6. Validate these exceptions with the publisher.
    7. Document exceptions in the Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures, Appendix 2: Types and Classes of Configuration Items
    Input

    Output

    • List of default settings for classes, types, and relationships
    • Small list of services for testing
    • List of CIs to map to at least one service
    • List of categories to add to the CMDB solution.
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Use Cases and Data Worksheet
    • Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures
    • IT service owners
    • Practice owners and managers
    • SCM practice manager
    • SCM project sponsor

    2.1.3 Create a configuration control board charter to define the board's responsibilities and protocols

    A charter will set the tone for meetings, ensure purpose is defined and meeting cadence is set for regular reviews.

    1. Open the Configuration Control Board Charter. Review the document and modify as appropriate for your CCB. This will include:
      • Purpose and mandate of the committee – Reference objectives from the project charter.
      • Team composition – Determine the right mix of team members. A team of six to ten people can provide a good balance between having a variety of opinions and getting work done.
      • Voting option – Determine the right quorum to approve changes.
      • Responsibilities – List responsibilities, starting with RACI chart items.
      • Authority – Define the control board's span of control.
      • Governing laws and regulations – List any regulatory requirements that will need to be met to satisfy your auditors.
      • Meeting preparation – Set expectations to ensure meetings are productive.
    2. Distribute the charter to CCB members.
    Input

    Output

    • Project team members
    • Project plan resources
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Configuration Control Board Charter
    • IT service owners
    • Practice owners and managers
    • SCM practice manager
    • SCM project sponsor

    Assess the default list of statuses for each state

    Align this list with your CMDB

    Minimize the number of customizations that will make it difficult to update the platform.

    1. Review the default status list within the tool.
    2. Identify which statuses will be most used. Write a definition for each status.
    3. Update this list as you update process documentation in Step 3.1. After initial implementation, this list should only be modified through change enablement.
    4. Record this list of statuses in the Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures, Appendix 4: Statuses
    State Status Description
    Preparation Ordered Waiting delivery from the vendor
    In Planning Being created
    Received Vendor has delivered the item, but it is not ready for deployment
    Production In Stock Available to be deployed
    In Use Deployed
    On Loan Deployed to a user on a temporary basis
    For Removal Planning to be phased out but still deployed to an end user
    Offline In Transit Moving to a new location
    Under Maintenance Temporarily offline while a patch or change is applied
    Removed Decommissioned Item has been retired and is no longer in production
    Disposed Item has been destroyed and we are no longer in possession of it
    Lost Item has been lost
    Stolen Item has been stolen

    Step 2.2

    Document statuses, attributes, and data sources

    Activities

    2.2.1 Follow the packet and map out the in-scope services and data centers

    2.2.2 Build data model diagrams

    2.2.3 Determine access rights for your data

    This step will walk you through the following aspects of a configuration management system:

    • Statuses
    • Attributes for each class of CI

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • IT service owners
    • Enterprise architects
    • Practice owners and managers
    • SCM practice manager
    • Project manager

    Outcomes of this step

    • Framework for approaching CI statuses
    • Attributes for each class of CI
    • Data sources for those attributes

    Service mapping approaches

    As you start thinking about dependency mapping, it's important to understand the different methods and how they work, as well as your CMDB's capabilities. These approaches may be all in the same tool, or the tool may only have the top-down options.

    Top down, most common

    Pattern-based

    Most common option, which includes indicators of connections such as code, access rights, scripting, host discovery, and APIs.

    Start with pattern-based, then turn on traffic-based for more detail. This combination will provide the most accuracy.

    Traffic-based

    Map against traffic patterns involving connection rules to get more granular than pattern-based.

    Traffic-based can add a lot of overhead with extraneous data, so you may not want to run it continuously.

    Tag-based

    Primarily used for cloud, containers, and virtual machines and will attach the cloud licenses to their dependent services and any related CIs.

    Tags work well with cloud but will not have the same hierarchical view as on-premises dependency mapping.

    Machine learning

    Machine learning will look for patterns in the traffic-based connections, match CIs to categories and help organize the data.

    Machine learning (ML) may not be in every solution, but if you have it, use it. ML will provide many suggestions to make the life of the data manager easier.

    Model hierarchy

    Automated data mapping will be helpful, but it won't be foolproof. It's critical to understand the data model to validate and map nondiscoverable CIs correctly.

    The framework consists of the business, enterprise, application, and implementation layers.

    The business layer encodes real-world business concepts via the conceptual model.

    The enterprise layer defines all enterprise data assets' details and their relationships.

    The application layer defines the data structures as used by a specific application.

    The implementation layer defines the data models and artifacts for use by software tools.

    An example of Model Hierarchy is depicted.

    Learn how to create data models with Info-Tech's blueprint Create and Manage Enterprise Data Models

    2.2.1 Follow the packet and map out the in-scope services and data centers

    Reference your network topology and architecture diagrams.

    Allot 1 hour for this activity.

    1. Start with a single service that is well understood and documented.
    2. Identify the technical components (hardware and applications) that make up the service.
    3. Determine if there is a need to further break down services into logical service groupings. For example, the email service to the right is broken down into authentication and mail flow.
    4. If you don't have a network diagram to follow, create a simple one to identify workflows within the service and components the service uses.
    5. Record the apps and underlying components in the Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures, Appendix 1: Configuration Data Model Structure.

    This information will be used for CM project planning and validating the contents of the CMDB.

    an example of a Customer-facing service is shown, for Email sample topology.

    Download the Configuration Management Diagram Template Library to see an example.

    Build your configuration data model

    Rely on out-of-the-box functionality where possible and keep a narrow focus in the early implementation stages.

    1. If you have an enterprise architecture, then your configuration management data model should align with it.
    2. Keep a narrow focus in the early implementation stages. Don't fill up your CMDB until you are ready to validate and fix the data.
    3. Rely on out-of-the-box (OOTB) functionality where possible. If your configuration management database (CMDB) and platform do not have a data model OOTB, then rely on a publicly available data model.
    4. Map your business or IT service offering to the first few layers.

    Once this is built out in the system, you can let the automated dependency mapping take over, but you will still need to validate the accuracy of the automated mapping and investigate anything that is incorrect.

    Sample Configuration Data Model

    Every box represents a CI, and every line represents a relationship

    A sample configuration Data model is shown.

    Example: Data model and CMDB visualization

    Once the data model is entered into the CMDB, it will provide a more dynamic and complex view, including CIs shared with other services.

    An example of a Data Model Exercise

    CMDB View

    An example of a CMDB View of the Data Model Exercise

    2.2.2 Build data model diagrams

    Visualize the expected CI classes and relationships.

    Allot 45 minutes.

    1. Identify the different data model views you need. Use multiple diagrams to keep the information simple to read and understand. Common diagrams include:
      1. Network level: Outline expected CI classes and relationships at the network level.
      2. Application level: Outline the expected components and relationships that make up an application.
      3. Services level: Outline how business capability CIs and service CIs relate to each other and to other types of CIs.
    1. Use boxes to represent CI classes.
    2. Use lines to represent relationships. Include details such as:
      1. Relationship name: Write this name on the arrow.
      2. Direction: Have an arrow point to each child.

    Review samples in Configuration Management Diagram Template Library.
    Record these diagrams in the Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures, Appendix 1: Configuration Data Model Structure.

    Input

    Output

    • List of default settings for classes, types, and relationships
    • Small list of services for testing
    • List of CIs to map to at least one service
    • List of additions of categories to add to the CMDB solution.
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures
    • Configuration Management Diagram Template Library
    • IT service owners
    • Practice owners and managers
    • SCM practice manager
    • SCM project sponsor

    Download the Configuration Management Diagram Template Library to see examples.

    Determine governance for data security, access, and validation

    Align CMDB access to the organization's access control policy to maintain authorized and secure access for legitimate staff performing their role.

    Data User Type Access Role
    Data consumers
    • View-only access
    • Will need to view and use the data but will not need to make modifications to it
    • Service desk
    • Change manager
    • Major incident manager
    • Finance
    CMDB owner
    • Read/write access with the ability to update and validate data as needed
    • Configuration manager
    Domain owner
    • Read/write access for specific domains
    • Data owner within their domain, which includes validating that data is in the database and that it is correctly categorized.
    • Enterprise architect
    • Application owner
    Data provider
    • Read/write access for specific domains
    • Ensures automated data has been added and adds nondiscoverable assets and attributes as needed
    • Server operations
    • Database management
    • Network teams
    CMDB administrator
    • View-only access for data
    • Will need to have access for modifying the structure of the product, including adding fields, as determined by the CCB
    • ITSM tool administrator

    2.2.3 Determine access rights for your data

    Allot 30 minutes for this discussion.

    1. Open the Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures, section 5: Access Rights.
    2. Review the various roles from an access perspective.
      1. Who needs read-only access?
      2. Who needs read/write access?
      3. Should there be restrictions on who can delete data?
    1. Fill in the chart and communicate this to your CMDB installation vendor or your CMDB administrator.
    Input

    Output

    • Task assignments
    • Access rights and roles
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures
    • IT service owners
    • Practice owners and managers
    • SCM practice manager
    • SCM project sponsor

    Phase 3

    Configuration Record Updates

    StrategyData StructureProcessesRoadmap
    • Challenges and Goals
    • Use Cases and Data
    • Roles and Responsibilities
    • Services
    • Classifications
    • Data Modeling
    • Lifecycle Processes
    • Baselines
    • Audit and Data Validation
    • Metrics
    • Communications Plan
    • Roadmap

    This phase will walk you through the following aspects of a configuration management system:

    • ITSM Practices and Workflows
    • Discovery and Dependency Mapping Tools
    • Auditing and Data Validation Practices

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • IT service owners
    • Enterprise architects
    • Practice owners and managers
    • SCM practice manager
    • SCM project manager
    • IT audit

    Harness Service Configuration Management Superpowers

    Step 3.1

    Keep CIs and relationships up to date through lifecycle process integrations

    Activities

    3.1.1 Define processes to bring new services into the CMDB

    3.1.2 Determine when each type of CI will be created in the CMDB

    3.1.3 Identify when each type of CI will be retired in the CMDB

    3.1.4 Record when and how attributes will change

    3.1.5 Institute configuration control and configuration baselines

    This step will walk you through the following aspects of a configuration management system:

    1. ITSM Practices and Workflows
    2. Discovery and Dependency Mapping Tools

    This phase involves the following participants:

    1. IT service owners
    2. Enterprise architects
    3. Practice owners and managers
    4. SCM practice manager
    5. Project manager

    Outcomes of this step

    • List of action items for updating interfacing practices and processes
    • Identification of where configuration records will be manually updated

    Incorporate CMDB updates into IT operations

    Determine which processes will prompt changes to the CMDB data

    Onboard new services - Offboard Redundant Services. Onboard new CIs - Offboard Redundant CIs; Maintain CIs - Update Attributes.

    Change enablement

    Identify which process are involved in each stage of data input, maintenance, and removal to build out a process for each scenario.

    Project management

    Change enablement

    Asset management

    Security controls

    Project management

    Incident management

    Deployment management

    Change enablement

    Asset management

    Security controls

    Project management

    Incident management

    Service management

    Formalize the process for adding new services to the CMDB

    As new services and products are introduced into the environment, you can improve your ability to correctly cost the service, design integrations, and ensure all operational capabilities are in place, such as data backup and business continuity plans.
    In addition, attributes such as service-level agreements (SLAs), availability requirements, and product, technical, and business owners should be documented as soon as those new systems are made live.

    • Introduce the technical team and CCB to the product early to ensure the service record is created before deployment and to quickly map the services once they are moved into the production environment.
    • Engage with project managers or business analysts to define the process to include security and technical reviews early.
    • Engage with the security and technical reviewers to start documenting the service as soon as it is approved.
    • Determine which practices will be involved in the creation and approval of new services and formalize the process to streamline entry of the new service, onboarding corresponding CIs and mapping dependencies.

    an example of the review and approval process for new service or products is shown.

    3.1.1 Define processes to bring new services into the CMDB

    Start with the most frequent intake methods, and if needed, use this opportunity to streamline the process.

    1. Discuss the methods for new services to be introduced to the IT environment.
    2. Critique existing methods to assess consistency and identify issues that could prevent the creation of services in the CMDB in a timely manner.
    3. Create a workflow for the existing processes, with an eye to improvement. Identify any changes that will need to be introduced and managed appropriately.
    4. Identify where additional groups may need to be engaged to ensure success. For example, if project managers are not interfacing early with IT, discuss process changes with them.
    5. Discuss the validation process and determine where control points are. Document these on the workflows.
    6. Complete the Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures, section 8.1: Introduce New Service and Data Model.

    Possible intake opportunities:

    • Business-driven project intake process
    • IT-driven project intake process
    • Change enablement reviews
    • Vendor-driven product changes
    Input

    Output

    • Discussion
    • Intake processes
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures
    • Configuration Management Diagram Template Library
    • Configuration control board
    • Configuration manager
    • Project sponsor
    • IT stakeholders

    Identify scenarios where CIs are added and removed in the configuration management database

    New CIs may be introduced with new services or may be introduced and removed as part of asset refreshes or through service restoration in incident management. Updates may be done by your own services team or a managed services provider.
    Determine the various ways the CIs may be changed and test with various CI types.
    Review attributes such as SLAs, availability requirements, and product, technical, and business owners to determine if changes are required.

    • Identify what will be updated automatically or manually. Automation could include discovery and dependency mapping or synchronization with AMDB or AIOps tools.
    • Engage with relevant program managers to define and validate processes.
    • Identify control points and review audit requirements.

    An example of New or refresh CI from Procurement.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Data deemed no longer current may be archived or deleted. Retained data may be used for tracing lifecycle changes when troubleshooting or meeting audit obligations. Determine what types of CIs and use cases require archived data to meet data retention policies. If none do, deletion of old data may be appropriate.

    3.1.2 Identify when each type of CI will be created in the CMDB

    Allot 45 minutes for discussion.

    1. Discuss the various methods for new CIs to be introduced to the IT environment.
    2. Critique existing methods to assess consistency and identify issues that could prevent the creation of CIs in the CMDB in a timely manner.
    3. Create a workflow for the existing processes, with an eye to improvement. Identify any changes that will need to be introduced and managed appropriately.
    4. Identify where additional groups may need to be engaged to ensure success. For example, if project managers are not interfacing early with IT, discuss process changes with them.
    5. Discuss the validation process and determine where control points are. Document these on the workflows.
    6. Complete Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures, section 8.2: Introduce New Configuration Items to the CMDB

    Possible intake opportunities:

    • Business-driven project intake process
    • IT-driven project intake process
    • Change enablement reviews
    • Vendor-driven product changes
    • Incident management
    • Asset management, lifecycle refresh
    Input

    Output

    • Discussion
    • Retirement processes
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures
    • Configuration Management Diagram Template Library
    • Configuration control board
    • Configuration manager
    • Project sponsor
    • IT stakeholders

    3.1.3 Identify when each type of CI will be retired in the CMDB

    Allot 45 minutes for discussion.

    1. Discuss the various methods for CIs to be removed from the IT environment.
    2. Critique existing methods to assess consistency and identify issues that could prevent the retirement of CIs in the CMDB in a timely manner.
    3. Create a workflow for the existing processes, with an eye to improvement. Identify any changes that will need to be introduced and managed appropriately.
    4. Identify where additional groups may need to be engaged to ensure success. For example, if project managers are not interfacing early with IT, discuss process changes with them.
    5. Discuss the validation process and determine where control points are. Document these on the workflows.
    6. Discuss data retention. How long will retired information need to be archived? What are the potential scenarios where legacy information may be needed for analysis?
    7. Complete the Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures, section 8.4: Retire and Archive Configuration Records.

    Possible retirement scenarios:

    • Change enablement reviews
    • Vendor-driven product changes
    • Incident management
    • Asset management, lifecycle refresh
    Input

    Output

    • Discussion
    • Intake processes
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures
    • Configuration Management Diagram Template Library
    • Configuration control board
    • Configuration manager
    • Project sponsor
    • IT stakeholders

    Determine appropriate actions for detecting new or changed CIs through discovery

    Automated detection will provide the most efficient way of recording planned changes to CIs as well as detected unplanned changes. Check with the tool to determine what reports or notifications are available for the configuration management process and define what actions will be appropriate.

    As new CIs are detected, identify the process by which they should have been introduced into configuration management and compare against those records. If your CMDB can automatically check for documentation, this may be easier. Weekly reporting will allow you to catch changes quickly, and alerts on critical CIs could enable faster remediation, if the tool allows for alerting. AIOps could identify, notify of, and process many changes in a highly dynamic environment.

    Type of Change

    Impacted Process

    Validation

    Findings

    Actions

    Configuration change to networking equipment or software

    Change management

    Check for request for change

    No RFC

    Add to CAB agenda, notify technical owner

    Configuration change to end-user device or software

    Asset management

    Check for service ticket

    No ticket

    Escalate to asset agenda, notify service manager

    New assets coming into service

    Security incident and event management

    Check for SIEM integration

    No SIEM integration

    Notify security operations team to investigate

    The configuration manager may not have authority to act but can inform the process owners of unauthorized changes for further action. Once the notifications are forwarded to the appropriate process owner, the configuration manager will note the escalation and follow up on data corrections as deemed appropriate by the associated process owner.

    3.1.4 Record when and how attributes will change

    These lists will help with configuration control plans and your implementation roadmap.

    1. List each attribute that will change in that CI type's life.
    2. Write all the times that each attribute will change. Identify:
      1. The name of the workflow, service request, process, or practice that modifies the attribute.
      2. Whether the update is made automatically or manually.
      3. The role or tool that updates the CMDB.
    1. Update the relevant process or procedure documentation. Explicitly identify when the configuration records are updated.

    Document these tables in Configuration Management Standard Operation Procedures, Section 8.7: Practices That Modify CIs.

    Network Equipment
    Attributes

    Practices That Modify This Attribute

    Status
    • Infra Deployment (updated manually by Network Engineering)
    • Change Enablement (updated manually by CAB or Network Engineering)
    Assigned User
    • IT Employee Offboarding or Role Change (updated manually by Network Engineering)
    Version
    • Patch Deployment (updated automatically by SolarWinds)
    End-User Computers
    Attributes
    Practices That Modify This Attribute
    Status
    • Device Deployment (updated manually by Desktop Support)
    • Device Recovery (updated manually by Desktop Support)
    • Employee Offboarding and Role Change (updated manually by Service Desk)
    Assigned User
    • Device Deployment (updated manually by Desktop Support)
    • Device Recovery (updated manually by Desktop Support)
    • Employee Offboarding and Role Change (updated manually by Service Desk)
    Version
    • Patch Deployment (updated automatically by ConfigMgr)

    Institute configuration control and configuration baselines where appropriate

    A baseline enables an assessment of one or more systems against the desired state and is useful for troubleshooting incidents or problems and validating changes and security settings.

    Baselines may be used by enterprise architects and system engineers for planning purposes, by developers to test their solution against production copies, by technicians to assess configuration drift that may be causing performance issues, and by change managers to assess and verify the configuration meets the target design.

    Configuration baselines are a snapshot of configuration records, displaying attributes and first-level relationships of the CIs. Standard configurations may be integral to the success of automated workflows, deployments, upgrades, and integrations, as well as prevention of security events. Comparing current CIs against their baselines will identify configuration drift, which could cause a variety of incidents. Configuration baselines are updated through change management processes.
    Configuration baselines can be used for a variety of use cases:

    • Version control – Management of software and hardware versions, https://dj5l3kginpy6f.cloudfront.net/blueprints/harness-configuration-management-superpowers-phases-1-4/builds, and releases.
    • Access control – Management of access to facilities, storage areas, and the CMS.
    • Deployment control – Take a baseline of CIs before performing a release so you can use this to check against actual deployment.
    • Identify accidental changes Everyone makes mistakes. If someone installs software on the wrong server or accidentally drops a table in a database, the CMS can alert IT of the unauthorized change (if the CI is included in configuration control).

    Info-Tech Insight

    Determine the appropriate method for evaluating and approving changes to baselines. Delegating this to the CCB every time may reduce agility, depending on volume. Discuss in CCB meetings.

    A decision tree for deploying requested changes.

    3.1.5 Institute configuration control and configuration baselines where appropriate

    Only baseline CIs and relationships that you want to control through change enablement.

    1. Determine criteria for capturing configuration baselines, including CI type, event, or processes.
    2. Identify who will use baselines and how they will use the data. Identify their needs.
    3. Identify CIs that will be out of scope and not have baselines created.
    4. Document requirements in the SOP.
    5. Ensure appropriate team members have training on how to create and capture baselines in the CMDB.
    6. Document in the Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures, section 8.5: Establish and Maintain Configuration Baselines.
    Process Criteria Systems
    Change Enablement & Deployment All high-risk changes must have the baseline captured with version number to revert to stable version in the event of an unsuccessful change
    • Servers (physical and virtual)
    • Enterprise software
    • IaaS
    • Data centers
    Security Identify when configuration drift may impact risk mitigation strategies
    • Servers (physical and virtual)
    • Enterprise software
    • IaaS
    • Data centers
    Input

    Output

    • Discussion
    • Baseline configuration guidelines
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures
    • Configuration control board
    • Configuration manager
    • Project sponsor
    • IT stakeholders

    Step 3.2

    Validate data within the CMDB

    Activities

    3.2.1 Build an audit plan and checklist

    This step will walk you through the following aspects of a configuration management system:

    • Data validation and audit

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • IT service owners
    • Enterprise architects
    • Practice owners and managers
    • SCM practice manager
    • Project manager
    • IT audit

    Outcomes of this step

    • Updates to processes for data validation
    • Plan for auditing and validating the data in the CMDB

    Audit and validate the CMDB

    Review the performance of the supporting technologies and processes to validate the accuracy of the CMDB.

    A screenshot of the CM Audit Plan.

    CM Audit Plan

    • CM policies
    • CM processes and procedures
    • Interfacing processes
    • Content within the CMDB

    "If the data in your CMDB isn't accurate, then it's worthless. If it's wrong or inaccurate, it's going to drive the wrong decisions. It's going to make IT worse, not better."
    – Valence Howden, Research Director, Info-Tech Research Group

    Ensure the supporting technology is working properly

    Does the information in the database accurately reflect reality?

    Perform functional tests during audits and as part of release management practices.

    Audit results need to have a clear status of "compliant," "noncompliant," or "compliant with conditions," and conditions need to be noted. The conditions will generally offer a quick win to improve a process, but don't use these audit results to quickly check off something as "done." Ensure the fix is useful and meaningful to the process.
    The audit should cover three areas:

    • Process: Are process requirements for the program well documented? Are the processes being followed? If there were updates to the process, were those updates to the process documented and communicated? Has behavior changed to suit those modified processes?
    • Physical: Physical configuration audits (PCAs) are audits conducted to verify that a configuration item, as built, conforms to the technical documentation that defines and describes it.
    • Functional: Functional configuration audits (FCAs) are audits conducted to verify that the development of a configuration item has been completed satisfactorily, the item has achieved the functional attributes specified in the functional or allocated baseline, and its technical documentation is complete and satisfactory.

    Build auditing and validation of processes whenever possible

    When technicians and analysts are working on a system, they should check to make sure the data about that system is correct. When they're working in the CMDB, they should check that the data they're working with is correct.

    More frequent audits, especially in the early days, may help move toward process adoption and resolving data quality issues. If audits are happening more frequently, the audits can include a smaller scope, though it's important to vary each one to ensure many different areas have been audited through the year.

    • Watch for data duplication from multiple discovery tools.
    • Review mapping to ensure all relevant CIs are attached to a product or service.
    • Ensure report data is logical.

    Ensure the supporting technology is working properly

    Does the information in the database accurately reflect reality?

    Perform functional tests during audits and as part of release management practices.

    Audit results need to have a clear status of "compliant," "noncompliant," or "compliant with conditions," and conditions need to be noted. The conditions will generally offer a quick win to improve a process, but don't use these audit results to quickly check off something as "done." Ensure the fix is useful and meaningful to the process.
    The audit should cover three areas:

    • Process: Are process requirements for the program well documented? Are the processes being followed? If there were updates to the process, were those updates to the process documented and communicated? Has behavior changed to suit those modified processes?
    • Physical: Physical configuration audits (PCAs) are audits conducted to verify that a configuration item, as built, conforms to the technical documentation that defines and describes it.
    • Functional: Functional configuration audits (FCAs) are audits conducted to verify that the development of a configuration item has been completed satisfactorily, the item has achieved the functional attributes specified in the functional or allocated baseline, and its technical documentation is complete and satisfactory.

    More frequent audits, especially in the early days, may help move toward process adoption and resolving data quality issues. If audits are happening more frequently, the audits can include a smaller scope, though it's important to vary each one to ensure many different areas have been audited through the year.

    • Watch for data duplication from multiple discovery tools.
    • Review mapping to ensure all relevant CIs are attached to a product or service.
    • Ensure report data is logical.

    Identify where processes break down and data is incorrect

    Once process stops working, data becomes less accurate and people find workarounds to solve their own data needs.

    Data within the CMDB often becomes incorrect or incomplete where human work breaks down

    • Investigate processes that are performed manually, including data entry.
    • Investigate if the process executors are performing these processes uniformly.
    • Determine if there are opportunities to automate or provide additional training.
    • Select a sample of the corresponding data in the CMS. Verify if the data is correct.

    Non-CCB personnel may not be completing processes fully or consistently

    • Identify where data in the CMS needs to be updated.
    • Identify whether the process practitioners are uniformly updating the CMS.
    • Discuss options for improving the process and driving consistency for data that will benefit the whole organization.

    Ensure that the data entered in the CMDB is correct

    • Confirm that there is no data duplication. Data duplication is very common when there are multiple discovery tools in your environment. Confirm that you have set up your tools properly to avoid duplication.
    • Build a process to respond to baseline divergence when people make changes without following change processes and when updates alter settings.
    • Audit the system for accuracy and completeness.

    3.2.1 Build an audit plan and checklist

    Use the audit to identify areas where processes are breaking down.

    Audits present you with the ability to address these pain points before they have greater negative impact.

    1. Identify which regulatory requirements and/or auditing bodies will be relevant to audit processes or findings.
    2. Determine frequency of practice audits and how they relate to internal audits or external audits.
    3. Determine audit scope, including requirements for data spot checks.
    4. Determine who will be responsible for conducting audits and validate this is consistent with the RACI chart.
    5. Record audit procedures in the Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures section 8.6: Verify and Review the Quality of Information Through Auditing.
    6. Review the Configuration Management Audit and Validation Checklist and modify to suit your needs.

    Download the Configuration Management Audit and Validation Checklist

    Input

    Output

    • Discussion
    • Baseline configuration guidelines
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures
    • Configuration control board
    • Configuration manager
    • Project sponsor
    • IT stakeholders

    Phase 4

    Service Configuration Roadmap

    StrategyData StructureProcessesRoadmap
    • Challenges and Goals
    • Use Cases and Data
    • Roles and Responsibilities
    • Services
    • Classifications
    • Data Modeling
    • Lifecycle Processes
    • Baselines
    • Audit and Data Validation
    • Metrics
    • Communications Plan
    • Roadmap

    This phase will walk you through the following aspect of a configuration management system:
    Roadmap
    This phase involves the following participants:

    • IT service owners
    • Enterprise architects
    • Practice owners and managers
    • SCM practice manager
    • SCM project manager

    Harness Service Configuration Management Superpowers

    Step 4.1

    Define measures of success

    Activities

    4.1.1 Identify key metrics to define configuration management success
    4.1.2 Brainstorm and record desired reports, dashboards, and analytics
    4.1.3 Build a configuration management policy

    This phase will walk you through the following aspects of a configuration management system:

    • Metrics
    • Policy

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • IT service owners
    • Enterprise architects
    • Practice owners and managers
    • SCM practice manager
    • SCM project manager

    The value of metrics can be found in IT efficiency increases

    When determining metrics for configuration management, be sure to separate metrics needed to gauge configuration management success and those that will use data from the CMDB to provide metrics on the success of other practices.

    • Metrics provide accurate indicators for IT and business decisions.
    • Metrics help you identify IT efficiencies and problems and solve issues before they become more serious.
    • Active metrics tracking makes root cause analysis of issues much easier.
    • Proper application of metrics helps IT services identification and prioritization.
    • Operational risks can be prevented by identifying and implementing metrics.
    • Metrics analysis increases the confidence of the executive team and ensures that IT is working well.

    A funnel is shown. The output is IT Performance. The inputs are: Service Desk Metrics; Incident Metrics; Asset Mgmt. Metrics; Release Mgmt. Metrics; Change Mgmt. Metrics; Infra. Metrics

    4.1.1 Identify key metrics to define configuration management success

    Determine what metrics are specifically related to the practice and how and when metrics will be accessed.

    Success factors

    Key metrics

    Source

    Product and service configuration data is relevant

    • Stakeholder satisfaction with data access, accuracy, and usability
    • Stakeholder satisfaction with service configuration management interface, procedures, and reports

    Stakeholder discussions

    • Number of bad decisions made due to incorrect or insufficient data
    • Impact of bad decisions made due to incorrect or insufficient data

    Process owner discussions

    • Number and impact of data identified as incorrect
    • % of CMDB data verified over the period

    CMDB

    Cost and effort are continually optimized

    • Effort devoted to service configuration management
    • Cost of tools directly related to the process

    Resource management or scheduling

    ERP

    Progress reporting

    • Communication execution
    • Process
    • Communications and feedback

    Communications team and stakeholder discussions

    Data – How many products are in the CMDB and are fully and accurately discovered and mapped?

    CMDB

    Ability to meet milestones on time and with appropriate quality

    Project team

    Document metrics in the Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures, section 7: Success Metrics

    Use performance metrics to identify areas to improve service management processes using CMDB data

    Metrics can indicate a problem with service management processes but cannot provide a clear path to a solution on their own.

    • The biggest challenge is defining and measuring the process and people side of the equation.
    • Expected performance may also need to be compared to actual performance in planning, budgeting, and improvements.
    • The analysis will need to include critical success factors (CSFs), data collection procedures, office routines, engineering practices, and flow diagrams including workflows and key relationships.
    • External benchmarking may also prove useful in identifying how similar organizations are managing aspects of their infrastructure, processing transactions/requests, or staffing. If using external benchmarking for actual process comparisons, clearly defining your internal processes first will make the data collection process smoother and more informative.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Using a service framework such as ITIL, COBIT, or ISO 20000 may make this job easier, and subscribing to benchmarking partners will provide some of the external data needed for comparison.

    4.1.2 Brainstorm and record desired reports, dashboards, and analytics with related practices

    The project team will use this list as a starting point

    Allot 45 minutes for this discussion.

    1. Create a table for each service or business capability.
      1. Have one column for each way of consuming data: reports, dashboards, and ad hoc analytics.
      2. Have one row for each stakeholder group that will consume the information.
    2. Use the challenges and use cases to brainstorm reports, dashboards, and ad hoc analytic capabilities that each stakeholder group will find useful.
    3. Record these results in your Configuration Management Standard Operating Procedures, section 7: Aligned Processes' Desired Analytical Capabilities.
    Stakeholder Groups Reports Dashboards
    Change Management
    • CI changes executed without an RFC
    • RFCs grouped by service
    • Potential collisions in upcoming changes
    Security
    • Configuration changes that no longer match the baseline
    • New configuration items discovered
    Finance
    • Service-based costs
    • Service consumption by department

    Download the blueprint Take Control of Infrastructure and Operations Metrics to create a complete metrics program.

    Create a configuration management policy and communicate it

    Policies are important documents to provide definitive guidelines and clarity around data collection and use, process adherence, and controls.

    • A configuration management policy will apply to IT as the audience, and participants in the program will largely be technical.
    • Business users will benefit from a great configuration management program but will not participate directly.
    • The policy will include objectives and scope, use of data, security and integrity of data, data models and criteria, and baseline configurations.
    • Several governing regulations and practices may intersect with configuration management, such as ITIL, COBIT, and NIST frameworks, as well as change enablement, quality management, asset management, and more.
    • As the policy is written, review processes to ensure policies and processes are aligned. The policy should enable processes, and it may require modifications if it hinders the collection, security, or use of data required to meet proposed use cases.
    • Once the policy is written and approved, ensure all stakeholders understand the importance, context, and repercussions of the policy.

    The approvals process is about appropriate oversight of the drafted policies. For example:

    • Do the policies satisfy compliance and regulatory requirements?
    • Do the policies work with the corporate culture?
    • Do the policies address the underlying need?

    If the draft is approved:

    • Set the effective date and a review date.
    • Begin communication, training, and implementation.

    Employees must know that there are new policies and understand the steps they must take to comply with the policies in their work.

    Employees must be able to interpret, understand, and know how to act upon the information they find in the policies.

    Employees must be informed on where to get help or ask questions and who to request policy exceptions from.

    If the draft is rejected:

    • Acquire feedback and make revisions.
    • Resubmit for approval.

    4.1.3 Build a configuration management policy

    This policy provides the foundation for configuration control.

    Use this template as a starting point.

    The Configuration Management Policy provides the foundation for a configuration control board and the use of configuration baselines.
    Instructions:

    1. Review and modify the policy statements. Ensure that the policy statements reflect your organization and the expectations you wish to set.
    2. If you don't have a CCB: The specified responsibilities can usually be assigned to either the configuration manager or the governing body for change enablement.
    3. Determine if you should apply this policy beyond SCM. As written, this policy may provide a good starting point for practices such as:
      • Secure baseline configuration management
      • Software configuration management

    Two screenshots from the Configuration Management Policy template

    Download the Configuration Management Policy template

    Step 4.2

    Build communications and a roadmap

    Activities

    4.2.1 Build a communications plan
    4.2.2 Identify milestones

    This phase will walk you through the following aspects of a configuration management system:

    • Communications plan
    • Roadmap

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • IT service owners
    • Enterprise architects
    • Practice owners and managers
    • SCM practice manager
    • SCM project manager

    Outcomes of this step

    • Documented expectations around configuration control
    • Roadmap and action items for the SCM project

    Do not discount the benefits of a great communications plan as part of change management

    Many configuration management projects have failed due to lack of organizational commitment and inadequate communications.

    • Start at the top to ensure stakeholder buy-in by verifying alignment and use cases. Without a committed project sponsor who believes in the value of configuration management, it will be difficult to draw the IT team into the vision.
    • Clearly articulate the vision, strategy, and goals to all stakeholders. Ensure the team understands why these changes are happening, why they are happening now, and what outcomes you hope to achieve.
    • Gain support from technical teams by clearly expressing organizational and departmental benefits – they need to know "what's in it for me."
    • Clearly communicate new responsibilities and obligations and put a feedback process in place to hear concerns, mitigate risk, and act on opportunities for improvement. Be prepared to answer questions as this practice is rolled out.
    • Be consistent in your messaging. Mixed messages can easily derail progress.
    • Communicate to the business how these efforts will benefit the organization.
    • Share documents built in this blueprint or workshop with your technical teams to ensure they have a clear picture of the entire configuration management practice.
    • Share your measures and view of success and communicate wins throughout building the practice.

    30%

    When people are truly invested in change, it is 30% more likely to stick.
    McKinsey

    82%

    of CEOs identify organizational change management as a priority.
    D&B Consulting

    6X

    Initiatives with excellent change management are six times more likely to meet objectives than those with poor change management.
    Prosci

    For a more detailed program, see Drive Technology Adoption

    Formulate a communications plan to ensure all stakeholders and impacted staff will be aware of the plan

    Communication is key to success in process adoption and in identifying potential risks and issues with integration with other processes. Engage as often as needed to get the information you need for the project and for adoption.

    Identify Messages

    Distinct information that needs to be sent at various times. Think about:

    • Who will be impacted and how.
    • What the goals are for the project/new process.
    • What the audience needs to know about the new process and how they will interface with each business unit.
    • How people can request configuration data.

    Identify Audiences

    Any person or group who will be the target of the communication. This may include:

    • Project sponsors and stakeholders.
    • IT staff who will be involved in the project.
    • IT staff who will be impacted by the project (i.e. who will benefit from it or have obligations to fulfill because of it).
    • Business sponsors and product owners.

    Document and Track

    Document messaging, medium, and responsibility, working with the communications team to refine messages before executing.

    • Identify where people can send questions and feedback to ensure they have the information they need to make or accept the changes.
    • Document Q&A and share in a central location.

    Determine Timing

    Successful communications plans consider timing of various messages:

    • Advanced high-level notice of improvements for those who need to see action.
    • Advanced detailed notice for those who will be impacted by workload.
    • Advanced notice for who will be impacted (i.e. who will benefit from it or have obligations to fulfill because of it) once the project is ready to be transitioned to daily life.

    Determine Delivery

    Work with your communications team, if you have one, to determine the best medium, such as:

    • Meeting announcement for stakeholders and IT.
    • Newsletter for those less impacted.
    • Intranet announcements: "coming soon!"
    • Demonstrations with vendors or project team.

    4.2.1 Build a communications plan

    The communications team will use this list as a starting point.

    Allot 45 minutes for this discussion.

    Identify stakeholders.

    1. Identify everyone who will be affected by the project and by configuration management.

    Craft key messages tailored to each stakeholder group.

    1. Identify the key messages that must be communicated to each group.

    Finalize the communication plan.

    1. Determine the most appropriate timing for communications with each group to maximize receptivity.
    2. Identify any communication challenges you anticipate and incorporate steps to address them into your communication plan.
    3. Identify multiple methods for getting the messages out (e.g. newsletters, emails, meetings).
    1. Identify how feedback will be collected (i.e. through interviews or surveys) to measure whether the changes were communicated well.
    Audience Message Medium Timing Feedback Mechanism
    Configuration Management Team Communicate all key processes, procedures, policies, roles, and responsibilities In-person meetings and email communications Weekly meetings Informal feedback during weekly meetings
    Input

    Output

    • Discussion
    • Rough draft of messaging for communications team
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Project plan
    • Configuration manager
    • Project sponsor
    • IT director
    • Communications team

    Build a realistic, high-level roadmap including milestones

    Break the work into manageable pieces

    1. Plan to have multiple phases with short-, medium-, and long-term goals/timeframes. Building a CMDB is not easy and should be broken into manageable sections.
    2. Set reasonable milestones. For each phase, document goals to define "done" and ensure they're reasonable for the resources you have available. If working with a vendor, include them in your discussions of what's realistic.
    3. Treat the first phase as a pilot. Focus on items you understand well:
      1. Well-understood user-facing and IT services
      2. High-maturity management and governance practices
      3. Trusted data sources
    4. Capture high-value, high-criticality services early. Depending on the complexity of your systems, you may need to split this phase into multiple phases.

    Document this table in the Configuration Management Project Charter, section 3.0: Milestones

    Timeline/Owner Milestone/Deliverable Details
    First four weeks Milestone: Plan defined and validated with ITSM installation vendor Define processes for intake, maintenance, and retirement.
    Rebecca Roberts Process documentation written, approved, and ready to communicate Review CI categories

    4.2.2 Identify milestones

    Build out a high-level view to inform the project plan

    Open the Configuration Management Project Charter, section 3: Milestones.
    Instructions:

    1. Identify high-level milestones for the implementation of the configuration management program. This may include tool evaluation and implementation, assignment of roles, etc.
    2. Add details to fill out the milestone, keeping to a reasonable level of detail. This may inform vendor discussion or further development of the project plan.
    3. Add target dates to the milestones. Validate they are realistic with the team.
    4. Add notes to the assumptions and constraints section.
    5. Identify risks to the plan.

    Two Screenshots from the Configuration Management Project Charter

    Download the Configuration Management Project Charter

    Workshop Participants

    R = Recommended
    O = Optional

    Participants Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4
    Configuration Management Strategy CMDB Data Structure Processes Communications & Roadmap
    Morning Afternoon Morning Afternoon Morning Afternoon Morning Afternoon
    Head of IT R O
    Project Sponsor R R O O O O O O
    Infrastructure, Enterprise Apps Leaders R R O O O O O O
    Service Manager R R O O O O O O
    Configuration Manager R R R R R R R R
    Project Manager R R R R R R R R
    Representatives From Network, Compute, Storage, Desktop R R R R R R R R
    Enterprise Architecture R R R R O O O O
    Owner of Change Management/Change Control/Change Enablement R R R R R R R R
    Owner of In-Scope Apps, Use Cases R R R R R R R R
    Asset Manager R R R R R R R R

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Research Contributors and Experts

    Thank you to everyone who contributed to this publication

    Brett Johnson, Senior Consultant, VMware

    Yev Khovrenkov, Senior Consultant, Solvera Solutions

    Larry Marks, Reviewer, ISACA New Jersey

    Darin Ohde, Director of Service Delivery, GreatAmerica Financial Services

    Jim Slick, President/CEO, Slick Cyber Systems

    Emily Walker, Sr. Digital Solution Consultant, ServiceNow

    Valence Howden, Principal Research Director, Info-Tech Research Group

    Allison Kinnaird, Practice Lead, IT Operations, Info-Tech Research Group

    Robert Dang, Principal Research Advisor, Security, Info-Tech Research Group

    Monica Braun, Research Director, IT Finance, Info-Tech Research Group

    Jennifer Perrier, Principal Research Director, IT Finance, Info-Tech Research Group

    Plus 13 anonymous contributors

    Bibliography

    An Introduction to Change Management, Prosci, Nov. 2019.
    BAI10 Manage Configuration Audit Program. ISACA, 2014.
    Bizo, Daniel, et al, "Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2021." Uptime Institute, 1 Sept. 2021.
    Brown, Deborah. "Change Management: Some Statistics." D&B Consulting Inc. May 15, 2014. Accessed June 14, 2016.
    Cabinet Office. ITIL Service Transition. The Stationery Office, 2011.
    "COBIT 2019: Management and Governance Objectives. ISACA, 2018.
    "Configuration Management Assessment." CMStat, n.d. Accessed 5 Oct. 2022.
    "Configuration Management Database Foundation." DMTF, 2018. Accessed 1 Feb. 2021.
    Configuration Management Using COBIT 5. ISACA, 2013.
    "Configuring Service Manager." Product Documentation, Ivanti, 2021. Accessed 9 Feb. 2021.
    "Challenges of Implementing configuration management." CMStat, n.d. Accessed 5 Oct. 2022.
    "Determining if configuration management and change control are under management control, part 1." CMStat, n.d. Accessed 5 Oct. 2022.
    "Determining if configuration management and change control are under management control, part 2." CMStat, n.d. Accessed 5 Oct. 2022.
    "Determining if configuration management and change control are under management control, part 3." CMStat, n.d. Accessed 5 Oct. 2022.
    "CSDM: The Recipe for Success." Data Content Manager, Qualdatrix Ltd. 2022. Web.
    Drogseth, Dennis, et al., 2015, CMDB Systems: Making Change Work in the Age of Cloud and Agile. Morgan Kaufman.
    Ewenstein, B, et al. "Changing Change Management." McKinsey & Company, 1 July 2015. Web.
    Farrell, Karen. "VIEWPOINT: Focus on CMDB Leadership." BMC Software, 1 May 2006. Web.
    "How to Eliminate the No. 1 Cause of Network Downtime." SolarWinds, 4 April 2014. Accessed 9 Feb. 2021.
    "ISO 10007:2017: Quality Management -- Guidelines for Configuration Management." International Organization for Standardization, 2019.
    "IT Operations Management." Product Documentation, ServiceNow, version Quebec, 2021. Accessed 9 Feb. 2021.
    Johnson, Elsbeth. "How to Communicate Clearly During Organizational Change." Harvard Business Review, 13 June 2017. Web.
    Kloeckner, K. et al. Transforming the IT Services Lifecycle with AI Technologies. Springer, 2018.
    Klosterboer, L. Implementing ITIL Configuration Management. IBM Press, 2008.
    Norfolk, D., and S. Lacy. Configuration Management: Expert Guidance for IT Service Managers and Practitioners. BCS Learning & Development Limited, revised ed., Jan. 2014.
    Painarkar, Mandaar. "Overview of the Common Data Model." BMC Documentation, 2015. Accessed 1 Feb. 2021.
    Powers, Larry, and Ketil Been. "The Value of Organizational Change Management." Boxley Group, 2014. Accessed June 14, 2016.
    "Pulse of the Profession: Enabling Organizational Change Throughout Strategic Initiatives." PMI, March 2014. Accessed June 14, 2016.
    "Service Configuration Management, ITIL 4 Practice Guide." AXELOS Global Best Practice, 2020
    "The Guide to Managing Configuration Drift." UpGuard, 2017.

    Implement Crisis Management Best Practices

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    • Parent Category Name: DR and Business Continuity
    • Parent Category Link: /business-continuity
    • There’s a belief that you can’t know what crisis will hit you next, so you can’t prepare for it. As a result, resilience planning stops at more-specific planning such as business continuity planning or IT disaster recovery planning.
    • Business contingency and IT disaster recovery plans focus on how to resume normal operations following an incident. The missing piece is the crisis management plan – the overarching plan that guides the organization’s initial response, assessment, and action.
    • Organizations without a crisis management plan are far less able to minimize the impact of other crises such as a security breach, health & safety incident, or attacks on their reputation.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Effective crisis management has a long-term demonstrable impact on your organization, long after the crisis is resolved. While all organizations can expect a short-term negative impact when a crisis hits, if the crisis is managed well, the research shows that your market capitalization can actually increase long term.
    • Crisis communication is more science than art and should follow a structured approach. Crisis communication is about more than being a good writer or having a social media presence. There are specific messages that must be included, and specific audiences to target, to get the results you need.
    • IT has a critical role in non-IT crises (as well as IT crises). Many crises are IT events (e.g. security breach). For non-IT events, IT is critical in supporting crisis communication and the operational response (e.g. COVID-19 and quickly ramping up working-from-home).

    Impact and Result

    • You can anticipate the types of crisis your organization may face in the future and build flexible plans that can be adapted in a crisis to meet the needs of the moment.
    • Identify potential crises that present a high risk to your organization.
    • Document emergency response and crisis response plans that provide a framework for addressing a range of crises.
    • Establish crisis communication guidelines to avoid embarrassing and damaging communications missteps.

    Implement Crisis Management Best Practices Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should implement crisis management best practices, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Identify potential crises and your crisis management team

    Identify, analyze, and prioritized potential crises based on risk to the organization. Set crisis management team roles and responsibilities. Adopt a crisis management framework.

    • Example Crisis Management Process Flowcharts (Visio)
    • Example Crisis Management Process Flowcharts (PDF)
    • Business Continuity Teams and Roles Tool

    2. Document your emergency and crisis response plans

    Document workflows for notification, situational assessment, emergency response, and crisis response.

    • Emergency Response Plan Checklist
    • Emergency Response Plan Summary
    • Emergency Response Plan Staff Instructions
    • Pandemic Response Plan Example
    • Pandemic Policy

    3. Document crisis communication guidelines

    Develop and document guidelines that support the creation and distribution of crisis communications.

    • Crisis Communication Guidelines and Templates

    4. Complete and maintain your crisis management plan

    Summarize your crisis management and response plans, create a roadmap to implement potential improvement projects, develop training and awareness initiatives, and schedule maintenance to keep the plan evergreen.

    • Crisis Management Plan Summary Example
    • BCP Project Roadmap Tool
    • Organizational Learning Guide
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Implement Crisis Management Best Practices

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Identify Potential Crises and Your Crisis Management Team

    The Purpose

    Identify and prioritize relevant potential crises.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Enable crisis management pre-planning and identify gaps in current crisis management plans.

    Activities

    1.1 Identify high-risk crises.

    1.2 Assign roles and responsibilities on the crisis management team.

    1.3 Review Info-Tech’s crisis management framework.

    Outputs

    List of high-risk crises.

    CMT membership and responsibilities.

    Adopt the crisis management framework and identify current strengths and gaps.

    2 Document Emergency Response and Crisis Management Plans

    The Purpose

    Outline emergency response and crisis response plans.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Develop and document procedures that enable rapid, effective, and reliable crisis and emergency response.

    Activities

    2.1 Develop crisis notification and assessment procedures.

    2.2 Document your emergency response plans.

    2.3 Document crisis response plans for potential high-risk crises.

    Outputs

    Documented notification and assessment workflows.

    Emergency response plans and checklists.

    Documented crisis response workflows.

    3 Document Crisis Communication Guidelines

    The Purpose

    Define crisis communication guidelines aligned with an actionable crisis communications framework.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Document workflows and guidelines support crisis communications.

    Activities

    3.1 Establish the elements of baseline crisis communications.

    3.2 Identify audiences for the crisis message.

    3.3 Modify baseline communication guidelines based on audience and organizational responsibility.

    3.4 Create a vetting process.

    3.5 Identify communications channels.

    Outputs

    Baseline communications guidelines.

    Situational modifications to crisis communications guidelines.

    Documented vetting process.

    Documented communications channels

    4 Complete and Maintain Your Crisis Management Plan

    The Purpose

    Summarize the crisis management plan, establish an organizational learning process, and identify potential training and awareness activities.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Plan ahead to keep your crisis management practice evergreen.

    Activities

    4.1 Review the CMP Summary Template.

    4.2 Create a project roadmap to close gaps in the crisis management plan.

    4.3 Outline an organizational learning process.

    4.4 Schedule plan reviews, testing, and updates.

    Outputs

    Long-term roadmap to improve crisis management capabilities.

    Crisis management plan maintenance process and awareness program.

    CIO Priorities 2023

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    CIOs are facing these challenges in 2023:

    • Trying to understand the implications of external trends.
    • Determining what capabilities are most important to support the organization.
    • Understanding how to help the organization pursue new opportunities.
    • Preparing to mitigate new sources of organizational risk.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • While functional leaders may only see their next move, as head of the organization with a complete view of all the pieces, the CIO has full context awareness. It's up to them to assess their gaps, consider the present scenario, and then make their next move.
    • Each priority carries new opportunities for organizations that pursue them.
    • There are also different risks to mitigate as each priority is explored.

    Impact and Result

    • Inform your IT strategy for the year ahead.
    • Identify which capabilities you need to improve.
    • Add initiatives that support your priorities to your roadmap.

    CIO Priorities 2023 Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. CIO Priorities 2023 Report – Read about the priorities on IT leaders' agenda.

    Understand the five priorities that will help navigate the opportunities and risks of the year ahead.

    • CIO Priorities 2023 Report

    Infographic

     

    Further reading

    CIO Priorities 2023

    Engage cross-functional leadership to seize opportunity while protecting the organization from volatility.

    Analyst Perspective

    Take a full view of the board and use all your pieces to win.

    In our Tech Trends 2023 report, we called on CIOs to think of themselves as chess grandmasters. To view strategy as playing both sides of the board, simultaneously attacking the opponent's king while defending your own. In our CIO Priorities 2023 report, we'll continue with that metaphor as we reflect on IT's capability to respond to trends.

    If the trends report is a study of the board state that CIOs are playing with, the priorities report is about what move they should make next. We must consider all the pieces we have at our disposal and determine which ones we can afford to use to seize on opportunity. Other pieces are best used by staying put to defend their position.

    In examining the different capabilities that CIOs will require to succeed in the year ahead, it's apparent that a siloed view of IT isn't going to work. Just like a chess player in a competitive match would never limit themselves to only using their knights or their rooks, a CIO's responsibility is to deploy each of their pieces to win the day. While functional leaders may only see their next move, as head of the organization with a complete view of all the pieces, the CIO has full awareness of the board state.

    It's up to them to assess their gaps, consider the present scenario, and then make their next move.

    This is a picture of Brian Jackson

    Brian Jackson
    Principal Research Director, Research – CIO
    Info-Tech Research Group

    CIO Priorities 2023 is informed by Info-Tech's primary research data of surveys and benchmarks

    Info-Tech's Tech Trends 2023 report and State of Hybrid Work in IT: A Trend Report inform the externalities faced by organizations in the year ahead. They imply opportunities and risks that organizations face. Leadership must determine if they will respond and how to do so. CIOs then determine how to support those responses by creating or improving their IT capabilities. The priorities are the initiatives that will deliver the most value across the capabilities that are most in demand. The CIO Priorities 2023 report draws on data from several different Info-Tech surveys and diagnostic benchmarks.

    2023 Tech Trends and Priorities Survey; N=813 (partial), n=521 (completed)
    Info-Tech's Trends and Priorities 2023 Survey was conducted between August 9 and September 9, 2022. We received 813 total responses with 521 completed surveys. More than 90% of respondents work in IT departments. More than 84% of respondents are at a manager level of seniority or higher.

    2023 The State of Hybrid Work in IT Survey; N=518
    The State of Hybrid Work in IT Survey was conducted between July 11 and July 29 and received 518 responses. Nine in ten respondents were at a manager level of seniority or higher.

    Every organization will have its own custom list of priorities based on its internal context. Organizational goals, IT maturity level, and effectiveness of capabilities are some of the important factors to consider. To provide CIOs with a starting point for their list of priorities for 2023, we used aggregate data collected in our diagnostic benchmark tools between August 1, 2021, and October 31, 2022.

    Info-Tech's CEO-CIO Alignment Program is intended to be completed by CIOs and their supervisors (CEO or other executive position [CxO]) and will provide the average maturity level and budget expectations (N=107). The IT Management and Governance Diagnostic will provide the average capability effectiveness and importance ranking to CIOs (N=271). The CIO Business Vision Diagnostic will provide stakeholder satisfaction feedback (N=259).

    The 2023 CIO priorities are based on that data, internal collaboration sessions at Info-Tech, and external interviews with CIOs and subject matter experts.

    Build IT alignment

    Assess your IT processes

    Determine stakeholder satisfaction

    Most IT departments should aim to drive outcomes that deliver better efficiency and cost savings

    Slightly more than half of CIOs using Info-Tech's CEO-CIO Alignment Program rated themselves at a Support level of maturity in 2022. That aligns with IT professionals' view of their organizations from our Tech Trends and Priorities Survey, where organizations are rated at the Support level on average. At this level, IT departments can provide reliable infrastructure and support a responsive IT service desk that reasonably satisfies stakeholders.

    In the future, CIOs aspire to attain the Transform level of maturity. Nearly half of CIOs select this future state in our diagnostic, indicating a desire to deliver reliable innovation and lead the organization to become a technology-driven firm. However, we see that fewer CxOs aspire for that level of maturity from IT. CxOs are more likely than CIOs to say that IT should aim for the Optimize level of maturity. At this level, IT will help other departments become more efficient and lower costs across the organization.

    Whether a CIO is aiming for the top of the maturity scale in the future or not, IT maturity is achieved one step at a time. Aiming for outcomes at the Optimize level will be a realistic goal for most CIOs in 2023 and will satisfy many stakeholders.

    Current and future state of IT maturity

    This image depicts a table showing the Current and future states of IT maturity.

    Trends indicate a need to focus on leadership and change management

    Trends imply new opportunities and risks that an organization must decide on. Organizational leadership determines if action will be taken to respond to the new external context based on its importance compared to current internal context. To support their organizations, IT must use its capabilities to deliver on initiatives. But if a capability's effectiveness is poor, it could hamper the effort.

    To determine what capabilities IT departments may need to improve or create to support their organizations in 2023, we conducted an analysis of our trends data. Using the opportunities and risks implied by the Tech Trends 2023 report and the State of Hybrid Work in IT: A Trend Report, we've determined the top capabilities IT will need to respond. Capabilities are defined by Info-Tech's IT Management and Governance Framework.

    Tier 1: The Most Important Capabilities In 2023

    Enterprise Application Selection & Implementation

    Manage the selection and implementation of enterprise applications, off-the-shelf software, and software as a service to ensure that IT provides the business with the most appropriate applications at an acceptable cost.

    Effectiveness: 6.5; Importance: 8.8

    Leadership, Culture, and Values

    Ensure that the IT department reflects the values of your organization. Improve the leadership skills of your team to generate top performance.

    Effectiveness: 6.9; Importance: 9

    Data Architecture

    Manage the business' databases, including the technology, the governance processes, and the people that manage them. Establish the principles, policies, and guidelines relevant to the effective use of data within the organization.

    Effectiveness: 6.3; Importance: 8.8

    Organizational Change Management

    Implement or optimize the organization's capabilities for managing the impact of new business processes, new IT systems, and changes in organizational structure or culture.

    Effectiveness: 6.1; Importance: 8.8

    External Compliance

    Ensure that IT processes and IT-supported business processes are compliant with laws, regulations, and contractual requirements.

    Effectiveness: 7.4; Importance: 8.8

    Info-Tech's Management and Diagnostic Benchmark

    Tier 2: Other Important Capabilities In 2023

    Ten more capabilities surfaced as important compared to others but not as important as the capabilities in tier 1.

    Asset Management

    Track IT assets through their lifecycle to make sure that they deliver value at optimal cost, remain operational, and are accounted for and physically protected. Ensure that the assets are reliable and available as needed.

    Effectiveness: 6.4; Importance: 8.5

    Business Intelligence and Reporting

    Develop a set of capabilities, including people, processes, and technology, to enable the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for the purpose of business analysis.

    Effectiveness: 6.3; Importance: 8.8

    Business Value

    Secure optimal value from IT-enabled initiatives, services, and assets by delivering cost-efficient solutions and services and by providing a reliable and accurate picture of costs and benefits.

    Effectiveness: 6.5; Importance: 8.7

    Cost and Budget Management

    Manage the IT-related financial activities and prioritize spending through the use of formal budgeting practices. Provide transparency and accountability for the cost and business value of IT solutions and services.

    Effectiveness: 6.5; Importance: 8.8

    Data Quality

    Put policies, processes, and capabilities in place to ensure that appropriate targets for data quality are set and achieved to match the needs of the business.

    Effectiveness: 6.4; Importance: 8.9

    Enterprise Architecture

    Establish a management practice to create and maintain a coherent set of principles, methods, and models that are used in the design and implementation of the enterprise's business processes, information systems, and infrastructure.

    Effectiveness: 6.8; Importance: 8.8

    IT Organizational Design

    Set up the structure of IT's people, processes, and technology as well as roles and responsibilities to ensure that it's best meeting the needs of the business.

    Effectiveness: 6.8; Importance: 8.8

    Performance Measurement

    Manage IT and process goals and metrics. Monitor and communicate that processes are performing against expectations and provide transparency for performance and conformance.

    Effectiveness: 6; Importance: 8.4

    Stakeholder Relations

    Manage the relationship between the business and IT to ensure that the stakeholders are satisfied with the services they need from IT and have visibility into IT processes.

    Effectiveness: 6.7; Importance: 9.2

    Vendor Management

    Manage IT-related services provided by all suppliers, including selecting suppliers, managing relationships and contracts, and reviewing and monitoring supplier performance.

    Effectiveness: 6.6; Importance: 8.4

    Defining the CIO Priorities for 2023

    Understand the CIO priorities by analyzing both how CIOs respond to trends in general and how a specific CIO responded in the context of their organization.

    This is an image of the four analyses: 1: Implications; 2: Opportunities and risks; 3: Case examples; 4: Priorities to action.

    The Five CIO Priorities for 2023

    Engage cross-functional leadership to seize opportunity while protecting the organization from volatility.

    1. Adjust IT operations to manage for inflation
      • Business Value
      • Vendor Management
      • Cost and Budget Management
    2. Prepare your data pipeline to train AI
      • Business Intelligence and Reporting
      • Data Quality
      • Data Architecture
    3. Go all in on zero-trust security
      • Asset Management
      • Stakeholder Relations
      • External Compliance
    4. Engage employees in the digital age
      • Leadership, Culture, and Values
      • Organizational Change Management
      • Enterprise Architecture
    5. Shape the IT organization to improve customer experience
      • Enterprise Application Selection & Implementation
      • Performance Measurement
      • IT Organizational Design

    Adjust IT operations to manage for inflation

    Priority 01

    • APO06 Cost and Budget Management
    • APo10 Vendor Management
    • EDM02 Business Value

    Recognize the relative impact of higher inflation on IT's spending power and adjust accordingly.

    Inflation takes a bite out of the budget

    Two-thirds of IT professionals are expecting their budgets to increase in 2023, according to our survey. But not every increase is keeping up with the pace of inflation. The International Monetary Fund forecasts that global inflation rose to 8.8% in 2022. It projects it will decline to 6.5% in 2023 and 4.1% by 2024 (IMF, 2022).

    CIOs must account for the impact of inflation on their IT budgets and realize that what looks like an increase on paper is effectively a flat budget or worse. Applied to our survey takers, an IT budget increase of more than 6.5% would be required to keep pace with inflation in 2023. Only 40% of survey takers are expecting that level of increase. For the 27% expecting an increase between 1-5%, they are facing an effective decrease in budget after the impact of inflation. Those expecting no change in budget or a decrease will be even worse off.

    Looking ahead to 2023, how do you anticipate your IT spending will change compared to spending in 2022?

    Global inflation estimates by year

    2022 8.8%
    2023 6.5%
    2024 4.1%

    International Monetary Fund, 2022

    CIOs are more optimistic about budgets than their supervisors

    Data from Info-Tech's CEO-CIO Alignment Diagnostic benchmark also shows that CIOs and their supervisors are planning for increases to the budget. This diagnostic is designed for a CIO to use with their direct supervisor, whether it's the CEO or otherwise (CxO). Results show that on average, CIOs are more optimistic than their supervisors that they will receive budget increases and headcount increases in the years ahead.

    While 14% of CxOs estimated the IT budget would see no change or a decrease in the next three to five years, only 3% of CIOs said the same. A larger discrepancy is seen in headcount, where nearly one-quarter of CXOs estimated no change or decrease in the years ahead, versus only 10% of CIOs estimating the same.

    When we account for the impact of inflation in 2023, this misalignment between CIOs and their supervisors increases. When adjusting for inflation, we need to view the responses projecting an increase of between 1-5% as an effective decrease. With the inflation adjustment, 26% of CXOs are predicting IT budgets to stay flat or see a decrease compared to only 10% of CIOs.

    CIOs should consider how inflation has affected their projected spending power over the past year and take into account projected inflation rates over the next couple of years. Given that the past decade has seen inflation rates between 2-3%, the higher rates projected will have more of an impact on organizational budgets than usual.

    Expect headcount to stay flat or decline over 3-5 years

    CIO: 10%; CXO: 24%

    IT budget expectations to stay flat or decrease before inflation

    CIO: 13.6 %; CXO: 3.2%

    IT budget expectations to stay flat or decrease adjusted for inflation

    CIO: 25.8%; CXO: 9.7%

    Info-Tech's CEO-CIO Alignment Program

    Opportunities

    Appoint a "cloud economist"

    Organizations that migrated from on-premises data centers to infrastructure as a service shifted their capital expenditures on server racks to operational expenditures on paying the monthly service bill. Managing that monthly bill so that it is in line with desired performance levels now becomes crucial. The expected benefit of the cloud is that an organization can turn the dial up to meet higher demand and turn it down when demand slows. In practice this is sometimes more difficult to execute than anticipated. Some IT departments realize their cloud-based data flows aren't always connected to the revenue-generating activity seen in the business. As a result, a "cloud economist" is needed to closely monitor cloud usage and adjust it to financial expectations. Especially during any recessionary period, IT departments will want to avoid a "bill shock" incident.

    Partner with technology providers

    Keep your friends close and your vendors closer. Look for opportunities to create leverage with your strategic vendors to unlock new opportunities. Identify if a vendor you work with is not entrenched in your industry and offer them the credibility of working with you in exchange for a favorable contract. Offering up your logo for a website listing clients or giving your own time to speak in a customer session at a conference can go a long way to building up some goodwill with your vendors. That's goodwill you'll need when you ask for a new multi-year contract on your software license without annual increases built into the structure.

    Demonstrate IT projects improve efficiency

    An IT department that operates at the Optimize level of Info-Tech's maturity scale can deliver outcomes that lower costs for other departments. IT can defend its own budget if it's able to demonstrate that its initiatives will automate or augment business activities in a way that improves margins. The argument becomes even more compelling if IT can demonstrate it is supporting a revenue-generating initiative or customer-facing experience. CIOs will need to find business champions to vouch for the important contributions IT is making to their area.

    Risks

    Imposition of non-financial reporting requirements

    In some jurisdictions, the largest companies will be required to start collecting information on carbon emissions emitted as a result of business activities by the end of next year. Smaller sized organizations will be next on the list to determine how to meet new requirements issued by various regulators. Risks of failure include facing fines or being shunned by investors. CIOs will need to support their financial reporting teams in collecting the new required data accurately. This will incur new costs as well.

    Rising asset costs

    Acquiring IT equipment is becoming more expensive due to overall inflation and specific pressures around semiconductor supply chains. As a result, more CIOs are extending their device refresh policies to last another year or two. Still, demands for new devices to support new hybrid work models could put pressure on budgets as IT teams are asked to modernize conferencing rooms. For organizations adopting mixed reality headsets, cutting-edge capabilities will come at a premium. Operating costs of devices may also increase as inflation increases costs of the electricity and bandwidth they depend on.

    CASE STUDY
    Leverage your influence in vendor negotiations

    Denise Cornish, Associate VP of IT and Deputy COO,
    Western University of Health Sciences

    Since taking on the lead IT role at Western University in 2020, Denise Cornish has approached vendor management like an auditable activity. She evaluates the value she gets from each vendor relationship and creates a list of critical vendors that she relies upon to deliver core business services. "The trick is to send a message to the vendor that they also need us as a customer that's willing to act as a reference," she says. Cornish has managed to renegotiate a contract with her ERP vendor, locking in a multi-year contract with a very small escalator in exchange for presenting as a customer at conferences. She's also working with them on developing a new integration to another piece of software popular in the education space.

    Western University even negotiated a partnership approach with Apple for a program run with its College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific (COMP) called the Digital Doctor Bag. The partnership saw Apple agree to pre-package a customer application developed by Western that delivered the curriculum to students and facilitated communications across students and faculty. Apple recognized Western as an Apple Distinguished School, a program that recognizes innovative schools that use Apple products.

    "I like when negotiations are difficult.
    I don't necessarily expect a zero-sum game. We each need to get something out of this and having the conversation and really digging into what's in it for you and what's in it for me, I enjoy that. So usually when I negotiate a vendor contract, it's rare that it doesn't work out."

    CASE STUDY
    Control cloud costs with a simplified approach

    Jim Love, CIO, IT World Canada

    As an online publisher and a digital marketing platform for technology products and services companies, IT World Canada (ITWC) has observed that there are differences in how small and large companies adopt the cloud as their computing infrastructure. For smaller companies, even though adoption is accelerating, there may still be some reluctance to fully embrace cloud platforms and services. While larger companies often have a multi-cloud approach, this might not be practical for smaller IT shops that may struggle to master the skills necessary to effectively manage one cloud platform. While Love acknowledges that the cloud is the future of corporate computing, he also notes that not all applications or workloads may be well suited to run in the cloud. As well, moving data into the cloud is cheap but moving it back out can be more expensive. That is why it is critical to understand your applications and the data you're working with to control costs and have a successful cloud implementation.

    "Standardization is the friend of IT. So, if you can standardize on one platform, you're going to do better in terms of costs."

    From priorities to action

    Go deeper on pursuing your priorities by improving the associated capabilities.

    Improve Cost and Budget Management

    Take control of your cloud costs by providing central financial oversight on the infrastructure-as-a-service provider your organization uses. Create visibility into your operational costs and define policies to control them. Right-size the use of cloud services to stay within organizational budget expectations.

    Take Control of Cloud Costs on AWS

    Take Control of Cloud Costs on Microsoft Azure

    Improve Business Value

    Reduce the funds allocated to ongoing support and impose tougher discipline around change requests to lighten your maintenance burden and make room for investment in net-new initiatives to support the business.

    Free up funds for new initiatives

    Improve Vendor Management

    Lay the foundation for a vendor management process with long-term benefits. Position yourself as a valuable client with your strategic vendors and leverage your position to improve your contract terms.

    Elevate Your Vendor Management Initiative

    Prepare your data pipeline to train AI

    Priority 02

    • ITRG06 BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND REPORTING
    • ITRG07 DATA ARCHITECTURE
    • ITRG08 DATA QUALITY

    Keep pace as the market adopts AI capabilities, and be ready to create competitive advantage.

    Today's innovation is tomorrow's expectation

    During 2022, some compelling examples of generative-AI-based products took the world by storm. Images from AI-generating bots Midjourney and Stable Diffusion went viral, flooding social media and artistic communities with images generated from text prompts. Exchanges with OpenAI's ChatGPT bot also caught attention, as the bot was able to do everything from write poetry, to provide directions on a cooking recipe and then create a shopping list for it, to generate working code in a variety of languages. The foundation models are trained with AI techniques that include generative adversarial networks, transformers, and variational autoencoders. The end result is an algorithm that can produce content that's meaningful to people based on some simple direction. The industry is only beginning to come to grips with how this sort of capability will disrupt the enterprise.

    Slightly more than one-third of IT professionals say their organization has already invested in AI or machine learning. It's the sixth-most popular technology to have already invested in after cloud computing (82%), application programming interfaces (64%), workforce management solutions (44%), data lakes (36%), and next-gen cybersecurity (36%). It's ahead of 12 other technologies that IT is already invested in.

    When we asked what technologies organizations planned to invest in for next year, AI rocketed up the list to second place, as it's selected by 44% of IT professionals. It falls behind only cloud computing. This jump up the list makes AI the fastest growing technology for new investment from organizations.

    Many AI capabilities seem cutting edge now, but organizations are prioritizing it as a technology investment. In a couple of years, access to foundational models that produce images, text, or code will become easy to access with a commercial license and an API integration. AI will become embedded in off-the-shelf software and drive many new features that will quickly become commonplace.

    To stay even with the competition and meet customer expectations, organizations will have to work to at least adopt these AI-enhanced products and services. For those that want to create a competitive advantage, they will have to build a data pipeline that is capable of training their own custom AI models based on their unique data sets.

    Which of the following technology categories has your organization already invested in?

    A bar graph is depicted the percentage of organizations which already had invested in the following Categories: Cloud Computing; Application Programming; Next-Gen Cybersecurity; Workforce Management Solutions; Data Lake/Lakehouse; Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning.

    Which of those same technologies does your organization plan to invest in by the end of 2023?

    A bar graph is depicted the percentage of organizations which plan to invest in the following categories by the end of 2023: No-Code / Low-Code Platforms; Next-Gen Cybersecurity; Application Programming Interfaces (APIs); Data Lake / Lakehouse; Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning; Cloud Computing

    Tech Trends 2023 Survey

    Data quality and governance will be critical to customize generative AI

    Data collection and analysis are on the minds of both CIOs and their supervisors. When asked what technologies the business should adopt in the next three to five years, big data (analytics) ranked as most critical to adopt among CIOs and their supervisors. Big data (collection) ranked fourth out of 11 options.

    Organizations that want to drive a competitive advantage from generative AI will need to train these large, versatile models on their own data sets. But at the same time, IT organizations are struggling to provide clean data. The second-most critical gap for IT organizations on average is data quality, behind only organizational change management. Organizations know that data quality is important to support analytics goals, as algorithms can suffer in their integrity if they don't have reliable data to work with. As they say, garbage in, garbage out.

    Another challenge to overcome is the gap seen in IT governance, the sixth largest gap on average. Using data toward training custom generative models will hold new compliance and ethical implications for IT departments to contend with. How user data can be leveraged is already the subject of privacy legislation in many different jurisdictions, and new AI legislation is being developed in various places around the world that could create further demands. In some cases, users are reacting negatively to AI-generated content.

    Biggest capability gaps between rated importance and effectiveness

    This is a Bar graph showing the capability gaps between rated importance and effectiveness.

    IT Management and Governance Diagnostic

    Most critical technologies to adopt rated by CIOs and their supervisors

    This is a Bar graph showing the most critical technologies to adopt as rated by CIO's and their supervisors

    CEO-CIO Alignment Program

    Opportunities

    Enterprise content discovery

    Many organizations still cobble together knowledgebases in SharePoint or some other shared corporate drive, full of resources that no one quite knows how to find. A generative AI chatbot holds potential to be trained on an organization's content and produce content based on an employee's queries. Trained properly, it could point employees to the right resource they need to answer their question or just provide the answer directly.

    Supply chain forecasts

    After Hurricane Ian shut down a Walmart distribution hub, the retailer used AI to simulate the effects on its supply chain. It rerouted deliveries from other hubs based on the predictions and planned for how to respond to demand for goods and services after the storm. Such forecasts would typically take a team of analysts days to compose, but thanks to AI, Walmart had it done in a matter of hours (The Economist, 2022).

    Reduce the costs of AI projects

    New generative AI models of sufficient scale offer advantages over previous AI models in their versatility. Just as ChatGPT can write poetry or dialogue for a play or perhaps a section of a research report (not this one, this human author promises), large models can be deployed for multiple use cases in the enterprise. One AI researcher says this could reduce the costs of an AI project by 20-30% (The Economist, 2022).

    Risks

    Impending AI regulation

    Multiple jurisdictions around the world are pursuing new legislation that imposes requirements on organizations that use AI, including the US, Europe, and Canada. Some uses of AI will be banned outright, such as the real-time use of facial recognition in public spaces, while in other situations people can opt out of using AI and work with a human instead. Regulations will take the risk of the possible outcomes created by AI into consideration, and organizations will often be required to disclose when and how AI is used to reach decisions (Science | Business, 2022). Questions around whether creators can prevent their content from being used for training AI are being raised, with some efforts already underway to collect a list of those who want to opt out. Organizations that adopt a generative AI model today may find it needs to be amended for copyright reasons in the future.

    Bias in the algorithms

    Organizations using a large AI model trained by a third party to complete their tasks or as a foundation to further customize it with their own data will have to contend with the inherent bias of the algorithm. This can lead to unintended negative experiences for users, as it did for MIT Technology Review journalist Melissa Heikkilä when she uploaded her images to AI avatar app Lensa, only to have it render a collection of sexualized portraits. Heikkilä contends that her Asian heritage overly influenced the algorithm to associate her with video-game characters, anime, and adult content (MIT Technology Review, 2022).

    Convincing nonsense

    Many of the generative AI bots released so far often create very good responses to user queries but sometimes create nonsense that at first glance might seem to be accurate. One example is Meta's Galactica bot – intended to streamline scientific research discovery and aid in text generation – which was taken down only three days after being made available. Scientists found that it generated fake research that sounded convincing or failed to do math correctly (Spiceworks, 2022).

    CASE STUDY
    How MLSE enhances the Toronto Raptors' competitiveness with data-driven practices

    Christian Magsisi, Vice President of Venue and Digital Technology, MLSE

    At the Toronto Raptors practice facility, the OVO Athletic Centre, a new 120-foot custom LG video screen towers over the court. The video board is used to playback game clips so coaches can use them to teach players, but it also displays analytics from algorithmic models that are custom-made for each player. Data on shot-making or defensive deflections are just a couple examples of what might inform the players.

    Vice President of Digital Technology Christian Magsisi leads a functional Digital Labs technical group at MLSE. The in-house team builds the specific data models that support the Raptors in their ongoing efforts to improve. The analytics are fed by Noah Analytics, which uses cognitive vision to provide real-time feedback on shot accuracy. SportsVU is a motion capture system that represents how players are positioned on the court, with detail down to which way they are facing and whether their arms are up or down. The third-party vendors provide the solutions to generate the analytics, but it's up to MLSE's internal team to shape them to be actionable for players during a practice.

    "All the way from making sure that a specific player is achieving the results that they're looking for and showing that through data, or finding opportunities for the coaching staff. This is the manifestation of it in real life. Our ultimate goal with the coaches was to be able to take what was on emails or in a report and sometimes even in text message and actually implement it into practice."

    Read the full story on Spiceworks Insights.

    How MLSE enhances the Toronto Raptors' competitiveness with data-driven practices (cont.)

    Humza Teherany, Chief Technology Officer, MLSE

    MLSE's Digital Labs team architects its data insights pipeline on top of cloud services. Amazon Web Services Rekognition provides cognitive vision analysis from video and Amazon Kinesis provides the video processing capabilities. Beyond the court, MLSE uses data to enhance the fan experience, explains CTO Humza Teherany. It begins with having meaningful business goals about where technology can provide the most value. He starts by engaging the leadership of the organization and considering the "art of the possible" when it comes to using technology to unlock their goals.

    Humza Teherany (left) and Christian Magsisi lead MLSE's digital efforts for the pro sports teams owned by the group, including the Toronto Raptors, Toronto Maple Leafs, and Toronto Argonauts. (Photo by Brian Jackson).

    Read the full story on Spiceworks Insights.

    "Our first goal in the entire buildup of the Digital Labs organization has been to support MLSE and all of our teams. We like to do things first. We leverage our own technology to make things better for our fans and for our teams to complete and find incremental advantages where possible."
    Humza Teherany,
    Chief Technology Officer, MLSE

    From priorities to action

    Go deeper on pursuing your priorities by improving the associated capabilities.

    Improve Data Quality

    The performance of AI-assisted tools depends on mature IT operations processes and reliable data sets. Standardize service management processes and build a knowledgebase of structured content to prepare for AI-assisted IT operations.

    Prepare for Cognitive Service Management

    Improve Business Intelligence and Reporting

    Explore the enterprise chatbots that are available to not only assist with customer interactions but also help your employees find the resources they need to do their jobs and retrieve data in real time.

    Explore the best chatbots software

    Improve Data Architecture

    Understand if you are ready to embark on the AI journey and what business use cases are appropriate for AI. Plan around the organization's maturity in people, tools, and operations for delivering the correct data, model development, and model deployment and managing the models in the operational areas.

    Create an Architecture for AI

    Go all in on zero-trust security

    Priority 03

    • BAI09 ASSET MANAGEMENT
    • APO08 STAKEHOLDER RELATIONS
    • MEA03 EXTERNAL COMPLIANCE

    Adopt zero-trust architecture as the new security paradigm across your IT stack and from an organizational risk management perspective.

    Putting faith in zero trust

    The push toward a zero-trust security framework is becoming necessary for organizations for several different reasons over the past couple of years. As the pandemic forced workers away from offices and into their homes, perimeter-based approaches to security were challenged by much wider network footprints and the need to identify users external to the firewall. Supply-chain security became more of a concern with notable attacks affecting many thousands of firms, some with severe consequences. Finally, the regulatory pressure to implement zero trust is rising following President Joe Biden's 2021 Executive Order on Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity. It directs federal agencies to implement zero trust. That will impact any company doing business with the federal government, and it's likely that zero trust will propagate through other government agencies in the years ahead. Zero-trust architecture can also help maintain compliance around privacy-focused regulations concerned about personal data (CSO Online, 2022).

    IT professionals are modestly confident that they can meet new government legislation regarding cybersecurity requirements. When asked to rank their confidence on a scale of one to five, the most common answer was 3 out of 5 (38.5%). The next most common answer was 4 out of 5 (33.3%).

    Zero-trust barriers:
    Talent shortage and lack of leadership involvement

    Out of a list of challenges, IT professionals are most concerned with talent shortages leading to capacity constraints in cybersecurity. Fifty-four per cent say they are concerned or very concerned with this issue. Implementing a new zero-trust framework for security will be difficult if capacity only allows for security teams to respond to incidents.

    The next most pressing concern is that cyber risks are not on the radar of executive leaders or the board of directors, with 46% of IT pros saying they are concerned or very concerned. Since zero-trust requires that organizations take an enterprise risk management approach to cybersecurity and involve top decision makers, this reveals another area where organizations may fall short of achieving a zero-trust environment.

    How confident are you that your organization is prepared to meet current and future government legislation regarding cybersecurity requirements? A circle graph is shown with 68.6% colored dark green, and the words: AVG 3.43 written inside the graph.
    a bar graph showing the confidence % for numbers 1-5
    54%

    of IT professionals are concerned with talent shortages leading to capacity constraints in cybersecurity.

    46%

    of IT professionals are concerned that cyber risks are not on the radar of executive leaders or the board of directors.

    Zero trust mitigates risk while removing friction

    A zero-trust approach to security requires organizations to view cybersecurity risk as part of its overall risk framework. Both CIOs and their supervisors agree that IT-related risks are a pain point. When asked to rate the severity of pain points, 58% of CIOs rated IT-related business risk incidents as a minor pain or major pain. Their supervisors were more concerned, with 61% rating it similarly. Enterprises can mitigate this pain point by involving top levels of leadership in cybersecurity planning.

    Organizations can be wary about implementing new security measures out of concern it will put barriers between employees and what they need to work. Through a zero-trust approach that focuses on identity verification, friction can be avoided. Overall, IT organizations did well to provide security without friction for stakeholders over the past 18 months. Results from Info-Tech's CIO Business Vision Diagnostic shows that stakeholders almost all agree friction due to security practices are acceptable. The one area that stands to be improved is remote/mobile device access, where 78.3% of stakeholders view the friction as acceptable.

    A zero-trust approach treats user identity the same regardless of device and whether it is inside or outside of the corporate network. This can remove friction when workers are looking to connect remotely from a mobile device.

    IT-related business risk incidents viewed as a pain point

    CXO 61%
    CIO 58%

    Business stakeholders rate security friction levels as acceptable

    A bar graph is depicted with the following dataset: Regulatory Compliance: 93.80%; Office/Desktop Computing:	86.50%;Data Access/Integrity: 86.10%; Remote/Mobile Device Access:	78.30%;

    CIO Business Vision Diagnostic, N=259

    Opportunities

    Move to identity-driven access control

    Today's approach to access control on the network is to allow every device to exchange data with every other device. User endpoints and servers talk to each other directly without any central governance. In a zero-trust environment, a centralized zero-trust network access broker provides one-to-one connectivity. This allows servers to rest offline until needed by a user with the right access permissions. Users verify their identity more often as they move throughout the network. The user can access the resources and data they need with minimal friction while protecting servers from unauthorized access. Log files are generated for analysis to raise alerts about when an authorized identity has been compromised.

    Protect data with just-in-time authentication

    Many organizations put process in place to make sure data at rest is encrypted, but often when users copy that data to their own devices, it becomes unencrypted, allowing attackers opportunities to exfiltrate sensitive data from user endpoints. Moving to a zero-trust environment where each data access is brokered by a central broker allows for encryption to be preserved. Parties accessing a document must exchange keys to gain access, locking out unauthorized users that don't have both sets of keys to decrypt the data (MIT Lincoln Laboratory, 2022).

    Harness free and open-source tools to deploy zero trust

    IT teams may not be seeing a budget infusion to invest in a new approach to security. By making use of the many free and open-source tools available, they can bootstrap their strategy into reality. Here's a list to get started:

    PingCastle Wrangle your Active Directory and find all the domains that you've long since forgotten about and manage the situation appropriately. Also builds a spoke-and-hub map of your Active Directory.

    OpenZiti Create an overlay network to enable programmable networking that supports zero trust.

    Snyk Developers can automatically find and fix vulnerabilities before they commit their code. This vendor offers a free tier but users that scale up will need to pay.

    sigstore Open-source users and maintainers can use this solution to verify the code they are running is the code the developer intended. Works by stitching together free services to facilitate software signing, verify against a transparent ledger, and provide auditable logs.

    Microsoft's SBOM generation tool A software bill of materials is a requirement in President Biden's Executive Order, intended to provide organizations with more transparency into their software components by providing a comprehensive list. Microsoft's tool will work with Windows, Linux, and Mac and auto-detect a longlist of software components, and it generates a list organized into four sections that will help organizations comprehend their software footprint.

    Risks

    Organizational culture change to accommodate zero trust

    Zero trust requires that top decision makers get involved in cybersecurity by treating it as an equal consideration of overall enterprise risk. Not all boards will have the cybersecurity expertise required, and some executives may not prioritize cybersecurity despite the warnings. Organizations that don't appoint a chief information security officer (CISO) role to drive the cybersecurity agenda from the top will be at risk of cybersecurity remaining an afterthought.

    Talent shortage

    No matter what industry you're in or what type of organization you run, you need cybersecurity. The demand for talent is very high and organizations are finding it difficult to hire in this area. Without the talent needed to mature cybersecurity approaches to a zero-trust model, the focus will remain on foundational principles of patch management to eliminate vulnerabilities and intrusion prevention. Smaller organizations may want to consider a "virtual CISO" that helps shape the organizational strategy on a part-time basis.

    Social engineering

    Many enterprise security postures remain vulnerable to an attack that commandeers an employee's identity to infiltrate the network. Hosted single sign-on models provide low friction and continuity of identity across applications but also offer a single point of failure that hackers can exploit. Phishing scams that are designed to trick an employee into providing their credentials to a fake website or to just click on a link that delivers a malware payload are the most common inroads that criminals take into the corporate network. Being aware of how user behavior influences security is crucial.

    CASE STUDY
    Engage the entire organization with cybersecurity awareness

    Serge Suponitskiy, CIO, Brosnan Risk Consultants

    Brosnan provides private security services to high-profile clients and is staffed by security experts with professional backgrounds in intelligence services and major law enforcement agencies. Safe to say that security is taken seriously in this culture and CIO Serge Suponitskiy makes sure that extends to all back-office staff that support the firm's activities. He's aware that people are often the weakest link in a cybersecurity posture and are prone to being fooled by a phishing email or even a fraudulent phone call. So cybersecurity training is an ongoing activity that takes many forms. He sends out a weekly cybersecurity bulletin that features a threat report and a story about the "scam of the week." He also uses KnowBe4, a tool that simulates phishing attacks and trains employees in security awareness. Suponitskiy advises reaching out to Marketing or HR for help with engaging employees and finding the right learning opportunities.

    "What is financially the best solution to protect yourself? It's to train your employees. … You can buy all of the tools and it's expensive. Some of the prices are going up for no reason. Some by 20%, some by 50%, it's ridiculous. So, the best way is to keep training, to keep educating, and to reimagine the training. It's not just sending this video that no one clicks on or posting a poster no one looks at. … Given the fact we're moving into this recession world, and everyone is questioning why we need to spend more, it's time to reimagine the training approach."

    CASE STUDY
    Focus on micro-segmentation as the foundation of zero trust

    David Senf, National Cybersecurity Strategist, Bell

    As a cybersecurity analyst and advisor that works with Bell's clients, David Senf sees zero-trust security as an opportunity for organizations to put a strong set of mitigating controls in place to defend against the thorny challenge of reducing vulnerabilities in their software supply chain. With major breaches being linked to widely used software in the past couple of years, security teams might find it effective to focus on a different layer of security to prevent certain breaches. With security policy being enforced at a narrow point/perimeter, attacks are in essence blocked from exploiting application vulnerabilities (e.g. you can't exploit what you can see). Organizations must still ensure there is a solid vulnerability management program in place, but surrounding applications with other controls is critical. One aspect of zero trust, micro-segmentation, which is an approach to network management, can limit the damage caused by a breach. The solutions help to map out and protect the different connections between applications that could otherwise be abused for discovery or lateral movement. Senf advises that knowing your inventory of software and the interdependencies between applications is the first step on a zero-trust journey, before putting protection and detection in place.

    "Next year will be a year of a lot more ZTNA, zero-trust network access, being deployed. So, I think that will give organizations more of an understanding of what zero trust is as well, from a really basic perspective. If I can just limit what applications you can see and no one can even see that application, it's undiscoverable because I've got that ZTNA solution in place. … I would see that as a leading area of deployment and coming to understand what zero trust is in 2023."

    From priorities to action

    Go deeper on pursuing your priorities by improving the associated capabilities.

    Improve Asset Management

    Enable reduced friction in the remote user experience by underpinning it with a hardware asset management program. Creating an inventory of devices and effectively tracking them will aid in maintaining compliance, result in stronger policy enforcement, and reduce the harm of a lost or stolen device.

    Implement Hardware Asset Management

    Improve Stakeholder Relations

    Communicate the transition from a perimeter-based security approach to an "Always Verify" approach with a clear roadmap toward implementation. Map key protect surfaces to business goals to demonstrate the importance of zero-trust security in helping the organization succeed. Help the organization's top leadership build awareness of cybersecurity risk.

    Build a Zero Trust Roadmap

    Improve External Compliance

    Manage the challenge of meeting new government requirements to implement zero-trust security and other data protection and cybersecurity regulations with a compliance program. Create a control environment that aligns multiple compliance regimes, and be prepared for IT audits.

    Build a Security Compliance Program

    Engage employees in the digital age

    Priority 04

    • ITRG02 LEADERSHIP, CULTURE, AND VALUES
    • BAI05 ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE MANAGEMENT
    • APO03 ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE

    Lead a strong culture through digital means to succeed in engaging the hybrid workforce.

    The new deal for employers in a hybrid work world

    Necessity is the mother of innovation.

    The pandemic's disruption for non-essential workers looks to have a long-lasting, if not permanent, effect on the relationship between employer and employee. The new bargain for almost all organizations is a hybrid work reality, with employees splitting time between the office and working remotely, if not working remotely full-time. IT is in a unique position in the organization as it must not only contend with the shift to this new deal with its own employees but facilitate it for the entire organization.

    With 90% of organizations embracing some form of hybrid work, IT leaders have an opportunity to shift from coping with the new work reality to finding opportunities to improve productivity. Organizations that embrace a hybrid model for their IT departments see a more effective IT department. Organizations that offered no remote work for IT rated their IT effectiveness on average 6.2 out of 10, while organizations with at least 10% of IT roles in a hybrid model saw significantly higher effectiveness. At minimum, organizations with between 50%-70% of IT roles in a hybrid model rated their effectiveness at 6.9 out of 10.

    IT achieved this increase in effectiveness during a disruptive time that often saw IT take on a heavier burden. Remote work required IT to support more users and be involved in facilitating more work processes. Thriving through this challenging time is a win that's worth sharing with the rest of the organization.

    90% of organizations are embracing some form of hybrid work.

    IT's effectiveness compared to % working hybrid or remotely

    A bar graph is shown which compares the effectiveness of IT work with hybrid and full remote work, compared to No Remote Work for IT.

    High effectiveness doesn't mean high engagement

    Despite IT's success with hybrid work, CIOs are more concerned about their staff sufficiency, skill, and engagement than their supervisors. Among clients using our CEO-CIO Alignment Diagnostic, 49% of CIOs considered this issue a major pain point compared to only 32% of CXOs. While IT staff are more effective than ever, even while carrying more of a burden in the digital age, CIOs are still looking to improve staff engagement.

    Info-Tech's State of Hybrid Work Survey illuminates further details about where IT leaders are concerned for their employee engagement. About four in ten IT leaders say they are concerned for employee wellbeing, and almost the same amount say they are concerned they are not able to see signs that employees are demotivated (N=518).

    Boosting IT employees' engagement levels to match their effectiveness will require IT leaders to harness all the tools at their disposal. Communicating culture and effectively managing organizational change in the digital age is a real test of leadership.

    Staff sufficiency, skill, and engagement issues as a major pain point

    CXO 32%
    CIO 49%

    CEO-CIO Alignment Diagnostic

    Opportunities

    Drive effectiveness with a hybrid environment

    IT leaders concerned about the erosion of culture and connectedness due to hybrid work can mitigate those effects with increased and improved communication. Among highly effective IT departments, 55% of IT leaders made themselves highly available through instant messaging chat. Another 54% of highly effective leaders increased team meetings (State of Hybrid Work Survey, n=213). The ability to adapt to the team's needs and use a number of tactics to respond is the most important factor. The greater the number of tactics used to overcome communication barriers, the more effective the IT department (State of Hybrid Work Survey, N=518).

    Modernize the office conference room

    A hybrid work approach emphasizes the importance of not only the technology in the office conference room but the process around how meetings are conducted. Creating an equal footing for all participants regardless of how they join is the goal. In pursuit of that, 63% of organizations say they have made changes or upgrades to their conference room technology (n=496). The conferencing experience can influence employee engagement and work culture and enhance collaboration. IT should determine if the business case exists for upgrades and work to decrease the pain of using legacy solutions where possible (State of Hybrid Work in IT: A Trend Report).

    Understand the organizational value chain

    Map out the value chain from the customer perspective and then determine the organizational capabilities involved in delivering on that experience. It is a useful tool for helping IT staff understand how they're connected to the customer experience and organizational mission. It's crucial to identify opportunities to resolve pain points and create more efficiency throughout the organization.

    Risks

    Talent rejects the working model

    Many employees that experienced hybrid work over the past couple of years are finding it's a positive development for work/life balance and aren't interested in a full-time return to the office. Organizations that insist on returning all employees to the office all the time may find that employees choose to leave the organization. Similarly, it could be hard to hire IT talent in a competitive market if the position is required to be onsite every day. Most organizations are providing flexible options to employees and finding ways to manage work in the new digital age.

    Wasted expense on facilities

    Organizations may choose to keep their physical office only to later realize that no one is going to work there. While providing an office space can help foster positive culture through valuable face time, it has to be used intentionally. Managers should plan for specific days that their teams will meet in the office and make sure that work activities take advantage of everyone being in the same place at the same time. Asking everyone to come in so that they can be on a videoconference meeting in their cubicle isn't the point.

    Isolated employees and teams

    Studies on a remote work environment show it has an impact on how many connections each employee maintains within the company. Employees still interact well within their own teams but have fewer interactions across departments. Overall, workers are likely to collaborate just as often as they did when working in the office but with fewer other individuals at the company. Keep the isolating effect of remote work in mind and foster collaboration and networking opportunities across different departments (BBC News, 2022).

    CASE STUDY
    Equal support of in-office and remote work

    Roberto Eberhardt, CIO, Ontario Legislative Assembly

    Working in the legislature of the Ontario provincial government, CIO Roberto Eberhardt's staff went from a fully onsite model to a fully remote model at the outset of the pandemic. Today he's navigating his path to a hybrid model that's somewhere in the middle. His approach is to allow his business colleagues to determine the work model that's needed but to support a technology environment that allows employees to work from home or in the office equally. Every new process that's introduced must meet that paradigm, ensuring it will work in a hybrid environment. For his IT staff, he sees a culture of accountability and commitment to metrics to drive performance measurement as key to the success of this new reality.

    "While it's good in a way, the challenge for us is it became a little more complex because you have to account for all those things in the office environment and in the remote work approach. Everything you do now, you have to say OK well how is this going to work in this world and how will it work in the other world?"

    Creating purpose for IT through strategy

    Mike Russell, Virginia Community College System

    At the Virginia Community College System (VCCS), CIO Mike Russell's IT team supports an organization that governs and delivers services to all community colleges in the state. Russell sees his IT team's purpose as being driven by the organization's mission to ensure success throughout the entire student journey, from enrolment to becoming employed after graduation. That customer-focused mindset starts from the top-level leadership, the chancellor, and the state governor. The VCCS maintains a six-year business plan that informs IT's strategic plan and aligns IT with the mission, and both plans are living documents that get refreshed every two years. Updating the plans provides opportunities for the chancellor to engage the organization and remind everyone of the purpose of their work.

    "The outcome isn't the degree. The outcome we're trying to measure is the job. Did you get the job that you wanted? Whether it's being re-employed or first-time employment, did you get what you were after?"

    From priorities to action

    Go deeper on pursuing your priorities by improving the associated capabilities.

    Improve Leadership, Culture, and Values

    Help leaders manage their teams effectively in a hybrid environment by providing them with the right tools and tactics to manage the challenges of hybrid work. Focus on promoting teamwork and fostering connection.

    Prepare People Leaders for the Hybrid Work Environment

    Improve Organizational Change Management

    Assign accountability for managing the changes that the organization is experiencing in the digital age. Make a people-centric approach that takes human behavior into account and plans to address different needs in different ways. Be proactive about change.

    Master Organizational Change Management Practices

    Improve Enterprise Architecture

    Develop a foundation for aligning IT's activities with business value by creating a right-sized enterprise architecture approach that isn't heavy on bureaucracy. Drive IT's purpose by illustrating how their work contributes to the overall mission and the customer experience.

    Create a Right-Sized Enterprise Architecture Governance Framework

    Shape the IT organization to improve customer experience

    PRIORITY 05

    • BAI03 ENTERPRISE APPLICATION SELECTION & IMPLEMENTATION
    • MEA01 PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT
    • ITRG01 IT ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN

    Tightly align the IT organization with the organization's value chain from a customer perspective.

    IT's value is defined by faster, better, bigger

    The pandemic motivated organizations to accelerate their digital transformation efforts, digitalizing more of their tasks and organizing the company's value chain around satisfying the customer experience. Now we see organizations taking their foot off the gas pedal of digitalization and shifting their focus to extracting the value from their investments. They want to execute on the digital transformation in their operations and realize the vision they set out to achieve.

    In our Trends Report we compared the emphasis organizations are putting on digitalization to last year. Overall, we see that most organizations shifted fewer of their processes to digital in the past year.

    We also asked organizations what motivated their push toward automation. The most common drivers are to improve efficiency, with almost seven out of ten organizations looking to increase staff on high-level tasks by automating repetitive tasks, 67% also wanting to increase productivity without increasing headcount, and 59% wanting to reduce errors being made by people. In addition, more than half of organizations pursued automation to improve customer satisfaction.

    What best describes your main motivation to pursue automation, above other considerations?

    A bar graph is depicted showing the following dataset: Increase staff focus on high-level tasks by automating repetitive tasks:	69%; Increase productivity of existing staff to avoid increasing headcount:	67%; Reduce errors made by people:	59%; Improve customer satisfaction:	52%; Achieve cost savings through reduction in headcount:	35%; Increase revenue by enabling higher volume of work:	30%

    Tech Trends 2023 Survey

    To what extent did your organization shift its processes from being manually completed to digitally completed during past year?

    A bar graph is depicted showing the extent to which organizations shifted processes from manual to digital during the past year for 2022 and 2023, from Tech Trends 2023 Survey

    With the shift in focus from implementing new applications to support digital transformation to operating in the new environment, IT must shift its own focus to help realize the value from these systems. At the same time, IT must reorganize itself around the new value chain that's defined by a customer perspective.

    IT struggles to deliver business value or support innovation

    Many current IT departments are structured around legacy processes that hinder their ability to deliver business value. CIOs are trying to grapple with the misalignment between the modern business structure and keep up with the demands for innovation and agility.

    Almost nine in ten CIOs say that business frustration with IT's failure to deliver value is a pain point. Their supervisors have a slightly more favorable opinion, with 76% agreeing that it is a pain point.

    Similarly, nine in ten CIOs say that IT limits affecting business innovation and agility is a pain point, while 81% of their supervisors say the same.

    Supervisors say that IT should "ensure benefits delivery" as the most important process (CEO-CIO Alignment Program). This underlines the need to achieve alignment, optimize service delivery, and facilitate innovation. The pain points identified here will need to be resolved to make this possible.

    IT departments will need to contend with a tight labor market and economic volatility in the year ahead. If this drives down resource capacity, it will be even more critical to tightly align with the organization.

    Views business frustration with IT failure to deliver value as a pain point

    CXO 76%
    CIO 88%

    Views IT limits affecting business innovation and agility as a pain point

    CXO 81%
    CIO

    90%

    CEO-CIO Alignment Program

    Opportunities

    Define IT's value by its contributions to enterprise value

    Communicate the performance of IT to stakeholders by attributing positive changes in enterprise value to IT initiatives. For example, if a digital channel helped increase sales in one area, then IT can claim some portion of that revenue. If optimization of another process resulted in cost savings, then IT can claim that as a contribution toward the bottom line. CIOs should develop their handle on how KPIs influence revenues and costs. Keeping tabs on normalized year-over-year revenue comparisons can help demonstrate that IT contributions are making an impact on driving profitability.

    Go with buy versus build if it's a commodity service

    Most back-office functions common to operating a company can be provided by cloud-based applications accessed through a web browser. There's no value in having IT spend time maintaining on-premises applications that require hosting and ongoing maintenance. Organizations that are still accruing technical debt and are unable to modernize will increasingly find it is negatively impacting employee experience, as users expect their working experience to be similar to their experience with consumer applications. In addition, IT will continue to have capacity challenges as resources will be consumed by maintenance. As they seek to outsource some applications, IT will need to consider the geopolitical risk of certain jurisdictions in selecting a provider.

    Redefine how employee performance is tracked

    The concept of "clocking in" for a shift and spending eight hours a day on the job doesn't help guide IT toward its objectives or create any higher sense of purpose. Leaders must work to create a true sense of accountability by reaching consensus on what key performance indicators are important and tasking staff to improve them. Metrics should clearly link back to business outcomes and IT should understand the role they play in delivering a good customer experience.

    Risks

    Lack of talent available to drive transformation

    CIOs are finding it difficult to hire the talent needed to create the capacity they need as digital demands of their organizations increase. This could slow the pace of change as new positions created in IT go unfilled. CIOs may need to consider reskilling and rebalancing workloads of existing staff in the short term and tap outsourcing providers to help make up shortfalls.

    Resistance to change

    New processes may have been given the official rubber stamp, but that doesn't mean staff are adhering to them. Organizations that reorganize themselves must take steps to audit their processes to ensure they're executed the way they intend. Some employees may feel they are being made obsolete or pushed out of their jobs and become disengaged.

    Short-term increased costs

    Restructuring the organization can come with the need for new tools and more training. It may be necessary to operate with redundant staff for the transitional period. Some additional expenses might be incurred for a brief period as the new structure is being put in place.

    Emphasize the value of IT in driving revenue

    Salman Ali, CIO, McDonald's Germany

    As the new CIO to McDonald's Germany, Salman Ali came on board with an early mandate to reorganize the IT department. The challenge is to merge two organizations together: one that delivers core technology services of infrastructure, security, service desk, and compliance and one that delivers customer-facing technology such as in-store touchscreen kiosks and the mobile app for food delivery. He is looking to organize this new-look department around the technology in the hands of both McDonald's staff and its customers. In conversations with his stakeholders, Ali emphasizes the value that IT is driving rather than discussing the costs that go into it. For example, there was a huge cost in integrating third-party meal delivery apps into the point-of-sales system, but the seamless experience it delivers to customers looking to place an order helps to drive a large volume of sales. He plans to reorganize his department around this value-driven approach. The organization model will be executed with clear accountability in place and key performance indicators to measure success.

    "Technology is no longer just an enabler. It's now a strategic business function. When they talk about digital, they are really talking about what's in the customers' hands and what do they use to interact with the business directly? Digital transformation has given technology a new front seat that's really driving the business."

    CASE STUDY
    Overhauling the "heartbeat" of the organization

    Ernest Solomon, Former CIO, LAWPRO

    LAWPRO is a provider of professional liability insurance and title insurance in Canada. The firm is moving its back-office applications from a build approach to a buy approach and focusing its build efforts on customer-facing systems tied to revenue generation. CIO Ernest Solomon says his team has been developing on a legacy platform for two decades, but it's time to modernize. The firm is replacing its legacy platform and moving to a cloud-based system to address technical debt and improve the experience for staff and customers. The claims and policy management platform, the "heartbeat" of the organization, is moving to a software-as-a-service model. At the same time, the firm's customer-facing Title Plus application is being moved to a cloud-native, serverless architecture. Solomon doesn't see the need for IT to spend time building services for the back office, as that doesn't align with the mission of the organization. Instead, he focuses his build efforts on creating a competitive advantage.

    "We're redefining the customer experience, which is how do we move the needle in a positive direction for all the lawyers that interact with us? How do we generate that value-based proposition and improve their interactions with our organization?"

    From priorities to action

    Go deeper on pursuing your priorities by improving the associated capabilities.

    Improve Enterprise Application Selection & Implementation

    Help leaders manage their teams effectively in a hybrid environment by providing them with the right tools and tactics to manage the challenges of hybrid work. Focus on promoting teamwork and fostering connection.

    Embrace Business-Managed Applications

    Improve Performance Measurement

    Drive the most important IT process in the eyes of supervisors by defining business value and linking IT spend to it. Make benefits realization part of your IT governance.

    Maximize Business Value From IT Through Benefits Realization

    Improve IT Organizational Design

    Showcase IT's value to the business by aligning IT spending and staffing to business functions. Provide transparency into business consumption of IT and compare your spending to your peers'.

    IT Spend & Staffing Benchmarking

    The Five Priorities

    Engage cross-functional leadership to seize opportunity while protecting the organization from volatility.

    1. Adjust IT operations to manage for inflation
    2. Prepare your data pipeline to train AI
    3. Go all in on zero-trust security
    4. Engage employees in the digital age
    5. Shape the IT organization to improve customer experience

    Expert Contributors

    In order of appearance

    Denise Cornish, Associate VP of IT and Deputy COO, Western University of Health Sciences

    Jim Love, CIO, IT World Canada

    Christian Magsisi, Vice President of Venue and Digital Technology, MLSE

    Humza Teherany, Chief Technology Officer, MLSE

    Serge Suponitskiy, CIO, Brosnan Risk Consultants

    David Senf, National Cybersecurity Strategist, Bell

    Roberto Eberhardt, CIO, Ontario Legislative Assembly

    Mike Russell, Virginia Community College System

    Salman Ali, CIO, McDonald's Germany

    Ernest Solomon, Former CIO, LAWPRO

    Bibliography

    Anderson, Brad, and Seth Patton. "In a Hybrid World, Your Tech Defines Employee Experience." Harvard Business Review, 18 Feb. 2022. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022.
    "Artificial Intelligence Is Permeating Business at Last." The Economist, 6 Dec. 2022. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022.
    Badlani, Danesh Kumar, and Adrian Diglio. "Microsoft Open Sources Its Software Bill
    of Materials (SBOM) Generation Tool." Engineering@Microsoft, 12 July 2022. Accessed
    12 Dec. 2022.
    Birch, Martin. "Council Post: Equipping Employees To Succeed In Digital Transformation." Forbes, 9 Aug. 2022. Accessed 7 Dec. 2022.
    Bishop, Katie. "Is Remote Work Worse for Wellbeing than People Think?" BBC News,
    17 June 2022. Accessed 7 Dec. 2022.
    Carlson, Brian. "Top 5 Priorities, Challenges For CIOs To Recession-Proof Their Business." The Customer Data Platform Resource, 19 July 2022. Accessed 7 Dec. 2022.
    "CIO Priorities: 2020 vs 2023." IT PRO, 23 Sept. 2022. Accessed 2 Nov. 2022.
    cyberinsiders. "Frictionless Zero Trust Security - How Minimizing Friction Can Lower Risks and Boost ROI." Cybersecurity Insiders, 9 Sept. 2021. Accessed 7 Dec. 2022.
    Garg, Sampak P. "Top 5 Regulatory Reasons for Implementing Zero Trust."
    CSO Online, 27 Oct. 2022. Accessed 7 Dec. 2022.
    Heikkilä, Melissa. "The Viral AI Avatar App Lensa Undressed Me—without My Consent." MIT Technology Review, 12 Dec. 2022. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022.
    Jackson, Brian. "How the Toronto Raptors Operate as the NBA's Most Data-Driven Team." Spiceworks, 1 Dec. 2022. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022.
    Kiss, Michelle. "How the Digital Age Has Transformed Employee Engagement." Spiceworks,16 Dec. 2021. Accessed 7 Dec. 2022.
    Matthews, David. "EU Hopes to Build Aligned Guidelines on Artificial Intelligence with US." Science|Business, 22 Nov. 2022. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022.
    Maxim, Merritt. "New Security & Risk Planning Guide Helps CISOs Set 2023 Priorities." Forrester, 23 Aug. 2022. Accessed 7 Dec. 2022.
    Miller, Michael J. "Gartner Surveys Show Changing CEO and Board Concerns Are Driving a Different CIO Agenda for 2023." PCMag, 20 Oct. 2022. Accessed 2 Nov. 2022.
    MIT Lincoln Laboratory. "Overview of Zero Trust Architectures." YouTube,
    2 March 2022. Accessed 7 Dec. 2022.
    MIT Technology Review Insights. "CIO Vision 2025: Bridging the Gap between BI and AI." MIT Technology Review, 20 Sept. 2022. Accessed 1 Nov. 2022.
    Paramita, Ghosh. "Data Architecture Trends in 2022." DATAVERSITY, 22 Feb. 2022. Accessed 7 Dec. 2022.
    Rosenbush, Steven. "Cybersecurity Tops the CIO Agenda as Threats Continue to Escalate - WSJ." The Wall Street Journal, 17 Oct. 2022. Accessed 2 Nov. 2022.
    Sacolick, Isaac. "What's in the Budget? 7 Investments for CIOs to Prioritize." StarCIO,
    22 Aug. 2022. Accessed 2 Nov. 2022.
    Singh, Yuvika. "Digital Culture-A Hurdle or A Catalyst in Employee Engagement." International Journal of Management Studies, vol. 6, Jan. 2019, pp. 54–60. ResearchGate, https://doi.org/10.18843/ijms/v6i1(8)/08.
    "Talent War Set to Become Top Priority for CIOs in 2023, Study Reveals." CEO.digital,
    8 Sept. 2022. Accessed 7 Dec. 2022.
    Tanaka, Rodney. "WesternU COMP and COMP-Northwest Named Apple Distinguished School." WesternU News. 10 Feb. 2022. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022.
    Wadhwani, Sumeet. "Meta's New Large Language Model Galactica Pulled Down Three Days After Launch." Spiceworks, 22 Nov. 2022. Accessed 12 Dec. 2022.
    "World Economic Outlook." International Monetary Fund (IMF), 11 Oct. 2022. Accessed
    14 Dec. 2022.

    Establish Data Governance – APAC Edition

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}348|cart{/j2store}
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    • Parent Category Name: Data Management
    • Parent Category Link: /data-management
    • Organisations are faced with challenges associated with changing data landscapes, evolving business models, industry disruptions, regulatory and compliance obligations, and changing and maturing user landscapes and demands for data.
    • Although the need for a data governance program is often evident, organisations miss the mark when their data governance efforts are not directly aligned to delivering measurable business value by supporting key strategic initiatives, value streams, and their underlying business capabilities.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Your organisation’s value streams and the associated business capabilities require effectively governed data. Without this, you face the impact of elevated operational costs, missed opportunities, eroded stakeholder satisfaction, and exposure to increased business risk.
    • Ensure your data governance program delivers measurable business value by aligning the associated data governance initiatives with the business architecture.
    • Data governance must continuously align with the organisation’s enterprise governance function. It should not be perceived as an IT pet project, but rather as a business-driven initiative.

    Impact and Result

    Info-Tech’s approach to establishing and sustaining effective data governance is anchored in the strong alignment of organisational value streams and their business capabilities with key data governance dimensions and initiatives.

    • Align with enterprise governance, business strategy and organizational value streams to ensure the program delivers measurable business value.
    • Understand your current data governance capabilities and build out a future state that is right sized and relevant.
    • Define data governance leadership, accountability, and responsibility, supported by an operating model that effectively manages change and communication and fosters a culture of data excellence.

    Establish Data Governance – APAC Edition Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Data Governance Research – A step-by-step document to ensure that the people handling the data are involved in the decisions surrounding data usage, data quality, business processes, and change implementation.

    Data governance is a strategic program that will help your organisation control data by managing the people, processes, and information technology needed to ensure that accurate and consistent data policies exist across varying lines of the business, enabling data-driven insight. This research will provide an overview of data governance and its importance to your organization, assist in making the case and securing buy-in for data governance, identify data governance best practices and the challenges associated with them, and provide guidance on how to implement data governance best practices for a successful launch.

    • Establish Data Governance – Phases 1-3 – APAC

    2. Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook – A structured tool to assist with establishing effective data governance practices.

    This workbook will help your organisation understand the business and user context by leveraging your business capability map and value streams, developing data use cases using Info-Tech's framework for building data use cases, and gauging the current state of your organisation's data culture.

    • Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook – APAC

    3. Data Use Case Framework Template – An exemplar template to highlight and create relevant use cases around the organisation’s data-related problems and opportunities.

    This business needs gathering activity will highlight and create relevant use cases around data-related problems or opportunities that are clear and contained and, if addressed, will deliver value to the organisation. This template provides a framework for data requirements and a mapping methodology for creating use cases.

    • Data Use Case Framework Template – APAC

    4. Data Governance Initiative Planning and Roadmap Tool – A visual roadmapping tool to assist with establishing effective data governance practices.

    This tool will help your organisation plan the sequence of activities, capture start dates and expected completion dates, and create a roadmap that can be effectively communicated to the organisation.

    • Data Governance Initiative Planning and Roadmap Tool – APAC

    5. Business Data Catalogue – A comprehensive template to help you to document the key data assets that are to be governed based on in-depth business unit interviews, data risk/value assessments, and a data flow diagram for the organisation.

    Use this template to document information about key data assets such as data definition, source system, possible values, data sensitivity, data steward, and usage of the data.

    • Business Data Catalogue – APAC

    6. Data Governance Program Charter Template – A program charter template to sell the importance of data governance to senior executives.

    This template will help get the backing required to get a data governance project rolling. The program charter will help communicate the project purpose, define the scope, and identify the project team, roles, and responsibilities.

    • Data Governance Program Charter Template – APAC

    7. Data Policies – A set of policy templates to support the data governance framework for the organisation.

    This set of policies supports the organisation's use and management of data to ensure that it efficiently and effectively serves the needs of the organisation.

    • Data Governance Policy – APAC
    • Data Classification Policy, Standard, and Procedure – APAC
    • Data Quality Policy, Standard, and Procedure – APAC
    • Data Management Definitions – APAC
    • Metadata Management Policy, Standard, and Procedure – APAC
    • Data Retention Policy and Procedure – APAC
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Establish Data Governance – APAC Edition

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Establish Business Context and Value

    The Purpose

    Identify key business data assets that need to be governed.

    Create a unifying vision for the data governance program.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understand the value of data governance and how it can help the organisation better leverage its data.

    Gain knowledge of how data governance can benefit both IT and the business.

    Activities

    1.1 Establish business context, value, and scope of data governance at the organisation.

    1.2 Introduction to Info-Tech’s data governance framework.

    1.3 Discuss vision and mission for data governance.

    1.4 Understand your business architecture, including your business capability map and value streams.

    1.5 Build use cases aligned to core business capabilities.

    Outputs

    Sample use cases (tied to the business capability map) and a repeatable use case framework

    Vision and mission for data governance

    2 Understand Current Data Governance Capabilities and Plot Target-State Levels

    The Purpose

    Assess which data contains value and/or risk and determine metrics that will determine how valuable the data is to the organisation.

    Assess where the organisation currently stands in data governance initiatives.

    Determine gaps between the current and future states of the data governance program.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Gain a holistic understanding of organisational data and how it flows through business units and systems.

    Identify which data should fall under the governance umbrella.

    Determine a practical starting point for the program.

    Activities

    2.1 Understand your current data governance capabilities and maturity.

    2.2 Set target-state data governance capabilities.

    Outputs

    Current state of data governance maturity

    Definition of target state

    3 Build Data Domain to Data Governance Role Mapping

    The Purpose

    Determine strategic initiatives and create a roadmap outlining key steps required to get the organisation to start enabling data-driven insights.

    Determine timing of the initiatives.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Establish clear direction for the data governance program.

    Step-by-step outline of how to create effective data governance, with true business-IT collaboration.

    Activities

    3.1 Evaluate and prioritise performance gaps.

    3.2 Develop and consolidate data governance target-state initiatives.

    3.3 Define the role of data governance: data domain to data governance role mapping.

    Outputs

    Target-state data governance initiatives

    Data domain to data governance role mapping

    4 Formulate a Plan to Get to Your Target State

    The Purpose

    Consolidate the roadmap and other strategies to determine the plan of action from day one.

    Create the required policies, procedures, and positions for data governance to be sustainable and effective.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Prioritised initiatives with dependencies mapped out.

    A clearly communicated plan for data governance that will have full business backing.

    Activities

    4.1 Identify and prioritise next steps.

    4.2 Define roles and responsibilities and complete a high-level RACI.

    4.3 Wrap-up and discuss next steps and post-workshop support.

    Outputs

    Initialised roadmap

    Initialised RACI

    Further reading

    Establish Data Governance

    Deliver measurable business value.

    Analyst Perspective

    Establish a data governance program that brings value to your organisation.

    Picture of analyst

    Data governance does not sit as an island on its own in the organisation – it must align with and be driven by your enterprise governance. As you build out data governance in your organisation, it's important to keep in mind that this program is meant to be an enabling framework of oversight and accountabilities for managing, handling, and protecting your company's data assets. It should never be perceived as bureaucratic or inhibiting to your data users. It should deliver agreed-upon models that are conducive to your organisation's operating culture, offering clarity on who can do what with the data and via what means. Data governance is the key enabler for bringing high-quality, trusted, secure, and discoverable data to the right users across your organisation. Promote and drive the responsible and ethical use of data while helping to build and foster an organisational culture of data excellence.

    Crystal Singh

    Director, Research & Advisory, Data & Analytics Practice

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    The amount of data within organisations is growing at an exponential rate, creating a need to adopt a formal approach to governing data. However, many organisations remain uninformed on how to effectively govern their data. Comprehensive data governance should define leadership, accountability, and responsibility related to data use and handling and be supported by a well-oiled operating model and relevant policies and procedures. This will help ensure the right data gets to the right people at the right time, using the right mechanisms.

    Common Obstacles

    Organisations are faced with challenges associated with changing data landscapes, evolving business models, industry disruptions, regulatory and compliance obligations, and changing and maturing user landscape and demand for data. Although the need for a data governance program is often evident, organisations miss the mark when their data governance efforts are not directly aligned to delivering measurable business value. Initiatives should support key strategic initiatives, as well as value streams and their underlying business capabilities.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    Info-Tech's approach to establishing and sustaining effective data governance is anchored in the strong alignment of organisational value streams and their business capabilities with key data governance dimensions and initiatives. Organisations should:

    • Align their data governance with enterprise governance, business strategy and value streams to ensure the program delivers measurable business value.
    • Understand their current data governance capabilities so as to build out a future state that is right-sized and relevant.
    • Define data leadership, accountability, and responsibility. Support these with an operating model that effectively manages change and communication and fosters a culture of data excellence.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your organisation's value streams and the associated business capabilities require effectively governed data. Without this, you face elevated operating costs, missed opportunities, eroded stakeholder satisfaction, and increased business risk.

    Your challenge

    This research is designed to help organisations build and sustain an effective data governance program.

    • Your organisation has recognised the need to treat data as a corporate asset for generating business value and/or managing and mitigating risk.
    • This has brought data governance to the forefront and highlighted the need to build a performance-driven enterprise program for delivering quality, trusted, and readily consumable data to users.
    • An effective data governance program is one that defines leadership, accountability. and responsibility related to data use and handling. It's supported by a well-oiled operating model and relevant policies and procedures, all of which help build and foster a culture of data excellence where the right users get access to the right data at the right time via the right mechanisms.

    As you embark on establishing data governance in your organisation, it's vital to ensure from the get-go that you define the drivers and business context for the program. Data governance should never be attempted without direction on how the program will yield measurable business value.

    'Data processing and cleanup can consume more than half of an analytics team's time, including that of highly paid data scientists, which limits scalability and frustrates employees.' – Petzold, et al., 2020

    Image is a circle graph and 30% of it is coloured with the number 30% in the middle of the graph

    'The productivity of employees across the organisation can suffer.' – Petzold, et al., 2020

    Respondents to McKinsey's 2019 Global Data Transformation Survey reported that an average of 30% of their total enterprise time was spent on non-value-added tasks because of poor data quality and availability. – Petzold, et al., 2020

    Common obstacles

    Some of the barriers that make data governance difficult to address for many organisations include:

    • Gaps in communicating the strategic value of data and data governance to the organisation. This is vital for securing senior leadership buy-in and support, which, in turn, is crucial for sustained success of the data governance program.
    • Misinterpretation or a lack of understanding about data governance, including what it means for the organisation and the individual data user.
    • A perception that data governance is inhibiting or an added layer of bureaucracy or complication rather than an enabling and empowering framework for stakeholders in their use and handling of data.
    • Embarking on data governance without firmly substantiating and understanding the organisational drivers for doing so. How is data governance going to support the organisation's value streams and their various business capabilities?
    • Neglecting to define and measure success and performance. Just as in any other enterprise initiative, you have to be able to demonstrate an ROI for time, resources and funding. These metrics must demonstrate the measurable business value that data governance brings to the organisation.
    • Failure to align data governance with enterprise governance.
    Image is a circle graph and 78% of it is coloured with the number 78% in the middle of the graph

    78% of companies (and 92% of top-tier companies) have a corporate initiative to become more data-driven. – Alation, 2020.

    Image is a circle graph and 58% of it is coloured with the number 58% in the middle of the graph

    But despite these ambitions, there appears to be a 'data culture disconnect' – 58% of leaders overestimate the current data culture of their enterprises, giving a grade higher than the one produced by the study. – Fregoni, 2020.

    The strategic value of data

    Power intelligent and transformative organisational performance through leveraging data.

    Respond to industry disruptors

    Optimise the way you serve your stakeholders and customers

    Develop products and services to meet ever-evolving needs

    Manage operations and mitigate risk

    Harness the value of your data

    The journey to being data-driven

    The journey to declaring that you are a data-driven organisation requires a pit stop at data enablement.

    The Data Economy

    Data Disengaged

    You have a low appetite for data and rarely use data for decision making.

    Data Enabled

    Technology, data architecture, and people and processes are optimised and supported by data governance.

    Data Driven

    You are differentiating and competing on data and analytics; described as a 'data first' organisation. You're collaborating through data. Data is an asset.

    Data governance is essential for any organisation that makes decisions about how it uses its data.

    Data governance is an enabling framework of decision rights, responsibilities, and accountabilities for data assets across the enterprise.

    Data governance is:

    • Executed according to agreed-upon models that describe who can take what actions with what information, when, and using what methods (Olavsrud, 2021).
    • True business-IT collaboration that will lead to increased consistency and confidence in data to support decision making. This, in turn, helps fuel innovation and growth.

    If done correctly, data governance is not:

    • An annoying, finger-waving roadblock in the way of getting things done.
    • Meant to solve all data-related business or IT problems in an organisation.
    • An inhibitor or impediment to using and sharing data.

    Info-Tech's Data Governance Framework

    An image of Info-Tech's Data Governance Framework

    Create impactful data governance by embedding it within enterprise governance

    A model is depicted to show the relationship between enterprise governance and data governance.

    Organisational drivers for data governance

    Data governance personas:

    Conformance: Establishing data governance to meet regulations and compliance requirements.

    Performance: Establishing data governance to fuel data-driven decision making for driving business value and managing and mitigating business risk.

    Two images are depicted that show the difference between conformance and performance.

    Data Governance is not a one-person show

    • Data governance needs a leader and a home. Define who is going to be leading, driving, and steering data governance in your organisation.
    • Senior executive leaders play a crucial role in championing and bringing visibility to the value of data and data governance. This is vital for building and fostering a culture of data excellence.
    • Effective data governance comes with business and IT alignment, collaboration, and formally defined roles around data leadership, ownership, and stewardship.
    Four circles are depicted. There is one person in the circle on the left and is labelled: Data Governance Leadership. The circle beside it has two people in it and labelled: Organisational Champions. The circle beside it has three people in it and labelled: Data Owners, Stewards & Custodians. The last circle has four people in it and labelled: The Organisation & Data Storytellers.

    Traditional data governance organisational structure

    A traditional structure includes committees and roles that span across strategic, tactical, and operational duties. There is no one-size-fits-all data governance structure. However, most organisations follow a similar pattern when establishing committees, councils, and cross-functional groups. Most organisations strive to identify roles and responsibilities at a strategic and operational level. Several factors will influence the structure of the program, such as the focus of the data governance project and the maturity and size of the organisation.

    A triangular model is depicted and is split into three tiers to show the traditional data governance organisational structure.

    A healthy data culture is key to amplifying the power of your data.

    'Albert Einstein is said to have remarked, "The world cannot be changed without changing our thinking." What is clear is that the greatest barrier to data success today is business culture, not lagging technology.' – Randy Bean, 2020

    What does it look like?

    • Everybody knows the data.
    • Everybody trusts the data.
    • Everybody talks about the data.

    'It is not enough for companies to embrace modern data architectures, agile methodologies, and integrated business-data teams, or to establish centres of excellence to accelerate data initiatives, when only about 1 in 4 executives reported that their organisation has successfully forged a data culture.'– Randy Bean, 2020

    Data literacy is an essential part of a data-driven culture

    • In a data-driven culture, decisions are made based on data evidence, not on gut instinct.
    • Data often has untapped potential. A data-driven culture builds tools and skills, builds users' trust in the condition and sources of data, and raises the data skills and understanding among their people on the front lines.
    • Building a data culture takes an ongoing investment of time, effort, and money. This investment will not achieve the transformation you want without data literacy at the grassroots level.

    Data-driven culture = 'data matters to our company'

    Despite investments in data initiative, organisations are carrying high levels of data debt

    Data debt is 'the accumulated cost that is associated with the sub-optimal governance of data assets in an enterprise, like technical debt.'

    Data debt is a problem for 78% of organisations.

    40% of organisations say individuals within the business do not trust data insights.

    66% of organisations say a backlog of data debt is impacting new data management initiatives.

    33% of organisations are not able to get value from a new system or technology investment.

    30% of organisations are unable to become data-driven.

    Source: Experian, 2020

    Absent or sub-optimal data governance leads to data debt

    Only 3% of companies' data meets basic quality standards. (Source: Nagle, et al., 2017)

    Organisations suspect 28% of their customer and prospect data is inaccurate in some way. (Source: Experian, 2020)

    Only 51% of organisations consider the current state of their CRM or ERP data to be clean, allowing them to fully leverage it. (Source: Experian, 2020)

    35% of organisations say they're not able to see a ROI for data management initiatives. (Source: Experian, 2020)

    Embrace the technology

    Make the available data governance tools and technology work for you:

    • Data catalogue
    • Business data glossary
    • Data lineage
    • Metadata management

    While data governance tools and technologies are no panacea, leverage their automated and AI-enabled capabilities to augment your data governance program.

    Logos of data governance tools and technology.

    Measure success to demonstrate tangible business value

    Put data governance into the context of the business:

    • Tie the value of data governance and its initiatives back to the business capabilities that are enabled.
    • Leverage the KPIs of those business capabilities to demonstrate tangible and measurable value. Use terms and language that will resonate with senior leadership.

    Don't let measurement be an afterthought:

    Start substantiating early on how you are going to measure success as your data governance program evolves.

    Build a right-sized roadmap

    Formulate an actionable roadmap that is right-sized to deliver value in your organisation.

    Key considerations:

    • When building your data governance roadmap, ensure you do so through an enterprise lens. Be cognizant of other initiatives that might be coming down the pipeline that may require you to align your data governance milestones accordingly.
    • Apart from doing your planning with consideration for other big projects or launches that might be in-flight and require the time and attention of your data governance partners, also be mindful of the more routine yet still demanding initiatives.
    • When doing your roadmapping, consider factors like the organisation's fiscal cycle, typical or potential year-end demands, and monthly/quarterly reporting periods and audits. Initiatives such as these are likely to monopolise the time and focus of personnel key to delivering on your data governance milestones.

    Sample milestones:

    Data Governance Leadership & Org Structure Definition

    Define the home for data governance and other key roles around ownership and stewardship, as approved by senior leadership.

    Data Governance Charter and Policies

    Create a charter for your program and build/refresh associated policies.

    Data Culture Diagnostic

    Understand the organisation's current data culture, perception of data, value of data, and knowledge gaps.

    Use Case Build and Prioritisation

    Build a use case that is tied to business capabilities. Prioritise accordingly.

    Business Data Glossary

    Build and/or refresh the business' glossary for addressing data definitions and standardisation issues.

    Tools & Technology

    Explore the tools and technology offering in the data governance space that would serve as an enabler to the program. (e.g. RFI, RFP).

    Key takeaways for effective business-driven data governance

    Data governance leadership and sponsorship is key.

    Ensure strategic business alignment.

    Build and foster a culture of data excellence.

    Evolve along the data journey.

    Make data governance an enabler, not a hindrance.

    Insight summary

    Overarching insight

    Your organisation's value streams and the associated business capabilities require effectively governed data. Without this, you face the impact of elevated operational costs, missed opportunities, eroded stakeholder satisfaction, and exposure to increased business risk.

    Insight 1

    Data governance should not sit as an island in your organisation. It must continuously align with the organisation's enterprise governance function. It shouldn't be perceived as a pet project of IT, but rather as an enterprise-wide, business-driven initiative.

    Insight 2

    Ensure your data governance program delivers measurable business value by aligning the associated data governance initiatives with the business architecture. Leverage the measures of success or KPIs of the underlying business capabilities to demonstrate the value data governance has yielded for the organisation.

    Insight 3

    Data governance remains the foundation of all forms of reporting and analytics. Advanced capabilities such as AI and machine learning require effectively governed data to fuel their success.

    Tactical insight

    Tailor your data literacy program to meet your organisation's needs, filling your range of knowledge gaps and catering to your different levels of stakeholders. When it comes to rolling out a data literacy program, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Your data literacy program is intended to fill the knowledge gaps about data, as they exist in your organisation. It should be targeted across the board – from your executive leadership and management through to the subject matter experts across different lines of the business in your organisation.

    Info-Tech's methodology for establishing data governance

    1. Build Business and User Context 2. Understand Your Current Data Governance Capabilities 3. Build a Target State Roadmap and Plan
    Phase Steps
    1. Substantiate Business Drivers
    2. Build High-Value Use Cases for Data Governance
    1. Understand the Key Components of Data Governance
    2. Gauge Your Organisation's Current Data Culture
    1. Formulate an Actionable Roadmap and Right-Sized Plan
    Phase Outcomes
    • Your organisation's business capabilities and value streams
    • A business capability map for your organisation
    • Categorisation of your organisation's key capabilities
    • A strategy map tied to data governance
    • High-value use cases for data governance
    • An understanding of the core components of an effective data governance program
    • An understanding your organisation's current data culture
    • A data governance roadmap and target-state plan comprising of prioritised initiatives

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    Screenshot of Info-Tech's Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook data-verified=

    Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook

    Use the Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook as you plan, build, roll out, and scale data governance in your organisation.

    Screenshot of Info-Tech's Data Use Case Framework Template

    Data Use Case Framework Template

    This template takes you through a business needs gathering activity to highlight and create relevant use cases around the organisation's data-related problems and opportunities.

    Screenshot of Info-Tech's Business Data Glossary data-verified=

    Business Data Glossary

    Use this template to document the key data assets that are to be governed and create a data flow diagram for your organisation.

    Screenshot of Info-Tech's Data Culture Diagnostic and Scorecard data-verified=

    Data Culture Diagnostic and Scorecard

    Leverage Info-Tech's Data Culture Diagnostic to understand how your organisation scores across 10 areas relating to data culture.

    Key deliverable:

    Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    Data Governance Initiative Planning and Roadmap Tool

    Leverage this tool to assess your current data governance capabilities and plot your target state accordingly.

    This tool will help you plan the sequence of activities, capture start dates and expected completion dates, and create a roadmap that can be effectively communicated to the organisation.

    Data Governance Program Charter Template

    This template will help get the backing required to get a data governance project rolling. The program charter will help communicate the project purpose, define the scope, and identify the project team, roles, and responsibilities.

    Data Governance Policy

    This policy establishes uniformed data governance standards and identifies the shared responsibilities for assuring the integrity of the data and that it efficiently and effectively serves the needs of your organisation

    Other Deliverables:

    • Data Governance Initiative Planning and Roadmap Tool
    • Data Governance Program Charter Template
    • Data Governance Policy

    Blueprint benefits

    Defined data accountability & responsibility

    Shared knowledge & common understanding of data assets

    Elevated trust & confidence in traceable data

    Improved data ROI & reduced data debt

    Support for ethical use and handling of data in a culture of excellence

    Measure the value of this blueprint

    Leverage this blueprint's approach to ensure your data governance initiatives align and support your key value streams and their business capabilities.

    • Aligning your data governance program and its initiatives to your organisation's business capabilities is vital for tracing and demonstrating measurable business value for the program.
    • This alignment of data governance with value streams and business capabilities enables you to use business-defined KPIs and demonstrate tangible value.
    Screenshot from this blueprint on the Measurable Business Value

    In phases 1 and 2 of this blueprint, we will help you establish the business context, define your business drivers and KPIs, and understand your current data governance capabilities and strengths.

    In phase 3, we will help you develop a plan and a roadmap for addressing any gaps and improving the relevant data governance capabilities so that data is well positioned to deliver on those defined business metrics.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    'Our team, has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.'

    Guided Implementation

    'Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keeps us on track.'

    Workshop

    'We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.'

    Consulting

    'Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.'

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

    Establish Data Governance project overview

    Contact your account representative for more information. workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    1. Build Business and User context2. Understand Your Current Data Governance Capabilities3. Build a Target State Roadmap and Plan
    Best-Practice Toolkit
    1. Substantiate Business Drivers
    2. Build High-Value Use Cases for Data Governance
    1. Understand the Key Components of Data Governance
    2. Gauge Your Organisation's Current Data Culture
    1. Formulate an Actionable Roadmap and Right-Sized Plan
    Guided Implementation
    • Call 1
    • Call 2
    • Call 3
    • Call 4
    • Call 5
    • Call 6
    • Call 7
    • Call 8
    • Call 9
    Phase Outcomes
    • Your organisation's business capabilities and value streams
    • A business capability map for your organisation
    • Categorisation of your organisation's key capabilities
    • A strategy map tied to data governance
    • High-value use cases for data governance
    • An understanding of the core components of an effective data governance program
    • An understanding your organisation's current data culture
    • A data governance roadmap and target-state plan comprising of prioritised initiatives

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    An outline of what guided implementation looks like.

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organisation. A typical GI is between 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

    Workshop overview

    Contact your account representative for more information. workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4
    Establish Business Context and Value Understand Current Data Governance Capabilities and Plot Target-State Levels Build Data Domain to Data Governance Role Mapping Formulate a Plan to Get to Your Target State
    Activities
    • Establish business context, value, and scope of data governance at the organisation
    • Introduction to Info-Tech's data governance framework
    • Discuss vision and mission for data governance
    • Understand your business architecture, including your business capability map and value streams
    • Build use cases aligned to core business capabilities
    • Understand your current data governance capabilities and maturity
    • Set target state data governance capabilities
    • Evaluate and prioritise performance gaps
    • Develop and consolidate data governance target-state initiatives
    • Define the role of data governance: data domain to data governance role mapping
    • Identify and prioritise next steps
    • Define roles and responsibilities and complete a high-level RACI
    • Wrap-up and discuss next steps and post-workshop support
    Deliverables
    1. Sample use cases (tied to the business capability map) and a repeatable use case framework
    2. Vision and mission for data governance
    1. Current state of data governance maturity
    2. Definition of target state
    1. Target-state data governance initiatives
    2. Data domain to data governance role mapping
    1. Initialised roadmap
    2. Initialised RACI
    3. Completed Business Data Glossary (BDG)

    Phase 1

    Build Business and User Context

    Three circles are in the image that list the three phases and the main steps. Phase 1 is highlighted.

    'When business users are invited to participate in the conversation around data with data users and IT, it adds a fundamental dimension — business context. Without a real understanding of how data ties back to the business, the value of analysis and insights can get lost.' – Jason Lim, Alation

    This phase will guide you through the following activities:

    • Identify Your Business Capabilities
    • Define your Organisation's Key Business Capabilities
    • Develop a Strategy Map that Aligns Business Capabilities to Your Strategic Focus

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Data Governance Leader/Data Leader (CDO)
    • Senior Business Leaders
    • Business SMEs
    • Data Leadership, Data Owners, Data Stewards and Custodians

    Step 1.1

    Substantiate Business Drivers

    Activities

    1.1.1 Identify Your Business Capabilities

    1.1.2 Categorise Your Organisation's Key Business Capabilities

    1.1.3 Develop a Strategy Map Tied to Data Governance

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Leverage your organisation's existing business capability map or initiate the formulation of a business capability map, guided by Info-Tech's approach
    • Determine which business capabilities are considered high priority by your organisation
    • Map your organisation's strategic objectives to value streams and capabilities to communicate how objectives are realised with the support of data

    Outcomes of this step

    • A foundation for data governance initiative planning that's aligned with the organisation's business architecture: value streams, business capability map, and strategy map

    Info-Tech Insight

    Gaining a sound understanding of your business architecture (value streams and business capabilities) is a critical foundation for establishing and sustaining a data governance program that delivers measurable business value.

    1.1.1 Identify Your Business Capabilities

    Confirm your organisation's existing business capability map or initiate the formulation of a business capability map:

    1. If you have an existing business capability map, meet with the relevant business owners/stakeholders to confirm that the content is accurate and up to date. Confirm the value streams (how your organisation creates and captures value) and their business capabilities are reflective of the organisation's current business environment.
    2. If you do not have an existing business capability map, follow this activity to initiate the formulation of a map (value streams and related business capabilities):
      1. Define the organisation's value streams. Meet with senior leadership and other key business stakeholders to define how your organisation creates and captures value.
      2. Define the relevant business capabilities. Meet with senior leadership and other key business stakeholders to define the business capabilities.

    Note: A business capability defines what a business does to enable value creation. Business capabilities are business terms defined using descriptive nouns such as 'Marketing' or 'Research and Development.' They represent stable business functions, are unique and independent of each other, and typically will have a defined business outcome.

    Input

    • List of confirmed value streams and their related business capabilities

    Output

    • Business capability map with value streams for your organisation

    Materials

    • Your existing business capability map or the template provided in the Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook accompanying this blueprint

    Participants

    • Key business stakeholders
    • Data stewards
    • Data custodians
    • Data Governance Working Group

    For more information, refer to Info-Tech's Document Your Business Architecture.

    Define or validate the organisation's value streams

    Value streams connect business goals to the organisation's value realisation activities. These value realisation activities, in turn, depend on data.

    If the organisation does not have a business architecture function to conduct and guide Activity 1.1.1, you can leverage the following approach:

    • Meet with key stakeholders regarding this topic, then discuss and document your findings.
    • When trying to identify the right stakeholders, consider: Who are the decision makers and key influencers? Who will impact this piece of business architecture related work? Who has the relevant skills, competencies, experience, and knowledge about the organisation?
    • Engage with these stakeholders to define and validate how the organisation creates value.
    • Consider:
      • Who are your main stakeholders? This will depend on the industry in which you operate. For example, customers, residents, citizens, constituents, students, patients.
      • What are your stakeholders looking to accomplish?
      • How does your organisation's products and/or services help them accomplish that?
      • What are the benefits your organisation delivers to them and how does your organisation deliver those benefits?
      • How do your stakeholders receive those benefits?

    Align data governance to the organisation's value realisation activities.

    Value streams enable the organisation to create or capture value in the market in which it operates by engaging in a set of interconnected activities.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your organisation's value streams and the associated business capabilities require effectively governed data. Without this, you face the possibilities of elevated operational costs, missed opportunities, eroded stakeholder satisfaction, negative impact to reputation and brand, and/or increased exposure to business risk.

    Example of value streams – Retail Banking

    Value streams connect business goals to the organisation's value realisation activities.

    Example value stream descriptions for: Retail Banking

    Value streams enable the organisation to create or capture value in the market in which it operates by engaging in a set of interconnected activities.

    Model example of value streams for retail banking.

    For this value stream, download Info-Tech's Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Retail Banking.

    Example of value streams – Higher Education

    Value streams connect business goals to the organisation's value realisation activities.

    Example value stream descriptions for: Higher Education

    Value streams enable the organisation to create or capture value in the market in which it operates by engaging in a set of interconnected activities.

    Model example of value streams for higher education

    For this value stream, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Higher Education.

    Example of value streams – Local Government

    Value streams connect business goals to the organisation's value realisation activities.

    Example value stream descriptions for: Local Government

    Value streams enable the organisation to create or capture value in the market in which it operates by engaging in a set of interconnected activities.

    Model example of value streams for local government

    For this value stream, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Local Government.

    Example of value streams – Manufacturing

    Value streams connect business goals to the organisation's value realisation activities.

    Example value stream descriptions for: Manufacturing

    Value streams enable the organisation to create or capture value in the market in which it operates by engaging in a set of interconnected activities.

    Model example of value streams for manufacturing

    For this value stream, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Manufacturing.

    Example of value streams – Retail

    Value streams connect business goals to the organisation's value realisation activities.

    Example value stream descriptions for: Retail

    Model example of value streams for retail

    Value streams enable the organisation to create or capture value in the market in which it operates by engaging in a set of interconnected activities.

    For this value stream, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Retail.

    Define the organisation's business capabilities in a business capability map

    A business capability defines what a business does to enable value creation. Business capabilities represent stable business functions and typically will have a defined business outcome.

    Business capabilities can be thought of as business terms defined using descriptive nouns such as 'Marketing' or 'Research and Development.'

    If your organisation doesn't already have a business capability map, you can leverage the following approach to build one. This initiative requires a good understanding of the business. By working with the right stakeholders, you can develop a business capability map that speaks a common language and accurately depicts your business.

    Working with the stakeholders as described above:

    • Analyse the value streams to identify and describe the organisation's capabilities that support them.
    • Consider: What is the objective of your value stream? (This can highlight which capabilities support which value stream.)
    • As you initiate your engagement with your stakeholders, don't start a blank page. Leverage the examples on the next slides as a starting point for your business capability map.
    • When using these examples, consider: What are the activities that make up your particular business? Keep the ones that apply to your organisation, remove the ones that don't, and add any needed.

    Align data governance to the organisation's value realisation activities.

    Info-Tech Insight

    A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organisation's business capabilities and hence represents a view of what your data governance program must support.

    For more information, refer to Info-Tech's Document Your Business Architecture.

    Example business capability map – Retail Banking

    A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organisation's business capabilities and hence represents a view of what your data governance program must support.

    Validate your business capability map with the right stakeholders, including your executive team, business unit leaders, and/or other key stakeholders.

    Info-Tech Tip:

    Leverage your business capability map verification session with these key stakeholders as a prime opportunity to share and explain the role of data and data governance in supporting the very value realisation capabilities under discussion. This will help to build awareness and visibility of the data governance program.

    Example business capability map for: Retail Banking

    Model example business capability map for retail banking

    For this business capability map, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Retail Banking.

    Example business capability map – Higher Education

    A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organisation's business capabilities and hence represents a view of what your data governance program must support.

    Validate your business capability map with the right stakeholders, including your executive team, business unit leaders, and/or other key stakeholders.

    Info-Tech Tip:

    Leverage your business capability map verification session with these key stakeholders as a prime opportunity to share and explain the role of data and data governance in supporting the very value realisation capabilities under discussion. This will help to build awareness and visibility of the data governance program.

    Example business capability map for: Higher Education

    Model example business capability map for higher education

    For this business capability map, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Higher Education.

    Example business capability map – Local Government

    A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organisation's business capabilities and hence represents a view of what your data governance program must support.

    Validate your business capability map with the right stakeholders, including your executive team, business unit leaders, and/or other key stakeholders.

    Info-Tech Tip:

    Leverage your business capability map verification session with these key stakeholders as a prime opportunity to share and explain the role of data and data governance in supporting the very value realisation capabilities under discussion. This will help to build awareness and visibility of the data governance program.

    Example business capability map for: Local Government

    Model example business capability map for local government

    For this business capability map, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Local Government.

    Example business capability map – Manufacturing

    A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organisation's business capabilities and hence represents a view of what your data governance program must support.

    Validate your business capability map with the right stakeholders, including your executive team, business unit leaders, and/or other key stakeholders.

    Info-Tech Tip:

    Leverage your business capability map verification session with these key stakeholders as a prime opportunity to share and explain the role of data and data governance in supporting the very value realisation capabilities under discussion. This will help to build awareness and visibility of the data governance program.

    Example business capability map for: Manufacturing

    Model example business capability map for manufacturing

    For this business capability map, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Manufacturing.

    Example business capability map - Retail

    A business capability map can be thought of as a visual representation of your organisation's business capabilities and hence represents a view of what your data governance program must support.

    Validate your business capability map with the right stakeholders, including your executive team, business unit leaders, and/or other key stakeholders.

    Info-Tech Tip:

    Leverage your business capability map verification session with these key stakeholders as a prime opportunity to share and explain the role of data and data governance in supporting the very value realisation capabilities under discussion. This will help to build awareness and visibility of the data governance program.

    Example business capability map for: Retail

    Model example business capability map for retail

    For this business capability map, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Retail.

    1.1.2 Categorise Your Organisation's Key Capabilities

    Determine which capabilities are considered high priority in your organisation.

    1. Categorise or heatmap the organisation's key capabilities. Consult with senior and other key business stakeholders to categorise and prioritise the business' capabilities. This will aid in ensuring your data governance future state planning is aligned with the mandate of the business. One approach to prioritising capabilities with business stakeholders is to examine them through the lens of cost advantage creators, competitive advantage differentiators, and/or by high value/high risk.
    2. Identify cost advantage creators. Focus on capabilities that drive a cost advantage for your organisation. Highlight these capabilities and prioritise programs that support them.
    3. Identify competitive advantage differentiators. Focus on capabilities that give your organisation an edge over rivals or other players in your industry.

    This categorisation/prioritisation exercise helps highlight prime areas of opportunity for building use cases, determining prioritisation, and the overall optimisation of data and data governance.

    Input

    • Strategic insight from senior business stakeholders on the business capabilities that drive value for the organisation

    Output

    • Business capabilities categorised and prioritised (e.g. cost advantage creators, competitive advantage differentiators, high value/high risk)

    Materials

    • Your existing business capability map or the business capability map derived in the previous activity

    Participants

    • Key business stakeholders
    • Data stewards
    • Data custodians
    • Data Governance Working Group

    For more information, refer to Info-Tech's Document Your Business Architecture.

    Example of business capabilities categorisation or heatmapping – Retail

    This exercise is useful in ensuring the data governance program is focused and aligned to support the priorities and direction of the business.

    • Depending on the mandate from the business, priority may be on developing cost advantage. Hence the capabilities that deliver efficiency gains are the ones considered to be cost advantage creators.
    • The business' priority may be on maintaining or gaining a competitive advantage over its industry counterparts. Differentiation might be achieved in delivering unique or enhanced products, services, and/or experiences, and the focus will tend to be on the capabilities that are more end-stakeholder-facing (e.g. customer-, student-, patient,- and/or constituent-facing). These are the organisation's competitive advantage creators.

    Example: Retail

    Example of business capabilities categorisation or heatmapping – Retail

    For this business capability map, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Retail.

    1.1.3 Develop a Strategy Map Tied to Data Governance

    Identify the strategic objectives for the business. Knowing the key strategic objectives will drive business-data governance alignment. It's important to make sure the right strategic objectives of the organisation have been identified and are well understood.

    1. Meet with senior business leaders and other relevant stakeholders to help identify and document the key strategic objectives for the business.
    2. Leverage their knowledge of the organisation's business strategy and strategic priorities to visually represent how these map to value streams, business capabilities, and, ultimately, to data and data governance needs and initiatives. Tip: Your map is one way to visually communicate and link the business strategy to other levels of the organisation.
    3. Confirm the strategy mapping with other relevant stakeholders.

    Guide to creating your map: Starting with strategic objectives, map the value streams that will ultimately drive them. Next, link the key capabilities that enable each value stream. Then map the data and data governance to initiatives that support those capabilities. This is one approach to help you prioritise the data initiatives that deliver the most value to the organisation.

    Input

    • Strategic objectives as outlined by the organisation's business strategy and confirmed by senior leaders

    Output

    • A strategy map that maps your organisational strategic objectives to value streams, business capabilities, and, ultimately, to data program

    Materials

    Participants

    • Key business stakeholders
    • Data stewards
    • Data custodians
    • Data Governance Working Group

    Download Info-Tech's Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook

    Example of a strategy map tied to data governance

    • Strategic objectives are the outcomes that the organisation is looking to achieve.
    • Value streams enable an organisation to create and capture value in the market through interconnected activities that support strategic objectives.
    • Business capabilities define what a business does to enable value creation in value streams.
    • Data capabilities and initiatives are descriptions of action items on the data and data governance roadmap and which will enable one or multiple business capabilities in its desired target state.

    Info-Tech Tip:

    Start with the strategic objectives, then map the value streams that will ultimately drive them. Next, link the key capabilities that enable each value stream. Then map the data and data governance initiatives that support those capabilities. This process will help you prioritise the data initiatives that deliver the most value to the organisation.

    Example: Retail

    Example of a strategy map tied to data governance for retail

    For this strategy map, download Info-Tech's Industry Reference Architecture for Retail.

    Step 1.2

    Build High-Value Use Cases for Data Governance

    Activities

    1.2.1 Build High-Value Use Cases

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Leveraging your categorised business capability map to conduct deep-dive sessions with key business stakeholders for creating high-value uses cases
    • Discussing current challenges, risks, and opportunities associated with the use of data across the lines of business
    • Exploring which other business capabilities, stakeholder groups, and business units will be impacted

    Outcomes of this step

    • Relevant use cases that articulate the data-related challenges, needs, or opportunities that are clear and contained and, if addressed ,will deliver value to the organisation

    Info-Tech Tip

    One of the most important aspects when building use cases is to ensure you include KPIs or measures of success. You have to be able to demonstrate how the use case ties back to the organisational priorities or delivers measurable business value. Leverage the KPIs and success factors of the business capabilities tied to each particular use case.

    1.2.1 Build High-Value Use Cases

    This business needs-gathering activity will highlight and create relevant use cases around data-related problems or opportunities that are clear and contained and, if addressed, will deliver value to the organisation.

    1. Bring together key business stakeholders (data owner, stewards, SMEs) from a particular line of business as well as the relevant data custodian(s) to build cases for their units. Leverage the business capability map you created for facilitating this act.
    2. Leverage Info-Tech's framework for data requirements and methodology for creating use cases, as outlined in the Data Use Case Framework Template and seen on the next slide.
    3. Have the stakeholders move through each breakout session outlined in the Use Case Worksheet. Use flip charts or a whiteboard to brainstorm and document their thoughts.
    4. Debrief and document results in the Data Use Case Framework Template.
    5. Repeat this exercise with as many lines of the business as possible, leveraging your business capability map to guide your progress and align with business value.

    Tip: Don't conclude these use case discussions without substantiating what measures of success will be used to demonstrate the business value of the effort to produce the desired future state, as relevant to each particular use case.

    This business needs-gathering activity will highlight and create relevant use cases around data-related problems or opportunities that are clear and contained and, if addressed, will deliver value to the organisation.

    1. Bring together key business stakeholders (data owner, stewards, SMEs) from a particular line of business as well the relevant data custodian(s) to build cases for their units. Leverage the business capability map you created for facilitating this act.
    2. Leverage Info-Tech's framework for data requirements and methodology for creating use cases, as outlined in the Data Use Case Framework Template and seen on the next slide.
    3. Have the stakeholders move through each breakout session outlined in the Use Case Worksheet. Use flip charts or a whiteboard to brainstorm and document their thoughts.
    4. Debrief and document results in the Data Use Case Framework Template
    5. Repeat this exercise with as many lines of the business as possible, leveraging your business capability map to guide your progress and align with business value.

    Tip: Don't conclude these use case discussions without substantiating what measures of success will be used to demonstrate the business value of the effort to produce the desired future state, as relevant to each particular use case.

    Input

    • Value streams and business capabilities as defined by business leaders
    • Business stakeholders' subject area expertise
    • Data custodian systems, integration, and data knowledge

    Output

    • Use cases that articulate data-related challenges, needs or opportunities that are tied to defined business capabilities and hence if addressed will deliver measurable value to the organisation.

    Materials

    • Your business capability map from activity 1.1.1
    • Info-Tech's Data Use Case Framework Template
    • Whiteboard or flip charts (or shared screen if working remotely)
    • Markers/pens

    Participants

    • Key business stakeholders
    • Data stewards and business SMEs
    • Data custodians
    • Data Governance Working Group

    Download Info-Tech's Data Use Case Framework Template

    Info-Tech's Framework for Building Use Cases

    Objective: This business needs-gathering activity will highlight and create relevant use cases around data-related problems or opportunities that are clear and contained and, if addressed, will deliver value to the organisation.

    Leveraging your business capability map, build use cases that align with the organisation's key business capabilities.

    Consider:

    • Is the business capability a cost advantage creator or an industry differentiator?
    • Is the business capability currently underserved by data?
    • Does this need to be addressed? If so, is this risk- or value-driven?

    Info-Tech's Data Requirements and Mapping Methodology for Creating Use Cases

    1. What business capability (or capabilities) is this use case tied to for your business area(s)?
    2. What are your data-related challenges in performing this today?
    3. What are the steps in this process/activity today?
    4. What are the applications/systems used at each step today?
    5. What data domains are involved, created, used, and/or transformed at each step today?
    6. What does an ideal or improved state look like?
    7. What other business units, business capabilities, activities, and/or processes will be impacted or improved if this issue was solved?
    8. Who are the stakeholders impacted by these changes? Who needs to be consulted?
    9. What are the risks to the organisation (business capability, revenue, reputation, customer loyalty, etc.) if this is not addressed?
    10. What compliance, regulatory, and/or policy concerns do we need to consider in any solution?
    11. What measures of success or change should we use to prove the value of the effort (such as KPIs, ROI)? What is the measurable business value of doing this?

    The resulting use cases are to be prioritised and leveraged for informing the business case and the data governance capabilities optimisation plan.

    Taken from Info-Tech's Data Use Case Framework Template

    Phase 2

    Understand Your Current Data Governance Capabilities

    Three circles are in the image that list the three phases and the main steps. Phase 2 is highlighted.

    This phase will guide you through the following activities:

    • Understand the Key Components of Data Governance
    • Gauge Your Organisation's Current Data Culture

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Data Leadership
    • Data Ownership & Stewardship
    • Policies & Procedures
    • Data Literacy & Culture
    • Operating Model
    • Data Management
    • Data Privacy & Security
    • Enterprise Projects & Services

    Step 2.1

    Understand the Key Components of Data Governance

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Understanding the core components of an effective data governance program and determining your organisation's current capabilities in these areas:
      • Data Leadership
      • Data Ownership & Stewardship
      • Policies & Procedures
      • Data Literacy & Culture
      • Operating Model
      • Data Management
      • Data Privacy & Security
      • Enterprise Projects & Services

    Outcomes of this step

    • An understanding of the core components of an effective data governance program
    • An understanding your organisation's current data governance capabilities

    Leverage Info-Tech's: Data Governance Initiative Planning and Roadmap Tool to assess your current data governance capabilities and plot your target state accordingly.

    This tool will help your organisation plan the sequence of activities, capture start dates and expected completion dates, and create a roadmap that can be effectively communicated to the organisation.

    Review: Info-Tech's Data Governance Framework

    An image of Info-Tech's Data Governance Framework

    Key components of data governance

    A well-defined data governance program will deliver:

    • Defined accountability and responsibility for data.
    • Improved knowledge and common understanding of the organisation's data assets.
    • Elevated trust and confidence in traceable data.
    • Improved data ROI and reduced data debt.
    • An enabling framework for supporting the ethical use and handling of data.
    • A foundation for building and fostering a data-driven and data-literate organisational culture.

    The key components of establishing sustainable enterprise data governance, taken from Info-Tech's Data Governance Framework:

    • Data Leadership
    • Data Ownership & Stewardship
    • Operating Model
    • Policies & Procedures
    • Data Literacy & Culture
    • Data Management
    • Data Privacy & Security
    • Enterprise Projects & Services

    Data Leadership

    • Data governance needs a dedicated head or leader to steer the organisation's data governance program.
    • For organisations that do have a chief data officer (CDO), their office is the ideal and effective home for data governance.
    • Heads of data governance also have titles such as director of data governance, director of data quality, and director of analytics.
    • The head of your data governance program works with all stakeholders and partners to ensure there is continuous enterprise governance alignment and oversight and to drive the program's direction.
    • While key stakeholders from the business and IT will play vital data governance roles, the head of data governance steers the various components, stakeholders, and initiatives, and provides oversight of the overall program.
    • Vital data governance roles include: data owners, data stewards, data custodians, data governance steering committee (or your organisation's equivalent), and any data governance working group(s).

    The role of the CDO: the voice of data

    The office of the chief data officer (CDO):

    • Has a cross-organisational vision and strategy for data.
    • Owns and drives the data strategy; ensures it supports the overall organisational strategic direction and business goals.
    • Leads the organisational data initiatives, including data governance
    • Is accountable for the policy, strategy, data standards, and data literacy necessary for the organisation to operate effectively.
    • Educates users and leaders about what it means to be 'data-driven.'
    • Builds and fosters a culture of data excellence.

    'Compared to most of their C-suite colleagues, the CDO is faced with a unique set of problems. The role is still being defined. The chief data officer is bringing a new dimension and focus to the organisation: "data." '
    – Carruthers and Jackson, 2020

    Who does the CDO report to?

    Example reporting structure.
    • The CDO should be a true C- level executive.
    • Where the organisation places the CDO role in the structure sends an important signal to the business about how much it values data.

    'The title matters. In my opinion, you can't have a CDO without executive authority. Otherwise no one will listen.'

    – Anonymous European CDO

    'The reporting structure depends on who's the 'glue' that ties together all these uniquely skilled individuals.'

    – John Kemp, Senior Director, Executive Services, Info-Tech Research Group

    Data Ownership & Stewardship

    Who are best suited to be data owners?

    • Wherever they may sit in your organisation, data owners will typically have the highest stake in that data.
    • Data owners needs to be suitably senior and have the necessary decision-making power.
    • They have the highest interest in the related business data domain, whether they are the head of a business unit or the head of a line of business that produces data or consumes data (or both).
    • If they are neither of these, it's unlikely they will have the interest in the data (in terms of its quality, protection, ethical use, and handling, for instance) necessary to undertake and adopt the role effectively.

    Data owners are typically senior business leaders with the following characteristics:

    • Positioned to accept accountability for their data domain.
    • Hold authority and influence to affect change, including across business processes and systems, needed to improve data quality, use, handling, integration, etc.
    • Have access to a budget and resources for data initiatives such as resolving data quality issues, data cleansing initiatives, business data catalogue build, related tools and technology, policy management, etc.
    • Hold the influence needed to drive change in behaviour and culture.
    • Act as ambassadors of data and its value as an organisational strategic asset.

    Right-size your data governance organisational structure

    • Most organisations strive to identify roles and responsibilities at a strategic, and operational level. Several factors will influence the structure of the program such as the focus of the data governance project as well as the maturity and size of the organisation.
    • Your data governance structure has to work for your organisation, and it has to evolve as the organisation evolves.
    • Formulate your blend of data governance roles, committees, councils, and cross-functional groups, that make sense for your organisation.
    • Your data governance organisational structure should not add complexity or bureaucracy to your organisation's data landscape; it should support and enable your principle of treating data as an asset.

    There is no one-size-fits-all data governance organisational structure.

    Example of a Data Governance Organisational Structure

    Critical roles and responsibilities for data governance

    Data Governance Working Groups

    Data governance working groups:

    • Are cross-functional teams
    • Deliver on data governance projects, initiatives, and ad hoc review committees.

    Data Stewards

    Traditionally, data stewards:

    • Serve on an operational level addressing issues related to adherence to standards/procedures, monitoring data quality, raising issues identified, etc.
    • Are responsible for managing access, quality, escalating issues, etc.

    Data Custodians

    • Traditionally, data custodians:
    • Serve on an operational level addressing issues related to data and database administration.
    • Support the management of access, data quality, escalating issues, etc.
    • Are SMEs from IT and database administration.

    Example: Business capabilities to data owner and data stewards mapping for a selected data domain

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your organisation's value streams and the associated business capabilities require effectively governed data. Without this, you face elevated operational costs, missed opportunities, eroded stakeholder satisfaction, and exposure to increased business risk.

    Enabling business capabilities with data governance role definitions

    Example: Business capabilities to data owner and data stewards mapping for a selected data domain

    Operating Model

    Your operating model is the key to designing and operationalizing a form of data governance that delivers measurable business value to your organisation.

    'Generate excitement for data: When people are excited and committed to the vision of data enablement, they're more likely to help ensure that data is high quality and safe.' – Petzold, et al., 2020

    Operating Model

    Defining your data governance operating model will help create a well-oiled program that sustainably delivers value to the organisation and manages risks while building and fostering a culture of data excellence along the way. Some organisations are able to establish a formal data governance office, whether independent or attached to the office of the chief data officer. Regardless of how you are organised, data governance requires a home, a leader, and an operating model to ensure its sustainability and evolution.

    Examples of focus areas for your operating model:

    • Delivery: While there are core tenets to every data governance program, there is a level of variability in the implementation of data governance programs across organisations, sectors, and industries. Every organisation has its own particular drivers and mandates, so the level and rigour applied will also vary.
    • The key is to determine what style will work best in your organisation, taking into consideration your organisational culture, executive leadership support (present and ongoing), catalysts such as other enterprise-wide transformative and modernisation initiatives, and/or regulatory and compliances drivers.

    • Communication: Communication is vital across all levels and stakeholder groups. For instance, there needs to be communication from the data governance office up to senior leadership, as well as communication within the data governance organisation, which is typically made up of the data governance steering committee, data governance council, executive sponsor/champion, data stewards, and data custodians and working groups.
    • Furthermore, communication with the wider organisation of data producers, users, and consumers is one of the core elements of the overall data governance communications plan.

    Communication is vital for ensuring acceptance of new processes, rules, guidelines, and technologies by all data producers and users as well as for sharing success stories of the program.

    Operating Model

    Tie the value of data governance and its initiatives back to the business capabilities that are enabled.

    'Leading organisations invest in change management to build data supporters and convert the sceptics. This can be the most difficult part of the program, as it requires motivating employees to use data and encouraging producers to share it (and ideally improve its quality at the source)[.]' – Petzold, et al., 2020

    Operating Model

    Examples of focus areas for your operating model (continued):

    • Change management and issue resolution: Data governance initiatives will very likely bring about a level of organisational disruption, with governance recommendations and future state requiring potentially significant business change. This may include a redesign of a substantial number of data processes affecting various business units, which will require tweaking the organisation's culture, thought processes, and procedures surrounding its data.
    • Preparing people for change well in advance will allow them to take the steps necessary to adapt and reduce potential confrontation. By planning for and efficiently communicating any changes that a data governance initiative may bring, many initial issues can be resolved from the outset.

      Attempting to implement change without an effective communications plan can result in disagreements over data control and stalemates between stakeholder units. The recommendations of the governance group must reflect the needs of all stakeholders or there will be pushback.

    • Performance measuring, monitoring and reporting: Measuring and reporting on performance, successes, and realisation of tangible business value are a must for sustaining, growing, and scaling your data governance program.
    • Aligning your data governance to the organisation's value realisation activities enables you to leverage the KPIs of those business capabilities to demonstrate tangible and measurable value. Use terms and language that will resonate with your senior business leadership.

    Info-Tech Tip:

    Launching a data governance program will bring with it a level of disruption to the culture of the organisation. That disruption doesn't have to be detrimental if you are prepared to manage the change proactively and effectively.

    Policies, Procedures & Standards

    'Data standards are the rules by which data are described and recorded. In order to share, exchange, and understand data, we must standardise the format as well as the meaning.' – U.S. Geological Survey

    Policies, Procedures & Standards

    • When defining, updating, or refreshing your data policies, procedures, and standards, ensure they are relevant, serve a purpose, and/or support the use of data in the organisation.
    • Avoid the common pitfall of building out a host of policies, procedures, and standards that are never used or followed by users and therefore don't bring value or serve to mitigate risk for the organisation.
    • Data policies can be thought of as formal statements and are typically created, approved, and updated by the organisation's data decision-making body (such as a data governance steering committee).
    • Data standards and procedures function as actions, or rules, that support the policies and their statements.
    • Standards and procedures are designed to standardise the processes during the overall data lifecycle. Procedures are instructions to achieve the objectives of the policies. The procedures are iterative and will be updated with approval from your data governance committee as needed.
    • Your organisation's data policies, standards, and procedures should not bog down or inhibit users; rather, they should enable confident data use and handling across the overall data lifecycle. They should support more effective and seamless data capture, integration, aggregation, sharing, and retention of data in the organisation.

    Examples of data policies:

    • Data Classification Policy
    • Data Retention Policy
    • Data Entry Policy
    • Data Backup Policy
    • Data Provenance Policy
    • Data Management Policy

    See Info-Tech's Data Governance Policy Template: This policy establishes uniformed data governance standards and identifies the shared responsibilities for assuring the integrity of the data and that it efficiently and effectively serves the needs of your organisation.

    Data Domain Documentation

    Select the correct granularity for your business need

    Diagram of data domain documentation
    Sources: Dataversity; Atlan; Analytics8

    Data Domain Documentation Examples

    Data Domain Documentation Examples

    Data Culture

    'Organisational culture can accelerate the application of analytics, amplify its power, and steer companies away from risky outcomes.' – Petzold, et al., 2020

    A healthy data culture is key to amplifying the power of your data and to building and sustaining an effective data governance program.

    What does a healthy data culture look like?

    • Everybody knows the data.
    • Everybody trusts the data.
    • Everybody talks about the data.

    Building a culture of data excellence.

    Leverage Info-Tech's Data Culture Diagnostic to understand your organisation's culture around data.

    Screenshot of Data Culture Scorecard

    Contact your Info-Tech Account Representative for more information on the Data Culture Diagnostic

    Cultivating a data-driven culture is not easy

    'People are at the heart of every culture, and one of the biggest challenges to creating a data culture is bringing everyone into the fold.' – Lim, Alation

    It cannot be purchased or manufactured,

    It must be nurtured and developed,

    And it must evolve as the business, user, and data landscapes evolve.

    'Companies that have succeeded in their data-driven efforts understand that forging a data culture is a relentless pursuit, and magic bullets and bromides do not deliver results.' – Randy Bean, 2020

    Hallmarks of a data-driven culture

    There is a trusted, single source of data the whole company can draw from.

    There's a business glossary and data catalogue and users know what the data fields mean.

    Users have access to data and analytics tools. Employees can leverage data immediately to resolve a situation, perform an activity, or make a decision – including frontline workers.

    Data literacy, the ability to collect, manage, evaluate, and apply data in a critical manner, is high.

    Data is used for decision making. The company encourages decisions based on objective data and the intelligent application of it.

    A data-driven culture requires a number of elements:

    • High-quality data
    • Broad access and data literacy
    • Data-driven decision-making processes
    • Effective communication

    Data Literacy

    Data literacy is an essential part of a data-driven culture.

    • Building a data-driven culture takes an ongoing investment of time, effort, and money.
    • This investment will not realise its full return without building up the organisation's data literacy.
    • Data literacy is about filling data knowledge gaps across all levels of the organisation.
    • It's about ensuring all users – senior leadership right through to core users – are equipped with appropriate levels of training, skills, understanding, and awareness around the organisation's data and the use of associated tools and technologies. Data literacy ensures users have the data they need and they know how to interpret and leverage it.
    • Data literacy drives the appetite, demand, and consumption for data.
    • A data-literate culture is one where the users feel confident and skilled in their use of data, leveraging it for making informed or evidence-based decisions and generating insights for the organisation.

    Data Management

    • Data governance serves as an enabler to all of the core components that make up data management:
      • Data quality management
      • Data architecture management
      • Data platform
      • Data integration
      • Data operations management
      • Data risk management
      • Reference and master data management (MDM)
      • Document and content management
      • Metadata management
      • Business intelligence (BI), reporting, analytics and advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML)
    • Key tools such as the business data glossary and data catalogue are vital for operationalizing data governance and in supporting data management disciplines such as data quality management, metadata management, and MDM as well as BI, reporting, and analytics.

    Enterprise Projects & Services

    • Data governance serves as an enabler to enterprise projects and services that require, use, share, sell, and/or rely on data for their viability and, ultimately, their success.
    • Folding or embedding data governance into the organisation's project management function or project management office (PMO) serves to ensure that, for any initiative, suitable consideration is given to how data is treated.
    • This may include defining parameters, following standards and procedures around bringing in new sources of data, integrating that data into the organisation's data ecosystem, using and sharing that data, and retaining that data post-project completion.
    • The data governance function helps to identify and manage any ethical issues, whether at the start of the project and/or throughout.
    • It provides a foundation for asking relevant questions as it relates to the use or incorporation of data in delivering the specific project or service. Do we know where the data obtained from? Do we have rights to use that data? Are there legislations, policies, or regulations that guide or dictate how that data can be used? What are the positive effects, negative impacts, and/or risks associated with our intended use of that data? Are we positioned to mitigate those risks?
    • Mature data governance creates organisations where the above considerations around data management and the ethical use and handling of data is routinely implemented across the business and in the rollout and delivery of projects and services.

    Data Privacy & Security

    • Data governance supports the organisation's data privacy and security functions.
    • Key tools include the data classification policy and standards and defined roles around data ownership and data stewardship. These are vital for operationalizing data governance and supporting data privacy, security, and the ethical use and handling of data.
    • While some organisations may have a dedicated data security and privacy group, data governance provides an added level of oversight in this regard.
    • Some of the typical checks and balances include ensuring:
      • There are policies and procedures in place to restrict and monitor staff's access to data (one common way this is done is according to job descriptions and responsibilities) and that these comply with relevant laws and regulations.
      • There's a data classification scheme in place where data has been classified on a hierarchy of sensitivity (e.g. top secret, confidential, internal, limited, public).
      • The organisation has a comprehensive data security framework, including administrative, physical, and technical procedures for addressing data security issues (e.g. password management and regular training).
      • Risk assessments are conducted, including an evaluation of risks and vulnerabilities related to intentional and unintentional misuse of data.
      • Policies and procedures are in place to mitigate the risks associated with incidents such as data breaches.
      • The organisation regularly audits and monitors its data security.

    Ethical Use & Handling of Data

    Data governance will support your organisation's ethical use and handling of data by facilitating definition around important factors, such as:

    • What are the various data assets in the organisation and what purpose(s) can they be used for? Are there any limitations?
    • Who is the related data owner? Who holds accountability for that data? Who will be answerable?
    • Where was the data obtained from? What is the intended use of that data? Do you have rights to use that data? Are there legislations, policies, or regulations that guide or dictate how that data can be used?
    • What are the positive effects, negative impacts, and/or risks associated with the use of that data?

    Ethical Use & Handling of Data

    • Data governance serves as an enabler to the ethical use and handling of an organisation's data.
    • The Open Data Institute (ODI) defines data ethics as: 'A branch of ethics that evaluates data practices with the potential to adversely impact on people and society – in data collection, sharing and use.'
    • Data ethics relates to good practice around how data is collected, used and shared. It's especially relevant when data activities have the potential to impact people and society, whether directly or indirectly (Open Data Institute, 2019).
    • A failure to handle and use data ethically can negatively impact an organisation's direct stakeholders and/or the public at large, lead to a loss of trust and confidence in the organisation's products and services, lead to financial loss, and impact the organisation's brand, reputation, and legal standing.
    • Data governance plays a vital role is building and managing your data assets, knowing what data you have, and knowing the limitations of that data. Data ownership, data stewardship, and your data governance decision-making body are key tenets and foundational components of your data governance. They enable an organisation to define, categorise, and confidently make decisions about its data.

    Step 2.2

    Gauge Your Organisation's Current Data Culture

    Activities

    2.2.1 Gauge Your Organisation's Current Data Culture

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Conduct a data culture survey or leverage Info-Tech's Data Culture Diagnostic to increase your understanding of your organisation's data culture

    Outcomes of this step

    • An understanding of your organisational data culture

    2.2.1 Gauge Your Organisation's Current Data Culture

    Conduct a Data Culture Survey or Diagnostic

    The objectives of conducting a data culture survey are to increase the understanding of the organisation's data culture, your users' appetite for data, and their appreciation for data in terms of governance, quality, accessibility, ownership, and stewardship. To perform a data culture survey:

    1. Identify members of the data user base, data consumers, and other key stakeholders for surveying.
    2. Conduct an information session to introduce Info-Tech's Data Culture Diagnostic survey. Explain the objective and importance of the survey and its role in helping to understand the organisation's current data culture and inform the improvement of that culture.
    3. Roll out the Info-Tech Data Culture Diagnostic survey to the identified users and stakeholders.
    4. Debrief and document the results and scorecard in the Data Strategy Stakeholder Interview Guide and Findings document.

    Input

    • Email addresses of participants in your organisation who should receive the survey

    Output

    • Your organisation's Data Culture Scorecard for understanding current data culture as it relates to the use and consumption of data
    • An understanding of whether data is currently perceived to be an asset to the organisation

    Materials

    Screenshot of Data Culture Scorecard

    Participants

    • Participants include those at the senior leadership level through to middle management, as well as other business stakeholders at varying levels across the organisation
    • Data owners, stewards, and custodians
    • Core data users and consumers

    Contact your Info-Tech Account Representative for details on launching a Data Culture Diagnostic.

    Phase 3

    Build a Target State Roadmap and Plan

    Three circles are in the image that list the three phases and the main steps. Phase 3 is highlighted.

    'Achieving data success is a journey, not a sprint. Companies that set a clear course, with reasonable expectations and phased results over a period of time, get to the destination faster.' – Randy Bean, 2020

    This phase will guide you through the following activities:

    • Build your Data Governance Roadmap
    • Develop a target state plan comprising of prioritised initiatives

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Data Governance Leadership
    • Data Owners/Data Stewards
    • Data Custodians
    • Data Governance Working Group(s)

    Step 3.1

    Formulate an Actionable Roadmap and Right-Sized Plan

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Build your data governance roadmap
    • Develop a target state plan comprising of prioritised initiatives

    Download Info-Tech's Data Governance Planning and Roadmapping Workbook

    See Info-Tech's Data Governance Program Charter Template: A program charter template to sell the importance of data governance to senior executives.

    This template will help get the backing required to get a data governance project rolling. The program charter will help communicate the project purpose, define the scope, and identify the project team, roles, and responsibilities.

    Outcomes of this step

    • A foundation for data governance initiative planning that's aligned with the organisation's business architecture: value streams, business capability map, and strategy map

    Build a right-sized roadmap

    Formulate an actionable roadmap that is right sized to deliver value in your organisation.

    Key considerations:

    • When building your data governance roadmap, ensure you do so through an enterprise lens. Be cognizant of other initiatives that might be coming down the pipeline that may require you to align your data governance milestones accordingly.
    • Apart from doing your planning with consideration for other big projects or launches that might be in-flight and require the time and attention of your data governance partners, also be mindful of the more routine yet still demanding initiatives.
    • When doing your roadmapping, consider factors like the organisation's fiscal cycle, typical or potential year-end demands, and monthly/quarterly reporting periods and audits. Initiatives such as these are likely to monopolise the time and focus of personnel key to delivering on your data governance milestones.

    Sample milestones:

    Data Governance Leadership & Org Structure Definition

    Define the home for data governance and other key roles around ownership and stewardship, as approved by senior leadership.

    Data Governance Charter and Policies

    Create a charter for your program and build/refresh associated policies.

    Data Culture Diagnostic

    Understand the organisation's current data culture, perception of data, value of data, and knowledge gaps.

    Use Case Build and Prioritisation

    Build a use case that is tied to business capabilities. Prioritise accordingly.

    Business Data Glossary/catalogue

    Build and/or refresh the business' glossary for addressing data definitions and standardisation issues.

    Tools & Technology

    Explore the tools and technology offering in the data governance space that would serve as an enabler to the program. (e.g. RFI, RFP).

    Recall: Info-Tech's Data Governance Framework

    An image of Info-Tech's Data Governance Framework

    Build an actionable roadmap

    Data Governance Leadership & Org Structure Division

    Define key roles for getting started.

    Use Case Build & Prioritisation

    Start small and then scale – deliver early wins.

    Literacy Program

    Start understanding data knowledge gaps, building the program, and delivering.

    Tools & Technology

    Make the available data governance tools and technology work for you.

    Key components of your data governance roadmap

    Data Governance Program Charter Template – A program charter template to sell the importance of data governance to senior executives.

    This template will help get the backing required to get a data governance project rolling. The program charter will help communicate the project purpose, define the scope, and identify the project team, roles, and responsibilities.

    By now, you have assessed current data governance environment and capabilities. Use this assessment, coupled with the driving needs of your business, to plot your data Governance roadmap accordingly.

    Sample data governance roadmap milestones:

    • Define data governance leadership.
    • Define and formalise data ownership and stewardship (as well as the role IT/data management will play as data custodians).
    • Build/confirm your business capability map and data domains.
    • Build business data use cases specific to business capabilities.
    • Define business measures/KPIs for the data governance program (i.e. metrics by use case that are relevant to business capabilities).
    • Data management:
      • Build your data glossary or catalogue starting with identified and prioritised terms.
      • Define data domains.
    • Design and define the data governance operating model (oversight model definition, communication plan, internal marketing such as townhalls, formulate change management plan, RFP of data governance tool and technology options for supporting data governance and its administration).
    • Data policies and procedures:
      • Formulate, update, refresh, consolidate, rationalise, and/or retire data policies and procedures.
      • Define policy management and administration framework (i.e. roll-out, maintenance, updates, adherence, system to be used).
    • Conduct Info-Tech's Data Culture Diagnostic or survey (across all levels of the organisation).
    • Define and formalise the data literacy program (build modules, incorporate into LMS, plan lunch and learn sessions).
    • Data privacy and security: build data classification policy, define classification standards.
    • Enterprise projects and services: embed data governance in the organisation's PMO, conduct 'Data Governance 101' for the PMO.

    Defining data governance roles and organisational structure at Organisation

    The approach employed for defining the data governance roles and supporting organisational structure for .

    Key Considerations:

    • The data owner and data steward roles are formally defined and documented within the organisation. Their involvement is clear, well-defined, and repeatable.
    • There are data owners and data stewards for each data domain within the organisation. The data steward role is given to someone with a high degree of subject matter expertise.
    • Data owners and data stewards are effective in their roles by ensuring that their data domain is clean and free of errors and that they protect the organisation against data loss.
    • Data owners and data stewards have the authority to make final decisions on data definitions, formats, and standard processes that apply to their respective data sets. Data owners and data stewards have authority regarding who has access to certain data.
    • Data owners and data stewards are not from the IT side of the organisation. They understand the lifecycle of the data (how it is created, curated, retrieved, used, archived, and destroyed) and they are well-versed in any compliance requirements as it relates to their data.
    • The data custodian role is formally defined and is given to the relevant IT expert. This is an individual with technical administrative and/or operational responsibility over data (e.g. a DBA).
    • A data governance steering committee exists and is comprised of well-defined roles, responsibilities, executive sponsors, business representatives, and IT experts.
    • The data governance steering committee works to provide oversight and enforce policies, procedures, and standards for governing data.
    • The data governance working group has cross-functional representation. This comprises business and IT representation, as well as project management and change management where applicable: data stewards, data custodians, business subject matter experts, PM, etc.).
    • Data governance meetings are coordinated and communicated about. The meeting agenda is always clear and concise, and meetings review pressing data-related issues. Meeting minutes are consistently documented and communicated.

    Sample: Business capabilities to data owner and data stewards mapping for a selected data domain

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your organisation's value streams and the associated business capabilities require effectively governed data. Without this, you face elevated operational costs, missed opportunities, eroded stakeholder satisfaction, and exposure to increased business risk.

    Enable business capabilities with data governance role definitions.

    Sample: Business capabilities to data owner and data stewards mapping for a selected data domain

    Consider your technology options:

    Make the available data governance tools and technology work for you:

    • Data catalogue
    • Business data glossary
    • Data lineage
    • Metadata management

    Logos of data governance tools and technology.

    These are some of the data governance tools and technology players. Check out SoftwareReviews for help making better software decisions.

    Make the data steward the catalyst for organisational change and driving data culture

    The data steward must be empowered and backed politically with decision-making authority, or the role becomes stale and powerless.

    Ensuring compliance can be difficult. Data stewards may experience pushback from stakeholders who must deliver on the policies, procedures, and processes that the data steward enforces.

    Because the data steward must enforce data processes and liaise with so many different people and departments within the organisation, the data steward role should be their primary full-time job function – where possible.

    However, in circumstances where budget doesn't allow a full-time data steward role, develop these skills within the organisation by adding data steward responsibilities to individuals who are already managing data sets for their department or line of business.

    Info-Tech Tip

    A stewardship role is generally more about managing the cultural change that data governance brings. This requires the steward to have exceptional interpersonal skills that will assist in building relationships across departmental boundaries and ensuring that all stakeholders within the organisation believe in the initiative, understand the anticipated outcomes, and take some level of responsibility for its success.

    Changes to organisational data processes are inevitable; have a communication plan in place to manage change

    Create awareness of your data governance program. Use knowledge transfer to get as many people on board as possible.

    Data governance initiatives must contain a strong organisational disruption component. A clear and concise communication strategy that conveys milestones and success stories will address the various concerns that business unit stakeholders may have.

    By planning for and efficiently communicating any changes that a data governance initiative may bring, many initial issues can be resolved from the outset.

    Governance recommendations will require significant business change. The redesign of a substantial number of data processes affecting various business units will require an overhaul of the organisation's culture, thought processes, and procedures surrounding its data. Preparing people for change well in advance will allow them to take the necessary steps to adapt and reduce potential confrontation.

    Because a data governance initiative will involve data-driven business units across the organisation, the governance team must present a compelling case for data governance to ensure acceptance of new processes, rules, guidelines, and technologies by all data producers and users.

    Attempting to implement change without an effective communication plan can result in disagreements over data control and stalemates between stakeholder units. The recommendations of the governance group must reflect the needs of all stakeholders or there will be pushback.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Launching a data governance initiative is guaranteed to disrupt the culture of the organisation. That disruption doesn't have to be detrimental if you are prepared to manage the change proactively and effectively.

    Create a common data governance vision that is consistently communicated to the organisation

    A data governance program should be an enterprise-wide initiative.

    To create a strong vision for data governance, there must be participation from the business and IT. A common vision will articulate the state the organisation wishes to achieve and how it will reach that state. Visioning helps to develop long-term goals and direction.

    Once the vision is established, it must be effectively communicated to everyone, especially those who are involved in creating, managing, disposing, or archiving data.

    The data governance program should be periodically refined. This will ensure the organisation continues to incorporate best methods and practices as the organisation grows and data needs evolve.

    Info-Tech Tips

    • Use information from the stakeholder interviews to derive business goals and objectives.
    • Work to integrate different opinions and perspectives into the overall vision for data governance.
    • Brainstorm guiding principles for data and understand the overall value to the organisation.

    Develop a compelling data governance communications plan to get all departmental lines of business on board

    A data governance program will impact all data-driven business units within the organisation.

    A successful data governance communications plan involves making the initiative visible and promoting staff awareness. Educate the team on how data is collected, distributed, and used, what internal processes use data, and how that data is used across departmental boundaries.

    By demonstrating how data governance will affect staff directly, you create a deeper level of understanding across lines of business, and ultimately, a higher level of acceptance for new processes, rules, and guidelines.

    A clear and concise communications strategy will raise the profile of data governance within the organisation, and staff will understand how the program will benefit them and how they can share in the success of the initiative. This will end up providing support for the initiative across the board.

    A proactive communications plan will:

    • Assist in overcoming issues with data control, stalemates between stakeholder units, and staff resistance.
    • Provide a formalised process for implementing new policies, rules, guidelines, and technologies, and managing organisational data.
    • Detail data ownership and accountability for decision making, and identify and resolve data issues throughout the organisation.
    • Encourage acceptance and support of the initiative.

    Info-Tech Tip

    Focus on literacy and communication: include training in the communication plan. Providing training for data users on the correct procedures for updating and verifying the accuracy of data, data quality, and standardised data policies will help validate how data governance will benefit them and the organisation.

    Leverage the data governance program to communicate and promote the value of data within the organisation

    The data governance program is responsible for continuously promoting the value of data to the organisation. The data governance program should seek a variety of ways to educate the organisation and data stakeholders on the benefit of data management.

    Even if data policies and procedures are created, they will be highly ineffective if they are not properly communicated to the data producers and users alike.

    There needs to be a communication plan that highlights how the data producer and user will be affected, what their new responsibilities are, and the value of that change.

    To learn how to manage organisational change, refer to Info-Tech's Master Organisational Change Management Practices.

    Understand what makes for an effective policy for data governance

    It can be difficult to understand what a policy is, and what it is not. Start by identifying the differences between a policy and standards, guidelines, and procedures.

    Diagram of an effective policy for data governance

    The following are key elements of a good policy:

    Heading Descriptions
    Purpose Describes the factors or circumstances that mandate the existence of the policy. Also states the policy's basic objectives and what the policy is meant to achieve.
    Scope Defines to whom and to what systems this policy applies. Lists the employees required to comply or simply indicates 'all' if all must comply. Also indicates any exclusions or exceptions, i.e. those people, elements, or situations that are not covered by this policy or where special consideration may be made.
    Definitions Define any key terms, acronyms, or concepts that will be used in the policy. A standard glossary approach is sufficient.
    Policy Statements Describe the rules that comprise the policy. This typically takes the form of a series of short prescriptive and proscriptive statements. Sub-dividing this section into sub-sections may be required depending on the length or complexity of the policy.
    Non-Compliance Clearly describe consequences (legal and/or disciplinary) for employee non-compliance with the policy. It may be pertinent to describe the escalation process for repeated non-compliance.
    Agreement Confirms understanding of the policy and provides a designated space to attest to the document.

    Leverage myPolicies, Info-Tech's web-based application for managing your policies and procedures

    Most organisations have problems with policy management. These include:

    1. Policies are absent or out of date
    2. Employees largely unaware of policies in effect
    3. Policies are unmonitored and unenforced
    4. Policies are in multiple locations
    5. Multiple versions of the same policy exist
    6. Policies managed inconsistently across different silos
    7. Policies are written poorly by untrained authors
    8. Inadequate policy training program
    9. Draft policies stall and lose momentum
    10. Weak policy support from senior management

    Technology should be used as a means to solve these problems and effectively monitor, enforce, and communicate policies.

    Product Overview

    myPolicies is a web-based solution to create, distribute, and manage corporate policies, procedures, and forms. Our solution provides policy managers with the tools they need to mitigate the risk of sanctions and reduce the administrative burden of policy management. It also enables employees to find the documents relevant to them and build a culture of compliance.

    Some key success factors for policy management include:

    • Store policies in a central location that is well known and easy to find and access. A key way that technology can help communicate policies is by having them published on a centralised website.
    • Link this repository to other policies' taxonomies of your organisation. E.g. HR policies to provide a single interface for employees to access guidance across the organisation.
    • Reassess policies annually at a minimum. myPolicies can remind you to update the organisation's policies at the appropriate time.
    • Make the repository searchable and easily navigable.
    • myPolicies helps you do all this and more.
    myPolicies logo myPolicies

    Enforce data policies to promote consistency of business processes

    Data policies are short statements that seek to manage the creation, acquisition, integrity, security, compliance, and quality of data. These policies vary amongst organisations, depending on your specific data needs.

    • Policies describe what to do, while standards and procedures describe how to do something.
    • There should be few data policies, and they should be brief and direct. Policies are living documents and should be continuously updated to respond to the organisation's data needs.
    • The data policies should highlight who is responsible for the data under various scenarios and rules around how to manage it effectively.

    Examples of Data Policies

    Trust

    • Data Cleansing and Quality Policy
    • Data Entry Policy

    Availability

    • Acceptable Use Policy
    • Data Backup Policy

    Security

    • Data Security Policy
    • Password Policy Template
    • User Authorisation, Identification, and Authentication Policy Template
    • Data Protection Policy

    Compliance

    • Archiving Policy
    • Data Classification Policy
    • Data Retention Policy

    Leverage data management-related policies to standardise your data management practices

    Info-Tech's Data Management Policy:

    This policy establishes uniform data management standards and identifies the shared responsibilities for assuring the integrity of the data and that it efficiently and effectively serves the needs of the organisation. This policy applies to all critical data and to all staff who may be creators and/or users of such data.

    Info-Tech's Data Entry Policy:

    The integrity and quality of data and evidence used to inform decision making is central to both the short-term and long-term health of an organisation. It is essential that required data be sourced appropriately and entered into databases and applications in an accurate and complete manner to ensure the reliability and validity of the data and decisions made based on the data.

    Info-Tech's Data Provenance Policy:

    Create policies to keep your data's value, such as:

    • Only allow entry of data from reliable sources.
    • Employees entering and accessing data must observe requirements for capturing/maintaining provenance metadata.
    • Provenance metadata will be used to track the lifecycle of data from creation through to disposal.

    Info-Tech's Data Integration and Virtualisation Policy:

    This policy aims to assure the organisation, staff, and other interested parties that data integration, replication, and virtualisation risks are taken seriously. Staff must use the policy (and supporting guidelines) when deciding whether to integrate, replicate, or virtualise data sets.

    Select the right mix of metrics to successfully supervise data policies and processes

    Policies are only as good as your level of compliance. Ensure supervision controls exist to oversee adherence to policies and procedures.

    Although they can be highly subjective, metrics are extremely important to data governance success.

    • Establishing metrics that measure the performance of a specific process or data set will:
      • Create a greater degree of ownership from data stewards and data owners.
      • Help identify underperforming individuals.
      • Allow the steering committee to easily communicate tailored objectives to individual data stewards and owners.
    • Be cautious when establishing metrics. The wrong metrics can have negative repercussions.
      • They will likely draw attention to an aspect of the process that doesn't align with the initial strategy.
      • Employees will work hard and grow frustrated as their successes aren't accurately captured.

    Policies are great to have from a legal perspective, but unless they are followed, they will not benefit the organisation.

    • One of the most useful metrics for policies is currency. This tracks how up to date the policy is and how often employees are informed about the policy. Often, a policy will be introduced and then ignored. Policies must be continuously reviewed by management and employees.
    • Some other metrics include adherence (including performance in tests for adherence) and impacts from non-adherence.

    Review metrics on an ongoing basis with those data owners/stewards who are accountable, the data governance steering committee, and the executive sponsors.

    Establish data standards and procedures for use across all organisational lines of business

    A data governance program will impact all data-driven business units within the organisation.

    • Data management procedures are the methods, techniques, and steps to accomplish a specific data objective. Creating standard data definitions should be one of the first tasks for a data governance steering committee.
    • Data moves across all departmental boundaries and lines of business within the organisation. These definitions must be developed as a common set of standards that can be accepted and used enterprise wide.
    • Consistent data standards and definitions will improve data flow across departmental boundaries and between lines of business.
    • Ensure these standards and definitions are used uniformly throughout the organisation to maintain reliable and useful data.

    Data standards and procedural guidelines will vary from company to company.

    Examples include:

    • Data modelling and architecture standards.
    • Metadata integration and usage procedures.
    • Data security standards and procedures.
    • Business intelligence standards and procedures.

    Info-Tech Tip

    Have a fundamental data definition model for the entire business to adhere to. Those in the positions that generate and produce data must follow the common set of standards developed by the steering committee and be accountable for the creation of valid, clean data.

    Changes to organisational data processes are inevitable; have a communications plan in place to manage change

    Create awareness of your data governance program, using knowledge transfer to get as many people on board as possible.

    By planning for and efficiently communicating any changes that a data governance initiative may bring, many initial issues can be resolved from the outset.

    Governance recommendations will require significant business change. The redesign of a substantial number of data processes affecting various business units will require an overhaul of the organisation's culture, thought processes, and procedures surrounding its data. Preparing people for change well in advance will allow them to take the necessary steps to adapt and reduce potential confrontation.

    Because a data governance initiative will involve data-driven business units across the organisation, the governance team must present a compelling case for data governance to ensure acceptance of new processes, rules, guidelines, and technologies by all data producers and users.

    Attempting to implement change without an effective communications plan can result in disagreements over data control and stalemates between stakeholder units. The recommendations of the governance group must reflect the needs of all stakeholders or there will be pushback.

    Data governance initiatives will very likely bring about a level of organisational disruption. A clear and concise communications strategy that conveys milestones and success stories will address the various concerns that business unit stakeholders may have.

    Info-Tech Tip

    Launching a data governance program will bring with it a level of disruption to the culture of the organisation. That disruption doesn't have to be detrimental if you are prepared to manage the change proactively and effectively.

    Other Deliverables:

    The list of supporting deliverables will help to kick start on some of the Data Governance initiatives

    • Data Classification Policy, Standard, and Procedure
    • Data Quality Policy, Standard, and Procedure
    • Metadata Management Policy, Standard, and Procedure
    • Data Retention Policy and Procurement

    Screenshot from Data Classification Policy, Standard, and Procedure

    Data Classification Policy, Standard, and Procedure

    Screenshot from Data Retention Policy and Procedure

    Data Retention Policy and Procedure

    Screenshot from Metadata Management Policy, Standard, and Procedure

    Metadata Management Policy, Standard, and Procedure

    Screenshot from Data Quality Policy, Standard, and Procedure

    Data Quality Policy, Standard, and Procedure

    Additional Support

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech Workshop.

    Picture of analyst

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team. Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech's historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.

    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

    Screenshot of example data governance strategy map.

    Build Your Business and User Context

    Work with your core team of stakeholders to build out your data governance strategy map, aligning data governance initiatives with business capabilities, value streams, and, ultimately, your strategic priorities.

    Screenshot of Data governance roadmap

    Formulate a Plan to Get to Your Target State

    Develop a data governance future state roadmap and plan based on an understanding of your current data governance capabilities, your operating environment, and the driving needs of your business.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Build a Robust and Comprehensive Data Strategy

    Key to building and fostering a data-driven culture.

    Create a Data Management Roadmap

    Streamline your data management program with our simplified framework.

    The First 100 Days as CDO

    Be the voice of data in a time of transformation.

    Research Contributors

    Name Position Company
    David N. Weber Executive Director - Planning, Research and Effectiveness Palm Beach State College
    Izabela Edmunds Information Architect Mott MacDonald
    Andy Neill Practice Lead, Data & Analytics Info-Tech Research Group
    Dirk Coetsee Research Director, Data & Analytics Info-Tech Research Group
    Graham Price Executive Advisor, Advisory Executive Services Info-Tech Research Group
    Igor Ikonnikov Research Director, Data & Analytics Info-Tech Research Group
    Jean Bujold Senior Workshop Delivery Director Info-Tech Research Group
    Rajesh Parab Research Director, Data & Analytics Info-Tech Research Group
    Reddy Doddipalli Senior Workshop Director Info-Tech Research Group
    Valence Howden Principal Research Director, CIO Info-Tech Research Group

    Bibliography

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    Allott, Joseph, et al. “Data: The Next Wave in Forestry Productivity.” McKinsey & Company, 27 Oct. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Bean, Randy. “Why Culture Is the Greatest Barrier to Data Success.” MIT Sloan Management Review, 30 Sept. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Brence, Thomas. “Overcoming the Operationalization Challenge With Data Governance at New York Life.” Informatica, 18 March 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Bullmore, Simon, and Stuart Coleman. “ODI Inside Business – A Checklist for Leaders.” Open Data Institute, 19 Oct. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Canadian Institute for Health Information. “Developing and Implementing Accurate National Standards for Canadian Health Care Information.” Canadian Institute for Health Information. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Carruthers, Caroline, and Peter Jackson. “The Secret Ingredients of the Successful CDO.” IRM UK Connects, 23 Feb. 2017.

    Dashboards. “Useful KPIs for Healthy Hospital Quality Management.” Dashboards. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Dashboards. “Why (and How) You Should Improve Data Literacy in Your Organization Today.” Dashboards. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Datapine. “Healthcare Key Performance Indicators and Metrics.” Datapine. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Datapine. “KPI Examples & Templates: Measure what matters the most and really impacts your success.” Datapine. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Diaz, Alejandro, et al. “Why Data Culture Matters.” McKinsey Quarterly, Sept. 2018. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Everett, Dan. “Chief Data Officer (CDO): One Job, Four Roles.” Informatica, 9 Sept. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Experian. “10 Signs You Are Sitting On A Pile Of Data Debt.” Experian. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Fregoni, Silvia. “New Research Reveals Why Some Business Leaders Still Ignore the Data.” Silicon Angle, 1 Oct. 2020

    Informatica. Holistic Data Governance: A Framework for Competitive Advantage. Informatica, 2017. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Knight, Michelle. “What Is a Data Catalog?” Dataversity, 28 Dec. 2017. Web.

    Lim, Jason. “Alation 2020.3: Getting Business Users in the Game.” Alation, 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    McDonagh, Mariann. “Automating Data Governance.” Erwin, 29 Oct. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    NewVantage Partners. Data-Driven Business Transformation: Connecting Data/AI Investment to Business Outcomes. NewVantage Partners, 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Olavsrud, Thor. “What Is Data Governance? A Best Practices Framework For Managing Data Assets.” CIO.com, 18 March 2021. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Open Data Institute. “Introduction to Data Ethics and the Data Ethics Canvas.” Open Data Institute, 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Open Data Institute. “The UK National Data Strategy 2020: Doing Data Ethically.” Open Data Institute, 17 Nov. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Open Data Institute. “What Is the Data Ethics Canvas?” Open Data Institute, 3 July 2019. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Pathak, Rahul. “Becoming a Data-Driven Enterprise: Meeting the Challenges, Changing the Culture.” MIT Sloan Management Review, 28 Sept. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Petzold, Bryan, et al. “Designing Data Governance That Delivers Value.” McKinsey & Company, 26 June 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Redman, Thomas, et al. “Only 3% of Companies’ Data Meets Basic Quality Standards.” Harvard Business Review. 11 Sept 2017.

    Smaje, Kate. “How Six Companies Are Using Technology and Data To Transform Themselves.” McKinsey & Company, 12 Aug. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Talend. “The Definitive Guide to Data Governance.” Talend. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    “The Powerfully Simple Modern Data Catalog.” Atlan, 2021. Web.

    U.S. Geological Survey. “Data Management: Data Standards.” U.S. Geological Survey. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Waller, David. “10 Steps to Creating a Data-Driven Culture.” Harvard Business Review, 6 Feb. 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    “What Is the Difference Between A Business Glossary, A Data Dictionary, and A Data Catalog, and How Do They Play A Role In Modern Data Management?” Analytics8, 23 June 2021. Web.

    Wikipedia. “RFM (Market Research).” Wikipedia. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Windheuser, Christoph, and Nina Wainwright. “Data in a Modern Digital Business.” Thoughtworks, 12 May 2020. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Wright, Tom. “Digital Marketing KPIs - The 12 Key Metrics You Should Be Tracking.” Cascade, 3 March 2021. Accessed 25 June 2021.

    Adapt Your Onboarding Process to a Virtual Environment

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    • member rating average days saved: Read what our members are saying
    • Parent Category Name: Attract & Select
    • Parent Category Link: /attract-and-select
    • For many, the WFH arrangement will be temporary, however, the uncertainty around the length of the pandemic makes it hard for organizations to plan long term.
    • As onboarding plans traditionally carry a six- to twelve-month outlook, the uncertainty around how long employees will be working remotely makes it challenging to determine how much of the current onboarding program needs to change. In addition, introducing new technologies to a remote workforce and planning training on how to access and effectively use these technologies is difficult.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a virtual environment many organizations were not prepared for.
    • Focusing on critical parts of the onboarding process and leveraging current technology allows organizations to quickly adapt to the uncertainty and constant change.

    Impact and Result

    • Organizations need to assess their existing onboarding process and identify the parts that are critical.
    • Using the technology currently available, organizations must adapt onboarding to a virtual environment.
    • Develop a plan to re-assess and update the onboarding program according to the duration of the situation.

    Adapt Your Onboarding Process to a Virtual Environment Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Assess current onboarding processes

    Map the current onboarding process and identify the challenges to a virtual approach.

    • Adapt Your Onboarding Process to a Virtual Environment Storyboard
    • Virtual Onboarding Workbook
    • Process Mapping Guide

    2. Modify onboarding activities

    Determine how existing onboarding activities can be modified for a virtual environment.

    • Virtual Onboarding Ideas Catalog
    • Performance Management for Emergency Work-From-Home

    3. Launch the virtual onboarding process and plan to re-assess

    Finalize the virtual onboarding process and create an action plan. Continue to re-assess and iterate over time.

    • Virtual Onboarding Guide for HR
    • Virtual Onboarding Guide for Managers
    • HR Action and Communication Plan
    • Virtual Onboarding Schedule
    [infographic]

    Tech Trend Update: If Digital Ethics Then Data Equity

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    • Parent Category Name: Innovation
    • Parent Category Link: /innovation

    COVID-19 is driving the need for quick technology solutions, including some that require personal data collection. Organizations are uncertain about the right thing to do.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Data equity approaches personal data like money, putting the owner in control and helping to protect against unethical systems.

    Impact and Result

    There are some key considerations for businesses grappling with digital ethics:

    1. If partnering, set expectations.
    2. If building, invite criticism.
    3. If imbuing authority, consider the most vulnerable.

    Tech Trend Update: If Digital Ethics Then Data Equity Research & Tools

    Tech Trend Update: If Digital Ethics Then Data Equity

    Understand how to use data equity as an ethical guidepost to create technology that will benefit everyone.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    • Tech Trend Update: If Digital Ethics Then Data Equity Storyboard
    [infographic]

    Gain Real Insights with a Social Analytics Program

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    • Social media is wildly popular with consumers and as a result, many businesses are starting to develop a presence on social media services like Facebook and Twitter. However, many businesses still struggle with understanding how to leverage consumer insights from these services to drive business decisions. They’re intimidated by the sheer volume of social data, and aren’t sure what to do about it.
    • Companies that do have an analytics program are often operating it on an ad-hoc basis rather than making an effort to integrate social insights with existing sourcing of consumer data. In doing this, they’re failing to make holistic decisions and missing out on valuable consumer and competitive insights.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Social analytics are indispensable in gaining real-time insights across marketing, sales, and customer service. SMBs can use social analytics to gain valuable consumer insights at a significantly lower expense than traditional forms of market research.
    • The greatest value from social analytics comes when organizations marry social data sources with other forms of customer information, such as point-of-sale data, customer surveys, focus groups, and psychographic profiles.
    • Social analytics must be integrated with your broader BI program for maximum effect. Consider creating a Customer Insights Center of Excellence (CICOE) to serve as a one-stop shop for both traditional and social customer analytics.
    • IT has an invaluable role to play in helping to govern and manage the analytics program. A best-of-breed Social Media Management Platform is the key enabling technology for conducting analytics, and IT must assist with selection, implementation and operation of this solution.
    • Internal social analytics is an emerging field that allows you to gauge the sentiment of your employees, while turbocharging ideation and feedback processes. Social networking analysis is particularly valuable for internal analysis.

    Impact and Result

    • Understand the value of a social analytics program and the various departmental use cases – how social analytics improves decision making and boosts critical KPIs like revenue attainment and customer satisfaction.
    • Determine the different social metrics (such as sentiment and frequency analysis) your business should be tracking and how to turn metrics into deep consumer insights.
    • Follow a step-by-step guide for successfully executing a social analytics program across your organization.
    • Roll out an internal analytics program to gauge the sentiment of your employees, improve engagement, and understand informal influencer networks.

    Gain Real Insights with a Social Analytics Program Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Determine the organization’s use cases

    Decide which functional areas in the organization will benefit the most from using social data, and create use cases accordingly.

    • Storyboard: Gain Real Insights with a Social Analytics Program

    2. Define and interpret metrics

    Identify and evaluate key social analytics metrics and understand the importance of combining multiple metrics to get the most out of the analytics program.

    • Social Analytics Maturity Assessment

    3. Execute the social analytics program

    Leverage a cross-departmental Social Media Steering Committee and evaluate SMMPs and other social analytics tools.

    • Social Analytics Specialist
    • Social Analytics Business Plan

    4. Leverage internal social analytics

    Identify specific uses of internal social analytics: crowd-sourcing ideation, harvesting employee feedback, and rewarding internal brand advocates.

    [infographic]

    Build a Data Classification MVP for M365

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}67|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): N/A
    • member rating average dollars saved: N/A
    • member rating average days saved: N/A
    • Parent Category Name: End-User Computing Applications
    • Parent Category Link: /end-user-computing-applications
    • Resources are the primary obstacle to getting a foot hold in O365 governance, whether it is funding or FTE resources.
    • Data is segmented and is difficult to analyze when you can’t see it or manage the relationships between sources.
    • Organizations expect results early and quickly and a common obstacle is that building a proper data classification framework can take more than two years and the business can't wait that long.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Data classification is the lynchpin to ANY effective governance of O/M365 and your objective is to navigate through this easily and effectively and build a robust, secure, and viable governance model.
    • Start your journey by identifying what and where your data is and how much data you have. You need to understand what sensitive data you have and where it is stored before you can protect it or govern that data.
    • Ensure there is a high-level leader who is the champion of the governance objective.

    Impact and Result

    • Using least complex sensitivity labels in your classification are your building blocks to compliance and security in your data management schema; they are your foundational steps.

    Build a Data Classification MVP for M365 Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Build a Data Classification MVP for M365 Deck – A guide for how to build a minimum-viable product for data classification that end users will actually use.

    Discover where your data resides, what governance helps you do, and what types of data you're classifying. Then build your data and security protection baselines for your retention policy, sensitivity labels, workload containers, and both forced and unforced policies.

    • Build a Data Classification MVP for M365 Storyboard
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Build a Data Classification MVP for M365

    Kickstart your governance with data classification users will actually use!

    Executive Summary

    Info-Tech Insight

    • Creating an MVP gets you started in data governance
      Information protection and governance are not something you do once and then you are done. It is a constant process where you start with the basics (a minimum-viable product or MVP) and enhance your schema over time. The objective of the MVP is reducing obstacles to establishing an initial governance position, and then enabling rapid development of the solution to address a variety of real risks, including data loss prevention (DLP), data retention, legal holds, and data labeling.
    • Define your information and protection strategy
      The initial strategy is to start looking across your organization and identifying your customer data, regulatory data, and sensitive information. To have a successful data protection strategy you will include lifecycle management, risk management, data protection policies, and DLP. All key stakeholders need to be kept in the loop. Ensure you keep track of all available data and conduct a risk analysis early. Remember, data is your highest valued intangible asset.
    • Planning and resourcing are central to getting started on MVP
      A governance plan and governance decisions are your initial focus. Create a team of stakeholders that include IT and business leaders (including Legal, Finance, HR, and Risk), and ensure there is a top-level leader who is the champion of the governance objective, which is to ensure your data is safe, secure, and not prone to leakage or theft, and maintain confidentiality where it is warranted.

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge
    • Today, the amount of data companies are gathering is growing at an explosive rate. New tools are enabling unforeseen channels and ways of collaborating.
    • Combined with increased regulatory oversight and reporting obligations, this makes the discovery and management of data a massive undertaking. IT can’t find and protect the data when the business has difficulty defining its data.
    • The challenge is to build a framework that can easily categorize and classify data yet allows for sufficient regulatory compliance and granularity to be useful. Also, to do it now because tomorrow is too late.
    Common Obstacles

    Data governance has several obstacles that impact a successful launch, especially if governing M365 is not a planned strategy. Below are some of the more common obstacles:

    • Resources are the primary obstacle to starting O365 governance, whether it is funding or people.
    • Data is segmented and is difficult to analyze when you can’t see it or manage the relationships between sources.
    • Organizations expect results early and quickly and a common obstacle is that building a "proper data classification framework” is a 2+ year project and the business can't wait that long.
    Info-Tech’s Approach
    • Start with the basics: build a minimum-viable product (MVP) to get started on the path to sustainable governance.
    • Identify what and where your data resides, how much data you have, and understand what sensitive data needs to be protected.
    • Create your team of stakeholders, including Legal, records managers, and privacy officers. Remember, they own the data and should manage it.
    • Categorization comes before classification, and discovery comes before categorization. Use easy-to-understand terms like high, medium, or low risk.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Data classification is the lynchpin to any effective governance of O/M365 and your objective is to navigate through this easily and effectively and build a robust, secure, and viable governance model. Start your journey by identifying what and where your data is and how much data do you have. You need to understand what sensitive data you have and where it is stored before you can protect or govern it. Ensure there is a high-level leader who is the champion of the governance objectives. Data classification fulfills the governance objectives of risk mitigation, governance and compliance, efficiency and optimization, and analytics.

    Questions you need to ask

    Four key questions to kick off your MVP.

    1

    Know Your Data

    Do you know where your critical and sensitive data resides and what is being done with it?

    Trying to understand where your information is can be a significant project.

    2

    Protect Your Data

    Do you have control of your data as it traverses across the organization and externally to partners?

    You want to protect information wherever it goes through encryption, etc.

    3

    Prevent Data Loss

    Are you able to detect unsafe activities that prevent sharing of sensitive information?

    Data loss prevention (DLP) is the practice of detecting and preventing data breaches, exfiltration, or unwanted destruction of sensitive data.

    4

    Govern Your Data

    Are you using multiple solutions (or any) to classify, label, and protect sensitive data?

    Many organizations use more than one solution to protect and govern their data, making it difficult to determine if there are any coverage gaps.

    Classification tiers

    Build your schema.

    Pyramid visualization for classification tiers. The top represents 'Simplicity', and the bottom 'Complexity' with the length of the sides at each level representing the '# of policies' and '# of labels'. At the top level is 'MVP (Minimum-Viable Product) - Confidential, Internal (Subcategory: Personal), Public'. At the middle level is 'Regulated - Highly Confidential, Confidential, Sensitive, General, Internal, Restricted, Personal, Sub-Private, Public'. And a the bottom level is 'Government (DOD) - Top Secret (TS), Secret, Confidential, Restricted, Official, Unclassified, Clearance'

    Info-Tech Insight

    Deciding on how granular you go into data classification will chiefly be governed by what industry you are in and your regulatory obligations – the more highly regulated your industry, the more classification levels you will be mandated to enforce. The more complexity you introduce into your organization, the more operational overhead both in cost and resources you will have to endure and build.

    Microsoft MIP Topology

    Microsoft Information Protection (MIP), which is Microsoft’s Data Classification Services, is the key to achieving your governance goals. Without an MVP, data classification will be overwhelming; simplifying is the first step in achieving governance.

    A diagram of multiple offerings all connected to 'MIP Data Classification Service'. Circled is 'Sensitivity Labels' with an arrow pointing back to 'MIP' at the center.
    (Source: Microsoft, “Microsoft Purview compliance portal”)

    Info-Tech Insight

    Using least-complex sensitivity labels in your classification are your building blocks to compliance and security in your data management schema; they are your foundational steps.

    MVP RACI Chart

    Data governance is a "takes a whole village" kind of effort.

    Clarify who is expected to do what with a RACI chart.

    End User M365 Administrator Security/ Compliance Data Owner
    Define classification divisions R A
    Appy classification label to data – at point of creation A R
    Apply classification label to data – legacy items R A
    Map classification divisions to relevant policies R A
    Define governance objectives R A
    Backup R A
    Retention R A
    Establish minimum baseline A R

    What and where your data resides

    Data types that require classification.

    Logos for 'Microsoft', 'Office 365', and icons for each program included in that package.
    M365 Workload Containers
    Icon for MS Exchange. Icon for MS SharePoint.Icon for MS Teams. Icon for MS OneDrive. Icon for MS Project Online.
    Email
    • Attachments
    Site Collections, Sites Sites Project Databases
    Contacts Teams and Group Site Collections, Sites Libraries and Lists Sites
    Metadata Libraries and Lists Documents
    • Versions
    Libraries and Lists
    Teams Conversations Documents
    • Versions
    Metadata Documents
    • Versions
    Teams Chats Metadata Permissions
    • Internal Sharing
    • External Sharing
    Metadata
    Permissions
    • Internal Sharing
    • External Sharing
    Files Shared via Teams Chats Permissions
    • Internal Sharing
    • External Sharing

    Info-Tech Insight

    Knowing where your data resides will ensure you do not miss any applicable data that needs to be classified. These are examples of the workload containers; you may have others.

    Discover and classify on- premises files using AIP

    AIP helps you manage sensitive data prior to migrating to Office 365:
    • Use discover mode to identify and report on files containing sensitive data.
    • Use enforce mode to automatically classify, label, and protect files with sensitive data.
    Can be configured to scan:
    • SMB files
    • SharePoint Server 2016, 2013
    Stock image of a laptop uploading to the cloud with a padlock and key in front of it.
    • Map your network and find over-exposed file shares.
    • Protect files using MIP encryption.
    • Inspect the content in file repositories and discover sensitive information.
    • Classify and label file per MIP policy.
    Azure Information Protection scanner helps discover, classify, label, and protect sensitive information in on-premises file servers. You can run the scanner and get immediate insight into risks with on-premises data. Discover mode helps you identify and report on files containing sensitive data (Microsoft Inside Track and CIAOPS, 2022). Enforce mode automatically classifies, labels, and protects files with sensitive data.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Any asset deployed to the cloud must have approved data classification. Enforcing this policy is a must to control your data.

    Understanding governance

    Microsoft Information Governance

    Information Governance
    • Retention policies for workloads
    • Inactive and archive mailboxes

    Arrow pointing down-right

    Records Management
    • Retention labels for items
    • Disposition review

    Arrow pointing down-left

    Retention and Deletion

    ‹——— Connectors for Third-Party Data ———›

    Information governance manages your content lifecycle using solutions to import, store, and classify business-critical data so you can keep what you need and delete what you do not. Backup should not be used as a retention methodology since information governance is managed as a “living entity” and backup is a stored information block that is “suspended in time.” Records management uses intelligent classification to automate and simplify the retention schedule for regulatory, legal, and business-critical records in your organization. It is for that discrete set of content that needs to be immutable.
    (Source: Microsoft, “Microsoft Purview compliance portal”)

    Retention and backup policy decision

    Retention is not backup.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Retention is not backup. Retention means something different: “the content must be available for discovery and legal document production while being able to defend its provenance, chain of custody, and its deletion or destruction” (AvePoint Blog, 2021).

    Microsoft Responsibility (Microsoft Protection) Weeks to Months Customer Responsibility (DLP, Backup, Retention Policy) Months to Years
    Loss of service due to natural disaster or data center outage Loss of data due to departing employees or deactivated accounts
    Loss of service due to hardware or infrastructure failure Loss of data due to malicious insiders or hackers deleting content
    Short-term (30 days) user error with recycle bin/ version history (including OneDrive “File Restore”) Loss of data due to malware or ransomware
    Short-term (14 days) administrative error with soft- delete for groups, mailboxes, or service-led rollback Recovery from prolonged outages
    Long-term accidental deletion coverage with selective rollback

    Understand retention policy

    What are retention policies used for? Why you need them as part of your MVP?

    Do not confuse retention labels and policies with backup.

    Remember: “retention [policies are] auto-applied whereas retention label policies are only applied if the content is tagged with the associated retention label” (AvePoint Blog, 2021).

    E-discovery tool retention policies are not turned on automatically.

    Retention policies are not a backup tool – when you activate this feature you are unable to delete anyone.

    “Data retention policy tools enable a business to:

    • “Decide proactively whether to retain content, delete content, or retain and then delete the content when needed.
    • “Apply a policy to all content or just content meeting certain conditions, such as items with specific keywords or specific types of sensitive information.
    • “Apply a single policy to the entire organization or specific locations or users.
    • “Maintain discoverability of content for lawyers and auditors, while protecting it from change or access by other users. […] ‘Retention Policies’ are different than ‘Retention Label Policies’ – they do the same thing – but a retention policy is auto-applied, whereas retention label policies are only applied if the content is tagged with the associated retention label.

    “It is also important to remember that ‘Retention Label Policies’ do not move a copy of the content to the ‘Preservation Holds’ folder until the content under policy is changed next.” (Source: AvePoint Blog, 2021)

    Definitions

    Data classification is a focused term used in the fields of cybersecurity and information governance to describe the process of identifying, categorizing, and protecting content according to its sensitivity or impact level. In its most basic form, data classification is a means of protecting your data from unauthorized disclosure, alteration, or destruction based on how sensitive or impactful it is.

    Once data is classified, you can then create policies; sensitive data types, trainable classifiers, and sensitivity labels function as inputs to policies. Policies define behaviors, like if there will be a default label, if labeling is mandatory, what locations the label will be applied to, and under what conditions. A policy is created when you configure Microsoft 365 to publish or automatically apply sensitive information types, trainable classifiers, or labels.

    Sensitivity label policies show one or more labels to Office apps (like Outlook and Word), SharePoint sites, and Office 365 groups. Once published, users can apply the labels to protect their content.

    Data loss prevention (DLP) policies help identify and protect your organization's sensitive info (Microsoft Docs, April 2022). For example, you can set up policies to help make sure information in email and documents is not shared with the wrong people. DLP policies can use sensitive information types and retention labels to identify content containing information that might need protection.

    Retention policies and retention label policies help you keep what you want and get rid of what you do not. They also play a significant role in records management.

    Data examples for MVP classification

    • Examples of the type of data you consider to be Confidential, Internal, or Public.
    • This will help you determine what to classify and where it is.
    Internal Personal, Employment, and Job Performance Data
    • Social Security Number
    • Date of birth
    • Marital status
    • Job application data
    • Mailing address
    • Resume
    • Background checks
    • Interview notes
    • Employment contract
    • Pay rate
    • Bonuses
    • Benefits
    • Performance reviews
    • Disciplinary notes or warnings
    Confidential Information
    • Business and marketing plans
    • Company initiatives
    • Customer information and lists
    • Information relating to intellectual property
    • Invention or patent
    • Research data
    • Passwords and IT-related information
    • Information received from third parties
    • Company financial account information
    • Social Security Number
    • Payroll and personnel records
    • Health information
    • Self-restricted personal data
    • Credit card information
    Internal Data
    • Sales data
    • Website data
    • Customer information
    • Job application data
    • Financial data
    • Marketing data
    • Resource data
    Public Data
    • Press releases
    • Job descriptions
    • Marketing material intended for general public
    • Research publications

    New container sensitivity labels (MIP)

    New container sensitivity labels

    Public Private
    Privacy
    1. Membership to group is open; anyone can join
    2. “Everyone except external guest” ACL onsite; content available in search to all tenants
    1. Only owner can add members
    2. No access beyond the group membership until someone shares it or changes permissions
    Allowed Not Allowed
    External guest policy
    1. Membership to group is open; anyone can join
    2. “Everyone except external guest” ACL onsite; content available in search to all tenants
    1. Only owner can add members
    2. No access beyond the group membership until someone shares it or changes permissions

    What users will see when they create or label a Team/Group/Site

    Table of what users will see when they create or label a team/group/site highlighting 'External guest policy' and 'Privacy policy options' as referenced above.
    (Source: Microsoft, “Microsoft Purview compliance portal”)

    Info-Tech Insights

    Why you need sensitivity container labels:
    • Manage privacy of Teams Sites and M365 Groups
    • Manage external user access to SPO sites and teams
    • Manage external sharing from SPO sites
    • Manage access from unmanaged devices

    Data protection and security baselines

    Data Protection Baseline

    “Microsoft provides a default assessment in Compliance Manager for the Microsoft 365 data protection baseline" (Microsoft Docs, June 2022). This baseline assessment has a set of controls for key regulations and standards for data protection and general data governance. This baseline draws elements primarily from NIST CSF (National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework) and ISO (International Organization for Standardization) as well as from FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union).

    Security Baseline

    The final stage in M365 governance is security. You need to implement a governance policy that clearly defines storage locations for certain types of data and who has permission to access it. You need to record and track who accesses content and how they share it externally. “Part of your process should involve monitoring unusual external sharing to ensure staff only share documents that they are allowed to” (Rencore, 2021).

    Info-Tech Insights

    • Controls are already in place to set data protection policy. This assists in the MVP activities.
    • Finally, you need to set your security baseline to ensure proper permissions are in place.

    Prerequisite baseline

    Icon of crosshairs.
    Security

    MFA or SSO to access from anywhere, any device

    Banned password list

    BYOD sync with corporate network

    Icon of a group.
    Users

    Sign out inactive users automatically

    Enable guest users

    External sharing

    Block client forwarding rules

    Icon of a database.
    Resources

    Account lockout threshold

    OneDrive

    SharePoint

    Icon of gears.
    Controls

    Sensitivity labels, retention labels and policies, DLP

    Mobile application management policy

    Building baselines

    Sensitivity Profiles: Public, Internal, Confidential; Subcategory: Highly Confidential

    Microsoft 365 Collaboration Protection Profiles

    Sensitivity Public External Collaboration Internal Highly Confidential
    Description Data that is specifically prepared for public consumption Not approved for public consumption, but OK for external collaboration External collaboration highly discouraged and must be justified Data of the highest sensitivity: avoid oversharing, internal collaboration only
    Label details
    • No content marking
    • No encryption
    • Public site
    • External collaboration allowed
    • Unmanaged devices: allow full access
    • No content marking
    • No encryption
    • Private site
    • External collaboration allowed
    • Unmanaged devices: allow full access
    • Content marking
    • Encryption
    • Private site
    • External collaboration allowed but monitored
    • Unmanaged devices: limited web access
    • Content marking
    • Encryption
    • Private site
    • External collaboration disabled
    • Unmanaged devices: block access
    Teams or Site details Public Team or Site open discovery, guests are allowed Private Team or Site members are invited, guests are allowed Private Team or Site members are invited, guests are not allowed
    DLP None Warn Block

    Please Note: Global/Compliance Admins go to the 365 Groups platform, the compliance center (Purview), and Teams services (Source: Microsoft Documentation, “Microsoft Purview compliance documentation”)

    Info-Tech Insights

    • Building baseline profiles will be a part of your MVP. You will understand what type of information you are addressing and label it accordingly.
    • Sensitivity labels are a way to classify your organization's data in a way that specifies how sensitive the data is. This helps you decrease risks in sharing information that shouldn't be accessible to anyone outside your organization or department. Applying sensitivity labels allows you to protect all your data easily.

    MVP activities

    PRIMARY
    ACTIVITIES
    Define Your Governance
    The objective of the MVP is reducing barriers to establishing an initial governance position, and then enabling rapid progression of the solution to address a variety of tangible risks, including DLP, data retention, legal holds, and labeling.
    Decide on your classification labels early.

    CATEGORIZATION





    CLASSIFICATION

    MVP
    Data Discovery and Management
    AIP (Azure Information Protection) scanner helps discover, classify, label, and protect sensitive information in on-premises file servers. You can run the scanner and get immediate insight into risks with on-premises data.
    Baseline Setup
    Building baseline profiles will be a part of your MVP. You will understand what type of information you are addressing and label it accordingly. Microsoft provides a default assessment in Compliance Manager for the Microsoft 365 data protection baseline.
    Default M365 settings
    Microsoft provides a default assessment in Compliance Manager for the Microsoft 365 data protection baseline. This baseline assessment has a set of controls for key regulations and standards for data protection and general data governance.
    SUPPORT
    ACTIVITIES
    Retention Policy
    Retention policy is auto-applied. Decide whether to retain content, delete content, or retain and then delete the content.
    Sensitivity Labels
    Automatically enforce policies on groups through labels; classify groups.
    Workload Containers
    M365: SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, and Exchange, where your data is stored for labels and policies.
    Unforced Policies
    Written policies that are not enforceable by controls in Compliance Manager such as acceptable use policy.
    Forced Policies
    Restrict sharing controls to outside organizations. Enforce prefix or suffix to group or team names.

    ACME Company MVP for M/O365

    PRIMARY
    ACTIVITIES
    Define Your Governance


    Focus on ability to use legal hold and GDPR compliance.

    CATEGORIZATION





    CLASSIFICATION

    MVP
    Data Discovery and Management


    Three classification levels (public, internal, confidential), which are applied by the user when data is created. Same three levels are used for AIP to scan legacy sources.

    Baseline Setup


    All data must at least be classified before it is uploaded to an M/O365 cloud service.

    Default M365 settings


    Turn on templates 1 8 the letter q and the number z

    SUPPORT
    ACTIVITIES
    Retention Policy


    Retention policy is auto-applied. Decide whether to retain content, delete content, or retain and then delete the content.

    Sensitivity Labels


    Automatically enforce policies on groups through labels; classify groups.

    Workload Containers


    M365: SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, and Exchange, where your data is stored for labels and policies.

    Unforced Policies


    Written policies that are not enforceable by controls in Compliance Manager such as acceptable use policy.

    Forced Policies


    Restrict sharing controls to outside organizations. Enforce prefix or suffix to group or team names.

    Related Blueprints

    Govern Office 365

    Office 365 is as difficult to wrangle as it is valuable. Leverage best practices to produce governance outcomes aligned with your goals.

    Map your organizational goals to the administration features available in the Office 365 console. Your governance should reflect your requirements.

    Migrate to Office 365 Now

    Jumping into an Office 365 migration project without careful thought of the risks of a cloud migration will lead to project halt and interruption. Intentionally plan in order to expose risk and to develop project foresight for a smooth migration.

    Microsoft Teams Cookbook

    Remote work calls for leveraging your Office 365 license to use Microsoft Teams – but IT is unsure about best practices for governance and permissions. Moreover, IT has few resources to help train end users with Teams best practices

    IT Governance, Risk & Compliance

    Several blueprints are available on a broader topic of governance, from Make Your IT Governance Adaptable to Improve IT Governance to Drive Business Results and Build an IT Risk Management Program.

    Bibliography

    “Best practices for sharing files and folders with unauthenticated users.” Microsoft Build, 28 April 2022. Accessed 2 April 2022.

    “Build and manage assessments in Compliance Manager.” Microsoft Docs, 15 June 2022. Web.

    “Building a modern workplace with Microsoft 365.” Microsoft Inside Track, n.d. Web.

    Crane, Robert. “June 2020 Microsoft 365 Need to Know Webinar.” CIAOPS, SlideShare, 26 June 2020. Web.

    “Data Classification: Overview, Types, and Examples.” Simplilearn, 27 Dec. 2021. Accessed 11 April 2022.

    “Data loss prevention in Exchange Online.” Microsoft Docs, 19 April 2022. Web.

    Davies, Nahla. “5 Common Data Governance Challenges (and How to Overcome Them).” Dataversity. 25 October 2021. Accessed 5 April 2022.

    “Default labels and policies to protect your data.” Microsoft Build, April 2022. Accessed 3 April 2022.

    M., Peter. "Guide: The difference between Microsoft Backup and Retention." AvePoint Blog, 9 Oct. 2021. Accessed 4 April 2022.

    Meyer, Guillaume. “Sensitivity Labels: What They Are, Why You Need Them, and How to Apply Them.” nBold, 6 October 2021. Accessed 2 April 2022.

    “Microsoft 365 guidance for security & compliance.” Microsoft, 27 April 2022. Accessed 28 April 2022.

    “Microsoft Purview compliance portal.” Microsoft, 19 April 2022. Accessed 22 April 2022.

    “Microsoft Purview compliance documentation.” Microsoft, n.d. Accessed 22 April 2022.

    “Microsoft Trust Center: Products and services that run on trust.” Microsoft, 2022. Accessed 3 April 2022.

    “Protect your sensitive data with Microsoft Purview.” Microsoft Build, April 2022. Accessed 3 April 2022.

    Zimmergren, Tobias. “4 steps to successful cloud governance in Office 365.” Rencore, 9 Sept. 2021. Accessed 5 April 2022.

    Get the Most Out of Your SAP

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}240|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): 9.7/10 Overall Impact
    • member rating average dollars saved: $6,499 Average $ Saved
    • member rating average days saved: 11 Average Days Saved
    • Parent Category Name: Optimization
    • Parent Category Link: /optimization
    • SAP systems are changed rarely and changing them has significant impact on an organization.
    • Research shows that even newly installed systems often fail to realize their full potential benefit to the organization.
    • Business process improvement is rarely someone’s day job.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    A properly optimized SAP business process will reduce costs and increase productivity.

    Impact and Result

    • Build an ongoing optimization team to conduct application improvements.
    • Assess your SAP application(s) and the environment in which they exist. Take a business first strategy to prioritize optimization efforts.
    • Validate SAP capabilities, user satisfaction, issues around data, vendor management, and costs to build out an optimization strategy.
    • Pull this all together to develop a prioritized optimization roadmap.

    Get the Most Out of Your SAP Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Get the Most Out of Your SAP Storyboard – A guide to optimize your SAP.

    SAP is a core tool that the business leverages to accomplish its goals. Use this blueprint to strategically re-align business goals, identify business application capabilities, complete a process assessment, evaluate user adoption, and create an optimization plan that will drive a cohesive technology strategy that delivers results.

    • Get the Most Out of Your SAP – Phases 1-4

    2. Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook – A tool to document and assist with optimizing your SAP.

    The Get the Most out of Your SAP Workbook serves as the holding document for the different elements for the Get the Most out of Your SAP blueprint. Use each assigned tab to input the relevant information for the process of optimizing your SAP.

    • Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Infographic

    Workshop: Get the Most Out of Your SAP

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Define Your SAP Application Vision

    The Purpose

    Get the most out of your SAP.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Develop an ongoing SAP optimization team.

    Re-align SAP and business goals.

    Understand your current system state capabilities and processes.

    Validate user satisfaction, application fit, and areas of improvement to optimize your SAP.

    Take a 360-degree inventory of your SAP and related systems.

    Realign business and technology drivers. Assess user satisfaction.

    Review the SAP marketplace.

    Complete a thorough examination of capabilities and processes.

    Manage your vendors and data.

    Pull this all together to prioritize optimization efforts and develop a concrete roadmap.

    Activities

    1.1 Determine your SAP optimization team.

    1.2 Align organizational goals.

    1.3 Inventory applications and interactions.

    1.4 Define business capabilities.

    1.5 Explore SAP-related costs.

    Outputs

    SAP optimization team

    SAP business model

    SAP optimization goals

    SAP system inventory and data flow

    SAP process list

    SAP and related costs

    2 Map Current-State Capabilities

    The Purpose

    Map current-state capabilities.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Complete an SAP process gap analysis to understand where the SAP is underperforming.

    Review the SAP application portfolio assessment to understand user satisfaction and data concerns.

    Undertake a software review survey to understand your satisfaction with the vendor and product.

    Activities

    2.1 Conduct gap analysis for SAP processes.

    2.2 Perform an application portfolio assessment.

    2.3 Review vendor satisfaction.

    Outputs

    SAP process gap analysis

    SAP application portfolio assessment

    ERP software reviews survey

    3 Assess SAP

    The Purpose

    Assess SAP.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Learn the processes that you need to focus on.

    Uncover underlying user satisfaction issues to address these areas.

    Understand where data issues are occurring so that you can mitigate this.

    Investigate your relationship with the vendor and product, including that relative to others.

    Identify any areas for cost optimization (optional).

    Activities

    3.1 Explore process gaps.

    3.2 Analyze user satisfaction.

    3.3 Assess data quality.

    3.4 Understand product satisfaction and vendor management.

    3.5 Look for SAP cost optimization opportunities (optional).

    Outputs

    SAP process optimization priorities

    SAP vendor optimization opportunities

    SAP cost optimization

    4 Build the Optimization Roadmap

    The Purpose

    Build the optimization roadmap.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understanding where you need to improve is the first step, now understand where to focus your optimization efforts.

    Activities

    4.1 SAP process gap analysis

    4.2 SAP application portfolio assessment

    4.3 SAP software reviews survey

    Outputs

    ERP optimization roadmap

    Further reading

    Get the Most Out of Your SAP

    In today’s connected world, the continuous optimization of enterprise applications to realize your digital strategy is key.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    Focus optimization on organizational value delivery.

    The image contains a picture of Chad Shortridge.

    Chad Shortridge

    Senior Research Director, Enterprise Applications

    Info-Tech Research Group

    The image contains a picture of Lisa Highfield.

    Lisa Highfield

    Research Director, Enterprise Applications

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is a core tool that the business leverages to accomplish its goals. An ERP that is doing its job well is invisible to the business. The challenges come when the tool is no longer invisible. It has become a source of friction in the functioning of the business.

    SAP systems are expensive, benefits can be difficult to quantify, and issues with the products can be difficult to understand. Over time, technology evolves, organizational goals change, and the health of these systems is often not monitored. This is complicated in today’s digital landscape with multiple integrations points, siloed data, and competing priorities.

    Too often organizations jump into selecting replacement systems without understanding the health of their systems. We can do better than this.

    IT leaders need to take a proactive approach to continually monitor and optimize their enterprise applications. Strategically re-align business goals, identify business application capabilities, complete a process assessment, evaluate user adoption, and create an optimization plan that will drive a cohesive technology strategy that delivers results.

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Common Obstacles

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    Your SAP ERP systems are critical to supporting the organization’s business processes. They are expensive. Direct benefits and ROI can be hard to measure.

    SAP application portfolios are often behemoths to support. With complex integration points and unique business processes, stabilization is the norm.

    Application optimization is essential to staying competitive and productive in today’s digital environment.

    Balancing optimization with stabilization is one of the most difficult decisions for ERP application leaders.

    Competing priorities and often unclear ERP strategies make it difficult to make decisions about what, how, and when to optimize.

    Enterprise applications involve large numbers of processes, users, and evolving vendor roadmaps.

    Teams do not have a framework to illustrate, communicate, and justify the optimization effort in the language your stakeholders understand.

    In today’s rapidly changing SAP landscape it is imperative to evaluate your applications for optimization, no matter what your strategy is moving forward.

    Assess your SAP applications and the environment in which they exist. Take a business-first strategy to prioritize optimization efforts.

    Validate ERP capabilities, user satisfaction, issues around data, vendor management, and costs to build out an overall roadmap and optimization strategy.

    Pull this all together to prioritize optimization efforts and develop a concrete roadmap.

    Info-Tech Insight

    SAP ERP environments are changing, but we cannot stand still on our optimization efforts. Understand your product(s), processes, user satisfaction, integration points, and the availability of data to business decision makers. Examine these areas to develop a personalized SAP optimization roadmap that fits the needs of your organization. Incorporate these methodologies into an ongoing optimization strategy aimed at enabling the business, increasing productivity, and reducing costs.

    The image contains an Info-Tech Thought model on get the most out of your ERP.

    Insight summary

    Continuous assessment and optimization of your SAP ERP systems is critical to the success of your organization.

    • Applications and the environments in which they live are constantly evolving.
    • This blueprint provides business and application managers with a method to complete a health assessment of their ERP systems to identify areas for improvement and optimization.
    • Put optimization practices into effect by:
      • Aligning and prioritizing key business and technology drivers.
      • Identifying ERP process classification and performing a gap analysis.
      • Measuring user satisfaction across key departments.
      • Evaluating vendor relations.
      • Understanding how data plays into the mix.
      • Pulling it all together into an optimization roadmap.

    SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems facilitate the flow of information across business units. It allows for the seamless integration of systems and creates a holistic view of the enterprise to support decision making. In many organizations, the SAP system is considered the lifeblood of the enterprise. Problems with this key operational system will have a dramatic impact on the ability of the enterprise to survive and grow. ERP implementation should not be a one-and-done exercise. There needs to be ongoing optimization to enable business processes and optimal organizational results.

    SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP)

    The image contains a diagram of the SAP enterprise resource planning. The diagram includes a circle with smaller circles all around it. The inside of the circle contains SAP logos. The circles around the big circle are labelled: Human Resources Management, Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Asset Management, Logistics, Supply Chain Management, Manufacturing, R&D and Engineering, and Finance.

    What is SAP?

    SAP ERP systems facilitate the flow of information across business units. They allow for the seamless integration of systems and create a holistic view of the enterprise to support decision making.

    In many organizations, the ERP system is considered the lifeblood of the enterprise. Problems with this key operational system will have a dramatic impact on the ability of the enterprise to survive and grow.

    An ERP system:

    • Automates processes, reducing the amount of manual, routine work.
    • Integrates with core modules, eliminating the fragmentation of systems.
    • Centralizes information for reporting from multiple parts of the value chain to a single point.

    SAP use cases:

    Product-Centric

    Suitable for organizations that manufacture, assemble, distribute, or manage material goods.

    Service-Centric

    Suitable for organizations that provide and manage field services and/or professional services.

    SAP Fast Facts

    Product Description

    • SAP has numerous ERP products. Products can be found under ERP, Finance, Customer Relations and Experience, Supply Chain Management, Human Resources, and Technology Platforms.
    • SAP offers on-premises and cloud solutions for its ERP. In 2011, SAP released the HANA in-memory database. SAP ECC 6.0 reaches the end of life in 2027 (2030 extended support).
    • Many organizations are facing mandatory transformation. This is an excellent opportunity to examine ERP portfolios for optimization opportunities.
    • Now is the time to optimize to ensure you are prepared for the journey ahead.
    The image contains a timeline of the evolution of SAP ERP. The timeline is ordered: SAP R1-R3 1972-1992, SAP ECC 2003-2006, ERP Business Suite 2000+, SAP HANA In-Memory Database 2011, S/4 2015.

    Vendor Description

    • SAP SE was founded in 1972 by five former IBM employees.
    • The organization is focused on enterprise software that integrates all business processes and enables data processing in real-time.
    • SAP stands for Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing.
    • SAP offers more than 100 solutions covering all business functions.
    • SAP operates 65 data centers at 35 locations in 16 countries.

    Employees

    105,000

    Headquarters

    Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

    Website

    sap.com

    Founded

    1972

    Presence

    Global, Publicly Traded

    SAP by the numbers

    Only 72% of SAP S/4HANA clients were satisfied with the product’s business value in 2022. This was 9th out of 10 in the enterprise resource planning category.

    Source: SoftwareReviews

    As of 2022, 65% of SAP customers have not made the move to S/4HANA. These customers will continue to need to optimize the current ERP to meet the demanding needs of the business.

    Source: Statista

    Organizations will need to continue to support and optimize their SAP ERP portfolios. As of 2022, 42% of ASUG members were planning a move to S/4HANA but had not yet started to move.

    Source: ASUG

    Your challenge

    This research is designed to help organizations who need to:

    • Understand the multiple deployment models and the roadmap to successfully navigate a move to S/4HANA.
    • Build a business case to understand the value behind a move.
    • Map functionality to ensure future compatibility.
    • Understand the process required to commercially navigate a move to S/4HANA.
    • Avoid a costly audit due to missed requirements or SAP whiteboarding sessions.

    HANA used to be primarily viewed as a commercial vehicle to realize legacy license model discounts. Now, however, SAP has built a roadmap to migrate all customers over to S/4HANA. While timelines may be delayed, the inevitable move is coming.

    30-35% of SAP customers likely have underutilized assets. This can add up to millions in unused software and maintenance.

    – Upperedge

    SAP challenges and dissatisfaction

    Drivers of Dissatisfaction

    Organizational

    People and teams

    Technology

    Data

    Competing priorities

    Knowledgeable staff/turnover

    Integration issues

    Access to data

    Lack of strategy

    Lack of internal skills

    Selecting tools and technology

    Data hygiene

    Budget challenges

    Ability to manage new products

    Keeping pace with technology changes

    Data literacy

    Lack of training

    Update challenges

    One view of the customer

    Finance, IT, Sales, and other users of the ERP system can only optimize ERP with the full support of each other. The cooperation of the departments is crucial when trying to improve ERP technology capabilities and customer interaction.

    Info-Tech Insight

    While technology is the key enabler of building strong customer experiences, there are many other drivers of dissatisfaction. IT must stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the business to develop a technology framework for ERP.

    Where are applications leaders focusing?

    Big growth numbers

    Year-over-year call topic requests

    Other changes

    Year-over-year call topic requests

    The image contains a graph to demonstrate year-over-year call topic requests. Year 1 has 79%, Year 2 76%, Year 3 65% requests, and Year 4 has 124% requests. The image contains a graph to demonstrate other changes in year-over-year call topic requests. Year 1 has -25%, Year 2 has 4%, and Year 3 has 13%.

    We are seeing applications leaders’ priorities change year over year, driven by a shift in their approach to problem solving. Leaders are moving from a process-centric approach to a collaborative approach that breaks down boundaries and brings teams together.

    Software development lifecycle topics are tactical point solutions. Organizations have been “shifting left” to tackle the strategic issues such as product vision and Agile mindset to optimize the whole organization.

    The S/4HANA journey

    Optimization can play a role in your transition to S/4HANA.

    • The business does not stop. Satisfy ongoing needs for business enablement.
    • Build out a collaborative SAP optimization team across the business and IT.
    • Engage the business to understand requirements.
    • Discover applications and processes.
    • Explore current-state capabilities and future-state needs.
    • Evaluate optimization opportunities. Are there short-term wins? What are the long-term goals?
    • Navigate the path to S/4HANA and develop some timelines and stage gates.
    • Set your course and optimization roadmap.
    • Capitalize on the methodologies for an ongoing optimization effort that can be continued after the S/4HANA go-live date.

    Many organizations may be coming up against changes to their SAP ERP application portfolio.

    Some challenges organizations may be dealing with include:

    • Heavily customized instances
    • Large volumes of data
    • Lack of documentation
    • Outdated business processes
    • Looming end of life

    Application optimization is risky without a plan

    Avoid these common pitfalls:

    • Not pursuing optimization because you are migrating to S/4HANA.
    • Not considering how this plays into the short-, medium-, and long-term ERP strategy.
    • Not considering application optimization as a business and IT partnership, which requires the continuous formal engagement of all participants.
    • Not having a good understanding of your current state, including integration points and data.
    • Not adequately accommodating feedback and changes after digital applications are deployed and employed.
    • Not treating digital applications as a motivator for potential future IT optimization efforts and incorporating digital assets in strategic business planning.
    • Not involving department leads, management, and other subject-matter experts to facilitate the organizational change digital applications bring.

    “[A] successful application [optimization] strategy starts with the business need in mind and not from a technological point of view. No matter from which angle you look at it, modernizing a legacy application is a considerable undertaking that can’t be taken lightly. Your best approach is to begin the journey with baby steps.”

    – Medium

    Info-Tech’s methodology for getting the most out of your ERP

    1. Map Current-State Capabilities

    2. Assess Your Current State

    3. Identify Key Optimization Areas

    4. Build Your Optimization Roadmap

    Phase Steps

    1. Identify stakeholders and build your SAP optimization team.
    2. Build an SAP strategy model.
    3. Inventory current system state.
    4. Define business capabilities.
    1. Conduct a gap analysis for ERP processes.
    2. Assess user satisfaction.
    3. Review your satisfaction with the vendor and product.
    1. Identify key optimization areas.
    2. Evaluate product sustainability over the short, medium, and long term.
    3. Identify any product changes anticipated over short, medium, and long term.
    1. Prioritize optimization opportunities.
    2. Identify key optimization areas.
    3. Compile optimization assessment results.

    Phase Outcomes

    1. Stakeholder map
    2. SAP optimization team
    3. SAP business model
    4. Strategy alignment
    5. Systems inventory and diagram
    6. Business capabilities map
    7. Key SAP processes list
    1. Gap analysis for SAP-related processes
    2. Understanding of user satisfaction across applications and processes
    3. Insight into SAP data quality
    4. Quantified satisfaction with the vendor and product
    5. Understanding SAP costs
    1. List of SAP optimization opportunities
    1. SAP optimization roadmap

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Identify and prioritize your SAP optimization goals.

    The image contains screenshots of the SAP Workbook.

    Application Portfolio Assessment

    Assess IT-enabled user satisfaction across your SAP portfolio.

    The image contains a screenshot of the Application Portfolio Assessment.

    Key deliverable:

    The image contains a screenshot of the SAP Organization Roadmap.

    SAP Optimization Roadmap

    Complete an assessment of processes, user satisfaction, data quality, and vendor management.

    The image contains screenshots further demonstrating SAP deliverables.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.

    Guided Implementation

    Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.

    Workshop

    We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.

    Consulting

    Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Phase 3 Phase 4

    Call #1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenge.

    Call #2:

    • Build the SAP team.
    • Align organizational goals.

    Call #3:

    • Map current state.
    • Inventory SAP capabilities and processes.
    • Explore SAP-related costs.

    Call #4: Understand product satisfaction and vendor management.

    Call #5: Review APA results.

    Call #6: Understand SAP optimization opportunities.

    Call #7: Determine the right SAP path for your organization.

    Call #8:

    Build out optimization roadmap and next steps.

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization. A typical GI is 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com1-888-670-8889

    Day 1

    Day 2

    Day 3

    Day 4

    Day 5

    Define Your SAP Application Vision

    Map Current State

    Assess SAP

    Build Your Optimization Roadmap

    Next Steps and Wrap-Up (offsite)

    Activities

    1.1 Identify Stakeholders and Build Your Optimization Team

    1.2 Build an SAP Strategy Model

    1.3 Inventory Current System State

    1.4 Define Optimization Timeframe

    1.5 Understand SAP Costs

    2.1 Assess SAP Capabilities

    2.2 Review Your Satisfaction With the Vendor/Product and Willingness for Change

    3.1 Prioritize Optimization Opportunities

    3.2 Discover Optimization Initiatives

    4.1 Build Your Optimization Roadmap

    5.1 Complete in-progress deliverables from previous four days.

    5.2 Set up review time for workshop deliverables and to discuss next steps.

    Deliverables

    1. SAP optimization team
    2. SAP business model
    3. SAP optimization goals
    4. System inventory and data flow
    5. Application and business capabilities list
    6. SAP optimization timeline
    1. SAP capability gap analysis
    2. SAP user satisfaction (application portfolio assessment)
    3. SAP SoftwareReviews survey results
    4. SAP current costs
    1. Product and vendor satisfaction opportunities
    2. Capability and feature optimization opportunities
    3. Process optimization opportunities
    4. Integration optimization opportunities
    5. Data optimization opportunities
    6. SAP cost-saving opportunities
    1. SAP optimization roadmap

    Phase 1

    Map Current-State Capabilities

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Phase 3

    Phase 4

    1.1 Identify Stakeholders and Build Your Optimization Team

    1.2 Build an SAP Strategy Model

    1.3 Inventory Current System State

    1.4 Define Optimization Timeframe

    1.5 Understand SAP Costs

    2.1 Assess SAP Capabilities

    2.2 Review Your Satisfaction With the Vendor/Product and Willingness for Change

    3.1 Prioritize Optimization Opportunities

    3.2 Discover Optimization Initiatives

    4.1 Build Your Optimization Roadmap

    This phase will guide you through the following activities:

    • Align your organizational goals
    • Gain a firm understanding of your current state
    • Inventory ERP and related applications
    • Confirm the organization’s capabilities

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CFO
    • Department Leads – Finance, Procurement, Asset Management
    • Applications Director
    • Senior Business Analyst
    • Senior Developer
    • Procurement Analysts

    Step 1.1

    Identify Stakeholders and Build Your Optimization Team

    Activities

    1.1.1 Identify stakeholders critical to success

    1.1.2 Map your SAP optimization stakeholders

    1.1.3 Determine your SAP optimization team

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Identify ERP drivers and objectives
    • Explore ERP challenges and pain points
    • Discover ERP benefits and opportunities
    • Align the ERP foundation with the corporate strategy

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Stakeholders
    • Project sponsors and leaders

    Outcomes of this step

    • Stakeholder map
    • SAP Optimization Team

    ERP optimization stakeholders

    • Understand the roles necessary to get the most out of your SAP.
    • Understand the role of each player within your project structure. Look for listed participants on the activities slides to determine when each player should be involved.

    Title

    Role Within the Project Structure

    Organizational Sponsor

    • Owns the project at the management/C-suite level
    • Responsible for breaking down barriers and ensuring alignment with your organizational strategy
    • CIO, CFO, COO, or similar

    Project Manager

    • The IT individual(s) that oversee day-to-day project operations
    • Responsible for preparing and managing the project plan and monitoring the project team’s progress
    • Applications Manager or other IT Manager, Business Analyst, Business Process Owner, or similar

    Business Unit Leaders

    • Works alongside the IT Project Manager to ensure the strategy is aligned with business needs
    • In this case, likely to be a marketing, sales, or customer service lead
    • Sales Director, Marketing Director, Customer Care Director, or similar

    Optimization Team

    • Comprised of individuals whose knowledge and skills are crucial to project success
    • Responsible for driving day-to-day activities, coordinating communication, and making process and design decisions; can assist with persona and scenario development for ERP
    • Project Manager, Business Lead, ERP Manager, Integration Manager, Application SMEs, Developers, Business Process Architects, and/or similar SMEs

    Steering Committee

    • Comprised of the C-suite/management-level individuals that act as the project’s decision makers
    • Responsible for validating goals and priorities, defining the project scope, enabling adequate resourcing, and managing change
    • Project Sponsor, Project Manager, Business Lead, CFO, Business Unit SMEs, or similar

    Info-Tech Insight

    Do not limit project input or participation. Include subject-matter experts and internal stakeholders at stages within the project. Such inputs can be solicited on a one-off basis as needed. This ensures you take a holistic approach to create your ERP optimization strategy.

    1.1.1 Identify SAP optimization stakeholders

    1 hour

    1. Hold a meeting to identify the SAP optimization stakeholders.
    2. Use next slide as a guide.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    The image contains a screenshot from the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Understand how to navigate the complex web of stakeholders in ERP

    Identify which stakeholders to include and what their level of involvement should be during requirements elicitation based on relevant topic expertise.

    Sponsor

    End User

    IT

    Business

    Description

    An internal stakeholder who has final sign-off on the ERP project.

    Front-line users of the ERP technology.

    Back-end support staff who are tasked with project planning, execution, and eventual system maintenance.

    Additional stakeholders that will be impacted by any ERP technology changes.

    Examples

    • CEO
    • CIO/CTO
    • COO
    • CFO
    • Warehouse personnel
    • Sales teams
    • HR admins
    • Applications manager
    • Vendor relationship manager(s)
    • Director, Procurement
    • VP, Marketing
    • Manager, HR

    Value

    Executive buy-in and support is essential to the success of the project. Often, the sponsor controls funding and resource allocation.

    End users determine the success of the system through user adoption. If the end user does not adopt the system, the system is deemed useless and benefits realization is poor.

    IT is likely to be responsible for more in-depth requirements gathering. IT possesses critical knowledge around system compatibility, integration, and data.

    Involving business stakeholders in the requirements gathering will ensure alignment between HR and organizational objectives.

    Large-scale ERP projects require the involvement of many stakeholders from all corners and levels of the organization, including project sponsors, IT, end users, and business stakeholders. Consider the influence and interest of stakeholders in contributing to the requirements elicitation process and involve them accordingly.

    EXAMPLE: Stakeholder involvement during selection

    The image contains an example of stakeholder involvement during selection. The graph is comparing influence and interest. In the lowest section of both influence and interest, it is labelled Monitor. With low interest but high influence that is labelled Keep Satisfied. In low influence but high interest it is labelled Keep Informed. The section that is high in both interest and influence that is labelled Involve closely.

    Activity 1.1.2 Map your SAP optimization stakeholders

    1 hour

    1. Use the list of SAP optimization stakeholders.
    2. Map each stakeholder on the quadrant based on their expected influence and involvement in the project.
    3. [Optional] Color code the users using the scale below to quickly identify the group that the stakeholder belongs to.

    The image contains an example of a colour scheme. Sponsor is coloured blue, End user is purple, IT is yellow, and Business is light blue.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    The image contains a screenshot of an example map on organization's stakeholders.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Map the organization’s stakeholders

    The image contains a larger version of the image from the previous slide where there is a graph comparing influence and involvement and has a list of stakeholders in a legend on the side.

    The SAP optimization team

    Consider the core team functions when putting together the project team. Form a cross-functional team (i.e. across IT, Marketing, Sales, Service, Operations) to create a well-aligned ERP optimization strategy. Don’t let your project team become too large when trying to include all relevant stakeholders. Carefully limiting the size of the project team will enable effective decision making while still including functional business units such as Marketing, Sales, Service, and Finance as well as IT.

    Required Skills/Knowledge

    Suggested Project Team Members

    Business

    • Department leads
    • Business process leads
    • Business analysts
    • Subject matter experts
    • SMEs/Business process leads –All functional areas; example: Strategy, Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Finance, HR

    IT

    • Application development
    • Enterprise integration
    • Business processes
    • Data management
    • Product owner
    • ERP application manager
    • Business process manager
    • Integration manager
    • Application developer
    • Data stewards

    Other

    • Operations
    • Administrative
    • Change management
    • COO
    • CFO
    • Change management officer

    1.1.3 Determine your SAP optimization team

    1 hour

    1. Have the project manager and other key stakeholders discuss and determine who will be involved in the SAP optimization project.
    • The size of the team will depend on the initiative and size of your organization.
    • Key business leaders in key areas and IT representatives should be involved.

    Note: Depending on your initiative and the size of your organization, the size of this team will vary.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    The image contains a screenshot of the section ERP Optimization Team in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Step 1.2

    Build an SAP Strategy Model

    Activities

    1.2.1 Explore environmental factors and technology drivers

    1.2.2 Consider potential barriers and challenges

    1.2.3 Discuss enablers of success

    1.2.4 Develop your SAP optimization goals

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Identify ERP drivers and objectives
    • Explore ERP challenges and pain points
    • Discover ERP benefits and opportunities
    • Align the ERP foundation with the corporate strategy

    This step involves the following participants:

    • SAP Optimization Team

    Outcomes of this step

    • ERP business model
    • Strategy alignment

    Align your SAP strategy with the corporate strategy

    Corporate Strategy

    Unified ERP Strategy

    IT Strategy

    Your corporate strategy:

    • Conveys the current state of the organization and the path it wants to take.
    • Identifies future goals and business aspirations.
    • Communicates the initiatives that are critical for getting the organization from its current state to the desired future state.
    • The ideal ERP strategy is aligned with overarching organizational business goals and with broader IT initiatives.
    • Include all affected business units and departments in these conversations.
    • The ERP optimization can be and should be linked, with metrics, to the corporate strategy and ultimate business objectives

    Your IT strategy:

    • Communicates the organization’s budget and spending on ERP.
    • Identifies IT initiatives that will support the business and key ERP objectives.
    • Outlines staffing and resourcing for ERP initiatives.

    ERP projects are more successful when the management team understands the strategic importance and the criticality of alignment. Time needs to be spent upfront aligning business strategies with ERP capabilities. Effective alignment between IT and the business should happen daily. Alignment doesn’t just need to occur just at the executive level but at each level of the organization.

    ERP Business Model Template

    The image contains a screenshot of a ERP Business Model Template.

    Conduct interviews to elicit the business context

    Stakeholder Interviews

    Begin by conducting interviews of your executive team. Interview the following leaders:

    1. Chief Information Officer
    2. Chief Executive Officer
    3. Chief Financial Officer
    4. Chief Revenue Officer/Sales Leader
    5. Chief Operating Officer/Supply Chain & Logistics Leader
    6. Chief Technology Officer/Chief Product Officer

    INTERVIEWS MUST UNCOVER

    1. Your organization’s top three business goals
    2. Your organization’s top ten business initiatives
    3. Your organization’s mission and vision

    Understand the ERP drivers and organizational objectives

    Business Needs

    Business Drivers

    Technology Drivers

    Environmental Factors

    Definition

    A business need is a requirement associated with a particular business process.

    Business drivers can be thought of as business-level goals. These are tangible benefits the business can measure such as customer retention, operation excellence, and financial performance.

    Technology drivers are technological changes that have created the need for a new ERP enablement strategy. Many organizations turn to technology systems to help them obtain a competitive edge.

    These external considerations are factors that take place outside of the organization and impact the way business is conducted inside the organization. These are often outside the control of the business.

    Examples

    • Audit tracking
    • Authorization levels
    • Business rules
    • Data quality
    • Customer satisfaction
    • Branding
    • Time-to-resolution
    • Deployment model (i.e. SaaS)
    • Integration
    • Reporting capabilities
    • Fragmented technologies
    • Economic and political factors
    • Competitive influencers
    • Compliance regulations

    Info-Tech Insight

    One of the biggest drivers for ERP adoption is the ability to make quicker decisions from timely information. This driver is a result of external considerations. Many industries today are highly competitive, uncertain, and rapidly changing. To succeed under these pressures, there needs to be timely information and visibility into all components of the organization.

    1.2.1 Explore environmental factors and technology drivers

    30 minutes

    1. Identify business drivers that are contributing to the organization’s need for ERP.
    2. Understand how the company is running today and what the organization’s future will look like. Try to identify the purpose for becoming an integrated organization. Use a whiteboard or flip charts and markers to capture key findings.
    3. Consider external considerations, organizational drivers, technology drivers, and key functional requirements.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    The image contains a diagram on exploring the environmental factors and technology drivers.

    External Considerations

    Organizational Drivers

    Technology Considerations

    Functional Requirements

    • Funding constraints
    • Regulations
    • Compliance
    • Scalability
    • Operational efficiency
    • Data accuracy
    • Data quality
    • Better reporting
    • Information availability
    • Integration between systems
    • Secure data

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Create a realistic ERP foundation by identifying the challenges and barriers the project will bestow

    There are several different factors that may stifle the success of an ERP implementation. Organizations that are creating an ERP foundation must scan their current environment to identify internal barriers and challenges.

    Common Internal Barriers

    Management Support

    Organizational Culture

    Organizational Structure

    IT Readiness

    Definition

    The degree of understanding and acceptance toward ERP systems.

    The collective shared values and beliefs.

    The functional relationships between people and departments in an organization.

    The degree to which the organization’s people and processes are prepared for a new ERP system.

    Questions

    • Is an ERP project recognized as a top priority?
    • Will management commit time to the project?
    • Are employees resistant to change?
    • Is the organization highly individualized?
    • Is the organization centralized?
    • Is the organization highly formalized?
    • Is there strong technical expertise?
    • Is there strong infrastructure?

    Impact

    • Funding
    • Resources
    • Knowledge sharing
    • User acceptance
    • Flow of knowledge
    • Quality of implementation
    • Need for reliance on consultants

    ERP Business Model

    Organizational Goals

    Enablers

    Barriers

    • Efficiency
    • Effectiveness
    • Integrity
    • One source of truth for data
    • One team
    • Customer service, external and internal
    • Cross-trained employees
    • Desire to focus on value-add activities
    • Collaborative
    • Top-level executive support
    • Effective change management process
    • Organizational silos
    • Lack of formal process documentation
    • Funding availability
    • What goes first? Organizational priorities

    What does success look like?

    Top 15 critical success factors for ERP system implementation

    The image contains a graph that demonstrates the top 15 critical success factors for ERP system implementation. The top 15 are: Top management support and commitment, Interdepartmental communication and cooperations throughout the institution, Commitment to business process re-engineering to do away with redundant processes, Implementation project management from initiation to closing, Change management program to ensure awareness and readiness for possible changes, Project team competence, Education and training for stakeholders, Project champion to lead implementation, Project mission and goals for the system with clear objectives agreed upon, ERP expert consultant use to guide the implementation process, Minimum level of customization to use ERP functionalities to maximum, Package selection, Understanding the institutional culture, Use involvement and participation throughout implementation, ERP vendor support and partnership.

    Source: Epizitone and Olugbara, 2020; CC BY 4.0

    Info-Tech Insight

    Complement your ability to deliver on your critical success factors with the capabilities of your implementation partner to drive a successful ERP implementation.

    “Implementation partners can play an important role in successful ERP implementations. They can work across the organizational departments and layers creating a synergy and a communications mechanism.” – Ayogeboh Epizitone, Durban University of Technology

    1.2.2 Consider potential barriers and challenges

    1-3 hours

    • Open tab “1.2 Strategy & Goals,” in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.
    • Identify barriers to ERP optimization success.
    • Review the ERP critical success factors and how they relate to your optimization efforts.
    • Discuss potential barriers to successful ERP optimization.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    The image contains the same diagram as shown previously, where it demonstrated the environmental factors in relation to the ERP strategy. The same diagram is used and highlights the barriers section.

    Functional Gaps

    Technical Gaps

    Process Gaps

    Barriers to Success

    • No online purchase order for requisitions
    • Inconsistent reporting – data quality concerns
    • Duplication of data
    • Lack of system integration
    • Cultural mindset
    • Resistance to change
    • Lack of training
    • Funding

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    1.2.3 Discuss enablers of success

    1-3 hours

    1. Open tab “1.2 Strategy & Goals,” in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.
    2. Identify barriers to ERP optimization success.
    3. Review the ERP critical success factors and how they relate to your optimization efforts.
    4. Discuss potential barriers to successful ERP optimization.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    The image contains the same diagram as shown previously, where it demonstrated the environmental factors in relation to the ERP strategy. The same diagram is used and highlights the enablers and organizational goals sections.

    Business Benefits

    IT Benefits

    Organizational Benefits

    Enablers of Success

    • Business-IT alignment
    • Compliance
    • Scalability
    • Operational efficiency
    • Data accuracy
    • Data quality
    • Better reporting
    • Change management
    • Training
    • Alignment with strategic objectives

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    The Business Value Matrix

    Rationalizing and quantifying the value of SAP

    Benefits can be realized internally and externally to the organization or department and have different drivers of value.

    • Financial benefits refer to the degree to which the value source can be measured through monetary metrics and are often quite tangible.
    • Human benefits refer to how an application can deliver value through a user’s experience.
    • Inward refers to value sources that have an internal impact and improve your organization’s effectiveness and efficiency in performing its operations.
    • Outward refers to value sources that come from your interaction with external factors, such as the market or your customers.

    Organizational Goals

    • Increased Revenue
    • Application functions that are specifically related to the impact on your organization’s ability to generate revenue and deliver value to your customers.

    • Reduced Costs
    • Reduction of overhead. The ways in which an application limits the operational costs of business functions.

    • Enhanced Services
    • Functions that enable business capabilities that improve the organization’s ability to perform its internal operations.

    • Reach Customers
    • Application functions that enable and improve the interaction with customers or produce market information and insights.

    Business Value Matrix

    The image contains a screenshot of a Business Value Matrix. It includes: Reach Customers, Increase Revenue or Deliver Value, Reduce Costs, and Enhance Services.

    Link SAP capabilities to organizational value

    The image contains screenshots that demonstrate linking SAP capabilities to organizational value.

    1.2.4 Define your SAP optimization goals

    30 minutes

    1. Discuss the ERP business model and ERP critical success factors.
    2. Through the lens of corporate goals and objectives think about supporting ERP technology. How can the ERP system bring value to the organization? What are the top things that will make this initiative a success?
    3. Develop five to ten optimization goals that will form the basis for the success of this initiative.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    The image contains an example of the activity describe above on defining your SAP optimization goals.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Step 1.3

    Inventory Current System State

    Activities

    1.3.1 Inventory SAP applications and interactions

    1.3.2 Draw your SAP system diagram

    1.3.3 Inventory your SAP modules and business capabilities (or business processes)

    1.3.4 Define your key SAP optimization modules and business capabilities

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Inventory of applications
    • Mapping interactions between systems

    This step involves the following participants:

    • SAP Optimization Team
    • Enterprise Architect
    • Data Architect

    Outcomes of this step

    • Systems inventory
    • Systems diagram

    1.3.1 Inventory SAP applications and interfaces

    1-3+ hours

    1. Enter your SAP systems, SAP extended applications, and integrated applications within scope.
    2. Include any abbreviated names or nicknames.
    3. List the application type or main function.
    4. List the modules the organization has licensed.
    5. List any integrations.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    The image contains a screenshot of the SAP application inventory.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    ERP Data Flow

    The image contains an example ERP Data Flow with a legend.

    Be sure to include enterprise applications that are not included in the ERP application portfolio. Popular systems to consider for POIs include billing, directory services, content management, and collaboration tools.

    ERP – enterprise resource planning

    Email – email system such as Microsoft Exchange

    Calendar – calendar system such as Microsoft Outlook

    WEM – web experience management

    ECM – enterprise content management

    When assessing the current application portfolio that supports your ERP, the tendency will be to focus on the applications under the ERP umbrella. These relate mostly to marketing, sales, and customer service. Be sure to include systems that act as input to, or benefit due to outputs from, ERP or similar applications.

    1.3.2 Draw your SAP system diagram

    1-3+ hours

    1. From the SAP application inventory, diagram your network.
    2. Include:

    • Any internal or external systems
    • Integration points
    • Data flow

    The image contains a screenshot of the example ERP Systems Diagram.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Sample SAP and integrations map

    The image contains a screenshot of a sample SAP and integrations map.

    Business capability map (Level 0)

    The image contains a screenshot of the business capability map, level 0. The capability map includes: Products and Services Development, Revenue Generation, Demand Fulfillment, and Enterprise Management and Planning.

    In business architecture, the primary view of an organization is known as a business capability map. A business capability defines what a business does to enable value creation, rather than how.

    Business capabilities:

    • Represent stable business functions.
    • Are unique and independent of each other.
    • Will typically have a defined business outcome.

    A business capability map provides details that help the business architecture practitioner direct attention to a specific area of the business for further assessment.

    ERP process mapping

    The image contains screenshots to demonstrate the ERP process mapping. One of the screenshots is of the business capability map, level 0, the second screenshot contains the objectives , value streams, capabilities, and processes. The third image contains a screenshot of the SAP screenshot with the circles around it as previously shown.

    The operating model

    An operating model is a framework that drives operating decisions. It helps to set the parameters for the scope of ERP and the processes that will be supported. The operating model will serve to group core operational processes. These groupings represent a set of interrelated, consecutive processes aimed at generating a common output. From your developed processes and your SAP license agreements you will be able to pinpoint the scope for investigation including the processes and modules.

    APQC Framework

    Help define your inventory of sales, marketing, and customer services processes.

    Operating Processes

    1. Develop vision and strategy 2. Develop and manage products and services 3. Market and sell products and services 4. Deliver physical products 5. Deliver services

    Management and Support Processes

    6.Manage customer service

    7. Develop and manage human capital

    8. Manage IT

    9. Manage financial resources

    10. Acquire, construct, and manage assets

    11. Manage enterprise risk, compliance, remediation, and resiliency

    12. Manage external relationships

    13. Develop and manage business capabilities

    Source: APQC

    If you do not have a documented process model, you can use the APQC Framework to help define your inventory of sales business processes. APQC’s Process Classification Framework is a taxonomy of cross-functional business processes intended to allow the objective comparison of organizational performance within and among organizations.

    APQC’s Process Classification Framework

    The value stream

    Value stream defined:

    Value Streams

    Design Product

    Produce Product

    Sell Product

    Customer Service

    • Manufacturers work proactively to design products and services that will meet consumer demand.
    • Products are driven by consumer demand and government regulations.
    • Production processes and labor costs are constantly analyzed for efficiencies and accuracies.
    • Quality of product and services are highly regulated through all levels of the supply chain.
    • Sales networks and sales staff deliver the product from the organization to the end consumer.
    • Marketing plays a key role throughout the value stream, connecting consumers’ wants and needs to the products and services offered.
    • Relationships with consumers continue after the sale of products and services.
    • Continued customer support and data mining is important to revenue streams.

    Value streams connect business goals to the organization’s value realization activities in the marketplace. Those activities are dependent on the specific industry segment in which an organization operates.

    There are two types of value streams: core value streams and support value streams.

    • Core value streams are mostly externally facing. They deliver value to either an external or internal customer and they tie to the customer perspective of the strategy map.
    • Support value streams are internally facing and provide the foundational support for an organization to operate.

    An effective method for ensuring all value streams have been considered is to understand that there can be different end-value receivers.

    Process mapping hierarchy

    The image contains a screenshot of the PCF levels explained. The levels are 1-5. The levels are: Category, Process Group, Process, Activity, and Task.

    Source: APQC

    APQC provides a process classification framework. It allows organizations to effectively define their processes and manage them appropriately.

    APQC’s Process Classification Framework

    Cross-industry classification framework

    Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Level 4

    Market and sell products and services

    Understand markets, customers, and capabilities

    Perform customer and market intelligence analysis

    Conduct customer and market research

    Market and sell products and services

    Develop a sales strategy

    Develop a sales forecast

    Gather current and historic order information

    Deliver services

    Manage service delivery resources

    Manage service delivery resource demand

    Develop baseline forecasts

    ? ? ? ?

    Info-Tech Insight

    Focus your initial assessment on the level 1 processes that matter to your organization. This allows you to target your scant resources on the areas of optimization that matter most to the organization and minimize the effort required from your business partners. You may need to iterate the assessment as challenges are identified. This allows you to be adaptive and deal with emerging issues more readily and become a more responsive partner to the business.

    SAP modules and process enablement

    Cloud/Hardware

    Fiori

    Analytics

    Integrations

    Extended Solutions

    R&D Engineering

    • Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management
    • Product Development Foundation
    • Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management
    • Product Lifecycle Management
    • Product Compliance
    • Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management
    • Product Safety and Stewardship
    • Engineering Record

    Sourcing and Procurement

    • Procurement Analytics
    • Sourcing & Contract Management
    • Operational Procurement
    • Invoice Management
    • Supplier Management

    Supply Chain

    • Inventory
    • Delivery & Transportation
    • Warehousing
    • Order Promising

    Asset Management

    • Maintenance Operations
    • Resource Scheduling
    • Env, Health and Safety
    • Maintenance Management
    The image contains a diagram of the SAP enterprise resource planning. The diagram includes a circle with smaller circles all around it. The inside of the circle contains SAP logos. The circles around the big circle are labelled: Human Resources Management, Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Asset Management, Logistics, Supply Chain Management, Manufacturing, R&D and Engineering, and Finance.

    Finance

    • Financial Planning and Analysis
    • Accounting and Financial Close
    • Treasury Management
    • Financial Operations
    • Governance, Risk & Compliance
    • Commodity Management

    Human Resources

    • Core HR
    • Payroll
    • Timesheets
    • Organization Management
    • Talent Management

    Sales

    • Sales Support
    • Order and Contract Management
    • Agreement Management
    • Performance Management

    Service

    • Service Operations and Processes
    • Basic Functions
    • Workforce Management
    • Case Management
    • Professional Services
    • Service Master Data Management
    • Service Management

    Beyond the core

    The image contains a screenshot of a diagram to demonstrate beyond the core. In the middle of the image is S/4 Core, and the BTP: Business Technology Platform. Surrounding it are: SAP Fieldglass, SAP Concur, SAP Success Factors, SAP CRM SAO Hybris, SAP Ariba. On the left side of the image are: Business Planning and Consolidations, Transportation Management System, Integrated Business Planning, Extended Warehouse Management.

    1.3.3 Inventory your SAP modules and business capabilities

    1-3+ hours

    1. Look at the major functions or processes within the scope of ERP.
    2. From the inventory of current systems, choose the submodules or processes that you want to investigate and are within scope for this optimization initiative.
    3. Use tab 1.3 “SAP Capabilities” in Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook for a list of common SAP Level 1 and Level 2 modules/business capabilities.
    4. List the top modules, capabilities, or processes that will be within the scope of this optimization initiative.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    The image contains a screenshot of an example of what to do for the activity 1.3.3.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    1.3.4 Define your key SAP optimization modules and business capabilities

    1-3+ hours

    1. Look at the major functions or processes within the scope of ERP.
    2. From the inventory of current systems, choose the submodules or processes for this optimization initiative. Base this on those that are most critical to the business, those with the lowest levels of satisfaction, or those that perhaps need more knowledge around them.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    The image contains a screenshot of the Key SAP Optimization Capabilities.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Step 1.4

    Define Optimization Timeframe

    Activities

    1.4.1 Define SAP key dates and SAP optimization roadmap timeframe and structure

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Defining key dates related to your optimization initiative
    • Identifying key building blocks for your optimization roadmap

    This step involves the following participants:

    • SAP Optimization Team
    • Vendor Management

    Outcomes of this step

    • Optimization Key Dates
    • Optimization Roadmap Timeframe and Structure

    1.4.1 Optimization roadmap timeframe and structure

    1-3+ hours

    1. Record key items and dates relevant to your optimization initiatives, such as any products reaching end of life or end of contract or budget proposal submission deadlines.
    2. Enter the expected Optimization Initiative Start Date.
    3. Enter the Roadmap Length. This is the total amount of time you expect to participate in the SAP optimization initiative.
    4. This includes short-, medium- and long-term initiatives.
    5. Enter your Roadmap Date markers: how you want dates displayed on the roadmap.
    6. Enter Column time values: what level of granularity will be helpful for this initiative?
    7. Enter the sprint or cycle timeframe; use this if following Agile.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    The image contains a screenshot of the Optimization Roadmap Timeframe and Structure.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Step 1.5

    Understand SAP Costs

    Activities

    1.5.1 Document costs associated with SAP

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Define your SAP direct and indirect costs
    • List your SAP expense line items

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Finance Representatives
    • SAP Optimization Team

    Outcomes of this step

    • Current SAP and related costs

    1.5.1 Document costs associated with SAP

    1-3 hours

    Before you can make changes and optimization decisions, you need to understand the high-level costs associated with your current application architecture. This activity will help you identify the types of technology and people costs associated with your current systems.

    1. Identify the types of technology costs associated with each current system:
      1. System Maintenance
      2. Annual Renewal
      3. Licensing
    2. Identify the cost of people associated with each current system:
      1. Full-Time Employees
      2. Application Support Staff
      3. Help Desk Tickets

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    The image contains a screenshot of the activity 1.5.1 on documenting costs associated with SAP.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Phase 2

    Assess Your Current State

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Phase 3

    Phase 4

    1.1 Identify Stakeholders and Build Your Optimization Team

    1.2 Build an SAP Strategy Model

    1.3 Inventory Current System State

    1.4 Define Optimization Timeframe

    1.5 Understand SAP Costs

    2.1 Assess SAP Capabilities

    2.2 Review Your Satisfaction With the Vendor/Product and Willingness for Change

    3.1 Prioritize Optimization Opportunities

    3.2 Discover Optimization Initiatives

    4.1 Build Your Optimization Roadmap

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Determine process relevance
    • Perform a gap analysis
    • Perform a user satisfaction survey
    • Assess software and vendor satisfaction

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • SAP Optimization Team
    • Users across functional areas of your ERP and related technologies

    Step 2.1

    Assess SAP Capabilities

    Activities

    2.1.1 Rate capability relevance to organizational goals

    2.1.2 Complete an SAP application portfolio assessment

    2.1.3 (Optional) Assess SAP process maturity

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Capability relevance
    • Process gap analysis
    • Application Portfolio Assessment

    This step involves the following participants:

    • SAP Users

    Outcomes of this step

    • SAP Capability Assessment

    Benefits of the Application Portfolio Assessment

    The image contains a screenshot of the activity of assessing the health of the application portfolio.

    Assess the health of the application portfolio

    • Get a full 360-degree view of the effectiveness, criticality, and prevalence of all relevant applications to get a comprehensive view of the health of the applications portfolio.
    • Identify opportunities to drive more value from effective applications, retire nonessential applications, and immediately address at-risk applications that are not meeting expectations.
    The image contains a screenshot of the activity on providing targeted department feedback.

    Provide targeted department feedback

    • Share end-user satisfaction and importance ratings for core IT services, IT communications, and business enablement to focus on the right end-user groups or lines of business, and ramp up satisfaction and productivity.
    The image contains a screenshot of the activity on gaining insight into the state of data quality.

    Gain insight into the state of data quality

    • Data quality is one of the key issues causing poor CRM user satisfaction and business results. This can include the relevance, accuracy, timeliness, or usability of the organization’s data.
    • Targeted, open-ended feedback around data quality will provide insight into where optimization efforts should be focused.

    2.1.1 Complete a current-state assessment (via the Application Portfolio Assessment)

    3 hours

    Option 1: Use Info-Tech’s Application Portfolio Assessment to generate your user satisfaction score. This tool not only measures application satisfaction but also elicits great feedback from users regarding the support they receive from the IT team around SAP.

    1. Download the ERP Application Inventory Tool.
    2. Complete the “Demographics” tab (tab 2).
    3. Complete the “Inventory” tab (tab 3).
      1. Complete the inventory by treating each module within your SAP system as an application.
      2. Treat every department as a separate column in the department section. Feel free to add, remove, or modify department names to match your organization.
      3. Include data quality for all applications applicable.

    Option 2: Create a survey manually.

    1. Use tab (Reference) 2.1 “APA Questions” as a guide for creating your survey.
    2. Send out surveys to end users.
    3. Modify tab 2.1, “SAP Assessment,” if required.

    Record Results

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    The image contains a screenshot of the Application Portfolio Assessment.

    Download the ERP Application Inventory Tool

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Sample Report from Application Portfolio Assessment.

    The image contains a screenshot of a sample report from the Application Portfolio Assessment.

    2.1.2 (Optional) Assess SAP process and technical maturity

    1-3 hours

    1. As with any ERP system, the issues encountered may not be related to the system itself but processes that have developed over time.
    2. Use this opportunity to interview key stakeholders to learn about deeper capability processes.
    • Identify key stakeholders.
    • Hold sessions to document deeper processes.
    • Discuss processes and technical enablement in each area.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    The image contains an example of the process maturity activity.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Process Maturity Assessment

    The image contains a screenshot of the Process Maturity Assessment.

    Step 2.2

    Review Your Satisfaction With the Vendor/Product and Willingness for Change

    Activities

    2.2.1 Rate your vendor and product satisfaction

    2.2.2 Review SAP product scores (if applicable)

    2.2.3 Evaluate your product satisfaction

    2.2.4 Check your business process change tolerance

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Rate your vendor and product satisfaction
    • Compare with survey data from SoftwareReviews

    This step involves the following participants:

    • SAP Product Owner(s)
    • Procurement Representative
    • Vendor Contracts Manager

    Outcomes of this step

    • Quantified satisfaction with vendor and product

    2.2.1 Rate your vendor and product satisfaction

    30 minutes

    Use Info-Tech’s vendor satisfaction survey to identify optimization areas with your ERP product(s) and vendor(s).

    1. Option 1 (recommended): Conduct a satisfaction survey using SoftwareReviews. This option allows you to see your results in the context of the vendor landscape.
    2. Option 2: Use the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook to review your satisfaction with your SAP software.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    The image contains a screenshot of the activity Vendor Optimization.

    SoftwareReviews’ Enterprise Resource Planning Category

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    2.2.2 Review SAP product scores (if applicable)

    30 minutes

    1. Download the scorecard for your SAP product from the SoftwareReviews website. (Note: Not all products are represented or have sufficient data, so a scorecard may not be available.)
    2. Use the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook tab 2.2 “Vend. & Prod. Sat” to record the scorecard results.
    3. Use your Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook to flag areas where your score may be lower than the product scorecard. Brainstorm ideas for optimization.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    The image contains a screenshot of the activity 2.2.2 review SAP product scores.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    SoftwareReviews’ Enterprise Resource Planning Category

    2.2.3 How does your satisfaction compare with your peers?

    Use SoftwareReviews to explore product features, vendor experience, and capability satisfaction.

    The image contains two screenshots of SoftwareReviews. One is of the ERP Mid-Market, and the second is of the ERP Enterprise.

    Source: SoftwareReviews ERP Mid-Market, April 2022

    Source: SoftwareReviews ERP Enterprise, April 2022

    2.2.4 Check your business process change tolerance

    1 hours

    1. As a group, review the level 0 business capabilities on the previous slide.
    2. Assess the department’s willingness for change and the risk of maintaining the status quo.
    3. Color-code the level 0 business capabilities based on:
    • Green – Willing to follow best practices
    • Yellow – May be challenging or unique business model
    • Red – Low tolerance for change
  • For clarity, move to level 1 if specific areas need to be called out and use the same color code.
  • Input Output
    • Business process capability map
    • Heat map of risk areas that require more attention for validating best practices or minimizing customization
    Materials Participants
    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook
    • Implementation team
    • CIO
    • Key stakeholders

    Download Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook for additional process levels

    Heat map representing desire for best practice or those having the least tolerance for change

    The image contains a screenshot of a heat map to demonstrate desire for best practice or those having the least tolerance for change.

    Determine the areas of risk to conform to best practice and minimize customization. These will be areas needing focus from the vendor supporting change and guiding best practice. For example: Must be able to support our unique process manufacturing capabilities and enhance planning and visibility to detailed costing.

    Phase 3

    Identify Key Optimization Opportunities

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Phase 3

    Phase 4

    1.1 Identify Stakeholders and Build Your Optimization Team

    1.2 Build an SAP Strategy Model

    1.3 Inventory Current System State

    1.4 Define Optimization Timeframe

    1.5 Understand SAP Costs

    2.1 Assess SAP Capabilities

    2.2 Review Your Satisfaction With the Vendor/Product and Willingness for Change

    3.1 Prioritize Optimization Opportunities

    3.2 Discover Optimization Initiatives

    4.1 Build Your Optimization Roadmap

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Identify key optimization areas
    • Create an optimization roadmap

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • SAP Optimization Team

    Assessing application business value

    In this context…business value is

    the value of the business outcome that the application produces. Additionally, it is how effective the application is at producing that outcome.

    Business value is not

    the user’s experience or satisfaction with the application.

    The image contains a screenshot of a Venn Diagram. In the left circle, labelled The Business it contains the following text: Keepers of the organization’s mission, vision, and value statements that define IT success. The business maintains the overall ownership and evaluation of the applications. In the right circle labelled IT, it contains the following text: Technical subject-matter experts of the applications they deliver and maintain. Each IT function works together to ensure quality applications are delivered to stakeholder expectations. The middle space is labelled: Business Value of Applications.

    First, the authorities on business value need to define and weigh their value drivers that describe the priorities of the organization. This will allow the applications team to apply a consistent, objective, and strategically aligned evaluation of applications across the organization.

    Brainstorm IT initiatives to enable high areas of opportunity to support the business

    Brainstorm ERP optimization initiatives in each area. Ensure you are looking for all-encompassing opportunities within the context of IT, the business, and SAP systems.

    Capabilities are what the system and business does that creates value for the organization. Optimization initiatives are projects with a definitive start and end date, and they enhance, create, maintain, or remove capabilities with the goal of increasing value.

    The image contains a Venn Diagram with 3 circles. The circles are labelled as: Process, Technology, and Organization.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Enabling a high-performing organization requires excellent management practices and continuous optimization efforts. Your technology portfolio and architecture are important, but we must go deeper. Taking a holistic view of ERP technologies in the environments in which they operate allows for the inclusion of people and process improvements – this is key to maximizing business results. Using a formal ERP optimization initiative will drive business-IT alignment, identify IT automation priorities, and dig deep into continuous process improvement.

    Address process gaps:

    • ERP and related technologies are invaluable to the goal of organizational enablement, but they must have supported processes driven by business goals.
    • Identify areas where capabilities need to be improved and work toward optimization.

    Support user satisfaction:

    • The best technology in the world won’t deliver business results if it’s not working for the users who need it.
    • Understand concerns, communicate improvements, and support users in all roles.

    Improve data quality:

    • Data quality is unique to each business unit and requires tolerance, not perfection.
    • Implement data quality initiatives that are aligned with overall business objectives and aimed at addressing data practices and the data itself.

    Proactively manage vendors:

    • Vendor management is a critical component of technology enablement and IT satisfaction.
    • Assess your current satisfaction against that of your peers and work toward building a process that is best fit for your organization.

    Step 3.1

    Prioritize Optimization Opportunities

    Activities

    3.1.1 Prioritize optimization capability areas

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Explore existing process gaps
    • Identify the impact of processes on user satisfaction
    • Identify the impact of data quality on user satisfaction
    • Review your overall product satisfaction and vendor management

    This step involves the following participants:

    • SAP Optimization Team

    Outcomes of this step

    • Application optimization plan

    The Business Value Matrix

    Rationalizing and quantifying the value of SAP

    Benefits can be realized internally and externally to the organization or department and have different drivers of value.

    • Financial benefits refer to the degree to which the value source can be measured through monetary metrics and are often quite tangible.
    • Human benefits refer to how an application can deliver value through a user’s experience.
    • Inward refers to value sources that have an internal impact and improve your organization’s effectiveness and efficiency in performing its operations.
    • Outward refers to value sources that come from your interaction with external factors, such as the market or your customers.

    Organizational Goals

    • Increased Revenue
    • Application functions that are specifically related to the impact on your organization’s ability to generate revenue and deliver value to your customers.

    • Reduced Costs
    • Reduction of overhead. The ways in which an application limits the operational costs of business functions.

    • Enhanced Services
    • Functions that enable business capabilities that improve the organization’s ability to perform its internal operations.

    • Reach Customers
    • Application functions that enable and improve the interaction with customers or produce market information and insights.

    Business Value Matrix

    The image contains a screenshot of a Business Value Matrix. It includes: Reach Customers, Increase Revenue or Deliver Value, Reduce Costs, and Enhance Services.

    Prioritize SAP optimization areas that will bring the most value to the organization

    Review your ERP capability areas and rate them according to relevance to organizational goals. This will allow you to eliminate optimization ideas that may not bring value to the organization.

    The image contains a screenshot of a graph that compares satisfaction by relevance to organizational goals to demonstrate high priority.

    3.1.1 Prioritize and rate optimization capability areas

    1-3 hours

    1. From the SAP capabilities, discuss areas of scope for the SAP optimization initiative.
    2. Discuss the four areas of the business value matrix and identify how each module, along with organizational goals, can bring value to the organization.
    3. Rate each of your SAP capabilities for the level of importance to your organization. The levels of importance are:
    • Crucial
    • Important
    • Secondary
    • Unimportant
    • Not applicable

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    The image contains a screenshot of activity 3.1.1.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Step 3.2

    Discover Optimization Initiatives

    Activities

    3.2.1 Discover product and vendor satisfaction opportunities

    3.2.2 Discover capability and feature optimization opportunities

    3.2.3 Discover process optimization opportunities

    3.2.4 Discover integration optimization opportunities

    3.2.5 Discover data optimization opportunities

    3.2.6 Discover SAP cost-saving opportunities

    This step will guide you through the following activities:

    • Explore existing process gaps
    • Identify the impact of processes on user satisfaction
    • Identify the impact of data quality on user satisfaction
    • Review your overall product satisfaction and vendor management

    This step involves the following participants:

    • SAP Optimization Team

    Outcomes of this step

    • Application optimization plan

    Satisfaction with SAP product

    The image contains three screenshots to demonstrate satisfaction with sap product.

    Improving vendor management

    Create a right-size, right-fit strategy for managing the vendors relevant to your organization.

    The image contains a diagram to demonstrate lower strategic value, higher vendor spend/switching costs, higher strategic value, and lower vendor spend/switching costs.

    Info-Tech Insight

    A vendor management initiative (VMI) is an organization’s formalized process for evaluating, selecting, managing, and optimizing third-party providers of goods and services.

    The amount of resources you assign to managing vendors depends on the number and value of your organization’s relationships. Before optimizing your vendor management program around the best practices presented in Info-Tech’s Jump Start Your Vendor Management Initiative blueprint, assess your current maturity and build the process around a model that reflects the needs of your organization.

    Note: Info-Tech uses VMI interchangeably with the terms “vendor management office (VMO),” “vendor management function,” “vendor management process,” and “vendor management program.”

    Jump Start Your Vendor Management Initiative

    3.2.1 Discover product and vendor satisfaction

    1-2 hours

    1. Use tab 3.1 “Optimization Priorities” and tab 2.2 “Vend. & Prod. Sat” to review the capabilities and features of your SAP system.
    2. Answer the following questions:
      1. Document overall product satisfaction.
      2. How does your satisfaction compare with your peers?
      3. Is the overall system fit for use?
      4. Do you have a proactive vendor management strategy in place?
      5. Is the product dissatisfaction at the point that you need to evaluate if it is time to replace the product?
      6. Could your vendor or Systems Integrator help you achieve better results?
    3. Review the Value Effort Matrix for each initiative.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Examples from Application Portfolio Assessment

    The image contains screenshots from the Application Portfolio Assessment.

    3.2.2 Discover capability and feature optimization opportunities

    1-2 hours

    1. Use tab 3.1 “Optimization Priorities” and tab 2.2 “Vend. & Prod. Sat” to review the capabilities and features of your SAP system.
    2. Answer the following questions:
      1. What capabilities and features are performing the worst?
      2. Do other organizations and users struggle with these areas?
      3. Why is it not performing well?
      4. Is there an opportunity for improvement?
      5. What are some optimization initiatives that could be undertaken?
    3. Review the Value Effort Matrix for each initiative.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Process optimization: the hidden goldmine

    In ~90% of SAP business process analysis reports, SAP identified significant potential for improving the existing SAP implementation, i.e. the large majority of customers are not yet using their SAP Business Suite to the full extent.

    Goals of Process Improvement

    Process Improvement Sample Areas

    Improvement Possibilities

    • Optimize business and improve value drivers
    • Reduce TCO
    • Reduce process complexity
    • Eliminate manual processes
    • Increase efficiencies
    • Support digital transformation and enablement
    • Order to cash
    • Procure to pay
    • Order to replenish
    • Plan to produce
    • Request to settle
    • Make to order
    • Make to stock
    • Purchase to order
    • Increase number of process instances processed successfully end-to-end
    • Increase number of instances processed in time
    • Increase degree of process automation
    • Speed up cycle times of supply chain processes
    • Reduce number of process exceptions
    • Apply internal best practices across organizational units

    3.2.3 Discover process optimization opportunities

    1-2 hours

    1. Use exercise 2.13 and tab 2.1 “SAP Current State Assessment” to assess process optimization opportunities.
    2. List underperforming capabilities around process.
    3. Answer the following:
      1. What is the state of the current processes?
      2. Is there an opportunity for process improvement?
      3. What are some optimization initiatives that could be undertaken in this area?

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Integration provides long-term usability

    Balance the need for secure, compliant data availability with organizational agility.

    The Benefits of Integration

    The Challenges of Integration

    • The largest benefit is the extended use of data. The ERP data can be used in the enterprise-level business intelligence suite rather than the application-specific analytics.
    • Enhanced data security. Integrated approaches lend themselves to auditable processes such as sign-on and limiting the email movement of data.
    • Regulatory compliance. Large multi-site organizations have many layers of regulation. A clear understanding of where orders, deliveries, and payments were made streamlines the audit process.
    • Extending a single instance ERP to multiple sites. The challenge for data management is the same as any SaaS application. The connection and data replication present challenges.
    • Combining data from equally high-volume systems. For SAP it is recommended that one instance is set to primary and all other sites are read-only to maintain data integrity.
    • Incorporating data from the separate system(s). The proprietary and locked-in nature of the data collection and definitions for ERP systems often limit the movement of data between separate systems.

    Common integration and consolidation scenarios

    Financial Consolidation

    Data Backup

    Synchronization Across Sites

    Legacy Consolidation

    • Require a holistic view of data format and accounting schedules.
    • Use a data center as the main repository to ensure all geographic locations have equal access to the necessary data.
    • Set up synchronization schedules based on data usage, not site location.
    • Carefully define older transactions. Only active transactions should be brought in the ERP. Send older data to storage.
    • Problem: Controlling financial documentation across geographic regions.
      Most companies are required to report in each region where they maintain a presence. Stakeholders and senior management also need a holistic view. This leads to significant strain on the financial department to consolidate both revenue and budget allocations for cross-site projects across the various geographic locations on a regular basis.
    • Solution: For enterprises with a single vendor, SAP-only portfolios, SAP can offer integration tools. For those needing to integrate with other ERPs, the use of a connector may be required to send financial data to the main system. The format and accounting calendar for transactions should match the primary ERP system to allow consolidation. The local-specific format should be a role-based customization at the level of the site’s specific instance.
    • Problem: ERP systems generate high volumes of data. Most systems have a defined schedule of back-up during off-hours. Multi-instance brings additional issues through lack of defined off-hours, higher volume of data, and the potential for cross-site or instance data relationships. This leads to headaches for both the database administrator and business analysts.
    • Solution: The best solution is an off-site data center with high availability. This may include cloud storage or hosted data centers. Regardless of where the data is stored, centralize the data and replicate to each site. Ensure that the data center can mirror the database and binary large object (BLOB) storage that exists for each site.
    • Problem: Providing access to up-to-date transactions requires copying of both contextual information (permissions, timestamp, location, history) and the transaction itself across multiple sites to allow local copies to be used for analysis and audits. The sheer volume of information makes timely synchronization difficult.
    • Solution: Not all data needs to be synchronized in a timely fashion. In SAP, administrators can use NetWeaver to maintain and alter global data synchronization through the Master Data Management module. Permissions can be given to users to perform on-demand synchronization of data attached to that user.
    • The Problem: Subsidiaries and acquired companies often have a Tier 2 ERP product. Prior to fully consolidating the processes many enterprises will want to migrate data to their ERP system to build compliance and audit trails. Migration of data often breaks historical linkages between transactions.
    • Solution: SAP offers tools to integrate data across applications that can be used as part of a data migration strategy. The process of data migration should be combined with data warehousing to ensure a cost-effective process. For most enterprises, the lack of experience in data migration will necessitate the use of consultants and independent software vendors (ISV).

    For more information: Implement a Multi-site ERP

    3.2.4 Discover integration optimization opportunities

    1-2 hours

    1. Use tab 1.3.1 “SAP Application Inventory” to discuss integrations and how they are related to capability areas that are not performing well.
    2. List capabilities that might be affected by integration issues. Think about exercise 3.2.1 and discuss how integrations could be affecting overall product satisfaction.
    3. Answer the following:
      1. Are there some areas where integration could be improved?
      2. Is there an opportunity for process improvement?
      3. What are some optimization initiatives that could be undertaken in this area?

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    System and data optimization

    Consolidating your business and technology requires an overall system and data migration plan.

    The image contains a screenshot of a diagram that demonstrates three different integrations: system, organization, and data.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Have an overall data migration plan before beginning your systems consolidation journey to S/4HANA.

    Use a data strategy that fixes the enterprise-wide data management issues

    Your data management must allow for flexibility and scalability for future needs.

    IT has several concerns around ERP data and wide dissemination of that data across sites. Large organizations can benefit from building a data warehouse or at least adopting some of the principles of data warehousing. The optimal way to deal with the issue of integration is to design a metadata-driven data warehouse that acts as a central repository for all ERP data. They serve as the storage facility for millions of transactions, formatted to allow analysis and comparison.

    Key considerations:

    • Technical: At what stage does data move to the warehouse? Can processes be automated to dump data or to do a scheduled data movement?
    • Process: Data integration requires some level of historical context for all data. Ensure that all data has multiple metadata tags to future-proof the data.
    • People: Who will be accessing the data and what are the key items that users will need to adapt to the data warehouse process?

    Info-Tech Insight

    Data warehouse solutions can be expensive. See Info-Tech’s Build a Data Warehouse on a Solid Foundation for guidance on what options are available to meet your budget and data needs.

    Optimizing SAP data, additional considerations

    Data Quality Management

    Effective Data Governance

    Data-Centric Integration Strategy

    Extensible Data Warehousing

    • Prevention is ten times cheaper than remediation. Stop fixing data quality with band-aid solutions and start fixing at the source of the problem.
    • Data quality is unique to each business unit and requires tolerance, not perfection. If the data allows the business to operate at the desired level, don’t waste time fixing data that may not need to be fixed.
    • Implement a set of data quality initiatives that are aligned with overall business objectives and aimed at addressing data practices and the data itself.
    • Develop a prioritized data quality improvement project roadmap and long-term improvement strategy.
    • Build related practices with more confidence and less risk after achieving an appropriate level of data quality.
    • Data governance enables data-driven insight. Think of governance as a structure for making better use of data.
    • Collaboration is critical. The business may own the data, but IT understands the data. Data governance will not work unless the business and IT work together.
    • Data governance powers the organization up the data value chain through policies and procedures, master data management, data quality, and data architecture.
    • Create a roadmap to prioritize initiatives and delineate responsibilities among data stewards, data owners, and the data governance steering committee.
    • Ensure buy-in from business and IT stakeholders. Communicate initiatives to end users and executives to reduce resistance.
    • Every enterprise application involves data integration. Any change in the application and database ecosystem requires you to solve a data integration problem.
    • Data integration is becoming more and more critical for downstream functions of data management and for business operations to be successful. Poor integration holds back these critical functions.
    • Build your data integration practice with a firm foundation in governance and a reference architecture. Ensure that your process is scalable and sustainable.
    • Support the flow of data through the organization and meet the organization’s requirements for data latency, availability, and relevancy.
    • Data availability must be frequently reviewed and repositioned to continue to grow with the business.
    • A data warehouse is a project, but successful data warehousing is a program. An effective data warehouse requires planning beyond the technology implementation.
    • Governance, not technology, needs to be the core support system for enabling a data warehouse program.
    • Leverage an approach that focuses on constructing a data warehouse foundation that can address a combination of operational, tactical, and ad hoc business needs.
    • Invest time and effort to put together pre-project governance to inform and guide your data warehouse implementation.
    • Select the most suitable architecture pattern to ensure the data warehouse is “built right” at the very beginning.

    Restore Trust in Your Data Using a Business-Aligned Data Quality Management Approach

    Establish Data Governance

    Build a Data Integration Strategy

    Build an Extensible Data Warehouse Foundation

    Data Optimization

    Organizations are faced with challenges associated with changing data landscapes.

    Data migrations should not be taken lightly. It requires an overall data governance to assure data integrity for the move to S/4HANA and beyond.

    Have a solid plan before engaging S/4HANA Migration Cockpit.

    Develop a Master Data Management Strategy and Roadmap

    • Master data management (MDM) is complex in practice and requires investments in governance, technology, and planning.
    • Develop a MDM strategy and initiative roadmap using Info-Tech’s MDM framework, which takes data governance, architecture, and other critical data capabilities into consideration.

    Establish Data Governance

    • Ensure your data governance program delivers measurable business value by aligning the associated data governance initiatives with the business architecture.
    • Data governance must continuously align with the organization’s enterprise governance function. It should not be perceived as a pet project of IT but rather as an enterprise-wide, business-driven initiative.
    The image contains a screenshot of the S/4HANA Migration Cockpit.

    3.2.5 Discover data optimization opportunities

    1-2 hours

    1. Use your APA or user satisfaction survey to understand issues related to data.
      Note: Data issues happen for a number of reasons:
    • Poor underlying data in the system
    • More than one source of truth
    • Inability to consolidate data
    • Inability to measure KPIs effectively
    • Reporting that is cumbersome or non-existent
  • List underperforming capabilities related to data.
  • Answer the following:
    1. What are some underlying issues?
    2. Is there an opportunity for data improvement?
    3. What are some optimization initiatives that could be undertaken in this area?

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    SAP cost savings

    SAP cost savings does not have to be complicated.

    Look for quick wins:

    • Evaluate user licensing:
      • Ensure you are not double paying for employees or paying for employees who are no longer with the organization.
      • Verify user activity – if users are accessing the system very infrequently it does not make sense to license them as full users.
      • Audit your user classifications – ensure title positions and associated licenses are up to date.
    • Curb data sprawl.
    • Consolidate applications.

    30-35% of SAP customers likely have underutilized assets. This can add up to millions in unused software and maintenance.

    -Riley et al.

    20% Only 20 percent of companies manage to capture more than half the projected benefits from ERP systems.

    -McKinsey
    The image contains a screenshot of the Explore the Secrets of SAP Software Contracts to Optimize Spend and Reduce Compliance Risk.

    Explore the Secrets of SAP Software Contracts to Optimize Spend and Reduce Compliance Risk

    The image contains a screenshot of Secrets of SAP S/4HANA Licensing.

    Secrets of SAP S/4HANA Licensing

    License Optimization

    With the relatively slow uptake of the S/4HANA platform, the pressure is immense for SAP to maintain revenue growth.

    SAP’s definitions and licensing rules are complex and vague, making it extremely difficult to purchase with confidence while remaining compliant.

    Without having a holistic negotiation strategy, it is easy to hit a common obstacle and land into SAP’s playbook, requiring further spend.

    Price Benchmarking & Negotiation

    • Use price benchmarking and negotiation intelligence to secure a market-competitive price.
    • Understand negotiation tactics that can be used to better your deal.

    Secrets of SAP S/4HANA Licensing:

    • Build a business case to evaluate S/4HANA.
    • Understand the S/4HANA roadmap and map current functionality to ensure compatibility.

    SAP’s 2025 Support End of Life Date Delayed…As Predicted Here First

    • The math simply did not add up for SAP.
    • Extended support post 2027 is a mixed bag.

    3.2.6 Discover SAP cost-saving opportunities

    1-2 hours

    1. Use tab 1.5 “Current Costs” as an input for this exercise.
    2. Look for opportunities to cut SAP costs, both quick-wins and long-term strategy.
    3. Review Info-Tech’s SAP vendor management resources to understand cost-saving strategies:
    4. List cost-savings initiatives and opportunities.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Other optimization opportunities

    There are many opportunities to improve your SAP portfolio. Choose the ones that are right for your business:

    • Artificial intelligence (AI) (and management of the AI lifecycle)
    • Machine learning (ML)
    • Augment business interactions
    • Automatically execute sales pipelines
    • Process mining
    • SAP application monitoring
    • Be aware of the SAP product roadmap
    • Implement and take advantage of SAP tools and product offerings

    Phase 4

    Build Your Optimization Roadmap

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Phase 3

    Phase 4

    1.1 Identify Stakeholders and Build Your Optimization Team

    1.2 Build an SAP Strategy Model

    1.3 Inventory Current System State

    1.4 Define Optimization Timeframe

    1.5 Understand SAP Costs

    2.1 Assess SAP Capabilities

    2.2 Review Your Satisfaction With the Vendor/Product and Willingness for Change

    3.1 Prioritize Optimization Opportunities

    3.2 Discover Optimization Initiatives

    4.1 Build Your Optimization Roadmap

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Review the different options to solve the identified pain points
    • Build out a roadmap showing how you will get to those solutions
    • Build a communication plan that includes the stakeholder presentation

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Primary stakeholders in each value stream supported by the ERP
    • ERP applications support team

    Get the Most Out of Your SAP

    Step 4.1

    4.1 Build Your Optimization Roadmap

    Activities

    4.1.1 Pick your path

    4.1.2 Pick the right SAP migration path

    4.1.3 Build a roadmap

    4.1.4 Build a visual roadmap

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Review the different options to solve the identified pain points then build out a roadmap of how to get to that solution.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Primary stakeholders in each value stream supported by the ERP
    • ERP applications support team

    Outcomes of this step

    • A strategic direction is set
    • An initial roadmap is laid out

    Choose the right path for your organization

    There are several different paths you can take to achieve your ideal future state. Make sure to pick the one that suits your needs as defined by your current state.

    The image contains a diagram to demonstrate the different paths that can be taken. The pathways are: Optimize current system, augment current system, consolidate current systems, upgrade system, and replace system.

    Explore the options for achieving your ideal future state

    CURRENT STATE

    STRATEGY

    There is significant evidence of poor user satisfaction, inefficient processes, lack of data usage, poor integrations, and little vendor management. Look for opportunities to improve the system.

    OPTIMIZE CURRENT SYSTEM

    Your existing application is, for the most part, functionally rich but may need some tweaking. Spend time and effort building and enhancing additional functionalities or consolidating and integrating interfaces.

    AUGMENT CURRENT SYSTEM

    Your ERP application portfolio consists of multiple apps serving the same functions. Consolidating applications with duplicate functionality is more cost efficient and makes integration and data sharing simpler.

    CONSOLIDATE CURRENT SYSTEMS

    The current system is reaching end of life and the software vendor offers a fit-for-use upgrade or system to which you can migrate. Prepare your migration strategy to move forward on the product roadmap.

    UPGRADE SYSTEM

    The current SAP system and future SAP roadmap are not fit for use. Vendor satisfaction is at an all-time low. Revisit your ERP strategy as you move into requirements gathering and selection.

    REPLACE SYSTEM

    Option: Optimize your current system

    Look for process, workflow, data usage, and vendor relation improvements.

    MAINTAIN CURRENT SYSTEM

    Keep the system but look for optimization opportunities.

    Your existing application portfolio satisfies both functionality and integration requirements. The processes surrounding it likely need attention, but the system should be considered for retention.

    Maintaining your current system entails adjusting current processes and/or adding new ones and involves minimal cost, time, and effort.

    INDICATORS

    POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS

    People

    • User satisfaction is in the mid-range
    • There is an opportunity to rectify problems
    • Contact vendor to inquire about employee training opportunities
    • Build a change management strategy

    Process

    • Processes are old and have not been optimized
    • There are many manual processes and workarounds
    • Low process maturity or undocumented inconsistent processes
    • Explore process reengineering and process improvement opportunities
    • Evaluate and standardize processes

    Technology

    • No major capability gaps
    • Supported for 5+ years
    • Explore opportunities outside of the core technology including workflows, integrations, and reporting

    Alternative 1: Optimize your current system

    MAINTAIN CURRENT SYSTEM

    • Keep your SAP system running
    • Invest in resolving current challenges
    • Automate manual processes where appropriate
    • Improve/modify current system
    • Evaluate current system against requirements/processes
    • Reimplement functionality

    Alternative Overview

    Initial Investment ($)

    Medium

    Risk

    Medium

    Change Management Required

    Medium

    Operating Costs ($)

    Low

    Alignment With Organizational Goals and ERP Strategy

    Medium-Low

    Key Considerations

    • Now that I know my needs, where is the current system underused?
    • Do we have specialized needs?
    • Which functions can best enable the business?

    Advantages

    • Less cost investment than upgrading or replacing the system
    • Less technology risk
    • The current system has several optimization initiatives that can be implemented
    • Familiarity with the system; IT and business users know the system well
    • Least amount of changes
    • Integrations will be able to be maintained and will mean less complexity
    • Will allow us to leverage current investments and build on our current confidence in the solution
    • Allow us to review processes and engineer some workflow and process improvements

    Disadvantages

    • The system may need some augmentation to handle some improvement areas
    • Build some items from scratch
    • Less user-friendly
    • Need to reimplement and reconfigure some modules
    • Lots of workarounds – more staff needed to support current processes
    • Increase customization (additional IT development investment)
    • System gaps would remain
    • System feels “hard” to use
    • Workarounds still needed
    • Hard to overcome “negative” experience with the current system
    • Some functional gaps will remain
    • Less system development and support from the vendor as the product ages.
    • May become a liability and risk area in the future

    For what time frame does this make sense?

    Short Term

    Medium Term

    Long Term

    Option: Augment your current system

    Use augmentation to resolve your existing technology and data pain points.

    AUGMENT CURRENT SYSTEM

    Add to the system.

    Your existing application is for the most part functionally rich but may need some tweaking. Spend time and effort enhancing your current system.

    You will be able to add functions by leveraging existing system features. Augmentation requires limited investment and less time and effort than a full system replacement.

    INDICATORS

    POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS

    Technology Pain Points

    • Lack of reporting functions
    • Lacking functional depth in key process areas
    • Add point solutions or enable modules to address missing functionality

    Data Pain Points

    • Poor data quality
    • Lack of data for processing and reporting
    • Single-source data entry
    • Add modules or augment processes to capture data

    Alternative 2: Augment current solution

    AUGMENT CURRENT SYSTEM

    Maintain core system.

    Invest in SAP modules or extended functionality.

    Add functionality with bolt-on targeted “best of breed” solutions.

    Invest in tools to make the SAP portfolio and ecosystem work better.

    Alternative Overview

    Initial Investment ($)

    High

    Risk

    High

    Change Management

    High

    Operating Costs ($)

    High

    Alignment With Organizational Goals and ERP Strategy

    High

    Key Considerations

    • Now that I know my needs, where is the current system underused?
    • Do we have specialized needs?
    • Which functions can best enable the business?

    Advantages

    • Meet specific business needs – right solution for each component
    • Well-aligned to specific business needs
    • Higher morale – best solution with improved user interface
    • Allows you to find the right solution for the unique needs of the organization
    • Allows you to incorporate a light change management strategy that can include training for the end users and IT
    • Incorporate best practice processes
    • Leverage out-of-the-box functionality

    Disadvantages

    • Multiple technological solutions
    • Lots of integrations
    • Out-of-sync upgrades
    • Extra costs – potential less negotiation leverage
    • Multiple solutions to support
    • Multiple vendors
    • Less control over upgrades – including timing (potential out of sync)
    • More training – multiple products, multiple interfaces
    • Confusion – which system to use when
    • Need more HR specialization
    • More complexity in reporting
    • More alignment with JDE E1 information

    For what time frame does this make sense?

    Short Term

    Medium Term

    Long Term

    Option: Consolidate systems

    Consolidate and integrate your current systems to address your technology and data pain points.

    CONSOLIDATE AND INTEGRATE SYSTEMS

    Get rid of one system, combine two, or connect many.

    Your ERP application portfolio consists of multiple apps serving the same functions.

    Consolidating your systems eliminates the need to manage multiple pieces of software that provide duplicate functionality. Reducing the number of ERP applications makes integration and data sharing simpler.

    INDICATORS

    POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS

    Technology Pain Points

    • Disparate and disjointed systems
    • Multiple systems supporting the same function
    • Unused software licenses
    • System consolidation
    • System and module integration
    • Assess usage and consolidate licensing

    Data Pain Points

    • Multiple versions of same data
    • Duplication of data entry in different modules or systems
    • Poor data quality
    • Centralize core records
    • Assign data ownership
    • Single-source data entry

    Alternative 3: Consolidate systems

    AUGMENT CURRENT SYSTEM

    Get rid of old disparate on-premise solutions.

    Consolidate into an up-to-date ERP solution.

    Standardize across the organization.

    Alternative Overview

    Initial Investment ($)

    High

    Risk

    Med

    Change Management

    Med

    Operating Costs ($)

    Med

    Alignment With Organizational Goals and ERP Strategy

    High

    Key Considerations

    • Now that I know my needs, where is the current system underused?
    • Do we have specialized needs?
    • Which functions can best enable the business?

    Advantages

    • Aligns the technology across the organization
    • Streamlining of processes
    • Opportunity for decreased costs
    • Easier to maintain
    • Modernizes the SAP portfolio
    • Easier to facilitate training
    • Incorporate best practice processes
    • Leverage out-of-the-box functionality

    Disadvantages

    • Unique needs of some business units may not be addressed
    • Will require change management and training
    • Deeper investment in SAP

    For what time frame does this make sense?

    Short Term

    Medium Term

    Long Term

    Option: Upgrade System

    Upgrade your system to address gaps in your existing processes and various pain points.

    REPLACE CURRENT SYSTEM

    Move to a new SAP solution

    You’re transitioning from an end-of-life legacy system. Your existing system offers poor functionality and poor integration. It would likely be more cost- and time-efficient to replace the application and its surrounding processes altogether. You are satisfied with SAP overall and want to continue to leverage your SAP relationships and investments.

    INDICATORS

    POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS

    Technology Pain Points

    • Obsolete or end-of-life technology portfolio
    • Lack of functionality and poor integration
    • Not aligned with technology direction or enterprise architecture plans
    • Evaluate the ERP technology landscape
    • Determine if you need to replace the current system with a point solution or an all-in-one solution
    • Align ERP technologies with enterprise architecture

    Data Pain Points

    • Limited capability to store and retrieve data
    • Understand your data requirements

    Process Pains

    • Insufficient tools to manage workflow
    • Review end-to-end processes
    • Assess user satisfaction

    Alternative 4: Upgrade System

    UPGRADE SYSTEM

    Upgrade your current SAP systems with SAP product replacements.

    Invest in SAP with the appropriate migration path for your organization.

    Alternative Overview

    Initial Investment ($)

    High

    Risk

    Med

    Change Management

    Med

    Operating Costs ($)

    Med

    Alignment With Organizational Goals and ERP Strategy

    High

    Key Considerations

    • Now that I know my needs, where is the current system underused?
    • Do we have specialized needs?
    • Which functions can best enable the business?

    Advantages

    • Aligns the technology across the organization
    • Opportunity for business transformation
    • Allows you to leverage your SAP and SI relationships
    • Modernizes your ERP portfolio
    • May offer you advantages around business transformation and process improvement
    • Opportunity for new hosting options
    • May offer additional opportunities for consolidation or business enablement

    Disadvantages

    • Big initiative
    • Costly
    • Adds business risk during ERP upgrade
    • May require a high amount of change management
    • Organization will have to build resources to support the replacement and ongoing support of the new product
    • Training will be required across business and IT
    • Integrations with other applications may need to be rebuilt

    For what time frame does this make sense?

    Short Term

    Medium Term

    Long Term

    Option: Replace your current system

    Replace your system to address gaps in your existing processes and various pain points.

    REPLACE CURRENT SYSTEM

    Start from scratch.

    You’re transitioning from an end-of-life legacy system. Your existing system offers poor functionality and poor integration. It would likely be more cost and time efficient to replace the application and its surrounding processes all together.

    INDICATORS

    POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS

    Technology Pain Points

    • Lack of functionality and poor integration
    • Obsolete technology
    • Not aligned with technology direction or enterprise architecture plans
    • Dissatisfaction with SAP and SI
    • Evaluate the ERP technology landscape
    • Determine if you need to replace the current system with a point solution or an all-in-one solution
    • Align ERP technologies with enterprise architecture

    Data Pain Points

    • Limited capability to store and retrieve data
    • Understand your data requirements

    Process Pains

    • Insufficient tools to manage workflow
    • Review end-to-end processes
    • Assess user satisfaction

    Alternative 5: Replace SAP with another ERP solution

    AUGMENT CURRENT SYSTEM

    Get rid of old disparate on-premises solutions.

    Consolidate into an up-to-date ERP solution.

    Standardize across the organization.

    Alternative Overview

    Initial Investment ($)

    High

    Risk

    Med

    Change Management

    Med

    Operating Costs ($)

    Med

    Alignment With Organizational Goals and ERP Strategy

    High

    Key Considerations

    • Do we have the appetite to walk away from SAP?
    • What opportunities are we looking for?
    • Are other ERP solutions better for our business?

    Advantages

    • Allows you to explore ERP options outside of SAP
    • Aligns the technology across the organization
    • Opportunity for business transformation
    • Allows you to move away from SAP
    • Modernizes your ERP portfolio
    • May offer you advantages around business transformation and process improvement
    • Opportunity for new hosting options
    • May offer additional opportunities for consolidation or business enablement

    Disadvantages

    • Big initiative
    • Costly
    • Adds business risk during ERP replacement
    • Relationships will have to be rebuilt with ERP vendor and SIs
    • May require a high amount of change management
    • Organization will have to build resources to support the replacement and ongoing support of the new product
    • Training will be required across business and IT
    • Integrations with other applications may need to be rebuilt

    For what time frame does this make sense?

    Short Term

    Medium Term

    Long Term

    Activity 4.1.1: Pick your path

    1.5 hours

    For each given path selected, identify:

    • Advantage
    • Disadvantages
    • Initial Investment ($)
    • Risk
    • Change Management
    • Operating Costs ($)
    • Alignment With ERP Objectives
    • Key Considerations
    • Timeframe

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    The image contains a screenshot of activity 4.1.1 pick your path.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Pick the right SAP migration path for your organization

    There are three S/4HANA paths you can take to achieve your ideal future state. Make sure to pick the one that suits your needs as defined by your current state and meets your overall long-term roadmap.

    The image contains a diagram of the pathways that can be take from current state to future state. The options are: BEST PRACTICE QUICK WIN
(Public Cloud), AUGMENT BEST PRACTICE (Private Cloud), OWN FULL SOLUTION (On Premise)

    SAP S/4 HANA offerings can be confusing

    The image contains a screenshot that demonstrates the SAP S/4 Offerings.

    What is the cloud, how is it deployed, and how is service provided?

    The image contains a screenshot from the National Institute of Standards and Technology that describes the Cloud Characteristics, Service Model, and Delivery Model.

    A workload-first approach will allow you to take full advantage of the cloud’s strengths

    • Under all but the most exceptional circumstances good cloud strategies will incorporate different service models. Very few organizations are “IaaS shops” or “SaaS shops,” even if they lean heavily in a one direction.
    • These different service models (including non-cloud options like colocation and on-premises infrastructure) each have different strengths. Part of your cloud strategy should involve determining which of the services makes the most sense for you.
    • Own the cloud by understanding which cloud (or non-cloud!) offering makes the most sense for you, given your unique context.

    See Info-Tech’s Define Your Cloud Vision for more information.

    Cloud service models

    • This research focuses on five key service models, each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses. Moving right from “on-prem” customers gradually give up more control over their environments to cloud service providers.
    • An entirely premises-based environment means that the customer is responsible for everything ranging from the dirt under the datacenter to application-level configurations. Conversely, in a SaaS environment, the provider is responsible for everything but those top-level application configurations.
    • A managed service provider or other third-party can manage any or of the components of the infrastructure stack. A service provider may, for example, build a SaaS solution on top of another provider’s IaaS or offer configuration assistance with a commercially available SaaS.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Not all workloads fit well in the cloud. Many environments will mix service models (e.g. SaaS for some workloads, some in IaaS, some on-premises) and this can be perfectly effective. It must be consistent and intentional, however.

    The image contains a screenshot of cloud service models: On-prem, CoLo, laaS, PaaS, and SaaS

    Option: Best Practice Quick Win

    S/4HANA Cloud, Essentials

    Updates

    4 times a year

    License Model

    Subscription

    Server Platform

    SAP

    Platform Management

    SAP only

    Pre-Set Templates (industries)

    Not allowed

    Single vs. Multi-Tenant

    Multi-client

    Maintenance ALM Tool

    SAP ALM

    New Implementation

    This is a public cloud solution for new clients adopting SAP that are mostly looking for full functionality within best practice.

    Consider a full greenfield approach. Even for mid-size existing customers looking for a best-practice overhaul.

    Functionality is kept to the core. Any specialties or unique needs would be outside the core.

    Regional localization is still being expanded and must be evaluated early if you are a global company.

    Option: Augment Best Practice

    S/4HANA Cloud, Extended Edition

    Updates

    Every 1-2 years or up to client’s schedule

    License Model

    Subscription

    Server Platform

    AZURE, AWS, Google

    Platform Management

    SAP only

    Pre-Set Templates (industries)

    Coded separately

    Single vs. Multi-Tenant

    Single tenant

    Maintenance ALM Tool

    SAP ALM or SAP Solution Manager

    New Implementation With Client Specifics

    No longer available to new customers from January 25, 2022, though available for renewals.

    Replacement is called SAP Extended Services for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition.

    This offering is a grey area, and the extended offerings are being defined.

    New S/4HANA Cloud extensibility is being offered to early adopters, allowing for customization within a separate system landscape (DTP) and aiming for an SAP Central Business Configuration solution for the cloud. A way of fine-tuning to meet customer-specific needs.

    Option: Augment Best Practice (Cont.)

    S/4HANA Cloud, Private Edition

    Updates

    Every 1-5 years or up to client’s schedule

    License Model

    Subscription

    Server Platform

    AZURE, AWS, Google

    Platform Management

    SAP only

    Pre-Set Templates (industries)

    Allowed

    Single vs. Multi-Tenant

    Single tenant

    Maintenance ALM Tool

    SAP ALM or SAP Solution Manager

    New Implementation With Client Specifics

    This is a private cloud solution for existing or new customers needing more uniqueness, though still looking to adopt best practice.

    Still considered a new implementation with data migration requirements that need close attention.

    This offering is trying to move clients to the S/4HANA Cloud with close competition with the Any Premise product offering. Providing client specific scalability while allowing for standardization in the cloud and growth in the digital strategy. All customizations and ABAP functionality must be revisited or revamped to fit standardization.

    Option: Own Full Solution

    S/4HANA Any Premise

    Updates

    Client decides

    License Model

    Perpetual or subscription

    Server Platform

    AZURE, AWS, Google, partner's or own server room

    Platform Management

    Client and/or partner

    Pre-Set Templates (industries)

    Allowed

    Single vs. Multi-Tenant

    Single tenant

    Maintenance ALM Tool

    SAP Solution Manager

    Status Quo Migration to S/4HANA

    This is for clients looking for a quick transition to S/4HANA with minimal risks and without immediate changes to their operations.

    Though knowing the direction with SAP is toward its cloud solution, this may be a long costly path to getting the that end state.

    The Any Premise version carries over existing critical ABAP functionalities, and the SAP GUI can remain as the user interface.

    Activity 4.1.2 (Optional) Evaluate optimization initiatives

    1 hour

    1. If there is an opportunity to optimize the current SAP environment or prepare for the move to a new platform, continue with this step.
    2. Valuate your optimization initiatives from tab 3.2 “Optimization Initiatives.”

    Consider: relevance to achieving goals, number of users, importance to role, satisfaction with features, usability, data quality

    Value Opportunities: increase revenue, decrease costs, enhanced services, reach customers

    Additional Factors:

    • Current to Future Risk Profile
    • Number of Departments to Benefit
    • Importance to Stakeholder Relations
    • Resources: Do we have resources available and the skillset?
    • Cost
    • Overall Effort Rating
    • "Gut Check: Is it achievable? Have we done it or something similar before? Are we willing to invest in it?"

    Prioritize

    • Relative priority
    • Determine if this will be included in your optimization roadmap
    • Decision to proceed
    • Next steps

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Activity 4.1.3 Roadmap building blocks: SAP migration

    1 hour

    Migration paths: Determine your migration path and next steps using the Activity 4.1.1 “SAP System Options.”

    1. Identify initiatives and next steps.
    2. For each item on your roadmap, assign an owner who will be accountable to the completion of the roadmap item.
    3. Wherever possible, assign a start date, month, or quarter. The more specific you can be the better.
    4. Identify completion dates to create a sense of urgency. If you are struggling with start dates, it can help to start with a finish date and “back in” to a start date based on estimated efforts.
    5. Include periphery tasks such as communication strategy.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    Note: Your roadmap should be treated as a living document that is updated and shared with the stakeholders on a regular schedule.

    The image contains a diagram of the pathways that can be take from current state to future state. The options are: BEST PRACTICE QUICK WIN
(Public Cloud), AUGMENT BEST PRACTICE (Private Cloud), OWN FULL SOLUTION (On Premise)

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    Activity 4.1.4 Roadmap building blocks: SAP optimization

    1 hour

    Optimization initiatives: Determine which if any to proceed with.

    1. Identify initiatives.
    2. For each item on your roadmap, assign an owner who will be accountable to the completion of the roadmap item.
    3. Wherever possible, assign a start date, month, or quarter. The more specific you can be the better.
    4. Identify completion dates to create a sense of urgency. If you are struggling with start dates, it can help to start with a finish date and “back in” to a start date based on estimated efforts.
    5. Include periphery tasks such as communication strategy.

    Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

    Note: Your roadmap should be treated as a living document that is updated and shared with the stakeholders on a regular schedule.

    The image contains a screenshot of activity 4.1.4 SAP optimization.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    SAP optimization roadmap

    Initiative

    Owner

    Start Date

    Completion Date

    Create final workshop deliverable

    Info-Tech

    16 September 2021

    Review final deliverable

    Workshop sponsor

    Present to executive team

    October 2021

    Build business case

    CFO, CIO, Directors

    3 weeks to build

    3-4 weeks process time

    Build an RFI for initial costings

    1-2 weeks

    Stage 1 approval for requirements gathering

    Executive committee

    Milestone

    Determine and acquire BA support for next step

    1 week

    Requirements gathering – level 2 processes

    Project team

    1 week

    Build RFP (based on informal approval)

    CFO, CIO, Directors

    4th calendar quarter 2022

    Possible completion: January 2023

    2-4 weeks

    Data strategy optimization

    The image contains a graph to demonstrate the data strategy optimization.

    Activity 4.1.5 (Optional) Build a visual SAP roadmap

    1 hour

    1. For some, a visual representation of a roadmap is easier to comprehend. Consider taking the roadmap built in 4.1.4 and creating a visual.
    2. Record this information in the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook.

      The image contains a screenshot of activity 4.1.5 build a visual SAP roadmap.

    Download the Get the Most Out of Your SAP Workbook

    SAP strategy roadmap

    The image contains a screenshot of the SAP strategy roadmap.

    Implementations Partners

    • Able to consult, migrate, implement, and manage the SAP S/4HANA business suite across industries.
    • Able to transform the enterprise’s core business system to achieve the desired outcome.
    • Capable in strategic planning, building business cases, developing roadmaps, cost and time analysis, deployment model (on-prem, cloud, hybrid model), database conversion, database and operational support, and maintenance services.

    Info-Tech Insight

    It is becoming a common practice for implementation partners to engage in a two- to three-month Discovery Phase or Phase 0 to prepare an implementation roadmap. It is important to understand how this effort is tied to the overall service agreement.

    The image contains several logos of the implementation partners: Atos, Accenture, Cognizant, EY, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, LTI, Capgemini, Wipro, IBM, tos.

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Get the Most Out of Your SAP

    ERP technology is critical to facilitating an organization’s flow of information across business units. It allows for seamless integration of systems and creates a holistic view of the enterprise to support decision making. ERP implementation should not be a one-and-done exercise. There needs to be an ongoing optimization to enable business processes and optimal organizational results.

    Get the Most Out of Your SAP allows organizations to proactively implement continuous assessment and optimization of their enterprise resource planning system, including:

    • Alignment and prioritization of key business and technology drivers.
    • Identification of processes, including classification and gap analysis.
    • Measurement of user satisfaction across key departments.
    • Improved vendor relations.
    • Data quality initiatives.

    This formal SAP optimization initiative will drive business-IT alignment, identify IT automation priorities, and dig deep into continuous process improvement.

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop.

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com

    1-888-670-8889

    Research Contributors

    The image contains a picture of Ben Dickie.

    Ben Dickie

    Research Practice Lead

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Ben Dickie is a Research Practice Lead at Info-Tech Research Group. His areas of expertise include customer experience management, CRM platforms, and digital marketing. He has also led projects pertaining to enterprise collaboration and unified communications.

    The image contains a picture of Scott Bickley.

    Scott Bickley

    Practice Lead and Principal Research Director

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Scott Bickley is a Practice Lead and Principal Research Director at Info-Tech Research Group focused on vendor management and contract review. He also has experience in the areas of IT asset management (ITAM), software asset management (SAM), and technology procurement along with a deep background in operations, engineering, and quality systems management.

    The image contains a picture of Andy Neil.

    Andy Neil

    Practice Lead, Applications

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Andy is a Senior Research Director, Data Management and BI, at Info-Tech Research Group. He has over 15 years of experience in managing technical teams, information architecture, data modeling, and enterprise data strategy. He is an expert in enterprise data architecture, data integration, data standards, data strategy, big data, and the development of industry standard data models.

    Bibliography

    Armel, Kate. "New Article: Data-Driven Estimation, Management Lead to High Quality." QSM: Quantitative Software Management, 14 May 2013. Accessed 4 Feb. 2021.

    Enterprise Resource Planning. McKinsey, n.d. Accessed 13 Apr. 2022.

    Epizitone, Ayogeboh. Info-Tech Interview, 10 May 2021.

    Epizitone, Ayogeboh, and Oludayo O. Olugbara. “Principal Component Analysis on Morphological Variability of Critical Success Factors for Enterprise Resource Planning.” International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA), vol. 11, no. 5, 2020. Web.

    Gheorghiu, Gabriel. "The ERP Buyer’s Profile for Growing Companies." Selecthub, 2018. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.

    Karlsson, Johan. "Product Backlog Grooming Examples and Best Practices." Perforce, 18 May 2018. Accessed 4 Feb. 2021.

    Lichtenwalter, Jim. “A look back at 2021 and a look ahead to 2022.” ASUG, 23 Jan. 2022. Web.

    “Maximizing the Emotional Economy: Behavioral Economics." Gallup, n.d. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.

    Mell, Peter, and Timothy Grance. “The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing.” National Institute of Standards and Technology. Sept. 2011. Web.

    Norelus, Ernese, Sreeni Pamidala, and Oliver Senti. "An Approach to Application Modernization: Discovery and Assessment Phase," Medium, 24 Feb 2020. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.

    “Process Frameworks." APQC, n.d. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.

    “Quarterly number of SAP S/4HANA subscribers worldwide, from 2015 to 2021.” Statista, n.d. Accessed 13 Apr. 2022.

    Riley, L., C.Hanna, and M. Tucciarone. “Rightsizing SAP in these unprecedented times.” Upperedge, 19 May 2020.

    Rubin, Kenneth S. Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process. Pearson Education, 2012.

    “SAP S/4HANA Product Scorecard Report.” SoftwareReviews, n.d. Accessed 18 Apr. 2022.

    Saxena, Deepak, and Joe Mcdonagh. "Evaluating ERP Implementations: The Case for a Lifecycle-based Interpretive Approach." The Electronic Journal of Information Systems Evaluation, vol. 22, no. 1, 2019, pp. 29-37. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.

    Smith, Anthony. "How To Create A Customer-Obsessed Company Like Netflix." Forbes, 12 Dec. 2017. Accessed 21 Feb. 2021.

    Assess the Viability of M365-O365 Security Add-Ons

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}251|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): N/A
    • member rating average dollars saved: N/A
    • member rating average days saved: N/A
    • Parent Category Name: Security Strategy & Budgeting
    • Parent Category Link: /security-strategy-and-budgeting

    The technical side of IT security demands the best security possible, but the business side of running IT demands that you determine what is cost-effective and can still do the job. You likely shrugged off the early iterations of Microsoft’s security efforts, but you may have heard that things have changed. Where do you start in evaluating Microsoft’s security products in terms of effectiveness? The value proposition sounds tremendous to the CFO, “free” security as part of your corporate license, but how does it truly measure up and how do you articulate your findings to the business?

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Microsoft’s security products have improved to the point where they are often ranked competitively with mainstream security products. Depending on your organization’s licensing of Office 365/Microsoft 365, some of these products are included in what you’re already paying for. That value proposition is hard to deny.

    Impact and Result

    Determine what is important to the business, and in what order of priority.

    Take a close look at your current solution and determine what are table stakes, what features you would like to have in its replacement, and what your current solution is missing.

    Consider Microsoft’s security solutions using an objective methodology. Sentiment will still be a factor, but it shouldn’t dictate the decision you make for the good of the business.

    Assess the Viability of M365/O365 Security Add-Ons Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to assess the viability of M365/O365 security add-ons. Review Info-Tech’s methodology and understand the four key steps to completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Review your current state

    Examine what you are licensed for, what you are paying, what you need, and what your constraints are.

    • Microsoft 365/Office 365 Security Add-Ons Assessment Tool

    2. Assess your needs

    Determine what is “good enough” security and assess the needs of your organization.

    3. Select your path

    Decide what you will go with and start planning your next steps.

    [infographic]

    Assess Your IT Financial Management Maturity Effectively

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}315|cart{/j2store}
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    • member rating average dollars saved: N/A
    • member rating average days saved: N/A
    • Parent Category Name: Cost & Budget Management
    • Parent Category Link: /cost-and-budget-management

    Organizations wishing to mature their IT financial management (ITFM) maturity often face the following obstacles:

    • Unfamiliarity: Lack of knowledge and understanding related to ITFM maturity.
    • Shortsightedness: Randomly reacting to changing circumstances.
    • Exchange: Inability to consistently drive dialogues.
    • Perception: IT is perceived as a cost center instead of a trustworthy strategic partner.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    No matter where you currently stand in your ITFM practice, there is always room for improvement. Hence, a maturity assessment should be viewed as a self-improvement tool that is only valuable if you are willing to act on it.

    Impact and Result

    A mature ITFM practice leads to many benefits.

    • Foundation: Improved governance, skill sets, processes, and tools.
    • Data: An appropriate taxonomy/data model alongside accurate data for high-quality reporting and insights.
    • Language: A common vocabulary across the organization.
    • Organization Culture: Improved communication and collaboration between IT and business partners.

    Assess Your IT Financial Management Maturity Effectively Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Assess Your IT Financial Management Maturity Effectively Storyboard – A framework and step-by-step methodology to assess your ITFM maturity.

    This research seeks to support IT leaders and ITFM practitioners in evaluating and improving their current maturity. It will help document both current and target states as well as prioritize focus areas for improvement.

    • Assess Your IT Financial Management Maturity Effectively Storyboard

    2. IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool – A structured tool to help you assess your ITFM maturity.

    This Excel workbook guides IT finance practitioners to effectively assess their IT financial management practice. Incorporate the visual outputs into your final executive presentation document. Key activities include context setting, completing the assessment, and prioritizing focus areas based on results.

    • IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

    3. IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Report Template – A report summarizing your ITFM maturity assessment results to help you communicate with stakeholders.

    Use this template to document your final ITFM maturity outputs, including the current and target states and your identified priorities.

    • IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Report Template
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Assess Your IT Financial Management Maturity Effectively

    Influence your organization’s strategic direction.

    Analyst Perspective

    Make better informed data-driven business decisions.

    Technology has been evolving throughout the years, increasing complexity and investments, while putting more stress on operations and people involved. As an IT leader, you are now entrusted to run your outfit as a business, sit at the executive table as a true partner, and be involved in making decisions that best suit your organization. Therefore, you have an obligation to fulfill the needs of your end customers and live up to their expectations, which is not an easy task.

    IT financial management (ITFM) helps you generate value to your organization’s clientele by bringing necessary trade-offs to light, while driving effective dialogues with your business partners and leadership team.

    This research will focus on Info-Tech’s approach to ITFM maturity, aiming for a state of continuous improvement, where an organization can learn and grow as it adapts to change. As the ITFM practice matures, IT and business leaders will be able to better understand one another and together make better business decisions, driven by data.

    This client advisory presentation and accompanying tool seek to support IT leaders and ITFM practitioners in evaluating and improving their current maturity. It will help document both current and target states as well as prioritize focus areas for improvement.

    Photo of Bilal Alberto Saab, Research Director, IT Financial Management, Info-Tech Research Group. Bilal Alberto Saab
    Research Director, IT Financial Management
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    The value of ITFM is undermined

    ITFM is often discarded and not given enough importance and relevance due to the operational nature of IT, and the specialized skillset of its people, leading to several problems and challenges, such as:

    • Unfamiliarity: Lack of knowledge and understanding related to ITFM maturity.
    • Shortsightedness: Randomly reacting to changing circumstances.
    • Exchange: Inability to consistently drive dialogues.
    • Perception: IT is perceived as a cost center instead of a trustworthy strategic partner.

    Constructive dialogues with business partners are not the norm

    Business-driven conversations around financials (spending, cost, revenue) are a rarity in IT due to several factors, including:

    • Foundation: Weak governance, inadequate skillset, and less than perfect processes and tools.
    • Data: Lack of adequate taxonomy/data model, alongside inaccurate data leading to poor reporting and insights.
    • Language: Lack of a common vocabulary across the organization.
    • Organization culture: No alignment, alongside minimal communication and collaboration between IT and business partners.

    Follow Info-Tech’s approach to move up the ITFM maturity ladder

    Mature your ITFM practice by activating the means to make informed business decisions.

    Info-Tech’s methodology helps you move the dial by focusing on three maturity focus areas:

    • Build an ITFM Foundation
    • Manage and Monitor IT Spending
    • Bridge the Language Barrier

    Info-Tech Insight

    Influence your organization’s strategic direction by maturing your ITFM practice.

    What is ITFM?

    ITFM is not just about finance.

    • ITFM has evolved from traditional budgeting, accounting, and cost optimization; however, it is much more than those activities alone.
    • It starts with understanding the financial implications of technology by adopting different perspectives to become adept in communicating with various stakeholders, including finance, business partners, IT managers, and your CEO.
    • Armed with this knowledge, ITFM helps you address a variety of questions, such as:
      • How are technology funds being spent?
      • Which projects is IT prioritizing and why?
      • What are the resources needed to speed IT delivery?
      • What’s the value of IT within the organization?
    • ITFM’s main objective is thus to improve decision-making capabilities by facilitating communication between IT leaders and stakeholders, while enabling a customer focus attitude throughout the organization.

    “ITFM embeds technology in financial management practices. Through cost, demand, and value, ITFM brings technology and business together, forging the necessary relationships and starting the right conversations to enable the best decisions for the organization.”
    – Monica Braun, Research Director, Info-Tech Research Group

    Your challenge

    IT leaders struggle to articulate and communicate business value.

    • IT spending is often questioned by different stakeholders, such as business partners and various IT business units. These questions, usually resulting from shifts in business needs, may revolve around investments, expenditures, services, and speed to market, among others. While IT may have an idea about its spending habits, aligning it to the business strategy may prove difficult.
    • IT staff often does not have access to, or knowledge of, the business model and its intricacies. In an operational environment, the focus tends to be on technical issues rather than overall value.
    • People tend to fear what they do not know. Some business managers may not be comfortable with technology. They do not recognize the implications and ramifications of certain implementations or understand the related terminology, which puts a strain on any conversation.

    “Value is not the numbers you visualize on a chart, it’s the dialogue this data generates with your business partners and leadership team.”
    – Dave Kish, Practice Lead, Info-Tech Research Group

    Technology is constantly evolving

    Increasing IT spending and decision-making complexity.

    Timeline of IT technology evolution, starting with 'Timesharing' in the 1980s to 'All Things Digital' in the 2020s. 'IT Spend Growth' grows from start to finish.

    Common obstacles

    IT leaders are not able to have constructive dialogues with their stakeholders.

    • The way IT funds are spent has changed significantly, moving from the purchase of discrete hardware and software tools to implementing data lakes, cloud solutions, the metaverse and blockchain. This implies larger investments and more critical decisions. Conversations around interoperability, integration, and service-based solutions that focus more on big-picture architecture than day-to-day operations have become the norm.
    • Speed to market is now a survival criterion for most organizations, requiring IT to shift rapidly based on changing priorities and customer expectations. This leads to the need for greater financial oversight, with the CFO as the gatekeeper. Today’s IT leaders need to possess both business and financial management savvy to justify their spending with various stakeholders.
    • Any IT budget increase is tied to expectations of greater value. Hence, the compelling demands for IT to prove its worth to the business. Promoting value comes in two ways: 1) objectively, based on data, KPIs, and return on investment; and 2) subjectively, based on stakeholder satisfaction, alongside relationships. Building trust, credibility, and confidence can go a long way.

    In a technology-driven world, advances come at a price. With greater spending required, more complex and difficult conversations arise.

    Constructive dialogues are key

    You don’t know what you don’t know.

    • IT, being historically focused on operations, has become a hub for technically savvy personnel. On the downside, technology departments are often alien to business, causing problems such as:
      • IT staff have no knowledge of the business model and lack customer focus.
      • Business is not comfortable with technology and related jargon.
    • The lack of two-way communication and business alignment is hence an important ramification. If the business does not understand technology, and IT does not speak in business terms, where does that lead us?
    • Poor data quality and governance practices, alongside overly manual processes can only exasperate the situation.

    IT Spending Survey

    79% of respondents believe that decisions taking too long to make is either a significant or somewhat of a challenge (Flexera 2022 Tech Spend Pulse; N=501).

    81% of respondents believe that ensuring spend efficiency (avoiding waste) is either a challenge or somewhat of a challenge (Flexera 2022 Tech Spend Pulse; N=501).

    ITFM is trailing behind

    IT leaders must learn to speak business.

    In today’s world, where organizations are driving customer experience through technology investments, having a seat at the table means IT leaders must be well versed in business language and practice, including solid financial management skills.

    However, IT staff across all industries aren’t very confident in how well IT is doing in managing its finances. This becomes evident after looking at three core processes:

    • Demonstrating IT’s value to the business.
    • Accounting of costs and budgets.
    • Optimizing costs to gain the best return on investment.

    Recent data from 4,137 respondents to Info-Tech’s IT Management & Governance Diagnostic shows that while most IT staff feel that these three financial management processes are important, notably fewer feel that IT management is effective at executing on them.

    IT leadership’s capabilities around fundamental cost data capture appear to be lagging, not to mention the essential value-added capabilities around optimizing costs and demonstrating IT’s contribution to business value.

    Bar charts comparing percentages of people who 'Agree process is important' and 'Agree process is effective' for three processes: Business Value, Cost & Budget Management, and Cost Optimization. In all instances, the importance outweighed the perceived effectiveness.
    Source: Info-Tech Research Group, IT Management & Governance Diagnostic, 2023.

    Info-Tech’s approach

    We take a holistic approach to ITFM and support you throughout your maturity journey.

    Visualization of the IT maturity levels with three goals at the bottom, 'Build am ITFM Foundation', 'Manage & Monitor IT Spending', and 'Bridge the Language Barrier'. The 5 levels, from bottom to top, are 'Nascent - Level 1, Inability to consistently deliver financial planning services', 'Cost Operator - Level 2, Rudimentary financial planning capabilities', 'Trusted Coordinator - Level 3, Enablement of business through cost-effective supply of technology', 'Value Optimizer - Level 4, Effective impact on business performance', and 'Strategic Partner - Level 5, Influence on the organization's strategic direction'.

    The Info-Tech difference:

    • Info-Tech has a methodology and set of tools that will help assess your ITFM maturity and take the first step in developing an improvement plan. We have identified three maturity focus areas:
      • Build an ITFM Foundation
      • Manage and Monitor IT Spending
      • Bridge the Language Barrier
    • No matter where you currently stand in your ITFM practice, there is always room for improvement. Hence, a maturity assessment should be viewed as a self-improvement tool, which is only valuable if you are willing to act on it.

    Note: See Appendix A for maturity level definitions and descriptions.

    Climb the maturity ladder

    By growing along three maturity focus areas.

    A diagram with '3 Maturity Focus Areas' and '9 Maturity Levers' within them. The first area is 'Build an ITFM Foundation' with levers 'Establish your Team', 'Set up your Governance Structure', and 'Adopt ITFM Processes & Tools'. The second area is 'Manage & Monitor IT Spending', with levers 'Standardize your Taxonomy & Data Model', 'Identify, Gather & Prepare your Data', and 'Analyze your Findings and Develop your Reports'. The third area is 'Bridge the Language Barrier' with levers 'Communicate your IT Spending', 'Educate the Masses', and 'Influence your Organization's Culture'.

    Info-Tech identified three maturity focus areas, each containing three levers.

    Identify where you stand across the nine maturity levers, detect the gaps, and determine your priorities as a first step to develop an improvement plan.

    Note: See Appendix B for maturity level definitions and descriptions per lever.

    Key project deliverables

    Each step of this activity is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals.

    IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Report Template

    A template of an ITFM maturity assessment report that can be customized based on your own results.

    IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

    A workbook including an ITFM maturity survey, generating a summary of your current state, target state, and priorities.

    Measure the value of this activity

    Reach your 12-month maturity target.

    • Determine your 12-month maturity target, identify your gaps, and set your priorities.
    • Use the ITFM maturity assessment to kickstart your improvement plan by developing actionable initiatives.
    • Implement your initiatives and monitor your progress to reach your 12-month target.

    Sample of a result page from the ITFM maturity assessment.

    Build your improvement plan and implement your initiatives to move the dial and climb the maturity ladder.

    Sample of a result page from the ITFM maturity assessment with a graph.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    Guided Implementation

    Workshop

    Consulting

    "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful." "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track." "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place." "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Step 1

    Prepare for the ITFM maturity assessment

    Content Overview

    1. Identify your stakeholders
    2. Set the context
    3. Determine the methodology
    4. Identify assessment takers

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO/IT director
    • CFO/finance director
    • IT finance lead
    • IT audit lead
    • Other IT management

    1. Prepare to take the ITFM maturity assessment

    3 hours

    Input: Understanding your context, objectives, and methodology

    Output: ITFM maturity assessment stakeholders and their objectives, ITFM maturity assessment methodology, ITFM maturity assessment takers

    Materials: 1a. Prepare for Assessment tab in the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool

    Participants: CIO/IT director, CFO/finance director, IT finance lead, IT audit lead, Other IT management

    1. Identify your stakeholders and document it in the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool (see next slides). We recommend having representatives from different business units across the organization, most notably IT, IT finance, finance, and IT audit.
    2. Set the context with your stakeholders and document it in the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool. Discuss the reason behind taking the ITFM maturity assessment among the various stakeholders. Why do each of your stakeholders want to take the assessment? What are their main objectives? What would they like to achieve?
    3. Determine the methodology and document it in the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool. Discuss how you want to go about taking the assessment with your stakeholders. Do you want to have representatives from each business unit take the assessment individually, then share and discuss their findings? Do you prefer forming a working group with representatives from each business unit and go through the assessment together? Or does any of your stakeholders have a different suggestion? You will have to consider the effort, skillset, and knowledge required.
    4. Identify the assessment takers and document it in the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool. Determine who will be taking the assessment (specific names of stakeholders). Consider their availability, knowledge, and skills.

    Download the IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

    TEMPLATE & EXAMPLE

    Document your stakeholders, objectives, and methodology

    Excel Workbook: ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool – Prepare for Assessment worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to document stakeholders, objectives, and methodology (table range: columns B to G and rows 8 to 15).

    Example table from the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool re: 'Maturity Assessment Stakeholders'.

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    B Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required.
    C Text Enter the full name of each stakeholder on a separate row.
    D Text Enter the job title related to each stakeholder.
    E Text Enter the objective(s) related to each stakeholder.
    F Text Enter the agreed upon methodology.
    G Text Enter any notes or comments per stakeholder (optional).

    Review the following in the Excel workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the 1a. Prepare for Assessment tab.
    2. Enter the full names and job titles of the ITFM maturity assessment stakeholders.
    3. Document the maturity assessment objective of each of your stakeholders.
    4. Document the agreed-upon methodology.

    Download the IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

    TEMPLATE & EXAMPLE

    Document your assessment takers

    Excel Workbook: ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool – Prepare for Assessment worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to document assessment takers (table range: columns B to E and rows 18 to 25).

    Example table from the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool re: 'Maturity Assessment Takers'.

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    B Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required.
    C Text Enter the full name of each assessment taker on a separate row.
    D Text Enter the job title related to each stakeholder to identify which party is being represented per assessment taker.
    E Text Enter any notes or comments per stakeholder (optional).

    Review the following in the Excel workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the 1a. Prepare for Assessment tab.
    2. Enter the full name of each assessment taker, along with the job title of the stakeholder they are representing.

    Download the IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

    Step 2

    Take the ITFM maturity assessment

    Content Overview

    1. Complete the survey
    2. Review your assessment results
    3. Determine your priorities

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO/IT director
    • CFO/finance director
    • IT finance lead
    • IT audit lead
    • Other IT management

    2. Take the ITFM maturity assessment

    3 hours

    Input: Understanding of your ITFM current state and 12-month target state, ITFM maturity assessment results

    Output: ITFM current- and target-state maturity levels, average scores, and variance, ITFM current- and target-state average scores, variance, and priority by maturity focus area and maturity lever

    Materials: 1b. Glossary, 2a. Assess ITFM Foundation, 2b. Assess Mngt. & Monitoring, 2c. Assess Language, and 3. Assessment Summary tabs in the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool

    Participants: CIO/IT director, CFO/finance director, IT finance lead, IT audit lead, Other IT management

    1. Complete the survey: select the current and target state of each statement – refer to the glossary as needed for definitions of key terms – in the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool (see next slides). There are three tabs (one per maturity focus area) with three tables each (nine maturity levers). Review and discuss statements with all assessment takers: consider variations, differing opinions, and reach an agreement on each statement inputs.
    2. Review assessment results: navigate to the Assessment Summary tab in the ITFM maturity assessment tool (see next slides) to view your results. Review and discuss with all assessment takers: consider any shocking output and adjust survey input if necessary.
    3. Determine your priorities: decide on the priority (Low/Medium/High) by maturity focus area and/or maturity lever. Rank your maturity focus area priorities from 1 to 3 and your maturity lever priorities from 1 to 9. Consider the feasibility in terms of timeframe, effort, and skillset required, positive and negative impacts on business and technology, likelihood of failure, and necessary approvals. Document your priorities in the ITFM maturity assessment tool (see next slides).
      Review and discuss priorities with all assessment takers: consider variations, differing opinions, and reach an agreement on each priority.

    Download the IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

    TEMPLATE & EXAMPLE

    Complete the survey

    Excel workbook: ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool – Survey worksheets

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to complete the survey.

    Example table from the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool re: Survey worksheets.

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    B Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required.
    C Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required: ITFM maturity statement to assess.
    D, E Dropdown Select the maturity levels of your current and target states. One of five maturity levels for each statement, from “1. Nonexistent” (lowest maturity) to “5. Advanced” (highest maturity).
    F, G, H Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required: scores associated with your current and target state selection, along with related variance (column G – column F).
    I Text Enter any notes or comments per ITFM maturity statement (optional).

    Review the following in the Excel workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the survey tabs: 2a. Assess ITFM Foundation, 2b. Assess Management and Monitoring, and 2c. Assess Language.
    2. Select the appropriate current and target maturity levels.
    3. Add any notes or comments per ITFM maturity statement where necessary or helpful.

    Download the IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

    TEMPLATE & EXAMPLE

    Review your overall result

    Excel Workbook: ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool – Assessment Summary worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to review your results.

    Example table from the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool re: Assessment Summary worksheet.

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    K Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required.
    L Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required: Current State, Target State, and Variance entries. Please ignore the current state benchmark, it’s a placeholder for future reference.
    M Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required: average overall maturity score for your Current State and Target State entries, along with related Variance.
    N, O Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required: maturity level and related name based on the overall average score (column M), where level 1 corresponds to an average score less than or equal to 1.49, level 2 corresponds to an average score between 1.5 and 2.49 (inclusive), level 3 corresponds to an average score between 2.5 and 3.49 (inclusive), level 4 corresponds to an average score between 3.5 and 4.49 (inclusive), and level 5 corresponds to an average score between 4.5 and 5 (inclusive).
    P, Q Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required: maturity definition and related description based on the maturity level (column N).

    Review the following in the Excel workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to tab 3. Assessment Summary.
    2. Review your overall current state and target state result along with the corresponding variance.

    Download the IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

    TEMPLATE & EXAMPLE

    Set your priorities

    Excel Workbook: ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool – Assessment Summary worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to review your results per maturity focus area and maturity lever, then prioritize accordingly.

    Example table from the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool re: Assessment Summary worksheet.

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    B Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required.
    C Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required: ITFM maturity focus area or lever, depending on the table.
    D Placeholder Ignore this column because it’s a placeholder for future reference.
    E, F, G Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required: average score related to the current state and target state, along with the corresponding variance per maturity focus area or lever (depending on the table).
    H Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required: preliminary priority based on the average variance (column G), where Low corresponds to an average variance between 0 and 0.5 (inclusive), Medium corresponds to an average variance between 0.51 and 0.99 (inclusive), and High corresponds to an average variance greater than or equal to 1.
    J Dropdown Select your final priority (Low, Medium, or High) per ITFM maturity focus area or lever, depending on the table.
    K Whole Number Enter the appropriate rank based on your priorities; do not use the same number more than once. A whole number between 1 and 3 to rank ITFM maturity focus areas, and between 1 and 9 to rank ITFM maturity levers, depending on the table.

    Review the following in the Excel workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to tab 3. Assessment Summary.
    2. Review your current-state and target-state result along with the corresponding variance per maturity focus area and maturity lever.
    3. Select the appropriate priority for each maturity focus area and maturity lever.
    4. Enter a unique rank for each maturity focus area (1 to 3).
    5. Enter a unique rank for each maturity lever (1 to 9).

    Download the IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

    Step 3

    Communicate your ITFM maturity results

    Content Overview

    1. Review your assessment charts
    2. Customize the assessment report
    3. Communicate your results

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO/IT director
    • CFO/finance director
    • IT finance lead
    • IT audit lead
    • Other IT management

    3. Communicate your ITFM maturity results

    3 hours

    Input: ITFM maturity assessment results

    Output: Customized ITFM maturity assessment report

    Materials: 3. Assessment Summary tab in the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool, ITFM Maturity Assessment Report Template

    Participants: CIO/IT director, CFO/finance director, IT finance lead, IT audit lead, Other IT management

    1. Review assessment charts: navigate to the Assessment Summary tab in the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool (see next slides) to view your results and related charts.
    2. Edit the report template: complete the template based on your results and priorities to develop your customized ITFM maturity assessment report (see next slide).
    3. Communicate results: communicate and deliberate the assessment results with assessment takers at a first stage, and with your stakeholders at a second stage. The objective is to agree on next steps, including developing an improvement plan.

    Download the IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

    TEMPLATE & EXAMPLE

    Review assessment charts

    Excel Workbook: ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool – Assessment Summary worksheet

    Refer to the example below on charts depicting different views of the maturity assessment results across the three focus areas and nine levers.

    Samples of different tabs from the ITFM Maturity Assessment Tool: 'Assessment Summary tab: From cell B49 to cell M100' and 'Assessment Summary tab: From cell K13 to cell Q34'.

    From the Excel workbook, after completing your potential initiatives and filling all related entries in the Outline Initiatives tab:

    1. Navigate to tab 3. Assessment Summary.
    2. Review each of the charts.
    3. Navigate back to the survey tabs to examine, drill down, and amend individual entries as you deem necessary.

    Download the IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Tool

    TEMPLATE & EXAMPLE

    Customize your report

    PowerPoint presentation: ITFM Maturity Assessment Report Template

    Refer to the example below on slides depicting different views of the maturity assessment results across the three maturity focus areas and nine maturity levers.

    Samples of different slides from the ITFM Maturity Assessment Report Template, detailed below.

    Slide 6: Edit levels based on your assessment results. Copy and paste the appropriate maturity level definition and description from slide 4.

    Slide 7: Copy related charts from the assessment summary tab in the Excel workbook and remove the chart title. You can use the “Outer Offset: Bottom” shadow under shape effects on the chart.

    Slide 8: Copy related charts from the assessment summary tab in the Excel workbook and remove the chart title and legend. You can use the “Outer Offset: Center” shadow under shape effects on the chart.

    From the ITFM Maturity Assessment Report Template:

    1. Edit the report based on your results found in the assessment summary tab of the Excel workbook (see previous slide).
    2. Review slides 6 to 8 and bring necessary adjustments.

    Download the IT Financial Management Maturity Assessment Report Template

    Make informed business decisions

    Take a holistic approach to ITFM.

    • A thorough understanding of your technology spending in relation to business needs and drivers is essential to make informed decisions. As a trusted partner, you cannot have effective conversations around budgets and cost optimization without a solid foundation.
    • It is important to realize that ITFM is not a one-time exercise, but a continuous, sustainable process to educate (teach, mentor, and train), increase transparency, and assign responsibility.
    • Move up the ITFM maturity ladder by improving across three maturity focus areas:
      • Build an ITFM Foundation
      • Manage and Monitor IT Spending
      • Bridge the Language Barrier

    What’s Next?

    Communicate your maturity results with stakeholders and develop an actionable ITFM improvement plan.

    And remember, having informed discussions with your business partners and stakeholders, where technology helps propel your organization forward, is priceless!

    IT Financial Management Team

    Photo of Dave Kish, Practice Lead, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group. Dave Kish
    Practice Lead, ITFM Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Photo of Jennifer Perrier, Principal Research Director, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group. Jennifer Perrier
    Principal Research Director, ITFM Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Photo of Angie Reynolds, Principal Research Director, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group. Angie Reynolds
    Principal Research Director, ITFM Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Photo of Monica Braun, Research Director, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group. Monica Braun
    Research Director, ITFM Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Photo of Rex Ding, Research Specialist, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group. Rex Ding
    Research Specialist, ITFM Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Photo of Aman Kumari, Research Specialist, ITFM Practice, Info-Tech Research Group. Aman Kumari
    Research Specialist, ITFM Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Research Contributors and Experts

    Photo of Amy Byalick, Vice President, IT Finance, Info-Tech Research Group. Amy Byalick
    Vice President, IT Finance
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Amy Byalick is an IT Finance practitioner with 15 years of experience supporting CIOs and IT leaders elevating the IT financial storytelling and unlocking insights. Amy is currently working at Johnson Controls as the VP, IT Finance, previously working at PepsiCo, AmerisourceBergen, and Jacobs.
    Photo of Carol Carr, Technical Counselor, Executive Services, Info-Tech Research Group. Carol Carr
    Technical Counselor, Executive Services
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Photo of Scott Fairholm, Executive Counselor, Executive Services, Info-Tech Research Group. Scott Fairholm
    Executive Counselor, Executive Services
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Photo of Gokul Rajan, Executive Counselor, Executive Services, Info-Tech Research Group. Gokul Rajan
    Executive Counselor, Executive Services
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Photo of Allison Kinnaird, Practice Lead, Infrastructure & Operations, Info-Tech Research Group. Allison Kinnaird
    Practice Lead, Infrastructure & Operations
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Photo of Isabelle Hertanto, Practice Lead, Security & Privacy, Info-Tech Research Group. Isabelle Hertanto
    Practice Lead, Security & Privacy
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Sample of the IT spending transparency research. Achieve IT Spending Transparency

    Mature your ITFM practice by activating the means to make informed business decisions.

    Sample of the IT cost optimization roadmap research. Build Your IT Cost Optimization Roadmap

    Develop an IT cost optimization strategy based on your specific circumstances and timeline.

    Bibliography

    Eby, Kate. “The Complete Guide to Organizational Maturity: Models, Levels, and Assessments.” Smartsheet, 8 June 2022. Web.

    “Financial Management Maturity Model.” National Audit Office, n.d. Accessed 28 Apr. 2023.

    “ITFM/TBM Program Maturity Guide.” Nicus Software, n.d. Accessed 28 Apr. 2023.

    Jouravlev, Roman. "Service Financial Management: ITIL 4 Practice Guide." Axelos, 2020.

    McCarthy, Seamus. “Financial Management Maturity Model: A Good Practice Guide.” Office of the Comptroller & Auditor General, 26 June 2018. Web.

    “Principles for Effective Risk Data Aggregation and Risk Reporting.“ Bank for International Settlements, Jan. 2013. Web.

    “Role & Influence of the Technology Decision-Maker 2022.” Foundry, 2022. Web.

    Stackpole, Beth. “State of the CIO, 2022: Focus turns to IT fundamentals.” CIO, 21 March 2022. Web.

    “Tech Spend Pulse.” Flexera, 2022. Web.

    Appendix A

    Definition and Description
    Per Maturity Level

    ITFM maturity levels and definitions

    Maturity Level

    Definition

    Description

    Nascent
    Level 1
    Inability to consistently deliver financial planning services ITFM practices are almost inexistent. Only the most basic financial tasks and activities are being performed on an ad hoc basis to fulfill the Finance department’s requests.
    Cost Operator
    Level 2
    Rudimentary financial planning capabilities. ITFM activities revolve around minimizing the IT budget as much as possible. ITFM practices are not well defined, and IT’s financial view is limited to day-to-day technical operations.
    IT is only involved in low complexity decision making, where financial conversations center on general ledger items and IT spending.
    Trusted Coordinator
    Level 3
    Enablement of business through cost-effective supply of technology. ITFM activities revolve around becoming a proficient and cost-effective technology supplier to business partners.
    ITFM practices are in place, with moderate coordination and adherence to execution. Various IT business units coordinate to produce a consolidated financial view focused on business services.
    IT is involved in moderate complexity decision making, as a technology subject matter expert, where financial conversations center on IT spending in relation to technology services or solutions provided to business partners.
    Value Optimizer
    Level 4
    Effective impact on business performance. ITFM activities revolve around optimizing existing technology investments to improve both IT and business performance.
    ITFM practices are well managed, established, documented, repeatable, and integrated as necessary across the organization. IT’s financial view tie technology investments to lines of business, business products, and business capabilities.
    Business partners are well informed on the technology mix and drive related discussion. IT is trusted to contribute to complex decision making around existing investments to cost-effectively plan initiatives, as well as enhance business performance.
    Strategic Partner
    Level 5
    Influence on the organization’s strategic direction. ITFM activities revolve around predicting the outcome of new or potential technology investments to continuously optimize business performance.
    ITFM practices are fully optimized, reviewed, and improved in a continuous and sustainable manner, and related execution is tracked by gathering qualitative and quantitative feedback. IT’s financial view is holistic and fully integrated with the business, with an outlook on innovation, growth, and strategic transformation.
    Business and IT leaders know the financial ramifications of every business and technology investment decision. IT is trusted to contribute to strategic decision making around potential and future investments to grow and transform the business.

    Appendix B

    Maturity Level Definitions and Descriptions
    Per Lever

    Establish your ITFM team

    Maturity focus area: Build an ITFM foundation.

    Maturity Level

    Definition

    Description

    Nascent
    Level 1
    Inability to provide any type of financial insight.ITFM tasks, activities, and functions are not being met in any way, shape, or form.
    Cost Operator
    Level 2
    Ability to provide basic financial insights.There is no dedicated ITFM team.


    Basic ITFM tasks, activities, and functions are being performed on an ad hoc basis, such as high-level budget reporting.

    Trusted Coordinator
    Level 3
    Ability to provide basic business insights.A dedicated team is fulfilling essential ITFM tasks, activities, and functions.


    ITFM team can combine and analyze financial and technology data to produce necessary reports.

    Value Optimizer
    Level 4
    Ability to provide valuable business driven insights.A dedicated ITFM team with well-defined roles and responsibilities can provide effective advice to IT leaders, in a timely fashion, and positively influence IT decisions.
    Strategic Partner
    Level 5
    Ability to influence both technology and business decisions.A dedicated and highly specialized ITFM team is trusted and valued by both IT and Business leaders.


    Insights provided by the ITFM team can influence and shape the organization’s strategy.

    Set up your governance structure

    Maturity focus area: Build an ITFM foundation

    Maturity Level

    Definition

    Description

    Nascent
    Level 1
    Inability to ensure any adherence to rules and regulations.ITFM frameworks, guidelines, policies, and procedures are not developed nor documented.
    Cost Operator
    Level 2
    Ability to ensure basic adherence to rules and regulations.Basic ITFM frameworks, guidelines, policies, and procedures are in place, developed on an ad hoc basis, with no apparent coherence or complete documentation.
    Trusted Coordinator
    Level 3
    Ability to ensure compliance to rules and regulations, as well as accountability across ITFM processes.Essential ITFM frameworks, guidelines, policies, and procedures are in place, coherent, and documented, aiming to (a) comply with rules and regulations, and (b) provide clear accountability.
    Value Optimizer
    Level 4
    Ability to ensure compliance to rules and regulations, as well as structure, transparency, and business alignment across ITFM processes.ITFM frameworks, guidelines, policies, and procedures are well defined, coherent, documented, and regularly reviewed, aiming to (a) comply with rules and regulations, (b) provide clear accountability, and (c) maintain business alignment.
    Strategic Partner
    Level 5
    Ability to:
    • Ensure compliance to rules and regulations, as well as ITFM processes are transparent, structured, focused on business objectives, and support decision making.
    • Reinforce and shape the organization culture.
    ITFM frameworks, guidelines, policies, and procedures are complete, well defined, coherent, documented, continuously reviewed, and improved, aiming to (a) comply with rules and regulations, (b) provide clear accountability, (c) maintain business alignment, and (d) facilitate the decision-making process.


    Enforcement of the ITFM governance structure can influence the organization culture.

    Adopt ITFM processes and tools

    Maturity focus area: Build an ITFM foundation.

    Maturity Level

    Definition

    Description

    Nascent
    Level 1
    Inability to deliver IT financial planning and performance output.ITFM processes and tools are not developed nor documented.
    Cost Operator
    Level 2
    Ability to deliver basic IT financial planning output.Basic ITFM processes and tools are in place, developed on an ad hoc basis, with no apparent coherence or complete documentation.
    Trusted Coordinator
    Level 3
    Ability to deliver accurate IT financial output and basic IT performance output in a consistent cadence.Essential ITFM processes and tools are in place, coherent, and documented, aiming to (a) maintain integrity across activities, tasks, methodologies, data, and reports; (b) deliver IT financial planning and performance output needed by stakeholders; and (c) provide clear accountability. ITFM tools and processes are adopted by the ITFM team and some IT business units but are not fully integrated.
    Value Optimizer
    Level 4
    Ability to deliver accurate IT financial planning and performance output at the needed level of detail to stakeholders in a consistent cadence.ITFM processes and tools are complete, well defined, coherent, documented, continuously reviewed, and improved, aiming to (a) maintain integrity across activities, tasks, methodologies, data, and reports; (b) deliver IT financial planning and performance output needed by stakeholders; (c) provide clear accountability; and (d) facilitate decision-making. ITFM tools and processes are adopted by IT and business partners but are not fully integrated.
    Strategic Partner
    Level 5
    Ability to:
    • Deliver accurate IT financial planning and performance output at the needed level of detail to stakeholders.
    • Leverage IT financial planning and performance output in real time and when needed by stakeholders.
    ITFM processes and tools are complete, well defined, coherent, documented, continuously reviewed, and improved, aiming to (a) maintain integrity across activities, tasks, methodologies, data, and reports; (b) deliver IT financial planning and performance output needed by stakeholders; (c) provide clear accountability; and (d) facilitate decision making.


    ITFM processes and tools are automated to the full extent needed by the organization, utilized to their full potential, and integrated into a single enterprise platform, providing a holistic view of IT spending and IT performance.

    Standardize your taxonomy and data model

    Maturity focus area: Manage and monitor IT spending.

    Maturity Level

    Definition

    Description

    Nascent
    Level 1
    Inability to provide transparency across technology spending.ITFM taxonomy and data model are not developed nor documented.
    Cost Operator
    Level 2
    Ability to provide transparency and support IT financial planning data, analysis, and reporting needs of finance stakeholders.ITFM taxonomy and data model are in place, developed on an ad hoc basis, with no apparent coherence or complete documentation, to comply with, and meet the needs of finance stakeholders.
    Trusted Coordinator
    Level 3
    Ability to provide transparency and support IT financial planning and performance data, analysis, and reporting needs of IT and finance stakeholders.ITFM taxonomy and data model are in place, coherent, and documented to meet the needs of IT and finance stakeholders.
    Value Optimizer
    Level 4
    Ability to provide transparency and support IT financial planning and performance data, analysis, and reporting needs of IT, finance, business, and executive stakeholders.ITFM taxonomy and data model are complete, well defined, coherent, documented, continuously reviewed, and improved, aiming to provide (a) a holistic view of IT spending and IT performance, (b) visibility and transparency, (c) flexibility, and (d) valuable insights to facilitate data driven decision making.


    ITFM taxonomy and data model are standardized to meet the needs of IT, finance, business, and executive stakeholders, but not flexible enough to be adjusted in a timely fashion as needed.

    Strategic Partner
    Level 5
    Ability to:
    • Provide transparency and support IT financial planning and performance data, analysis, and reporting needs of IT, finance, business, and executive stakeholders.
    • Change to meet evolving needs.
    ITFM taxonomy and data model are complete, well defined, coherent, documented, continuously reviewed, and improved, aiming to provide (a) a holistic view of IT spending and IT performance, (b) visibility and transparency, (c) flexibility, and (d) valuable insights to facilitate data driven decision making.


    ITFM taxonomy and data model are standardized and meet the changing needs of IT, finance, business, and executive stakeholders.

    Identify, gather, and prepare your data

    Maturity focus area: Manage and monitor IT spending.

    Maturity Level

    Definition

    Description

    Nascent
    Level 1
    Inability to provide accurate and complete across technology spending.ITFM data needs and requirements are not understood.
    Cost Operator
    Level 2
    Ability to provide accurate, but incomplete IT financial planning data to meet the needs of finance stakeholders.Technology spending data is extracted, transformed, and loaded on an ad hoc basis to meet the needs of finance stakeholders.
    Trusted Coordinator
    Level 3
    Ability to provide accurate and complete IT financial planning data to meet the needs of IT and finance stakeholders, but IT performance data remain incomplete.IT financial planning data is extracted, transformed, and loaded in a regular cadence to meet the needs of IT and finance stakeholders.


    IT financial planning data is (a) complete and accurate, as defined in related control documents (guideline, policies, procedures, etc.), (b) regularly validated for inconsistencies, and (c) sourced from the organization’s system of record.

    Value Optimizer
    Level 4
    Ability to provide accurate and complete IT financial planning and performance data to meet the needs of IT, finance, business, and executive stakeholders.ITFM data needs and requirements are understood.


    ITFM data is extracted, transformed, and loaded in a regular cadence to meet the needs of IT, finance, business, and executive stakeholders.


    IT financial planning and performance data are (a) complete and accurate, as defined in related control documents (guideline, policies, procedures, etc.), (b) regularly validated for inconsistencies, and (c) sourced from the organization’s system of record.

    Strategic Partner
    Level 5
    Ability to provide accurate and complete IT financial planning and performance data real time and when needed by IT, finance, business, and executive stakeholders.ITFM data needs and requirements are understood.


    IT financial planning and performance data are (a) complete and accurate, as defined in related control documents (guideline, policies, procedures, etc.), (b) regularly validated for inconsistencies, (c) available and refreshed as needed, and (d) sourced from the organization’s system of record.

    Analyze your findings and develop your reports

    Maturity focus area: Manage and monitor IT spending.

    Maturity Level

    Definition

    Description

    Nascent
    Level 1
    Inability to provide any type of financial insight.ITFM analysis and reports are not developed nor documented.
    Cost Operator
    Level 2
    Ability to provide basic financial insights.IT financial planning analysis is conducted on an ad hoc basis to meet the needs of finance stakeholders.
    Trusted Coordinator
    Level 3
    Ability to provide basic financial planning and performance insights to meet the needs of IT and finance stakeholders.IT financial planning and performance analysis are methodical and rigorous, as defined in related control documents (guideline, policies, procedures, etc.).


    IT financial planning and performance reports are accurate, precise, and methodical, as defined in related control documents (guideline, policies, procedures, etc.).

    Value Optimizer
    Level 4
    Ability to provide practical insights and useful recommendations as needed by IT, finance, business, and executive stakeholders to facilitate business decision making around technology investments.ITFM analysis and reports support business decision making around technology investments.


    IT financial planning and performance analysis are methodical and rigorous, as defined in related control documents (guideline, policies, procedures, etc.).


    IT financial planning and performance reports are (a) accurate, precise, and methodical, as defined in related control documents (guideline, policies, procedures, etc.), (b) fit for purpose, and (c) regularly validated for inconsistencies.

    Strategic Partner
    Level 5
    Ability to provide practical insights and useful recommendations as needed by IT, finance, business, and executive stakeholders to facilitate strategic decision making.ITFM analysis and reports support strategic decision making.


    IT financial planning and performance analysis are methodical and rigorous, as defined in related control documents (guideline, policies, procedures, etc.), and consider multiple point of views (hypotheses, interpretations, opinions, etc.).


    IT financial planning and performance reports are (a) accurate, precise, and methodical, as defined in related control documents (guideline, policies, procedures, etc.), (b) fit for purpose, (c) comprehensive, and (d) regularly validated for inconsistencies.

    Communicate your IT spending

    Maturity focus area: Bridge the language barrier.

    Maturity Level

    Definition

    Description

    Nascent
    Level 1
    Inability of organization stakeholders to communicate and understand each other.The organization stakeholders including IT, finance, business, and executives do not understand one another, and cannot speak the same language.
    Cost Operator
    Level 2
    Ability to understand business and finance requirements.IT understands and meets business and financial planning requirements but does not communicate in a similar language.


    IT cannot influence finance or business decision making.

    Trusted Coordinator
    Level 3
    Ability to understand the needs of different stakeholders including IT, finance, business, and executives and take part in decision making around technology spending.The organization stakeholders including IT, finance, business, and executives understand each other’s needs, but do not communicate in a common language.


    IT leaders provide insights as technology subject matter experts, where conversations center on IT spending in relation to technology services or solutions provided to business partners.


    IT can influence technology decisions around its own budget.

    Value Optimizer
    Level 4
    Ability to communicate in a common vocabulary across the organization and take part in business decision making around technology investments.The organization stakeholders including IT, finance, business, and executives communicate in a common vocabulary and understand one another.


    IT and business leaders, along with their respective teams, collaborate frequently across various initiatives.


    IT leaders provide valuable insight to support and influence business decision making around existing technology investments.

    Strategic Partner
    Level 5
    Ability to communicate in a common vocabulary across the organization and take part in strategic decision making.The organization stakeholders including IT, finance, business, and executives communicate in a common vocabulary and understand one another.


    IT and business leaders, along with their respective teams, collaborate frequently across various initiatives.


    IT leaders provide valuable insight to facilitate decision making around potential and future investments to grow and transform the business, thus influencing the organization’s overall strategic direction.

    Educate the masses

    Maturity focus area: Bridge the language barrier.

    Maturity Level

    Definition

    Description

    Nascent
    Level 1
    Inability of organization stakeholders to acquire knowledge.Educational resources are inexistent.
    Cost Operator
    Level 2
    Ability to acquire financial knowledge and understand financial concepts.IT leaders have access to educational resources to gain the financial knowledge necessary to perform their duties.
    Trusted Coordinator
    Level 3
    Ability to acquire financial and business knowledge and understand related concepts.IT leaders and their respective teams have access to educational resources to gain the financial and business knowledge necessary to perform their duties.


    ITFM team has access to the necessary educational resources to keep up with changing financial regulations and technology developments.

    Value Optimizer
    Level 4
    Ability to acquire knowledge, across technology, business, and finance as needed by different organization stakeholders, and the leadership understand concepts across these various domains.Stakeholders including IT, finance, business, and executives have access to various educational resources to gain knowledge in different domains as needed.


    IT leaders have a good understanding of business and financial concepts.


    Business leaders have a good understanding of technology concepts.

    Strategic Partner
    Level 5
    Ability to acquire knowledge, and understand concepts across technology, business, and finance as needed by different organization stakeholders.The organization promotes continuous learning through well designed programs including training, mentorship, and academic courses. Thus, stakeholders including IT, finance, business, and executives have access to various educational resources to gain knowledge in different domains as needed.


    IT leaders and their respective teams have a good understanding of business and financial concepts.


    Business leaders and their respective teams have a good understanding of technology concepts.

    Influence your organization’s culture

    Maturity focus area: Bridge the language barrier.

    Maturity Level

    Definition

    Description

    Nascent
    Level 1
    Inability to provide and foster an environment of collaboration and continuous improvement.Stakeholders including IT, finance, business, and executives operate in silos, and collaboration between different teams is inexistent.
    Cost Operator
    Level 2
    Ability to provide an environment of cooperation to meet the needs of IT, finance, and business leaders.IT, finance, and business leaders cooperate to meet financial planning requirements as necessary to perform their duties.
    Trusted Coordinator
    Level 3
    Ability to provide and foster an environment of collaboration across the organization.IT, finance, and business collaborate on various initiatives.

    ITFM employees are trusted and supported by their stakeholders (IT, finance, and business).

    Value Optimizer
    Level 4
    Ability to provide and foster an environment of collaboration and continuous improvement, where employees across the organization feel trusted, supported, empowered, and valued.Stakeholders including IT, finance, business, and executives support and promote continuous improvement, transparency practices, and collaboration across the organization.


    Employees are trusted, supported, empowered, and valued.

    Strategic Partner
    Level 5
    Ability to provide and foster an environment of collaboration and continuous improvement, where leaders are willing to change, and employees across the organization feel trusted, supported, empowered, and valued.Stakeholders including IT, finance, business, and executives support and promote continuous improvement, transparency practices, and collaboration across the organization.


    The organization’s leadership is adaptable and open to change.


    Employees are trusted, supported, empowered, and valued.

    Service Management Integration With Agile Practices

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    • Parent Category Name: Service Management
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    • Work efficiently and in harmony with Agile and service management to deliver business value.
    • Optimize the value stream of services and products.
    • Leverage the benefits of each practice.
    • Create a culture of collaboration to support a rapidly changing business.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Agile and Service Management are not necessarily at odds; find the integration points to solve specific problems.

    Impact and Result

    • Optimize the value stream of services and products.
    • Work efficiently and in harmony with Agile and service management to deliver business value.
    • Create a culture of collaboration to support a rapidly changing business.

    Service Management Integration With Agile Practices Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Service Management Integration With Agile Practices Storyboard – Use this deck to understand the integration points and how to overcome common challenges.

    Understand how service management integrates with Agile software development practices, and how to solve the most common challenges to work efficiently and deliver business value.

    • Service Management Integration With Agile Practices Storyboard

    2. Service Management Stakeholder Register Template – Use this tool to identify and document Service Management stakeholders.

    Use this tool to identify your stakeholders to engage when working on the service management integration.

    • ITSM Stakeholder Register Template

    3. Service Management Integration With Agile Practices Assessment Tool – Use this tool to identify key challenging integration points in your organization.

    Use this tool to identify which of your current practices might already be aligned with Agile mindset and which might need adjustment. Identify integration challenges with the current service management practices.

    • Service Management Integration With Agile Practices Assessment Tool
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Service Management Integration With Agile Practices

    Understand how Agile transformation affects service management

    Analyst Perspective

    Don't forget about operations

    Many organizations believe that once they have implemented Agile that they no longer need any service management framework, like ITIL. They see service management as "old" and a roadblock to deliver products and services quickly. The culture clash is obvious, and it is the most common challenge people face when trying to integrate Agile and service management. However, it is not the only challenge. Agile methodologies are focused on optimized delivery. However, what happens after delivery is often overlooked. Operations may not receive proper communication or documentation, and processes are cumbersome or non-existent. This is a huge paradox if an organization is trying to become nimbler. You need to find ways to integrate your Agile practices with your existing Service Management processes.

    This is a picture of Renata Lopes

    Renata Lopes
    Senior Research Analyst
    Organizational Transformation Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    • Work efficiently and in harmony with Agile and service management to deliver business value.
    • Optimize the value stream of services and products.
    • Leverage the benefits of each practice.
    • Create a culture of collaboration to support a rapidly changing business.

    Common Obstacles

    • Culture clashes.
    • Inefficient or inexistent processes.
    • Lack of understanding of what Agile and service management mean.
    • Leadership doesn't understand the integration points of practices.
    • Development overlooks the operations requirement.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    • When integrating Agile and service management practices start by understanding the key integration points:
    • Processes
    • People and resources
    • Governance and org structure

    Info-Tech Insight

    Agile and Service Management are not necessarily at odds Find the integration points to solve specific problems.

    Your challenge

    Deliver seamless business value by integrating service management and Agile development.

    • Understand how Agile development impacts service management.
    • Identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies when integrating with service management.
    • Connect teams across the organization to collaborate toward the organizational goals.
    • Ensure operational requirements are considered while developing products in an Agile way.
    • Stay in alignment when designing and delivering services.

    The most significant Agile adoption barriers

    46% of respondents identified inconsistent processes and practices across teams as a challenge.
    Source: Digital.ai, 2021

    43% of respondents identified Culture clashes as a challenge.
    Source: Digital.ai, 2021

    What is Agile?

    Agile development is an umbrella term for several iterative and incremental development methodologies to develop products.

    In order to achieve Agile development, organizations will adopt frameworks and methodologies like Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Scrum, Large Scaled Scrum (LeSS), DevOps, Spotify Way of Working (WoW), etc.

    • DevOps
    • WoW
    • SAFe
    • Scrum
    • LeSS

    Build a Winning Business Process Automation Playbook

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    • Parent Category Name: Business Analysis
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    • Organizations often have many business processes that rely on manual, routine, and repetitive data collection and processing work. These processes need to be automated to meet strategic priorities.
    • Your stakeholders may have decided to invest in process automation solutions. They may be ready to begin the planning and delivery of their first automated processes.
    • However, if your processes are costly, slow, defective, and do not generate the value end users want, automation will only magnify these inefficiencies.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Put the user front and center. Aim to better understand the end user and their operational environment. Use cases, data models, and quality factors allow you to visualize the human-computer interactions from an end-user perspective and initiate a discussion on how technology and process improvements can be better positioned to help your end users.
    • Build for the future. Automation sets the technology foundations and process governance and management building blocks in your organization. Expect that more automation will be done using earlier investments.
    • Manage automations as part of your application portfolio. Automations are add-ons to your application portfolio. Unmanaged automations, like applications, will sprawl and reduce in value over time. A collaborative rationalization practice pinpoints where automation is required and identifies which business inefficiencies should be automated next.

    Impact and Result

    • Clarify the problem being solved. Gain a grounded understanding of your stakeholders’ drivers for business process automation. Discuss current business operations and systems to identify automation candidates.
    • Optimate your processes. Apply good practices to first optimize (opti-) and then automate (-mate) key business processes. Take a user-centric perspective to understand how users interact with technology to complete their tasks.
    • Deliver minimum viable automations (MVAs). Maximize the learning of automation solutions and business operational changes through small, strategic automation use cases. This sets the foundations for a broader automation practice.

    Build a Winning Business Process Automation Playbook Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Business Process Automation Deck – A step-by-step document that walks you through how to optimize and automate your business processes.

    This blueprint helps you develop a repeatable approach to understand your process challenges and to optimize and automate strategic business processes.

    • Build a Winning Business Process Automation Playbook – Phases 1-3

    2. Business Process Automation Playbook – A repeatable set of practices to assess, optimize, and automate your business processes.

    This playbook template gives your teams a step-by-step guide to build a repeatable and standardized framework to optimize and automate your processes.

    • Business Process Automation Playbook

    3. Process Interview Template – A structured approach to interviewing stakeholders about their business processes.

    Info-Tech's Process Interview Template provides a number of sections that you can populate to help facilitate and document your stakeholder interviews.

    • Process Interview Template

    4. Process Mapping Guide – A guide to mapping business processes using BPMN standards.

    Info-Tech's Process Mapping Guide provides a thorough framework for process mapping, including the purpose and benefits, the best practices for facilitation, step-by-step process mapping instructions, and process mapping naming conventions.

    • Process Mapping Guide

    Infographic

    Workshop: Build a Winning Business Process Automation Playbook

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Identify Automation Opportunities

    The Purpose

    Understand the goals and visions of business process automation.

    Develop your guiding principles.

    Build a backlog of automation opportunities

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Business process automation vision, expectations, and objectives.

    High-priority automation opportunities identified to focus on.

    Activities

    1.1 State your objectives and metrics.

    1.2 Build your backlog.

    Outputs

    Business process automation vision and objectives

    Business process automation guiding principles

    Process automation opportunity backlog

    2 Define Your MVAs

    The Purpose

    Assess and optimize high-strategic-importance business process automation use cases from the end user’s perspective.

    Shortlist your automation solutions.

    Build and plan to deliver minimum viable automations (MVAs).

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Repeatable framework to assess and optimize your business process.

    Selection of the possible solutions that best fit the business process use case.

    Maximized learning with a low-risk minimum viable automation.

    Activities

    2.1 Optimize your processes.

    2.2 Automate your processes.

    2.3 Define and roadmap your MVAs.

    Outputs

    Assessed and optimized business processes with a repeatable framework

    Fit assessment of use cases to automation solutions

    MVA definition and roadmap

    3 Deliver Your MVAs

    The Purpose

    Modernize your SDLC to support business process automation delivery.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    An SDLC that best supports the nuances and complexities of business process automation delivery.

    Activities

    3.1 Deliver your MVAs

    Outputs

    Refined and enhanced SDLC

    Select a Security Outsourcing Partner

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    • Most organizations do not have a clear understanding of their current security posture, their security goals, and the specific security services they require. Without a clear understanding of their needs, organizations may struggle to identify a partner that can meet their requirements.
    • Breakdowns and lack of communication can be a significant obstacle, especially when clear lines of communication with partners, including regular check-ins, reporting, and incident response protocols, have not been clearly established.
    • Ensuring that security partners’ systems and processes integrate seamlessly with existing systems can be a challenge for most organizations in addition to making sure that security partners have the necessary access and permissions to perform their services effectively.
    • Adhering to security policies is rarely a priority to users as compliance often feels like an interference to daily workflow. For a lot of organizations, security policies are not having the desired effect.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • You can outsource your responsibilities but not your accountability.
    • Be aware that in most cases, the traditional approach is more profitable to MSSPs, and they may push you toward one, so make sure you get the service you want, not what they prescribe.

    Impact and Result

    • Determine which security responsibilities can be outsourced and which should be insourced and the right procedure to outsourcing to gain cost savings, improve resource allocation, and boost your overall security posture.

    Select a Security Outsourcing Partner Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Select a Security Outsourcing Partner Storyboard – A guide to help you determine your requirements and select and manage your security outsourcing partner.

    Our systematic approach will ensure that the correct procedure for selecting a security outsourcing partner is implemented. This blueprint will help you build and implement your security policy program by following our three-phase methodology: determine what to outsource, select the right MSSP, and manage your MSSP.

    • Select a Security Outsourcing Partner – Phases 1-3

    2. MSSP RFP Template – A customizable template to help you choose the right security service provider.

    This modifiable template is designed to introduce consistency and outline key requirements during the request for proposal phase of selecting an MSSP.

    • MSSP RFP Template

    Infographic

    Further reading

    Select a Security Outsourcing Partner

    Outsource the right functions to secure your business.

    Analyst Perspective

    Understanding your security needs and remaining accountable is the key to selecting the right partner.

    The need for specialized security services is fast becoming a necessity to most organizations. However, resource challenges will always mean that organizations will still have to take practical measures to ensure that the time, quality, and service that they require from outsourcing partners have been carefully crafted and packaged to elicit the right services that cover all their needs and requirements.

    Organizations must ensure that security partners are aligned not only with their needs and requirements, but also with the corporate culture. Rather than introducing hindrances to daily operations, security partners must support business goals and protect the organization’s interests at all times.

    And as always, outsource only your responsibilities and do not outsource your accountability, as that will cost you in the long run.

    Photo of Danny Hammond
    Danny Hammond
    Research Analyst
    Security, Risk, Privacy & Compliance Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    A lack of high-skill labor increases the cost of internal security, making outsourcing more appealing.

    A lack of time and resources prevents your organization from being able to enable security internally.

    Due to a lack of key information on the subject, you are unsure which functions should be outsourced versus which functions should remain in-house.

    Having 24/7/365 monitoring in-house is not feasible for most firms.

    There is difficulty measuring the effectiveness of managed security service providers (MSSPs).

    Common Obstacles

    InfoSec leaders will struggle to select the right outsourcing partner without knowing what the organization needs, such as:

    • How to start the process to select the right service provider that will cover your security needs. With so many service providers and technology tools in this field, who is the right partner?
    • Where to obtain guidance on externalization of resources or maintaining internal posture to enable to you confidently select an outsourcing partner.

    InfoSec leaders must understand the business environment and their own internal security needs before they can select an outsourcing partner that fits.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    Info-Tech’s Select a Security Outsourcing Partner takes a multi-faceted approach to the problem that incorporates foundational technical elements, compliance considerations, and supporting processes:

    • Determine which security responsibilities can be insourced and which should be outsourced, and the right procedure to outsourcing in order to gain cost savings, improve resource allocation, and boost your overall security posture.
    • Understand the current landscape of MSSPs that are available today and the features they offer.
    • Highlight the future financial obligations of outsourcing vs. insourcing to explain which method is the most cost-effective.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Mitigate security risks by developing an end-to-end process that ensures you are outsourcing your responsibilities and not your accountability.

    Your Challenge

    This research is designed to help organizations select an effective security outsourcing partner.

    • A security outsourcing partner is a third-party service provider that offers security services on a contractual basis depending on client needs and requirements.
    • An effective outsourcing partner can help an organization improve its security posture by providing access to more specialized security experts, tools, and technologies.
    • One of the main challenges with selecting a security outsourcing partner is finding a partner that is a good fit for the organization's unique security needs and requirements.
    • Security outsourcing partners typically have access to sensitive information and systems, so proper controls and safeguards must be in place to protect all sensitive assets.
    • Without careful evaluation and due diligence to ensure that the partner is a good fit for the organization's security needs and requirements, it can be challenging to select an outsourcing partner.

    Outsourcing is effective, but only if done right

    • 83% of decision makers with in-house cybersecurity teams are considering outsourcing to an MSP (Syntax, 2021).
    • 77% of IT leaders said cyberattacks were more frequent (Syntax, 2021).
    • 51% of businesses suffered a data breach caused by a third party (Ponemon, 2021).

    Common Obstacles

    The problem with selecting an outsourcing partner isn’t a lack of qualified partners, it’s the lack of clarity about an organization's specific security needs.

    • Most organizations do not have a clear understanding of their current security posture, their security goals, and the specific security services they require. Without a clear understanding of their needs, organizations may struggle to identify a partner that can meet their requirements.
    • Breakdowns and lack of communication can be a significant obstacle, especially when clear lines of communication with partners, including regular check-ins, reporting, and incident response protocols, have not been clearly established.
    • Ensuring that security partner's systems and processes integrate seamlessly with existing systems can be a challenge for most organizations. This is in addition to making sure that security partners have the necessary access and permissions to perform their services effectively.
    • Adhering to security policies is rarely a priority to users, as compliance often feels like an interference to daily workflow. For a lot of organizations, security policies are not having the desired effect.

    A diagram that shows Average cost of a data breach from 2019 to 2022.
    Source: IBM, 2022 Cost of a Data Breach; N=537.


    Reaching an all-time high, the cost of a data breach averaged US$4.35 million in 2022. This figure represents a 2.6% increase from 2021, when the average cost of a breach was US$4.24 million. The average cost has climbed 12.7% since 2020.

    Info-Tech’s methodology for selecting a security outsourcing partner

    Determine your responsibilities

    Determine what responsibilities you can outsource to a service partner. Analyze which responsibilities you should outsource versus keep in-house? Do you require a service partner based on identified responsibilities?

    Scope your requirements

    Refine the list of role-based requirements, variables, and features you will require. Use a well-known list of critical security controls as a framework to determine these activities and send out RFPs to pick the best candidate for your organization.

    Manage your outsourcing program

    Adopt a program to manage your third-party service security outsourcing. Trust your managed security service providers (MSSP) but verify their results to ensure you get the service level you were promised.

    Select a Security Outsourcing Partner

    A diagram that shows your organization responsibilities & accountabilities, framework for selecting a security outsourcing partner, and benefits.

    Blueprint benefits

    IT/InfoSec Benefits

    Reduces complexity within the MSSP selection process by highlighting all the key steps to a successful selection program.

    Introduces a roadmap to clearly educate about the do’s and don’ts of MSSP selection.

    Reduces costs and efforts related to managing MSSPs and other security partners.

    Business Benefits

    Assists with selecting outsourcing partners that are essential to your organization’s objectives.

    Integrates outsourcing into corporate culture, leveraging organizational requirements while maximizing value of outsourcing.

    Reduces security outsourcing risk.

    Insight summary

    Overarching insight: You can outsource your responsibilities but not your accountability.

    Determine what to outsource: Assess your responsibilities to determine which ones you can outsource. It is vital that an understanding of how outsourcing will affect the organization, and what cost savings, if any, to expect from outsourcing is clear in order to generate a list of responsibilities that can/should be outsourced.

    Select the right partner: Create a list of variables to evaluate the MSSPs and determine which features are important to you. Evaluate all potential MSSPs and determine which one is right for your organization

    Manage your MSSP: Align the MSSP to your organization. Adopt a program to monitor the MSSP which includes a long-term strategy to manage the MSSP.

    Identifying security needs and requirements = Effective outsourcing program: Understanding your own security needs and requirements is key. Ensure your RFP covers the entire scope of your requirements; work with your identified partner on updates and adaptation, where necessary; and always monitor alignment to business objectives.

    Measure the value of this blueprint

    Phase

    Purpose

    Measured Value

    Determine what to outsource Understand the value in outsourcing and determining what responsibilities can be outsourced. Cost of determining what you can/should outsource:
    • 120 FTE hours at $90K per year = $5,400
    Cost of determining the savings from outsourcing vs. insourcing:
    • 120 FTE hours at $90K per year = $5,400
    Select the right partner Select an outsourcing partner that will have the right skill set and solution to identified requirements. Cost of ranking and selecting your MSSPs:
    • 160 FTE hours at $90K per year = $7,200
    Cost of creating and distributing RFPs:
    • 200 FTE hours at $90K per year = $9,000
    Manage your third-party service security outsourcing Use Info-Tech’s methodology and best practices to manage the MSSP to get the best value. Cost of creating and implementing a metrics program to manage the MSSP:
    • 80 FTE hours at $90K per year = $3,600

    After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve.

    Overall Impact: 8.9 /10

    Overall Average Cost Saved: $22,950

    Overall Average Days Saved: 9

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit
    "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

    Guided Implementation
    "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

    Workshop
    "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

    Consulting
    "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

    Develop Your Agile Approach for a Successful Transformation

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}163|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): 9.2/10 Overall Impact
    • member rating average dollars saved: $86,469 Average $ Saved
    • member rating average days saved: 16 Average Days Saved
    • Parent Category Name: Development
    • Parent Category Link: /development
    • Your organization wants to shorten delivery time and improve quality by adopting Agile delivery methods.
    • You know that Agile transformations are complex and difficult to implement.
    • Your organization may have started using Agile, but with only limited success.
    • You want to maximize your Agile transformation’s chances of success.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Agile transformations are more likely to be successful when the entire organization understands Agile fundamentals, principles, and practices; the “different way of working” that Agile requires; and the role each person plays in its success.

    Impact and Result

    • Understand the “what and why” of Agile.
    • Identify your organization’s biggest Agile pain points.
    • Gain a deeper understanding of Agile principles and practices, and apply these to your Agile pain points.
    • Create a list of action items to address your organization’s Agile challenges.

    Develop Your Agile Approach for a Successful Transformation Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Identify common Agile challenges

    Identify your organization's biggest Agile pain points so you can focus attention on those topics that are impacting your Agile capabilities the most.

    • Develop Your Agile Approach for a Successful Transformation – Phases 1-2

    2. Establish a solid foundation for Agile delivery

    Ensure that your organization has a solid understanding of Agile principles and practices to help ensure your Agile transformation is successful. Understand Agile's different way of working and identify the steps your organization will need to take to move from traditional Waterfall delivery to Agile.

    • Roadmap for Transition to Agile

    3. Backlog Management Module: Manage your backlog effectively

    The Backlog Management Module helps teams develop a better understanding of backlog management and user story decomposition. Improve your backlog quality by implementing a three-tiered backlog with quality filters.

    4. Scrum Simulation Module: Simulate effective Scrum practices

    The Scrum Simulation Module helps teams develop a better understanding of Scrum practices and the behavioral blockers affecting Agile teams and organizational culture. This module features two interactive simulations to encourage a deeper understanding of good Scrum practices and Agile principles.

    • Scrum Simulation Exercise (Online Banking App)

    5. Estimation Module: Improve product backlog item estimation

    The Estimation Module helps teams develop a better understanding of Agile estimation practices and how to apply them. Teams learn how Agile estimation and reconciliation provide reliable planning estimates.

    6. Product Owner Module: Establish an Effective Product Owner Role

    The Product Owner Module helps teams understand product management fundamentals and a deeper understanding of the product owner role. Teams define their product management terminology, create quality filters for PBIs moving through the backlog, and develop their product roadmap approach for key audiences.

    7. Product Roadmapping Module: Create effective product roadmaps

    The Product Roadmapping Module helps teams understand product road mapping fundamentals. Teams learn to effectively use the six tools of Product Roadmapping.

    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Develop Your Agile Approach for a Successful Transformation

    Understand Agile fundamentals, principles, and practices so you can apply them effectively in your organization.

    Analyst Perspective

    Understand Agile fundamentals, principles, and practices so you can apply them effectively in your organization.

    Pictures of Alex Ciraco and Hans Eckman

    Alex Ciraco and Hans Eckman
    Application Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    • Your organization wants to shorten delivery time and improve quality by adopting Agile delivery methods.
    • You know that Agile transformations are complex and difficult to implement.
    • Your organization may have started using Agile, but with only limited success.
    • You want to maximize your Agile transformation's chances of success.

    Common Obstacles

    • People seem to have different, conflicting, or inadequate knowledge of Agile principles and practices.
    • Your organization is not seeing the full benefits that Agile promises, and project teams aren't sure they are "doing Agile right."
    • Confusion and misinformation about Agile is commonplace in your organization.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    • Use our Common Agile Challenges Survey to identify your organization's Agile pain points.
    • Leverage this blueprint to level-set the organization on Agile fundamentals.
    • Address your survey's biggest Agile pain points to see immediate benefits and improvements in the way you practice Agile in your organization.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Agile transformations are more likely to be successful when the entire organization genuinely understands Agile fundamentals, principles and practices, as well as the role each person plays in its success. Focus on developing a solid understanding of Agile practices so your organization can "Be Agile", not just "Do Agile".

    Info-Tech's methodology

    1. Identify Common Agile Challenges

    2. Establish a Solid Foundation for Agile Delivery

    3. Agile Modules

    Phase Steps

    1.1 Identify common agile challenges

    2.1 Align teams with Agile fundamentals

    2.2 Interpret your common Agile challenges survey results

    2.3 (Optional) Move stepwise to iterative Agile delivery

    2.4 Identify insights and team feedback

    • Backlog Management Module:
      Manage Your Backlog Effectively
    • Scrum Simulation Module:
      Simulate Effective Scrum Practices
    • Estimation Module:
      Improve Product Backlog Item Estimation
    • Product Owner Module:
      Establish an Effective Product Owner Role
    • Product Roadmapping Module: Create Effective Product Roadmaps
    Phase Outcomes

    Understand common challenges associated with Agile transformations and identify your organization's struggles.

    Establish and apply a uniform understanding of Agile fundamentals and principles.

    Create a roadmap for your transition to Agile delivery and prioritized challenges.

    Foster deeper understanding of Agile principles and practices to resolve pain points.

    Develop your agile approach for a successful transformation

    Everyone's Agile journey is not the same.

    agile journey for a successful transformation

    Application delivery continues to fall short

    78% of IT professionals believe the business is "usually" or "always" out of sync with project requirements.
    Source: "10 Ways Requirements Can Sabotage Your Projects Right From the Start"

    Only 34% of software is rated as both important and effective by users.

    Source: Info-Tech's CIO Business Vision Diagnostic

    Agile DevOps is a progression of cultural, behavioral, and process changes. It takes time.

    An image of the trail to climb Mount Everest, with the camps replaced by the main steps of the agile approach to reaching Nirvana.

    Enhancements and maintenance are misunderstood

    an image showing the relationship between enhancements and maintenance.

    Source: "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering"

    Why Agile/DevOps? It's about time to value

    Leaders and stakeholders are frustrated with long lead times to implement changes. Agile/DevOps promotes smaller, more frequent releases to start earning value sooner.

    A frequency graph showing the Time to delivering value depends on Frequency of Releases

    Time to delivering value depends on Frequency of Releases

    Embrace change, don't "scope creep" it

    64% of IT professionals adopt Agile to enhance their ability to manage changing priorities.

    71% of IT professionals found their ability to manage changing priorities improved after implementing Agile.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Traditional delivery processes work on the assumption that product requirements will remain constant throughout the SDLC. This results in delayed delivery of product enhancements which are critical to maintaining a positive customer experience.

    Adapted from: "12th Annual State of Agile Report"

    Agile's four core values

    "…while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more."
    – Source: "The Agile Manifesto"

    We value. . .

    Individuals and Interactions

    OVER

    Processes and Tools

    Working Software

    OVER

    Comprehensive Documentation

    Customer Collaboration

    OVER

    Contract Negotiation

    Responding to Change

    OVER

    Following a Plan

    Being Agile

    OVER

    Being Prescriptive

    Harness Agile's cultural advantages

    Collaboration

    • Team members leverage all their experience working toward a common goal.

    Iterations

    • Cycles provide opportunities for more product feedback.

    Continual Improvement

    • Self-managing teams continually improve their approach for the next iteration.

    Prioritization

    • The most important needs are addressed in the current iteration.

    Compare Waterfall and Agile – the "what" (how are they different?)

    This is an example of the Waterfall Approach.

    A "One and Done" Approach (Planning & Documentation Based)
    Elapsed time to deliver any value: Months to years

    This is an example of the Agile Approach

    An "Iterative" Approach (Empirical/Evidence Based)
    Elapsed time to deliver any value: Weeks

    Be aware of common myths around Agile

    1. … solve development and communication issues.
    2. … ensure you will finish requirements faster.
    3. … mean you don't need planning and documentation.

    "Although Agile methods are increasingly being adopted in globally distributed settings, there is no panacea for success."
    – "Negotiating Common Ground in Distributed Agile Development: A Case Study Perspective."

    "Without proper planning, organizations can start throwing more resources at the work which spirals into the classic Waterfall issues of managing by schedule."
    – Kristen Morton, Associate Implementation Architect,
    OneShield Inc., Info-Tech Interview

    Agile* SDLC

    With shared ownership instead of silos, we can deliver value at the end of every iteration (aka sprint)

    An image of the Agile SDLC Approach.

    * There are many Agile methodologies to choose from, but Scrum is by far the most widely used (and is shown above).

    Key Elements of the Agile SDLC

    • You are not "one-and-done." There are many short iterations with constant feedback.
    • There is an empowered product owner. This is a single authoritative voice that represents stakeholders.
    • There is a fluid product backlog. This enables prioritization of requirements "just-in-time."
    • Cross-functional, self-managing team. This team makes commitments and is empowered by the organization to do so.
    • Working, tested code at the end of each sprint. Value becomes more deterministic along sprint boundaries.
    • Demonstrate to stakeholders. Allow them to see and use the functionality and provide necessary feedback.
    • Feedback is being continuously injected back into the product backlog. This shapes the future of the solution.
    • Continuous improvement through sprint retrospectives.
    • "Internally Governed" when done right (the virtuous cycle of sprint-demo-feedback).

    A backlog stores and organizes PBIs at various stages of readiness

    A well-formed backlog can be thought of as a DEEP backlog:

    • Detailed Appropriately: Product backlog items (PBIs) are broken down and refined as necessary.
    • Emergent: The backlog grows and evolves over time as PBIs are added and removed.
    • Estimated: The effort a PBI requires is estimated at each tier.
    • Prioritized: The PBIs value and priority are determined at each tier.

    (Perforce, 2018)

    An image showing the Ideas; Qualified; Ready; funnel leading to the sprint approach.

    Outline the criteria to proceed to the next tier via quality filters

    Expand the concepts of defining "ready" and "done" to include the other stages of a PBIs journey through product planning.

    An image showing the approach you will use to Outline the criteria to proceed to the next tier via quality filters

    Info-Tech Insight: A quality filter ensures quality is met and teams are armed with the right information to work more efficiently and improve throughput.

    Deliverables

    Many steps in this blueprint are accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals.

    Common Agile Challenges Survey
    Survey the organization to understand which of the common Agile challenges the organization is experiencing

    A screenshot from Common Agile Challenges Survey

    Roadmap for Transition to Agile
    Identify steps you will take to move your organization toward Agile delivery

    A screenshot from Roadmap for Transition to Agile

    Blueprint benefits

    IT Benefits

    Business Benefits

    • Consistent Agile delivery teams.
    • Delivery prioritized with business needs and committed work is achievable.
    • Improved ability to adjust future delivery cycles to meet changing business, market, and end-user needs.
    • Increased alignment and stability of resources with products and technology areas.
    • Reduction in the mean time to delivery of product backlog items.
    • Reduction in technical debt.
    • Better delivery alignment with enterprise goals, vision, and outcomes.
    • Improved coordination with product owners and stakeholders.
    • Quantifiable value realization following each release.
    • Product decisions made at the right time and with the right input.
    • Improved team morale and productivity.
    • Improved operational efficiency and process automation.
    • Increased employee retention and quality of new hires.
    • Reduction in accumulated project risk.

    Measure the value of this blueprint

    Implementing quality and consistent Agile practices improves SDLC metrics and reduces time to value.

    • Use Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectivelyto track and measure the impact of Agile delivery. For example:
      • Reduction in PBI wait time
      • Improve throughput
      • Reduction in defects and defect severity
    • Phase 1 helps you prepare and send your Common Agile Challenges Survey.
    • Phase 2 builds a transformation plan aligned with your top pain points.

    Align Agile coaching and practices to address your key pain points identified in the Common Agile Challenges Survey.

    A screenshot from Common Agile Challenges Survey

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

    Guided Implementation

    "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

    Workshop

    "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

    Consulting

    "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    This is an image of the eight calls which will take place over phases 1-3.

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    A typical GI is between 6 to 8 calls over the course of 1 to 2 months.

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Phases 1-2
    1.5 - 3.0 days estimated

    Backlog Management
    0.5 - 1.0 days estimated

    Scrum Simulation
    1.25 - 2.25 days estimated

    Estimation
    1.0 - 1.25 days estimated

    Product Owner
    1.0 - 1.75 days estimated

    Product Roadmapping
    0.5 - 1.0 days estimated

    Establish a Solid Foundation for Agile Delivery

    Define the
    IT Target State

    Assess the IT
    Current State

    Bridge the Gap and
    Create the Strategy

    Establish an Effective Product Owner Role

    Create Effective Product Roadmaps

    Activities

    1.1 Gather Agile challenges and gaps
    2.1 Align teams with Agile fundamentals
    2.2 Interpret your common Agile challenges survey results
    2.3 (Optional) Move stepwise to iterative Agile delivery
    2.4 Identify insights and team feedback

    1. User stories and the art of decomposition
    2. Effective backlog management and refinement
    3. Identify insights and team feedback
    1. Scrum sprint planning and retrospective simulation
    2. Pass the balls – sprint velocity game
    1. Improve product backlog item estimation
    2. Agile estimation fundamentals
    3. Understand the wisdom of crowds
    4. Identify insights and team feedback
    1. Understand product management fundamentals
    2. The critical role of the product owner
    3. Manage effective product backlogs and roadmaps
    4. Identify insights and team feedback
    1. Identify your product roadmapping pains
    2. The six "tools" of product roadmapping
    3. Product roadmapping exercise

    Deliverables

    1. Identify your organization's biggest Agile pain points.
    2. Establish common Agile foundations.
    3. Prioritize support for a better Agile delivery approach.
    4. Plan to move stepwise to iterative Agile delivery.
    1. A better understanding of backlog management and user story decomposition.
    1. Scrum sprint planning and retrospective simulation
    2. Pass the balls – sprint velocity game
    1. Improve product backlog item estimation
    2. Agile estimation fundamentals
    3. Understand the wisdom of crowds
    4. Identify insights and team feedback
    1. Understand product management fundamentals
    2. The critical role of the product owner
    3. Manage effective product backlogs and roadmaps
    4. Identify insights and team feedback
    1. Understand product vs. project orientation.
    2. Understand product roadmapping fundamentals.

    Agile Modules

    For additional assistance planning your workshop, please refer to the facilitation planning tool in the appendix.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Mentoring for Agile Teams
    Get practical help and guidance on your Agile transformation journey.

    Implement DevOps Practices That Work
    Streamline business value delivery through the strategic adoption of DevOps practices.

    Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision
    Build a product vision your organization can take from strategy through execution.

    Deliver Digital Products at Scale
    Deliver value at the scale of your organization through defining enterprise product families.

    Phase 1

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Agile Modules

    1.1 Identify common Agile challenges

    2.1 Align teams with Agile fundamentals

    2.2 Interpret your common Agile challenges survey results

    2.3 (Optional) Move stepwise to iterative Agile delivery

    2.4 Identify insights and team feedback

    • Backlog Management Module: Manage Your Backlog Effectively
    • Scrum Simulation Module: Simulate Effective Scrum Practices
    • Estimation Module: Improve Product Backlog Item Estimation
    • Product Owner Module: Establish an Effective Product Owner Role
    • Product Roadmapping: Create Effective Product Roadmaps

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Decide who will participate in the Common Agile Challenges Survey
    • Compile the results of the survey to identify your organization's biggest pain points with Agile

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Develop Your Agile Approach for a Successful Transformation

    Step 1.1

    Identify common Agile challenges

    Activities

    1.1 Distribute Common Agile Challenges Survey and collect results

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • A better understanding of your organization's Agile pain points.

    Focus Agile support where it is most needed

    A screenshot from Common Agile Challenges Survey

    Info-Tech Insight

    There isn't one approach that cures all the problems your Agile teams are facing. First, understand these common challenges, then develop a plan to address the root causes.

    Use Info-Tech's Common Agile Challenges Survey to determine common issues and what problems individual teams are facing. Use the Agile modules and supporting guides in this blueprint to provide targeted support on what matters most.

    Exercise 1.1.1 Distribute Common Agile Challenges Survey

    30 minutes

    1. Download Survey Template: Info-Tech Common Agile Challenges Survey template.
    2. Create your own local copy of the Common Agile Challenges Survey by using the template. The Common Agile Challenges Survey will help you to identify which of the many common Agile-related challenges your organization may be facing.
    3. Decide on the teams/participants who will be completing the survey. It is best to distribute the survey broadly across the organization and include participants from several teams and roles.
    4. Copy the link for your local survey and distribute it for participants to complete (we suggest giving them one week to complete it).
    5. Collect the consolidated survey results in preparation for the next phase.
    6. NOTE: Using this survey template requires having access to Microsoft Forms. If you do not have access to Microsoft Forms, an Info-Tech analyst can perform the survey for you.

    Output

    • Your organization's biggest Agile pain points

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Record the results in the Roadmap for Transition to Agile Template

    Phase 2

    Establish a Solid Foundation for Agile Delivery

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Agile Modules

    1.1 Identify common Agile challenges

    2.1 Align teams with Agile fundamentals

    2.2 Interpret your common Agile challenges survey results

    2.3 (Optional) Move stepwise to iterative Agile delivery

    2.4 Identify insights and team feedback

    • Backlog Management Module: Manage Your Backlog Effectively
    • Scrum Simulation Module: Simulate Effective Scrum Practices
    • Estimation Module: Improve Product Backlog Item Estimation
    • Product Owner Module: Establish an Effective Product Owner Role
    • Product Roadmapping: Create Effective Product Roadmaps

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Gain a fundamental understanding of Agile
    • Understand why becoming Agile is hard
    • Identify steps needed to become more Agile
    • Understand your biggest Agile pain points

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Step 2.1

    Align teams with Agile fundamentals

    Activities

    2.1.1 Share what Agile means to you
    2.1.2 (Optional) Contrast two delivery teams
    2.1.3 (Optional) Dissect the Agilist's Oath
    2.1.4 (Optional) Create your prototype definitions of ready
    2.1.5 (Optional) Create your prototype definitions of done
    2.1.6 Identify the challenges of implementing agile in your organization

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • A better understanding of what Agile is and why we do it.

    Exercise 2.1.1 Share what Agile means to you

    30-60 minutes

    1. What is Agile? Why do we do it?
    2. As a group, discuss and capture your thoughts on:
      1. What is Agile (its characteristics, practices, differences from alternatives, etc.)?
      2. Why do we do it (its drivers, benefits, advantages, etc.)?
    3. Capture your findings in the table below:

    What is Agile?

    Why do we do it?

    (e.g. Agile mindset, principles, and practices)

    (e.g. benefits)

    Output

    • Your current understanding of Agile and its benefits

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Why Agile/DevOps? It's about time to value

    Leaders and stakeholders are frustrated with long lead times to implement changes. Agile/DevOps promotes smaller, more frequent releases to start earning value sooner.

    A graph demonstrating the increased frequency of release expected over time, from 1960 - present

    Time to delivering value depends on frequency of releases.
    Source: 5Q Partners

    The pandemic accelerated the speed of digital transformation

    With the massive disruption preventing people from gathering, businesses shifted to digital interactions with customers.

    December 2019 - 36%; acceleration of 3 years; July 2020 - 58%.

    Companies also accelerated the pace of creating digital or digitally enhanced products and services.

    December 2019 - 35%; acceleration of 3 years; July 2020 - 55%.

    (McKinsey, 2020 )

    "The Digital Economy incorporates all economic activity reliant on or significantly enhanced by the use of digital inputs, including digital technologies, digital infrastructure, digital services and data."
    (OECD Definition)

    What does "elite" DevOps look like?

    This is an image of an annotated table showing what elite devops looks like.

    Where are you now?
    Where do You Want to Be?

    * Google Cloud/Accelerate State of DevOps 2021

    Realize and sustain value with DevOps

    Businesses with elite DevOps practices…

    973x more frequent faster lead time code deployments from commit to deploy, 3x 6570x lower change failure rate faster time to recover.

    Waterfall vs. Agile – the "what" (How are they different?)

    This is an example of the Waterfall Approach.

    A "One and Done" Approach (Planning & Documentation Based)
    Elapsed time to deliver any value: Months to years

    This is an example of the Agile Approach

    An "Iterative" Approach (Empirical/Evidence Based)
    Elapsed time to deliver any value: Weeks

    (Optional) Exercise 2.1.2 A tale of two teams

    Discussion (5-10 minutes)

    As a group, discuss how these teams differ

    Team 1:
    An image of the business analyst passing the requirements baton to the architect runner.

    Team 2:
    An image of team of soldiers carrying a heavy log up a beach

    Image Credit: DVIDS

    Discuss differences between these teams:
    • How are they different?
    • How would you coach/train/manage/lead?
    • How does team members' behavior differ?
    • How would you measure each team?
    What would have to happen at your organization to make working like this possible?

    Output

    • How your organization can support Agile behavior and mindset

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Dissect the Agilist's Oath

    Read and consider each element of the oath.

    • As a member of this Scrum team, I recognize that we are all equally and collectively responsible for the success of this project.
    • Success is defined as achieving the best possible outcome for our stakeholders given the constraints of time, money, and circumstances we will face.
    • We will achieve this by working collaboratively with our product owner to regularly deliver high-quality, working, tested code that can be demonstrated, and we will adjust our path forward based on the feedback we receive.
    • I will holistically embrace the concept of "good enough for now" into my work practices, because I know that waiting for the best/perfect solution does not yield optimal results.
    • Collectively, we will work to holistically minimize risk for the project across all phases and disciplines.
    • My primary role will be _____ [PO, SM, BA, Dev, Arch, Test, Ops, etc.], but I will contribute wherever and however best serves the current needs of the project.
    • I recognize that working in Agile/Scrum is not an excuse to ignore important things like adequate design and documentation. Collectively, we will ensure that these things are completed incrementally to a level of detail and quality which adequately serves the organization and stakeholders.
    • We are a team, and we will succeed or fail as one.

    Exercise 2.1.3 (Optional) Dissect the Agilist's Oath

    30 minutes

    1. Each bullet point in the Agilist's Oath is chosen to convey one of eight key messages about Agile practices and the mindset change that's required by everyone involved.
    2. As a group, discuss the "message" for each bullet point in the Agilist's Oath. Then identify which of them would be "easy" and "hard" to achieve in your organization.
    • As a member of this Scrum team, I recognize that we are all equally and collectively responsible for the success of this project.
    • Success is defined as achieving the best possible outcome for our stakeholders given the constraints of time, money, and circumstances we will face.
    • We will achieve this by working collaboratively with our product owner to regularly deliver high-quality, working, tested code that can be demonstrated, and we will adjust our path forward based on the feedback we receive.
    • I will holistically embrace the concept of "good enough for now" into my work practices, because I know that waiting for the best/perfect solution does not yield optimal results.
    • Collectively, we will work to holistically minimize risk for the project across all phases and disciplines.
    • My primary role will be _____ [PO, SM, BA, Dev, Arch, Test, Ops, etc.], but I will contribute wherever and however best serves the current needs of the project.
    • I recognize that working in Agile/Scrum is not an excuse to ignore important things like adequate design and documentation. Collectively, we will ensure that these things are completed incrementally to a level of detail and quality which adequately serves the organization and stakeholders.
    • We are a team, and we will succeed or fail as one.

    Which aspects of the Agilist's Oath are "easy" in your org?

    Which aspects of the Agilist's Oath are "hard" in your org?

    Output

    • How your organization can support Agile behavior and mindset

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Be aware of common myths around Agile

    Agile does not . . . .

    1. … solve development and communication issues.
    2. … ensure you will finish requirements faster.
    3. … mean you don't need planning and documentation.

    "Although Agile methods are increasingly being adopted in globally distributed settings, there is no panacea for success."
    – "Negotiating Common Ground in Distributed Agile Development: A Case Study Perspective."

    "Without proper planning, organizations can start throwing more resources at the work which spirals into the classic Waterfall issues of managing by schedule."
    – Kristen Morton, Associate Implementation Architect,
    OneShield Inc., Info-Tech Interview

    Agile's four core values

    "…while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more."
    – Source: "The Agile Manifesto"

    We value. . .

    Individuals and Interactions

    OVER

    Processes and Tools

    Working Software

    OVER

    Comprehensive Documentation

    Customer Collaboration

    OVER

    Contract Negotiation

    Responding to Change

    OVER

    Following a Plan

    Being Agile

    OVER

    Being Prescriptive

    Consider the traditional/Waterfall SDLC

    With siloes and handoffs, valuable product is delivered only at the end of an extended project lifecycle.

    This is an image of the Traditional Waterfall SDLC approach

    View additional transition models in the appendix

    Agile* SDLC

    With shared ownership instead of silos, we can deliver value at the end of every iteration (aka sprint)

    Key Elements of the Agile SDLC

    • You are not "one-and-done". There are many short iterations with constant feedback.
    • There is an empowered product owner. This is a single authoritative voice that represents stakeholders.
    • There is a fluid product backlog. This enables prioritization of requirements "just-in-time"
    • Cross-functional, self-managing team. This team makes commitments and is empowered by the organization to do so.
    • Working, tested code at the end of each sprint. Value becomes more deterministic along sprint boundaries.
    • Demonstrate to stakeholders. Allow them to see and use the functionality and provide necessary feedback.
    • Feedback is being continuously injected back into the product backlog. This shapes the future of the solution.
    • Continuous improvement through sprint retrospectives.
    • "Internally Governed" when done right (the virtuous cycle of sprint-demo-feedback).

    This is a picture of the Agile SDLC approach.

    * There are many Agile methodologies to choose from, but Scrum (shown above) is by far the most widely used.

    Scrum roles and responsibilities

    Product Owner

    Scrum Master

    Team Members

    Responsible

    • For identifying the product features and their importance in the final deliverable.
    • For refining and reprioritizing the backlog that identifies which features will be delivered in the next sprint based on business importance.
    • For clearing blockers and escalations when necessary.
    • For leading scrums, retrospectives, sprint reviews, and demonstrations.
    • For team building and resolving team conflicts.
    • For creating, testing, deploying, and supporting deliverables and valuable features.
    • For self-managing. There is no project manager assigning tasks to each team member.

    Accountable

    • For delivering valuable features to stakeholders.
    • For ensuring communication throughout development.
    • For ensuring high-quality deliverables for the product owner.

    Consulted

    • By the team through collaboration, rather than contract negotiation.
    • By the product owner on resolution of risks.
    • By the team on suggestions for improvement.
    • By the scrum master and product owner during sprint planning to determine level of complexity of tasks.

    Informed

    • On the progress of the current sprint.
    • By the team on work completed during the current sprint.
    • On direction of the business and current priorities.

    Scrum ceremonies

    Are any of these challenges for your organization? Done When:

    Project Backlog Refinement (PO & SM): Prepare user stories to be used in the next two to three future sprints. User stories are broken down into small manageable pieces of work that should not span sprints. If a user story is too big for a sprint, it is broken down further here. The estimation of the user story is examined, as well as the acceptance criteria, and each is adjusted as necessary from the Agile team members' input.

    Regularly over the project's lifespan

    Sprint Planning (PO, SM & Delivery Team): Discuss the work for the upcoming sprint with the business. Establish a clear understanding of the expectations of the team and the sprint. The product owner decides if priority and content of the user stories is still accurate. The development team decides what they believe can be completed in the sprint, using the user stories, in priority order, refined in backlog refinement.

    At/before the start of each sprint

    Daily Stand-Up (SM & Delivery Team): Coordinate the team to communicate progress and identify any roadblocks as quickly as possible. This meeting should be kept to fifteen minutes. Longer conversations are tabled for a separate meeting. These are called "stand-ups" because attendees should stay standing for the duration, which helps keep the meeting short and focused. The questions each team member should answer at each meeting: What did I do since last stand-up? What will I do before the next stand-up? Do I have any roadblocks?

    Every day during the sprint

    Sprint Demo (PO, SM, Delivery Team & Stakeholders): Review and demonstrate the work completed in the sprint with the business (demonstrate working and tested code which was developed during the sprint and gather stakeholder feedback).

    At the end of each sprint

    Sprint Retrospective (SM & Delivery Team & PO): Discuss how the sprint worked to determine if anything can be changed to improve team efficiency. The intent of this meeting is not to find/place blame for things that went wrong, but instead to find ways to avoid/alleviate pain points.

    At the end of each sprint

    Sample delivery sprint calendar

    The following calendar illustrates a two-week Scrum cadence (including ceremonies). This diagram is for illustrative purposes only. The length of the sprint and timing of ceremonies may differ from delivery team to delivery team based on their needs and schedules.

    An image of a sample sprint delivery calendar

    Sample delivery sprint calendar

    The following calendar illustrates a three-week Scrum cadence (including ceremonies). This diagram is for illustrative purposes only. The length of the sprint and timing of ceremonies may differ from delivery team to delivery team based on their needs and schedules.

    An image of a sample sprint delivery calendar

    Ensure your teams have the right information

    Implement and enforce your definition of ready at each stage of planning. Ensure your teams understand the required tasks by clarifying the definition of done.*

    Ready

    Done
    • The request has a defined problem, and the value is understood.
    • The request is documented, and the owner is identified.
    • Business and IT roles are committed to participating in estimation and planning activities.
    • Estimates and plans are made and validated with IT teams and business representatives.
    • Stakeholders and decision makers accept the estimates and plans as well as the related risks.
    • Estimates and plans are documented and slated for future review.

    * Note that your definitions of ready and done may vary from project to project, and they should be decided on collectively by the delivery team at the beginning of the project (part of setting their "norms") and updated if/when needed.

    Exercise 2.1.4 (Optional) Create definition of ready and done for an oil change

    10-15 minutes

    Step 1:

    1. As a group, create a definition of ready and done for doing an oil change (this will help you to understand the nature and value of a definition of ready and done using a relatable example):

    Definition of Ready

    Checklist:

    Definition of Done

    Checklist – For each user story:

    The checklist of things that must be true/done to begin the oil change.

    • We have the customer's car and keys
    • We know which grade of oil the customer wants

    The checklist of things that must be true/done at the end of the oil change.

    • The oil has been changed
    • A reminder sticker has been placed on windshield

    Exercise 2.1.4 (Optional) Create your prototype definitions of ready

    30-60 minutes

    Step 2:

    1. As a group, review the two sample definitions of ready below and select the one you consider to be the best starting point for your prototype definition of ready.

    Definition of Ready SAMPLE 1:

    Checklist – For each user story:

    • Technical and business risks are identified.
    • Resources are available for development.
    • Story has been assigned to a sprint/iteration.
    • Organizational business value is defined.
    • A specific user has been identified.
    • Stakeholders and needs defined.
    • Process impacts are identified.
    • Data needs are defined.
    • Business rules and non-functional requirements are identified.
    • Acceptance criteria are ready.
    • UI design work is ready.
    • Story has been traced to the project, epic, and sprint goal.

    Definition of Ready SAMPLE 2:

    Checklist – For each user story:

    • The value of story to the user is clearly indicated.
    • The acceptance criteria for story have been clearly described.
    • User story dependencies identified.
    • User story sized by delivery team.
    • Scrum team accepts user experience artifacts.
    • Performance criteria identified, where appropriate.
    • Person who will accept the user story is identified.
    • The team knows how to demo the story.

    Output

    • Prototype definitions of ready and done for your organization

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Exercise 2.1.4 (Optional) Create your prototype definitions of ready

    30-60 minutes

    Step 3:

    1. As a group, using the selected sample as your starting point, decide what changes need to be made (keep/add/delete/modify):

    Definition of Ready Checklist – For each user story:

    Disposition

    The value of story to the user is clearly indicated.

    Keep as is

    The acceptance criteria for story have been clearly described. Keep as is
    User story dependencies identified. Modify to: "Story has been traced to the project, epic, and sprint goal"
    User story sized by delivery team. Modify to: "User Stories have been sized by the Delivery team using Story Points"
    Scrum team accepts user experience artifacts. Keep as is
    Performance criteria identified, where appropriate. Keep as is
    Person who will accept the user story is identified.

    Delete

    The team knows how to demo the story. Keep as is

    Add: "Any performance related criteria have been identified where appropriate"

    Add: "Any data model related changes have been identified where needed"

    Output

    • Prototype definitions of ready and done for your organization

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Exercise 2.1.4 (Optional) Create your prototype definitions of ready

    30-60 minutes

    Step 4:

    1. As a group, capture and agree on your prototype definition of ready*:

    Definition of Ready

    Checklist – For each user story:

    User stories and related requirements contain clear descriptions of what is expected of a given functionality. Business value is identified.

    • The value of the story to the user is clearly indicated.
    • The acceptance criteria for the story have been clearly described.
    • Story has been traced to the project, epic, and sprint goal.
    • User stories have been sized by the delivery team using story points.
    • Scrum team accepts user experience artifacts.
    • Performance criteria identified, where appropriate.
    • The team knows how to demo the story.
    • Any performance-related criteria have been identified where appropriate.
    • Any data-model-related changes have been identified where needed.

    Record the results in the Roadmap for Transition to Agile Template

    * This checklist helps Agile teams determine if the stories in their backlog are ready for sprint planning. As your team gains experience with Agile, tailor this list to your needs and follow it until the practice becomes second nature.

    Output

    • Prototype definitions of ready and done for your organization

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Exercise 2.1.5 (Optional) Create your prototype definitions of done

    30-60 minutes

    Step 5:

    1. As a group, review the two sample definitions of ready below and select the one you consider to be the best starting point for your prototype definition of ready:

    SAMPLE 1:

    Definition of Done Checklist – For each user story:

    • Design complete
    • Code compiles
    • Static code analysis has been performed and passed
    • Peer reviewed with coding standards passed
    • Code merging completed
    • Unit tests and smoke tests are done/functional (preferably automated)
    • Meets the steps identified in the user story
    • Unit & QA test passed
    • Usability testing completed
    • Passes functionality testing including security testing
    • Data validation has been completed
    • Ready to be released to the next stage

    SAMPLE 2:

    Definition of Done Checklist – For each user story:

    • Work was completed in a way that a professional would say they are satisfied with their work.
    • Work has been seen by multiple team members.
    • Work meets the criteria of satisfaction described by the customer.
    • The work is part of a package that will be shared with the customer as soon as possible.
    • The work and any learnings from doing the work have been documented.
    • Completion of the work is known by and visible to all team members.
    • The work has passed all quality, security, and completeness checks as defined by the team.

    Output

    • Prototype definitions of ready and done for your organization

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Exercise 2.1.4 (Optional) Create your prototype definitions of done

    30-60 minutes

    Step 6:

    1. As a group, using the selected sample as your starting point, decide what changes need to be made (keep/add/delete/modify):

    Definition of Ready Checklist – For each user story:

    Disposition

    • Work was completed in a way that a professional would say they are satisfied with their work.
    Keep as is
    • Work has been seen by multiple team members.
    Delete
    • Work meets the criteria of satisfaction described by the customer.
    Modify to: "All acceptance criteria for the user story have been met"
    • The work is a part of a package that will be shared with the customer as soon as possible.
    Modify to: "The user story is ready to be demonstrated to Stakeholders"
    • The work and any learnings from doing the work has been documented.
    Keep as is
    • Completion of the work is known by and visible to all team members.
    Keep as is
    • The work has passed all quality, security, and completeness checks as defined by the team.
    Modify to: "Unit, smoke and regression testing has been performed (preferably automated), all tests were passed"
    Add: "Any performance related criteria associated with the story have been met"

    Output

    • Prototype definitions of ready and done for your organization

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Exercise 2.1.4 (Optional) Create your prototype definitions of done

    30-60 minutes

    Step 7:

    1. As a group, capture and agree on your prototype Definition of Done*:

    Definition of Done

    Checklist – For each user story:

    When the user story is accepted by the product owner and is ready to be released.

    • Work was completed in a way that a professional would say they are satisfied with their work.
    • All acceptance criteria for the user story have been met.
    • The user story is ready to be demonstrated to stakeholders.
    • The work and any learnings from doing the work have been documented.
    • Completion of the work is known by and visible to all team members.
    • Unit, smoke, and regression testing has been performed (preferably automated), and all tests were passed.
    • Any performance-related criteria associated with the story have been met.

    Record the results in the Roadmap for Transition to Agile Template

    * This checklist helps Agile teams determine if the stories in their backlog are ready for sprint planning. As your team gains experience with Agile, tailor this list to your needs and follow it until the practice becomes second nature.

    Output

    • Prototype definitions of ready and done for your organization

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Getting to "Agile DevOps Nirvana" is hard, but it's worth it.

    An image of the trail to climb Mount Everest, from camps 1-4

    Agile DevOps is a progression of cultural, behavioral, and process changes.
    It takes time.

    An image of the trail to climb Mount Everest, with the camps replaced by the steps to deploy Agile, to reach Agile/Devops Nirvana

    Agile DevOps may be hard, but it's worth it…

    It turns out Waterfall is not as good at reducing risk and ensuring delivery after all.

    CHAOS RESOLUTION BY AGILE VERSUS WATERFALL
    Size Method Successful Challenged Failed
    All Size Projects Agile 39% 52% 9%
    Waterfall 11% 60% 29%

    Standish Group; CHAOS REPORT 2015

    "I believe in this [Waterfall] concept, but the implementation described above is risky and invites failure."

    – Winston W. Royce

    Compare Waterfall to Agile

    Waterfall

    Agile

    Roles and Responsibilities

    Silo your resources

    Defined/segregated responsibilities

    Handoffs between siloes via documents

    Avoid siloes

    Collective responsibility

    Transitions instead of handoffs

    Belief System

    Trust the process

    Assign tasks to individuals

    Trust the delivery team

    Assign ownership/responsibilities to the team

    Planning Approach

    Create a detailed plan before work begins

    Follow the plan

    High level planning only

    The plan evolves over project lifetime

    Delivery Approach

    One and done (big bang delivery at end of project)

    Iterative delivery (regularly demonstrate working code)

    Governance Approach

    Phases and gates

    Artifacts and approvals

    Demo working tested code and get stakeholder feedback

    Support delivery team and eliminate roadblocks

    Approach to Stakeholders

    Involved at beginning and end of project

    "Arm's length" relationship with delivery team

    Involved throughout project (sprint by sprint)

    Closely involved with delivery team (through full time PO)

    Approach to Requirements/Scope

    One-time requirements gathering at start of project

    Scope is fixed at beginning of project ("carved in stone")

    On going requirements gathering and refinement over time

    Scope is roughly determined at beginning (expect change)

    Approach to Changing Requirements

    Treats change like it is "bad"

    Onerous CM process (discourages change)

    Scope changes "require approval" and are disruptive

    Accepts change as natural part of development.

    Light Change Management process (change is welcome)

    Scope changes are handled like all changes

    Hybrid SDLC: Wagile/Agilfall/WaterScrumFall

    Valuable product delivered in multiple releases

    A picture of a hybrid waterfall - Agile approach.

    If moving directly from Waterfall to Agile is too much for your organization, this can be a valuable interim step (but it won't give you the full benefits of Agile, so be careful about getting stuck here).

    Exercise 2.1.6 Identify the challenges of implementing Agile in your organization

    30-60 minutes

    1. As a group, discuss:
      1. Why being Agile may be difficult in your organization?
      2. What are some of the roadblocks and speed bumps you may face?
      3. What incremental steps might the organization take toward becoming Agile?

    Record the results in the Roadmap for Transition to Agile Template

    Output

    • Why being Agile is hard in your organization

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Step 2.2

    Align teams with Agile fundamentals

    Activities

    2.2.1 Review the results of your Common Agile Challenges Survey (30-60 minutes)
    2.2.2 Align your support with your top five challenges

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • Identify your organization's biggest Agile pain points.

    Be aware of common Agile challenges

    The road to Agile is filled with potholes, speedbumps, roadblocks, and brick walls!

    1. Establish an effective product owner role (PO)
    2. Uncertainty about minimum viable product (MVP)
    3. How non-Agile teams (like architecture, infosec, operations, etc.) work with Agile teams
    4. Project governance/gating process
    5. What is the role of a PM/PMO in Agile?
    6. How to budget/plan Agile projects
    7. How to contract and work with an Agile vendor
    8. An Agile skills deficit (e.g. new-to-Agile teams who have difficulty "doing Agile right")
    9. General resistance to change in the organization
    10. Lack of Agile training, piloting, and coaching
    11. Different Agile approaches are used by different teams
    12. Backlog management and user story decomposition challenges
    13. Quality assurance challenges
    14. Hierarchical management practices and organization boundaries
    15. Difficulty with establishing autonomous Agile teams
    16. Lack of management support for Agile
    17. Poor Agile estimation practices
    18. Difficulty creating effective product roadmaps in Agile
    19. How do we know when an Agile project is ready to go live?
    20. Sprint goals are not being consistently met, or sprint deliverables that are full of bugs

    Exercise 2.2.1 Review the results of your Common Agile Challenges Survey

    30-60 minutes

    1. Using the results of your Common Agile Challenges Survey, fill in the bar chart with your top five pain points:

    A screenshot from Common Agile Challenges Survey

    Output

    • Your organization's biggest Agile pain points identified and prioritized

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Exercise 2.2.2 Align your support with your top five challenges

    30 minutes

    Using the Agile Challenges support mapping on the following slides, build your transformation plan and supporting resources. You can build your plan by individual team results or as an enterprise approach.

    Priority Agile Challenge Module Name and Sequence
    1
    1. Agile Foundations
    2. ?
    2
    1. Agile Foundations
    2. ?
    3
    1. Agile Foundations
    2. ?
    4
    1. Agile Foundations
    2. ?
    5
    1. Agile Foundations
    2. ?

    Output

    • Your organization's Agile Challenges transformation plan

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Map challenges to supporting modules

    Agile Challenges

    Supporting Resources

    Difficulty establishing an effective product owner (PO) or uncertainty about the PO role

    Modules:

    • Agile Foundations
    • Establish an Effective Product Owner Role
    Uncertainty about minimum viable product (MVP) and how to identify your MVP

    Modules:

    • Agile Foundations
    • Simulate Effective Scrum Practices
    How non-Agile teams (like architecture, info sec, operations, etc.) work with Agile teams

    Modules:

    • Agile Foundations
    • Work With Non-Agile Teams (Future)
    Project Governance/Gating processes that are unfriendly to Agile

    Modules:

    • Agile Foundations
    • Establish Agile-Friendly Gating (Future)
    Uncertainty about the role of a PM/PMO in Agile

    Modules:

    • Agile Foundations
    • Understand the role of PM/PMO in Agile Delivery (Future)
    Uncertainty about how to budget/plan Agile projects

    Modules:

    • Agile Foundations
    • Simulate Effective Scrum Practices
    • Understand Budgeting and Funding for Agile Delivery (Future)
    Creating an Agile friendly RFP/Contract (e.g. how to contract and work with an Agile vendor)

    Modules:

    • Agile Foundations
    • Work Effectively with Agile Vendors (Future)

    Note: Modules listed as (Future) are in development and may be available in draft format.

    Map challenges to supporting modules

    Agile Challenges

    Supporting Resources

    An Agile skills deficit (e.g. new-to-Agile teams who have difficulty "doing Agile right")

    Modules:

    • Agile Foundations
    General resistance in the organization to process changes required by Agile

    Modules:

    • Agile Foundations
    • Manage Organizational Change to Support Agile Delivery (Future)
    Lack of Agile training, piloting and coaching being offered by the organization

    Modules:

    • Agile Foundations
    Different Agile approaches are used by different teams, making it difficult to work together

    Modules:

    • Agile Foundations
    • Build Your Scrum Playbook (Future)
    Backlog management challenges (e.g. how to manage a backlog, and make effective use of Epics, Features, User Stories, Tasks and Bugs)

    Modules:

    • Agile Foundations
    • Manage Your Backlog Effectively
    Quality Assurance challenges (testing not being done well on Agile projects)

    Modules:

    • Agile Foundations
    • Establish Effect Quality Assurance for Agile Delivery (Future);
    • Use Test Automation Effectively (Future)
    Hierarchical management practices and organization boundaries make it difficult to be Agile

    Modules:

    • Agile Foundations
    • Manage Organizational Change to Support Agile Delivery (Future)

    Note: Modules listed as (Future) are in development and may be available in draft format.

    Map challenges to supporting modules

    Agile Challenges

    Supporting Resources

    Difficulty with establishing autonomous Agile teams (self managing, cross functional teams that are empowered by the organization to deliver)

    Modules:

    • Agile Foundations
    • Manage Organizational Change to Support Agile Delivery (Future)
    Lack of management support for Agile

    Modules:

    • Agile Foundations
    • Manage Organizational Change to Support Agile Delivery (Future)
    Poor understanding of Agile estimation techniques and how to apply them effectively

    Modules:

    • Agile Foundations
    • Estimation Module
    Difficulty creating effective product roadmaps in Agile

    Modules:

    • Agile Foundations
    • Product Roadmapping Tool
    How do we know when an Agile project is ready to go live

    Modules:

    • Agile Foundations
    • Decide When to Go Live (Future)
    Sprint goals are not being consistently met, or Sprint deliverables that are full of bugs

    Modules:

    • Agile Foundations
    • Establish Effect Quality Assurance for Agile Delivery (Future);
    • Use Test Automation Effectively (Future)

    Note: Modules listed as (Future) are in development and may be available in draft format.

    Map challenges to supporting blueprints

    Agile Challenges

    Supporting Resources

    Difficulty establishing an effective product owner (PO) or uncertainty about the PO role

    Blueprints: Build a Better Product Owner; Managing Requirements in an Agile Environment

    Uncertainty about minimum viable product (MVP) and how to identify your MVP

    Blueprints: Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision; Managing Requirements in an Agile Environment

    How non-Agile teams (like architecture, info sec, operations, etc.) work with Agile teams

    Blueprints: Create a Horizontally Optimized SDLC to Better Meet Business Demands, Extend Agile Practices Beyond IT, Implement DevOps Practices That Work; Build Your BizDevOps Playbook, Embed Security into the DevOps Pipeline

    Project Governance/Gating processes that are unfriendly to Agile

    Blueprints: Streamline Your Management Process to Drive Performance, Drive Business Value With a Right-Sized Project Gating Process

    Uncertainty about the role of a PM/PMO in Agile

    Blueprints: Define the Role of Project Management in Agile and Product-Centric Delivery, Create a Horizontally Optimized SDLC to Better Meet Business Demands

    Uncertainty about how to budget/plan Agile projects

    Blueprints: Identify and Reduce Agile Contract Risk

    Creating an Agile friendly RFP/Contract (e.g. how to contract and work with an Agile vendor)

    Blueprints: Identify and Reduce Agile Contract Risk

    Note: Modules listed as (Future) are in development and may be available in draft format.

    Map challenges to supporting blueprints

    Agile Challenges

    Supporting Resources

    An Agile skills deficit (e.g. new-to-Agile teams who have difficulty "doing Agile right")

    Blueprints: Perform an Agile Skills Assessment; Mentoring for Agile Teams

    General resistance in the organization to process changes required by Agile

    Blueprints: Master Organizational Change Management Practices

    Lack of Agile training, piloting and coaching being offered by the organization

    Blueprints: Perform an Agile Skills Assessment; Mentoring for Agile Teams

    Different Agile approaches are used by different teams, making it difficult to work together

    Blueprints: Create a Horizontally Optimized SDLC to Better Meet Business Demands, Extend Agile Practices Beyond IT

    Backlog management challenges (e.g. how to manage a backlog, and make effective use of epics, features, user stories, tasks and bugs)

    Blueprints: Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision, Managing Requirements in an Agile Environment

    Quality Assurance challenges (testing not being done well on Agile projects)

    Blueprints: Build a Software Quality Assurance Program, Automate Testing to Get More Done

    Hierarchical management practices and organization boundaries make it difficult to be Agile

    Blueprints: Master Organizational Change Management Practices

    Map challenges to supporting blueprints

    Agile Challenges

    Supporting Resources

    Difficulty with establishing autonomous Agile teams (self managing, cross functional teams that are empowered by the organization to deliver)

    Blueprints: Master Organizational Change Management Practices

    Lack of management support for Agile

    Blueprints: Master Organizational Change Management Practices

    Poor understanding of Agile estimation techniques and how to apply them effectively

    Blueprints: Estimate Software Delivery with Confidence, Managing Requirements in an Agile Environment

    Difficulty creating effective product roadmaps in Agile

    Blueprints: Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision

    How do we know when an Agile project is ready to go live

    Blueprints: Optimize Applications Release Management,Drive Business Value With a Right-Sized Project Gating Process, Managing Requirements in an Agile Environment

    Sprint goals are not being consistently met, or sprint deliverables that are full of bugs

    Blueprints: Build a Software Quality Assurance Program, Automate Testing to Get More Done, Managing Requirements in an Agile Environment

    Step 2.3

    Move stepwise to iterative Agile delivery (Optional)

    Activities

    2.3.1 (Optional) Identify a hypothetical project
    2.3.2 (Optional) Capture your traditional delivery approach
    2.3.3 (Optional) Consider what a two-phase delivery looks like
    2.3.4 (Optional) Consider what a four-phase delivery looks like
    2.3.5 (Optional) Consider what a four-phase delivery with monthly sprints looks like
    2.3.6 (Optional) Decide on your target state and the steps required to get there

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • Understand the changes that must take place in your organization to support a more Agile delivery approach.

    Moving stepwise from traditional to Agile

    Your transition to Agile and more frequent releases doesn't need to be all at once. Organizations may find it easier to build toward smaller iterations.

    An image of the stepwise approach to adopting Agile.

    Exercise 2.3.1 (Optional) Identify a hypothetical project

    15-30 minutes

    1. As a group, consider some typical, large, mission-critical system deliveries your organization has done in the past (name a few as examples).
    2. Imagine a project like this has been assigned to your team, and the plan calls for delivering the system using your traditional delivery approach and taking two years to complete.
    3. Give this imaginary project a name (e.g. traditional project, our project).

    Name of your imaginary 2-year long project:

    e.g. Big Bang ERP

    Brief Project Description:

    e.g. Replace home-grown legacy ERP with a modern COTS product in a single release scheduled to be delivered in 24 months

    Record this in the Roadmap for Transition to Agile Template

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    For best results, complete these sub-exercises with representatives from as many functional areas as possible
    (e.g. stakeholders, project management, business analysis, development, testing, operations, architecture, infosec)

    Output

    • An imaginary delivery project that is expected to take 2 years to complete

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Exercise 2.3.2 (Optional) Capture your traditional delivery approach

    30 minutes

    1. As a group, discuss and capture the high-level steps followed (after project approval) in your traditional delivery approach using the table below and on the next page.

    Step

    Description

    Who is involved

    1
    • Gather detailed requirements (work with project stakeholders to capture all requirements of the system and produce a Detailed Requirements Document)

    PM, Business Analysts, Stakeholders, etc.

    2
    • Produce a Detailed Design Document (develop a design that will meet all requirements identified in the Detailed Requirements Document)
    • Produce a Detailed Test Plan for acceptance of the system
    • Produce a Detailed Project Plan for the system delivery
    • Perform threat and privacy assessment (using the detailed requirements and design documents, perform a Threat Risk Assessment and Privacy Impact Analysis)
    • Submit detailed design to Architecture Review Board
    • Provide Operations with full infrastructure requirements
    PM, Architects, InfoSec, ARB, Operations, etc.
    3
    • Develop software (follow the Detailed Design Document and develop a system which meets all requirements)
    • Perform Unit Testing on all modules of the system as they are developed
    PM, Developers, etc.
    4
    • Create Production Environment based on project specification
    • Perform Integration testing of all modules to ensure the system works as designed
    • Produce an Integration Test Report capturing the results of testing and any deficiencies
    PM, Testers, etc.
    5
    • Fix all Sev 1 and Sev 2 deficiencies found during Integration Testing
    • Perform regression testing
    • Perform User Acceptance Testing as per the Detailed Test Plan
    PM, Developers, Testers, Stakeholders, etc.
    6
    • Product Deployment Plan
    • Perform User and Operations Training
    • Produce updated Threat Risk Assessment and Privacy Impact Analysis
    • Seek CAB (Change Approval Board) approval to go live
    PM, Developers, Testers, Operations, InfoSec, CAB, etc.
    7
    • Close out and Lessons Learned
    • Verify value delivery
    PM, etc.

    Output

    • The high-level steps in your current (traditional) delivery approach and who is involved in each step

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Exercise 2.3.2 (Optional) Capture your traditional delivery approach

    Step

    Description

    Who is involved

    1
    • Gather detailed requirements (work with project stakeholders to capture all requirements of the system and produce a Detailed Requirements Document)

    PM, Business Analysts, Stakeholders, etc.

    2
    • Produce a Detailed Design Document (develop a design that will meet all requirements identified in the Detailed Requirements Document)
    • Produce a Detailed Test Plan for acceptance of the system
    • Produce a Detailed Project Plan for the system delivery
    • Perform threat and privacy assessment (using the detailed requirements and design documents, perform a Threat Risk Assessment and Privacy Impact Analysis)
    • Submit detailed design to Architecture Review Board
    • Provide Operations with full infrastructure requirements
    PM, Architects, InfoSec, ARB, Operations, etc.
    3
    • Develop software (follow the Detailed Design Document and develop a system which meets all requirements)
    • Perform Unit Testing on all modules of the system as they are developed
    PM, Developers, etc.
    4
    • Create Production Environment based on project specification
    • Perform Integration testing of all modules to ensure the system works as designed
    • Produce an Integration Test Report capturing the results of testing and any deficiencies
    PM, Testers, etc.
    5
    • Fix all Sev 1 and Sev 2 deficiencies found during Integration Testing
    • Perform regression testing
    • Perform User Acceptance Testing as per the Detailed Test Plan
    PM, Developers, Testers, Stakeholders, etc.
    6
    • Product Deployment Plan
    • Perform User and Operations Training
    • Produce updated Threat Risk Assessment and Privacy Impact Analysis
    • Seek CAB (Change Approval Board) approval to go live
    PM, Developers, Testers, Operations, InfoSec, CAB, etc.
    7
    • Close out and Lessons Learned
    • Verify value delivery
    PM, etc.

    Output

    • The high-level steps in your current (traditional) delivery approach and who is involved in each step

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Exercise 2.3.3 (Optional) Consider what a two-phase delivery looks like

    30 minutes

    1. As a group, imagine that project stakeholders tell you two years is too long to wait for the project, and they want to know if they can have something (even if it's not the whole thing) in production sooner.
    2. Now imagine that you are able to convince the stakeholders to work with you to do the following:
      1. Identify their most important project requirements.
      2. Work with you to describe a valuable subset of the project requirements which reflect about ½ of all features they need (call this Phase 1).
      3. Work with you to get this Phase 1 of the project into production in about 1 year.
      4. Agree to leave the remaining requirements (e.g. the less important ones) until Phase 2 (second year of project).
    3. As a group, identify:
      1. How hard this would be for your organization to do, on a scale of 1 to 10.
      2. Identify what changes are needed to make this happen (consider people, processes, and technology).
      3. Capture your results using the table on the following slide.

    Output

    • The high-level steps in your current (traditional) delivery approach and who is involved in each step

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Exercise 2.3.3 (Optional) Consider what a two-phase delivery looks like

    30 minutes

    1. What would be needed to let you deliver a two-year project in two one-year phases considering people, process, and technology?

    People

    Processes

    Technology

    • e.g. Stakeholders would need to make hard decisions about which features are more valuable/important than others (and stick to them)
    • e.g. Delivery team and stakeholders would need to work closely together to determine what is a feasible and valuable set of features which can go live in Phase 1
    • e.g. Operations will need to be prepared to support Phase 1 (earlier than before), and then support an updated system after Phase 2
    • e.g. No significant change to traditional processes other than delivering in two phases
    • e.g. Need to decide whether requirements for the full project need to be gathered up front, or do you just do Phase 1, and then Phase 2
    • e.g. No significant changes other than we need a production environment sooner, and infrastructure requirements for the full project may be different from what is needed just for Phase 1

    How difficult would this be to achieve in your organization? (1-easy, 10-next to impossible)

    e.g. 2

    Output

    • Understand how your organization would deliver a large project in two phases

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Exercise 2.3.4 (Optional) Consider what a four-phase delivery looks like

    30 minutes

    1. Now, imagine that project stakeholders tell you that even one year is still too long to wait for something of value in production, and they want to know if they can have something (even if it's not the whole thing) in production sooner.
    2. Now imagine that you are able to convince the stakeholders to work with you to do the following:
      1. From the "Phase 1" requirements in Exercise 2.3.3, they will identify the most important ones that they need first.
      2. They will work with you to describe a valuable subset of these project requirements which reflect about ½ of all features they need (call this Phase 1A).
      3. They will work with you to get this Phase 1A of the project into production in about six months.
      4. Agree to leave all the remaining requirements (e.g. the less important ones) until later phases.
    1. As a group, identify:
      1. How hard this would be for your organization to do, on a scale of 1 to 10?
      2. Identify what changes are needed to make this happen (consider people, processes, and technology).
      3. Capture your results using the table on the following slide.

    Output

    • Understand how your organization would deliver a large project in two phases

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Exercise 2.3.4 (Optional) Consider what a four-phase delivery looks like

    30 minutes

    1. What more would be needed to let you deliver a two-year project in four, six-month phases considering people, process, and technology?

    People

    Processes

    Technology

    • e.g. Stakeholders would need to make even harder (and faster) decisions about which features are most valuable/important than others.
    • e.g. Because we will be delivering releases so quickly, we'll ask the stakeholders to nominate a "primary contact" who can make decisions on requirements for each phase (also to answer questions from the project team, when needed, so they aren't slowed down).
    • e.g. Delivery team and the "primary contact" would work closely together to determine what is a feasible and valuable set of features to go live within Phase 1A, and then repeat this for the remaining Phases.
    • e.g. Operations will need to be prepared to support Phase 1A (even earlier than before), and then support the remaining phases. Ask them to dedicate someone as primary contact for this series of releases, and who provides guidance/support as needed.

    e.g. Heavy and time-consuming process steps (e.g. architecture reviews, data modelling, infosec approvals, change approval board) will need to be streamlined and made more "iteration-friendly."

    e.g. Gather detailed requirements only for Phase 1A, and leave the rest as high-level requirements to be more fully defined at the beginning of each subsequent phase.

    • e.g. We will need (at a minimum) a Production, and a Pre-production environment set up (and earlier in the project lifecycle) and solid regression testing at the end of each phase to ensure the latest Release doesn't break anything.
    • e.g. Since we will be going into production multiple times over this 2-year project, we should consider using automation (e.g. automated build, automated regression testing, and automated deployment).

    How difficult would this be to achieve in your organization? (1-easy, 10-next to impossible)

    e.g. 5

    Output

    • Understand how your organization would deliver a large project in two phases

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Exercise 2.3.5 (Optional) Consider what a four-phase delivery with monthly sprints looks like

    30 minutes

    1. Now, imagine that project stakeholders tell you that they are happy with the six-month release approach (e.g. expect to go live four times over the two-year project, with each release providing increased functionality), but they want to see your team's progress frequently between releases.
    2. Additionally, stakeholders tell you that instead of asking you to provide the traditional monthly project status reports, they want you to demonstrate whatever features you have built and work for the system on a monthly basis. This will be done in the form of a demonstration to a selected list of stakeholders each month.
    3. Each month, your team must show working, tested code (not prototypes or mockups, unless asked for) and demonstrate how this month's deliverable brings value to the business.
    4. Furthermore, the stakeholders would like to be able to test out the system each month, so they can play with it, test it, and provide feedback to your team about what they like and what they feel needs to change.
    5. To help you to achieve this, the stakeholders designate their primary contact as the "product owner" (PO) who will be dedicated to the project and will help your team to decide what is being delivered each month. The PO will be empowered by the stakeholders to make decisions on scope and priority on an expedited basis and will also answer questions on their behalf when your team needs guidance.
    6. You agree with the stakeholders these one-month deliverables will be called "sprints."

    Output

    • Understand how your organization would deliver a large project in two phases

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Exercise 2.3.5 (Optional) Consider what a four-phase delivery with monthly sprints looks like

    30 minutes

    1. What more would be needed to let you deliver a two-year project in 24 one-month sprints (plus four six-month releases) considering people, process, and technology?

    People

    Processes

    Technology

    • e.g. The team will need to work closely with the product owner (and/or stakeholders) on a continuous basis to understand requirements and their relative priority
    • e.g. Stakeholders will need to be available for demos and testing at the end of each sprint, and provide feedback to the team as quickly as possible
    • e.g. all functional siloes within IT (e.g. analysts, architects, infosec, developers, testers, operations) will need to work hand in hand on a continuous basis to deliver working tested code into a demo/test environment at the end of each sprint
    • e.g. there isn't enough time in each sprint to have team members working in siloes, instead, we will need to work together as a team to ensure that all aspects of the sprint (requirements, design, build, test, etc.) are worked on as needed (team is equally and collectively responsible for delivery of each sprint)
    • e.g. We can't deliver much in 1-month sprints if we work in siloes and are expected to do traditional documentation and handoffs (e.g. requirements document), so we will use a fluid project backlog instead of requirements documents, we will evolve our design iteratively over the course of the many sprints, and we will need to streamline the CAB process to allow for faster (more frequent) deployments
    • e.g. We will need to evolve the system's data model iteratively over the course of many sprints (rather than a one-and-done approach at the beginning of the project)
    • e.g. We will need to quickly decide the scope to be delivered in each sprint (focusing on highest value functionality first). Each sprint should have a well-defined "goal" that the team is trying to achieve
    • We will need any approval processes (e.g. architecture review, infosec review, CAB approval) to be streamlined and simplified in order to support more frequent and iterative deployment of the system
    • e.g. We will need to maximize our use of automation (build, test, and deploy) in order to maximize what we can deliver in each sprint (Note: the ROI on automation is much higher when we deliver in sprints than in a one-and-done delivery because we are iterating repeatedly over the course of the project
    • e.g. We will need to quickly stand-up environments (dev, test, prod, etc.) and to make changes/enhancements to these environments quickly (it makes sense to leverage infrastructure as a service [IaaS] techniques here)
    • e.g. We will need to automate our security related testing (e.g. static and dynamic security testing, penetration testing, etc.) so that it can be run repeatedly before each release moves into production. We may need to evolve this automated testing with each sprint depending on what new features/functions are being delivered in each release

    How difficult would this be to achieve in your organization? (1-easy, 10-next to impossible)

    e.g. 8

    Output

    • Understand how your organization would deliver a large project in two phases

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Exercise 2.3.6 (Optional) Define the steps to reach your target state

    30 minutes

    1. From Exercises 2.3.1-2.3.5, identify your current state on the stepwise transition from traditional to Agile (e.g. one-and-done).
    2. Then, identify your desired future state (e.g. 24 one-month sprints with six-month releases).
    3. Now, review your people, process, and technology changes identified in Exercises 2.3.1-2.3.5 and create a roadmap for this transition using the table on the next slide.

    Identify your current state from Exercises 2.3.1-2.3.5

    e.g. One-and-done

    Identify your desired state from Exercises 2.3.1-2.3.5

    e.g. 24x1 Month Sprints

    Output

    • A roadmap and timeline for adopting a more Agile delivery approach

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Exercise 2.3.6 (Optional) Define the steps to reach your target state

    30 minutes

    1. Fill in the table below with your next steps. Identify who will be responsible for each step along with the timeline for completion: "Now" refers to steps you will take in the immediate future (e.g. days to weeks), "Next" refers to steps you will take in the medium term (e.g. weeks to months), and "Later" refers to long-term items (e.g. months to years).

    Now

    Next Later

    What are you going to do now?

    What are you going to do very soon?

    What are you going to do in the future?

    Roadmap Item

    Who

    Date

    Roadmap Item

    Who

    Date

    Roadmap Item

    Who

    Date

    Work with Stakeholders to identify a product owner for the project.

    AC

    Jan 1

    Break down full deliverable into 4 phases with high level requirements for each phase

    DL

    Feb 15

    Work with operations to set up Dev, Test, Pre-Prod, and Prod environments for first phase (make use of automation/scripting)

    DL

    Apr 15

    Work with PO and stakeholders to help them understand Agile approach

    Jan 15

    Work with PO to create a project backlog for the first phase deliverable

    JK

    Feb 28

    Work with QA group to select and implement test automation for the project (start with smoke and regression tests)

    AC

    Apr 30

    Work with project gating body, architecture, infosec and operations to agree on incremental deliveries for the project and streamlined activities to get there

    AC

    Mar 15

    Record the results in the Roadmap for Transition to Agile Template

    Output

    • A roadmap and timeline for adopting a more Agile delivery approach

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Step 2.4

    Identify insights and team feedback

    Activities

    2.4.1 Identify key insights and takeaways
    2.4.2 Perform an exit survey

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • Identify your key insights and takeaways from Phase 2

    Exercise 2.4.1 Identify key insights and takeaways

    30 minutes

    1. As a group, discuss and capture your thoughts on:
      1. What key insights have participants gained from the intro to Agile presentation?
      2. What if any takeaways do participants feel are needed as a result of the presentation?
      3. What changes need to be made in the organization to support/enhance Agile adoption?
    2. Capture your findings in the table below:
    What key insights have you gained? What takeaways have you identified?
    • (e.g. better understanding of Agile mindset, principles, and practices)
    • (e.g. how you can improve/spread Agile practices in the organization)

    Output

    • A better understanding of Agile principles and practices
    • Action items that will help solidify Agile practices in the organization

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Exercise 2.4.2 Perform an exit survey

    30 minutes

    1. Wrap up this section by addressing any remaining questions participants still have.
    2. Create your local exit survey by copying the template using the link below. Then copy and distribute your local survey link.
    3. Collect the consolidated survey results in preparation for your next steps.
    4. NOTE: Using this survey template requires having access to Microsoft Forms. If you cannot access Microsoft Forms, an Info-Tech analyst can send the survey for you. Alternatively, this survey can be done with sticky notes and a pen and paper to calculate the outcomes.

    Download Survey Template:

    Develop Your Agile Approach Exit Survey Template

    Output

    • A better understanding of Agile principles and practices
    • Action items that will help solidify Agile practices in the organization

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Agile Modules

    Prioritize Agile support with your top challenges

    Backlog Management

    Scrum Simulation

    Estimation

    Product Owner

    Product Roadmapping

    1: User stories and the art of decomposition

    2: Effective backlog management & refinement

    3: Identify insights and team feedback

    1: Scrum sprint planning and retrospective simulation

    2: Pass the balls – sprint velocity game

    1: Improve product backlog item estimation

    2: Agile estimation fundamentals

    3: Understand the wisdom of crowds

    4: Identify insights and team feedback

    1: Understand product management fundamentals

    2: The critical role of the product owner

    3: Manage effective product backlogs and roadmaps

    4: Identify insights and team feedback

    1: Identify your product roadmapping pains

    2: The six "tools" of product roadmapping

    3: Product roadmapping exercise

    Organizations often struggle with numerous pain points around Agile delivery.
    The Common Agile Challenges Survey results will help you identify and prioritize the organization's biggest (most cited) pain points. Treat these pain points like a backlog and address the biggest ones first.

    Agile modules provide supporting activities:
    Each module provides guidance and supporting activities related to a specific Agile challenge from your survey. These modules can be arranged to meet each organization's or team's needs while providing cohesive and consistent messaging. For additional supporting research, please visit the Agile / DevOps Resource Center.
    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Backlog Management Module

    Manage your backlog effectively

    Activities

    Backlog 1.1 Identify your backlog and user story decomposition pains
    Backlog 1.2 What are user stories and why do we use them?
    Backlog 1.3 User story decomposition: password reset
    Backlog 1.4 (Optional) Decompose a real epic

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • A better understanding of backlog management and user story decomposition.

    Backlog Exercise 1.1 Identify your backlog and user story decomposition pains

    30-60 minutes

    1. As a group, discuss and capture your thoughts on:
      1. What specific challenges you are facing with backlog management
      2. What specific challenges you are facing with user story decomposition
    1. Capture your findings in the table below:

    What are your specific backlog management and user story decomposition challenges?

    • (e.g. We have trouble telling the difference between epics, features, user stories, and tasks)
    • (e.g. We often don't finish all user stories in a sprint because some of them turn out to be too big to complete in one sprint)

    Output

    • Your specific backlog management and user story decomposition challenges

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    User stories and the art of decomposition

    User stories are core to Agile delivery.

    Good user story decomposition practices are key to doing Agile effectively.

    Agile doesn't use traditional "shoulds" and "shalls" to capture requirements

    Backlog Exercise 1.2 What are user stories and why do we use them?

    30-60 minutes

    1. User stories are a simple way of capturing requirements in Agile and have the form:

    Why do we capture requirements as user stories (what value do they provide)?

    How do they differ from traditional (should/shall) requirements (and are they better)?

    What else stands out to you about user stories?

    as a someone I want something so that achieve something.

    Example:
    As a banking customer, I want to see the current balance of my accounts so that I can know how much money I have in each account.

    Output

    • A better understanding of user stories and why they are used in Agile delivery

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    User stories are "placeholders for conversations"

    User stories enable collaboration and conversations to fully determine actual business requirements over time.

    e.g. As a banking customer, I want to see the current balance of my accounts so that I can know how much money I have in each account.

    Requirements, determined within the iterations, outline the steps to complete the story: how the user will access their account, the types of funds allowed, etc.

    User stories allow the product owners to prioritize and manage the product needs (think of them as "virtual sticky notes").

    User stories come in different "sizes"

    These items form a four-level hierarchy: epics, features, user stories, and tasks.
    They are collectively referred to as product backlog items or (PBIs)

    A table with the following headings: Agile; Waterfall; Relationship; Definition

    The process of taking large PBIs (e.g. epics and features) and breaking them down in to small PBIs (e.g. user stories and tasks) is called user story decomposition and is often challenging for new-to-Agile teams

    Backlog Exercise 1.3 User story decomposition: password reset

    30-60 minutes

    1. As a group, consider the following feature, which describes a high-level requirement from a hypothetical system:
      • FEATURE: As a customer, I want to be able to set and reset my password, so that I can transact with the system securely.
    2. Imagine your delivery team tells you that this is user story is too large to complete in one sprint, so they have asked you to decompose it into smaller pieces. Work together to break this feature down into several smaller user stories:
    User Story 1: User Story 2: User Story 3:
    As A I Want So That. As A I Want So That. As A I Want So That.

    Output

    • An epic which has been decomposed into smaller user stories which can be completed independently

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Backlog Exercise 1.3 User story decomposition: password reset

    Epic: As a customer, I want to be able to set and reset my password, so that I can transact securely.

    A single epic can be broken down into multiple user stories

    User Story 1: User Story 2: User Story 3: User Story 4:
    This is a picture of user story 1 This is a picture of user story 2 This is a picture of user story 3 This is a picture of user story 4

    Acceptance Criteria:
    Given that the customer has a password that they want to change,
    When the administrator clicks reset password on the admin console,
    Then the system will change the password and send it to the user.

    Acceptance Criteria:
    Given that the customer has a password that they want to change,
    When they click reset password in the system,
    Then the system will allow them to choose a new password and will save it the password and send it to the user.

    Acceptance Criteria:
    Given that the customer has not logged onto the system before,
    When they initially log in,
    Then the system will prompt them to change their password.

    Acceptance Criteria:
    Given that a password is stored in the database,
    When anyone looks at the password field in the database,
    Then the actual password will not be visible or easily decrypted.

    Are enablers included in your backlogs? Should they be?

    An enabler is any support activity needed to provide the means for future functionality. Enablers build out the technical foundations (e.g. architecture) of the product and uphold technical quality standards.

    Your audience will dictate the level of detail and granularity you should include in your enabler, but it is a good rule of thumb to stick to the feature level.

    Enablers

    Description

    Enabler Epics

    Non-functional and other technical requirements that support your features (e.g. data and system requirements)

    Enabler Capabilities of Features

    Enabler Stories

    Consider the various types of enabler

    Exploration

    Architectural

    Any efforts toward learning customer or user needs and creation of solutions and alternatives. Exploration enablers are heavily linked to learning milestones.

    Any efforts toward building components of your architecture. These will often be linked to delivery teams other than your pure development team.

    Infrastructure

    Compliance

    Any efforts toward building various development and testing environments. Again, these are artifacts that will relate to other delivery teams.

    Any efforts toward regulatory and compliance requirements in your development activities. These can be both internal and external.

    Source: Scaled Agile, "Enablers."

    Create, split, and bundle your PBIs

    The following questions can be helpful in dissecting an epic down to the user story level. The same line of thinking can also be useful for bundling multiple small PBIs together.

    An image showing how to Create, split, and bundle your PBIs

    Backlog Exercise 1.4 (Optional)
    Decompose a real epic

    30 minutes

    1. As a group, select a real epic or feature from one of your project backlogs which needs to be decomposed:
    2. Work together to decompose this epic down into several smaller features and/or user stories (user stories must be small enough to reasonably be completed within a sprint):

    Epic to be decomposed:

    As a ____ I want _____ so that ______

    User Story 1: User Story 2: User Story 3:
    As A I Want So That. As A I Want So That. As A I Want So That.

    Output

    • A real epic from your project backlog which has been decomposed into smaller features and user stories

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Backlog Management Module

    Manage your backlog effectively

    Activities

    Backlog 2.1 Identify enablers and blockers

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • Backlog PBI filters.
    • A better understanding of backlog types and levels.

    Effective backlog management and refinement

    Working with a tiered backlog

    an image showing the backlog tiers: New Idea; Ideas; Qualified; Ready - sprint.

    Use a tiered approach to managing your backlog, and always work on the highest priority items first.

    Distinguish your specific goals for refining in the product backlog vs. planning for a sprint itself

    Often backlog refinement is used interchangeably or considered a part of sprint planning. The reality is they are very similar, as the required participants and objectives are the same however, there are some key differences.

    An image of a Venn diagram comparing Backlog Refinement to sprint Planning.

    A better way to view them is "pre-planning" and "planning."

    A backlog stores and organizes PBIs at various stages of readiness

    A well-formed backlog can be thought of as a DEEP backlog:

    • Detailed Appropriately: Product backlog items (PBIs) are broken down and refined as necessary.
    • Emergent: The backlog grows and evolves over time as PBIs are added and removed.
    • Estimated: The effort a PBI requires is estimated at each tier.
    • Prioritized: The PBIs value and priority are determined at each tier.

    (Perforce, 2018)

    An image showing the Ideas; Qualified; Ready; funnel leading to the sprint approach.

    Backlog tiers facilitate product planning steps

    An image of the product planning steps facilitated by Backlog Tiers

    Each activity is a variation of measuring value and estimating effort to validate and prioritize a PBI.

    A PBI meets our definition of done and passes through to the next backlog tier when it meets the appropriate criteria. Quality filters should exist between each tier.

    Backlog Exercise 2.1 Build a starting checklist of quality filters

    60 minutes

    1. Quality filters provide a checklist to ensure each Product Backlog Item (PBI) meets our definition of Done and is ready to move to the next backlog group (status).
    2. Create a checklist of basic descriptors that must be completed between each backlog level.
    3. If you completed this exercise in a different Module, review and update it here.
    4. Use this information to start your product strategy playbook in Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision.

    An image of the backlog tiers, identifying where product backlog and sprint backlog are

    Output

    • List of enablers and blockers to establishing product owners

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Outline the criteria to proceed to the next tier via quality filters

    Expand the concepts of defining "ready" and "done" to include the other stages of a PBIs journey through product planning.

    An image showing the approach you will use to Outline the criteria to proceed to the next tier via quality filters

    Info-Tech Insight: A quality filter ensures quality is met and teams are armed with the right information to work more efficiently and improve throughput.

    Define product value by aligning backlog delivery with roadmap goals

    In each product plan, the backlogs show what you will deliver. Roadmaps identify when and in what order you will deliver value, capabilities, and goals.

    Facilitator slides: Explaining MVP

    Notes and Instructions

    The primary intent of this exercise is to explain the complex notion of MVP (it is one of the most misunderstood and contentious issues in Agile delivery). The exercise is intended to explain it in a simple and digestible way that will fundamentally change participants' understanding of MVP.

    Note that the slide contains animations.

    Imagine that your stakeholder tells you they want a blue 4-door sedan (consider this our "MVP" at this point), and you decide to build it the traditional way. As you build it (tires, then frame, then body, then joint body with frame and install engine), the stakeholder doesn't have anything they can use, and so they are only happy (and able to get value) at the end when the entire car is finished (point out the stakeholder "faces" go from unhappy to happy in the end).
    Animation 1:
    When we use Agile methods, we don't want to wait until the end before we have something the stakeholders can use. So instead of waiting until the entire car is completed, we decide our first iteration will be to give the stakeholder "a simple (blue) wheeled transportation device"…namely a skateboard that they can use for a little while (it's not a car, but it is something the stakeholder can use to get places).
    Animation 2:
    After the stakeholder has tried out the skateboard, we ask for feedback. They tell us the skateboard helped them to get around faster than walking, but they don't like the fact that it is so hard to maintain your balance on it. So, we add a handle to the skateboard to turn it into a scooter. The stakeholder then uses the scooter for a while. Stakeholder feedback says staying balanced on the scooter is much easier, but they don't have a place to put groceries when they go shopping, so can we do something about that?
    (Continued on next slide…)

    Facilitator slides: Explaining MVP

    Notes and Instructions
    Animation 3:
    Next, we build the stakeholder a bicycle and let them use it for a while before asking for feedback. The stakeholder tells us they love the bicycle, but they admit they get tired on long trips, so is there something we can do about that?
    Animation 4:
    So next we add a motor to the bicycle to turn it into a motorcycle, and again we give it to the stakeholder to use for a while. When we ask the stakeholder for feedback, they tell us that they love the motorcycle so much because they love the feeling of the wind in their hair, they've decided that they no longer want a 4-door sedan, but instead would prefer a blue 2-door convertible.
    Animation 5:
    And so, for our last iteration, we build the stakeholder what they actually wanted (a blue 2-door convertible) instead of what they asked for (a blue 4-door sedan), and we see that they are happier than they would have been if we had delivered the traditional way.

    INSIGHTS:

    • An MVP cannot be fully known at the beginning of a project (it is the "journey" of creating the MVP with stakeholders that defines what it looks like in the end).
    • Sometimes, stakeholders don't (or can't) know what they want until they see it.
    • There is no "straight path" to your MVP, you determine the path forward based on what you learned in the previous iterations.
    • This approach is part of the "power of Agile" and demonstrates why Agile can produce better outcomes and happier stakeholders.

    Understanding minimum viable product

    NOT Like This:

    This is a series of images. The top half of the image, shows building a car by starting with the wheels. The bottom Image shows the progression from skateboard, to scooter, to bike, to motorcycle, to car.

    It's Like This:

    Use iterations to maximize value delivery

    An image showing how to use iterations to maximize value delivery.

    Use iterations to reduce accumulated risk

    An image showing how to use iterations to reduce accumulated risk.

    Understanding MVP
    (always be ready to go live)

    A great and wise pharaoh hires two architects to build his memorial pyramids.

    An image shows two architects contribution to pyramid construction.

    Understanding MVP
    (always be ready to go live)

    Several years go by, and then…

    The pharaoh is on his death bed.

    Backlog Management Module

    Manage your backlog effectively

    Activities

    Backlog 3.1 Identify key insights and takeaways
    Backlog 3.2 Perform exit survey and capture results

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • Identify your key insights and takeaways.

    Backlog Exercise 3.1 Identify key insights and takeaways

    30 minutes

    1. As a group, discuss and capture your thoughts on:
      1. What key insights have participants gained from the Intro to Agile presentation?
      2. What if any takeaways do participants feel are needed as a result of the presentation?
      3. What changes need to be made in the organization to support/enhance Agile adoption?
    2. Capture your findings in the table below:

    What key insights have you gained?

    What takeaways have you identified?

    • (e.g. better understanding of Agile mindset, principles, and practices)
    • (e.g. how you can improve/spread Agile practices in the organization)

    Output

    • A better understanding of Agile principles and practices
    • Action items that will help solidify Agile practices in the organization

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Backlog Exercise 3.2 Perform an exit survey

    30 minutes

    1. Wrap up this section by addressing any remaining questions participants still have.
    2. Create your local exit survey by copying the template using the link below. Then copy and distribute your local survey link.
    3. Collect the consolidated survey results in preparation for your next steps.
    4. NOTE: Using this survey template requires having access to Microsoft Forms. If you cannot access Microsoft Forms, an Info-Tech analyst can send the survey for you. Alternatively, this survey can be done with sticky notes and a pen and paper to calculate the outcomes.

    Output

    • A better understanding of Agile principles and practices
    • Action items that will help solidify Agile practices in the organization

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Download Survey Template:

    Develop Your Agile Approach Exit Survey Template

    Agile Modules

    Prioritize Agile support with your top challenges

    Backlog Management

    Scrum Simulation

    Estimation

    Product Owner

    Product Roadmapping

    1: User stories and the art of decomposition

    2: Effective backlog management & refinement

    3: Identify insights and team feedback

    1: Scrum sprint planning and retrospective simulation

    2: Pass the balls – sprint velocity game

    1: Improve product backlog item estimation

    2: Agile estimation fundamentals

    3: Understand the wisdom of crowds

    4: Identify insights and team feedback

    1: Understand product management fundamentals

    2: The critical role of the product owner

    3: Manage effective product backlogs and roadmaps

    4: Identify insights and team feedback

    1: Identify your product roadmapping pains

    2: The six "tools" of product roadmapping

    3: Product roadmapping exercise

    Organizations often struggle with numerous pain points around Agile delivery.
    The Common Agile Challenges Survey results will help you identify and prioritize the organization's biggest (most cited) pain points. Treat these pain points like a backlog and address the biggest ones first.

    Agile modules provide supporting activities:
    Each module provides guidance and supporting activities related to a specific Agile challenge from your survey. These modules can be arranged to meet each organization's or team's needs while providing cohesive and consistent messaging. For additional supporting research, please visit the Agile / DevOps Resource Center.
    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Scrum Simulation Module

    Scrum sprint planning and retrospective simulation

    Activities

    1.1 Identify your scrum pains
    1.2 Review scrum simulation intro
    1.3 Create a mock backlog
    1.4 Review sprint 0
    1.5 Determine a budget and timeline
    1.6 Understand minimum viable product
    1.7 Plan your first sprint
    1.8 Do a sprint retrospective
    1.9 "What if" exercise (understanding what a fluid backlog really means)
    1.10 A sprint 1 example
    1.11 Simulate more sprints

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • A better understanding of Scrum (particularly backlog management and user story decomposition).

    Facilitator slides: Scrum Simulation Introduction

    Introduction Tab

    Talk to the nature of the Scrum team:

    • Collective ownership/responsibility for delivery.
    • The organization has given you great power. With great power comes great responsibility.
    • You may each be specialists in some way, but you need to be prepared to do anything the project requires (no one goes home until everyone can go home).
    • Product owner: Special role, empowered by the organization to act as a single, authoritative voice for stakeholders (again great power/responsibility), determines requirements and priorities, three ears (business/stakeholders/team), holds the vision for the project, answer questions from the team (or finds someone who can answer questions), must balance autonomy with stakeholder needs, is first among equals on the Scrum team, is laser-focused on getting the best possible outcome with the resources, money, and circumstances ← PO acts as the "pathfinder" for the project.
    • Talk about the criticality and qualities of the PO: well-respected, highly collaborative, wise decision maker, a "get it done" type (healthy bias toward immediacy), has a vision for product, understands stakeholders, can get stakeholders' attention when needed, is dedicated full-time to the project, can access help when needed, etc.
    • The rest of you are the delivery team (have avoided singling out an SM for this – not needed for the exercise – but SM is the servant leader/orchestra conductor for the delivery team. The facilitator should act as a pseudo-SM for this exercise).

    Speak about the "bank realizes that the precise scope of the first release can only be fully known at the end of the project" statement and what it means.

    Discuss exercise and everyone's roles (make sure everyone clear), make it as realistic as possible. Your level of participation will determine how much value you get.

    Discuss any questions the participants might have about the background section on the introduction tab. The exercise has been defined in a way that minimizes the scope and complexity of the work to be done by assuming there are existing web-capable services exposed to the bank's legacy system(s) and that the project is mostly about putting a deployable web front end in place.

    Speak about "definition of done": Why was it defined this way? What are the boundaries? What happens if we define it to be only up to unit testing?

    Facilitator slides: Scrum Simulation, Create a Mock Backlog

    Create a Mock Backlog Tab

    This exercise is intended to help participants understand the steps involved in creating an initial backlog and deciding on their MVP.

    Note: The output from this exercise will not be used in the remainder of the simulation (a backlog for the simulation already exists on tab Sprint 0) so don't overdo it on this exercise. Do enough to help the participants understand the basic steps involved (brainstorm features and functions for the app, group them into epics, and decide which will be in- and out-of-scope for MVP). Examples have been provided for all steps of this exercise and are shown in grey to indicate they should be replaced by the participants.

    Step 1: Have all participants brainstorm "features and functions" that they think should be available in the online banking app (stop once you have what feels like a "good enough" list to move on to the next step) – these do not need to be captured as user stories just yet.

    Step 2: Review the list of features and functions with participants and decide on several epics to capture groups of related features and functions (bill payments, etc.). Think of these as forming the high-level structure of your requirements. Now, organize all the features and functions from Step 1, into their appropriate epic (you can identify as many epics as you like, but try to keep them to a minimum).

    Step 3: Point out that on the Introduction tab, you were told the bank wants the first release to go live as soon as possible. So have participants go over the list of features and functions and identify those that they feel are most important (and should therefore go into the first release – that is, the MVP), and which they would leave for future releases. Help participants think critically and in a structured way about how to make these very hard decisions. Point out that the product owner is the ultimate decision maker here, but that the entire team should have input into the decision. Point out that all the features and functions that make up the MVP will be referred to as the "project backlog," and all the rest will be known as the "product backlog" (these are of course, just logical separations, there is only one physical backlog).

    Step 4: This step is optional and involves asking the participants to create user stories (e.g. "As a __, I want ___ so that ___") for all the epics and features and functions that make up their chosen MVP. This step is to get them used to creating user stories, because they will need to get used to doing this. Note that many who are new to Agile often have difficulty writing user stories and end up overdoing it (e.g. providing a long-winded list of things in the "I want ___" part of the user story for an epic) or struggling to come up with something for the "so that ____" part). Help them to get good at quickly capturing the gist of what should be in the user story (the details come later).

    Facilitator slides: Scrum Simulation, Budget and Timeline

    Project Budget and Timeline

    Total Number of Sprints = 305/20 = 15.25 → ROUND UP TO 16 (Why? You can't do a "partial sprint" – plus, give yourself a little breathing room.)

    Cost Per Sprint = 6 x $75 x 8 x 10 = $36,000

    Total Timeline = 16 * 2 = 32 Weeks

    Total Cost of First Release = $36,000 x 16 = $572,000

    Talk about the "commitment" a Scrum delivery team makes to the organization ("We can't tell you exactly what we will deliver, but based on what we know, if you give the team 32 weeks, we will deliver something like what is in the project backlog – subject to any changes our stakeholder tell us are needed"). Most importantly, the team commits to doing the most important backlog items first, so if we run out of time, the unfinished work will be the least valuable user stories. Lastly, to keep to the schedule/timeline, items may move in and out of the project backlog – this is part of the normal and important "horse trading" that takes place on health Agile projects.

    Speak to the fact that this approach allows you to provide a "deterministic" answer about how long a project will take and how much it will cost while keeping the project requirements flexible.

    Facilitator slides: Scrum Simulation, Sprint 0

    Sprint 0 Tab

    This is an unprioritized list, organized to make sense, and includes a user story (plus some stuff), and "good enough estimates" – How good?... Eh! (shoulder shrug)
    Point out the limited ("lazy") investment → Agile principle: simplicity, the art of maximizing the work not done.
    Point out that only way to really understand a requirement is to see a working example (requirements often change once the stakeholders see a working example – the "that's not what I meant" factor).

    Estimates are a balancing act (good enough that we understand the overall approximate size of this, and still acknowledges that more details will have to wait until we decide to put that requirement into a Sprint – remember, no one knows how long this project is going to take (or even what the final deliverable will look like) so don't over invest in estimates here.)

    Sprint velocity calculation is just a best guess → be prepared to find that your initial guess was off (but you will know this early rather than at the end of the project). This should lead to a healthy discussion about why the discrepancy is happening (sprint retrospectives can help here). Note: Sprint velocity doesn't assume working evenings and weekends!

    Speak to the importance of Sprint velocity being based on a "sustainable pace" by the delivery team. Calculations that implicitly expect sustained overtime in order to meet the delivery date must be avoided. Part of the power of Agile comes from this critical insight. Critical → Your project's execution will need to be adjusted to accommodate the actual sprint velocity of the team!

    Point out the "project backlog" and separation from the "product backlog" (and no sprint backlog yet!).

    Point out the function/benefits of the backlog:

    • A single holding place for all the work that needs to be done (so you don't forget/ignore anything).
    • Can calculate how much work is left to do.
    • A mechanism for prioritizing deliverables.
    • A list of placeholders for further discussion.
    • An evolving list that will grow and shrink over time.
    • A "living document" that must be maintained over the course of the project.

    Talk about large items in backlog (>20 pts) and how to deal with them (do we need to break them up now?).

    Give participants time to review the backlog: Questions/What would you be doing if this were real/We're going to collectively work through this backlog.
    Sprint 0 is your opportunity to: get organized as a team, do high level design, strategize on approach, think about test data, environments, etc. – it is the "Ready-Set" in "Ready-Set-Go."
    Think about doing a High/Med/Low value determination for each user story.

    Simulation Exercise 1.1 Identify your Scrum pains

    30 minutes

    1. As a group, discuss and capture your thoughts on:
      • What specific challenges are you facing with your Scrum practices?
    2. Capture your findings in the table below:

    What are your specific Scrum challenges?

    • (e.g. We don't know how to decide on our minimum viable product (MVP), or what to start working on first)
    • (e.g. We don't have a product owner assigned to the project)
    • (e.g. Our daily standups often take 30-60 minutes to complete)
    • (e.g. We heard Scrum was supposed to reduce the number of meetings we have, but instead, meetings have increased)
    • (e.g. We don't know how to determine the budget for an Agile project)

    Output

    • Your specific Scrum related challenges

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Simulation Exercise 1.2 Review Scrum Simulation intro

    30 minutes

    1. Ask participants to read the Introduction tab in the Scrum Simulation Exercise(5 minutes)
    2. Discuss and answer any questions the participants may have about the introduction (5 minutes)
    3. Discuss the approach your org would use to deliver this using their traditional approach (5 minutes)

    This is an image of the Introduction tab in the Scrum Simulation Exercise

    How would your organization deliver this using their traditional approach?

    1. Capture all requirements in a document and get signoff from stakeholders
    2. Create a detailed design for the entire system
    3. Build and test the system
    4. Deploy it into production

    Note: Refer to the facilitator slides for more guidance on how to deliver this exercise

    Simulation Exercise 1.3 Create a mock backlog

    30-60 minutes

    Step 1: Brainstorm "Features and Functions" that the group feels would be needed for this app

    Capture anything that you feel might be needed in the Online Banking Application:

    • See account balances
    • Pay a bill online
    • Set up payees for online bill payments
    • Make a deposit online
    • See a history of account transactions
    • Logon and logoff
    • Make an e-transfer
    • Schedule a bill payment for the future
    • Search for a transaction by payee/date/amount/etc.
    • Register for app
    • Reset password

    Note: Refer to the facilitator slides for more guidance on how to deliver this exercise

    Output

    • Create a mock initial backlog for the simulated project

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Simulation Exercise 1.3 Create a mock backlog

    30-60 minutes

    Step 2: Identify your epics

    1. Categorize your "Features and Functions" list into several epics for the application:

    Epics

    "Features and Functions" in This Epic

    Administration

    - Logon and logoff
    - Register for app
    - Reset password

    Accounts

    - See account balances
    - See a history of account transactions
    - Search for a transaction by payee/date/amount

    Bill payments

    - Set up payees for online bill payments
    - Pay a bill online
    - Schedule a bill payment for the future

    Deposits

    - Make a deposit online

    E-transfers

    - Make an e-transfer

    Note: Refer to the facilitator slides for more guidance on how to deliver this exercise

    Output

    • Create a mock initial backlog for the simulated project

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Simulation Exercise 1.3 Create a mock backlog

    30-60 minutes

    Step 3: Identify your MVP

    1. Decide which "Features and Functions" will be in your MVP and which will be delivered in future releases:

    YOUR MVP (Project Backlog)

    Epics

    "Features and Functions" in This Epic

    Administration

    - Logon and logoff
    - Register for app

    Accounts

    - See account balances
    - See a history of account transactions

    Bill payments

    - Set up payees for online bill payments
    - Pay a bill online

    FOR FUTURE RELEASES (Product Backlog)

    Epics

    In Scope

    Deposits- Make a deposit online
    Accounts- Search for a transaction by payee/date/amount/etc.
    Bill payments- Schedule a bill payment for the future

    Note: Refer to the facilitator slides for more guidance on how to deliver this exercise

    Output

    • Create a mock initial backlog for the simulated project

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Simulation Exercise 1.3 Create a mock backlog

    30-60 minutes

    Step 3: Identify your MVP

    1. Decide which "Features and Functions" will be in your MVP and which will be delivered in future releases:

    YOUR MVP EPICS

    Epics

    "Features and Functions" in This Epic

    Administration

    - Logon and logoff
    - Register for app

    Accounts

    - See account balances
    - See a history of account transactions

    Bill payments

    - Set up payees for online bill payments
    - Pay a bill online

    YOUR MVP USER STORIES

    Epics

    In Scope

    Logon and LogoffAs a user, I want to logon/logoff the app so I can do my banking securely
    Register for AppAs a user, I want to register to use the app so I can bank online
    See Account BalancesAs a user, I want to see my account balances so that I know my current financial status
    See a History of Account TransactionsAs a user, I want to see a history of my account transactions, so I am aware of where my money goes
    Set up Payees for Online Bill PaymentsAs a user, I want to set up payees so that I can easily pay my bills
    Pay a Bill OnlineAs a user, I want to pay bills online, so they get paid on time

    Note: Refer to the facilitator slides for more guidance on how to deliver this exercise

    Output

    • Create a mock initial backlog for the simulated project

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Simulation Exercise 1.4 Review
    Sprint 0

    The Online Banking Application of the spreadsheet for Sprint 0.

    Step 1: Set aside the Mock Backlog just created (you will be using the Backlog on Sprint 0 for remainder of exercise).
    Step 2: Introduce and walk through the Backlog on the Sprint 0 tab in the Scrum Simulation Exercise.
    Step 3: Discuss and answer any questions the participants may have about the Sprint 0 tab.
    Step 4: Capture any important issues or clarifications from this discussion in the table below.

    Important issues or clarifications from the Sprint 0 tab:

    • (e.g. What is the difference between the project backlog and the product backlog?)
    • (e.g. What do we do with user stories that are bigger than our sprint velocity?)
    • (e.g. Has the project backlog been prioritized?)
    • (e.g. How do we decide what to work on first?)

    Note: Refer to the facilitator slides for more guidance on how to deliver this exercise

    Output

    • Understand Sprint 0 for Scrum Simulation Exercise

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Simulation Exercise 1.4 Review
    Sprint 0

    30-60 minutes

    1. Using the information found on the Sprint 0 tab, determine the projected timeline and cost for this project's first release:

    GIVEN

    Total Story Points in Project Backlog (First Release): 307 Story Points
    Expected Sprint Velocity: 20 Story Points/Sprint
    Total Team Size (PO, SM and 4-person Delivery Team): 6 People
    Blended Hourly Rate Per Team Member (assume 8hr day): $75/Hour
    Sprint Duration: 2 Weeks

    DETERMINE

    Expected Number of Sprints to Complete Project Backlog:
    Cost Per Sprint ($):
    Total Expected Timeline (weeks):
    Total Cost of First Release:

    Note: Refer to the facilitator slides for more guidance on how to deliver this exercise

    Output

    • How to determine expected cost and timeline for an Agile project

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    The Estimation Cone of Uncertainty

    The Estimation Cone of Uncertainty

    Simulation Exercise 1.6 Understanding minimum viable products (MVP)

    30 minutes

    1. Discuss your current understanding of MVP.

    How do you describe/define MVP?

    • (Discuss/capture your understanding of minimum viable product)

    Note: Refer to the facilitator slides for more guidance on how to deliver this exercise

    Output

    • Capture your current understanding of Minimum Viable Product

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Facilitator slides: Explaining MVP

    Notes and Instructions

    The primary intent of this exercise is to explain the complex notion of MVP (it is one of the most misunderstood and contentious issues in Agile delivery). The exercise is intended to explain it in a simple and digestible way that will fundamentally change participants' understanding of MVP.
    Note that the slide contains animations.

    Imagine that your stakeholder tells you they want a blue 4-door sedan (consider this our "MVP" at this point), and you decide to build it the traditional way. As you build it (tires, then frame, then body, then joint body with frame and install engine), the stakeholder doesn't have anything they can use, and so they are only happy (and able to get value) at the end when the entire car is finished (point out the stakeholder "faces" go from unhappy to happy in the end).

    Animation 1:
    When we use Agile methods, we don't want to wait until the end before we have something the stakeholders can use. So instead of waiting until the entire car is completed, we decide our first iteration will be to give the stakeholder "a simple (blue) wheeled transportation device"…namely a skateboard that they can use for a little while (it's not a car, but it is something the stakeholder can use to get places).

    Animation 2:
    After the stakeholder has tried out the skateboard, we ask for feedback. They tell us the skateboard helped them to get around faster than walking, but they don't like the fact that it is so hard to maintain your balance on it. So, we add a handle to the skateboard to turn it into a scooter. The stakeholder then uses the scooter for a while. stakeholder feedback says staying balanced on the scooter is much easier, but they don't have a place to put groceries when they go shopping, so can we do something about that?

    (Continued on next slide…)

    Facilitator slides: Explaining MVP

    Notes and Instructions

    Animation 3:
    So next we build the stakeholder a bicycle and let them use it for a while before asking for feedback. The stakeholder tells us they love the bicycle, but they admit they get tired on long trips, so is there something we can do about that?

    Animation 4:
    So next we add a motor to the bicycle to turn it into a motorcycle, and again we give it to the stakeholder to use for a while. When we ask the stakeholder for feedback, they tell us that they LOVE the motorcycle so much, and that because they love the feeling of the wind in their hair, they've decided that they no longer want a 4-door sedan, but instead would prefer a blue 2-door convertible.

    Animation 5:
    And so, for our last iteration, we build the stakeholder what they wanted (a blue 2-door convertible) instead of what they asked for (a blue 4-door sedan), and we see that they are happier than they would have been if we had delivered the traditional way.

    INSIGHTS:
    An MVP cannot be fully known at the beginning of a project (it is the "journey" of creating the MVP with stakeholders that defines what it looks like in the end).
    Sometimes, stakeholders don't (or can't) know what they want until they see it.
    There is no "straight path" to your MVP, you determine the path forward based on what you learned in the previous iterations.
    This approach is part of the "power of Agile" and demonstrates why Agile can produce better outcomes and happier stakeholders.

    Understanding minimum viable product

    NOT Like This:

    This is a series of images. The top half of the image, shows building a car by starting with the wheels. The bottom Image shows the progression from skateboard, to scooter, to bike, to motorcycle, to car.

    It's Like This:

    Use iterations to maximize value delivery

    An image showing how to use iterations to maximize value delivery

    Use iterations to reduce accumulated risk

    An image showing how to use iterations to reduce accumulated risk.

    Understanding MVP
    (always be ready to go live)

    A great and wise pharaoh hires two architects to build his memorial pyramids.

    An image shows two architects contribution to pyramid construction.

    Understanding MVP
    (always be ready to go live)

    Several years go by, and then…

    The pharaoh is on his death bed.

    Simulation Exercise 1.7 Plan your first sprint

    30-60 minutes

    Step 1: Divide participants into independent Scrum delivery teams (max 7-8 people per team) and assign a PO (5 minutes)
    Step 2: Instruct each team to work together to decide on their "MVP strategy" for delivering this project (10-15 minutes)
    Step 3: Have each team decide on which user stories they would put in their first sprint backlog (5-10 minutes)
    Step 4: Have each team report on their findings. (10 minutes)

    Describe your team's "MVP strategy" for this project (Explain why you chose this strategy):

    Identify your first sprint backlog (Explain how this aligns with your MVP strategy):

    What, if anything, did you find interesting, insightful or valuable by having completed this exercise:

    Output

    • Experience deciding on an MVP strategy and creating your first sprint backlog

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Simulation Exercise 1.8 Do a sprint retrospective

    30-60 minutes

    Step 1: Thinking about the work you did in Exercise 3.2.7, identify what worked well and what didn't
    Step 2: Create a list of "Start/Stop/Continue" items using the table below
    Step 3: Present your list and discuss with other teams

    1. Capture findings in the table below:

    Start:
    (What could you start doing that would make Sprint Planning work better?)

    Stop:
    (What didn't work well for the team, and so you should stop doing it?)

    Continue:
    (What worked well for the team, and so you should continue doing?)

    Output

    • Experience performing a sprint retrospective

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Simulation Exercise 1.9 "What if" exercise (understanding what a fluid backlog really means)

    30-60 minutes

    1. As a team, consider what you would do in each of the following scenarios (treat each one as an independent scenario rather than cumulative):

    Scenario:

    How would you deal with this:

    After playing with and testing the Sprint 1 deliverable, your stakeholders find several small bugs that need to be fixed, along with some minor changes they would like made to the system. The total amount of effort to address all of these is estimated to be 4 story points in total.

    (e.g. First and foremost, put these requests into the Project Backlog, then…)

    Despite your best efforts, your stakeholders tell you that your Sprint 1 deliverable missed the mark by a wide margin, and they have major changes they want to see made to it.

    Several stakeholders have come forward and stated that they feel strongly that the "DEPOSIT – Deposit a cheque by taking a photo" User Story should be part of the first release, and they would like to see it moved from the Product Backlog to the project backlog (Important Note: they don't want this to change the delivery date for the first release)

    Output

    • A better understanding of how to handle change using a fluid project backlog

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Simulation Exercise 1.10 A Sprint 1 example

    30-60 minutes

    1. Consider the following example of what your Sprint 1 deliverable could be:

    An example of what your Sprint 1 deliverable could be.

    Output

    • Better understanding of an MVP strategy

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Simulation Exercise 1.10 A Sprint 1 example

    30-60 minutes

    1. As a group, discuss this approach, including:
      1. The pros and cons of the approach.
      2. Is this a shippable increment?
      3. What more would you need to do to make it a shippable increment?
    2. Capture your findings in the table below:

    Discussion

    Output

    • Better understanding of an MVP strategy

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Simulation Exercise 1.11 Simulate more sprints

    30-60 minutes

    1. As a group, continue to simulate more sprints for the online banking app:
      1. Simulate the planning, execution, demo, and retro stages for additional sprints
      2. Stop when you have had enough
    2. Capture your learnings in the table below:

    Discussion and learnings

    Output

    • Better understanding of an MVP strategy

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Scrum Simulation Module

    Simulate effective scrum practices

    Activities

    2.1 Execute the ball passing sprints

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • Model and understand behavioral blockers and patterns affecting Agile teams and organizational culture.

    Pass the balls – sprint velocity game

    Goal 1. Pass as many balls as possible (Story Points) through the system during each sprint.
    Goal 2. Improve your estimation and velocity after each retrospective.

    Backlog

    An image of Sprint, passing balls from one individual to another until you reach the completion point.

    Points Completed

    Rules:

    1. Two people cannot touch the ball at the same time.
    2. Only the first and last person can hold more than one ball at a time.
    3. Every person on the Delivery Team must touch the ball at least once per sprint.
    4. Each team must record its results during the retrospective.

    Scoring:

    1. One point for every ball that completes the system.
    2. Minus one point for every dropped ball.

    Epic 1: 3 sprints

    1. 1-minute Planning
    2. 2-minute Sprints
    3. 1-minute Retrospective

    Group Retrospective
    Epic 2: 3 sprints (repeat)

    1. 1-minute Planning
    2. 2-minute Sprints
    3. 1-minute Retrospective

    Simulation Exercise 1.11 Simulate more sprints

    30-60 minutes

    Goal 1: Pass as many balls (Story Points) through the system during each sprint.
    Goal 2: Improve your estimation and velocity after each retrospective.

    1. Epic 1: 3 sprints
      1. 1-minute Planning
      2. 2-minute Sprints
      3. 1-minute Retrospective
    2. Group Retrospective
    3. Epic 2: 3 sprints
      1. 1-minute Planning
      2. 2-minute Sprints
      3. 1-minute Retrospective
    4. Group Retrospective
    5. Optionally repeat for additional sprints with team configurations or scenarios

    Rules:

    1. Two people cannot touch the ball at the same time.
    2. Only the first and last person can hold more than one ball at a time.
    3. Every person on the delivery team must touch the ball at least once per sprint.
    4. Each team must record its results during the retrospective.

    Scoring:

    1. One point for every ball that completes the system.
    2. Minus one point for every dropped ball.

    Output

    • Understand basic estimation, sprint, and retrospective techniques.
    • Experience common Agile behavior challenges.

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Facilitator slides: Sprint velocity game

    Goal:

    Pass as many balls as possible through the system during each cycle.

    Game Setup

    • Divide into teams of 8-16 people. If you have a smaller group, form one team rather than two smaller teams to start. The idea is to cause chaos with too many people in the delivery flow. See alternate versions for adding additional Epics with smaller teams.
    • Read out the instructions and ensure teams understand each one. Note that no assistance will be given during the sprints.

    Use your phone's timer to create 2-minute cycles:

    • 1-minute sprint planning
    • 2-minute delivery sprint
    • 1-minute retrospective and results recording
    • Run 3-4 cycles, then stop for a facilitated discussion of their observations and challenges.
    • Begin epic 2 and run for 3-4 more cycles.

    Facilitator slides: Sprint velocity game

    • Game Cycles
      • Epic 1: 3 complete cycles
      • 1-minute Planning
      • 2-minute Sprints
      • 1-minute Sprint retrospective
    • Group Retrospective
      • Discuss each sprint, challenges, and changes made to optimize throughput.
    • Epic 2: 3 complete cycles
      • 1-minute Planning
      • 2-minute Sprints
      • 1-minute Sprint retrospective
    • Group Retrospective
      • Discuss each sprint, challenges, and changes made to optimize throughput.
    • Game Rules
      • Each ball must have airtime. No ball cannot touch two people at the same time.
      • No person can hold more than one ball at a time.
      • Ball must be passed by every person on a team.
      • You may not pass a ball to a person directly to the person on your left or right.
      • Each team must keep score and record their results during the Retrospective.
    • Scoring
      • 1 point for every ball that completes the system.
      • Minus 1 point for every dropped ball.

    Facilitator slides: Sprint velocity game

    Facilitator Tips

    • Create a feeling of competition to get the teams to rush and work against each other. The goal is to show how this culture must be broken in Agile and DevOps. Then challenge the teams against natural silos and not focus on enterprise goals.
    • Create false urgency to increase stress, errors, and breakdowns in communication.
    • Look for patterns of traditional delivery and top-down management that limit delivery. These will emerge naturally, and teams will fall back into familiar patterns under stress.
    • Look for key lessons you want to reinforce and bring out ball game examples to help teams relate to something that is easier to understand.

    Alternate Versions

    • Run Epic 1 as one team, then have them break into typical Agile teams of 4-9 people. Compare results.
    • Run Epics with different goals: How would their approach change?
      • Fastest delivery
      • Highest production
      • Lowest defect rate
    • Have teams assign a scrum master to coordinate delivery. A scrum master and product owner are part of the overall team, but not part of the delivery team. They would not need to pass balls during each sprint.
    • Increase sprint time. Discuss right sizing sprint to complete work.
    • Give each team different numbers of balls, but don't tell them. Alternately, start each team with half as many balls, then double for Epic 2. Discuss how the sprint backlog affected their throughput.

    Facilitator slides: Sprint velocity game

    Trends to Look For and Discuss

    • False constraints - patterns where teams unnecessarily limited themselves.
    • Larger teams could have divided into smaller working teams, passing the balls between working groups.
    • Instructions did not limit that "team" meant everyone in the group. They could have formed smaller groups to process more work. LEAN
    • Using the first sprint for planning only. More time to create a POC.
    • Teams will start communicating but will grow silent, especially in later sprints. Stress interactions over the process.
    • Borrowing best practices from other teams.
    • Using retrospectives to share ideas with other teams. Stress needs to align with the company's goals, not just the team's goals.
    • How did they treat dropped balls? Rejected as errors, started over (false constraint), or picked up and continued?

    Trends to Look For and Discuss

    • Did individuals dominate the planning and execution, or did everyone feel like an equal member of the team?
    • Did they consider assigning a scrum master? The scrum master and product owner are part of the overall team, but not part of the Delivery Team. They would not need to pass balls during each Sprint.
    • What impacted their expected number of balls completed? Did it help improve quality or was it a distraction?
    • What caused their improvement in velocity? Draw the connection between how teams must work together and the need for stability.
    • Discuss the overall goal and constraints. Did they understand what the desired outcome was? Where did they make assumptions? Add talking points:
      • What if the goal was overall completed balls?
      • What if it was zero defect? No dropped balls.
      • What if it was the fastest delivery? Each ball through the system in the shortest time? Were they timing each ball?

    Scrum Simulation Module

    Simulate effective scrum practices

    Activities

    3.1 Identify key insights and takeaways

    3.2 Perform exit survey and capture results

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • Identify your key insights and takeaways

    Simulation Exercise 3.1
    Identify key insights and takeaways

    30 minutes

    1. As a group, discuss and capture your thoughts on:
      1. What key insights have participants gained from the Intro to Agile presentation?
      2. What if any takeaways do participants feel are needed as a result of the presentation?
      3. What changes need to be made in the organization to support/enhance Agile adoption?
    2. Capture your findings in the table below:

    What key insights have you gained?

    What takeaways have you identified?

    • (e.g. better understanding of Agile mindset, principles, and practices)
    • (e.g. how you can improve/spread Agile practices in the organization)

    Output

    • A better understanding of Agile principles and practices
    • Action items that will help solidify Agile practices in the organization

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Simulation Exercise 3.2
    Perform an exit survey

    30 minutes

    1. Wrap up this section by addressing any remaining questions participants still have.
    2. Create your local exit survey by copying the template using the link below. Then copy and distribute your local survey link.
    3. Collect the consolidated survey results in preparation for your next steps.
    4. NOTE: Using this survey template requires having access to Microsoft Forms. If you cannot access Microsoft Forms, an Info-Tech analyst can send the survey for you. Alternatively, this survey can be done with sticky notes and a pen and paper to calculate the outcomes.

    Download Survey Template:

    Develop Your Agile Approach Exit Survey Template

    Output

    • A better understanding of Agile principles and practices
    • Action items that will help solidify Agile practices in the organization

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Agile Modules

    Prioritize Agile support with your top challenges

    Backlog Management

    Scrum Simulation

    Estimation

    Product Owner

    Product Roadmapping

    1: User stories and the art of decomposition

    2: Effective backlog management & refinement

    3: Identify insights and team feedback

    1: Scrum sprint planning and retrospective simulation

    2: Pass the balls – sprint velocity game

    1: Improve product backlog item estimation

    2: Agile estimation fundamentals

    3: Understand the wisdom of crowds

    4: Identify insights and team feedback

    1: Understand product management fundamentals

    2: The critical role of the product owner

    3: Manage effective product backlogs and roadmaps

    4: Identify insights and team feedback

    1: Identify your product roadmapping pains

    2: The six "tools" of product roadmapping

    3: Product roadmapping exercise

    Organizations often struggle with numerous pain points around Agile delivery.
    The Common Agile Challenges Survey results will help you identify and prioritize the organization's biggest (most cited) pain points. Treat these pain points like a backlog and address the biggest ones first.

    Agile modules provide supporting activities:

    Each module provides guidance and supporting activities related to a specific Agile Challenge from your survey. These modules can be arranged to meet each organization's or team's needs while providing cohesive and consistent messaging. For additional supporting research, please visit the Agile / DevOps Resource Center.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Estimation Module

    Improve product backlog item estimation

    Activities

    1.1 Identify your estimation pains

    1.2 (Optional) Why do we estimate?

    1.3 How do you estimate now?

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • A better understanding of Agile estimation practices and how to apply them.

    Establish consistent Agile estimation fundamentals

    an image of a hierarchy answering the question What is an estimate.

    Know the truth about estimates and their potential pitfalls.

    Then, understand how Agile estimation works to avoid these pitfalls.

    Estimation Exercise 1.1 Identify your estimation pains

    30-60 minutes

    1. As a group, discuss and capture your thoughts on:
      1. What specific challenges are you facing with your estimation practices today
      2. Capture your findings in the table below:

    What are your specific Estimation challenges?

    • (e.g. We don't estimate consistently)
    • (e.g. Our estimates are usually off by a large margin)
    • (e.g. We're not sure what approach to use when estimating)

    Output

    • Your specific estimation related challenges

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Estimation Exercise 1.2 (Optional) Why do we estimate?

    30 minutes

    1. As a group, discuss and capture your thoughts on:
      1. Why do we do estimates?
      2. What value/merit do estimates have?
    2. Capture your findings in the table below:

    Why would/should you do estimates?

    • (e.g. Our stakeholders need to know how long it will take to deliver a given feature/function)

    Output

    • Better understanding of the need for estimates

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Estimation Exercise 1.2 (Optional) Why do we estimate?

    30 minutes

    1. Estimation has its merits
    2. Here are some sample reasons for estimates:
      • "Estimates allow us to predict when a sprint goal will be met, and therefore when a substantial increment of value will be delivered."
      • "Our estimates help our stakeholders plan ahead. They are part of the value we provide."
      • "Estimates help us to de-risk scope of uncertain size and complexity."
      • "Estimated work can be traded in and out of scope for other work of similar size. Without estimates, you can't trade."
      • "The very process of estimation adds value. When we estimate we discuss requirements in more detail and gain a better understanding of what is needed."
      • "Demonstrates IT's commitment to delivering valuable products and changes."
      • "Supports business ambitions with customers and stakeholders."
      • "Helps to build a sustainable value-delivery cadence."

    Source: DZone, 2013.

    Output

    • Better understanding of the need for estimates

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Estimation Exercise 1.3 How do you estimate now?

    30 minutes

    1. As a group, speak about now you currently estimate in your organization.
    2. Capture your findings in the table below:

    Why would/should you do estimates?

    • (e.g. We don't do estimates)
    • (e.g. We ask the person assigned to each task in the project plan to estimate how long it will take)

    Output

    • Your current estimation approach

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Estimation Module

    Improve product backlog item estimation

    Activities

    2.1 (Optional) Estimate a real PBI

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • A better understanding of Agile estimation practices and how to apply them.

    Don't expect your estimates to be accurate!

    The average rough order of magnitude estimates for software are off by is up to 400%.
    Source: Boehm, 1981

    Estimate inaccuracy has many serious repercussions on the project and organization

    66%

    Average cost overrun(1)

    33%

    Average schedule overrun (1)

    17%

    Average benefits shortfall)1)

    (1) % of software projects with given issue

    Source: McKinsey & Company, 2012

    The Estimation Cone of Uncertainty

    The Estimation Cone of Uncertainty

    What is Agile estimation?

    There is no single Agile estimation technique. When selecting an approach, adopt an Agile estimation technique that works for your organization, and don't be afraid to adapt it to your circumstances. Remember: all estimates are wrong, so use them with care and skepticism.

    • Understands and accepts the limitations of any estimation process.
    • Leverages good practices to counteract these limitations (e.g. wisdom of crowds, quality-first thinking).
    • Doesn't over-invest in individual estimate accuracy (but sees their value "in aggregate").
    • Approach can change from project to project or team to team and evolves/matures over the project lifespan.
    • Uses the estimation process as an effective tool to:
      • Make commitments about what can be accomplished in a sprint (to establish capacity).
      • Convey a measure of progress and rough expected completion dates to stakeholders (including management).

    Info-Tech Insight

    All estimates are wrong, but some can be useful (leverage the "wisdom of crowds" to improve your estimation practices).

    There are many Agile estimation techniques to choose from…

    Consensus-Building Techniques
    Planning Poker

    Most popular by far (stick with one of these unless there is a good reason to consider others)

    This approach uses the Delphi method, where a group collectively estimates the size of a PBI, or user stories, with cards numbered by story points. See our Estimate Software Delivery With Confidence blueprint.

    T-Shirt Sizing

    This approach involves collaboratively estimating PBIs against a non-numerical system (e.g. small, medium, large). See DZone and C# Corner for more information.

    Dot Voting

    This approach involves giving participants a set number of dot stickers or marks and voting on the PBIs (and options) to deliver. See Dotmocracy and Wikipedia for more information.

    Bucket System

    This approach categorizes PBIs by placing them into defined buckets, which can then be further broken down through dividing and conquering. See Agile Advice and Crisp's Blog for more information.

    Affinity Mapping

    This approach involves the individual sizing and sorting of PBIs, and then the order of these PBIs are collaboratively edited. The grouping is then associated with numerical estimates or buckets if desired. See Getting Agile for more information.

    Ordering Method

    This approach involves randomly ordering items on a scale ranging from low to high. Each member will take turns moving an item one spot lower or higher where it seems appropriate. See Apiumhub, Sheidaei Blog (variant), and SitePoint (Relative Mass Valuation) for more information.

    Ensure your teams have the right information

    Estimate accuracy and consistency improve when it is clear what you are estimating (definition of ready) and what it means to complete the PBI (definition of done).
    Be sure to establish and enforce your definition of ready/done throughout the project.

    Ready

    Done
    • The value of the story to the user is indicated.
    • The acceptance criteria for the story have been clearly described.
    • Person who will accept the user story is identified.
    • The team knows how to demo the story…
    • Design complete, code compiles, static code analysis has been performed and passed.
    • Peer reviewed with coding standards passed.
    • Unit test and smoke test are done/functional (preferably automated).
    • Passes functionality testing including security testing…

    What are story points?

    Many organizations use story point sizing to estimate their PBIs
    (e.g. epics, features, user stories, and tasks)

    • A story point is a (unitless) measure of the relative size, complexity, risk, and uncertainty, of a PBI.
    • Story points do not correspond to the exact number of hours it will take to complete the PBI.
    • When using story points, think about them in terms of their size relative to one another.
    • The delivery team's sprint velocity and capacity should also be tracked in story points.

    How do you assign a point value to a user story? There is no easy answer outside of leveraging the experience of the team. Sizes are based on relative comparisons to other PBIs or previously developed items. Example: "This user story is 3 points because it is expected to take 3 times more effort than that 1-point user story."Therefore, the measurement of a story point is only defined through the team's experience, as the team matures.

    Can you equate a point to a unit of time? First and foremost, for the purposes of backlog prioritization, you don't need to know the time, just its size relative to other PBIs. For sprint planning, release planning, or any scenario where timing is a factor, you will need to have a reasonably accurate sprint capacity determined. Again, this comes down to experience.

    "Planning poker" estimation technique

    Leverage the wisdom of crowds to improve your estimates

    an image of the user story points and the Fibonacci sequence

    Planning poker: This approach uses the Delphi method, where a group collectively estimates the size of a PBI or user story, using cards with story points on them.

    Materials: Each participant has deck of cards, containing the numbers of the Fibonacci sequence.

    Typical Participants: Product owner, scrum master (usually acts as facilitator), delivery team.

    Steps:

    1. The facilitator will select a user story.
    2. The product owner answers any questions about the user story from the group.
    3. The group makes their first round of estimates, where each participant individually selects a card without showing it to anyone, and then all selections are revealed at once.
    4. If there is consensus, the facilitator records the estimate and moves onto step 1 for another user story.
    5. If there are discrepancies, the participants should state their case for their selection (especially high or low outliers) and engage in constructive debate.
    6. The group makes an additional round of estimates, where step 3-6 are completed until there is a reasonable consensus.
    7. If the consensus is the user story is too large to fit into a sprint or too poorly defined, then the user story should be decomposed or rewritten.

    Estimation Exercise 2.1 (Optional) Estimate a real PBI

    30-60 minutes

    Step 1: As a group, select a real epic, feature, or user story from one of your project backlogs which needs to be estimated:

    PBI to be Estimated:

    As a ____ I want _____ so that ______

    Step 2: Select one person in your group to act as the product owner and discuss/question the details of the selected PBI to improve your collective understanding of the requirement (the PO will do their best to explain the PBI and answer any questions).
    Step 3: Make your first round of estimates using either T-shirt sizing or the Fibonacci sequence. Be sure to agree on the boundaries for these estimates (e.g. "extra-small" (XS) is any work that can be completed in less than an hour, while "extra-large" (XL) is anything that would take a single person a full sprint to deliver – a similar approach could be used for Fibonacci where a "1" is less than an hour's work, and "21" might be a single person for a full sprint). Don't share your answer until everyone has had a chance to decide on their Estimate value for the PBI.
    Step 4: Have everyone share their chosen estimate value and briefly explain their reasoning for the estimate. If most estimate values are the same/similar, allow the group to decide whether they have reached a "collective agreement" on the estimate. If not, repeat step 3 now that everyone has had a chance to explain their initial Estimate.
    Step 5: Capture the "collective" estimate for the PBI here:

    Our collective estimate for this PBI:

    e.g. 8 story points

    Output

    • A real PBI from your project backlog which has estimated using planning poker

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Estimation Module

    Improve product backlog item estimation

    Activities

    3.1 Guess the number of jelly beans (Round 1) (15 minutes)
    3.2 Compare the average of your guesses (15 minutes)
    3.3 Guess the number of gumballs (Round 2) (15 minutes)
    3.4 Compare your guesses against the actual number

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • A better understanding of why Agile estimation and reconciliation provides reliable estimates for planning.

    Facilitator Slides: Agile Estimation (Wisdom of Crowds Exercise – Rounds 1 and 2)

    Notes and Instructions

    The exercise is intended to mimic the way Planning Poker is performed in Agile Estimation. Use the exercise to demonstrate the power of the Wisdom of Crowds and how, in circumstances where the exact answer to a question is not known, asking several people for their opinion often produces more accurate results than most/any individual opinion.

    Some participants will tend to "shout out an answer" right away, so be sure to tell participants not to share their answers until everyone has had an opportunity to register their guess (this is particularly important in Round 1, where we are trying to get unvarnished guesses from the participants).

    In Round 1:

    • Be sure to emphasize that participants are guessing the total number of jelly beans in the jar (sometimes people think it is just the number visible)
    • Once all guesses are gathered and you've calculated the error for them (and the average guess), review the results with participants (Note: the actual number of jelly beans in the jar is 1600 (it is "greyed out" on the bottom line of the table – you can make it visible by turning off the grey highlight on that cell in the table)
    • Most of the time, the average guess will be closer to the actual than most (if not all) individual guesses (but be prepared for the fact that this doesn't always happen – this is especially true when the number of participants is small)
    • When discussing the results, ask participants to share the "method" they used to make their guess (particularly those who were closest to the actual). This part of the exercise can help them to make more accurate guesses in Round 2

    In Round 2:

    • Note that this time, participants are guessing the total number of visible gumballs in the image (both whole and partial gumballs are counted)
    • Once all guesses are gathered and you've calculated the error for them (and the average guess), review the results with participants (Note: the actual number of visible gumballs is 1600 (it is "greyed out" on the bottom line of the table – you can make it visible by turning off the grey highlight on that cell in the table)
    • Most of the time, the average guess will be closer to the actual in Round 2 than it was in Round 1
    • Talk to participants about the outcomes and how the results varied from Round 1 to Round 2, along with any interesting insights they may have gained from the exercise

    Estimation Exercise 3.1 Guess the number of jelly beans (Round 1)

    15 minutes

    1. Option 1: Microsoft Forms
      1. Create your own local survey by copying the template using the link below.
      2. Add the local Survey link to the exercise instructions or send the link to the participants.
      3. Give the participants 2-3 minutes to complete their guesses.
      4. Collect the consolidated Survey responses and calculate the results on the next slide.
      5. NOTE: Using this survey template requires having access to Microsoft Forms. If you cannot access Microsoft Forms, an Info-Tech analyst or Workshop Specialist can set up the survey for you.
    2. Option 2: Embedded Excel table
      1. On the results slide, double-click the table to open the embedded Excel worksheet.
      2. Record each participant's guess in the table.
    3. Alternatively, this survey can be done with sticky notes, a pen, paper, and a calculator to determine the outcomes.

    Download Survey Template:

    Info-Tech Wisdom of the Crowd 1 (Jelly Bean Guess

    Output

    • An appreciation for the power of the wisdom of crowds

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Estimation Exercise 3.1 Guess the number of jelly beans (Round 1)

    15 minutes

    1. Guess the total number of jelly beans in the entire container (not just the ones you can see).
    2. Be sure not to share your guess with anyone else.
    3. It doesn't matter how you settle on your guess ("gut feel" is fine, so is being "scientific" about it, as well as everything in between).
    4. Again, please don't share your guess (or even how you settled on your guess) with anyone else (this exercise relies on independent guesses).

    See slide notes for instructions.

    Output

    • An appreciation for the power of the wisdom of crowds

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Estimation Exercise 3.2 Compare the average of your guesses

    15 minutes

    A blank table for you to compare the average of your guesses at the number of Jellybeans in the Jar.

    See slide notes for instructions.

    Output

    • An appreciation for the power of the wisdom of crowds

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Guess the number of gumballs

    • Option 1: Microsoft Forms
      • Create your own local survey by copying the template using the link below.
      • Add the local Survey link to the exercise instructions or send the link to the participants.
      • Give the participants 2-3 minutes to complete their guesses.
      • Collect the consolidated Survey responses and calculate the results on the next slide.
      • NOTE: Using this survey template requires having access to Microsoft Forms. If you cannot access Microsoft Forms, an Info-Tech analyst or Workshop Specialist can set up the survey for you.
    • Option 2: Embedded Excel table
      • On the results slide, double-click the table to open the embedded Excel worksheet.
      • Record each participant's guess in the table.
    • Alternatively, this survey can be done with sticky notes, a pen, paper, and a calculator to determine the outcomes.

    Download Survey Template:

    Info-Tech Wisdom of the Crowd 2 (Gumball Guess)

    Output

    • An appreciation for the power of the wisdom of crowds

    Participants

    • PM's, PO's and SM's
    • Delivery Managers
    • Delivery Teams
    • Business Stakeholders
    • Senior Leaders
    • Other Interested Parties

    Estimation Exercise 3.3 Guess the number of gumballs (Round 2)

    15 minutes

    1. Guess the total number of gumballs visible in the photo shown on the right.
    2. Again, please don't share your guess with anyone.

    Output

    • An appreciation for the power of the wisdom of crowds

    Participants

    • PM's, PO's and SM's
    • Delivery Managers
    • Delivery Teams
    • Business Stakeholders
    • Senior Leaders
    • Other Interested Parties

    Estimation Exercise 3.2 Compare the average of your guesses

    15 minutes

    A blank table for you to compare the average of your guesses at the number of Jellybeans in the Jar.

    See slide notes for instructions.

    Output

    • An appreciation for the power of the wisdom of crowds

    Participants

    • PM's, PO's and SM's
    • Delivery Managers
    • Delivery Teams
    • Business Stakeholders
    • Senior Leaders
    • Other Interested Parties

    Estimation Module

    Improve product backlog item estimation

    Activities

    4.1 Identify key insights and takeaways
    4.2 Perform exit survey and capture results

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • Identify your key insights and takeaways.

    Estimation Exercise 4.2
    Identify key insights and takeaways

    30 minutes

    1. As a group, discuss and capture your thoughts on:
      1. What key insights have participants gained from the Intro to Agile presentation?
      2. What if any takeaways do participants feel are needed as a result of the presentation?
      3. What changes need to be made in the organization to support/enhance Agile adoption?
    2. Capture your findings in the table below:

    What key insights have you gained?

    What takeaways have you identified?

    • (e.g. better understanding of Agile mindset, principles, and practices)
    • (e.g. how you can improve/spread Agile practices in the organization)

    Output

    • A better understanding of Agile principles and practices
    • Action items that will help solidify Agile practices in the organization

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Estimation Exercise 4.2
    Perform an exit survey

    30 minutes

    1. Wrap up this section by addressing any remaining questions participants still have.
    2. Create your local exit survey by copying the template using the link below. Then copy and distribute your local survey link.
    3. Collect the consolidated survey results in preparation for your next steps.
    4. NOTE: Using this survey template requires having access to Microsoft Forms. If you cannot access Microsoft Forms, an Info-Tech analyst can send the survey for you. Alternatively, this survey can be done with sticky notes and a pen and paper to calculate the outcomes.

    Download Survey Template:

    Develop Your Agile Approach Exit Survey Template

    Output

    • A better understanding of Agile principles and practices
    • Action items that will help solidify Agile practices in the organization

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Agile Modules

    Prioritize Agile support with your top challenges

    Backlog Management

    Scrum Simulation

    Estimation

    Product Owner

    Product Roadmapping

    1: User stories and the art of decomposition

    2: Effective backlog management & refinement

    3: Identify insights and team feedback

    1: Scrum sprint planning and retrospective simulation

    2: Pass the balls – sprint velocity game

    1: Improve product backlog item estimation

    2: Agile estimation fundamentals

    3: Understand the wisdom of crowds

    4: Identify insights and team feedback

    1: Understand product management fundamentals

    2: The critical role of the product owner

    3: Manage effective product backlogs and roadmaps

    4: Identify insights and team feedback

    1: Identify your product roadmapping pains

    2: The six "tools" of product roadmapping

    3: Product roadmapping exercise

    Organizations often struggle with numerous pain points around Agile delivery.
    The Common Agile Challenges Survey results will help you identify and prioritize the organization's biggest (most cited) pain points. Treat these pain points like a backlog and address the biggest ones first.

    Agile modules provide supporting activities:

    Each module provides guidance and supporting activities related to a specific Agile Challenge from your survey. These modules can be arranged to meet each organization's or team's needs while providing cohesive and consistent messaging. For additional supporting research, please visit the Agile / DevOps Resource Center.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Product Owner Module

    Establish an effective product owner role

    Activities

    1.1 Identify your product owner pains
    1.2 What is a "product"? Who are your "consumers"?
    1.3 Define your role terminology

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • Understand product management fundamentals.
    • Define your product management roles and terms.

    Product owners ensure we delivery the right changes, for the right people, at the right time.

    The importance of assigning an effective and empowered product owner to your Agile projects cannot be overstated.

    What is a product?

    A tangible solution, tool, or service (physical or digital), which enables the long-term and evolving delivery of value to customers, and stakeholders based on business and user requirements.

    Info-Tech Insight

    A proper definition of a product recognizes three key facts.

    1. A clear recognition that products are long-term endeavors that don't end after the project finishes.
    2. Products are not just 'apps', but can be software or services that drive value.
    3. There is more than one stakeholder group that derives value from the product or service.

    Estimation Exercise 4.2
    Perform an exit survey

    30-60 minutes

    1. As a group, discuss and capture your thoughts on:
      • What specific challenges are you facing with your product owner practices today?
    2. Capture your findings in the table below:

    What are your specific Product Owner challenges?

    • (e.g. We don't have product owners)
    • (e.g. Our product owners have "day jobs" as well, so they don't have enough time to devote to the project)
    • (e.g. Our product owners are unsure about the role and its associated responsibilities)

    Output

    • Your specific product owner challenges

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Product Owner Exercise 1.2 What is a "product"? Who are your "consumers"?

    30-60 minutes

    1. Discussion:
      1. How do you define a product, service, or application?
      2. Who are the consumers that receive value from the product?

    Input

    • Organizational knowledge
    • Internal terms and definitions

    Output

    • Our definition of products and services
    • Our definition of product and service consumers/customers

    Products and services share the same foundation and best practices

    The term "product" is used for consistency but would apply to services as well.

    Product=Service

    "Product" and "Service" are terms that each organization needs to define to fit its culture and customers (internal and external). The most important aspect is consistent use and understanding of:

    • External products
    • Internal products
    • External services
    • Internal services
    • Products as a service (PaaS)
    • Productizing services (SaaS)

    Recognize the different product owner perspectives

    • Business
      • Customer facing, revenue generating
    • Operations
      • Keep the lights on processes
    • Technical
      • IT systems and tools

    "A product owner in its most beneficial form acts like an Entrepreneur, like a 'mini-CEO'. The product owner is someone who really 'owns' the product."

    – – Robbin Schuurman,
    "Tips for Starting Technical Product Managers"

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Product owners must translate needs and constraints from their perspective into the language of their audience. Kathy Borneman, Digital Product Owner at SunTrust Bank, noted the challenges of finding a common language between lines of business and IT (e.g. what is a unit?).

    Implement Info-Tech's product owner capability model

    An image of Info-Tech’s product owner capability model

    Unfortunately, most product owners operate with an incomplete knowledge of the skills and capabilities needed to perform the role. Common gaps include focusing only on product backlogs, acting as a proxy for product decisions, and ignoring the need for key performance indicators (KPIs) and analytics in both planning and value realization.

    Scale products into families to improve alignment

    Operationally align product delivery to enterprise goals

    A hierarchy showing how to break enterprise goals and strategy down into product families.

    The Info-Tech difference:

    Start by piloting product families to determine which approaches work best for your organization.

    Create a common definition of what a product is and identify products in your inventory.

    Use scaling patterns to build operationally aligned product families.

    Develop a roadmap strategy to align families and products to enterprise goals and priorities.

    Use products and families to evaluate the delivery and organizational design improvements.

    Deliver Digital Products at Scale via Enterprise Product Families

    Select the right models for scaling product management

    • Pyramid
      • Logical hierarchy of products rolling into a single service area.
      • Lower levels of the pyramid focus on more discrete services.
      • Example: Human resources mapping down to supporting applications.
    • Service Grouping
      • Organization of related services into service family.
      • Direct hierarchy does not necessarily exist within the family.
      • Example: End user support and ticketing.
    • Technical Grouping
      • Logical grouping of IT infrastructure, platforms, or applications.
      • Provides full lifecycle management when hierarchies do not exist.
      • Example: Workflow and collaboration tools.
    • Market Alignment
      • Grouping of products by customer segments or market strategy.
      • Aligns product to end users and consumers.
      • Example: Customer banking products and services.
    • Organizational Alignment
      • Used at higher levels of the organization where products are aligned under divisions.
      • Separation of product management from organizational structure no longer distinct.

    Match your product management role definitions to your product family levels

    Product Ownership exists at the different operational tiers or levels in your product hierarchy. This does not imply or require a management relationship.

    Product Portfolio
    Groups of product families within an overall value stream or capability grouping.
    Product Portfolio Manager

    Product Family
    A collection of related products. Products can be grouped along architectural, functional, operational, or experiential patterns.
    Product Family Manager

    Product
    Single product composed of one or more applications and services.
    Product Owner

    Info-Tech Insight

    The primary role conflict occurs when the product owner is a proxy for stakeholders or responsible for the delivery team. The product owner owns the product backlog. The delivery team owns the sprint backlog and delivery.

    Examine the differences between product managers and product owners

    Product management terminology is inconsistent, creating confusion in organizations introducing these roles. Understand the roles, then define terms that work best for you.

    A Table comparing the different roles of product managers to those of product owners.

    Define who manages key milestone

    Key milestones must be proactively managed. If a project manager is not available, those responsibilities need to be managed by the Product Owner or Scrum Master. Start with responsibility mapping to decide which role will be responsible.

    An image of a table with the following column headings: Example Milestones; Project Manager; Product Owner; Scrum Master*

    Product Owner Exercise 1.3 Define your role terminology

    30-60 minutes

    1. Using consistent terms is important for any organizational change and evergreen process. Capture your preferred terms to help align teams and expectations.
    Term

    Definition

    Product Owner

    • Owns and manages the product or service providing continuous delivery of value.
    • Owns the product roadmap and backlog for the product or service.
    • Works with stakeholders, end users, the delivery team, and market research to identify the product features and their estimated return on investment when implemented.
    • Responsible for refining and reprioritizing the product backlog ensuring items are "Ready" for the sprint backlog.
    • Defines KPIs to measure the value and impact of each PBI to help refine the backlog and guide the roadmap.
    • Responsible for refining and reprioritizing the sprint backlog that identifies which features will be delivered in the next sprint based on business importance.
    • Works with the product owner, stakeholders, end users, and SMEs to help define PBIs to ensure they are "Ready" for the Sprint backlog.

    Product Manager

    • Owns and manages a product or service family consisting of multiple products or services.
    • Owns the product family roadmap. Note: Product families do not have a backlog, only products do.
    • Works with stakeholders, end users, product owners, enterprise architecture, and market research to identify the product capabilities needed to accomplish goals.
    • Validates the product PBIs delivered realized the expected value and capability. Feedback is used to refine the product family roadmap and guide product owners.

    Output

    • Product management role definitions

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Product Owner Module

    Establish an effective product owner role

    Activities

    2.1 Identify enablers and blockers

    2.2 (Optional) Dissect this definition of the product owner role

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • Identify cultural enablers and blockers for product owners.
    • Develop a deeper understanding of the product owner role.

    The importance of establishing an effective product owner role

    The critical importance of establishing an effective product owner role (PO) for your Agile projects cannot be overstated.

    Many new-to-Agile organizations do not fully appreciate the critical role played by the PO in Scrum, nor the fundamental changes the organization will need to make in support of the PO role. Both mistakes will reduce an organization's chances of successfully adopting Agile and achieving its promised benefits.

    The PO role is critical to the proper prioritization of requirements and efficient decision-making during the project.

    The PO role helps the organization to avoid "analysis paralysis" challenges often experienced in large command-and-control-style organizations.

    A poorly chosen or disengaged product owner will almost certainly stifle your Agile project.

    Note that for many organizations, "product owner" is not a formally recognized role, which can create HR issues. Some organizational education on Agile may be needed (especially if your organization is unionized).

    Info-Tech Insight

    Failing to establish effective product owners in your organization can be a "species-killing event" for your Agile transformation.

    The three A's of a product owner

    To ensure the effectiveness of a product owner, your organization should select one that meets the three A's:

    Available: Assign a PO that can focus full-time on the project. Make sure your PO can dedicate the time needed to fulfill this critical role.
    Appropriate: It's best for the PO to have strong subject matter expertise (so-called "super users" are often selected to be POs) as well as strong communication, collaboration, facilitation, and arbitration skills. A good PO will understand how to negotiate the best outcomes for the project, considering all project constraints.
    Authoritative: The PO must be empowered by your organization to speak authoritatively about priorities and goals and be able to answer questions from the project team quickly and efficiently. The PO must know when decisions can be made immediately and when they must be made in collaboration with other stakeholders – choosing a PO that is well-known and respected by stakeholders will help to make this more efficient.

    Info-Tech Insight

    It's critical to assign a PO that meets the three A's:

    • Available
    • Appropriate
    • Authoritative

    The three ears of a product owner*

    An effective product owner listens to (and effectively balances) the needs and constraints of three different groups:

    Organizational needs/constraints represent what is most important to the organization overall, and typically revolve around things like cost, schedule, return on investment, time to market, risk mitigation, conforming to policies and regulations, etc.

    Stakeholder needs/constraints represent what is most important to those who will be using the system and typically revolve around the delivery of value, ease of use, better outcomes, making their jobs easier and more efficient, getting what they ask for, etc.

    Delivery Team needs/constraints represent what is most important to those who are tasked with delivering the project and cover a broad range that includes tools, skills, capabilities, technology limitations, capacity limits, adequate testing, architectural considerations, sustainable workload, clear direction and requirements, opportunities to innovate, getting sufficient input and feedback, support for clearing roadblocks, dependencies on other teams, etc.

    Info-Tech Insight

    An effective PO will expertly balance the needs of:

    • The organization
    • Project stakeholders
    • The delivery team

    * For more, see Understanding Scrum: Why do Product Owners Have Three Ears

    A product owner doesn't act alone

    Although the PO plays a unique and central role in the success of an Agile project, it doesn't mean they "act alone."

    The PO is ultimately responsible for managing and maintaining an effective backlog over the project lifecycle, but many people contribute to maintaining this backlog (on large projects, BA's are often the primary contributors to the backlog).

    The PO role also relies heavily on stakeholders (to help define and elaborate user stories, provide input and feedback, answer questions, participate in sprint demos, participate in testing of sprint deliverables, etc.).

    The PO role also relies heavily on the delivery team. Some backlog management and story elaboration is done by delivery team members instead of the PO (think: elaborating user story details, creating acceptance criteria, writing test plans for user stories, etc.).

    The PO both contributes to these efforts and leads/oversees the efforts of others. The exact mix of "doing" and "leading" can be different on a case-by-case basis and is part of establishing the delivery team's norms.

    Given the importance of the role, care must be taken to not overburden the product owner, especially on large projects.

    Info-Tech Insight

    While being ultimately responsible for the product backlog, a PO often relies on others to aid in backlog management and maintenance.

    This is particularly true on large projects.

    The use of a proxy PO

    Sometimes, a proxy product owner is needed.

    It is always best to assign a product owner "from the business," who will bring subject matter expertise and have established relationships with stakeholders.

    When a PO from the business does not have enough time to fulfill the needs of the role completely (e.g. can only be a part-time PO, because they have a day job), assigning a proxy product owner can help to compensate for this.

    The proxy PO acts on behalf of the PO in order to reduce the PO's workload or to otherwise support them.

    Project participants (e.g. delivery team, stakeholders) should treat the PO and proxy PO as roughly equivalent.

    Project managers (PMs) and business analysts (BAs) are often good candidates for the proxy PO role.

    NOTE: It's highly advisable for the PO to attend all/most sprint demos in order to observe progress for themselves, and to identify any misalignment with expectations as early as possible (remember that the PO still has ultimate responsibility for the project outcomes).

    Info-Tech Insight

    Although not ideal, assigning a proxy PO can help to compensate for a PO who doesn't meet all three A's of Product Ownership.

    It is up to the PO and proxy to decide how they will work together (e.g. establish their norms).

    The use of a proxy PO

    The PO and proxy must work together closely and in a highly coordinated way.

    The PO and proxy must:

    • Work closely at the start of the project to agree on the overall approach they will follow, as well as any needs and constraints for the project.
    • Communicate frequently and effectively throughout the project, to ensure progress is being made and to address any challenges.
    • Have a "meeting of the minds" about how the different "parts" of the PO role will be divided between them (including when the proxy must defer to the PO on matters).
    • Focus on ensuring that all the responsibilities of the PO role are fulfilled effectively by the pair (how this is accomplished is up to the two of them to decide).
    • Ensure all project participants clearly understand the POs' and proxies' relative responsibilities to minimize confusion and mistakes.

    The use of multiple POs

    Sometimes, having multiple product owners makes sense.

    It is always best to assign a single product owner to a project. However, under certain circumstances, it can make sense to use multiple POs.

    For example, when implementing a large ERP system with many distinct modules (e.g. Finance, HR) it can be difficult to find a single PO who has sufficient subject matter expertise across all modules.

    When assigning Multiple POs to a project, be sure to identify a "Lead PO" (who is given ultimate responsibility for the entire project) and have the remaining POs act like Proxy POs.

    NOTE: Not surprisingly, it's highly advisable for the Lead PO to attend as many Sprint Demos as possible to observe progress for themselves, and to identify any misalignment with expectations as early as possible (remember that the Lead PO has ultimate responsibility for the project outcomes).

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Although not ideal, assigning multiple POs to a project sometimes makes sense.

    When needed, be sure to identify a "Lead PO" and have the other PO's act like Proxies.

    Product Owner Exercise 2.1 Identify enablers and blockers

    30-60 minutes

    1. Brainstorm and discuss the key enablers that can help promote and ease your implementation of Product Ownership.
    2. Brainstorm and discuss the key blockers (or risks) that may interrupt or derail your efforts.
    3. Brainstorm mitigation activities for each blocker.
    Enablers Blockers Mitigation
    High business engagement and buy-in Significant time is required to implement and train resources Limit the scope for pilot project to allow time to learn
    Organizational acceptance for change Geographically distributed resources Temporarily collocate all resources and acquire virtual communication technology
    Existing tools can be customized for BRM Difficulty injecting customers in demos Educate customer groups on the importance of attendance and 'what's in it for them'

    Output

    • List of enablers and blockers to establishing product owners

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Establish an effective product owner role

    • The nature of a PO role can be somewhat foreign to many organizations, so candidates for the role will benefit from training along with coaching/mentoring support when starting out.
    • The PO must be able to make decisions quickly around project priorities, goals, and requirements.
    • A PO who is simply a conduit to a slow-moving steering committee will stifle an Agile project.
    • Establish clear boundaries and rules regarding which project decisions can be made directly by the PO and which must be escalated to stakeholders. Lean toward approaches that support the quickest decision-making (e.g. give the PO as much freedom as they need to be effective).
    • An effective PO has a good instinct for what is "good enough for now."
    • The organization can support the PO by focusing attention on goals and accomplishments rather than pushing processes and documentation.
    • Understand the difference between a project sponsor and a PO (the PO role is much more involved in the details, with a higher workload).
    • Agree on and clearly define the roles and responsibilities of PO, PM, dev manager, SM, etc. at the start of the project for clarity and efficiency.

    Characteristics to look for when selecting a product owner

    Here are some "ideal characteristics" for your POs (the more of these that are true for a given PO, the better):

    • Knows how to get things done in your organization
    • Has strong working relationships with project stakeholders (has established trust with them and is well respected by stakeholders as well as others)
    • Comes from the stakeholder community and is invested in the success of the project (ideally, will be an end user of the system)
    • Has proven communication, facilitation, mediation, and negotiation skills
    • Can effectively balance multiple competing priorities and constraints
    • Sees the big picture and strives to achieve the best outcomes possible (grounded in realistic expectations)
    • Works with a sense of urgency and welcomes ongoing feedback and collaboration with stakeholders
    • Understands how to act as an effective "funnel and filter" for stakeholder requests
    • Acts as an informal (but inspirational) leader whom others will follow
    • Has a strong sense of what is "good enough for now"
    • Protects the delivery team from distractions and keeps them focused on goals
    • Thinks strategically and incrementally

    Product Owner Exercise 2.2 (Optional) Dissect this definition of the product owner role

    30-60 minutes

    1. Take a minute or two to review the bullet points below, which describe the product owner's role.
    2. As a group, discuss the "message" for each bullet point in the description, and then identify which aspects would be "easy" and "hard" to achieve in your organization.
      • The product owner is a project team member who has been empowered by both the organization and stakeholders to act on their behalf and to guide the project directly with a single voice (supported by appropriate consultations with the organization and stakeholders).
      • The product owner must be someone with a good understanding of the project deliverable (they are often considered to be a subject matter expert in an area related to the project deliverable) and ideally is both well-known and respected by both the organization and stakeholders.
      • During the project, requirements clarification, prioritization, and scope changes are ultimately decided by the product owner, who must perform the important balancing act required by the project to adequately reflect the needs and constraints of the organization, its stakeholders, and the project team.
      • The product owner role can only be successful in an organization that has established a trusting and supportive culture. Great trust must be placed in the product owner to adequately balance competing needs in a way that leads to good outcomes for the organization. This trust must come with some authority to make important project decisions, and the organization must also support the product owner in addressing risks and roadblocks outside the control of the project team.
      • The product owner is first among equals when it comes to ultimate ownership of success for the project (along with the project delivery team itself). Because of this, any project of any significance will require the full-time effort of the product owner (don't shortchange yourself by under-investing in a willing, able, and available product owner)

    Output

    • Better understanding of the product owner role.

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Product Owner Exercise 2.2 (Optional) Dissect this definition of the product owner role

    Which aspects of the product owner are "easy" in your organization?

    Which aspects of the product owner are "hard" in your organization?

    Product Owner Module

    Establish an effective product owner role

    Activities

    3.1 Build a starting checklist of quality filters

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • Understand the levels in a product backlog and how to create quality filters for PBIs moving through the backlog.
    • Define your product roadmap approach for key audiences.

    Product Owner Step 3: Managing effective product backlogs and roadmaps

    The primary role of the product owner is to manage the backlog effectively.

    When managed properly, the product backlog is a powerful project management tool that directly contributes to project success.

    The product owner's primary responsibility is to ensure this backlog is managed effectively.

    A backlog stores and organizes PBIs at various stages of readiness

    A well-formed backlog can be thought of as a DEEP backlog:

    • Detailed Appropriately: Product backlog items (PBIs) are broken down and refined as necessary.
    • Emergent: The backlog grows and evolves over time as PBIs are added and removed.
    • Estimated: The effort a PBI requires is estimated at each tier.
    • Prioritized: The PBIs value and priority are determined at each tier.

    (Perforce, 2018)

    An image showing the Ideas; Qualified; Ready; funnel leading to the sprint approach.

    Backlog tiers facilitate product planning steps

    An image of the product planning steps facilitated by Backlog Tiers

    Each activity is a variation of measuring value and estimating effort to validate and prioritize a PBI.

    A PBI meets our definition of done and passes through to the next backlog tier when it meets the appropriate criteria. Quality filters should exist between each tier.

    Backlog Exercise 2.1 Build a starting checklist of quality filters

    60 minutes

    1. Quality filters provide a checklist to ensure each Product Backlog Item (PBI) meets our definition of Done and is ready to move to the next backlog group (status).
    2. Create a checklist of basic descriptors that must be completed between each backlog level.
    3. If you completed this exercise in a different Module, review and update it here.
    4. Use this information to start your product strategy playbook in Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision.

    An image of the backlog tiers, identifying where product backlog and sprint backlog are

    Output

    • List of enablers and blockers to establishing product owners

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Outline the criteria to proceed to the next tier via quality filters

    Expand the concepts of defining "ready" and "done" to include the other stages of a PBIs journey through product planning.

    An image showing the approach you will use to Outline the criteria to proceed to the next tier via quality filters

    Info-Tech Insight: A quality filter ensures quality is met and teams are armed with the right information to work more efficiently and improve throughput.

    Define product value by aligning backlog delivery with roadmap goals

    In each product plan, the backlogs show what you will deliver.

    Roadmaps identify when and in what order you will deliver value, capabilities, and goals.

    Product roadmaps guide delivery and communicate your strategy

    In Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision, we demonstrate how the product roadmap is core to value realization. The product roadmap is your communicated path, and as a product owner, you use it to align teams and changes to your defined goals while aligning your product to enterprise goals and strategy.

    This is an image Adapted from: Pichler, What Is Product Management?

    Adapted from: Pichler, "What Is Product Management?"

    Info-Tech Insight

    The quality of your product backlog – and your ability to realize business value from your delivery pipeline – is directly related to the input, content, and prioritization of items in your product roadmap.

    Product delivery realizes value for your product family

    While planning and analysis are done at the family level, work and delivery are done at the individual product level.

    An example of performing planning and analysis at the family level.

    Leverage the product family roadmap for alignment

    It's more than a set of colorful boxes. It's the map to align everyone to where you are going.

    • Your product family roadmap:
      • Lays out a strategy for your product family.
      • Is a statement of intent for your family of products.
      • Communicates direction for the entire product family and product teams.
      • Directly connects to the organization's goals.
    • However, it is not:
      • Representative of a hard commitment.
      • A simple combination of your current product roadmaps.

    Your ideal roadmap approach is a spectrum, not a choice!

    Match your roadmap and backlog to the needs of the product.

    Tactical vs strategic roadmaps.

    Product Managers do not have to choose between being tactical or strategic.
    – Aha!, 2015

    Multiple roadmap views can communicate differently yet tell the same truth

    Audience

    Business/
    IT Leaders

    Users/Customers

    Delivery Teams

    Roadmap

    View

    Portfolio

    Product Family

    Technology

    Objectives

    To provide a snapshot
    of the portfolio and
    priority products

    To visualize and validate product strategy

    To coordinate broad technology and architecture decisions

    Artifacts

    Line items or sections of the roadmap are made up of individual products, and an artifact represents a disposition at its highest level.

    Artifacts are generally grouped by product teams and consist of strategic goals and the features that realize
    those goals.

    Artifacts are grouped by
    the teams who deliver
    that work and consist of technical capabilities that support the broader delivery of value for the product family.

    Product Owner Exercise 3.1 Build a starting checklist of quality filters

    60 minutes

    1. Views provide roadmap information to different audiences in the format and level of detail that is fit to their purpose.
    2. Consider the three primary audiences for roadmap alignment.
    3. Define the roles or people who the view best fits.
    4. Define the level of detail or artifacts shared in the view for each audience.
    5. Use this information to start your product strategy playbook in Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision.

    Business/
    IT Leaders

    Users/Customers

    Delivery Teams

    Audience:

    Audience:

    Audience:

    Level of Detail/Artifacts:

    Level of Detail/Artifacts:

    Level of Detail/Artifacts:

    Output

    • List of enablers and blockers to establishing product owners

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Connecting your product family roadmaps to product roadmaps

    Your product and product family roadmaps should be connected at an artifact level that is common between both. Typically, this is done with capabilities, but it can be done at a more granular level if an understanding of capabilities isn't available.

    A comparison between product family roadmaps and product roadmaps.

    Use product roadmaps to align cross-team dependencies

    Regardless of how other teams operate, teams need to align to common milestones.

    An image showing how you may Use product roadmaps to align cross-team dependencies

    Product Owner Module

    Establish an effective product owner role

    Activities

    4.1 Identify key insights and takeaways

    4.2 Perform exit survey and capture results

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • Identify your key insights and takeaways.

    Product Owner Exercise 4.1
    Identify key insights and takeaways

    30 minutes

    1. As a group, discuss and capture your thoughts on:
      1. What key insights have participants gained from the Intro to Agile presentation?
      2. What if any takeaways do participants feel are needed as a result of the presentation?
      3. What changes need to be made in the organization to support/enhance Agile adoption?
    2. Capture your findings in the table below:
    What key insights have you gained? What takeaways have you identified?
    (e.g. better understanding of Agile mindset, principles, and practices) (e.g. how you can improve/spread Agile practices in the organization)

    Output

    • A better understanding of Agile principles and practices
    • Action items that will help solidify Agile practices in the organization

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Product Owner Exercise 4.2
    Perform an exit survey

    30 minutes

    1. Wrap up this section by addressing any remaining questions participants still have.
    2. Create your local exit survey by copying the template using the link below. Then copy and distribute your local survey link.
    3. Collect the consolidated survey results in preparation for your next steps.
    4. NOTE: Using this survey template requires having access to Microsoft Forms. If you cannot access Microsoft Forms, an Info-Tech analyst can send the survey for you. Alternatively, this survey can be done with sticky notes and a pen and paper to calculate the outcomes.

    Download Survey Template:

    Develop Your Agile Approach Exit Survey Template

    Output

    • A better understanding of Agile principles and practices
    • Action items that will help solidify Agile practices in the organization

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Agile Modules

    Prioritize Agile support with your top challenges

    Backlog Management

    Scrum Simulation

    Estimation

    Product Owner

    Product Roadmapping

    1: User stories and the art of decomposition

    2: Effective backlog management & refinement

    3: Identify insights and team feedback

    1: Scrum sprint planning and retrospective simulation

    2: Pass the balls – sprint velocity game

    1: Improve product backlog item estimation

    2: Agile estimation fundamentals

    3: Understand the wisdom of crowds

    4: Identify insights and team feedback

    1: Understand product management fundamentals

    2: The critical role of the product owner

    3: Manage effective product backlogs and roadmaps

    4: Identify insights and team feedback

    1: Identify your product roadmapping pains

    2: The six "tools" of product roadmapping

    3: Product roadmapping exercise

    Organizations often struggle with numerous pain points around Agile delivery.
    The Common Agile Challenges Survey results will help you identify and prioritize the organization's biggest (most cited) pain points. Treat these pain points like a backlog and address the biggest ones first.

    Agile modules provide supporting activities:

    Each module provides guidance and supporting activities related to a specific Agile challenge from your survey. These modules can be arranged to meet each organization's or team's needs while providing cohesive and consistent messaging. For additional supporting research, please visit the Agile / DevOps Resource Center.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Product Roadmapping

    Create effective product roadmaps

    Activities

    Roadmapping 1.1 Identify your product roadmapping pains
    Roadmapping 1.2 The six "tools" of product roadmapping
    Roadmapping 1.3 Product roadmapping exercise

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • Understand product management fundamentals
    • Understand the six "tools" of roadmapping and how to use them

    Roadmapping Exercise 1.1: Tell us what product management means to you and how it differs from a project orientation

    10-15 minutes

    1. Share your current understanding of product management.
    What is product management, and how does it differ from a project orientation?

    Output

    • Your current understanding of product management and its benefits

    Participants

    • PMs, Pos, and SMs
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Business stakeholders
    • Senior leaders
    • Other interested parties

    Definition of terms

    Project

    "A temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result. The temporary nature of projects indicates a beginning and an end to the project work or a phase of the project work. Projects can stand alone or be part of a program or portfolio."

    – PMBOK, PMI

    Product

    "A tangible solution, tool, or service (physical or digital) that enables the long-term and evolving delivery of value to customers and stakeholders based on business and user requirements."
    Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision,
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Info-Tech Insight

    Any proper definition of product recognizes that they are long-term endeavors that don't end after the project finishes. Because of this, products need well thought out roadmaps.

    Deliver Digital Products at Scale via Enterprise Product Families

    Match your product management role definitions to your product family levels

    Product ownership exists at the different operational tiers or levels in your product hierarchy. This does not imply or require a management relationship.

    Product Portfolio
    Groups of product families within an overall value stream or capability grouping.
    Product Portfolio Manager

    Product Family
    A collection of related products. Products can be grouped along architectural, functional, operational, or experiential patterns.
    Product Family Manager

    Product
    Single product composed of one or more applications and services.
    Product Owner

    Info-Tech Insight

    The primary role conflict occurs when the product owner is a proxy for stakeholders or responsible for the delivery team. The product owner owns the product backlog. The delivery team owns the sprint backlog and delivery.

    Roadmapping Exercise 1.2 (Optional): Define "product" in your context*

    15-30 minutes

    1. Discuss what "product" means in your organization.
    2. Create a common, enterprise definition for "product."

    For example,

    • An application, platform, or application family.
    • Discrete items that deliver value to a user/customer.

    Capture your organization's definition of product:

    * For more on Product Management see Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision

    Output

    • Your enterprise/ organizational definition of products and services.

    Participants

    • PMs, Pos, and SMs
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Business stakeholders
    • Senior leaders
    • Other interested parties

    Product Roadmapping

    Create effective product roadmaps

    Activities

    The six "tools" of product roadmapping

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • Understand product management fundamentals
    • Understand the six "tools" of roadmapping and how to use them

    The six "tools" of product roadmapping

    the 6 tools of product roadmapping: Vision; Goals; Strategy; Roadmap; Backlog; Release Plan.

    Product Roadmapping

    Create effective product roadmaps

    Activities

    Roadmapping 3.1 Product roadmapping exercise
    Roadmapping 3.2 Identify key insights and takeaways
    Roadmapping 3.3 Perform an exit survey

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers and senior leaders
    • Stakeholders and delivery teams

    Outcomes of this step

    • Understand product management fundamentals
    • Understand the six "tools" of roadmapping and how to use them

    Roadmapping Exercise 1.2 (Optional): Define "product" in your context*

    30 minutes

    1. As a team, read through the exercise back story below:

    The city of Binbetter is a picturesque place that is sadly in decline because local industry jobs are slowly relocating elsewhere. So, the local government has decided to do something to reinvigorate the city. Binbetter City Council has set aside money and a parcel of land they would like to develop into a venue that will attract visitors and generate revenue for the city.

    Your team was hired to develop the site, and you have already spent time with city representatives to create a vision, goals and strategy for building out this venue (captured on the following slides). The city doesn't want to wait until the entire venue is completed before it opens to visitors, and so you have been instructed to build it incrementally in order to bring in much needed revenue as soon as possible.

    Using the vision, goals, and strategy you have created, your team will need to plan out the build (i.e. create a roadmap and release plan for which parts of the venue to build and in which order). You can assume that visitors will come to the venue after your "Release 1", even while the rest is still under construction. Select one member of your team to be designated as the product owner. The entire team will work together to consider options and agree on a roadmap/release plan, but the product owner will be the ultimate decision-maker.

    * Adapted from Rautiainen et al, Toward Agile Product and Portfolio Management, 2015

    Output

    • Practical understanding of how to apply the six tools of product roadmapping.

    Participants

    • PMs, Pos, and SMs
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Business stakeholders
    • Senior leaders
    • Other interested parties

    Roadmapping Exercise 3.1: Continued

    1. As a team, review vision, goal, and strategy:
      • Is this a "good" vision statement, and if so, why?
      • Does it live up to its definition of being: "notional and inspirational, while also calling out key guidance and constraints"?
      • Does it help you to rule in/out options for the Product?
      • e.g. Would a parking lot fit the vision?
      • What about a bunch of condominiums?
      • What about a theme park?

    Vision, Goals, and Strategy

    Product Vision: Create an architecturally significant venue that will attract both locals and tourists while also generating revenue for the city

    Roadmapping Exercise 3.1: Continued

    1. As a team, review vision, goal, and strategy:

    Vision, Goals, and Strategy

    Product Vision: Create an architecturally significant venue that will attract both locals and tourists while also generating revenue for the city

    An image of a Château-style Hotel (left) and a Gothic-style Cathedral (right)

    Goals: The venue will include a Château-style Hotel, Gothic-style Cathedral, and a Monument dedicated to the city's founder, Ivy Binbetter.

    Strategy: Develop the venue incrementally, focusing on the highest value elements first (prioritizing both usages by visitors and revenue generation).

    Roadmapping Exercise 3.1: Continued

    1. As a team, review the following exercise rules:
    • Your construction team has told you that they can divide the structures into 17 "equal" components (see below)
    • Each component will require about the same amount of time and resources to complete
    • You can ask the team to build these components in any order and temporary roofs can be built for components that are not at the top of a "stack" (e.g. you can build C3 without having to build C4 and C5 at the same time)
    • However, you cannot build the tops of any buildings first (e.g. don't build M3 until M2 and M1 are in place)

    An image of the chateau hotel and the Gothic Cathedral from the previous slide, broken down into 7 parts each

    Roadmapping Exercise 3.1: Continued

    1. As a team, review vision, goal, and strategy:
      • The city has asked you to decide on your "Release 1 MVP" and has limited you to selecting between 4 and 8 components for this MVP (fewer components = earlier opening date).
      • As a team, work together to decide which components will be in your MVP (remember, the PO makes the ultimate decision).
      • Drag your (4-8) selected MVP components over from the right and assemble them below (and explain your reasoning for your MVP selections):

    Release 1 (MVP)

    Vision, Goals, and Strategy

    Product Vision: Create an architecturally significant venue that will attract both locals and tourists while also generating revenue for the city

    Goals: The venue will include a Château-style Hotel, Gothic-style Cathedral, and a Monument dedicated to the city's founder, Ivy Binbetter.

    Strategy: Develop the venue incrementally, focusing on the highest value elements first (prioritizing both usages by visitors and revenue generation).

    An image of the chateau hotel and the Gothic Cathedral from the previous slide, broken down into 7 parts each

    Roadmapping Exercise 3.1: Continued
    (magnified venue)

    An image of the chateau hotel and the Gothic Cathedral from the previous slide, broken down into 7 parts each

    Roadmapping Exercise 3.1: Continued

    1. As a team, decide the rest of your roadmap:
      • The city has asked you to decide on the remainder of your roadmap
      • They have limited you to selecting between 2 and 4 components for each additional release (drag your selected component into each release below):
    Release 2 Release 3 Release 4 Release 5

    Vision, Goals, and Strategy

    Product Vision: Create an architecturally significant venue that will attract both locals and tourists while also generating revenue for the city

    Goals: The venue will include a Château-style Hotel, Gothic-style Cathedral, and a Monument dedicated to the city's founder, Ivy Binbetter.

    Strategy: Develop the venue incrementally, focusing on the highest value elements first (prioritizing both usages by visitors and revenue generation).

    An image of the chateau hotel and the Gothic Cathedral from the previous slide, broken down into 7 parts each

    Roadmapping Exercise 3.1: Continued

    Roadmap, Release Plan and Backlog

    an example roadmap plan; INCREASING: Priority; Requirements detail; Estimate accuracy; Level of commitment.

    Vision, Goals, and Strategy

    Product Vision: Create an architecturally significant venue that will attract both locals and tourists while also generating revenue for the city

    Goals: The venue will include a Château-style Hotel, Gothic-style Cathedral, and a Monument dedicated to the city's founder, Ivy Binbetter.

    Strategy: Develop the venue incrementally, focusing on the highest value elements first (prioritizing both usages by visitors and revenue generation).

    An image of the chateau hotel and the Gothic Cathedral from the previous slide, broken down into 7 parts each

    Roadmapping Exercise 3.2:
    Identify key insights and takeaways

    15 minutes

    1. As a group, discuss and capture your thoughts on:
      1. What key insights have participants gained from the product roadmapping module?
      2. What if any takeaways do participants feel are needed as a result of the module?
      3. What changes need to be made in the organization to support/enhance Agile adoption?
    2. Capture your findings in the table below:
    What key insights have you gained?What takeaways have you identified?
    • (e.g. better understanding of Agile mindset, principles, and practices)
    • (e.g. how you can improve/spread Agile practices in the organization)

    Output

    • A better understanding of Agile principles and practices
    • Action items that will help solidify Agile practices in the organization

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Roadmapping Exercise 3.3
    Perform an exit survey

    30 minutes

    1. Wrap up this section by addressing any remaining questions participants still have.
    2. Create your local exit survey by copying the template using the link below. Then copy and distribute your local survey link.
    3. Collect the consolidated survey results in preparation for your next steps.
    4. NOTE: Using this survey template requires having access to Microsoft Forms. If you cannot access Microsoft Forms, an Info-Tech analyst can send the survey for you. Alternatively, this survey can be done with sticky notes and a pen and paper to calculate the outcomes.

    Download Survey Template:

    Develop Your Agile Approach Exit Survey Template

    Output

    • A better understanding of Agile principles and practices
    • Action items that will help solidify Agile practices in the organization

    Participants

    • Product owners, product managers, and scrum masters
    • Delivery managers
    • Delivery teams
    • Stakeholders
    • Senior leaders

    Appendix

    Additional research to start your journey

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Mentoring for Agile Teams

    • Get practical help and guidance on your Agile transformation journey.

    Implement DevOps Practices That Work

    • Streamline business value delivery through the strategic adoption of DevOps practices.

    Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision

    • Build a product vision your organization can take from strategy through execution.

    Deliver Digital Products at Scale

    • Deliver value at the scale of your organization through defining enterprise product families.

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    Breddels, Dajo, and Paul Kuijten. "Product Owner Value Game." Agile2015 Conference. 2015. Web.
    Cagan, Martin. "Behind Every Great Product." Silicon Valley Product Group. 2005. Web.
    "Chaos Report 2015." The Standish Group, 2015. Accessed 29 July 2022.
    Cohn, Mike. Succeeding With Agile: Software Development Using Scrum. Addison-Wesley. 2010. Web.
    Connellan, Thomas K. Inside the Magic Kingdom, Bard Press, 1997. Print.
    Dyba, Tore, and Torgeir Dingsøyr. "Empirical Studies of Agile Software Development: A Systematic Review." Elsevier, ScienceDirect. 24 Jan. 2008. Web.
    "How do you define a product?" Scrum.org. 4 Apr 2017, Web
    EDUCAUSE. "Aligning IT Funding Models to the Pace of Technology Change." EDUCAUSE. 14 Dec. 2015. Web.
    Eick, Stephen. "Does Code Decay? Assessing the Evidence from Change Management Data." IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 27, no. 1, Jan. 2001, pp. 1-12. Web.
    "Enablers." Scaled Agile. n.d. Web.
    "Epic." Scaled Agile. n.d. Web.
    Eringa, Ron. "Evolution of the Product Owner." RonEringa.com. 12 June 2016. Web.
    Fernandes, Thaisa. "Spotify Squad Framework - Part I." Medium.com. 6 Mar. 2017. Web.
    Fowler, Martin. "Application Boundary." MartinFowler.com. 11 Sept. 2003. Web. 20 Nov. 2017.
    Galen, Robert. "Measuring Technical Product Managership – What Does 'Good' Look Like ...." RGalen Consulting. 5 Aug. 2015. Web.
    Hackshall, Robin. "Product Backlog Refinement." Scrum Alliance. 9 Oct. 2014. Web. Feb. 2019.
    Halisky, Merland, and Luke Lackrone. "The Product Owner's Universe." Agile Alliance, Agile2016. 2016. Web.
    Kamer, Jurriaan. "How to Build Your Own 'Spotify Model'." Medium.com. 9 Feb. 2018. Web.
    Karlsson, Johan. "Backlog Grooming: Must-Know Tips for High-Value Products." Perforce. 18 May 2018. Web. Feb. 2019.
    Lindstrom, Lowell. "7 Skills You Need to Be a Great Product Owner." Scrum Alliance. n.d. Web.
    Lawrence, Richard, and Peter Green. "The Humanizing Work Guide to Splitting User Stories." Humanizing Work, 22 Oct. 2020. Web.
    Leffingwell, Dean. "SAFe 5.0." Scaled Agile Inc. 2021. Web. Feb. 2021.
    Lucero, Mario. "Product Backlog – Deep Model." Agilelucero. 8 Oct. 2014. Web.
    Lukassen, Chris. "The Five Belts Of The Product Owner." Xebia.com. 20 Sept. 2016. Web.
    Management 3.0. "Delegation Poker Product Image." Management 3.0. n.d. Web.
    McCloskey, Heather. "Scaling Product Management: Secrets to Defeating Common Challenges." Scaling Product Management: Secrets to Defeating Common Challenges, ProductPlan, 12 July 2019 . Web.
    McCloskey, Heather. "When and How to Scale Your Product Team." UserVoice Blog, UserVoice, 21 Feb. 2017 . Web.
    Medium.com. "Exploring Key Elements of Spotify's Agile Scaling Model." Medium.com. 23 July 2018. Web.
    Mironov, Rich. "Scaling Up Product Manager/Owner Teams: - Rich Mironov's Product Bytes." Rich Mironov's Product Bytes, Mironov Consulting, 12 Apr. 2014 . Web.
    "Most Agile Transformations Will Fail." Vitality Chicago Inc., 24 Jan. 2019.
    Overeem, Barry. "A Product Owner Self-Assessment." Barry Overeem. 6 Mar. 2017. Web.
    Overeem, Barry. "Retrospective: Using the Team Radar." Barry Overeem. 27 Feb. 2017. Web.
    "PI Planning." Scaled Agile. n.d. Web.
    "PI Planning."SAFe. 2020.
    Pichler, Roman. "How to Scale the Scrum Product Owner." Roman Pichler, 28 June 2016 . Web.
    Pichler, Roman. "Product Management Framework." Pichler Consulting Limited. 2014. Web.
    Pichler, Roman. "Sprint Planning Tips for Technical Product Managers." LinkedIn. 4 Sept. 2018. Web.
    Pichler, Roman. "What Is Product Management?" Pichler Consulting Limited. 26 Nov. 2014. Web.
    Project Management Institute. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide). 7th ed., Project Management Institute, 2021.
    Radigan, Dan. "Putting the 'Flow' Back in Workflow With WIP Limits." Atlassian. n.d. Web.
    Royce, Dr. Winston W. "Managing the Development of Large Software Systems." Scf.usc.edu. 1970. Web.
    Schuurman, Robbin. "10 Tips for Technical Product Managers on Agile Product Management." Scrum.org. 28 Nov. 2017. Web.
    Schuurman, Robbin. "10 Tips for Technical Product Managers on (Business) Value." Scrum.org. 30 Nov. 2017. Web.
    Schuurman, Robbin. "10 Tips for Technical Product Managers on Product Backlog Management." Scrum.org. 5 Dec. 2017. Web.
    Schuurman, Robbin. "10 Tips for Technical Product Managers on the Product Vision." Scrum.org. 29 Nov. 2017. Web.
    Schuurman, Robbin. "Tips for Starting Technical Product Managers." Scrum.org. 27 Nov. 2017. Web.
    Sharma, Rohit. "Scaling Product Teams the Structured Way." Monetary Musings, Monetary Musings, 28 Nov. 2016 . Web.
    STEINER, ANNE. "Start to Scale Your Product Management: Multiple Teams Working on Single Product." Cprime, Cprime, 6 Aug. 2019 . Web.
    Shirazi, Reza. "Betsy Stockdale of Seilevel: Product Managers Are Not Afraid To Be Wrong." Austin VOP #50. 2 Oct. 2018. Web.
    Standish Group, The. "The Standish Group 2015 Chaos Report." The Standish Group. 2015. Web.
    Theus, Andre. "When Should You Scale the Product Management Team?" When Should You Scale the Product Management Team?, ProductPlan, 7 May 2019 . Web.
    Todaro, Dave. "Splitting Epics and User Stories." Ascendle. n.d. Web. Feb. 2019.
    Tolonen, Arto. "Scaling Product Management in a Single Product Company." Smartly.io - Digital Advertising Made Easy, Effective, and Enjoyable, Smartly.io, 26 Apr. 2018 . Web.
    Ulrich, Catherine. "The 6 Types of Product Managers. Which One Do You Need?" Medium.com. 19 Dec. 2017. Web.
    Vähäniitty, J. et al. "Chapter 7: Agile Product Management" in Towards Agile Product and Portfolio Management. Aalto University Software Process Research Group, 2010.
    VersionOne. "12th Annual State of Agile Report." VersionOne. 9 April 2018. Web.
    Verwijs, Christiaan. "Retrospective: Do The Team Radar." Medium.com. 10 Feb. 2017. Web.
    "Why Agile Fails Because of Corporate Culture - DZone Agile." Dzone.Com. Accessed 31 Aug. 2021.

    page 1 of the appendix
    page 2 of the appendix
    page 3 of the appendix
    page 4 of the appendix

    Cultural advantages of Agile

    Collaboration

    Team members leverage all their experience working towards a common goal.

    Iterations

    Cycles provide opportunities for more product feedback.

    Prioritization

    The most important needs are addressed in the current iteration.

    Continual Improvement

    Self-managing teams continually improve their approach for next iteration.

    A backlog stores and organizes PBIs at various stages of readiness

    A well-formed backlog can be thought of as a DEEP backlog:

    • Detailed Appropriately: Product backlog items (PBIs) are broken down and refined as necessary.
    • Emergent: The backlog grows and evolves over time as PBIs are added and removed.
    • Estimated: The effort a PBI requires is estimated at each tier.
    • Prioritized: The PBIs value and priority are determined at each tier.

    (Perforce, 2018)

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Don't fully elaborate all of your PBIs at the beginning of the project instead, make sure they are elaborated "just in time." (Keep no more than 2 or 3 sprints worth of user stories in the Ready state.)

    An image showing the Ideas; Qualified; Ready; funnel leading to the sprint aproach.

    Scrum versus Kanban: Key differences

    page 6 of the appendix

    Scrum versus Kanban: When to use each

    Scrum: Delivering related or grouped changes in fixed time intervals.

    • Coordinating the development or release of related items
    • Maturing a product or service
    • Interdependencies between work items

    Kanban: Delivering independent items as soon as each is ready.

    • Work items from ticketing or individual requests
    • Completing independent changes
    • Releasing changes as soon as possible

    Develop an adaptive governance process

    page 7 of the appendix

    Five key principles for building an adaptive governance framework

    Delegate and Empower

    Decision making must be delegated down within the organization, and all resources must be empowered and supported to make effective decisions.

    Define Outcomes

    Outcomes and goals must be clearly articulated and understood across the organization to ensure decisions are in line and stay within reasonable boundaries.

    Make Risk informed decisions

    Integrated risk information must be available with sufficient data to support decision making and design approaches at all levels of the organization.

    Embed / Automate

    Governance standards and activities need to be embedded in processes and practices. Optimal governance reduces its manual footprint while remaining viable. This also allows for more dynamic adaptation.

    Establish standards and behavior

    Standards and policies need to be defined as the foundation for embedding governance practices organizationally. These guardrails will create boundaries to reinforce delegated decision making.

    Maturing governance is a journey

    Organizations should look to progress in their governance stages. Ad-Hoc, and controlled governance tends to be slow, expensive, and a poor fit for modern practices.

    The goal as you progress in your stages is to delegate governance and empower teams to make optimal decisions in real-time, knowing that they are aligned with the understood best interests of the organization.

    Automate governance for optimal velocity, while mitigating risks and driving value.

    This puts your organization in the best position to be adaptive and able to react effectively to volatility and uncertainty.

    page 8 of the appendix

    Business value is a key component to driving better decision making

    Better Decisions

    • Team Engagement
    • Frequent Delivery
    • Stakeholder Input
    • Market Analysis
    • Articulating Business Value
    • Focus on Business Needs

    Facilitation Planning Tool

    • Double-click the embedded Excel workbook to select and plan your exercises and timing.
    • Place or remove the "X" in the "Add to Agenda" column to add it to the workshop agenda and duration estimate.
    • Verify the exercise and step timing estimates from the blueprint provided on the "Detailed Workshop Planner" in columns C-F and adjust based on your facilitation and intended audience.

    an image of the Facilitation Planning Tool

    Appendix:
    SDLC transformation steps

    Waterfall SDLC: Valuable product delivered at the end of an extended project lifecycle, frequently in years

    Page 1 of the SDLC Appendix.

    • Business separated from delivery of technology it needs, only one third of product is actually valuable (Info-Tech, N=40,000).
    • In Waterfall, a team of experts in specific disciplines hand off different aspects of the lifecycle.
    • Document signoffs are required to ensure integration between silos (Business, Dev, and Ops) and individuals.
    • A separate change request process lays over the entire lifecycle to prevent changes from disrupting delivery.
    • Tools are deployed to support a specific role (e.g. BA) and seldom integrated (usually requirements <-> test).

    Wagile/Agifall/WaterScrumFall SDLC: Valuable product delivered in multiple releases

    Page 2 of the SDLC Appendix.

    • Business is more closely integrated by a business product owner accountable for day-to-day delivery of value for users.
    • The team collaborates and develops cross-functional skills as they define, design, build, and test code over time.
    • Signoffs are reduced but documentation is still focused on satisfying project delivery and operations policy requirements.
    • Change is built into the process to allow the team to respond to change dynamically.
    • Tools start to be integrated to streamline delivery (usually requirements and Agile work management tools).

    Agile SDLC: Valuable product delivered iteratively; frequency depends on Ops' capacity

    Page 3 of the SDLC Appendix.

    • Business users are closely integrated through regularly scheduled demos (e.g. every two weeks).
    • Team is fully cross-functional and collaboratesto plan, define, design, build, and test the code supported by specialists.
    • Documentation is focused on future development and operations needs.
    • Change is built into the process to allow the team to respond to change dynamically.
    • Explore automation for application development (e.g. automated regression testing).

    Agile with DevOps SDLC: High frequency iterative delivery of valuable product (e.g. every two weeks)

    Page 4 of the SDLC Appendix.

    • Business users are closely integrated through regularly scheduled demos.
    • Dev and ops teams collaborate to plan, define, design, build, test, and deploy code supported by automation.
    • Documentation is focused on supporting users, future changes, and operational support.
    • Change is built into the process to allow the team to respond to change dynamically.
    • Build, test, deploy is fully automated (service desk is still separated).

    DevOps SDLC: Continuous integration and delivery

    Page 5 of the SDLC Appendix.

    • Business users are closely integrated through regularly scheduled demos.
    • Fully integrated DevOps team collaborates to plan, define, design, build, test, deploy, and maintain code.
    • Documentation Is focused on future development and use adoption.
    • Change is built into the process to allow the team to respond to change dynamically.
    • Fully integrated development and operations toolchain.

    Fully integrated product SDLC: Agile + DevOps + continuous delivery of valuable product on demand

    Page 6 of the SDLC Appendix.

    • Business users are fully integrated with the teams through dedicated business product owner.
    • Cross-functional teams collaborate across the business and technical life of the product.
    • Documentation supports internal and external needs (business, users, Ops).
    • Change is built into the process to allow the team to respond to change dynamically.
    • Fully integrated toolchain (including service desk).

    Optimize Applications Release Management

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}406|cart{/j2store}
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    • Parent Category Name: Testing, Deployment & QA
    • Parent Category Link: /testing-deployment-and-qa
    • The business demands high service and IT needs to respond. Rapid customer response through efficient release and deployment is critical to maintain high business satisfaction.
    • The lack of process ownership leads to chaotic and uncoordinated releases, resulting in costly rework and poor hand-offs.
    • IT emphasizes tools but release tools and technologies alone will not fix the problem. Tools are integrated into the processes they support – if the process challenges aren’t addressed first, then the tool won’t help.
    • Releases are traditionally executed in silos with limited communication across the entire release pipeline. Culturally, there is little motivation for cross-functional collaboration and holistic process optimization.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Release management is not solely driven by tools. It is about delivering high quality releases on time through accountability and governance aided by the support of tools.
    • Release management is independent of your software development lifecycle (SDLC). Release management practices sit as an agnostic umbrella over your chosen development methodology.
    • Ownership of the entire process is vital. Release managers ensure standards are upheld and the pipeline operates efficiently.

    Impact and Result

    • Acquire release management ownership. Ensure there is appropriate accountability for speed and quality of the releases passing through the entire pipeline. A release manager has oversight over the entire release process and facilitates the necessary communication between business stakeholders and various IT roles.
    • Instill holistic thinking. Release management includes all steps required to push release and change requests to production along with the hand-off to Operations and Support. Increase the transparency and visibility of the entire pipeline to ensure local optimizations do not generate bottlenecks in other areas.
    • Standardize and lay a strong release management foundation. Optimize the key areas where you are experiencing the most pain and continually improve.

    Optimize Applications Release Management Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should optimize release management, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Review your release management objectives

    Assess the current state and define the drivers behind your release management optimizations.

    • Optimize Applications Release Management – Phase 1: Review Your Release Management Objectives
    • Release Management Process Standard Template
    • Release Management Maturity Assessment

    2. Standardize release management

    Design your release processes, program framework, and release change management standards, and define your release management team.

    • Optimize Applications Release Management – Phase 2: Standardize Release Management
    • Release Manager

    3. Roll out release management enhancements

    Create an optimization roadmap that fits your context.

    • Optimize Applications Release Management – Phase 3: Roll Out Release Management Enhancements
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Optimize Applications Release Management

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Review Your Release Management Objectives

    The Purpose

    Reveal the motivators behind the optimization of release management.

    Identify the root causes of current release issues and challenges.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Ensure business alignment of optimization efforts.

    Firm grasp of why teams are facing release issues and the impacts they have on the organization.

    Activities

    1.1 Identify the objectives for application release.

    1.2 Conduct a current state assessment of release practices.

    Outputs

    Release management business objectives and technical drivers

    Current state assessment of release processes, communication flows, and tools and technologies

    2 Standardize Release Management

    The Purpose

    Alleviate current release issues and challenges with best practices.

    Standardize a core set of processes, tools, and roles & responsibilities to achieve consistency, cadence, and transparency.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Repeatable execution of the same set of processes to increase the predictability of release delivery.

    Defined ownership of release management.

    Adaptable and flexible release management practices to changing business and technical environments.

    Activities

    2.1 Strengthen your release process.

    2.2 Coordinate releases with a program framework.

    2.3 Manage release issues with change management practices.

    2.4 Define your release management team.

    Outputs

    Processes accommodating each release type and approach the team is required to complete

    Release calendars and program framework

    Release change management process

    Defined responsibilities and accountabilities of release manager and release management team

    3 Roll Out Release Management Enhancements

    The Purpose

    Define metrics to validate release management improvements.

    Identify the degree of oversight and involvement of the release management team.

    Prioritize optimization roadmap against business needs and effort.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Easy-to-gather metrics to measure success that can be communicated to stakeholders.

    Understanding of how involved release management teams are in enforcing release management standards.

    Practical and achievable optimization roadmap.

    Activities

    3.1 Define your release management metrics.

    3.2 Ensure adherence to standards.

    3.3 Create your optimization roadmap.

    Outputs

    List of metrics to gauge success

    Oversight and reporting structure of release management team

    Release management optimization roadmap

    Tech Trend Update: If Contact Tracing Then Distributed Trust

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    • Parent Category Name: DR and Business Continuity
    • Parent Category Link: /business-continuity

    With COVID-19's rapid spread through populations, governments are looking for technology tools that can augment the efforts of manual contact tracing processes. How the system is designed is crucial to a positive outcome.

    • CIOs must understand how distributed trust principles achieve embedded privacy and help encourage user adoption.
    • CEOs must consider how society's waning trust in institutions affects the way they engage their customers.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Mobile contact tracing apps that use a decentralized design approach will be the most likely to be adopted by a wide swath of the population.

    Impact and Result

    There are some key considerations to realize from the way different governments are approaching contact tracing:

    1. If centralized, then seek to ensure privacy protections.
    2. If decentralized, then seek to enable collaboration.
    3. In either case, put in place data governance to create trust.

    Tech Trend Update: If Contact Tracing Then Distributed Trust Research & Tools

    Learn why distributed trust is becoming critical to technology systems design

    Understand the differences between mobile app architectures available to developers and how to achieve success in implementation based on your goals.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    • Tech Trend Update: If Contact Tracing Then Distributed Trust Storyboard
    [infographic]

    Establish Realistic IT Resource Management Practices

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    • Parent Category Name: Portfolio Management
    • Parent Category Link: /portfolio-management
    • As CIO, you oversee a department that lacks the resource capacity to adequately meet organizational demand for new projects and services.
    • More projects are approved by the steering committee (or equivalent) than your department realistically has the capacity for, and you and your staff have little recourse to push back. If you have a PMO – and that PMO is one of the few that provides usable resource capacity projections – that information is rarely used to make strategic approval and prioritization decisions.
    • As a result, project quality and timelines suffer, and service delivery lags. Your staff are overallocated, but you lack statistical evidence because of incomplete estimates, allocations, and very little accurate data.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • IT’s capacity for new project work is largely overestimated. Much of IT’s time is lost to tasks that go unregulated and untracked (e.g. operations and support work, break-fixes and other reactive work) before project work is ever approved. When projects are approved, it is done so with little insight or concern for IT’s capacity to realistically complete that work.
    • The shift to matrix work structures has strained traditional methods of time tracking. Day-to-day demand is chaotic, and staff are pulled in multiple directions by numerous people. As fast-paced, rapidly changing, interruption-driven environments become the new normal, distractions and inefficiencies interfere with productive project work and usable capacity data.
    • The executive team approves too many projects, but it is not held to account for this malinvestment of time. Instead, it’s up to individual workers to sink or swim, as they attempt to reconcile, day after day, seemingly infinite organizational demand for new services and projects with their finite supply of working hours.

    Impact and Result

    • Instill a culture of capacity awareness. For years, the project portfolio management (PPM) industry has helped IT departments report on demand and usage, but has largely failed to make capacity part of the conversation. This research helps inject capacity awareness into project and service portfolio planning, enabling IT to get proactive about constraints before overallocation spirals, and project and service delivery suffers.
    • Build a sustainable process. Efforts to improve resource management often falter when you try to get too granular too quickly. Info-Tech’s approach starts at a high level, ensuring that capacity data is accurate and usable, and that IT’s process discipline is mature enough to maintain the data, before drilling down into greater levels of precision.
    • Establish a capacity book of record. You will ultimately need a tool to help provide ongoing resource visibility. Follow the advice in this blueprint to help with your tool selection, and ensure you meet the reporting needs of both your team and executives.

    Establish Realistic IT Resource Management Practices Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should develop a resource management strategy, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Take stock of organizational supply and demand

    Set the right resource management approach for your team and create a realistic estimate of your resource supply and organizational demand.

    • Balance Supply and Demand with Realistic Resource Management Practices – Phase 1: Take Stock of Organizational Supply and Demand
    • Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator
    • Time Audit Workbook
    • Time-Tracking Survey Email Template

    2. Design a realistic resource management process

    Build a resource management process to ensure data accuracy and sustainability, and make the best tool selection to support your processes.

    • Balance Supply and Demand with Realistic Resource Management Practices – Phase 2: Design a Realistic Resource Management Process
    • Resource Management Playbook
    • PPM Solution Vendor Demo Script
    • Portfolio Manager Lite 2017

    3. Implement sustainable resource management practices

    Develop a plan to pilot your resource management processes to achieve maximum adoption, and anticipate challenges that could inhibit you from keeping supply and demand continually balanced.

    • Balance Supply and Demand with Realistic Resource Management Practices – Phase 3: Implement Sustainable Resource Management Practices
    • Process Pilot Plan Template
    • Project Portfolio Analyst / PMO Analyst
    • Resource Management Communications Template
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Establish Realistic IT Resource Management Practices

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Take Stock of Organizational Supply and Demand

    The Purpose

    Obtain a high-level view of current resource management practices.

    Identify current and target states of resource management maturity.

    Perform an in-depth time-tracking audit and gain insight into how time is spent on project versus non-project work to calculate realized capacity.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Assess current distribution of accountabilities in resource management.

    Delve into your current problems to uncover root causes.

    Validate capacity and demand estimations with a time-tracking survey.

    Activities

    1.1 Perform a root-cause analysis of resourcing challenges facing the organization.

    1.2 Create a realistic estimate of project capacity.

    1.3 Map all sources of demand on resources at a high level.

    1.4 Validate your supply and demand assumptions by directly surveying your resources.

    Outputs

    Root-cause analysis

    Tab 2 of the Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator, the Time Audit Workbook, and survey templates

    Tabs 3 and 4 of the Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator

    Complete the Time Audit Workbook

    2 Design a Realistic Resource Management Process

    The Purpose

    Construct a resource management strategy that aligns with your team’s process maturity levels.

    Determine the resource management tool that will best support your processes.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Activities

    2.1 Action the decision points in Info-Tech’s seven dimensions of resource management.

    2.2 Review resource management tool options, and depending on your selection, prepare a vendor demo script or review and set up Info-Tech’s Portfolio Manager Lite.

    2.3 Customize a workflow and process steps within the bounds of your seven dimensions and informed by your tool selection.

    Outputs

    A wireframe for a right-sized resource management strategy

    A vendor demo script or Info-Tech’s Portfolio Manager Lite.

    A customized resource management process and Resource Management Playbook.

    3 Implement Sustainable Resource Management Practices

    The Purpose

    Develop a plan to pilot your new processes to test whether you have chosen the right dimensions for maintaining resource data.

    Develop a communication plan to guide you through the implementation of the strategy and manage any resistance you may encounter.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Identify and address improvements before officially instituting the new resource management strategy.

    Identify the other factors that affect resource productivity.

    Implement a completed resource management solution.

    Activities

    3.1 Develop a pilot plan.

    3.2 Perform a resource management start/stop/continue exercise.

    3.3 Develop plans to mitigate executive stakeholder, team, and structural factors that could inhibit your implementation.

    3.4 Finalize the playbook and customize a presentation to help explain your new processes to the organization.

    Outputs

    Process Pilot Plan Template

    A refined resource management process informed by feedback and lessons learned

    Stakeholder management plan

    Resource Management Communications Template

    Further reading

    Establish Realistic IT Resource Management Practices

    Holistically balance IT supply and demand to avoid overallocation.

    Analyst perspective

    Restore the right accountabilities for reconciling supply and demand.

    "Who gets in trouble at the organization when too many projects are approved?

    We’ve just exited a period of about 20-25 years where the answer to the above question was usually “nobody.” The officers of the corporation held nobody to account for the malinvestment of resources that comes from approving too many projects or having systemically unrealistic project due dates. Boards of directors failed to hold the officers accountable for that. And shareholders failed to hold boards of directors accountable for that.

    But this is shifting right under our feet. Increasingly, PMOs are being managed with the mentality previously reserved for those in the finance department. In many cases, the PMOs are now reporting to the CFO! This represents a very simple and basic reversion to the concept of fiduciary duty: somebody will be held to account for the consumption of all those hours, and somebody should be the approver of projects who created the excess demand." – Barry Cousins Senior Director of Research, PMO Practice Info-Tech Research Group

    Our understanding of the problem

    This Research Is Designed For:

    • IT leaders who lack actionable evidence of a resource-supply, work-demand imbalance.
    • CIOs whose departments struggle to meet service and project delivery expectations with given resources.
    • Portfolio managers, PMO directors, and project managers whose portfolio and project plans suffer due to unstable resource availability.

    This Research Will Help You:

    • Build trustworthy resource capacity data to support service and project portfolio management.
    • Develop sustainable resource management practices to help you estimate, and continually validate, your true resource capacity for services and projects.
    • Identify the demands that deplete your resource capacity without creating value for IT.

    This Research Will Also Assist:

    • Steering committee and C-suite management who want to improve IT’s delivery of projects.
    • Project sponsors that want to ensure their projects get the promised resource time by their project managers.

    This Research Will Help Them:

    • Ensure sufficient supply of time for projects to be successfully completed with high quality.
    • Communicate the new resource management practice and get stakeholder buy-in.

    Executive summary

    Situation

    • As CIO, you oversee a department that lacks the resource capacity to adequately meet organizational demand for new projects and services. As a result, project quality and timelines suffer, and service delivery lags.
    • You need a resource management strategy to help bring balance to supply and demand in order to improve IT’s ability to deliver.

    Complication

    • The shift to matrix work structures has strained traditional methods of time tracking. Day-to-day demand is chaotic; staff are pulled in multiple directions by numerous people, making usable capacity data elusive.
    • The executive team approves too many projects, but is not held to account for the overspend on time. Instead, the IT worker is made liable, expected to simply get things done under excessive demands.

    Resolution

    • Instill a culture of capacity awareness. For years, the project portfolio management (PPM) industry has helped IT departments report on demand and usage, but it has largely failed to make capacity part of the conversation. This research helps inject capacity awareness into project and service portfolio planning, enabling IT to get proactive about constraints before overallocation spirals, and project and service delivery suffers.
    • Build a sustainable process. Efforts to get better at resource management often falter when you try to get too granular too quickly. Info-Tech’s approach starts at a high level, ensuring that capacity data is accurate and usable, and that IT’s process discipline is mature enough to maintain the data, before drilling down into greater levels of precision.
    • Establish a capacity hub. You will ultimately need a tool to help provide ongoing resource visibility. Follow the advice in this blueprint to help with your tool selection and ensure the reporting needs of both your team and executives are met.

    Info-Tech Insight

    1. Take a realistic approach to resource management. New organizational realities have made traditional, rigorous resource projections impossible to maintain. Accept reality and get realistic about where IT’s time goes.
    2. Make IT’s capacity perpetually transparent. The best way to ensure projects are approved and scheduled based upon the availability of the right teams and skills is to shine a light into IT’s capacity and hold decision makers to account with usable capacity reports.

    The availability of staff time is rarely factored into IT project and service delivery commitments

    As a result, a lot gets promised and worked on, and staff are always busy, but very little actually gets done – at least not within given timelines or to expected levels of quality.

    Organizations tend to bite off more than they can chew when it comes to project and service delivery commitments involving IT resources.

    While the need for businesses to make an excess of IT commitments is understandable, the impacts of systemically overallocating IT are clearly negative:

    • Stakeholder relations suffer. Promises are made to the business that can’t be met by IT.
    • IT delivery suffers. Project timelines and quality frequently suffer, and service support regularly lags.
    • Employee engagement suffers. Anxiety and stress levels are consistently high among IT staff, while morale and engagement levels are low.

    76% of organizations say they have too many projects on the go and an unmanageable and ever-growing backlog of things to get to. (Cooper, 2014)

    Almost 70% of workers feel as though they have too much work on their plates and not enough time to do it. (Reynolds, 2016)

    Resource management can help to improve workloads and project results, but traditional approaches commonly fall short

    Traditional approaches to resource management suffer from a fundamental misconception about the availability of time in 2017.

    The concept of resource management comes from a pre-World Wide Web era, when resource and project plans could be based on a relatively stable set of assumptions.

    In the old paradigm, the availability of time was fairly predictable, as was the demand for IT services, so there was value to investing time into rigorous demand forecasts and planning.

    Resource projections could be based in a secure set of assumptions – i.e. 8 hour days, 40 hour weeks – and staff had the time to support detailed resource management processes that provided accurate usage data.

    Old Realities

    • Predictability. Change tended to be slow and deliberate, providing more stability for advanced, rigorous demand forecasts and planning.
    • Fixed hierarchy. Tasks, priorities, and decisions were communicated through a fixed chain of command.
    • Single-task focus. The old reality was more accommodating to sustained focus on one task at a time.

    96% of organizations report problems with the accuracy of information on employee timesheets. (Dimensional, 2013)

    Old reality resource forecasting inevitably falters under the weight of unpredictable demands and constant distractions

    New realities are causing demands on workers’ time to be unpredictable and unrelenting, making a sustained focus on a specific task for any length of time elusive.

    Part of the old resource management mythology is the idea that a person can do (for example) eight different one-hour tasks in eight hours of continuous work. This idea has gone from harmlessly mistaken to grossly unrealistic.

    The predictability and focus have given way to more chaotic workplace realities. Technology is ubiquitous, and the demand for IT services is constant.

    A day in IT is characterized by frequent task-switching, regular interruptions, and an influx of technology-enabled distractions.

    Every 3 minutes and 5 seconds: How often the typical office worker switches tasks, either through self-directed or other-directed interruptions. (Schulte, 2015)

    12 minutes, 40 seconds: The average amount of time in-between face-to-face interruptions in matrix organizations. (Anderson, 2015)

    23 minutes, 15 seconds: The average amount of time it takes to become on task, productive, and focused again after an interruption. (Schulte, 2015)

    759 hours: The average number of hours lost per employee annually due to distractions and interruptions. (Huth, 2015)

    The validity of traditional, rigorous resource planning has long been an illusion. New realities are making the sustained focus and stable assumptions that old reality projections relied on all but impossible to maintain.

    For resource management practices to be effective, they need to evolve to meet new realities

    New organizational realities have exacerbated traditional approaches to time tracking, making accurate and usable resource data elusive.

    The technology revolution that began in the 1990s ushered in a new paradigm in organizational structures. Matrix reporting structures, diminished supervision of knowledge workers, massive multi-tasking, and a continuous stream of information and communications from the outside world have smashed the predictability and stability of the old paradigm.

    The resource management industry has largely failed to evolve. It remains stubbornly rooted in old realities, relying on calculations and rollups that become increasingly unsustainable and irrelevant in our high-autonomy staff cultures and interruption-driven work days.

    New Realities

    • Unpredictable. Technologies and organizational strategies change before traditional IT demand forecasts and project plans can be realized.
    • Matrix management. Staff can be accountable to multiple project managers and functional managers at any given time.
    • Multi-task focus. In the new reality, workers’ attentions are scattered across multiple tasks and projects at any given time.

    87% of organizations report challenges with traditional methods of time tracking and reporting. (Dimensional, 2013)

    40% of working time is not tracked or tracked inaccurately by staff. (actiTIME, 2016)

    Poor resource management practices cost organizations dearly

    While time is money, the statistics around resource visibility and utilization suggest that the vast majority of organizations don’t spend their available time all that wisely.

    Research shows that ineffective resource management directly impacts an organization’s bottom line, contributing to such cost drains as the systemic late delivery of projects and increased project costs.

    Despite this, the majority of organizations fail to treat staff time like the precious commodity it is.

    As the results of a 2016 survey show, the top three pain points for IT and PMO leaders all revolve around a wider cultural negligence concerning staff time (Alexander, TechRepublic, 2016):

    • Overcommitted resources
    • Constant change that affects staff assignments
    • An inability to prioritize shared resources

    Top risks associated with poor resource management

    Inability to complete projects on time – 52%

    Inability to innovate fast enough – 39%

    Increased project costs – 38%

    Missed business opportunities – 34%

    Dissatisfied customers or clients – 32%

    12 times more waste – Organizations with poor resource management practices waste nearly 12 times more resource hours than high-performing organizations. (PMI, 2014)

    The concept of fiduciary duty represents the best way to bring balance to supply and demand, and improve project outcomes

    Unless someone is accountable for controlling the consumption of staff hours, too much work will get approved and committed to without evidence of sufficient resourcing.

    Who is accountable for controlling the consumption of staff hours?

    In many ways, no question is more important to the organization’s bottom line – and certainly, to the effectiveness of a resource management strategy.

    Historically, the answer would have been the executive layer of the organization. However, in the 1990s management largely abdicated its obligation to control resources and expenditures via “employee empowerment.”

    Controls on approvals became less rigid, and accountability for choosing what to do (and not do) shifted onto the shoulders of the individual worker. This creates a current paradigm where no one is accountable for the malinvestment…

    …of resources that comes from approving too many projects. Instead, it’s up to individual workers to sink-or-swim, as they attempt to reconcile, day after day, seemingly infinite organizational demand with their finite supply of working hours.

    If your organization has higher demand (i.e. approved project work) than supply (i.e. people’s time), your staff will be the final decision makers on what does and does NOT get worked on.

    Effective time leadership distinguishes top performing senior executives

    "Everything requires time… It is the one truly universal condition. All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable and necessary resource. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time." – Peter Drucker (quoted in Frank)

    67% of employees surveyed believe their CEOs focus too much on decisions based in short-term financial results and not enough time on decisions that create a stable, positive workplace for staff. (2016 Edelman Trust Barometer)

    Bring balance to supply and demand with realistic resource management practices

    Use Info-Tech’s approach to resource management to capture an accurate view of where your time goes and achieve sustained visibility into your capacity for new projects.

    Realistic project resource management starts by aligning demand with capacity, and then developing tactics to sustain alignment, even in the chaos of our fast-paced, rapidly changing, interruption-driven project environments.

    This blueprint will help you develop practices to promote and maintain accurate resourcing data, while developing tactics to continually inform decision makers’ assumptions about how much capacity is realistically available for project work.

    This research follows a three-phase approach to sustainable practices:

    1. Take Stock of Organizational Supply and Demand
    2. Design a Realistic Resource Management Process
    3. Implement Sustainable Resource Management Practices

    Info-Tech’s three-phase framework is structured around a practical, tactical approach to resource management. It’s not about what you put together as a one-time snapshot. It’s about what you can and will maintain every week, even during a crisis. When you stop maintaining resource management data, it’s nearly impossible to catch up and you’re usually forced to start fresh.

    Info-Tech’s approach is rooted in our seven dimensions of resource management

    Action the decision points across Info-Tech’s seven dimensions to ensure your resource management process is guided by realistic data and process goals.

    Default project vs. non-project ratio

    How much time is available for projects once non-project demands are factored in?

    Reporting frequency

    How often is the allocation data verified, reconciled, and reported for use?

    Forecast horizon

    How far into the future can you realistically predict resource supply?

    Scope of allocation

    To whom is time allocated?

    Allocation cadence

    How long is each allocation period?

    Granularity of time allocation

    What’s the smallest unit of time to allocate?

    Granularity of work assignment

    What is time allocated to?

    This blueprint will help you make the right decisions for your organization across each of these dimensions to ensure your resource management practices match your current process maturity levels.

    Once your framework is defined, we’ll equip you with a tactical plan to help keep supply and demand continually balanced

    This blueprint will help you customize a playbook to ensure your allocations are perpetually balanced week after week, month after month.

    Developing a process is one thing, sustaining it is another.

    The goal of this research isn’t just to achieve a one-time balancing of workloads and expect that this will stand the test of time.

    The true test of a resource management process is how well it facilitates the flow of accurate and usable data as workloads become chaotic, and fires and crises erupt.

    • Info-Tech’s approach will help you develop a playbook and a “rebalancing routine” that will help ensure your allocations remain perpetually current and balanced.
    • The sample routine to the right shows you an example of what this rebalancing process will look like (customizing this process is covered in Phase 3 of the blueprint).

    Sample “rebalancing” routine

    • Maintain a comprehensive list of the sources of demand (i.e. document the matrix).
    • Catalog the demand.
    • Allocate the supply.
    • Forecast the capacity to your forecast horizon.
    • Identify and prepare work packages or tasks for unsatisfied demand to ensure that supply can be utilized if it becomes free.
    • Reconcile any imbalance by repeating steps 1-5 on update frequency, say, weekly or monthly.

    Info-Tech’s method is complemented by a suite of resource management tools and templates

    Each phase of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help plan your resource management strategy and sustain your process implementation.

    Resource management depends on the flow of information and data from the project level up to functional managers, project managers, and beyond – CIOs, steering committees, and senior executives.

    Tools are required to help plan, organize, and facilitate this flow, and each phase of this blueprint is centered around tools and templates to help you successfully support your process implementation.

    Take Stock of Organizational Supply and Demand

    Tools and Templates:

    Design a Realistic Resource Management Process

    Tools and Templates:

    Implement Sustainable Resource Management Practices

    Tools and Templates:

    Use Info-Tech’s Portfolio Manager Lite to support your new process without a heavy upfront investment in tools

    Spreadsheets can provide a viable alternative for organizations not ready to invest in an expensive tool, or for those not getting what they need from their commercial selections.

    While homegrown solutions like spreadsheets and intranet sites lack the robust functionality of commercial offerings, they have dramatically lower complexity and cost-in-use.

    Info-Tech’s Portfolio Manager Lite is a sophisticated, scalable, and highly customizable spreadsheet-based solution that will get your new resource management process up and running, without a heavy upfront cost.

    Kinds of PPM solutions used by Info-Tech clients

    Homemade – 46%

    Commercial – 33%

    No Solution – 21%

    (Info-Tech Research Group (2016), N=433)

    The image shows 3 sheets with charts and graphs.

    Samples of Portfolio Manager Lite's output and reporting tabs

    Info-Tech’s approach to resource management is part of our larger project portfolio management framework

    This blueprint will help you master the art of resource management and set you up for greater success in other project portfolio management capabilities.

    Resource management is one capability within Info-Tech’s larger project portfolio management (PPM) framework.

    Resource visibility and capacity awareness permeates the whole of PPM, helping to ensure the right intake decisions get made, and projects are scheduled according to resource and skill availability.

    Whether you have an existing PPM strategy that you are looking to optimize or you are just starting on your PPM journey, this blueprint will help you situate your resource management processes within a larger project and portfolio framework.

    Info-Tech’ s PPM framework is based on extensive research and practical application, and complements industry standards such as those offered by PMI and ISACA.

    Project Portfolio Management
    Status & Progress Reporting
    Intake, Approval, & Prioritization Resource Management Project Management Project Closure Benefits Tracking
    Organizational Change Management
    Intake → Execution→ Closure

    Realize the value that improved resource management practices could bring to your organization

    Spend your company’s HR dollars more efficiently.

    Improved resource management and capacity awareness will allow your organization to improve resource utilization and increase project throughput.

    CIOs, PMOs, and portfolio managers can use this blueprint to improve the alignment between supply and demand. You should be able to gauge the value through the following metrics:

    Near-Term Success Metrics (6 to 12 months)

    • Increased frequency of currency (i.e. more accurate and usable resource data and reports).
    • Improved job satisfaction from project resources due to more even workloads.
    • Better ability to schedule project start dates and estimate end dates due to recourse visibility.

    Long-Term Success Metrics (12 to 24 months)

    • More projects completed on time.
    • Reclaimed capacity for project work.
    • A reduction in resource waste and increased resource utilization on productive project work.
    • Ability to track estimated vs. actual budget and work effort on projects.

    In the past 12 months, Info-Tech clients have reported an average measured value rating of $550,000 from the purchase of workshops based on this research.

    Info-Tech client masters resource management by shifting the focus to capacity forecasting

    CASE STUDY

    Industry Education

    Source Info-Tech Client

    Situation

    • There are more than 200 people in the IT organization.
    • IT is essentially a shared services environment with clients spanning multiple institutions across a wide geography.
    • The PMO identified dedicated resources for resource management.

    Complication

    • The definition of “resource management” was constantly shifting between accounting the past (i.e. time records), the present (i.e. work assignments), and the future (i.e. long term project allocations).
    • The task data set (i.e. for current work assignments) was not aligned to the historic time records or future capacity.
    • It was difficult to predict or account for the spend, which exceeded 30,000 hours per month.

    “We’re told we can’t say NO to projects. But this new tool set and approach allows us to give an informed WHEN.” – Senior PMO Director, Education

    Resolution

    • The leadership decided to forecast and communicate their resource capacity on a 3-4 month forecast horizon using Info-Tech’s Portfolio Manager 2017.
    • Unallocated resource capacity was identified within certain skill sets that had previously been assessed as fully allocated. While some of the more high-visibility staff were indeed overallocated, other more junior personnel had been systemically underutilized on projects.
    • The high demand for IT project resourcing was immediately placed in the context of a believable, credible expression of supply.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    “Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

    Guided Implementation

    “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

    Workshop

    “We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

    Consulting

    “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Establish Realistic IT Resource Management Practices – project overview

    1. Take Stock of Organizational Supply and Demand 2. Design a Realistic Resource Management Process 3. Implement Sustainable Resource Management Practices
    Best-Practice Toolkit

    1.1 Set a resource management course of action

    1.2 Create realistic estimates of supply and demand

    2.1 Customize the seven dimensions of resource management

    2.2 Determine the resource management tool that will best support your process

    2.3 Build process steps to ensure data accuracy and sustainability

    3.1 Pilot your resource management process to assess viability

    3.2 Plan to engage your stakeholders with your playbook

    Guided Implementations
    • Scoping call
    • Assess how accountability for resource management is currently distributed
    • Create a realistic estimate of project capacity
    • Map all sources of demand on resources at a high level
    • Set your seven dimensions of resource management
    • Jump-start spreadsheet-based resource management with Portfolio Manager Lite
    • Build on the workflow to determine how data will be collected and who will support the process
    • Define the scope of a pilot and determine logistics
    • Finalize resource management roles and responsibilities
    • Brainstorm and plan for potential resistance to change, objections, and fatigue from stakeholders
    Onsite Workshop

    Module 1:

    • Take Stock of Organizational Supply and Demand

    Module 2:

    • Design a Realistic Resource Management Process

    Module 3:

    • Implement Sustainable Resource Management Practices

    Phase 1 Outcome:

    • Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator

    Phase 2 Outcome:

    • Resource Management Playbook

    Phase 3 Outcome:

    • Resource Management Communications Template

    Workshop overview

    Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Workshop Day 1 Workshop Day 2 Workshop Day 3 Workshop Day 4 Workshop Day 5
    Activities

    Introduction to PPM and resource management

    1.1 Complete and review PPM Current State Scorecard Assessment

    1.2 Perform root cause analysis of resource management challenges

    1.3 Initiate time audit survey of management and staff

    Take stock of supply and demand

    2.1 Review the outputs of the time audit survey and analyze the data

    2.2 Analyze project and non-project demands, including the sources of those demands

    2.3 Set the seven dimensions of resource management

    Design a resource management process

    3.1 Review resource management tool options

    3.2 Prepare a vendor demo script or review Portfolio Manager Lite

    3.3 Build process steps to ensure data accuracy and sustainability

    Pilot and refine the process

    4.1 Define methods for piloting the strategy (after the workshop)

    4.2 Complete the Process Pilot Plan Template

    4.3 Conduct a mock resource management meeting

    4.4 Perform a RACI exercise

    Communicate and implement the process

    5.1 Brainstorm potential implications of the new strategy and develop a plan to manage stakeholder and staff resistance to the strategy

    5.2 Customize the Resource Management Communications Template

    5.3 Finalize the playbook

    Deliverables
    1. PPM Current State Scorecard Assessment
    2. Root cause analysis
    3. Time Audit Workbook and survey templates
    1. Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator
    1. Portfolio Manager Lite
    2. PPM Solution Vendor Demo Script
    3. Tentative Resource Management Playbook
    1. Process Pilot Plan Template
    2. RACI chart
    1. Resource Management Communications Template
    2. Finalized Resource Management Playbook

    Phase 1

    Take Stock of Organizational Resource Supply and Demand

    Phase 1 Outline

    Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

    Guided Implementation 1: Take Stock of Organizational Resource Supply and Demand

    Proposed Time to Completion (in weeks): 1-2 weeks

    Step 1.1: Analyze the current state

    Start with an analyst kick-off call:

    • Discuss the goals, aims, benefits, and challenges of resource management
    • Identify who is currently accountable for balancing resource supply and demand

    Then complete these activities…

    • Assess the current distribution of accountabilities in resource management
    • Delve into your current problems to uncover root causes
    • Make a go/no-go decision on developing a new resource management practice
    Step 1.2: Estimate your supply and demand

    Review findings with analyst:

    • Root causes of resource management
    • Your current impression about the resource supply-demand imbalance

    Then complete these activities…

    • Estimate your resource capacity for each role
    • Estimate your project/non-project demand on resources
    • Validate the findings with a time-tracking survey

    With these tools & templates:

    • Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator
    • Time-Tracking Survey Email Template

    Phase 1 Results & Insights:

    A matrix organization creates many small, untraceable demands that are often overlooked in resource management efforts, which leads to underestimating total demand and overcommitting resources. To capture them and enhance the success of your resource management effort, focus on completeness rather than precision. Precision of data will improve over time as your process maturity grows.

    Step 1.1: Set a resource management course of action

    PHASE 1

    1.1 Set a course of action

    1.2 Estimate supply and demand

    PHASE 2

    2.1 Select resource management dimensions

    2.2 Select resource management tools

    2.3 Build process steps

    PHASE 3

    3.1 Pilot your process for viability

    3.2 Plan stakeholder engagement

    This step will walk you through the following activities:
    • Determine your resource management process capability level
    • Assess how accountability for resource management is currently distributed
    This step involves the following participants:
    • CIO / IT Director
    • PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager
    • Functional / Resource Managers
    • Project Managers
    Outcomes of this step
    • Current distribution of accountability for resource management practice
    • Root-cause analysis of resourcing challenges facing the organization
    • Commitment to implementing a right-sized resource management practice

    “Too many projects, not enough resources” is the reality of most IT environments

    A profound imbalance between demand (i.e. approved project work and service delivery commitments) and supply (i.e. people’s time) is the top challenge IT departments face today..

    In today’s organizations, the desires of business units for new products and enhancements, and the appetites of senior leadership to approve more and more projects for those products and services, far outstrip IT’s ability to realistically deliver on everything.

    The vast majority of IT departments lack the resourcing to meet project demand – especially given the fact that day-to-day operational demands frequently trump project work.

    As a result, project throughput suffers – and with it, IT’s reputation within the organization.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Where does the time go? The portfolio manager (or equivalent) should function as the accounting department for time, showing what’s available in IT’s human resources budget for projects and providing ongoing visibility into how that budget of time is being spent.

    Resource management can help to even out staff workloads and improve project and service delivery results

    As the results of a recent survey* show, the top three pain points for IT and PMO leaders all revolve around a wider cultural negligence concerning staff time:

    • Overcommitted resources
    • Constant change that affects staff assignments
    • An inability to prioritize shared resources

    A resource management strategy can help to alleviate these pain points and reconcile the imbalance between supply and demand by achieving the following outcomes:

    • Improving resource visibility
    • Reducing overallocation, and accordingly, resource stress
    • Reducing project delay
    • Improving resource efficiency and productivity

    Top risks associated with poor resource management

    Inability to complete projects on time – 52%

    Inability to innovate fast enough – 39%

    Increased project costs – 38%

    Missed business opportunities – 34%

    Dissatisfied customers or clients – 32%

    12 times more waste – Organizations with poor resource management practices waste nearly 12 times more resource hours than high-performing organizations. (PMI, 2014)

    Resource management is a core process in Info-Tech’s project portfolio management framework

    Project portfolio management (PPM) creates a stable and secure infrastructure around projects.

    PPM’s goal is to maximize the throughput of projects that provide strategic and operational value to the organization. To do this, a PPM strategy must help to:

    Info-Tech's Project Portfolio Management Process Model
    3. Status & Progress Reporting [make sure the projects are okay]
    1. Intake, Approval, & Prioritization [select the right projects] 2. Resource Management [Pick the right time and people to execute the projects Project Management

    4. Project Closure

    [make sure the projects get done]

    5. Benefits Tracking

    [make sure they were worth doing]

    Organizational Change Management
    Intake → Execution→ Closure

    If you don’t yet have a PPM strategy in place, or would like to revisit your existing PPM strategy before implementing resource management practices, see Info-Tech’s blueprint, Develop a Project Portfolio Management Strategy.

    Effective resource management is rooted in a relatively simple set of questions

    However, while the questions are rather simple, the answers become complicated by challenges unique to matrix organizations and other workplace realities in 2017.

    To support the goals of PPM more generally, resource management must (1) supply quality work-hours to approved and ongoing projects, and (2) supply reliable data with which to steer the project portfolio.

    To do this, a resource management strategy must address a relatively straightforward set of questions.

    Key Questions

    • Who assigns the resources?
    • Who feeds the data on resources?
    • How do we make sure it’s valid?
    • How do we handle contingencies when projects are late or when availability changes?

    Challenges

    • Matrix organizations require project workers to answer to many masters and balance project work with “keep the lights on” activities and other administrative work.
    • Interruptions, distractions, and divided attention create consistent challenges for workplace productivity.

    "In matrix organizations, complicated processes and tools get implemented to answer the deceptively simple question “what’s Bob going to work on over the next few months?” Inevitably, the data captured becomes the focus of scrutiny as functional and project managers complain about data inaccuracy while simultaneously remaining reluctant to invest the effort necessary to improve quality." – Kiron Bondale

    Determine your organization’s resource management capability level with a maturity assessment

    1.1.1
    10 minutes

    Input

    • Organizational strategy and culture

    Output

    • Resource management capability level

    Materials

    • N/A

    Participants

    • PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager
    • Project Managers
    • Resource Managers

    Kick-off the discussion on the resource management process by deciding which capability level most accurately describes your organization’s current state.

    Capability Level Descriptions
    Capability Level 5: Optimized Our organization has an accurate picture of project versus non-project workloads and allocates resources accordingly. We periodically reclaim lost capacity through organizational and behavioral change.
    Capability Level 4: Aligned We have an accurate picture of how much time is spent on project versus non-project work. We allocate resources to these projects accordingly. We are checking in on project progress bi-weekly.
    Capability Level 3: Pixelated We are allocating resources to projects and tracking progress monthly. We have a rough estimate of how much time is spent on project versus non-project work.
    Capability Level 2: Opaque We match resource teams to projects and check in annually, but we do not forecast future resource needs or track project versus non-project work.
    Capability Level 1: Unmanaged Our organization expects projects to be finished, but there is no process in place for allocating resources or tracking project progress.

    If resources are poorly managed, they prioritize work based on consequences rather than on meeting demand

    As a result, matrix organizations are collectively steered by each resource and its individual motives, not by managers, executives, or organizational strategy.

    In a matrix organization, demands on a resource’s time come from many directions, each demand unaware of the others. Resources are expected to prioritize their work, but they typically lack the authority to formally reject demand, so demand frequently outstrips the supply of work-hours the resource can deliver.

    When this happens, the resource has three options:

    1. Work more hours, typically without compensation.
    2. Choose tasks not to do in a way that minimizes personal consequences.
    3. Diminish work quality to meet quantity demands.

    The result is an unsustainable system for those involved:

    1. Resources cannot meet expectations, leading to frustration and disengagement.
    2. Managers cannot deliver on the projects or services they manage and struggle to retain skilled resources who are looking elsewhere for “greener pastures.”
    3. Executives cannot execute strategic plans as they lose decision-making power over their resources.

    Scope your resource management practices within a matrix organization by asking “who?”

    Resource management boils down to a seemingly simple question: how do we balance supply and demand? Balancing requires a decision maker to make choices; however, in a matrix organization, identifying this decision maker is not straightforward:

    Balance

    • Who decides how much capacity should be dedicated to project work versus administrative or operational work?
    • Who decides how to respond to unexpected changes in supply or demand?

    Supply

    • Who decides how much total capacity we have for each necessary skill set?
    • Who manages the contingency, or redundancy, of capacity?
    • Who validates the capacity supply as a whole?
    • Who decides what to report as unexpected changes in supply (and to whom)?

    Demand

    • Who generates demand on the resource that can be controlled by their manager?
    • Who generates demand on the capacity that cannot be controlled by their manager?
    • Who validates the demand on capacity as a whole?
    • Who decides what to report as unexpected changes in demand (and to whom)?

    The individual who has the authority to make choices, and who is ultimately liable for those decisions, is an accountable person. In a matrix organization, accountability is dispersed, sometimes spilling over to those without the necessary authority.

    To effectively balance supply and demand, senior management must be held accountable

    Differentiate between responsibility and accountability to manage the organization’s project portfolio effectively.

    Responsibility

    The responsible party is the individual (or group) who actually completes the task.

    Responsibility can be shared.

    VS.

    Accountability

    The accountable person is the individual who has the authority to make choices, and is ultimately answerable for the decision.

    Accountability cannot be shared.

    Resources often do not have the necessary scope of authority to make resource management choices, so they can never be truly accountable for the project portfolio. Instead, resources are accountable for making available trustworthy data, so the right people can make choices driven by organizational strategy.

    The next activity will assess how accountability for resource management is currently distributed in your organization.

    Assess the current distribution of accountability for resource management practice

    1.1.2
    15 minutes

    Input

    • Organizational strategy and culture

    Output

    • Current distribution of accountabilities for resource management

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/flip chart
    • Markers

    Participants

    • CIO
    • PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager

    Below is a list of tasks in resource management that require choices. Discuss who is currently accountable and whether they have the right authority and ability to deliver on that accountability.

    Resource management tasks that require choices Accountability
    Current Effective?
    Identify all demands on resources
    Prioritize identified project demands
    Prioritize identified operational demands
    Prioritize identified administrative demands
    Prioritize all of the above demands
    Enumerate resource supply
    Validate resource supply
    Collect and validate supply and demand data
    Defer or reject work beyond available supply
    Adjust resource supply to meet demand

    Develop coordination between project and functional managers to optimize resource management

    Because resources are invariably responsible for both project and non-project work, efforts to procure capacity for projects cannot exist in isolation.

    IT departments need many different technical skill sets at their disposal for their day-to-day operations and services, as well as for projects. A limited hiring budget for IT restricts the number of hires with any given skill, forcing IT to share resources between service and project portfolios.

    This resource sharing produces a matrix organization divided along the lines of service and projects. Functional and project managers provide respective oversight for services and projects. Resources split their available work-hours toward service and project tasks according to priority – in theory.

    However, in practice, two major challenges exist:

    1. Poor coordination between functional and project managers causes commitments beyond resource capacity, disputes about resource oversight, and animosity among management, all while resources struggle to balance unclear priorities.
    2. Resources have a “third boss,” namely uncontrolled demands from the rest of the business, which lack both visibility and accountability.

    The image shows a board balanced on a ball (labelled Resource Management), with two balls on either end of it (Capacity Supply on the left, and Demand on the right), and another board balanced on top of the right ball, with two more balls balanced on either side of it (Projects on the left and Operational, Administrative, Etc. on the right).

    Resource management processes must account for the numerous small demands generated in a matrix organization

    Avoid going bankrupt $20 at a time: small demands add up to a significant chunk of work-hours.

    Because resource managers must cover both projects and services within IT, the typical solution to allocation problems in matrix organizations is to escalate the urgency and severity of demands by involving the executive steering committee. Unfortunately, the steering committee cannot expend time and resources on all demands. Instead, they often set a minimum threshold for cases – 100-1,000 work-hours depending on the organization.

    Under this resource management practice, small demands – especially the quick-fixes and little projects from “the third boss” – continue to erode project capacity. Eventually, projects fail to get resources because pesky small demands have no restrictions on the resources they consumed.

    Realistic resource management needs to account for demand from all three bosses; however…

    Info-Tech Insight

    Excess project or service request intake channels lead to the proliferation of “off-the-grid” projects and tasks that lack visibility from the IT leadership. This can indicate that there may be too much red tape: that is, the request process is made too complex or cumbersome. Consider simplifying the request process and bring IT’s visibility into those requests.

    Interrogate your resource management problems to uncover root causes

    1.1.3
    30 minutes to 1 hour

    Input

    • Organizational strategy and culture

    Output

    • Root causes of resource management failures

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/flip chart
    • Sticky notes
    • Markers

    Participants

    • CIO
    • PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager
    • Functional Managers
    • Project Managers
    1. Pick a starting problem statement in resource management. e.g. projects can’t get resource work-hours.
    2. Ask the participants “why”? Use three generic headings – people, processes, and technology – to keep participants focused. Keep the responses solution-agnostic: do not jump to solutions. If you have a large group, divide into smaller groups and use sticky notes to encourage more participation in this brainstorming step.
    People Processes Technology
    • We don’t have enough people/skills.
    • People are tied up on projects that run late.
    • Functional and project managers appear to hoard resources.
    • Resources cannot prioritize work.
    • Resources are too busy responding to 911s from the business.
    • Resources cannot prioritize projects vs. operational tasks.
    • “Soft-closed” projects do not release resources for other work.
    • We don’t have tools that show resource availability.
    • Tools we have for showing resource availability are not being used.
    • Data is inaccurate and unreliable.
    1. Determine the root cause by iteratively asking “why?” up to five times, or until the chain of whys comes full circle. (i.e. Why A? B. Why B? C. Why C? A.) See below for an example.

    1.1.2 Example of a root-cause analysis: people

    The following is a non-exhaustive example:

    The image shows an example of a root-cause analysis. It begins on the left with the header People, and then lists a series of challenges below. Moving toward the right, there are a series of headers that read Why? at the top of the chart, and listing reasons for the challenges below each one. As you read through the chart from left to right, the reasons for challenges become increasingly specific.

    Right-size your resource management strategy with Info-Tech’s realistic resource management practice

    If precise, accurate, and complete data on resource supply and demand was consistently available, reporting on project capacity would be easy. Such data would provide managers complete control over a resource’s time, like a foreman at a construction site. However, this theoretical scenario is incompatible with today’s matrixed workplace:

    • Sources of demand can lie outside IT’s control.
    • Demand is generated chaotically, with little predictability.
    • Resources work with minimal supervision.

    Collecting and maintaining resource data is therefore nearly impossible:

    • Achieving perfect data accuracy creates unnecessary overhead.
    • Non-compliance by one project or resource makes your entire data set unusable for resource management.

    This blueprint will guide you through right-sizing your resource management efforts to achieve maximum value-to-effort ratio and sustainability.


    The image shows a graph with Quality, Value on the Y axis, and Required Effort on the X-Axis. The graph is divided into 3 categories, based on the criteria: Value-to-effort Ratio and Sustainability. The three sections are labelled at the top of the graph as: Reactive, “gut feel”-driven; Right-sized resource management; Full control, complete data. The 2nd section is bolded. The line in the graph starts low, rising through the 2nd section, and is stable at the top of the chart in the final section.

    Choose your resource management course of action

    Portfolio managers looking for a resource management solution have three mutually exclusive options:

    Option A: Do Nothing

    • Rely on expert judgment and intuition to make portfolio choices.
    • Allow the third boss to dictate the demands of your resources.

    Option B: Get Precise

    • Aim for granularity and precision of data with a solution that may demand more capacity than is realistically available by hiring, outsourcing, or over-allocating people’s time.
    • Require detailed, accurate time sheets for all project tasks.
    • For those choosing this option, proceed to Info-Tech’s Select and Implement a PPM Solution.

    Option C: Get Realistic

    • Balance capacity supply and demand using abstraction.
    • Implement right-sized resource management practices that rely on realistic, high-level capacity estimates.
    • Reduce instability in data by focusing on resource capacity, rather than granular project demands and task level details.

    This blueprint takes you through the steps necessary to accomplish Option C, using Info-Tech’s tools and templates for managing your resources.

    Step 1.2: Create realistic estimates of supply and demand

    PHASE 1

    1.1 Set a course of action

    1.2 Estimate supply and demand

    PHASE 2

    2.1 Select resource management dimensions

    2.2 Select resource management tools

    2.3 Build process steps

    PHASE 3

    3.1 Pilot your process for viability

    3.2 Plan stakeholder engagement

    This step will walk you through the following activities:
    • Create a realistic estimate of project capacity
    • Map all sources of demand on resources at a high level
    • Validate your supply and demand assumptions by directly surveying your resources
    This step involves the following participants:
    • PMO Director / Portfolio Manager
    • Project Managers (optional)
    • Functional / Resource Managers (optional)
    • Project Resources (optional)
    Outcomes of this step
    • A realistic estimate of your total and project capacity, as well as project and non-project demand on their time
    • Quantitative insight into the resourcing challenges facing the organization
    • Results from a time-tracking survey, which are used to validate the assumptions made for estimating resource supply and demand

    Create a realistic estimate of your project capacity with Info-Tech’s Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator

    Take an iterative approach to capacity estimates: use your assumptions to create a meaningful estimate, and then validate with your staff to improve its accuracy.

    Use Info-Tech’s Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator to create a realistic estimate of your project capacity.

    The calculator tool requires minimal upfront staff participation: you can obtain meaningful results with participation from even a single person, with insight on the distribution of your resources and their average work week or month. As the number of participants increases, the quality of analysis will improve.

    The first half of this step guides you through how to use the calculator. The second half provides tactical advice on how to gather additional data and validate your resourcing data with your staff.

    Download Info-Tech’s Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator

    Info-Tech Insight

    What’s first, process or tools? Remember that process determines the quality of your data while data quality limits the tool’s utility. Without quality data, you cannot evaluate the success of the tool, so nail down your collection process first.

    Break down your resource capacity into high-level buckets of time for each role

    1.2.1
    30 minutes - 1 hour

    Input

    • Staff resource types
    • Average work week
    • Estimated allocations

    Output

    A realistic estimate of project capacity

    Materials

    Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator

    Participants

    • PMO Director
    • Resource/Functional Managers (optional)

    We define four high-level buckets of resource time:

    • Absence: on average, a resource spends 14% of the year on vacation, statutory holidays, business holidays and other forms of absenteeism.
    • Administrative: time spent on meetings, recordkeeping, etc.
    • Operational: keeping the lights on; reactive work.
    • Projects: time to work on projects; typically, this bucket of time is whatever’s left from the above.

    The image shows a pie chart with four sections: Absence - 6,698 14%; Admin - 10,286 22%; Keep the Lights On - 15, 026 31%; Project Capacity 15, 831 33%.

    Instructions for working through Tab 2 of the Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator are provided in the next two sections. Follow along to obtain your breakdown of annual resource capacity in a pie chart.

    Break down your resource capacity into high-level buckets of time for each role

    1.2.1
    Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator, Tab 2: Capacity Supply

    Discover how many work-hours are at your disposal by first accounting for absences.

    The image shows a section of the Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator, for calculating absences, with sample information filled in.

    1. Compile a list of each of the roles within your department.
    2. Enter the number of staff currently performing each role.
    3. Enter the number of hours in a typical work week for each role.
    4. Enter the foreseeable out-of-office time (vacation, sick time, etc.) Typically, this value is 12-16% depending on the region.

    Hours per Year represents your total resource capacity for each role, as well as the entire department. This column is automatically calculated.

    Working Time per Year represents your total resource capacity minus time employees are expected to spend out of office. This column is automatically calculated.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Example for a five-day work week:

    • 2 weeks (10 days) of statutory holidays
    • 3 weeks of vacation
    • 1.4 weeks (7 days) of sick days on average
    • 1 week (5 days) for company holidays

    Result: 7.4/52 weeks’ absence = 14.2%

    Break down your resource capacity into high-level buckets of time for each role (continued)

    1.2.1
    Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator, Tab 2: Capacity Supply

    Determine the current distribution of your resources’ time and your confidence in whether the resources indeed supply those times.

    The image is a screen capture of the Working Time section of the calculator, with sample information filled in.

    5. Enter the percentage of working time across each role that, on an annual basis, goes toward administrative duties (non-project meetings, training, time spent checking email, etc.) and keep-the-lights-on work (e.g. support and maintenance work).

    While these percentages will vary by individual, a high-level estimate across each role will suffice for the purposes of this activity.

    6. Express how confident you are in each resource being able to deliver the calculated project work hours in percentages.

    Another interpretation for supply confidence is “supply control”: estimate your current ability to control this distribution of working time to meet the changing needs in percentages.

    Percentage of your working time that goes toward project work is calculated based upon what’s left after your non-project working time allocations have been subtracted.

    Create a realistic estimate of the demand from your project portfolio with the T-shirt sizing technique

    1.2.2
    15 minutes - 30 minutes

    Input

    • Average work-hours for a project
    • List of projects
    • PPM Current State Scorecard

    Output

    A realistic estimate of resource demand from your project portfolio

    Materials

    Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator

    Participants

    • PMO Director
    • Project Managers (optional)

    Quickly re-express the size of your project portfolio in resource hours required.

    Estimating the resources required for a project in a project backlog can take a lot of effort. Rather than trying to create an accurate estimate for each project, a set of standard project sizes (often referred to as the “T-shirt sizing” technique) will be sufficiently accurate for estimating your project backlog’s overall demand.

    Instructions for working through Tab 3 of the tool are provided here and in the next section.

    1. For each type of project, enter the average number for work-hours.

    Project Types Average Number of Work Hours for a Project
    Small 80
    Medium 200
    Large 500
    Extra-Large 1000

    Improve your estimate of demand from your project portfolio by accounting for unproductive capacity spending

    1.2.2
    Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator, Tab 3: Project Demand

    2. Using your list of projects, enter the number of projects for each appropriate field.

    The image shows a screen capture of the number of projects section of the Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator, with sample information filled in.

    3. Enter your resource waste data from the PPM Current State Scorecard (see next section). Alternatively, enter your best guess on how much project capacity is spent wastefully per category.

    The image shows a screen capture of the Waste Assessment section of the Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator, with sample information filled in, and a pie chart on the right based on the sample data.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The calculator estimates the project demand by T-shirt-sizing the work-hours required by projects to be delivered within the next 12 months and then adding the corresponding wasted capacity. This may be a pessimistic estimate, but it is more realistic because projects tend to be delivered late more than early.

    Estimate how much project capacity is wasted with Info-Tech’s PPM Current State Scorecard

    Call 1-888-670-8889 or contact your Account Manager for more information.

    This step is highly recommended but not required.

    Info-Tech’s PPM Current State Scorecard diagnostic provides a comprehensive view of your portfolio management strengths and weaknesses, including project portfolio management, project management, customer management, and resource utilization.

    Use the wisdom-of-the-crowd to estimate resource waste in:

    • Cancelled projects
    • Inefficiency
    • Suboptimal assignment of resources
    • Unassigned resources
    • Analyzing, fixing, and redeploying

    50% of PPM resource is wasted on average, effectively halving your available project capacity.

    Estimate non-project demand on your resources by role

    1.2.3
    45 minutes - 1 hour

    Input

    • Organizational chart
    • Knowledge of staff non-project demand

    Output

    Documented non-project demands and their estimated degree of fluctuation

    Materials

    Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator

    Participants

    • PMO Director
    • Functional Managers (optional)
    Document non-project demand that could eat into your project capacity.

    When discussing project demands, non-project demands (administrative and operational) are often underestimated and downplayed – even though, in reality, they take a de facto higher priority to project work. Use Tab 4 of the tool to document these non-project demands, as well as their sources.

    The image shows a screen capture from Tab 4 of the tool, with sample information filled in.

    1. Choose a role using a drop-down list.

    2. Enter the type and the source of the demand.

    3. Enter the size and the frequency of the demand in hours.

    4. Estimate how stable the non-project demands are for each role.

    Examine and discuss your supply-demand analysis report

    1.2.4
    30 minutes - 1 hour

    Input

    Completed Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator

    Output

    Supply-Demand Analysis Report

    Materials

    Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator

    Participants

    • PMO Director
    • Functional Managers
    • Project Managers

    Start a data-driven discussion on resource management using the capacity supply-demand analysis report.

    Tab 5 of the calculator is a report that contains the following analysis:

    1. Overall resource capacity supply and demand gap
    2. Project capacity supply vs. demand gap
    3. Non-project capacity supply vs. demand balance
    4. Resource capacity confidence

    Each analysis is described and explained in the following four sections. Examine the report and discuss the following among the activity participants:

    1. How is your perception of the current resource capacity supply-demand balance affected by this analysis? How is it confirmed? Is it changed?
    2. Perform a root-cause analysis of problems revealed by the report. For each observation, ask “why?” repeatedly – generally, you can arrive at the root cause in four iterations.
    3. Refer back to Activity 1.1.2: current distribution of accountability for resource management. In your situation, how would you prioritize which resource management tasks to improve? Who are the involved stakeholders?

    Examine your supply-demand analysis report: overall resource capacity gap

    1.2.4
    Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator, Tab 5: Supply-Demand Analysis

    1. Examine your resource capacity supply and demand gap.

    The top of the report on Tab 5 shows a breakdown of your annual resource supply and demand, with resource capacity shown in both total hours and percentage of the total. For the purposes of the analysis, absence is averaged. If total demand is less than available resource supply, the surplus capacity will be displayed as “Free Capacity” on the demand side.

    The Supply & Demand Analysis table displays the realistic project capacity, which is calculated by subtracting non-project supply deficit from the project capacity. This is based on the assumption that all non-project work must get done. The difference between the project demand and the realistic project capacity is your supply-demand gap, in work-hours.

    If your supply-demand gap is zero, recognize that the project demand does not take into account the project backlog: it only takes into account the projects that are expected to be delivered within the next 12 months.

    Examine your supply-demand analysis report: project capacity gap

    1.2.4
    Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator, Tab 5: Supply-Demand Analysis

    2. Examine your project capacity supply vs. demand gap.

    The project capacity supply and demand analysis compares your available annual project capacity with the size of your project portfolio, expressed in work-hours.

    The supply side is further broken down to productive vs. wasted project capacity. The demand side is broken down to three buckets of projects: those that are active, those that sit in the backlog, and those that are expected to be added within 12 months. Percentage values are expressed in terms of total project capacity.

    A key observation here is the limitation to which reducing wasteful spending of resources can get to the project portfolio backlog. In this example, even a theoretical scenario of 100% productive project capacity will not likely result in net shrinkage of the project portfolio backlog. To achieve that, either the total project capacity must be increased, or less projects must be approved.

    Note: the work-hours necessary for delivering projects that are expected to be completed within 12 months is not shown in this visualization, as they should be represented within the other three categories of projects.

    Examine your supply-demand analysis report: non-project capacity gap

    1.2.4
    Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator, Tab 5: Supply-Demand Analysis

    3. Drill down on the non-project capacity supply-demand balance by each role.

    The non-project capacity supply and demand analysis compares your available non-project capacity and their demands in a year, for each role, in work-hours.

    With this chart, you can:

    1. Observe which roles are “running hot,” (i.e. they have more demand than available supply).
    2. Verify your non-project/project supply ratio assumptions in Tab 2 of the tool / Activity 1.2.1.

    Tab 5 also provides similar breakdowns for administrative and keep-the-lights-on capacity supply and demand by each role.

    Examine your supply-demand analysis report: resource capacity confidence (RCC)

    1.2.4
    Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator, Tab 5: Supply-Demand Analysis

    4. Examine your resource capacity confidence.

    In our approach, we introduce a metric called Resource Capacity Confidence (RCC). Conceptually, RCC is defined as follows:

    Resource Capacity Confidence = SC × DS × SDR

    Term Name Description
    SC Supply Control How confident are you that the supply of your resources’ project capacity will be delivered?
    DS Demand Stability How wildly does demand fluctuate? If it cannot be controlled, can it be predicted?
    SDR Supply-Demand Ratio How severely does demand outstrip supply?

    In this context, RCC can be defined as follows:

    "Given the uncertainty that our resources can supply hours according to the assumed project/non-project ratio, the fluctuations in non-project demand, and the overall deficit in project capacity, there is about 50% chance that we will be able to deliver the projects we are expected to deliver within the next 12 months."

    Case study: Non-project work is probably taking far more time than you might like

    CASE STUDY

    Industry Government

    Source Info-Tech Client

    "When our customers get a budget for a project, it’s all in capital. It never occurs to them that IT has a limited number of hours. "

    Challenge

    • A small municipal government was servicing a wide geographic area for information technology and infrastructure services.
    • There was no meaningful division of IT resources between support and project work.
    • Previous IT leadership tried a commercial PPM tool and stopped paying maintenance fees for it because of lack of adoption.
    • Projects were tracked inconsistently in multiple places.

    Solution

    • New project requests were approved with IT involvement.
    • Project approvals were entirely associated with the capital budget required and resourcing was never considered to be a constraint.
    • The broad assumption was that IT time was generally available for project work.
    • In reality, the IT personnel had almost no time for project work.

    Results

    • The organization introduced Info-Tech’s Grow Your Own PPM Solution template with minor modifications.
    • They established delivery dates for projects based on available time.
    • Time was allocated for projects based on person, project, percentage of time, and month.
    • They prioritized project allocations above reactive support work.

    Validate your resourcing assumptions with your staff by surveying their use of time

    Embrace the reality of imperfect IT labor efficiency to improve your understanding of resource time spend.

    Use Info-Tech’s time-tracking survey to validate your resourcing assumptions and get additional information to improve your understanding of resource time spent: imperfect labor efficiency and continuous partial attention.

    Causes of imperfect IT labor inefficiency
    • Most IT tasks are unique to their respective projects and contexts. A component that took 30 minutes to install last year might take two hours to install this year due to system changes that occurred since then.
    • Many IT tasks come up unexpectedly due to the need to maintain and support systems implemented on past projects. This work is unpredictable in terms of specifics (what will break where, when, or how).
    • Task switching slows people down and consumes time.
    • Problem solving and solution design often requires unstructured time to think more openly. Some of the most valuable solutions are conceived or discovered when people aren’t regimented and focused on getting things done.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Part of the old resource management mythology is the idea that a person can do (for example) eight different one-hour tasks in eight hours of continuous work. This idea has gone from harmlessly mistaken to grossly unrealistic.

    Constant interruptions lead to continuous partial attention that threatens real productivity

    There’s a difference between being busy and getting things done.

    “Working” on multiple tasks at once can often feel extremely gratifying in the short term because it distracts people from thinking about work that isn’t being done.

    The bottom line is that continuous partial attention impedes the progress of project work.

    Research on continuous partial attention
    • A study that analyzed interruptions and their effects on individuals in the workplace found that that “41% of the time an interrupted task was not resumed right away” (Mark, 2015).
    • Research has also shown that it can take people an average of 23 minutes to return to a task after being interrupted (Schulte, 2015).
    • Delays following interruptions are typically due to switching between multiple other activities before returning to the original task. In many cases, those tasks are much lower priorities – and in some cases not even work-related.

    Info-Tech Insight

    It may not be possible to minimize interruptions in the workplace, as many of these are considered to be urgent at the time. However, setting guidelines for how and when individuals can be interrupted may help to limit the amount of lost project time.

    "Like so many things, in small doses, continuous partial attention can be a very functional behavior. However, in large doses, it contributes to a stressful lifestyle, to operating in crisis management mode, and to a compromised ability to reflect, to make decisions, and to think creatively."

    – Linda Stone, Continuous Partial Attention

    Define the goals and the scope of the time-tracking survey

    1.2.5
    30 minutes

    Input

    Completed Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator

    Output

    Survey design for the time-tracking survey

    Materials

    N/A

    Participants

    • PMO Director
    • Functional Managers
    • Project Managers

    Discuss the following with the activity participants:

    1. Define the scope of the survey
      • Respondents: Comprehensive survey of individuals vs. a representative sample using roles.
      • Granularity: decide how in-depth the questions will be and how often the survey will be delivered.
      • Data Collection: what information do you want to collect?
        • Proportion of project vs. non-project work.
        • Time spent on administrative tasks.
        • Prevalence and impact of distractions.
        • Worker satisfaction.
    2. Determine the sample time period covered by the survey
      • Info-Tech recommends 2-4 weeks. Less than 2 weeks might not be a representative sample, especially during vacation seasons.
      • More than 4 weeks will impose unreasonable time and effort for diminishing returns; data quality will begin to deteriorate as participation declines.
    3. Determine the survey method
      • Use your organization’s preferred survey distributor/online survey tool, or conduct one-on-one interviews to capture data.

    1.2.5 continued - Refine the questionnaire to improve the relevance and quality of insights produced by the survey

    Start with Info-Tech’s recommended weekly survey questions:

    1. Estimate your daily average for number of hours spent on:
      1. Total work
      2. Project work
      3. Non-project work
    2. How many times are you interrupted with “urgent” requests requiring immediate response in a given day?
    3. How many people or projects did you complete tasks for this week?
    4. Rate your overall satisfaction with work this week.
    5. Describe any special tasks, interruptions, or requests that took your time and attention away from project work this week.

    Customize these questions to suit your needs.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Maximize the number of survey responses you get by limiting the number of questions you ask. Info-Tech finds that participation drops off rapidly after five questions.

    1.2.5 continued - Communicate the survey goals and steps, and conduct the survey

    1. Communicate the purpose and goals of the survey to maximize participation and satisfaction.
      • Provide background for why the survey is taking place. Clarify that the intention is to improve working conditions and management capabilities, not to play “gotcha” or hold workers accountable.
    2. Provide a timeline so expectations are clear about when possible next steps will occur, such as
      • Sharing and analyzing results
      • Making decisions
      • Taking action
    3. Reiterate what people are required or expected to do and how much effort is required. Provide reasonable and realistic estimates of how much time and effort people should spend on audit participation.
    4. Distribute the survey; collect and analyze the data.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Make sure that employees understand the purpose of the survey. It is important that they give honest responses that reflect the struggles they are encountering with balancing project and non-project work, not simply telling management what they want to hear.

    Ensuring that employees know this survey is being used to help them, rather than scolding them for not completing work, will give you useful, insightful data on employee time.

    Use Info-Tech’s Time-Tracking Survey Email Template for facilitating your communications.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Provide guidance to your resources with examples on how to differentiate project work vs. non-project work, administrative vs. keep-the-lights-on work, what counts as interruptions, etc.

    Optimize your project portfolio to maintain continuous visibility into capacity

    Now that you have a realistic picture of your realized project capacity and demand amounts, it’s time to use these values to tailor and optimize your resource management practices.

    Based on desired outcomes for this phase, we have

    1. Determined the correct course of action to resolve your supply/demand imbalances.
    2. Assessed the overall project capacity of your portfolio.
    3. Cataloged sources of project and non-project demands.
    4. Performed a time audit to create an accurate and realistic picture of the time spent on different types of work.

    In the next phase, we will:

    1. Wireframe a resource management process.
    2. Choose a resource management tool.
    3. Define data collection, analysis, and reporting steps within a sustainable resource management process.

    The image is a screenshot from tab 6 of the Time Audit Workbook. The image shows two pie charts.

    The image is a screenshot from tab 6 of the Time Audit Workbook. The image shows a pie chart.

    Screenshots from tab 6 of the Time Audit Workbook.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The validity of traditional, rigorous resource planning has long been an illusion because the resource projections were typically not maintained. New realities such as faster project cycles, matrix organizations, and high-autonomy staff cultures have made the illusion impossible to maintain.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
    • Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

    1.1.2 Assess the current distribution of accountability for resource management practice

    Discuss who is currently accountable for various facets of resource management, and whether they have the right authority and ability to deliver on that accountability.

    1.2.1 Create realistic estimates of supply and demand using Info-Tech’s Supply-Demand Calculator

    Derive actionable, quantitative insight into the resourcing challenges facing the organization by using Info-Tech’s methodology that prioritizes completeness over precision.

    Phase 2

    Design a Realistic Resource Management Process

    Phase 2 Outline

    Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

    Guided Implementation 2: Draft a Resource Management Process

    Proposed Time to Completion (in weeks): 3-6 weeks

    Step 2.1: Determine the dimensions of resource management

    Start with an analyst kick-off call:

    • Introduce the seven dimensions of resource management
    • Trade-off between granularity and utility of data

    Then complete these activities…

    • Decide on the seven dimensions
    • Examine the strategy’s cost-of-use

    With these tools & templates:

    Resource Management Playbook

    Step 2.2: Support your process with a resource management tool

    Discuss with the analyst:

    • Inventory of available PPM tools
    • Overview of Portfolio Manager Lite 2017

    Then complete these activities…

    • Populate the tool with data
    • Explore portfolio data with the workbook’s output tabs

    With these tools & templates:

    • Portfolio Manager Lite
    • PPM Solution Vendor Demo Script
    Step 2.3: Build process steps

    Discuss with the analyst:

    • Common challenges of resource management practice
    • Recommendations for a pilot initiative

    Then complete these activities…

    • Review and customize contents of the Resource Management Playbook

    With these tools & templates:

    • Resource Management Playbook

    Phase 2 Results & Insights:

    Draft the resource management practice with sustainability in mind. It is about what you can and will maintain every week, even during a crisis: it is not about what you put together as a one-time snapshot. Once you stop maintaining resource data, it's nearly impossible to catch up.

    Step 2.1: Customize the seven dimensions of resource management

    PHASE 1

    1.1 Set a course of action

    1.2 Estimate supply and demand

    PHASE 2

    2.1 Select resource management dimensions

    2.2 Select resource management tools

    2.3 Build process steps

    PHASE 3

    3.1 Pilot your process for viability

    3.2 Plan stakeholder engagement

    This step will walk you through the following activities:
    • Establish a default project vs. non-project work ratio
    • Decide the scope of allocation for your strategy
    • Set your allocation cadence
    • Limit the granularity of time allocation
    • Define the granularity of work assignment
    • Apply a forecast horizon
    • Determine the update frequency
    This step involves the following participants:
    • CIO / IT Director
    • PMO Director / Portfolio Manager
    • Functional / Resource Managers
    • Project Managers
    Outcomes of this step
    • Seven dimensions of resource management, chosen to fit the current needs and culture of the organization
    • Parameters for creating a resource management process (downstream)

    There is no one-size-fits-all resource management strategy

    Don’t get boxed into a canned solution that doesn’t make sense for your department’s maturity level and culture.

    Resource management strategies are commonly implemented “out-of-the-box,” via a commercial PPM or time-tracking tool, or an external third-party consultant in partnership with those types of tools.

    While these solutions and best practices have insights to offer – and provide admirable maturity targets – they often outstrip the near-term abilities of IT teams to successfully implement, adopt, and support them.

    Tailor an approach that makes sense for your department and organization. You don’t need complex and granular processes to get usable resourcing data; you just need to make sure that you’ve carved out a process that works in terms of providing data you can use.

    • In this step, we will walk you through Info-Tech’s seven dimensions of resource management to help wireframe your resource management process.
    • In the subsequent steps in this phase, we will develop these dimensions from a wireframe into a functioning process.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Put processes before tools. Most commercial PPM tools include a resource management function that was designed for hourly granularity. This is part of the fallacy of an old reality that was never real. Determine which goals are realistic and fit your solution to your problem.

    Wireframe a strategy that will work for your department using Info-Tech’s seven dimensions of resource management

    Action the decision points across Info-Tech’s seven dimensions to ensure your resource management process is guided by realistic data and process goals.

    In this step, we will walk you through the decision points in each dimension to determine the departmental specificities of your resource management strategy

    Default project vs. non-project ratio

    How much time is available for projects once non-project demands are factored in?

    Reporting frequency

    How often is the allocation data verified, reconciled, and reported for use?

    Forecast horizon

    How far into the future can you realistically predict resource supply?

    Scope of allocation

    To whom is time allocated?

    Allocation cadence

    How long is each allocation period?

    Granularity of time allocation

    What’s the smallest unit of time to allocate?

    Granularity of work assignment

    What is time allocated to?

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Ensure that both the functional managers and the project managers participate in the following discussions. Without buy-in from both dimensions of the matrix organization, you will have difficulty making meaningful resource management data and process decisions.

    Establish your default project versus non-project work ratio

    2.1.1
    30 minutes

    Input

    • Completed Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator

    Output

    • Default organizational P-NP ratio and role-specific P-NP ratios

    Materials

    • Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator
    • Time Audit Workbook
    • Resource Management Playbook

    Participants

    • CIO
    • PMO Director
    • Project Managers
    • Resource Managers

    How much time is available for projects once non-project demands are factored in?

    The default project vs. non-project work ratio (P-NP Ratio) is a starting point for functional and project managers to budget the work-hours at their disposal as well as for resources to split their time – if not directed otherwise by their managers.

    How to set this dimension. The Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator from step 1.2 shows the current P-NP ratio for the department, and how the percentages translate into work-hours. The Time Audit Workbook from step 1.2 shows the ratio for specific roles.

    For the work of setting this dimension, you can choose to keep the current ratio from step 1.2 as your default, or choose a new ratio based on the advice below.

    • Discuss and decide how the supply-demand gap should be reconciled from the project side vs. the functional side.
      • Use the current organizational priority as a guide, and keep in mind that the default P-NP ratio is to be adjusted over time to respond to changing needs and priorities of the organization.
      • Once the organizational default P-NP ratio is chosen, defining role-specific ratios may be helpful. A help desk employee may spend only 10% of their time on project work, while an analyst may spend 80% of their time on project work.

    Decide the scope of allocation for your strategy

    2.1.2
    15-30 minutes

    Input

    • Current practices for assigning work and allocating time
    • Distribution of RM accountability (Activity 1.1.2)

    Output

    • Resource management scope of allocation

    Materials

    • RM Playbook

    Participants

    • CIO
    • PMO Director
    • Project Managers
    • Resource Managers

    To whom is time allocated?

    Scope of allocation is the “who” of the equation. At the lowest and most detailed level, allocations are made to individual resources. At the highest and most abstract level, though, allocations can be made to a department. Other “whos” in scope of allocation can include teams, roles, or skills.

    How to set this dimension. Consider how much granularity is required for your overall project capacity visibility, and the process overhead you’re willing to commit to support this visibility. The more low-level and detailed the scope of allocation (e.g. skills or individuals) the more data maintenance required to keep it current.

    • Discuss and decide to whom time will be allocated for the purposes of resource management.
      • Recall your prior discussion from activity 1.1.2 on how accountabilities for resource management are distributed within your organization.
      • The benefit of allocating teams to projects is that it is much easier to avoid overallocation. When a team is overallocated, it is visible. Individual overallocations can go unnoticed.
      • Once you have mastered the art of keeping resource data current and accurate at a higher level (e.g. team), it can be easier move lower level and assign and track allocations in a per-role or per-person basis.

    Set your allocation cadence

    2.1.3
    15-30 minutes

    Input

    • Current practices for assigning work and allocating time
    • Scope of allocation (Activity 2.1.2)

    Output

    • Determination of temporal frames over which time will be allotted

    Materials

    • RM Playbook

    Participants

    • CIO
    • PMO Director
    • Project Managers
    • Resource Managers

    How long is each allocation period?

    How long is each individual allocation period? In what “buckets of time” do you plan to spend time – week by week, month by month, or quarter by quarter? The typical allocation cadence is monthly; however, depending on the scope of allocation and the nature of work assigned, this cadence can differ.

    How to set this dimension. Allocation cadence can depend on a number of factors. For instance, if you’re allocating time to agile teams, the cadence would most naturally be bi-weekly; if work is assigned via programs, you might allocate time by quarters.

    • Discuss and decide the appropriate allocation cadence for the purposes of resource management. You could even be an environment that currently has different cadences for different teams. If so, it will be helpful to standardize a cadence for the purposes of centralized project portfolio resource management.
      • If the cadence is too short (e.g. days or weeks), it will require a dedicated effort to maintain the data.
      • If the cadence is too long (e.g. quarters or bi-annual), your resource management strategy could fail to produce actionable insight and lack the appropriate agility in being responsive to changes in direction.
      • Ultimately, your allocation cadence may be contingent upon the limitations of your resource management solution (see step 2.2).

    Limit the granularity of time allocation

    2.1.3
    15-30 minutes

    Input

    • Requirements for granularity of data
    • Resource management scope of allocation (Activity 2.1.2)

    Output

    • Determination of lowest level of granularity for time allocation

    Materials

    • RM Playbook

    Participants

    • CIO
    • PMO Director
    • Project Managers
    • Resource Managers

    What’s the smallest unit of time that will be allocated?

    Granularity of time allocation refers to the smallest unit of time that can be allocated. You may not need to set firm limits on this, given that it could differ from PM to PM, and resource manager to resource manager. Nevertheless, it can be helpful to articulate an “as-low-as-you’ll-go” limit to help avoid getting too granular too soon in your data aspirations.

    How to set this dimension. At a high level, the granularity of allocation could be as high as a week. At its lowest level, it could be an hour. Other options include a full day (e.g. 8 hours), a half day (4 hours), or 2-hour increments.

    • Discuss and decide the appropriate granularity for all allocations in the new resource management practice.
      • As a guideline, granularity of allocation should be one order of magnitude smaller than the allocation cadence to provide enough precision for meaningfully dividing up each allocation cadence, without imposing an unreasonably rigorous expectation for resources to manage their time.
      • The purpose of codifying this dimension is to help provide a guideline for how granular allocations should be. Hourly granularity can be difficult to maintain, so (for instance) by setting a half-day granularity you can help avoid project managers and resource managers getting too granular.

    Define the granularity of work assignments

    2.1.4
    15-30 minutes

    Input

    • Requirements for granularity of work assignment
    • Resource management scope of allocation (Activity 2.1.2)

    Output

    • Determination of work assignment

    Materials

    • RM Playbook

    Participants

    • CIO
    • PMO Director
    • Project Managers
    • Resource Managers

    To what is time allocated?

    Determine a realistic granularity for your allocation. This is the “what” of the equation: what your resources are working on or the size of work for which allocations are managed.

    How to set this dimension. A high level granularity of work assignment would assign an entire program, a mid-level scope would involve allocating a project or a phase of a project, and a low level, rigorous scope would involve allocating an individual task.

    • Discuss and decide the appropriate granularity for all work assignments in the new resource management strategy.
      • The higher granularity that is assigned, the more difficult it becomes to maintain the data. However, assigning at program level might not lead to useful, practical data.
      • Begin by allocating to projects to help you mature your organization, and once you have mastered data maintenance at this level, you can move on to a more granular work assignment.
        • If you are at a maturity level of 1 or 2, Info-Tech recommends beginning by assigning by project. If you are at a maturity level 3-4, it may be time to start allocating by phase or task.

    Apply a forecast horizon

    2.1.5
    15-30 minutes

    Input

    • Current practices for work planning, capacity forecasting
    • Allocation scope, cadence, and granularity (Activities 2.1.2-4)

    Output

    • Resource management forecast horizon

    Materials

    • RM Playbook

    Participants

    • CIO
    • PMO Director
    • Project Managers
    • Resource Managers

    How far into the future can you realistically predict resource supply?

    Determine a realistic forecasting horizon for your allocation. At this point you have decided “what” “who” is working on and how frequently this will be updated. Now it is time to decide how far resource needs will be forecasted, e.g. “what will this person be working on in 3 months?”

    How to set this dimension. A high-level forecast horizon would only look forward week-to-week, with little consideration of the long-term future. A mid-level forecast would involve predicting one quarter in advance and a low-level, rigorous scope would involve forecasting one or more years in advance.

    • Discuss and decide the appropriate forecast horizon that will apply to all allocations in the new resource management practice. It’s important that your forecast horizon helps to foster accurate data. If you can’t ensure data accuracy for a set period, make your forecast horizon shorter.
      • If you are at a maturity level of 1 or 2, Info-Tech recommends forecasting one month in advance.
      • If you are already at level 3-4 on the resource management maturity model, Info-Tech recommends forecasting one quarter to one year in advance.

    See the diagram below for further explanation

    2.1.5 Forecast horizon diagram

    Between today and the forecast horizon (“forecast window”), all stakeholders in resource management commit to reasonable accuracy of data. The aim is to create a reliable data set that can be used to determine true resource capacity, as well as the available resource capacity to meet unplanned, urgent demands.

    The image shows a Forecast horizon diagram, with Time on the x-axis and Data completeness on the Y-axis. The time between today and the forecast horizon is labelled as the forecast window. there is a line which descends in small degrees until the Forecast Horizon point, where the line is labelled Reasonable level of completeness.

    The image shows a chart that lines up with the sections before and after the Forecast Horizon. In the accuracy row, Data is accurate before the forecast horizon and a rough estimate after. In the planning row, before the horizon is reliable for planning, and can inform high-level planning after the horizon. In the free capacity row, before the horizon, it can be committed to urgent demands, and after the horizon, negotiate for capacity.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Ensure data accuracy. It is important to note that forecasting a year in advance does not necessarily make your organization more mature, unless you can actually rely on these estimates and use them. It is important to only forecast as far in advance as you can accurately predict.

    Determine the update frequency

    2.1.6
    30 minutes

    Input

    • Current practices for work planning, capacity reporting
    • Current practices for project intake, prioritization, and approval
    • RM core dimensions (Activities 2.1.1)

    Output

    • Resource management update frequency

    Materials

    • RM Playbook

    Participants

    • CIO
    • PMO Director
    • Project Managers
    • Resource Managers

    How often is the allocation data verified, reconciled, and reported for use?

    How often will you reconcile and rebalance your allocations? Your update frequency will determine this. It is very much the heartbeat of resource management, dictating how often reports on allocations will be updated and published for stakeholders’ consumption.

    How to set this dimension. Determine a realistic frequency with which to update project reports. This will be how you determine who is working on what during each measurement period.

    • Discuss and decide how often the supply-demand gap should be reconciled from the project side vs. the functional side.
      • Keep in mind that the more frequent the reporting period, the more time must go into data maintenance. A monthly frequency requires maintenance at the end of the month, while weekly requires it at the end of each week.
      • Also think about how accurately you can maintain the data. Having a quarterly update frequency may require less maintenance time than monthly, but this information may not stay up to date in between these long stretches.
      • Reports generated at each update frequency should both inform resources on what to work on, what not to work on, and how to prioritize tasks if something unexpected comes up, as well as the steering committee, to help inform project approval decisions.

    Finalize the dimensions for your provisional resource management process

    2.1.7
    10 minutes

    Input

    • 7 core dimensions of resource management (Activities 2.1.1-6)

    Output

    • Provisional resource management strategy

    Materials

    • Resource Management Playbook

    Participants

    • CIO
    • PMO Director
    • Project Managers
    • Resource Managers

    Document the outputs from the preceding seven activities. These determinations will form the foundation of your resource management strategy, which we will go on to define in more detail in the subsequent steps of this phase.

    • Keep in mind, at this stage your dimensions are provisional and subject to change, pending the outcomes of steps 2.2 and 2.3.
    RM Core Dimensions Decision
    Default P-NP ratio 40%-60$ + exception by roles
    Scope of allocation Individual resource
    Allocation cadence Monthly
    Granularity of time allocation 4 hours
    Granularity of work assignment Projects
    Forecast horizon 3 months
    Reporting frequency Twice a month

    Document these dimensions in Section 1.1 of Info-Tech’s Resource Management Playbook. We will be further customizing this template in steps 2.3 and 3.1.

    Step 2.2: Determine the resource management tool that will best support your process

    PHASE 1

    1.1 Set a course of action

    1.2 Estimate supply and demand

    PHASE 2

    2.1 Select resource management dimensions

    2.2 Select resource management tools

    2.3 Build process steps

    PHASE 3

    3.1 Pilot your process for viability

    3.2 Plan stakeholder engagement

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Consider the pros and cons of commercial tools vs. spreadsheets as a resource management tool
    • Review the PPM Solution Vendor Demo Script to ensure your investment in a commercial tool meets your resource management needs
    • Jump-start spreadsheet-based resource management with Portfolio Manager Lite

    This step involves the following participants:

    • PMO Director / Portfolio Manager
    • Functional / Resource Managers
    • Project Managers

    Outcomes of this step

    • Choice of tool to support the resource management process
    • Examination of the commercial tool’s ability to support the resource management process chosen
    • Set-up and initial use of Portfolio Manager Lite for a spreadsheet-based resource management solution

    Effective resource management practices require an effective resource management tool

    The discipline of resource management has largely become inextricable from the tools that help support it. Ensure that you choose the right tool for your environment.

    Resource management depends on the flow of information and data from the project level up to functional managers, project managers, and beyond.

    Tools are required to help facilitate this flow, and the project portfolio management landscape is littered with endless time-tracking and capacity management options.

    These options can each have their merits and their drawbacks. The success of implementing a resource management strategy very much hinges upon weighing these, and then choosing the right solution for your project eco-system.

    • This first part of this step will help you assess the tool landscape and make the right choice to help support your resource management practices.
    • In the second part of this step, we’ll take a deep-dive into Info-Tech’s Excel-based resource management solution. If you are implementing our solution, these sections will help you understand and set up the tool.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Establish a book of record. While it is possible to succeed using ad hoc tools and data sources, a centralized repository for capacity data works best. Your tool choice should help establish a capacity book of record to help ensure ongoing reconciliation of supply and demand at the portfolio level.

    Get to know your resource management tool options

    At a high level, those looking for a resource management solution have two broad options: a commercial project portfolio management (PPM) or time-tracking software on the one hand, and a spreadsheet-based tool, like Google Sheets or Excel, on the other.

    Obviously, if your team or department already has access to a PPM or time-tracking software, it makes sense to continue using this, as long as it will accommodate the process that was wireframed in the previous step.

    Otherwise, pursue the tool option that makes the most sense given both the strategy that you’ve wireframed and other organizational factors. See the table below and the next section for guidance.

    If you’re planning on doing resource allocation by hand, you’re not going to get very far.”

    Rachel Burger

    Commercial Solutions Spreadsheet-Based Solutions
    Description
    • These highly powerful solutions are purchased from a software/service provider.
    • These can be as simple as a list of current projects on a spreadsheet or a more advanced solution with resource capacity analysis.
    Pros
    • Extraordinary function
    • Potential for automated roll-ups
    • Collaboration functionality
    • Easy to deploy: high process maturity or organization-wide adoption not required.
    • Lower cost-in-use – in many cases, they are free.
    • Highly customizable.
    Cons
    • High process maturity required
    • High cost-in-use
    • Generally expensive to customize
    • Comprehensive, continual, and organization-wide adoption required
    • Easy to break.
    • Typically, they require a centralized deployment with a single administrator responsible for data entry.

    Option A: When pursuing commercial options, don’t bite off more functionality than your people can sustain

    While commercial options offer the most robust functionality for automation, collaboration, and reporting, they are also costly, difficult to implement, and onerous to sustain over the long run.

    It’s not uncommon for organizations to sink vast amounts of money into commercial PPM tools, year after year, and never actually get any usable resource or forecasting data from these tools.

    The reasons for this can vary, but in many cases it is because organizations mistake a tool for a PPM or a resource management strategy.

    A tool is no substitute for having a clearly defined process that staff can support. Be aware of these two factors before investing in a commercial tool:

    • Visibility cannot be automated. It is not uncommon for CIOs to believe that because they’ve invested in a tool, they have an automated portfolio that enables them to sit back and wait for the data to roll in. With many tools, the challenge is that the calculations driving the rollups have become increasingly unsustainable and irrelevant in our high-autonomy staff cultures and interruption-driven work days.
    • Information does not equal knowledge. While commercial tools have robust reporting features, the data outputs can lead to information overload – and, subsequently, disinterest – unless they are curated and filtered to suit your executive’s needs and expectations.

    47%
    Of those companies using automated software to assist in resource management, almost half report that those systems failed to accurately calculate resource forecasts.

    PM Solutions

    Info-Tech Insight

    Put process sustainability before enhanced tool functionality.

    Ensure that you have sustainable processes in place before investing in an expensive commercial tool. Your tool selection should help facilitate capability-matched processes and serve user adoption.

    Trying to establish processes around a tool with a functionality that exceeds your process maturity is a recipe for failure.

    Before jumping into a commercial tool, consider some basic parameters for your selection

    Use the table below as a starting point to help ensure you are pursuing a resource management tool that is right for your organization’s size and process maturity level.

    Tool Category Characteristics # of Users PPM Maturity Sample Vendors
    Enterprise tools
    • Higher professional services requirements for enterprise deployment
    • Larger reference customers
    1,000> High
    • MS Project Server
    • Oracle Primavera
    • Planisware
    Mid-market tools
    • Lower expectation of professional services engaged in initial deployment contract
    • Fewer globally recognizable reference clients
    • Faster deployments
    100> Intermediate-to-High
    • Workfront
    • Project Insight
    • Innotas
    Entry-level tools
    • Lower cost than mid-market and enterprise PPM tools
    • Limited configurability, reporting, and resource management functionalities
    • Compelling solutions to the organizations that want to get a fast start to a trial deployment
    <100 Low-to-Intermediate
    • 5PM
    • AceProject
    • Liquid Planner

    For a more in-depth treatment of choosing and implementing a commercial PPM tool to assist with your resource management practice, see Info-Tech’s blueprint, Select and Implement a PPM Solution.

    Use Info-Tech’s PPM Solution Vendor Demo Script to help ensure you get the functionality you need

    PPM Solution Vendor Demo Script (optional)

    To ensure your investment in a commercial tool meets your resource management needs, use Info-Tech’s PPM Solution Vendor Demo Script to structure your tool demos and interactions with vendors.

    For instance, some important scenarios to consider when looking at potential tools include:

    • How are overallocation and underallocation situations identified and reconciled in the solution?
    • How are users motivated to maintain their own timesheets (beyond simply being mandated as part of their job); how does the solution and timesheet functionality help team members do their job?
    • How will portfolio-level reports remain useful and accurate despite “zero-adoption” scenarios, in which some or all teams do not actively maintain task and timesheet data?

    Any deficiencies in answering these types of questions should alert you to the fact that a potential solution may not adequately meet the needs of your resource management strategy.

    Download Info-Tech’s PPM Solution Vendor Demo Script

    "[H]ow (are PPM solutions) performing in a matrix organization? Well, there are gaps. There will be employees who do not submit timesheets, who share their time between project and operational activities, and whose reporting relationships do not fit neatly into the PPM database structure. This creates exceptions in the PPM application, and you may just have the perfect solution to a small subset of your problems." – Vilmos Rajda

    Option B: When managing resourcing via spreadsheets, you don’t have to feel like you’re settling for the lesser option

    Spreadsheets can provide a viable alternative for organizations not ready to invest in an expensive tool or for those not getting what they need from their commercial selections.

    When it comes to resource management at a portfolio level, spreadsheets can be just as effective as commercial tools for facilitating the flow of accurate and maintainable resourcing data and for communicating resource usage and availability.

    Some of the benefits of spreadsheets over commercials tools include:

    • They are easy to set up and deploy. High process maturity or organization-wide user adoption are not required.
    • They have a low cost-in-use. In the case of Excel, the tool itself comes at no additional cost.
    • They are highly customizable. No development time/costs are required to tweak the solution to suit your needs.

    To be clear: spreadsheets have their drawbacks (for instance, they are easy to break, require a centralized data administrator, and are yours and yours alone to maintain). If your department has the budget and the process maturity to support a commercial tool, you should pursue the options covered in the previous sections.

    However, if you are looking for a viable alternative to an expensive tool, spreadsheets have the ability to support a rigorous resource management practice.

    "Because we already have enterprise licensing for an expensive commercial tool, everyone else thinks it’s logical to start there. I think we’re going to start with something quick and dirty like Excel." – EPMO Director, Law Enforcement Services

    Info-Tech Insight

    Make the choice to ensure adoption.

    When making your selection, the most important consideration across all the solution categories is data maintenance. You must be assured that you and your team can maintain the data.

    As soon as your portfolio data becomes inconsistent and unreliable, decision makers will lose trust in your resource data, and the authority of your resource management strategy will become very tenuous.

    While spreadsheets offer a viable resource management option, not all spreadsheets are created equal

    Lean on Info-Tech’s experience and expertise to get up and running quickly with a superior resource management Excel-based tool: Portfolio Manager Lite 2017.

    Spreadsheets are the most common PPM tool – and it’s not hard to understand why: they can be created with minimal cost and effort.

    But when something is easy to do, it’s important to keep in mind that it’s also easy to do badly. As James Kwak says in his article, “The Importance of Excel,” “The biggest problem is that anyone can create Excel Spreadsheets—badly.”

    • Info-Tech’s Portfolio Manager Lite 2017 offers an antidote to the deficiencies that can haunt home-grown resource management tools.
    • As an easy-to-deploy, highly evolved spreadsheet-based option, Portfolio Manager Lite enables you to mature your resource management processes, and provide effective resource visibility without the costly upfront investment.

    Download Info-Tech’s Portfolio Manager Lite 2017

    Info-Tech Insight

    Balance functionality and adoption. Clients often find it difficult to gain adoption with commercial tools. Though homegrown solutions may have less functionality, the higher adoption level can make up for this and also potentially save your organization thousands a year in licensing fees.

    Determine your resource management solution and revisit your seven dimensions of resource management

    2.2.1
    Times will vary

    Participants

    • PMO Director

    Based on input from the previous slides, determine the resource management solution option you will pursue and implement to help support your resource management strategy. Record this selection in section 1.2 of the Resource Management Playbook.

    • You may need to revisit the decisions made in step 2.1 to consider if the default values for your seven core dimensions of resource management are still sound. Keep these current and relevant as you become more familiar with your resource management solution.
    RM Core Dimensions Default Value
    Default P-NP ratio Role-specific
    Scope of allocation Individual resource
    Allocation cadence Monthly
    Granularity of allocation (not defined)
    Granularity of work assignment Project
    Forecast horizon 6 months
    Reporting frequency (not defined)

    Portfolio Manager Lite has comprehensive sample data to help you understand its functions.

    As you can see in this table, the tool itself assumes five of the seven resource management core dimensions. You will need to determine departmental values for granularity of allocation and reporting frequency. The other dimensions are determined by the tool.

    If you’re piloting Info-Tech’s Portfolio Manager Lite, review the subsequent slides in this step before proceeding to step 2.3. If you are not piloting Portfolio Manager Lite, proceed directly to step 2.3.

    Overview of Portfolio Manager Lite

    Portfolio Manager Lite has two set-up tabs, three data entry tabs, and six output-only tabs. The next 15 slides show how to use them. To use this tool, you need Excel 2013 or 2016. If you’re using Excel 2013, you must download and install Microsoft Power Query version 2.64 or later, available for download from Microsoft.

    The image shows an overview of the Portfolio Manager Lite tool. It shows the Input and Data Tabs on the left, and output tabs on the right. The middle of the graphic includes guidance to ensure that you refresh the outputs after each data entry, by using the Refresh All button

    Observe “table manners” to maintain table integrity and prevent Portfolio Manager Lite malfunctions

    Excel tables enable you to manage and analyze a group of related data. Since Portfolio Manager Lite uses tables extensively, maintaining the table’s integrity is critical. Here are some things to know for working with Excel tables.

    Do not leave empty rows at the end.

    Adjust the sizing handle to eliminate empty rows.

    Always paste values.

    Default pasting behavior can interrupt formula references and introduce unwanted external links. Always right-click and select Paste Values.

    Correctly add/remove rows within a table.

    Do not use row headings; instead, always right-click inside a table to manipulate table rows.

    Set up Portfolio Manager Lite

    2.2.1
    Portfolio Manager Lite, Tab 2a: Org Setup

    The Org Setup tab is divided into two sections, Resources and Projects. Each section contains several categories to group your resources and projects. Items listed under each category will be available via drop-down lists in the data tabs.

    These categorizations will be used later to “slice” your resource allocation data. For example, you’ll be able to visualize the resource allocations for each team, for each division, or for each role.

    The image shows a screenshot of Tab 2a, with sample information filled in.

    1. Role and Default Non-Project Ratio columns: From the Supply-Demand Calculator, copy the list of roles, and how much of each role’s time is spent on non-projects by default (see below; add the values marked with yellow arrows).

    2. Resource Type column: List the type of resource you have available.

    3. Team and Skill columns: List the teams, and skills for your resources.

    In the Resources tab, items in drop-down lists will appear in the same order as shown here. Sort them to make things easy to find.

    Do not delete tables you won’t use. Instead, leave or hide tables.

    Set up Portfolio Manager Lite (continued)

    2.2.1
    Portfolio Manager Lite, Tab 2a: Org Setup

    The projects section of the Org Setup tab contains several categories for entering project data. Items listed under each category will be available via drop-down lists in the Projects tab. These categorizations will be used later to analyze how your resources are allocated.

    The image shows the projects sections of Tab 2a.

    1. Project Type: Enter the names of project types, in which projects will be grouped. All projects must belong to a type. Examples of types may include sub-portfolios or programs.

    2. Project Category: Enter the names of project categories, in which projects will be grouped. Unlike types, category is an optional grouping.

    3. Phase: Enter the project phases. Ensure that your phases list has “In Progress” and “Complete” options. They are needed for the portfolio-wide Gantt chart (the Gantt tab).

    4. Priority and Status: Define the choices for project priorities and statuses if necessary (optional).

    5. Unused: An extra column with predefined choices is left for customization (optional).

    Set up Portfolio Manager Lite (continued)

    2.2.1
    Portfolio Manager Lite, Tab 2b: Calendar Setup

    Portfolio Manager Lite is set up for a monthly allocation cadence out of the box. Use this tab to set up the start date, the default resource potential capacity, and the months to include in your reports.

    The image shows fields in the calendar set-up section of Tab 2a, with a Start Date and Hours Assumed per day.

    1. Enter a start date for the calendar, e.g. start of your fiscal or calendar year.

    2. Enter how many hours are assumed in a working day. It is used to calculate the default maximum available hours in a month.

    The image shows the Calendar section of tab 2a, with sample information filled in.

    Maximum Available Hours, Weekdays, and Business Days are automatically generated.

    The current month is highlighted in green.

    3. Enter the number of holidays to correct the number of business days for each month.

    Year to Date Reporting and Forecast Reporting ranges are controlled by this table. Use the period above Maximum Available Hours.

    The image shows the Year-to-Date and Forecast Reporting sections.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Both Portfolio Manager Lite and Portfolio Manager 2017 can be customized for non-monthly resource allocation. Speak to an Info-Tech analyst to ask for more information.

    Enter resource information and their total capacity

    2.2.2
    Portfolio Manager Lite, Tab 3: Resources

    Portfolio Manager Lite is set up for allocating time to individual resources out of the box. Information on these resources is entered in the Resources tab. It has four sections, arranged horizontally.

    1. Enter basic information on your resources. Resource type, team, role, and skill will be used to help you analyze your resource data.

    The image shows a screenshot of the Resources tab with sample information filled in.

    Ensure that the resource names are unique.

    Sort or filter the table using the filter button in the header row.

    2. Their total capacity in work-hours is automatically calculated for each month, using the default numbers from the Calendar Setup tab. If necessary, overwrite the formula and enter in custom values.

    The image shows a screenshot of the total capacity in work-hours, with sample info filled in.

    Cells with less than 120 hours are highlighted in blue.

    Do not add or delete any columns, or modify this header row.

    Enter out-of-office time and non-project time for your resources

    2.2.2
    Portfolio Manager Lite, Tab 3: Resources

    3. Enter the resources’ out-of-office time for each month, as they are reported.

    The image shows the Absence (hours) section, with sample information filled in.

    Do not add or delete any columns, or modify the header row, below the dates.

    4. Resources’ percentages of time spent on non-projects are automatically calculated, based on their roles’ default P-NP ratios. If necessary, overwrite the formula and enter in custom values.

    The image shows the Non-Project Ratio section, with sample information filled in.

    Do not add or delete any columns, or modify the header row, below the dates.

    Populate your project records

    2.2.3
    Portfolio Manager Lite, Tab 4: Projects

    Portfolio Manager Lite is set up for allocating time to projects out of the box. Information on these projects is entered in the Projects tab.

    1. Enter project names and some basic information. These fields are mandatory.

    The image shows the section for filling in project names and basic information in the Projects tab. The image shows the table with sample information.

    Ensure that the project names are unique.

    Do not modify or change the headers of the first seven columns. Do not add to or delete these columns.

    2. Continue entering more information about projects. These fields are optional and can be customized.

    The image shows a section of the Projects tab, where you fill in more information.

    Headers of these columns can be changed. Extra columns can be added to the right of the Status column if desired. However, Info-Tech strongly recommends that you speak to an Info-Tech analyst before customizing.

    The Project Category, Phase, and Priority fields are entered using drop-down lists from the Org Setup tab.

    Allocate your resource project capacity to projects

    2.2.4
    Portfolio Manager Lite, Tab 5: Allocations

    Project capacity for each resource is calculated as follows, using the data from the Resources tab:

    Project capacity = (total project capacity – absence) x (100% – non-project%)

    In the Allocations tab, project capacity is allocated in percentages with 100% representing the allocation of all available project time of a resource to a project.

    This allocation-by-percentage model has some advantages and drawbacks:

    Advantages

    • Allocating all available project capacity to project is straightforward
    • Easy for project managers to coordinate with each other (e.g. “Jon’s project time will be split 50%-50% between two projects” = enter 50% allocation to each project)

    Drawbacks

    • How many hours is represented by a percentage of someone’s capacity is unclear
    • Must check whether enough work-hours are allocated for what’s needed (e.g. “Deliverable A needs 20 hours of work from Jon in November. Is 50% of his project capacity enough?”)

    The Allocations tab has a few features to help you mitigate these disadvantages.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    For organizations with lower resource management practice maturity, start with percentages. In Portfolio Manager 2017, allocations are entered in work-hours to avoid the above drawbacks altogether, but this may require a higher practice maturity.

    Enter your resource project capacity allocations

    2.2.4
    Portfolio Manager Lite, Tab 5: Allocations

    A line item in the Allocations tab requires three pieces of information: a project, a resource, and the percentage of project capacity for each month.

    The image shows a screenshot from the Allocations tab, with sample information filled in.

    1. Choose a project. Type, Start date, and End date are automatically displayed.

    2. Choose a resource. Team is automatically displayed.

    This image is another screenshot of the Allocations tab, showing the section with dates, with sample information filled in.

    3. Enter the resource’s allocated hours for the project in percentages.

    Built-in functions in the Allocations tab display helpful information for balancing project supply and demand

    2.2.4
    Portfolio Manager Lite, Tab 5: Allocations

    The Allocations tab helps you preview the available project capacity of a resource, as well as the work-hours represented by each allocation line item, to mitigate the drawbacks of percentage allocations.

    In addition, overallocations (allocations for a given month add up to over 100%) are highlighted in red. These functions help resource managers balance the project supply and demand.

    The image shows a screenshot of the Allocations tab, with sample information filled in.

    To preview a resource’s project capacity in work-hours, choose a resource using a drop down. The resource’s available project capacity for each month is displayed to the right.

    Sort or filter the table using the filter button in the header row. Here, the Time table is sorted by Resource.

    The total work-hours for each line item is shown in the Hours column. Here, 25% of Bethel’s project capacity for 4 months adds up to only 16 work-hours for this project.

    A resource is overallocated when project capacity allocations add up to more than 100% for a given month. Overallocations are highlighted in red.

    Get the timeline of your project portfolio with the Gantt chart tab

    2.2.5
    Portfolio Manager Lite, Tab 6: Gantt

    The Gantt tab is a pivot-table-driven chart that graphically represents the start and end dates of projects and their project statuses.

    The image shows a screenshot of the Gantt tab, with sample information filled in.

    Filter entries by project type above the chart.

    The current month (9-17) is highlighted.

    You can filter and sort entries by project name, sponsor, or project manager.

    In progress (under Phase column) projects show the color of their overall status.

    Projects that are neither completed nor in progress are shown in grey.

    Completed (under Phase column) projects are displayed as black.

    Get a bird’s-eye view of your available project capacity with the Resource Load tab

    2.2.6
    Portfolio Manager Lite, Tab 7: Resource Load

    The Resource Load tab is a PivotTable showing the available project capacity for each resource.

    The image is a screenshot of the Resource Load tab, with sample information filled in.

    Change the thresholds for indicating project overallocation at the top right.

    You can filter and sort entries by resource or role.

    Values in yellow and red highlight overallocation.

    Values in green indicate resource availability.

    This table provides a bird’s-eye view of all available project capacity. Highlights for overallocated resources yield a simple heat map that indicates resourcing conflicts that need attention.

    The next two tabs contain graphical dashboards of available capacity.

    Tip: Add more resource information by dragging a column name into the Rows box in the PivotTable field view pane.

    Example: add the Team column by dragging it into the Rows box

    The image shows a screenshot demonstrating that you can add a Team column.

    Analyze your resource allocation landscape with the Capacity Slicer tab

    2.2.7
    Portfolio Manager Lite, Tab 8: Capacity Slicer

    The Capacity Slicer tab is a set of pivot charts showing the distribution of resource allocation and how they compare against the potential capacity.

    The image shows a collection of 5 graphs and charts, showing the distribution of resource allocation, and compared against potential capacity.

    At the top left of each chart, you can turn Forecast Reporting on (true) or off (false). For Year to Date reporting, replace Forecast with YTD in the Field View pane’s Filter field.

    In the Allocated Capacity, in % chart, capacity is shown as a % of total available capacity. Exceeding 100% indicates overallocation.

    In the Realized Project Capacity, in hours chart, the vertical axis is in work-hours. This gap between allocation and capacity represents available project capacity.

    The bottom plots show how allocated project capacity is distributed. If the boxes are empty, no allocation data is available.

    Use the Team slicer to drill down on resource capacity and allocation by groups of resources

    2.2.7
    Portfolio Manager Lite, Tab 8: Capacity Slicer

    A slicer filters the data shown in a PivotTable, a PivotChart, or other slicers. In this tab, the team slicer enables you to view resource capacity and allocation by each team or for multiple teams.

    The image shows a sample graph.

    The button next to the Team header enables multiple selection.

    The next button to the right clears the filter set by this slicer.

    All teams with capacity or allocation data are listed in the slicers.

    For example, if you select "App Dev":

    The image shows the same graph as previously shown, but this time with only App Dev selected in the left-hand column.

    The vertical axis scales automatically for filtered data.

    The capacity and allocation data for all application division teams is shown.

    Resources not in the App Dev team are filtered out.

    Drill down on individual-level resource allocation and demand with the Capacity Locator tab

    2.2.8
    Portfolio Manager Lite, Tab 9: Capacity Locator

    The Capacity Locator tab is a group of PivotCharts with multiple slicers to view available project capacity.

    For example: click on “Developer” under Role:

    The image shows the list of slicers available using the Capacity Locator tab.

    The image shows a series of graphs produced in the Capacity Locator tab.

    Primary skills of all developers are displayed on the left in the Primary Skill column. You can choose a skill to narrow down the list of resources from all developers to all developers with that skill.

    The selected resources are shown in the Resources column. Data on the right pertains to these resources.

    • The top left graph shows the average available project capacity for all selected resources.
    • The top right graph shows the sum of all available capacity from all selected resources.
    • In the lower left graph, pay attention to available total capacity, as selected resources may have significant non-project demands.
    • The lower right graph shows the number of assigned projects. Control the number of concurrent projects to reduce the need for multitasking and optimize your resource use.

    Where you see the filter button with an x, you can clear the filter imposed by this slicer.

    Check how your projects are resourced with the Project Viewer tab

    2.2.9
    Portfolio Manager Lite
    , Tab 10: Project Viewer

    The Project Viewer tab is a set of PivotCharts with multiple slicers to view how resources are allocated to different projects.

    The image shows a screenshot of the Project Viewer tab, with a bar graph at the top, filter selections at the bottom left, and four pie charts at the bottom right.

    Filtering by sponsor or project manager is useful for examining a group of projects by accountability (sponsor) or responsibility (project manager).

    The graphs show how project budgets are distributed across different categories and priorities of projects, and how resource allocations are distributed across different categories and priorities of projects.

    Report on your project portfolio status with the Project Updates tab

    2.2.10
    Portfolio Manager Lite
    , Tab 11: Project Updates

    The Project Updates tab is a PivotTable showing various fields from the Projects table to rapidly generate a portfolio-wide status report. You can add or remove fields from the Projects table using the PivotTable’s Field View pane.

    The image shows a screenshot of a large table, which is the Project Updates tab. A selection is open, showing how you can filter entries.

    Filter entries by phase. The screenshot shows an expansion of this drop down at the top left.

    Rearrange the columns by first clicking just below the header to select all cells in the column, and then dragging it to the desired position. Alternatively, arrange them in the Field View pane.

    Tools and other requirements needed to complete the resource management strategy

    2.2.11
    10 minutes

    • Recommended: If you are below a level 4 on Info-Tech’s resource management maturity scale, use Info-Tech’s Portfolio Manager Lite to start.
    • Use a commercial PPM tool if you already have one in use and feel that you can accurately maintain the data in this tool.
    • Use this chart to estimate the amount of time it will take to accurately maintain the data for each reporting period.
      • Determine who will be responsible for this maintenance.
      • If there is no one currently available to maintain the data, allocate time for someone or you may even need a portfolio analyst.
      • We will confirm roles and responsibilities in phase 3.
    Maturity Level Dimensions Time needed per month
    Small (1-25 employees) Medium (25-75) Large (75-100) Enterprise (100+)
    1-2 %, team, project, monthly update, 1 month forecast 2 hours 6 hours 20 hours 50 hours
    3-4 %, person, phase, weekly update, 1 quarter forecast 4 hours 12 hours 50 hours 150 hours
    5 %, person, task, continuous update, 1 year forecast 8+ hours 20+ hours 100+ hours 400+ hours

    See also: Grow Your Own PPM Solution with Info-Tech’s Portfolio Manager 2017

    Join hundreds of Info-Tech clients who are successfully growing their own PPM solution.

    If you are looking for a more robust resource management solution, or prefer to allocate staff time in hours rather than percentages, see Info-Tech’s Portfolio Manager 2017.

    Similar to Portfolio Manager Lite, Portfolio Manager 2017 is a Microsoft Excel-based PPM solution that provides project visibility, forecasting, historical insight, and portfolio analytics capabilities for your PMO without a large upfront investment for a commercial solution.

    Watch Info-Tech’s Portfolio Manager 2017 Video – Introduction and Demonstration.

    System Requirements

    To use all functions of Portfolio Manager 2017, you need Excel 2013 or Excel 2016 running on Windows, with the following add-ins:

    • Power Query (Excel 2013 only)
    • Power Pivot
    • Power View

    Power View is only available on select editions of Excel 2013 and 2016, but you can still use Portfolio Manager 2017 without Power View.

    If you are unsure, speak to your IT help desk or an Info-Tech analyst for help.

    For a new PMO, start with the new reality

    CASE STUDY

    Industry Law Enforcement

    Source Info-Tech Client

    Because we already have enterprise licensing for an expensive commercial tool, everyone else thinks it’s logical to start there. I think we’re going to start with something quick and dirty like Excel.” – EPMO Director, Law Enforcement Services

    Situation

    • This was an enterprise PMO, but with relatively low organizational maturity.
    • The IT department had relatively high project management maturity, but the enterprise was under-evolved at the portfolio level.
    • Other areas of the organization already had licensing and deployment of a top-tier commercial PPM tool.
    • There were no examples of a resource management practice.

    Complication

    • There was executive visibility on larger and more strategic projects.
    • There were no constraints on the use of resources for smaller projects.
    • The PMO was generally expected to provide project governance with their limited resources.
    • The organization lacked an understanding of the difference between project and portfolio management. Consequently, it was difficult to create resource management practices at the portfolio level due to a lack of resourcing.

    Resolution

    • The organization deferred the implementation of the commercial PPM tool.
    • They added high-level resource management using spreadsheets.
    • Executive focus was reoriented around overall resource capacity as the principle constraint for project approvals.
    • They introduced deeper levels of planning granularity over time.
    • When the planning granularity gets down to the task level, they move toward the commercial solution.

    Step 2.3: Build process steps to ensure data accuracy and sustainability

    PHASE 1

    1.1 Set a course of action

    1.2 Estimate supply and demand

    PHASE 2

    2.1 Select resource management dimensions

    2.2 Select resource management tools

    2.3 Build process steps

    PHASE 3

    3.1 Pilot your process for viability

    3.2 Plan stakeholder engagement

    This step will walk you through the following activities:
    • Draft a high-level resource management workflow
    • Build on the workflow to determine how data will be collected at each step, and who will support the process
    • Document your provisional resource management process
    This step involves the following participants:
    • PMO Director / Portfolio Manager
    • Functional / Resource Managers
    • Project Managers
    Outcomes of this step
    • A high-level resource management workflow, customized from Info-Tech’s sample workflow
    • Process for collecting resource supply data for each reporting period
    • Process for capturing the project demand within each reporting period
    • Process for identifying and documenting resource constraints and issues for each reporting period
    • Standard protocol for resolving resource issues within each reporting period
    • Process for finalizing and communicating resource allocations for the forecast window
    • A customized Resource Management Playbook, documenting the standard operating procedure for the processes

    Make sustainability the goal of your resource management practices

    A resource management process is doing more harm than good if it doesn’t facilitate the flow of accurate and usable data week after week, month after month, year after year.

    When resource management strategies fail, it can typically be tied back to the same culprit: unrealistic expectations from the outset.

    If a resource management process strives for a level of data precision that staff cannot juggle day to day, over the long run, then things will eventually fall apart as staff and decision makers alike lose faith in the data and the relevancy of the process.

    Two things can be done to help avoid this fate:

    1. Strive for accuracy over precision. If your department’s process maturity is low, and staff are ping-ponged from task to task, fire to fire, throughout any given day, then striving for precise data is ill advised. Keep your granularity of allocation more high level, and strive for data that is “maintainably” accurate rather than “unmaintainably” precise.
    2. Keep the process simple. Use the advice in this step to develop a sustainable process, one that is easy to follow with clearly defined responsibilities and accountabilities at each step.

    Info-Tech Insight

    It's not about what you put together as a one-time snapshot. It's about what you can and will maintain every week, even during a crisis. When you stop maintaining resource management data, it’s nearly impossible to catch up and you’re usually forced to start fresh.

    Maintain reliable resourcing data with an easy-to-follow, repeatable process

    Info-Tech recommends following a simple five-step process for resource management.

    1. Collect resource supply data

    • Resources
    • Resource Managers

    2. Collect project demand data

    • Resource Managers
    • Project Managers
    • PMO

    3. Identify sources of supply/demand imbalance

    • PMO

    4. Resolve conflicts and balance project and non-project allocations

    • Resource Managers
    • Project Managers
    • PMO
    • Steering Committee, CIO, other executives

    5. Approve allocations for forecast window

    • PMO
    • Steering Committee, CIO, other executives

    This is a sample workflow with sample roles and responsibilities. This step will help you customize the appropriate steps for your department.

    Info-Tech Insight

    This process aims to control the resource supply to meet the demand – project and non-project alike. Coordinate this process with other portfolio management processes, ensuring that up-to-date resource data is available for project approval, portfolio reporting, closure, etc.

    Draft your own high-level resource management workflow

    2.3.1
    60 to 90 minutes

    Participants

    • Portfolio Manager
    • Project Managers
    • Resource Managers
    • Business Analysts

    Input

    • Process data requirements

    Output

    • High-level description of your target-state process

    Materials

    • Whiteboard or recipe cards

    Conduct a table-top planning exercise to map out, at a high-level, your required and desired process steps.

    While Info-Tech recommends a simple five-step process (see previous slide), you may need to flesh out your process into additional steps, depending upon the granularity of your seven dimensions and the complexity of your resource management tool. A table-top planning exercise can be helpful to ensure the right process steps are covered.

    1. On a whiteboard or using white 4x6 recipe cards, write the unique steps of a resource management process. Use the process example at the bottom of this slide as a guide.
    2. Use a green marker or green cards to write artifacts or deliverables that result from each step.
    3. Use a red marker or red cards to address potential issues, problems, or risks that you can foresee at each step.

    For the purposes of this activity, avoid getting into too much detail by keeping to your focus on the high-level data points that will be required to keep supply and demand balanced on an ongoing basis.

    "[I]t’s important not to get too granular with your time tracking. While it might be great to get lots of insight into how your team is performing, being too detailed can eat into your team’s productive work time. A good rule of thumb to work by is if your employees’ timesheets include time spent time tracking, then you’ve gone too granular."

    Nicolas Jacobeus

    Use Info-Tech’s Resource Management Playbook to help evolve your high-level steps into a repeatable practice

    Once you’ve determined a high-level workflow, you’ll need to flesh out the organizational details for how data will be collected at each step and who will support the process.

    Use Info-Tech’s Resource Management Playbook to help determine and communicate the “who, what, when, where, why, and how” of each of your high-level process steps.

    The playbook template is intended to function as your resource management standard operating procedure. Customize Section 3 of the template to record the specific organizational details of how data will be collected at each process step, and the actions and decisions the data collection process will necessitate.

    • Activities 2.3.2-2.3.6 in this step will help you customize the process steps in Info-Tech’s five-step resource management model and record these in the template. If you developed a customized process in activity 2.3.1, you will need to add to/take away from the activity slides and customize the template accordingly.
    • Lean on the seven dimensions of resource management that you developed in step 2.1 to determine the cadence and frequency of data collection. For instance, if your update frequency is monthly, you will need to ensure you collect your supply-demand data prior to that, giving yourself enough time to analyze it and reconcile imbalances with stakeholders before refreshing your monthly reporting data.

    Download Info-Tech’s Resource Management Playbook

    How the next five activities will help you develop your playbook

    2.3 Resource Management Playbook

    Each of the slides for activities 2.3.2-2.3.6 are comprised of a task-at-a glance box as well as “important decisions to document” for each step.

    Work as a group to complete the task-at-a-glance boxes for each step. Use the “important decisions to document” notes to help brainstorm the “how” for each step. These details should be recorded below the task-at-a-glance boxes in the playbook – see point 6 in the legend below.

    Screenshot of Section 3 of the RM Playbook.

    The image shows a screenshot of Section 3 of the RM Playbook. A legend is included below.

    Screenshot Legend:

    1. Review your existing steps, tools, and templates used for this task. Alternatively, review the example provided in the RM Playbook.
    2. Designate the responsible party/parties for this process. Who carries out the task?
    3. Document the inputs and outputs for the task: artifacts, consulted and informed parties.
    4. If applicable, document the tools and templates used for the task.
    5. Designate the accountable party for this task. Only a single party can be accountable.
    6. Describe the “how” of the task below the Task-at-a-Glance table.

    Step one: determine the logistics for collecting resource supply data for each reporting period

    2.3.2
    20 minutes

    Step one in your resource management process should be ensuring a perpetually current view into your resource supply.

    Resource supply in this context should be understood as the time, per your scope of allocation (i.e. individual, team, skill, etc.) that is leftover or available once non-project demands have been taken out of the equation. In short, the goal of this process step is to determine the non-project demands for the forecast period.

    The important decisions to document for this step include:

    1. What data will be collected and from whom? For example, functional managers to update resource potential capacity and non-project resource allocations.
    2. How often will data be collected and when? For example, data will be collected third Monday of the month, three days before our monthly update frequency.
    3. How will the data be collected? For example, tool admin to send out data to update on third Monday; resource managers update the data and email back to tool admin.

    Document your process for determining resource supply in Section 3.1 of Info-Tech’s Resource Management Playbook.

    Task-at-a-glance:

    Inputs Artifacts i.e. historical usage data
    Consulted i.e. project resources
    Tools & Templates i.e. time tracking template
    Outputs Artifacts i.e. updated template
    Informed i.e. portfolio analyst
    Timing i.e. every second Monday
    Responsible i.e. functional managers
    Accountable i.e. IT directors

    Step two: map out how project demand will be captured within each reporting period

    2.3.3
    20 minutes

    Step two in your resource management process will be to determine the full extent of project demand for your forecast period.

    Project demand in this context can entail both in-flight projects as well as new project plans or new project requests that are proposing to consume capacity during the forecast period. In short, the goal of this process step is to determine all of the project demands for the forecast period.

    The important decisions to document for this step include:

    1. What data will be collected and from whom? For example, project managers to update project allocations for in-flight projects, and PMO will provide proposed allocations for new project requests.
    2. How often will data be collected and when? For example, data will be collected third Tuesday of the month, two days before our monthly update frequency.
    3. How will the data be collected? For example, tool admin to send out data to update on third Tuesday; project managers update the data and email back to tool admin.

    Document your process for determining project demand in Section 3.2 of Info-Tech’s Resource Management Playbook.

    Task-at-a-glance

    Inputs Artifacts i.e. historical usage data
    Consulted i.e. project resources
    Tools & Templates i.e. project demand template
    Outputs Artifacts i.e. updated demand table
    Informed i.e. portfolio analyst
    Timing i.e. every second Monday
    Responsible i.e. project managers
    Accountable i.e. PMO director

    Step three: record how resource constraints and issues for each reporting period will be identified and documented

    2.3.4
    20 minutes

    Step three in your resource management process will be to analyze your resource supply and project demand data to identify points of conflict.

    Once the supply-demand data has been compiled, it will need to be analyzed for points of imbalance and conflict. The goal of this process step is to analyze the raw data and to make it consumable by other stakeholders in preparation for a reconciliation or rebalancing process.

    The important decisions to document for this step include:

    1. How will the data be checked for inaccuracies? For example, tool admin to enter and QA data; reach out by the following Wednesday at noon with inconsistencies; managers to respond no later than next day by noon.
    2. What reports will employed? For example, a refreshed demand spreadsheet will be made available.
    3. What is an acceptable range for over- and under-allocations? For example, the acceptable tolerance for allocation is 15%; that is, report only those resources that are less than 85% allocated, or more than 115% allocated.

    Document your process for identifying resource constraints and issues in Section 3.3 of Info-Tech’s Resource Management Playbook.

    Task-at-a-glance

    Inputs Artifacts i.e. supply/demand data
    Consulted i.e. no one
    Tools & Templates i.e. Portfolio Manager Lite
    Outputs Artifacts i.e. list of issues
    Informed i.e. no one
    Timing i.e. every second Tuesday
    Responsible i.e. portfolio analyst
    Accountable i.e. PMO director

    Step four: establish a standard protocol for resolving resource issues within each reporting period

    2.3.5
    20 minutes

    Step four in your resource management process should be to finalize your capacity management book of record for the reporting period and prepare recommendations for resolving conflicts and issues.

    The reconciliation process will likely take place at a meeting amongst the management of the PMO and representatives from the various functional groups within the department. The goal of this step is to get the right roles and individuals to agree upon proposed reconciliations and to sign-off on resource allocations.

    The important decisions to document for this step include:

    1. What reports will be distributed and in what form? For example, refreshed spreadsheet will be available on the PMO SharePoint site.
    2. When will the reports be generated and for whom? For example, fourth Tuesday of the month, end of day – accessible for all managers.
    3. Who has input into how conflicts should be resolved? For example, conflicts will be resolved at monthly resource management meeting. All meeting participants have input, but the PMO director will have ultimate decision-making authority.

    Document your process for resolving resource constraints and issues in Section 3.4 of Info-Tech’s Resource Management Playbook.

    Inputs Artifacts i.e. meeting agenda
    Consulted i.e. meeting participants
    Tools & Templates i.e. capacity reports
    Outputs Artifacts i.e. minutes and resolutions
    Informed i.e. steering committee
    Timing i.e. every second Thursday
    Responsible i.e. PMO director
    Accountable i.e. CIO

    Step five: record how resource allocations will be finalized and communicated for the forecast window

    2.3.6
    20 minutes

    The final step in your resource management process is to clarify how resource allocations will be documented in your resource management solution and reported to the department.

    Once a plan to rebalance supply and demand for the reporting period has been agreed on, you will need to ensure that the appropriate data is updated in your resource management book of record, and that allocation decisions are communicated to the appropriate stakeholders.

    The important decisions to document for this step include:

    1. Who has ultimate authority for allocation decisions? For example, the CIO has final authority when conflicts need to be escalated and must approve all allocations for the forecast period.
    2. Who will update the book of record and when? For example, the tool admin will update the data before the end of the day following the resource management meeting.
    3. Who needs to be informed and of what? For example, resource plans will be updated in SharePoint for resources and managers to review.

    Document your process for approving and finalizing allocation in Section 3.5 of Info-Tech’s Resource Management Playbook.

    Task-at-a-glance

    Inputs Artifacts i.e. minutes and resolutions
    Consulted i.e. CIO, IT directors
    Tools & Templates i.e. Portfolio Manager Lite
    Outputs Artifacts i.e. updated availability table
    Informed i.e. steering committee
    Timing i.e. every second Friday
    Responsible i.e. portfolio analyst
    Accountable i.e. PMO director

    Finalize your provisional resource management process in the Playbook Template

    2.3 Resource Management Playbook

    Use Info-Tech’s Resource Management Playbook to solidify your processes in a formalized operating plan.

    Throughout this phase, we have been customizing sections 1, 2, and 3 of the Resource Management Playbook.

    Before we move to pilot and implement your resource management strategy in the next phase of this blueprint, ensure that sections 1-3 of your playbook have been drafted and are ready to be communicated and shared with stakeholders.

    • Avoid getting too granular in your process requirements. Keep it to high-level data requirements. Imposing too much detail in your playbook is a recipe for failure.
    • The playbook should remain provisional throughout your pilot phase. Aspects of your process will likely need to be changed or tweaked as they are met with some day-to-day realities. As with any “living document,” it can be helpful to explicitly assign responsibilities for updating the playbook over the long term to ensure it stays relevant.

    "People are spending far more time creating these elaborate [time-tracking] systems than it would have taken just to do the task. You’re constantly on your app refiguring, recalculating, re-categorizing... A better strategy would be [returning] to the core principles of good time management…Block out your calendar for the non-negotiable things. [Or] have an organized prioritized task list." – Laura Stack (quoted in Zawacki)

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
    • Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

    2.1 Wireframe a resource management strategy using Info-Tech’s seven dimensions of resource management

    Action the decision points across Info-Tech’s seven dimensions to ensure your resource management process is guided by realistic data and process goals.

    2.3 Draft a high-level resource management workflow and elaborate it into a repeatable practice

    Customize Info-Tech’s five-step resource management process model. Then, document how the process will operate by customizing the Resource Management Playbook.

    Phase 3

    Implement Sustainable Resource Management Practices

    Phase 3 outline

    Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

    Guided Implementation 3: Implement Sustainable Resource Management Practices

    Proposed Time to Completion (in weeks): 4-12 weeks

    Step 3.1: Pilot your resource management process

    Start with an analyst kick-off call:

    • Review your resource management dimensions and tools
    • Review your provisional resource management processes
    • Discuss your ideas for a pilot

    Then complete these activities…

    • Select receptive project/functional managers to work with
    • Define the scope of your pilot and determine logistics
    • Finalize resource management roles and responsibilities

    With these tools & templates:

    • Process Pilot Plan Template
    • Resource Management Playbook
    • Project Portfolio Analyst Job Description
    Step 3.2: Plan to engage your stakeholders

    Review findings with analyst:

    • Results of your pilot, team feedback, and lessons learned
    • Your stakeholder landscape

    Then complete these activities…

    • Brainstorm and plan for potential resistance to change, objections, and fatigue from stakeholders
    • Plan for next steps

    With these tools & templates:

    • Resource Management Playbook

    Phase 3 Results & Insights:

    Engagement paves the way for smoother adoption. An engagement approach (rather than simply communication) turns stakeholders into advocates who can help boost your message, sustain the change, and realize benefits without constant intervention or process command-and-control.

    Step 3.1: Pilot your resource management process to assess viability

    PHASE 1

    1.1 Set a course of action

    1.2 Estimate supply and demand

    PHASE 2

    2.1 Select resource management dimensions

    2.2 Select resource management tools

    2.3 Build process steps

    PHASE 3

    3.1 Pilot your process for viability

    3.2 Plan stakeholder engagement

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Select receptive project and functional managers to work with during your pilot
    • Define the scope of your pilot and determine logistics
    • Plan to obtain feedback, document lessons learned, and create an action plan for any changes
    • Finalize resource management roles and responsibilities

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • PMO Director / Portfolio Manager
    • Project Managers
    • Resource Managers

    Outcomes of this step

    • A pilot team
    • A process pilot plan that defines the scope, logistics, and process for retrospection
    • Roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities for resource management
    • Project Portfolio Analyst job description template

    Pilot your new processes to test feasibility and address issues before a full deployment

    Adopting the right set of practices requires a significant degree of change that necessitates buy-in from varied stakeholders throughout IT and the business.

    Rome wasn’t built in a day. Similarly, your visibility into resource usage and availability won’t happen overnight.

    Resist the urge to deploy a big-bang rollout of your research management practices. This approach is ill advised for two main reasons:

    • It will put more of a strain on the implementation team in the near term, with a larger pool of end users to train and collect data from.
    • Putting untested practices in a department-wide spotlight could lead to mass confusion in the near-term and color the new processes in a negative light, leading to a loss of stakeholder trust and engagement right out of the gate.

    Start with a pilot phase. Identify receptive project managers and functional managers to work with, and leverage their insights to help iron out the kinks in your process before unveiling your practices to IT and business users at large.

    This step will help you:

    • Plan and execute a pilot of the processes we developed in Phase 2.
    • Incorporate the lessons learned from that pilot to strengthen your playbook and ease the communication process.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Engagement paves the way for smoother adoption. An engagement approach (rather than simply communication) turns stakeholders into advocates who can help boost your message, sustain the change, and realize benefits without constant intervention or process command-and-control.

    Plan your pilot like you would any project to ensure it’s well defined and its goals are clearly articulated

    Use Info-Tech’s Process Pilot Plan Template to help define the scope of your pilot and set appropriate goals for the test run of your new processes.

    A process pilot is a limited scope of an implementation (constrained by time and resources involved) to test the viability and effectiveness of the process as it has been designed.

    • Investing time and energy into a pilot phase can help to lower implementation risk, enhance the details and steps within a process, and improve stakeholder relations prior to a full scale rollout.
    • More than a dry run, however, a pilot should be approached strategically and planned out to limit the scope of it and achieve specific outcomes.
    • Leverage a planning document to ensure your process pilot is grounded in a common set of definitions, that the pilot is delivering value and insight, and that ultimately the pilot can serve as a starting point for a full-scale process implementation.

    "The advantages to a pilot are several. First, risk is constrained. Pilots are closely monitored so if a problem does occur, it can be fixed immediately. Second, the people working in the pilot can become trainers as you roll the process out to the rest of the organization. Third, the pilot is another opportunity for skeptics to visit the pilot process and learn from those working in it. There’s nothing like seeing a new process working for people to change their minds." – Daniel Madison

    Download Info-Tech’s Process Pilot Plan Template

    Select receptive project and functional managers to work with during your pilot

    3.1.1
    20 to 60 minutes

    Input

    • Project management staff and functional managers

    Output

    • Pilot project teams

    Materials

    • Stakeholder Engagement Workbook
    • Process Pilot Plan Template

    Participants

    • Process owner (PMO director or portfolio owner)
    • CIO

    Info-Tech recommends selecting project managers and functional managers who are aware of your role and some of the supply-demand challenges to assist in the implementation process.

    1. If receptive project and functional managers are known, schedule a 15-minute meeting with them to inquire if they would be willing to be part of the pilot process.
    2. If receptive project managers are not known, use Info-Tech’s Stakeholder Engagement Workbook to conduct a formal selection process.
      1. Enter a list of potential pilot project managers in tab 3.
      2. Rate project managers in terms of influence, pilot interest, and potential deployment contribution within tab 4.
      3. Review tab 5 in the workbook. Receptive project managers will appear in the top quadrants. Ideal project managers for the pilot are located in the top right quadrant of the graph.

    Document the project and functional managers involved in your pilot in Section 3 of Info-Tech’s Process Pilot Plan Template.

    Define the scope of your pilot and determine logistics

    Input

    • Sections 1 through 4 of the Process Pilot Plan Template

    Output

    • A process pilot plan

    Materials

    • Process Pilot Plan Template

    Participants

    • Process Owner (PMO Director or Portfolio Owner)
    • CIO
    • Project and Resource Managers

    Use Info-Tech’s Process Pilot Plan Template to design the details of your pilot.

    Investing time into planning your pilot phase strategically will ensure a clear scope, better communications for those piloting the processes, and overall, better, more actionable results during the pilot phase. The Process Pilot Plan Template is broken into five sections to assist in these goals:

      • Pilot Overview and Scope
      • Success and Risk Factors
      • Stakeholders Involved and Communications Plan
      • Pilot Retrospective and Feedback Protocol
      • Lessons Learned
    • The duration of your pilot should go at least one allocation period, depending on your frequency of updates, e.g. one week or month.
    • Estimates of time commitments should be captured for each stakeholder. During the retrospective at the end of the pilot, you should capture actuals to help determine the time-cost of the process itself and measure its sustainability.
    • Once the template is completed, schedule time to share and communicate it with the pilot team and executive sponsors of the process.

    While you should invest time in this planning document, continue to lean on the Resource Management Playbook as well as a process guide throughout the pilot phase.

    Execute your pilot and prepare to make process revisions before the full rollout

    Hit play! Begin the process pilot and get familiar with the work routine and resource management solution.

    Some things to keep in mind during the pilot include:

    • Depending on the solution you’re using, you will likely need to spend one day or less to populate the tool. During the pilot, measure the time and effort required to manage the data within the tool. Compare with the original estimate from activity 2.2.2. Determine whether time and effort required are viable on an ongoing basis (i.e. can you do it every week or month) and have value.
    • Meet with the pilot team and other stakeholders regularly during the pilot – at least weekly. Allow the team (and yourself) to speak honestly and openly about what isn’t working. The pilot is your chance to make things better.
    • Keep notes about what will need to change in the RM Playbook. For major changes, you may have to tweak the process during the pilot itself. Update the process documents as needed and communicate the changes and why they’re being made. If required, update the scope of the pilot in the Process Pilot Plan Template.

    Obtain feedback from the pilot group to improve your processes before a wider rollout

    3.1.3
    30 minutes

    Input

    • What’s working and what isn’t in the process

    Output

    • Ideas to improve process

    Materials

    • Whiteboard
    • Sticky notes
    • Process Pilot Plan Template

    Participants

    • Process Owner (PMO Director or Portfolio Owner)
    • Pilot Team

    Pilot projects allow you to validate your assumptions and leverage lessons learned. During the planning of the pilot, you should have scheduled a retrospective meeting with the pilot team to formally assess strengths and weaknesses in the process you have drafted.

    • Schedule the retrospective shortly after the pilot is completed. Info-Tech recommends a stop/start/continue activity with pilot participants to obtain and capture feedback.
    • Have members of the meeting record any processes/activities on sticky notes that should:
      • Stop: because they are ineffective or not useful
      • Start: because they would be useful for the tool and have not been incorporated into current processes
      • Continue: because they are useful and positively contribute to intended process outcomes

    An example of how to structure a stop/start/continue activity on a whiteboard using sticky notes.

    The image shows three black squares, each with three brightly coloured sticky notes in it. The three squares are labelled: Stop; Start; Continue.

    See below for additional instructions

    Document lessons learned and create an action plan for any changes to the resource management processes

    3.1.4
    30 minutes

    As a group, discuss everyone’s responses and organize according to top priority (mark with a 1) and lower priority/next steps (mark with a 2). At this point, you can also remove any sticky notes that are repetitive or no longer relevant.

    Once you have organized based on priority, be sure to come to a consensus with the group regarding which actions to take. For example, if the group agrees that they should “stop holding meetings weekly,” come to a consensus regarding how often meetings will be held, i.e. monthly.

    Create an action plan for the top priority items that require changes (the stops and starts). Record in this slide or your preferred medium. Be sure to include who is responsible for the action and the date that it will be implemented.

    Priority Action Required Who is Responsible Implementation Date
    Stop: Holding meetings weekly Hold meetings monthly Jane Doe, PMO Next Meeting: November 1, 2017
    Start: Discussing backlog during meetings Ensure that backlog data is up to date for discussion on date of next meeting John Doe, Portfolio Manager November 1, 2017

    Document the outcomes of the start/stop/continue exercise and your action plan in Section 6 of Info-Tech’s Process Pilot Plan Template.

    Review actions that can be taken based on the results of your pilot

    Situation Action Next Steps
    The dimensions that we chose for our strategy have proven to be too difficult to accurately maintain. The dimensions that we chose for our strategy have proven to be too difficult to accurately maintain. Reassess the dimensions that you chose for your strategy. Make sure that you are not overcommitting yourself based on your maturity level. You can always go back and adjust for a higher level of resource management maturity once you have mastered your current level. For example, if you chose “weekly” as your update frequency and this has proven to be too much to maintain, try updating monthly for a few months. Once you have mastered this update frequency, it will be easier to adjust to a weekly update process.
    We were able to maintain the data for our pilot based on the dimensions that we chose. However, allocating projects based on realized capacity did not alleviate any of our resourcing issues and resources still seem to be working on more projects than they can handle. Determine other factors at the organization that would help to maintain the data and work toward reclaiming capacity. Continue working with the dimensions that you chose and maintain the accuracy of this data. The next step is to identify other factors that are contributing to your resource allocation problems and begin reclaiming capacity. Continue forward to the resource management roadmap section and work on changing organizational structures and worker behavior to maximize capacity for project work.
    We were able to easily and accurately maintain the data, which led to positive results and improvement in resource allocation issues. If your strategy is easily maintained, identify factors that will help your organization reclaim capacity. Continue to maintain this data, and eventually work toward maintaining it at a more precise level. For example, if you are currently using an update frequency of “monthly” and succeeding, think about moving toward a “weekly” frequency within a few months. Once you feel confident that you can maintain project and resource data, continue on to the roadmap section to discover ways to reclaim resource capacity through organizational and behavioral change.

    Finalize resource management roles and responsibilities

    3.1.5
    15 to 30 minutes

    Input

    • Tasks for resource management
    • Stakeholder involved

    Output

    • Roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities for resource management

    Materials

    • Resource Management Playbook

    Participants

    • PMO Director/ Portfolio Manager
    • Functional Managers
    • Project Managers

    Perform a RACI exercise to help standardize terminology around roles and responsibilities and to ensure that expectations are consistent across stakeholders and teams.

    • A RACI will help create a clear understanding of the tasks and expectations for each stakeholder at each process step, assigning responsibilities and accountability for resource management outcomes.

    Responsible

    Accountable

    Consulted

    Informed

    Roles CIO PMO Portfolio Analyst Project Manager Functional Manager
    Collect supply data I A R I C
    Collect demand data I A R C I
    Identify conflicts I C/A R C C
    Resolve conflicts C A/R I R R
    Approve allocations A R I R I

    Document your roles and responsibilities in Section 2 of Info-Tech’s Resource Management Playbook.

    Use Info-Tech’s Portfolio Analyst job description to help fill any staffing needs around data maintenance

    3.1 Project Portfolio Analyst/PMO Analyst Job Description

    You will need to determine responsibilities and accountabilities for portfolio management functions within your team.

    If you do not have a clearly identifiable portfolio manager at this time, you will need to clarify who will wear which hats in terms of facilitating intake and prioritization, high-level capacity awareness, and portfolio reporting.

    • Use Info-Tech’s Project Portfolio Analyst job description template to help clarify some of the required responsibilities to support your PPM strategy.
      • If you need to bring in an additional staff member to help support the strategy, you can customize the job description template to help advertise the position. Simply edit the text in grey within the template.
    • If you have other PPM tasks that you need to define responsibilities for, you can use the RASCI chart on the final tab of the PPM Strategy Development Tool.

    Download Info-Tech’s Project Portfolio Analyst Job Description Template

    Finalize the Resource Management Playbook and prepare to communicate your processes

    Once you’ve completed the pilot process and made the necessary tweaks, you should finalize your Resource Management Playbook and prepare to communicate it.

    Revisit your RM Playbook from step 2.3 and ensure it has been updated to reflect the process changes that were identified in activity 3.1.4.

    • If during the pilot process the data was too difficult or time consuming to maintain, revisit the dimensions you have chosen and select dimensions that are easier to accurately maintain. Tweak your process steps in the playbook accordingly.
    • In the long term, if you are not observing any capacity being reclaimed, revisit the roadmap that we’ll prepare in step 3.2 and address some of these inhibitors to organizational change.
    • In the next step, we will also be repurposing some of the content from the playbook, as well as from previous activities, to include them in your presentation to stakeholders, using Info-Tech’s Resource Management Communications Template.

    Download Info-Tech’s Resource Management Playbook

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Make your process standardization comprehensive. The RM Playbook should serve as your resource management standard operating procedure. In addition to providing a walk-through of the process, an SOP also clarifies project governance by clearly defining roles and responsibilities.

    Step 3.2: Plan to engage your stakeholders with your playbook

    PHASE 1

    1.1 Set a course of action

    1.2 Estimate supply and demand

    PHASE 2

    2.1 Select resource management dimensions

    2.2 Select resource management tools

    2.3 Build process steps

    PHASE 3

    3.1 Pilot your process for viability

    3.2 Plan stakeholder engagement

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Brainstorm and plan for potential resistance to change, objections, and fatigue from stakeholders
    • Plan for next steps in reclaiming project capacity
    • Plan for next steps in overcoming supply-demand reconciliation challenges

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • PMO Director / Portfolio Manager
    • Pilot Team from Step 3.1

    Outcomes of this step

    • Plan for communicating responses and objections from stakeholders and staff
    • Plan to manage structural/enabling factors that influence success of the resource management strategy
    • Description of next steps in reclaiming project capacity and overcoming supply-demand reconciliation challenges
    • Final draft of the customized Resource Management Playbook

    Develop a resource management roadmap to communicate and reinforce the strategy

    A roadmap will help anticipate, plan, and address barriers and opportunities that influence the success of the resource management strategy.

    This step of the project will ensure the new strategy is adopted and applied with maximum success by helping you manage challenges and opportunities across three dimensions:

    1. Executive Stakeholder Factors

    For example, resistance to adopting new assumptions about ratio of project versus non-project work.

    2. Workforce/Team Factors

    For example, resistance to moving from individual- to team-based allocations.

    3. Structural Factors

    For example, ensuring priorities are stable within the chosen resource planning horizon.

    See Info-Tech’s Drive Organizational Change from the PMOfor comprehensive tools and guidance on achieving organizational buy-in for your new resource management practices.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Communicate, communicate, communicate. Staff are 34% more likely to adapt to change quickly during the implementation and adoption phases when they are provided with a timeline of impending changes specific to their department. (McLean & Company)

    Anticipate a wide range of responses toward your new processes

    While your mandate may be backed by an executive sponsor, you will need to influence stakeholders from throughout the organization in order to succeed. Indeed, as EPMO leader, success will depend upon your ability to confirm and reaffirm commitments on soft or informal grounds. Prepare an engagement strategy that anticipates a wide range of responses.

    Enthusiasts Fence-sitters Skeptics Saboteurs
    What they look like: Put all their energy into learning new skills and behaviors. Start to use new skills and behaviors at a sluggish pace. Look for alternate ways of implementing the change. Refuse to learn anything new or try new behaviors.
    How they contribute: Lead the rest of the group. Provide an undercurrent of movement from old behaviors to new. Challenge decisions and raise risk points with managers. May raise valid points about the process that should be fixed.
    How to manage them: Give them space to learn and lead others. Keep them moving forward by testing their progress. Listen to them, but don’t give in to their demands. Keep communicating with them until you convert them.
    How to leverage them: Have them lead discussions and training sessions. Use them as an example to forecast the state once the change is adopted. Test new processes by having them try to poke holes in them. If you can convert them, they will lead the Skeptics and Fence-sitters.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Hone your stakeholder engagement strategy. Most people affected by an IT-enabled change tend to be fence-sitters. Small minorities will be enthusiasts, saboteurs, and skeptics. Your communication strategy should focus on engaging the skeptics, saboteurs, and enthusiasts. Fence-sitters will follow.

    Define plans to deal with resistance to change, objections, and fatigue

    Be prepared to confront skeptics and saboteurs when communicating the change.

    1. Use the templates on the following slide to:
      1. Brainstorm possible objections from stakeholders and staff. Prioritize objections that are likely to occur.
      2. Develop responses to objections.
    2. Develop a document and plan for proactively communicating responses and objections to show people that you understand their point of view.
      1. Revise the communications messaging and plan to include proactive objection handling.
    3. Discuss the likelihood and impact of “saboteurs” who aren’t convinced or affected by change management efforts.
      1. Explore contingency plans for dealing with difficult saboteurs. These individuals can negate the progress of the rest of the team by continuing to resist the process and spreading toxic energy. If necessary, be ruthless with these individuals. Let them know that the rest of the group is moving on without them, and if they can’t or won’t adopt the new standards, then they can leave.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Communicate well and engage often. Agility and continuous improvement are good, but can degenerate into volatility if change isn’t managed properly. People will perceive change to be volatile if their expectations aren’t managed through communications and engagement planning.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    The individuals best positioned to provide insight and influence change positively are also best positioned to create resistance.

    These people should be engaged early and often in the implementation process – not just to make them feel included or part of the change, but also because their insight could very likely identify risks, barriers, and opportunities that need to be addressed.

    Develop a plan to manage stakeholder resistance to the new resource management strategy

    3.2.1
    30 minutes

    Brainstorm potential implications and objections that executive stakeholders might raise about your new processes.

    Dimension Decision Potential Impact, Implications, and Objections Possible Responses and Actions
    i.e. Default Project Ratio 50% “This can’t be right...” “We conducted a thorough time audit to establish this ratio.”
    “We need to spend more time on project work.” “Realistic estimates will help us control new project intake, which will help us optimize time allocated to projects.”
    i.e. Frequency Monthly “This data isn’t detailed enough, we need to know what people are working on right now.” “Maintaining an update frequency of weekly would require approximately [X] extra hours of PMO effort. We can work toward weekly as we mature.”
    i.e. Scope Person “That is a lot of people to keep track of.” “Managing individuals is still the job of the project manager; we are responsible for allocating individuals to projects.”
    i.e. Granularity of Work Assignment Project “We need to know exactly what tasks are being worked on and what the progress is.” “Assigning at task level is very difficult to accurately maintain. Once we have mastered a project-level granularity we can move toward task level.”
    i.e. Forecast Horizon One month “We need to know what each resource is working on next year.” “With a monthly forecast, our estimates are dependable. If we forecast a year in advance, this estimate will not be accurate.”

    Document the outcomes of this activity on slide 26 of Info-Tech’s Resource Management Communications Template.

    Develop a plan to manage staff/team resistance to the new resource management strategy

    3.2.2
    30 minutes

    Brainstorm potential implications and objections that individual staff and members of project teams might raise about your new processes.

    Dimension Decision Potential Impact, Implications, and Objections Possible Responses and Actions
    i.e. Default Project Ratio 50% “There’s too much support work.” “We conducted a thorough time audit to establish this ratio. Realistic estimates will help us control new project intake, which will help us optimize your project time.”
    i.e. Frequency Monthly “I don’t have time to give you updates on project progress.” “This update frequency requires only [X] amount of time from you per week/month.”
    i.e. Granularity Project “I need more clarity on what I’m working on.” “Team members and project managers are in the best position to define and assign (or self-select) individual tasks.”
    i.e. Forecast Horizon One month “I need to know what my workload will be further in advance.” “You will still have a high-level understanding of what you will be working on in the future, but projects will only be officially forecasted one month in advance.”
    i.e. Allocation Cadence Monthly “We need a more frequent cadence.” “We can work toward weekly cadence as we mature.”

    Document the outcomes of this activity on slide 27 of Info-Tech’s Resource Management Communications Template.

    Develop a plan to manage structural/enabling factors that influence success of the resource management strategy

    3.2.3
    30 minutes

    Brainstorm a plan to manage other risks and challenges to implementing your processes.

    Dimension Decision Potential Impact, Implications, and Objections Possible Responses and Actions
    i.e. Default Project Ratio 50% “We have approved too many projects to allocate so little time to project work.” Nothing has changed – this was always the amount of time that would actually go toward projects. If you are worried about a backlog, stop approving projects until you have completed the current workload.
    i.e. Frequency Monthly “Status reports aren’t reliably accurate and up to date more than quarterly.” Enforce strict requirements to provide monthly status updates for 1-3 key KPIs.
    i.e. Scope Person “How can we keep track of what each individual is working on?” Establish a simple, easy reporting mechanism so that resources are reporting their own progress.
    i.e. Granularity Project “How will we know the status of a project without knowing what tasks are completed?” It is in the domain of the project manager to know what tasks have been completed and to report overall project progress.
    i.e. Forecast Horizon One Month “It will be difficult to plan for resource needs in advance.” Planning a month in advance allows you to address conflicts or issues before they are urgent.

    Document the outcomes of this activity on slide 28 of Info-Tech’s Resource Management Communications Template.

    Finalize your communications plan and prepare to present the new processes to the organization

    Use Info-Tech’s Resource Management Communications Template to record the challenges your resource management strategy is addressing and how it is addressing them.

    Highlight organizational factors that necessitated the change.

    • Stakeholders and staff understandably tend to dislike change for the sake of change. Use Info-Tech’s Resource Management Communications Template to document the pain points that your process change is addressing and explain the intended benefits for all who will be subject to the new procedures.

    Determine goals and benefits for implementation success.

    • Provide metrics by which the implementation will be deemed a success. Providing this horizon will provide some structure for stakeholders and hopefully help to encourage process discipline.

    Clearly indicate what is required of people to adopt new processes.

    • Document your Resource Management Playbook. Be sure to include specific roles and responsibilities so there is no doubt regarding who is accountable for what.

    Download Info-Tech’s Resource Management Communications Template

    "You need to be able to communicate effectively with major stakeholders – you really need their buy-in. You need to demonstrate credibility with your audience in the way you communicate and show how portfolio [management] is a structured decision-making process." – Dr. Shan Rajegopal (quoted in Akass, “What Makes a Successful Portfolio Manager”)

    Review tactics for keeping your processes on track

    Once the strategy is adopted, the next step is to be prepared to address challenges as they come up. Review the tactics in the table below for assistance.

    Challenge Resolution Next Step
    Workers are distracted because they are working on too many projects at once; their attention is split and they are unproductive. Workers are distracted because they are working on too many projects at once; their attention is split and they are unproductive. Review portfolio practices for ways to limit work in progress (WIP).
    Employees are telling project managers what they want to hear and not giving honest estimates about the way their time is spent. Ensure that employees understand the value of honest time tracking. If you’re allocating your hours to the wrong projects, it is your projects that suffer. If you are overallocated, be honest and share this with management. Display employee time-tracking reports on a public board so that everyone will see where their time is spent. If they are struggling to complete projects by their deadlines they must be able to demonstrate the other work that is taking up their time.
    Resources are struggling with projects because they do not have the necessary expertise. Perform a skills audit to determine what skills employees have and assign them to projects accordingly. If an employee with a certain skill is in high demand, consider hiring more resources who are able to complete this work.

    See below for additional challenges and tactics

    Review tactics for keeping supply and demand aligned

    Once the strategy is adopted, the next step is to use the outputs of the strategy to reclaim capacity and ensure supply and demand remain aligned. Review the tactics in the table below for assistance.

    Challenge Resolution Next Step
    There is insufficient project capacity to take on new work, but demand continues to grow. Extend project due date and manage the expectations of project sponsors with data. If possible, reclaim capacity from non-project work. Customize the playbook to address insufficient project capacity.
    There is significant fluctuation in demand, making it extremely challenging to stick to allocations. Project managers can build in additional contingencies to project plans based on resourcing data, with plans for over-delivering with surplus capacity. In addition, the CIO can leverage business relationships to curb chaotic demand. The portfolio manager should analyze the project portfolio for clues on expanding demand. Customize the playbook to address large fluctuations in demand.
    On a constant basis, there are conflicting project demands over specific skills. Re-evaluate the definition of a project to guard the value of the portfolio. Continually prioritize projects based on their business values as of today. Customize the playbook to address conflicting project demands. Feed into any near- and long-term staffing plans.

    Prepare to communicate your new resource management practices and reap their benefits

    As you roll out your resource management strategy, familiarize yourself with the capability improvements that will drive your resource management success metrics.

    1. Increased capacity awareness through the ability to more efficiently and more effectively collect and track complex, diverse, and dynamic project data across the project portfolio.
    2. Improved supply management. Increased awareness of resource capacity (current and forecasted) combined with the ability to see the results of resource allocations across the portfolio will help ensure that project resources are used as effectively as possible.
    3. Improved demand management. Increased capacity awareness, combined with reliable supply management, will help PMOs set realistic limits on the amount and kind of IT projects the organization can take on at any given time. The ability to present user-friendly reports to key decision makers will help the PMO to ensure that the projects that are approved are realistically attainable and strategically aligned.
    4. Increased portfolio success. Improvements in the three areas indicated above should result in more realistic demands on project workers/managers, better products, and better service to all stakeholders. While successfully implemented PPM solutions should produce more efficient PPM processes, ideally they should also drive improved project stakeholder satisfaction across the organization.

    The image shows a series on concentric circles, labelled (from the inside out): Capacity Awareness; Supply Management; Demand Management; Project Success.

    Info-Tech client achieves resource management success by right-sizing its data requirements and focusing on reporting

    CASE STUDY

    Industry Manufacturing

    Source Info-Tech Client

    We were concerned that the staff would not want to do timesheets. With one level of task definition, it’s not really timesheets. It’s more about reconciling our allocations.” – PMO Director, Manufacturing

    Challenge

    • In a very fast-paced environment, the PMO had developed a meaningful level of process maturity.
    • There had never been time to slow down enough to introduce a mature PPM tool set.
    • The executive leadership had started to ask for more throughput of highly visible IT projects.

    Solution

    • There had never been oversight on how much IT time went toward escalated support issues and smaller enhancement requests.
    • Staff had grown accustomed to a lack of documentation rigor surrounding the portfolio.
    • Despite a historic baseline of the ratio between strategic projects, small projects, and support, the lack of recordkeeping made it hard to validate or reconcile these ratios.

    Results

    • The organization introduced a robust commercial PPM tool.
    • They were able to restrict the granularity of data to a high level in order to limit the time required to enter and manage, and track the actuals.
    • They prepared executive leadership for their renewed focus on the allocation of resources to strategically important projects.
    • Approval of projects was right-sized based on the actual capacity and realized through improved timesheet recordkeeping.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
    • Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

    3.1 Define the scope of your pilot and set appropriate goals for the test-run of your new processes

    An effective pilot lowers implementation risk, enhances the details and steps within a process, and improves stakeholder relations prior to a full scale rollout.

    3.2 Develop a plan to manage stakeholder and staff resistance to the new resource management practice

    Proactively plan for communicating responses and objections to show people that you understand their point of view and win their buy-in.

    Insight breakdown

    Insight 1

    A matrix organization creates many small, untraceable demands that are often overlooked in resource management efforts, which lead to underestimating total demand and overcommitting resources. To capture them and enhance the success of your resource management effort, focus on completeness rather than precision. Precision of data will improve over time as your process maturity grows.

    Insight 2

    Draft the resource management practice with sustainability in mind. It is about what you can and will maintain every week, even during a crisis: it is not about what you put together as a one-time snapshot. Once you stop maintaining resource data, it’s nearly impossible to catch up.

    Insight 3

    Engagement paves the way for smoother adoption. An engagement approach (rather than simply communication) turns stakeholders into advocates who can help boost your message, sustain the change, and realize benefits without constant intervention or process command-and-control.

    Summary of accomplishment

    Knowledge Gained

    • Disconnect between traditional resource management paradigms and today’s reality of work environment
    • Differentiation of accuracy and precision in capacity data
    • Snapshot of resource capacity supply and demand
    • Seven dimensions of resource management strategy
    • How to create sustainability of a resource management practice

    Processes Optimized

    • Collecting resource supply data
    • Capturing the project demand
    • Identifying and documenting resource constraints and issues
    • Resolving resource issues
    • Finalizing and communicating resource allocations for the forecast window

    Deliverable Completed

    • Resource Management Supply-Demand Calculator, to create an initial estimate of resource capacity supply and demand
    • Time-tracking survey emails, to validate assumptions made for creating the initial snapshot of resource capacity supply and demand
    • Resource Management Playbook, which documents your resource management strategy dimensions, process steps, and responses to challenges
    • PPM Solution Vendor Demo Script, to structure your resource management tool demos and interactions with vendors to ensure that their solutions can fully support your resource management practices
    • Portfolio Manager Lite, a spreadsheet-based resource management solution to facilitate the flow of data
    • Process Pilot Plan, to ensure that the pilot delivers value and insight necessary for a wider rollout
    • Project Portfolio Analyst job description, to help your efforts in bringing in additional staff to provide support for the new resource management practice
    • Resource Management Communications presentation, with which to engage your stakeholders during the new process rollout

    Research contributors and experts

    Trevor Bramwell, ICT Project Manager Viridor Waste Management

    John Hansknecht, Director of Technology University of Detroit Jesuit High School & Academy

    Brian Lasby, Project Manager Toronto Catholic District School Board

    Jean Charles Parise, CIO & DSO Office of the Auditor General of Canada

    Darren Schell, Associate Executive Director of IT Services University of Lethbridge

    Related Info-Tech research

    Develop a Project Portfolio Management Strategy

    Grow Your Own PPM Solution

    Optimize Project Intake, Approval, and Prioritization

    Maintain and Organized Portfolio

    Manage a Minimum-Viable PMO

    Establish the Benefits Realization Process

    Manage an Agile Portfolio

    Tailor Project Management Processes to Fit Your Projects

    Project Portfolio Management Diagnostic Program

    The Project Portfolio Management Diagnostic Program is a low-effort, high-impact program designed to help project owners assess and improve their PPM practices. Gather and report on all aspects of your PPM environment to understand where you stand and how you can improve.

    Bibliography

    actiTIME. “How Poor Tracking of Work Time Affects Your Business.” N.p., Oct. 2016. Web.

    Akass, Amanda. “What Makes a Successful Portfolio Manager.” Pcubed, n.d. Web.

    Alexander, Moira. “5 Steps to avoid overcommitting resources on your IT projects.” TechRepublic. 18 July 2016. Web.

    Anderson, Ryan. “Some Shocking Statistics About Interruptions in Your Work Environment.” Filevine, 9 July 2015. Web.

    Bondale, Kiron. “Focus less on management and more on the resources with resource management.” Easy in Theory, Difficult in Practice. 16 July 2014. Web.

    Burger, Rachel. “10 Software Options that Will Make Your Project Resource Allocation Troubles Disappear.” Capterra Project Management Blog, 6 January 2016. Web.

    Cooper, Robert, G. “Effective Gating: Make product innovation more productive by using gates with teeth.” Stage-Gate International and Product Development Institute. March/April 2009. Web.

    Dimensional Research. “Lies, Damned Lies and Timesheet Data.” Replicon, July 2013. Web.

    Edelman Trust Barometer. “Leadership in a Divided World.” 2016. Web.

    Frank, T.A. “10 Execs with Time-Management Secrets You Should Steal.” Monday*. Issue 2: Nov-Dec 2014. Drucker Institute. Web.

    Huth, Susanna. “Employees waste 759 hours each year due to workplace distractions.” The Telegraph, 22 Jun 2015. Web.

    Jacobeus, Nicolas. “How Detailed Does Your Agency Time Tracking Need to Be?” Scale Blog, 18 Jul 2016. Web.

    Lessing, Lawrence. Free Culture. Lulu Press Inc.: 30 July 2016.

    Kwak, James. “The Importance of Excel. The Baseline Scenario, 9 Feb 2013. Web.

    Madison, Daniel. “The Five Implementation Options to Manage the Risk in a New Process.” BPMInstitute.org. n.d. Web.

    Mark, Gloria. Multitasking in the Digital Age. Morgan & Claypool Publishers. 1 April 2015

    Maron, Shim. “Accountability Vs. Responsibility In Project Management.” Workfront, 10 June 2016. Web.

    PM Solutions. “Resource Management and the PMO: Three Strategies for Addressing Your Biggest Challenge.” N.p., 2009. Web.

    Project Management Institute. “Pulse of the Profession 2014.” PMI, 2014. Web.

    Planview. “Capacity Planning Fuels Innovation Speed.” 2016. Web.

    Rajda, Vilmos. “The Case Against Project Portfolio Management.” PMtimes, 1 Dec 2010. Web.

    Reynolds, Justin. “The Sad Truth about Nap Pods at Work.” TINYpulse, 22 Aug 2016. Web.

    Schulte, Brigid. “Work interrupts can cost you 6 hours a day. An efficiency expert explains how to avoid them.” Washington Post, 1 June 2015. Web.

    Stone, Linda. "Continuous Partial Attention." Lindastone.net. N.p., n.d. Web.

    Zawacki, Kevin. “The Perils of Time Tracking.” Fast Company, 26 Jan 2015. Web.

    Vendor Management

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    • Parent Category Name: Financial Management
    • Parent Category Link: /financial-management
    That does not mean strong-arming. It means maximizing the vendor relationship value.

    Manage End-User Devices

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    • Parent Category Name: End-User Computing Devices
    • Parent Category Link: /end-user-computing-devices
    • Desktop and mobile device management teams use separate tools and different processes.
    • People at all levels of IT are involved in device management.
    • Vendors are pushing unified endpoint management (UEM) products, and teams struggling with device management are hoping that UEM is their savior.
    • The number and variety of devices will only increase with the continued advance of mobility and emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT).

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Many problems can be solved by fixing roles, responsibilities, and process. Standardize so you can optimize.
    • UEM is not a silver bullet. Your current solution can image computers in less than 4 hours if you use lean images.
    • Done with, not done to. Getting input from the business will improve adoption, avoid frustration, and save everyone time.

    Impact and Result

    • Define the benefits that you want to achieve and optimize based on those benefits.
    • Take an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, approach to merging end-user support teams. Process and tool unity comes first.
    • Define the roles and responsibilities involved in end-user device management, and create a training plan to ensure everyone can execute their responsibilities.
    • Stop using device management practices from the era of Windows XP. Create a plan for lean images and app packages.

    Manage End-User Devices Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should optimize end-user device management, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Identify the business and IT benefits of optimizing endpoint management

    Get your desktop and mobile device support teams out of firefighting mode by identifying the real problem.

    • Manage End-User Devices – Phase 1: Identify the Business and IT Benefits
    • End-User Device Management Standard Operating Procedure
    • End-User Device Management Executive Presentation

    2. Improve supporting teams and processes

    Improve the day-to-day operations of your desktop and mobile device support teams through role definition, training, and process standardization.

    • Manage End-User Devices – Phase 2: Improve Supporting Teams and Processes
    • End-User Device Management Workflow Library (Visio)
    • End-User Device Management Workflow Library (PDF)

    3. Improve supporting technologies

    Stop using management tools and techniques from the Windows XP era. Save yourself, and your technicians, from needless pain.

    • Manage End-User Devices – Phase 3: Improve Supporting Technologies
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Manage End-User Devices

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Identify the Business and IT Benefits of Optimizing End-User Device Management

    The Purpose

    Identify how unified endpoint management (UEM) can improve the lives of the end user and of IT.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Cutting through the vendor hype and aligning with business needs.

    Activities

    1.1 Identify benefits you can provide to stakeholders.

    1.2 Identify business and IT goals in order to prioritize benefits.

    1.3 Identify how to achieve benefits.

    1.4 Define goals based on desired benefits.

    Outputs

    Executive presentation

    2 Improve the Teams and Processes That Support End-User Device Management

    The Purpose

    Ensure that your teams have a consistent approach to end-user device management.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Developed a standard approach to roles and responsibilities, to training, and to device management processes.

    Activities

    2.1 Align roles to your environment.

    2.2 Assign architect-, engineer-, and administrator-level responsibilities.

    2.3 Rationalize your responsibility matrix.

    2.4 Ensure you have the necessary skills.

    2.5 Define Tier 2 processes, including patch deployment, emergency patch deployment, device deployment, app deployment, and app packaging.

    Outputs

    List of roles involved in end-user device management

    Responsibility matrix for end-user device management

    End-user device management training plan

    End-user device management standard operating procedure

    Workflows and checklists of end-user device management processes

    3 Improve the Technologies That Support End-User Device Management

    The Purpose

    Modernize the toolset used by IT to manage end-user devices.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Saving time and resources for many standard device management processes.

    Activities

    3.1 Define the core image for each device/OS.

    3.2 Define app packages.

    3.3 Gather action items for improving the support technologies.

    3.4 Create a roadmap for improving end-user device management.

    3.5 Create a communication plan for improving end-user device management.

    Outputs

    Core image outline

    Application package outline

    End-user device management roadmap

    End-user device management communication plan

    Effectively Acquire Infrastructure Services

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    • Parent Category Name: Data Center & Facilities Optimization
    • Parent Category Link: /data-center-and-facilities-optimization
    • Most organizations are good at procuring IT products, but few are truly good at acquiring infrastructure services.
    • The lack of expertise in acquiring services is problematic – not only is the acquisition process for services more complex, but it also often has high stakes with large deal sizes, long-term contracts, and high switching costs.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Don’t treat infrastructure service acquisitions lightly. Not only are failure rates high, but the stakes are high as well.
    • Make sure your RFP strategy aligns with your deal value. Large deals, characterized by high monthly spend, high criticality to the organization, and high switching costs, warrant a more thorough and lengthy planning period and RFP process.
    • Word your RFP carefully and do your due diligence when reviewing SLAs. Make sure your RFP will help you understand what the vendor’s standard offerings are and don’t treat your service level agreements like an open negotiation. The vendor’s standard offerings will be your most reliable options.

    Impact and Result

    • Follow this blueprint to avoid common pitfalls and navigate the tricky business of acquiring infrastructure services.
    • This blueprint will provide step-by-step guidance from assessing your acquisition goals to transitioning your service. Make sure you do the due diligence required to acquire the best service for your needs.

    Effectively Acquire Infrastructure Services Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should follow the blueprint to effectively acquire infrastructure services, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Develop the procurement strategy and process

    Kick off an acquisition by establishing acquisition goals, validating the decision to acquire a service, and structuring an acquisition approach. There are several RFP approaches and strategies – evaluate the options and develop one that aligns with the nature of the acquisition.

    • Effectively Acquire Infrastructure Services – Phase 1: Develop the Procurement Strategy and Process

    2. Assess requirements and build the RFP

    A solid RFP is critical to the success of this project. Assess the current and future requirements, examine the characteristics of an effective RFP, and develop an RFP.

    • Effectively Acquire Infrastructure Services – Phase 2: Assess Requirements and Build the RFP
    • Infrastructure Service RFP Template

    3. Manage vendor questions and select the vendor

    Manage the activities surrounding vendor questions and score the RFP responses to select the best-fit solution.

    • Effectively Acquire Infrastructure Services – Phase 3: Manage Vendor Questions and Select the Vendor
    • Vendor Question Organizer Template
    • Infrastructure Outsourcing RFP Scoring Tool

    4. Manage the contract, transition, and vendor

    Perform due diligence in reviewing the SLAs and contract before signing. Plan to transition the service into the environment and manage the vendor on an ongoing basis for a successful partnership.

    • Effectively Acquire Infrastructure Services – Phase 4: Manage the Contract, Transition, and Vendor
    • Service Acquisition Planning and Tracking Tool
    • Vendor Management Template
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Effectively Acquire Infrastructure Services

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Develop the Procurement Strategy and Process

    The Purpose

    Establish procurement goals and success metrics.

    Develop a projected acquisition timeline.

    Establish the RFP approach and strategy.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Defined acquisition approach and timeline.

    Activities

    1.1 Establish your acquisition goals.

    1.2 Establish your success metrics.

    1.3 Develop a projected acquisition timeline.

    1.4 Establish your RFP process and refine your RFP timeline.

    Outputs

    Acquisition goals

    Success metrics

    Acquisition timeline

    RFP strategy and approach

    2 Gather Service Requirements

    The Purpose

    Gather requirements for services to build into the RFP.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Gathered requirements.

    Activities

    2.1 Assess the current state.

    2.2 Evaluate service requirements and targets.

    2.3 Assess the gap and validate the service acquisition.

    2.4 Define requirements to input into the RFP.

    Outputs

    Current State Assessment

    Service requirements

    Validation of services being acquired and key processes that may need to change

    Requirements to input into the RFP

    3 Develop the RFP

    The Purpose

    Build the RFP.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    RFP development.

    Activities

    3.1 Build the RFP requirement section.

    3.2 Develop the rest of the RFP.

    Outputs

    Service requirements input into the RFP

    Completed RFP

    4 Review RFP Responses and Select a Vendor (Off-Site)

    The Purpose

    Review RFP responses to select the best solution for the acquisition.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Vendor selected.

    Activities

    4.1 Manage vendor questions regarding the RFP.

    4.2 Review RFP responses and shortlist the vendors.

    4.3 Conduct additional due diligence on the vendors.

    4.4 Select a vendor.

    Outputs

    Managed RFP activities

    Imperceptive scoring of RFP responses and ranking of vendors

    Additional due diligence and further questions for the vendor

    Selected vendor

    Essentials of Vendor Management for Small Business

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    • Parent Category Name: Vendor Management
    • Parent Category Link: /vendor-management
    • Each year, SMB IT organizations spend more money “outsourcing” tasks, activities, applications, functions, and other items.
    • Many SMBs lack the affordability of implementing a sophisticated vendor management initiative or office.
    • The increased spend and associated outsourcing leads to less control, and more risk for IT organizations. Managing this becomes a higher priority for IT, but many IT organizations are ill-equipped to do this proactively.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Vendor management is not “plug and play” – each organization’s vendor management initiative (VMI) needs to fit its culture, environment, and goals. There are commonalities among vendor management initiatives, but the key is to adapt vendor management principles to fit your needs, not the other way around.
    • All vendors are not of equal importance to an organization. Internal resources are a scarce commodity and should be deployed so that they provide the best return on the organization’s investment. Classifying or segmenting your vendors allows you to focus your efforts on the most important vendors first, allowing your VMI to have the greatest impact possible.
    • Having a solid foundation is critical to the VMI’s ongoing success. Whether you will be creating a formal vendor management office or using vendor management techniques, tools, and templates “informally”, starting with the basics is essential. Make sure you understand why the VMI exists and what it hopes to achieve, what is in and out of scope for the VMI, what strengths the VMI can leverage and the obstacles it will have to address, and how it will work with other areas within your organization.

    Impact and Result

    • Build and implement a vendor management initiative tailored to your environment.
    • Create a solid foundation to sustain your vendor management initiative as it evolves and matures.
    • Leverage vendor management-specific tools and templates to manage vendors more proactively and improve communication.
    • Concentrate your vendor management resources on the right vendors.
    • Build a roadmap and project plan for your vendor management journey to ensure you reach your destination.
    • Build collaborative relationships with critical vendors.

    Essentials of Vendor Management for Small Business Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read this Executive Brief to understand how changes in the vendor landscape and customer reliance on vendors have made a vendor management initiative indispensible.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Plan

    This phase helps you organize your VMI and document internal processes, relationships, roles, and responsibilities. The main outcomes from this phase are organizational documents, a baseline VMI maturity level, and a desired future state for the VMI.

    • Essentials of Vendor Management for Small Business – Phase 1: Plan
    • Phase 1 Small Business Tools and Templates Compendium

    2. Build

    This phase helps you configure and create the tools and templates that will help you run the VMI. The main outcomes from this phase are a clear understanding of which vendors are important to you, the tools to manage the vendor relationships, and an implementation plan.

    • Essentials of Vendor Management for Small Business – Phase 2: Build
    • Phase 2 Small Business Vendor Classification Tool
    • Phase 2 Small Business Risk Assessment Tool
    • Phase 2 Small Business Tools and Templates Compendium

    3. Run

    This phase helps you begin operating the VMI. The main outcomes from this phase are guidance and the steps required to implement your VMI.

    • Essentials of Vendor Management for Small Business – Phase 3: Run

    4. Review

    This phase helps the VMI identify what it should stop doing, start doing, and continue doing as it improves and matures. The main outcomes from this phase are ways to advance the VMI and maintain internal alignment.

    • Essentials of Vendor Management for Small Business – Phase 4: Review
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Essentials of Vendor Management for Small Business

    Create and implement a vendor management framework to begin obtaining measurable results in 90 days.


    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    Vendor Management Challenge

    Small businesses are often challenged by the growth and complexity of their vendor ecosystem, including the degree to which the vendors control them. Vendors are increasing, obtaining more and more budget dollars, while funding for staff or headcount is decreasing as a result of cloud-based applications and an increase in our reliance on Managed Service Providers. Initiating a vendor management initiative (VMI) vs. creating a fully staffed vendor management office will get you started on the path of proactively controlling your vendors instead of consistently operating in a reactionary mode. This blueprint is designed with that very thought: to assist small businesses in creating the essentials of a vendor management initiative.

    This is a picture of Steve Jeffery

    Steve Jeffery
    Principal Research Director, Vendor Management
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Each year, IT organizations "outsource" tasks, activities, functions, and other items. During 2021:

    • Spend on as-a-service providers increased 38% over 2020.*
    • Spend on managed service providers increased 16% over 2020.*
    • IT service providers increased their merger and acquisition numbers by 47% over 2020.*

    This leads to more spend, less control, and more risk for IT organizations. Managing this becomes a higher priority for IT, but many IT organizations are ill-equipped to do this proactively.

    Common Obstacles

    As new contracts are negotiated and existing contracts are renegotiated or renewed, there is a perception that the contracts will yield certain results, output, performance, solutions, or outcomes. The hope is that these will provide a measurable expected value to IT and the organization. Oftentimes, much of the expected value is never realized. Many organizations don't have a VMI to help:

    • Ensure at least the expected value is achieved.
    • Improve on the expected value through performance management.
    • Significantly increase the expected value through a proactive VMI.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    Vendor Management is a proactive, cross-functional lifecycle. It can be broken down into four phases:

    • Plan
    • Build
    • Run
    • Review

    The Info-Tech process addresses all four phases and provides a step-by-step approach to configure and operate your VMI. The content in this blueprint helps you quickly establish your VMI and sets a solid foundation for its growth and maturity.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Vendor management is not a one-size-fits-all initiative. It must be configured:

    • For your environment, culture, and goals.
    • To leverage the strengths of your organization and personnel.
    • To focus your energy and resources on your critical vendors.

    Executive Summary

    Your challenge

    Spend on managed service providers and as-a-service providers continues to increase. In addition, IT services vendors continue to be active in the mergers and acquisitions arena. This increases the need for a VMI to help with the changing IT vendor landscape.

    38%

    2021

    16%

    2021

    47%

    2021

    Spend on as-a-service providers

    Spend on managed services providers

    IT services merger & acquisition growth (transactions)

    Source: Information Services Group, Inc., 2022.

    Executive Summary

    Common obstacles

    When organizations execute, renew, or renegotiate a contract, there is an "expected value" associated with that contract. Without a robust VMI, most of the expected value will never be realized. With a robust VMI, the realized value significantly exceeds the expected value during the contract term.

    A contract's realized value with and without a vendor management initiative

    This is an image of a bar graph showing the difference in value between those with and without a VMI, with and for those with a VMI, with Vendor Collaboration and with Vendor Performance Management. The data for those with a VMI have substantially more value.

    Source: Based on findings from Geller & Company, 2003.

    Executive Summary

    Info-Tech's approach

    A sound, cyclical approach to vendor management will help you create a VMI that meets your needs and stays in alignment with your organization as they both change (i.e. mature and grow).

    This is an image of the 4 Step Vendor Management Process. The four steps are: 1. Plan; 2. Build; 3. Run; 4. Review.

    Info-Tech's methodology for creating and operating your vmi

    Phase 1 - Plan Phase 2 - Build Phase 3 - Run Phase 4 - Review
    Phase Steps

    1.1 Mission Statement and Goals

    1.2 Scope

    1.3 Strengths and Obstacles

    1.4 Roles and Responsibilities

    2.1 Classification Model

    2.2 Risk Assessment Tool

    2.3 Scorecards and Feedback

    2.4 Business Alignment Meeting Agenda

    2.5 Relationship Alignment Document

    2.6 Vendor Orientation

    2.7 3-Year Roadmap

    2.8 90-Day Plan

    2.9 Quick Wins2.10 Reports

    3.1 Classify Vendors

    3.2 Compile Scorecards

    3.3 Conduct Business Alignment Meetings

    3.4 Work the 90-Day Plan

    3.5 Manage the 3-Year Roadmap

    3.6 Develop/Improve Vendor Relationships

    4.1 Incorporate Leading Practices

    4.2 Leverage Lessons Learned

    4.3 Maintain Internal Alignment

    Phase Outcomes This phase helps you organize your VMI and document internal processes, relationships, roles, and responsibilities. The main outcomes from this phase are organizational documents, a baseline VMI maturity level, and a desired future state for the VMI. This phase helps you configure and create the tools and templates that will help you run the VMI. The main outcomes from this phase are a clear understanding of which vendors are important to you, the tools to manage the vendor relationships, and an implementation plan. This phase helps you begin operating the VMI. The main outcomes from this phase are guidance and the steps required to implement your VMI. This phase helps the VMI identify what it should stop doing, start doing, and continue doing as it improves and matures. The main outcomes from this phase are ways to advance the VMI and maintain internal alignment.

    Insight Summary

    Insight 1

    Vendor management is not "plug and play" – each organization's vendor management initiative (VMI) needs to fit its culture, environment, and goals. While there are commonalities and leading practices associated with vendor management, your initiative won't look exactly like another organization's. The key is to adapt vendor management principles to fit your needs.

    Insight 2

    All vendors are not of equal importance to your organization. Internal resources are a scarce commodity and should be deployed so that they provide the best return on the organization's investment. Classifying or segmenting your vendors allows you to focus your efforts on the most important vendors first, allowing your VMI to have the greatest impact possible.

    Insight 3

    Having a solid foundation is critical to the VMI's ongoing success. Whether you will be creating a formal vendor management office or using vendor management techniques, tools, and templates "informally", starting with the basics is essential. Make sure you understand why the VMI exists and what it hopes to achieve, what is in and out of scope for the VMI, what strengths the VMI can leverage and the obstacles it will have to address, and how it will work with other areas within your organization.

    Blueprint benefits

    IT benefits

    • Identify and manage risk proactively.
    • Reduce costs and maximize value.
    • Increase visibility with your critical vendors.
    • Improve vendor performance.
    • Create a collaborative environment with key vendors.
    • Segment vendors to allocate resources more effectively and more efficiently.

    Business benefits

    • Improve vendor accountability.
    • Increase collaboration between departments.
    • Improve working relationships with your vendors.
    • Create a feedback loop to address vendor/customer issues before they get out of hand or are more costly to resolve.
    • Increase access to meaningful data and information regarding important vendors.

    Phase 1 - Plan

    Phase 1

    Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4

    1.1 Mission Statement and Goals

    1.2 Scope

    1.3 Strengths and Obstacles

    1.4 Roles and Responsibilities

    2.1 Classification Model

    2.2 Risk Assessment Tool

    2.3 Scorecards and Feedback

    2.4 Business Alignment Meeting Agenda

    2.5 Relationship Alignment Document

    2.6 Vendor Orientation

    2.7 3-Year Roadmap

    2.8 90-Day Plan

    2.9 Quick Wins

    2.10 Reports

    3.1 Classify Vendors

    3.2 Compile Scorecards

    3.3 Conduct Business Alignment Meetings

    3.4 Work the 90-Day Plan

    3.5 Manage the 3-Year Roadmap

    3.6 Develop/Improve Vendor Relationships

    4.1 Incorporate Leading Practices

    4.2 Leverage Lessons Learned

    4.3 Maintain Internal Alignment

    This phase will walk you through the following activity:

    • Organizing your VMI and document internal processes, relationships, roles, and responsibilities. The main outcomes from this phase are organizational documents, and a desired future state for the VMI.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • VMI team
    • Applicable stakeholders and executives
    • Procurement/Sourcing
    • IT
    • Others as needed

    Vendor Management Initiative Basics for the Small/Medium Businesses

    Phase 1 – Plan

    Get Organized

    Phase 1 – Plan focuses on getting organized. Foundational elements (Mission Statement, Goals, Scope, Strengths and Obstacles, Roles and Responsibilities, and Process Mapping) will help you define your VMI. These and the other elements of this Phase will follow you throughout the process of starting up your VMI and running it.

    Spending time up front to ensure that everyone is on the same page will help avoid headaches down the road. The tendency is to skimp (or even skip) on these steps to get to "the good stuff." To a certain extent, the process provided here is like building a house. You wouldn't start building your dream home without having a solid blueprint. The same is true with vendor management. Leveraging vendor management tools and techniques without the proper foundation may provide some benefit in the short term, but in the long term it will ultimately be a house of cards waiting to collapse.

    Step 1.1 – Mission statement and goals

    Identify why the VMI exists and what it will achieve

    Whether you are starting your vendor management journey or are already down the path, it is important to know why the vendor management initiative exists and what it hopes to achieve. The easiest way to document this is with a written declaration in the form of a Mission Statement and Goals. Although this is the easiest way to proceed, it is far from easy.

    The Mission Statement should identify at a high level the nature of the services provided by the VMI, who it will serve, and some of the expected outcomes or achievements. The Mission Statement should be no longer than one or two sentences.

    The complement to the Mission Statement is the list of goals for the VMI. Your goals should not be a reassertion of your Mission Statement in bullet format. At this stage it may not be possible to make them SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable/Attainable, Relevant, Time-Bound/Time-Based), but consider making them as SMART as possible. Without some of the SMART parameters attached, your goals are more like dreams and wishes. At a minimum, you should be able to determine the level of success achieved for each of the VMI goals.

    Although the VMI's Mission Statement will stay static over time (other than for significant changes to the VMI or organization as a whole), the goals should be reevaluated periodically using a SMART filter, and adjusted as needed.

    1.1.1 – Mission statement and goals

    20 – 40 Minutes

    1. Meet with the participants and use a brainstorming activity to list, on a whiteboard or flip chart, the reasons why the VMI will exist.
    2. Review external mission statements for inspiration.
    3. Review internal mission statements from other areas to ensure consistency.
    4. Draft and document your Mission Statement in the Phase 1 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 1.1 Mission Statement and Goals.
    5. Continue brainstorming and identify the high-level goals for the VMI.
    6. Review the list of goals and make them as SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable/Attainable, Relevant, Time-Bound/Time-Based) as possible.
    7. Document your goals in the Phase 1 Tools and Templates Compendium– Tab 1.1 Mission Statement and Goals.
    8. Obtain signoff on the Mission Statement and goals from stakeholders and executives as required.

    Input

    • Brainstorming results
    • Mission statements from other internal and external sources

    Output

    • Completed Mission Statement and Goals

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts
    • Phase 1 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 1.1 Mission Statement and Goals

    Participants

    • VMI team
    • Applicable stakeholders and executives (as needed)

    Download the Info-Tech Phase 1 Tools and Templates Compendium

    Step 1.2 – Scope

    Determine what is in scope and out of scope for the VMI

    Regardless of where your VMI resides or how it operates, it will be working with other areas within your organization. Some of the activities performed by the VMI will be new and not currently handled by other groups or individuals internally; at the same time, some of the activities performed by the VMI may be currently handled by other groups or individuals internally. In addition, executives, stakeholders, and other internal personnel may have expectations or make assumptions about the VMI. As a result, there can be a lot of confusion about what the VMI does and doesn't do, and the answers cannot always be found in the VMI's Mission Statement and Goals.

    One component of helping others understand the VMI landscape is formalizing the VMI Scope. The Scope will define boundaries for the VMI. The intent is not to fence itself off and keep others out but provide guidance on where the VMI's territory begins and ends. Ultimately, this will help clarify the VMI's roles and responsibilities, improve workflow, and reduce errant assumptions.

    When drafting your VMI scoping document, make sure you look at both sides of the equation (similar to what you would do when following best practices for a statement of work). Identify what is in scope and what is out of scope. Be specific when describing the individual components of the VMI Scope, and make sure executives and stakeholders are onboard with the final version.

    1.2.1 – Scope

    20 - 40 Minutes

    1. Meet with the participants and use a brainstorming activity to list, on a whiteboard or flip chart, the activities and functions in scope and out of scope for the VMI.
      1. Be specific to avoid ambiguity and improve clarity.
      2. Go back and forth between in scope and out of scope as needed; it is not necessary to list all the in-scope items and then turn your attention to the out-of-scope items.
    2. Review the lists to make sure there is enough specificity. An item may be in scope or out of scope, but not both.
    3. Use the Phase 1 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 1.2 Scope to document the results.
    4. Obtain signoff on the Scope from stakeholders and executives as required.

    Input

    • Brainstorming results
    • Mission Statement and Goals

    Output

    • Completed list of items in and out of scope for the VMI

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts
    • Phase 1 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 1.2 Scope

    Participants

    • VMI team
    • Applicable stakeholders and executives (as needed)

    Download the Info-Tech Phase 1 Tools and Templates Compendium

    Step 1.3 – Strengths and obstacles

    Pinpoint the VMI's strengths and obstacles

    A SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) is a valuable tool, but it is overkill for your VMI at this point. However, using a modified and simplified form of this tool (strengths and obstacles) will yield significant results and benefit the VMI as it grows and matures.

    Your output will be two lists: the strengths associated with the VMI and the obstacles the VMI is facing. For example, strengths could include items such as smart people working within the VMI and executive support. Obstacles could include items such as limited headcount and training required for VMI staff.

    The goals are 1) to harness the strengths to help the VMI be successful and 2) to understand the impact of the obstacles and plan accordingly. The output can also be used to enlighten executives and stakeholders about the challenges associated with their directives or requests (e.g. human bandwidth may not be sufficient to accomplish some of the vendor management activities and there is a moratorium on hiring until the next budget year).

    For each strength identified, determine how you will or can leverage it when things are going well or when the VMI is in a bind. For each obstacle, list the potential impact on the VMI (e.g. scope, growth rate, and number of vendors that can actively be part of the VMI).

    As you do your brainstorming, be as specific as possible and validate your lists with stakeholders and executives as needed.

    1.3.1 – Strengths and obstacles

    20 - 40 Minutes

    Meet with the participants and use a brainstorming activity to list, on a whiteboard or flip chart, the VMI's strengths and obstacles.

    Be specific to avoid ambiguity and improve clarity.

    Go back and forth between strengths and obstacles as needed; it is not necessary to list all the strengths first and then all the obstacles.

    It is possible for an item to be a strength and an obstacle; when this happens, add details to distinguish the situations.

    Review the lists to make sure there is enough specificity.

    Determine how you will leverage each strength and how you will manage each obstacle.

    Use the Phase 1 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 1.3 Strengths and Obstacles to document the results.

    Obtain signoff on the strengths and obstacles from stakeholders and executives as required.

    Input

    • Brainstorming
    • Mission Statement and Goals
    • Scope

    Output

    • Completed list of items impacting the VMI's ability to be successful: strengths the VMI can leverage and obstacles the VMI must manage

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts
    • Phase 1 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 1.3 Strengths and Obstacles

    Participants

    • VMI team
    • Applicable stakeholders and executives (as needed)

    Download the Info-Tech Phase 1 Tools and Templates Compendium

    Step 1.4 – Roles and responsibilities

    Obtain consensus on who is responsible for what

    One crucial success factor for VMIs is gaining and maintaining internal alignment. There are many moving parts to an organization, and a VMI must be clear on the various roles and responsibilities related to the relevant processes. Some of this information can be found in the VMI's Scope referenced in Step 1.2, but additional information is required to avoid stepping on each other's toes; many of the processes require internal departments to work together. (For example, obtaining requirements for a request for proposal takes more than one person or department). While it is not necessary to get too granular, it is imperative that you have a clear understanding of how the VMI activities will fit within the larger vendor management lifecycle (which is comprised of many sub processes) and who will be doing what.

    As we have learned through our workshops and guided implementations, a traditional RACI* or RASCI* Chart does not work well for this purpose. These charts are not intuitive, and they lack the specificity required to be effective. For vendor management purposes, a higher-level view and a slightly different approach provide much better results.

    This step will lead your through the creation of an OIC* Chart to determine vendor management lifecycle roles and responsibilities. Afterward, you'll be able to say, "Oh, I see clearly who is involved in each part of the process and what their role is."

    *RACI – Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed

    *RASCI – Responsible, Accountable, Support, Consulted, Informed

    *OIC – Owner, Informed, Contributor

    This is an image of a table, where the row headings are: Role 1-5, and the Column Headings are: Step 1-5.

    Step 1.4 – Roles and responsibilities (cont'd)

    Obtain consensus on who is responsible for what

    To start, define the vendor management lifecycle steps or process applicable to your VMI. Next, determine who participates in the vendor management lifecycle. There is no need to get too granular – think along the lines of departments, subdepartments, divisions, agencies, or however you categorize internal operational units. Avoid naming individuals other than by title; this typically happens when a person oversees a large group (e.g. the CIO [chief information officer] or the CPO [chief procurement officer]). Be thorough, but don't let the chart get out of hand. For each role and step of the lifecycle, ask whether the entry is necessary; does it add value to the clarity of understanding the responsibilities associated with the vendor management lifecycle? Consider two examples, one for roles and one for lifecycle steps. 1) Is IT sufficient or do you need IT Operations and IT Development? 2) Is "negotiate contract documents" sufficient or do you need negotiate the contract and negotiate the renewal? The answer will depend on your culture and environment but be wary of creating a spreadsheet that requires an 85-inch monitor to view it.

    After defining the roles (departments, divisions, agencies) and the vendor management lifecycle steps or process, assign one of three letters to each box in your chart:

    • O – Owner – who owns the process; they may also contribute to it.
    • I – Informed – who is informed about the progress or results of the process.
    • C – Contributor – who contributes or works on the process; it can be tangible or intangible contributions.

    This activity can be started by the VMI or done as a group with representatives from each of the named roles. If the VMI starts the activity, the resulting chart should be validated by the each of the named roles.

    1.4.1 – Roles and responsibilities

    1 – 6 hours

    1. Meet with the participants and configure the OIC Chart in the Phase 1 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 1.4 OIC Chart.
      1. Review the steps or activities across the top of the chart and modify as needed.
      2. Review the roles listed along the left side of the chart and modify as needed.
    2. For each activity or step across the top of the chart, assign each role a letter – O for owner of that activity or step, I for informed, or C for contributor. Use only one letter per cell.
    3. Work your way across the chart. Every cell should have an entry or be left blank if it is not applicable.
    4. Review the results and validate that every activity or step has an O assigned to it; there must be an owner for every activity or step.
    5. Obtain signoff on the OIC Chart from stakeholders and executives as required.

    Input

    • A list of activities or steps to complete a project starting with requirements gathering and ending with ongoing risk management.
    • A list of internal areas (departments, divisions, agencies, etc.) and stakeholders that contribute to completing a project.

    Output

    • Completed OCI chart indicating roles and responsibilities for the VMI and other internal areas.

    Materials

    • Phase 1 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 1.4 OIC Chart

    Participants

    • VMI team
    • Procurement/Sourcing
    • IT
    • Representatives from other areas as needed
    • Applicable stakeholders and executives (as needed)

    Download the Info-Tech Phase 1 Tools and Templates Compendium

    Phase 2 - Build

    Create and configure tools, templates, and processes

    Phase 1

    Phase 2Phase 3Phase 4

    1.1 Mission Statement and Goals

    1.2 Scope

    1.3 Strengths and Obstacles

    1.4 Roles and Responsibilities

    2.1 Classification Model

    2.2 Risk Assessment Tool

    2.3 Scorecards and Feedback

    2.4 Business Alignment Meeting Agenda

    2.5 Relationship Alignment Document

    2.6 Vendor Orientation

    2.7 3-Year Roadmap

    2.8 90-Day Plan

    2.9 Quick Wins

    2.10 Reports

    3.1 Classify Vendors

    3.2 Compile Scorecards

    3.3 Conduct Business Alignment Meetings

    3.4 Work the 90-Day Plan

    3.5 Manage the 3-Year Roadmap

    3.6 Develop/Improve Vendor Relationships

    4.1 Incorporate Leading Practices

    4.2 Leverage Lessons Learned

    4.3 Maintain Internal Alignment

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Configuring and creating the tools and templates that will help you run the VMI. The main outcomes from this phase are a clear understanding of which vendors are important to you, the tools to manage the vendor relationships, and an implementation plan.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • VMI team
    • Applicable stakeholders and executives
    • Human Resources
    • Legal
    • Others as needed

    Vendor Management Initiative Basics for the Small/Medium Businesses

    Phase 2 – Build

    Create and configure tools, templates, and processes

    Phase 2 – Build focuses on creating and configuring the tools and templates that will help you run your VMI. Vendor management is not a plug and play environment, and unless noted otherwise, the tools and templates included with this blueprint require your input and thought. The tools and templates must work in concert with your culture, values, and goals. That will require teamwork, insights, contemplation, and deliberation.

    During this Phase you'll leverage the various templates and tools included with this blueprint and adapt them for your specific needs and use. In some instances, you'll be starting with mostly a blank slate; while in others, only a small modification may be required to make it fit your circumstances. However, it is possible that a document or spreadsheet may need heavy customization to fit your situation. As you create your VMI, use the included materials for inspiration and guidance purposes rather than as absolute dictates.

    Step 2.1 – Classification model

    Configure the COST vendor classification tool

    One of the functions of a VMI is to allocate the appropriate level of vendor management resources to each vendor since not all vendors are of equal importance to your organization. While some people may be able intuitively to sort their vendors into vendor management categories, a more objective, consistent, and reliable model works best. Info-Tech's COST model helps you assign your vendors to the appropriate vendor management category so that you can focus your vendor management resources where they will do the most good.

    COST is an acronym for Commodity, Operational, Strategic, and Tactical. Your vendors will occupy one of these vendor management categories, and each category helps you determine the nature of the resources allocated to that vendor, the characteristics of the relationship desired by the VMI, and the governance level used.

    The easiest way to think of the COST model is as a 2 x 2 matrix or graph. The model should be configured for your environment so that the criteria used for determining a vendor's classification align with what is important to you and your organization. However, at this point in your VMI's maturation, a simple approach works best. The Classification Model included with this blueprint requires minimal configuration to get your started, and that is discussed on the activity slide associated with this Step 2.1.

    This is an image of the COST Vendor Classification Tool.

    Step 2.1 – Classification model (cont'd)

    Configure the COST vendor classification tool

    Common characteristics by vendor management category

    Operational

    Strategic
    • Low to moderate risk and criticality; moderate to high spend and switching costs
    • Product or service used by more than one area
    • Price is a key negotiation point
    • Product or service is valued by the organization
    • Quality or the perception of quality is a differentiator (i.e. brand awareness)
    • Moderate to high risk and criticality; moderate to high spend and switching costs
    • Few competitors and differentiated products and services
    • Product or service significantly advances the organization's vision, mission, and success
    • Well-established in their core industry

    Commodity

    Tactical
    • Low risk and criticality; low spend and switching costs
    • Product or service is readily available from many sources
    • Market has many competitors and options
    • Relationship is transactional
    • Price is the main differentiator
    • Moderate to high risk and criticality; low to moderate spend and switching costs
    • Vendor offerings align with or support one or more strategic objectives
    • Often IT vendors "outside" of IT (i.e. controlled and paid for by other areas)
    • Often niche or new vendors

    Source: Compiled in part from Guth, Stephen. "Vendor Relationship Management Getting What You Paid for (And More)." 2015.

    2.1.1 – Classification model

    15 – 30 Minutes

    1. Meet with the participants to configure the spend ranges in Phase 2 Vendor Classification Tool – Tab 1. Configuration for your environment.
    2. Collect your vendors and their annual spend to sort by largest to lowest.
    3. Update cells F14-J14 in the Classification Model based on your actual data.
      1. Cell F14 – Set the boundary at a point between the spend for your 10th and 11th ranked vendors. For example, if the 10th vendor by spend is $1,009, 850 and the 11th vendor by spend is $980,763, the range for F14 would be $1,000,00+.
      2. Cell G14 – Set the bottom of the range at a point between the spend for your 30th and 31st ranked vendors; the top of the range will be $1 less than the bottom of the range specified in F14.
      3. Cell H14 – Set the bottom of the range slightly below the spend for your 50th ranked vendor; the top of the range will be $1 less than the bottom of the range specified in G14.
      4. Cells I14 and J14 – Divide the remaining range in half and split it between the two cells; for J14 the range will be $0 to $1 less than the bottom range in I14.
    4. Ignore the other variables at this time.

    Input

    • Phase 1 List of Vendors by Annual Spend

    Output

    • Configured Vendor Classification Tool

    Materials

    • Phase 2 Vendor Classification Tool – Tab 1. Configuration

    Participants

    • VMI team

    Download the Info-Tech Phase 2 Vendor Classification Tool

    Step 2.2 – Risk assessment tool

    Identify risks to measure, monitor, and report on

    One of the typical drivers of a VMI is risk management. Organizations want to get a better handle on the various risks their vendors pose. Vendor risks originate from many areas: financial, performance, security, legal, and others. However, security risk is the high-profile risk, and the one organizations often focus on almost exclusively, which leaves the organization vulnerable in other areas.

    Risk management is a program, not a project; there is no completion date. A proactive approach works best and requires continual monitoring, identification, and assessment. Reacting to risks after they occur can be costly and have other detrimental effects on the organization. Any risk that adversely affects IT will adversely affect the entire organization.

    While the VMI won't necessarily be quantifying or calculating the risk directly, it generally is the aggregator of risk information across the risk categories, which it then includes in its reporting function (see Steps 2.12 and 3.8).

    At a minimum, your risk management strategy should involve:

    • Identifying the risks you want to measure and monitor.
    • Identifying your risk appetite (the amount of risk you are willing to live with).
    • Measuring, monitoring, and reporting on the applicable risks.
    • Developing and deploying a risk management plan to minimize potential risk impact.

    Vendor risk is a fact of life, but you do have options for how to handle it. Be proactive and thoughtful in your approach, and focus your resources on what is important.

    2.2.1 – Risk assessment tool

    30 - 90 Minutes

    1. Meet with the participants to configure the risk indicators in Phase 2 Vendor Risk Assessment Tool – Tab 1. Set parameters for your environment.
    2. Review the risk categories and determine which ones you will be measuring and monitoring.
    3. Review the risk indicators under each risk category and determine whether the indicator is acceptable as written, is acceptable with modifications, should be replaced, or should be deleted.
    4. Make the necessary changes to the risk indicators; these changes will cascade to each of the vendor tabs. Limit the number of risk indicators to no more than seven per risk category.
    5. Gain input and approval as needed from sponsors, stakeholders, and executives as required.

    Input

    • Scope
    • OIC Chart
    • Process Maps
    • Brainstorming

    Output

    • Configured Vendor Risk Assessment Tool

    Materials

    • Phase 2 Vendor Risk Assessment Tool – Tab 1. Set Parameters

    Participants

    • VMI team

    Download the Info-Tech Phase 2 Vendor Classification Tool

    Step 2.3 – Scorecards and feedback

    Design a two-way feedback loop with your vendors

    A vendor management scorecard is a great tool for measuring, monitoring, and improving relationship alignment. In addition, it is perfect for improving communication between you and the vendor.

    Conceptually, a scorecard is similar to a school report card. At the end of a learning cycle, you receive feedback on how well you do in each of your classes. For vendor management, the scorecard is also used to provide periodic feedback, but there are some nuances and additional benefits and objectives when compared to a report card.

    Although scorecards can be used in a variety of ways, the focus here will be on vendor management scorecards – contract management, project management, and other types of scorecards will not be included in the materials covered in this Step 2.3 or in Step 3.4.

    This image contains a table with the score for objectives A-D. The scores are: A4, B3, C5, D4.

    Step 2.3 – Scorecards and feedback (cont'd)

    Design a two-way feedback loop with your vendors

    Anatomy

    The Info-Tech scorecard includes five areas:

    • Measurement categories. Measurement categories help organize the scorecard. Limit the number of measurement categories to three to five; this allows the parties to stay focused on what's important. Too many measurement categories make it difficult for the vendor to understand the expectations.
    • Criteria. The criteria describe what is being measured. Create criteria with sufficient detail to allow the reviewers to fully understand what is being measured and to evaluate it. Criteria can be objective or subjective. Use three to five criteria per measurement category.
    • Measurement category weights. Not all your measurement categories may be of equal importance to you; this area allows you to give greater weight to a measurement category when compiling the overall score.
    • Rating. Reviewers will be asked to assign a score to each criteria using a 1 to 5 scale.
    • Comments. A good scorecard will include a place for reviewers to provide additional information regarding the rating, or other items that are relevant to the scorecard.

    An overall score is calculated based on the rating for each criteria and the measurement category weights.

    Step 2.3 – Scorecards and feedback (cont'd)

    Design a two-way feedback loop with your vendors

    Goals and objectives

    Scorecards can be used for a variety of reasons. Some of the common ones are:

    • Improving vendor performance.
    • Conveying expectations to the vendor.
    • Identifying and recognizing top vendors.
    • Increasing alignment between the parties.
    • Improving communication with the vendor.
    • Comparing vendors across the same criteria.
    • Measuring items not included in contract metrics.
    • Identifying vendors for "strategic alliance" consideration.
    • Helping the organization achieve specific goals and objectives.

    Identifying and resolving issues before they impact performance or the relationship.

    Identifying your scorecard drivers first will help you craft a suitable scorecard.

    Step 2.3 – Scorecards and feedback (cont'd)

    Design a two-way feedback loop with your vendors

    Info-Tech recommends starting with simple scorecards to allow you and the vendors to acclimate to the new process and information. As you build your scorecards, keep in mind that internal personnel will be scoring the vendors and the vendors will be reviewing the scorecard. Make your scorecard easy for your personnel to fill out, and containing meaningful content to drive the vendor in the right direction. You can always make the scorecard more complex in the future.

    Our recommendation of five categories is provided below. Choose three to five of the categories that help you accomplish your scorecard goals and objectives:

    1. Timeliness – Responses, resolutions, fixes, submissions, completions, milestones, deliverables, invoices, etc.
    2. Cost – Total cost of ownership, value, price stability, price increases/decreases, pricing models, etc.
    3. Quality – Accuracy, completeness, mean time to failure, bugs, number of failures, etc.
    4. Personnel – Skilled, experienced, knowledgeable, certified, friendly, trustworthy, flexible, accommodating, etc.
    5. Risk – Adequate contractual protections, security breaches, lawsuits, finances, audit findings, etc.

    Some criteria may be applicable in more than one category. The categories above should cover at least 80% of the items that are important to your organization. The general criteria listed for each category is not an exhaustive list, but most things break down into time, money, quality, people, and risk issues.

    Step 2.3 – Scorecards and feedback (cont'd)

    Design a two-way feedback loop with your vendors

    Additional Considerations

    • Even a good rating system can be confusing. Make sure you provide some examples or a way for reviewers to discern the differences between a 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Don't assume your "rating key" will be intuitive.
    • When assigning weights, don't go lower than 10% for any measurement category. If the weight is too low, it won't be relevant enough to have an impact on the total score. If it doesn't "move the needle", don't include it.
    • Final sign-off on the scorecard template should occur outside the VMI. The heavy lifting can be done by the VMI to create it, but the scorecard is for the benefit of the organization overall, and those impacted by the vendors specifically. You may end up playing arbiter or referee, but the scorecard is not the exclusive property of the VMI. Try to reach consensus on your final template whenever possible.
    • You should notice improved ratings and total scores over time for your vendors. One explanation for this is the Pygmalion Effect: "The Pygmalion [E]ffect describes situations where someone's high expectations improves our behavior and therefore our performance in a given area. It suggests that we do better when more is expected of us."* Convey your expectations and let the vendors' competitive juices take over.
    • While creating your scorecard and materials to explain the process to internal personnel, identify those pieces that will help you explain it to your vendors during vendor orientation (see Steps 2.6 and 3.4). Leveraging pre-existing materials is a great shortcut.

    *Source: The Decision Lab, n.d.

    Step 2.3 – Scorecards and feedback (cont'd)

    Design a two-way feedback loop with your vendors

    Vendor Feedback

    After you've built your scorecard, turn your attention to the second half of the equation – feedback from the vendor. A communication loop cannot be successful without dialogue flowing both ways. While this can happen with just a scorecard, a mechanism specifically geared toward the vendor providing you with feedback improves communication, alignment, and satisfaction.

    You may be tempted to create a formal scorecard for the vendor to use; avoid that temptation until later in your maturity or development of the VMI. You'll be implementing a lot of new processes, deploying new tools and templates, and getting people to work together in new ways. Work on those things first.

    For now, implement an informal process for obtaining information from the vendor. Start by identifying information that you will find useful – information that will allow you to improve overall, to reduce waste or time, to improve processes, to identify gaps in skills. Incorporate these items into your business alignment meetings (see Steps 2.4 and 3.5). Create three to five good questions to ask the vendor and include these in the business alignment meeting agenda. The goal is to get meaningful feedback, and that starts with asking good questions.

    Keep it simple at first. When the time is right, you can build a more formal feedback form or scorecard. Don't be in a rush; as long as the informal method works, keep using it.

    2.3.1 – Scorecards and feedback

    30 – 60 Minutes

    1. Meet with the participants and brainstorm ideas for your scorecard measurement categories:
      1. What makes a vendor valuable to your organization?
      2. What differentiates a "good" vendor from a "bad" vendor?
      3. What items would you like to measure and provide feedback on to the vendor to improve performance, the relationship, risk, and other areas?
    2. Select three, but no more than five, of the following measure categories: timeliness, cost, quality, personnel, and risk.
    3. Within each measurement category, list two or three criteria that you want to measure and track for your vendors. Choose items that are as universal as possible rather than being applicable to one vendor or one vendor type.
    4. Assign a weight to each measurement category, ensuring that the total weight is 100% for all measurement categories.
    5. Document your results as you go in Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 2.3 Scorecard.

    Input

    • Brainstorming

    Output

    • Configured Scorecard template

    Materials

    • Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 2.3 Scorecard

    Participants

    • VMI team
    • Applicable stakeholders and executives (as needed)

    Download the Info-Tech Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium

    2.3.2 – Scorecards and feedback

    15 to 30 Minutes

    1. Meet with the participants and brainstorm ideas for feedback to seek from your vendors during your business alignment meetings. During the brainstorming, identify questions to ask the vendor about your organization that will:
      1. Help you improve the relationship.
      2. Help you improve your processes or performance.
      3. Help you improve ongoing communication.
      4. Help you evaluate your personnel.
    2. Identify the top five questions you want to include in your business alignment meeting agenda. (Note: you may need to refine the actual questions from the brainstorming activity before they are ready to include in your business alignment meeting agenda.)
    3. Document both your brainstorming activity and your final results in Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 2.3 Feedback. The brainstorming questions can be used in the future as your VMI matures and your feedback transforms from informal to formal. The results will be used in Steps 2.4 and 3.5.

    Input

    • Brainstorming

    Output

    • Feedback questions to include with the business alignment meeting agenda

    Materials

    • Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 2.3 Feedback

    Participants

    • VMI team
    • Applicable stakeholders and executives (as needed)

    Download the Info-Tech Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium

    Step 2.4 – Business alignment meeting agenda

    Craft an agenda that meets the needs of the VMI

    A business alignment meeting (BAM) is a multi-faceted tool to ensure the customer and the vendor stay focused on what is important to the customer at a high level. BAMs are not traditional operational meetings where the parties get into the details of the contracts, deal with installation problems, address project management issues, or discuss specific cost overruns. The focus of the BAM is the scorecard (see Step 2.3), but other topics are discussed, and other purposes are served. For example:

    • You can use the BAM to develop the relationship with the vendor's leadership team so that if escalation is ever needed, your organization is more than just a name on a spreadsheet or customer list.
    • You can learn about innovations the vendor is working on (without the meeting turning into a sales call).
    • You can address high-level performance trends and request corrective action as needed.
    • You can clarify your expectations.
    • You can educate the vendor about your industry, culture, and organization.
    • You can learn more about the vendor.

    As you build your BAM Agenda, someone in your organization may say, "Oh, that's just a quarterly business review (QBR) or top-to-top meeting." In most instances, an existing QBRs or top-to-top meeting is not the same as a BAM. Using the term QBR or top-to-top meeting instead of BAM can lead to confusion internally. The VMI may say to the business unit, procurement, or another department, "We're going to start running some QBRs for our strategic vendors." The typical response is, "There's no need; we already run QBRs/top-to-top meetings with our important vendors." This may be accompanied by an invitation to join their meeting, where you may be an afterthought, have no influence, and get five minutes at the end to talk about your agenda items. Keep your BAM separate so that it meets your needs.

    Step 2.4 – Business alignment meeting agenda (cont'd)

    Craft an agenda that meets the needs of the VMI

    As previously noted, using the term BAM more accurately depicts the nature of the VMI meeting and prevents confusion internally with other meetings already occurring. In addition, hosting the BAM yourself rather than piggybacking onto another meeting ensures that the VMI's needs are met. The VMI will set and control the BAM agenda and determine the invite list for internal personnel and vendor personnel. As you may have figured out by now, having the right customer and vendor personnel attend will be essential.

    BAMs are conducted at the vendor level, not the contract level. As a result, the frequency of the BAMs will depend on the vendor's classification category (see Steps 2.1 and 3.1). General frequency guidelines are provided below, but they can be modified to meet your goals:

    • Commodity vendors – Not applicable
    • Operational vendors – Biannually or annually
    • Strategic vendors – Quarterly
    • Tactical vendors – Quarterly or biannually

    BAMs can help you achieve some additional benefits not previously mentioned:

    • Foster a collaborative relationship with the vendor.
    • Avoid erroneous assumptions by the parties.
    • Capture and provide a record of the relationship (and other items) over time.

    Step 2.4 – Business alignment meeting agenda (cont'd)

    Craft an agenda that meets the needs of the VMI

    As with any meeting, building the proper agenda will be one of the keys to an effective and efficient meeting. A high-level BAM agenda with sample topics is set out below:

    BAM Agenda

    • Opening remarks
      • Welcome and introductions
      • Review of previous minutes
    • Active discussion
      • Review of open issues
      • Scorecard and feedback
      • Current status of projects to ensure situational awareness by the vendor
      • Roadmap/strategy/future projects
      • Accomplishments
    • Closing remarks
      • Reinforce positives (good behavior, results, and performance, value added, and expectations exceeded)
      • Recap
    • Adjourn

    2.4.1 – Business alignment meeting agenda

    20 – 45 Minutes

    1. Meet with the participants and review the sample agenda in Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 2.4 BAM Agenda.
    2. Using the sample agenda as inspiration and brainstorming activities as needed, create a BAM agenda tailored to your needs.
      1. Select the items from the sample agenda applicable to your situation.
      2. Add any items required based on your brainstorming.
      3. Add the feedback questions identified during Activity 2.3.2 and documented in Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 2.3 Feedback.
    3. Gain input and approval from sponsors, stakeholders, and executives as required or appropriate.
    4. Document the final BAM agenda in Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium –Tab 2.4 BAM Agenda.

    Input

    • Brainstorming
    • Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 2.3 Feedback

    Output

    • Configured BAM agenda

    Materials

    • Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab2 .4 BAM Agenda

    Participants

    • VMI team
    • Applicable stakeholders and executives (as needed)

    Download the Info-Tech Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium

    Step 2.5 – Relationship alignment document

    Draft a document to convey important VMI information to your vendors

    Throughout this blueprint, alignment is mentioned directly (e.g. business alignment meetings [Steps 2.4 and 3.3]) or indirectly implied. Ensuring you and your vendors are on the same page, have clear and transparent communication, and understand each other's expectations is critical to fostering strong relationships. One component of gaining and maintaining alignment with your vendors is the Relationship Alignment Document (RAD). Depending upon the Scope of your VMI and what your organization already has in place, your RAD will fill in the gaps on various topics.

    Early in the VMI's maturation, the easiest approach is to develop a short document (1 one page) or a pamphlet (i.e. the classic trifold) describing the rules of engagement when doing business with your organization. The RAD can convey expectations, policies, guidelines, and other items. The scope of the document will depend on:

    1. What you believe is important for the vendors to understand.
    2. Any other similar information already provided to the vendors.

    The first step to drafting a RAD is to identify what information vendors need to know to stay on your good side. You may want vendors to know about your gift policy (e.g. employees may not accept vendor gifts above a nominal value, such as a pen or mousepad). Next, compare your list of what vendors need to know and determine if the content is covered in other vendor-facing documents such as a vendor code of conduct or your website's vendor portal. Lastly, create your RAD to bridge the gap between what you want and what is already in place. In some instances, you may want to include items from other documents to reemphasize them with the vendor community.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The RAD can be used with all vendors regardless of classification category. It can be sent directly to the vendors or given to them during vendor orientation (see Step 3.3)

    2.5.1 – Relationship alignment document

    1 to 4 Hours

    1. Meet with the participants and review the RAD sample and checklist in Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 2.5 Relationship Alignment Doc.
    2. Determine:
      1. Whether you will create one RAD for all vendors or one RAD for strategic vendors and another RAD for tactical and operational vendors; whether you will create a RAD for commodity vendors.
      2. The concepts you want to include in your RAD(s).
      3. The format for your RAD(s) – traditional, pamphlet, or other.
      4. Whether signoff or acknowledgement will be required by the vendors.
    3. Draft your RAD(s) and work with other internal areas, such as Marketing to create a consistent brand for the RADS, and Legal to ensure consistent use and preservation of trademarks or other intellectual property rights and other legal issues.
    4. Review other vendor-facing documents (e.g. supplier code of conduct, onsite safety and security protocols) for consistencies between them and the RAD(s).
    5. Obtain signoff on the RAD(s) from stakeholders, sponsors, executives, Legal, Marketing, and others as needed.

    Input

    • Brainstorming
    • Vendor-facing documents, policies, and procedures

    Output

    • Completed Relationship Alignment Document(s)

    Materials

    • Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 2.5 Relationship Alignment Doc

    Participants

    • VMI team
    • Marketing, as needed
    • Legal, as needed

    Download the Info-Tech Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium

    Step 2.6 – Vendor orientation

    Create a VMI awareness process to build bridges with your vendors

    Your organization is unique. It may have many similarities with other organizations, but your culture, risk tolerance, mission, vision, and goals, finances, employees, and "customers" (those that depend on you) make it different. The same is true of your VMI. It may have similar principles, objectives, and processes to other organizations' VMIs, but yours is still unique. As a result, your vendors may not fully understand your organization and what vendor management means to you.

    Vendor orientation is another means to helping you gain and maintain alignment with your important vendors, educate them on what is important to you, and provide closure when/if the relationship with the vendor ends. Vendor orientation is comprised of three components, each with a different function:

    • Orientation
    • Reorientation
    • Debrief

    Vendor orientation focuses on the vendor management pieces of the puzzle (e.g. the scorecard process) rather than the operational pieces (e.g. setting up a new vendor in the system to ensure invoices are processed smoothly).

    Step 2.6 – Vendor orientation (cont'd)

    Create a VMI awareness process to build bridges with your vendors

    Reorientation

    • Reorientation is either identical or similar to orientation, depending upon the circumstances. Reorientation occurs for several reasons, and each reason will impact the nature and detail of the reorientation content. Reorientation occurs whenever:
    • There is a significant change in the vendor's products or services.
    • The vendor has been through a merger, acquisition, or divestiture.
    • A significant contract renewal/renegotiation has recently occurred.
    • Sufficient time has passed from orientation; commonly 2 to 3 years.
    • The vendor has been placed in a "performance improvement plan" or "relationship improvement plan" protocol.
    • Significant turnover has occurred within your organization (executives, key stakeholders, and/or VMI personnel).
    • Substantial turnover has occurred at the vendor at the executive or account management level.
    • The vendor has changed vendor classification categories after the most current classification.
    • As the name implies, the goal is to refamiliarize the vendor with your current VMI situation, governances, protocols, and expectations. The drivers for reorientation will help you determine the reorientation's scope, scale, and frequency.

    Step 2.6 – Vendor orientation (cont'd)

    Create a VMI awareness process to build bridges with your vendors

    Debrief

    To continue the analogy from orientation, debrief is like an exit interview for an employee when their employment is terminated. In this case, debrief occurs when the vendor is no longer an active vendor with your organization - all contracts have terminated or expired, and no new business with the vendor is anticipated within the next three months.

    Similar to orientation and reorientation, debrief activities will be based on the vendor's classification category within the COST model. Strategic vendors don't go away very often; usually, they transition to operational or tactical vendors first. However, if a strategic vendor is no longer providing products or services to you, dig a little deeper into their experiences and allocate extra time for the debrief meeting.

    The debrief should provide you with feedback on the vendor's experience with your organization and their participation in your VMI. Additionally, it can provide closure for both parties since the relationship is ending. Be careful that the debrief does not turn into a finger-pointing meeting or therapy session for the vendor. It should be professional and productive; if it is going off the rails, terminate the meeting before more damage can occur.

    End the debrief on a high note if possible. Thank the vendor, highlight its key contributions, and single out any personnel who went above and beyond. You never know when you will be doing business with this vendor again – don't burn bridges!

    Step 2.6 – Vendor orientation (cont'd)

    Create a VMI awareness process to build bridges with your vendors

    As you create your vendor orientation materials, focus on the message you want to convey.

    • For orientation and reorientation:
      • What is important to you that vendors need to know?
      • What will help the vendors understand more about your organization and your VMI?
      • What and how are you different from other organizations overall, and in your "industry"?
      • What will help them understand your expectations?
      • What will help them be more successful?
      • What will help you build the relationship?
    • For debrief:
      • What information or feedback do you want to obtain?
      • What information or feedback to you want to give?

    The level of detail you provide strategic vendors during orientation and reorientation may be different from the information you provide tactical and operational vendors. Commodity vendors are not typically involved in the vendor orientation process. The orientation meetings can be conducted on a one-to-one basis for strategic vendors and a one-to-many basis for operational and tactical vendors; reorientation and debrief are best conducted on a one-to-one basis. Lastly, face-to-face or video meetings work best for vendor orientation; voice-only meetings, recorded videos, or distributing only written materials seldom hit their mark or achieve the desired results.

    Step 2.7 – Three-year roadmap

    Plot your path at a high level

    1. The VMI exists in many planes concurrently:
    2. It operates both tactically and strategically.

    It focuses on different timelines or horizons (e.g., the past, the present, and the future). Creating a three-year roadmap facilitates the VMI's ability to function effectively across these multiple landscapes.

    The VMI roadmap will be influenced by many factors. The work product from Phase 1 – Plan, input from executives, stakeholders, and internal clients, and the direction of the organization are great sources of information as you begin to build your roadmap.

    To start, identify what you would like to accomplish in year 1. This is arguably the easiest year to complete: budgets are set (or you have a good idea what the budget will look like), personnel decisions have been made, resources have been allocated, and other issues impacting the VMI are known with a higher degree of certainty than any other year. This does not mean things won't change during the first year of the VMI, but expectations are usually lower, and the short event horizon makes things more predictable during the year-1 ramp-up period.

    Years 2 and 3 are more tenuous, but the process is the same: identify what you would like to accomplish or roll out in each year. Typically, the VMI maintains the year-1 plan into subsequent years and adds to the scope or maturity. For example, you may start year 1 with BAMs and scorecards for three of your strategic vendors; during year 2, you may increase that to five vendors; and during year 3, you may increase that to nine vendors. Or, you may not conduct any market research during year 1, waiting to add it to your roadmap in year 2 or 3 as you mature.

    Breaking things down by year helps you identify what is important and the timing associated with your priorities. A conservative approach is recommended. It is easy to overcommit, but the results can be disastrous and painful.

    2.7.1 – Three-year roadmap

    45 – 90 Minutes

    1. Meet with the participants and decide how to coordinate year 1 of your three-year roadmap with your existing fiscal year or reporting year. Year 1 may be shorter or longer than a calendar year.
    2. Review the VMI activities listed in Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 2.7 Three-year roadmap. Use brainstorming and your prior work product from Phase 1 and Phase 2 to identify additional items for the roadmap and add them at the bottom of the spreadsheet.
    3. Starting with the first activity, determine when that activity will begin and put an X in the corresponding column; if the activity is not applicable, leave it blank or insert N/A.
    4. Go back to the top of the list and add information as needed.
      1. For any year-1 or year-2 activities, add an X in the corresponding columns if the activity will be expanded/continued in subsequent periods (e.g., if a Year 2 activity will continue in year 3, put an X in year 3 as well).
      2. Use the comments column to provide clarifying remarks or additional insights related to your plans or "X's". For example, "Scorecards begin in year 1 with three vendors and will roll out to five vendors in year 2 and nine vendors in year 3."
    5. Obtain signoff from stakeholders, sponsors, and executives as needed.

    Input

    • Phase 1 work product
    • Steps 2.1 – 2.6 work product
    • Brainstorming

    Output

    • High level three-year roadmap for the VMI

    Materials

    • Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 2.7 Three-Year Roadmap

    Participants

    • VMI team
    • Applicable stakeholders and executives (as needed)

    Download the Info-Tech Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium

    Step 2.8 – 90-day plan

    Pave your short-term path with a series of detailed quarterly plans

    Now that you have prepared a three-year roadmap, it's time to take the most significant elements from the first year and create action plans for each three-month period. Your first 90-day plan may be longer or shorter if you want to sync to your fiscal or calendar quarters. Aligning with your fiscal year can make it easier for tracking and reporting purposes; however, the more critical item is to make sure you have a rolling series of four 90-day plans to keep you focused on the important activities and tasks throughout the year.

    The 90-day plan is a simple project plan that will help you measure, monitor, and report your progress. Use the Info-Tech tool to help you track:

    Activities.

    • Tasks comprising each activity.
    • Who will be performing the tasks.
    • An estimate of the time required per person per task.
    • An estimate of the total time to achieve the activity.
    • A due date for the activity.
    • A priority of the activity.

    The first 90-day plan will have the greatest level of detail and should be as thorough as possible; the remaining three 90-day plans will each have less detail for now. As you approach the middle of the first 90-day plan, start adding details to the next 90-day plan; toward the end of the first quarter add a high-level 90-day plan to the end of the chain. Continue repeating this cycle each quarter and consult the three-year roadmap and the leadership team, as necessary.

    2.8.1 – 90-day plan

    45 – 90 Minutes

    1. Meet with the participants and decide how to coordinate the first "90-day" plan with your existing fiscal year or reporting cycles. Your first plan may be shorter or longer than 90 days.
    2. Looking at the year-1 section of the three-year roadmap, identify the activities that will be started during the next 90 days.
    3. Using the Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 2.8 90-Day Plan, enter the following information into the spreadsheet for each activity to be accomplished during the next 90 days:
      1. Activity description.
      2. Tasks required to complete the activity (be specific and descriptive).
      3. The people who will be performing each task.
      4. The estimated number of hours required to complete each task.
      5. The start date and due date for each task or the activity.
    4. Validate the tasks are a complete list for each activity and the people performing the tasks have adequate time to complete the tasks by the due date(s).
    5. Assign a priority to each Activity.

    Input

    • Three-Year Roadmap
    • Phase 1 work product
    • Steps 2.1 – 2.7 work product
    • Brainstorming

    Output

    • Detailed plan for the VMI for the next quarter or "90" days

    Materials

    • Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 2.8 90-Day Plan

    Participants

    • VMI team
    • Applicable stakeholders and executives (as needed)

    Download the Info-Tech Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium

    Step 2.9 – Quick wins

    Identify potential short-term successes to gain momentum and show value immediately

    As the final step in the timeline trilogy, you are ready to identify some quick wins for the VMI. Using the first 90-day plan and a brainstorming activity, create a list of things you can do in 15 to 30 days that add value to your initiative and build momentum.

    As you evaluate your list of potential candidates, look for things that:

    • Are achievable within the stated timeline.
    • Don't require a lot of effort.
    • Involve stopping a certain process, activity, or task; this is sometimes known as a "stop doing stupid stuff" approach.
    • Will reduce or eliminate inefficiencies; this is sometimes known as the war on waste.
    • Have a moderate to high impact or bolster the VMI's reputation.

    As you look for quick wins, you may find that everything you identify does not meet the criteria. That's okay; don't force the issue. Return your focus to the 90-day plan and three-year roadmap and update those documents if the brainstorming activity associated with Step 2.9 identified anything new.

    2.9.1 – Quick wins

    15 - 30 Minutes

    1. Meet with the participants and review the three-year roadmap and 90-day plan. Determine if any item on either document can be completed:
      1. Quickly (30 days or less).
      2. With minimal effort.
      3. To provide or show moderate to high levels of value or provide the VMI with momentum.
    2. Brainstorm to identify any other items that meet the criteria in step 1 above.
    3. Compile a comprehensive list of these items and select up to five to pursue.
    4. Document the list in the Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 2.9 Quick Wins.
    5. Manage the quick wins list and share the results with the VMI team and applicable stakeholders and executives.

    Input

    • Three-Year Roadmap
    • 90-Day Plan
    • Brainstorming

    Output

    • A list of activities that require low levels of effort to achieve moderate to high levels of value in a short period

    Materials

    • Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 2.9 Quick Wins

    Participants

    • VMI team

    Download the Info-Tech Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium

    Step 2.10 – Reports

    Construct your reports to resonate with your audience

    Issuing reports is a critical piece of the VMI since the VMI is a conduit of information for the organization. It may be aggregating risk data from internal areas, conducting vendor research, compiling performance data, reviewing market intelligence, or obtaining relevant statistics, feedback, comments, facts, and figures from other sources. Holding onto this information minimizes the impact a VMI can have on the organization; however, the VMI's internal clients, stakeholders, and executives can drown in raw data and ignore it completely if it is not transformed into meaningful, easily-digested information.

    Before building a report, think about your intended audience:

    • What information are they looking for? What will help them understand the big picture?
    • What level of detail is appropriate, keeping in mind the audience may not be like-minded?
    • What items are universal to all the readers and what items are of interest to one or two readers?
    • How easy or hard will it be to collect the data? Who will be providing it, and how time consuming will it be?
    • How accurate, valid, and timely will the data be?
    • How frequently will each report need to be issued?

    Step 2.10 – Reports (cont'd)

    Construct your reports to resonate with your audience

    Use the following guidelines to create reports that will resonate with your audience:

    • Value information over data, but sometimes data does have a place in your report.
    • Use pictures, graphics, and other representations more than words, but words are often necessary in small, concise doses.
    • Segregate your report by user; for example, general information up top, CIO information below that on the right, CFO information to the left of CIO information, etc.
    • Send a draft report to the internal audience and seek feedback, keeping in mind you won't be able to cater to or please everyone.

    2.10.1 – Reports

    15 – 45 Minutes

    1. Meet with the participants and review the applicable work product from Phase 1 and Phase 2; identify qualitative and quantitative items the VMI measures, monitors, tracks, or aggregates.
    2. Determine which items will be reported and to whom (by category):
      1. Internally to personnel within the VMI.
      2. Internally to personnel outside the VMI.
      3. Externally to vendors.
    3. Within each category above, determine your intended audiences/recipients. For example, you may have a different list of recipients for a risk report than you do a scorecard summary report. This will help you identify the number of reports required.
    4. Create a draft structure for each report based on the audience and the information being conveyed. Determine the frequency of each report and person responsible for creating for each report.
    5. Document your final choices in Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 2.10 Reports.

    Input

    • Brainstorming
    • Phase 1 work product
    • Steps 2.1 – 2.11 work product

    Output

    • A list of reports used by the VMI
    • For each report
      • The conceptual content
      • A list of who will receive or have access
      • A creation/distribution frequency

    Materials

    • Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium – Tab 2.10 Reports

    Participants

    • VMI team
    • Applicable stakeholders and executives (as needed)

    Download the Info-Tech Phase 2 Tools and Templates Compendium

    Phase 3 - Run

    Implement your processes and leverage your tools and templates

    Phase 1

    Phase 2Phase 3Phase 4

    1.1 Mission Statement and Goals

    1.2 Scope

    1.3 Strengths and Obstacles

    1.4 Roles and Responsibilities

    2.1 Classification Model

    2.2 Risk Assessment Tool

    2.3 Scorecards and Feedback

    2.4 Business Alignment Meeting Agenda

    2.5 Relationship Alignment Document

    2.6 Vendor Orientation

    2.7 3-Year Roadmap

    2.8 90-Day Plan

    2.9 Quick Wins

    2.10 Reports

    3.1 Classify Vendors

    3.2 Compile Scorecards

    3.3 Conduct Business Alignment Meetings

    3.4 Work the 90-Day Plan

    3.5 Manage the 3-Year Roadmap

    3.6 Develop/Improve Vendor Relationships

    4.1 Incorporate Leading Practices

    4.2 Leverage Lessons Learned

    4.3 Maintain Internal Alignment

    This phase will walk you through the following activity:

    • Beginning to operate the VMI. The main outcomes from this phase are guidance and the steps required to initiate your VMI.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • VMI team
    • Applicable stakeholders and executives
    • Others as needed

    Vendor Management Initiative Basics for the Small/Medium Businesses

    Phase 3 – Run

    Implement your processes and leverage your tools and templates

    All the hard work invested in Phase 1 – Plan and Phase 2 – Build begins to pay off in Phase 3 – Run. It's time to stand up your VMI and ensure that the proper level of resources is devoted to your vendors and the VMI itself. There's more hard work ahead, but the foundational elements are in place. This doesn't mean there won't be adjustments and modifications along the way, but you are ready to use the tools and templates in the real world; you are ready to begin reaping the fruits of your labor.

    Phase 3 – Run guides you through the process of collecting data, monitoring trends, issuing reports, and conducting effective meetings to:

    • Manage risk better.
    • Improve vendor performance.
    • Improve vendor relationships.
    • Identify areas where the parties can improve.
    • Improve communication between the parties.
    • Increase the value proposition with your vendors.

    Step 3.1 – Classify vendors

    Begin classifying your top 25 vendors by spend

    Step 3.1 sets the table for many of the subsequent steps in Phase 3 – Run. The results of your classification process will determine which vendors go through the scorecarding process (Step 3.2); which vendors participate in BAMs (Step 3.3), and which vendors you will devote relationship-building resources to (Step 3.6).

    As you begin classifying your vendors, Info-Tech recommends using an iterative approach initially to validate the results from the classification model you configured in Step 2.1.

    1. Identify your top 25 vendors by spend.
    2. Run your top 10 vendors by spend through the classification model and review the results.
      1. If the results are what you expected and do not contain any significant surprises, go to 3. on the next page.
      2. If the results are not what you expected or do contain significant surprises, look at the configuration page of the tool (Tab 1) and adjust the weights or the spend categories slightly. Be cautious in your evaluation of the results before modifying the configuration page - some legitimate results are unexpected, or are surprises based on bias. If you modify the weighting, review the new results and repeat your evaluation. If you modify the spend categories, review the answers on the vendor tabs to ensure that the answers are still accurate; review the new results and repeat your evaluation.

    Step 3.1 – Classify vendors (cont'd)

    Review your results and adjust the classification tool as needed

    1. Run your top 11-through-25 vendors by spend through the classification model and review the results. Identify any unexpected results. Determine if further configuration makes sense and repeat the process outlined in 2.b., previous page, as necessary. If no further modifications are required, continue to 4., below.
    2. Share the preliminary results with the leadership team, executives, and stakeholders to obtain their approval or adjustments to the results.
      1. They may have questions and want to understand the process before approving the results.
      2. They may request that you move a vendor from one quadrant to another based on your organization's roadmap, the vendor's roadmap, or other information not available to you.
    3. Identify the vendors that will be part of the VMI at this stage – how many and which ones. Based on this number and the VMI's scope (Step 1.2), make sure you have the resources necessary to accommodate the number of vendors participating in the VMI. Proceed cautiously and gradually increase the number of vendors participating in the VMI.

    Step 3.1 – Classify vendors (cont'd)

    Finalize the results and update VMI tools and templates

    1. Update the vendor inventory tool (Step 1.7) to indicate the current classification status for the top 25 vendors by spend. Once your vendors have been classified, you can sort the vendor inventory tool by classification status to see all the vendors in that category at once.
    2. Review your three-year roadmap (Step 2.9) and 90-day plans (Step 2.6) to determine if any modifications are needed to the activities and timelines.

    Additional classification considerations:

    • You should only have a few vendors that fit in the strategic category. As a rough guideline, no more than 5% to 10% of your IT vendors should end up in the strategic category. If you have many vendors, even 5% may be too many. the classification model is an objective start to the classification process, but common sense must prevail over the "math" at the end of the day.
    • At this point, there is no need to go beyond the top 25 by spend. Most VMIs starting out can't handle more than three to five strategic vendors initially. Allow the VMI to run a pilot program with a small sample size, work out any bugs, make adjustments, and then ramp up the VMI's rollout in waves. Vendors can be added quarterly, biannually, or annually, depending upon the desired goals and available resources.

    Step 3.1 – Classify vendors (cont'd)

    Align your vendor strategy to your classification results

    As your VMI matures, additional vendors will be part of the VMI. Review the table below and incorporate the applicable strategies into your deployment of vendor management principles over time. Stay true to your mission, goals, and scope, and remember that not all your vendors are of equal importance.

    Operational

    Strategic
    • Focus on spend containment
    • Concentrate on lowering total cost of ownership
    • Invest moderately in cultivating the relationship
    • Conduct BAMs biannually or annually
    • Compile scorecards quarterly or biannually
    • Identify areas for performance and cost improvement
    • Focus on value, collaboration, and alignment
    • Review market intelligence for the vendor's industry
    • Invest significantly in cultivating the relationship
    • Initiate executive-to-executive relationships
    • Conduct BAMs quarterly
    • Compile scorecards quarterly
    • Understand how the vendors view your organization

    Commodity

    Tactical
    • Investigate vendor rationalization and consolidation
    • Negotiate for the best-possible price
    • Leverage competition during negotiations
    • Streamline the purchasing and payment process
    • Allocate minimal VMI resources
    • Assign the lowest priority for vendor management metrics
    • Conduct risk assessments biannually or annually
    • Cultivate a collaborative relationship based on future growth plans or potential with the vendor
    • Conduct BAMs quarterly or biannually
    • Compile scorecards quarterly
    • Identify areas of performance improvement
    • Leverage innovation and creative problem solving

    Step 3.1 – Classify vendors (cont'd)

    Be careful when using the word "partner" with your strategic and other vendors

    For decades, vendors have used the term "partner" to refer to the relationship they have with their clients and customers. This is often an emotional ploy used by the vendors to get the upper hand. To fully understand the terms "partner" and "partnership", let's evaluate them through two more objective, less cynical lenses.

    If you were to talk to your in-house or outside legal counsel, you may be told that partners share in profits and losses, and they have a fiduciary obligation to each other. Unless there is a joint venture between the parties, you are unlikely to have a partnership with a vendor from this perspective.

    What about a "business" partnership — one that doesn't involve sharing profits and losses? What would that look like? Here are some indicators of a business partnership (or preferably a strategic alliance):

    • Trust and transparent communication exist.
    • You have input into the vendor's roadmap for products and services.
    • The vendor is aligned with your desired outcomes and helps you achieve success.
    • You and the vendor are accountable for actions and inactions, with both parties being at risk.
    • There is parity in the peer-to-peer relationships between the organizations (e.g. C-Level to C-Level).
    • The vendor provides transparency in pricing models and proactively suggests ways for you to reduce costs.
    • You and the vendor work together to make each party better, providing constructive feedback on a regular basis.
    • The vendor provides innovative suggestions for you to improve your processes, performance, the bottom line, etc.
    • Negotiations are not one-sided; they are meaningful and productive, resulting in an equitable distribution of money and risk.

    Step 3.1 – Classify vendors (cont'd)

    Understand the implications and how to leverage the words "partner" and "partnership"

    By now you might be thinking, "What's all the fuss? Why does it matter?" At Info-Tech, we've seen firsthand how referring to the vendor as a partner can have the following impact:

    • Confidences are disclosed unnecessarily.
    • Negotiation opportunities and leverage are lost.
    • Vendors no longer have to earn the customer's business.
    • Vendor accountability is missing due to shared responsibilities.
    • Competent skilled vendor resources are assigned to other accounts.
    • Value erodes over time since contracts are renewed without being competitively sourced.
    • One-sided relationships are established, and false assurances are provided at the highest levels within the customer organization.

    Proceed with caution when using partner or partnership with your vendors. Understand how your organization benefits from using these terms and mitigate the negatives outlined above by raising awareness internally to ensure people understand the psychology behind the terms. Finally, use the term to your advantage when warranted by referring to the vendor as a partner when you want or need something that the vendor is reluctant to provide. Bottom line: be strategic in how you refer to vendors and know the risks.

    Step 3.2 – Compile scorecards

    Begin scoring your top vendors

    The scorecard process typically is owned and operated by the VMI, but the actual rating of the criteria within the measurement categories is conducted by those with day-to-day interactions with the vendors, those using or impacted by the services and products provided by the vendors, and those with the skills to research other information on the scorecard (e.g. risk). Chances are one person will not be able to complete an entire scorecard by themselves. As a result, the scorecard process is a team sport comprised of sub-teams where necessary.

    The VMI will compile the scores, calculate the final results, and aggregate all the comments into one scorecard. There are two common ways to approach this task:

    1. Send out the scorecard template to those who will be scoring the vendor and ask them to return it when completed, providing them with a due date a few days before you need it; you'll need time to compile, calculate, and aggregate.
    2. Invite those who will be scoring the vendor to a meeting and let the contributors use that time to score the vendors; make VMI team members available to answer questions and facilitate the process.

    Step 3.2 – Compile scorecards (cont'd)

    Gather input from stakeholders and others impacted by the vendors

    Since multiple people will be involved in the scorecarding process or have information to contribute, the VMI will have to work with the reviewers to ensure he right mix of data is provided. For example:

    • If you are tracking lawsuits filed by or against the vendor, one person from Legal may be able to provide that, but they may not be able to evaluate any other criteria on the scorecard.
    • If you are tracking salesperson competencies, multiple people from multiple areas may have valuable insights.
    • If you are tracking deliverable timeliness, several project managers may want to contribute across several projects.

    Where one person is contributing exclusively to limited criteria, make it easy for them to identify the criteria they are to evaluate. When multiple people from the same functional area will provide insights, they can contribute individually (and the VMI will average their responses) or they can respond collectively after reaching consensus as a group.

    After the VMI has compiled, calculated, and aggregated, share the results with executives, impacted stakeholders, and others who will be attending the BAM for that vendor. Depending upon the comments provided by internal personnel, you may need to create a sanitized version of the scorecard for the vendor.

    Make sure your process timeline has a buffer built in. You'll be sending the final scorecard to the vendor three to five days before the BAM, and you'll need some time to assemble the results. The scorecarding process can be perceived as a low-priority activity for people outside of the VMI, and other "priorities" will arise for them. Without a timeline buffer, the VMI may find itself behind schedule and unprepared, due to things beyond its control.

    Step 3.3 – Conduct business alignment meetings

    Determine which vendors will participate and how long the meetings will last

    At their core, BAMs aren't that different from any other meeting. The basics of running a meeting still apply, but there are a few nuances that apply to BAMs. Set out below are leading practices for conducing your BAMs; adapt them to meet your needs and suit your environment.

    Who

    Initially, BAMs are conducted with the strategic vendors in your pilot program. Over time you'll add vendors until all your strategic vendors are meeting with you quarterly. After that, roll out the BAMs to those tactical and operational vendors located close to the strategic quadrant in the classification model (Steps 2.1 and 3.1) and as VMI resources allow. It may take several years before you are holding regular BAMs with all your strategic, tactical, and operational vendors.

    Duration

    Keep the length of your meetings reasonable. The first few with a vendor may need to be 60 to 90 minutes long. After that, you should be able to trim them to 45 minutes to 60 minutes. The BAM does not have to fill the entire time. When you are done, you are done.

    Step 3.3 – Conduct business alignment meetings (cont'd)

    Identify who will be invited and send out invitations

    Invitations

    Set up a recurring meeting whenever possible. Changes will be inevitable but keeping the timeline regular works to your advantage. Also, the vendors included in your initial BAMs won't change for twelve months. For the first BAM with a vendor, provide adequate notice; four weeks is usually sufficient, but calendars will fill up quickly for the main attendees from the vendor. Treat the meeting as significant and make sure your invitation reflects this. A simple meeting request will often be rejected, treated as optional, or ignored completely by the vendor's leadership team (and maybe yours as well!).

    Invitees

    Internal invitees should include those with a vested interest in the vendor's performance and the relationship. Other functional areas may be invited based on need or interest. Be careful the attendee list doesn't get too big. Based on this, internal BAM attendees often include representatives from IT, Sourcing/Procurement, and the applicable business units. At times, Finance and Legal are included.

    From the vendor's side, strive to have decision makers and key leaders attend. The salesperson/account manager is often included for continuity, but a director or vice president of sales will have more insights and influence. The project manager is not needed at this meeting due to the nature of the meeting and its agenda; however, a director or vice president from the product or service delivery area is a good choice. Bottom line: get as high into the vendor's organization as possible whenever possible; look at the types of contracts you have with that vendor to provide guidance on the type of people to invite.

    Step 3.3 – Conduct business alignment meetings (cont'd)

    Prepare for the Meetings and Maintain Control

    Preparation

    Send the scorecard and agenda to the vendor five days prior to the BAM. The vendor should provide you with any information you require for the meeting five days prior, as well.

    Decide who will run the meeting. Some customers like to lead, and others let the vendor present. How you craft the agenda and your preferences will dictate who runs the show.

    Make sure the vendor knows what materials they should bring to the meeting or have access to. This will relate to the agenda and any specific requests listed under the discussion points. You don't want the vendor to be caught off guard and unable to discuss a matter of importance to you.

    Running the BAM

    Regardless of which party leads, make sure you manage the agenda to stay on topic. This is your meeting – not the vendor's, not IT's, not Procurement's or Sourcing's. Don't let anyone hijack it.

    Make sure someone is taking notes. If you are running this virtually, consider recording the meeting. Check with your legal department first for any concerns, notices, or prohibitions that may impact your recording the session.

    Remember, this is not a sales call, and it is not a social activity. Innovation discussions are allowed and encouraged, but that can quickly devolve into a sales presentation. People can be friendly toward one another, but the relationship building should not overwhelm the other purposes.

    Step 3.3 – Conduct business alignment meetings (cont'd)

    Follow these additional guidelines to maximize your meetings

    More leading practices

    • Remind everyone that the conversation may include items covered by various confidentiality provisions or agreements.
    • Publish the meeting minutes on a timely basis (within 48 hours).
    • Focus on the bigger picture by looking at trends over time; get into the details only when warranted.
    • Meet internally immediately beforehand to prepare – don't go in cold. Review the agenda and the roles and responsibilities for the attendees.
    • Physical meetings are better than virtual meetings, but travel constraints, budgets, and pandemics may not allow for physical meetings.

    Final thoughts

    • When performance or the relationship is suffering, be constructive in your feedback and conversations rather than trying to assign blame; lead with the carrot rather than the stick.
    • Look for collaborative solutions whenever possible and avoid referencing the contract if possible. Communicate your willingness to help resolve outstanding issues.
    • Use inclusive language and avoid language that puts the vendor on the defensive.
    • Make sure that your meetings are not focused exclusively on the negative, but don't paint a rosy picture where one doesn't exist.
    • A vendor that is doing well should be commended. This is an important part of relationship building.

    Step 3.4 – Work the 90-day plan

    Monitor your progress and share your results

    Having a 90-day plan is a good start, but assuming the tasks on the plan will be accomplished magically or without any oversight can lead to failure. While it won't take a lot of time to work the plan, following a few basic guidelines will help ensure the 90-day plan gets results and wasn't created in vain.

    1. Measure and track your progress against the initial/current 90-day plan at least weekly; with a short timeline, any delay can have a huge impact.
    2. If adjustments are needed to any elements of the plan, understand the cause and the impact of those adjustments before making them.
    3. Make adjustments ONLY when warranted. The temptation will be to push activities and tasks further out on the timeline (or to the next 90-day plan!) when there is any sort of hiccup along the way, especially when personnel outside the VMI are involved. Hold true to the timeline whenever possible; once you start slipping, it often becomes a habit.
    4. Report on progress every week and hold people accountable for their assignments and contributions.
    5. Take the 90-day plan seriously and treat it as you would any significant project. This is part of the VMI's branding and image.

    Step 3.5 – Manage the three-year roadmap

    Keep an eye on the future since it will feed the present

    The three-year roadmap is a great planning tool, but it is not 100% reliable. There are inherent flaws and challenges. Essentially, the roadmap is a set of three "crystal balls" attempting to tell you what the future holds. The vision for year 1 may be clear, but for each subsequent year, the crystal ball becomes foggier. In addition, the timeline is constantly changing; before you know it, tomorrow becomes today and year 2 becomes year 1.

    To help navigate through the roadmap and maximize its potential, follow these principles:

    • Manage each year of the roadmap differently.
      • Review the year-1 map each quarter to update your 90-day plans (See steps 2.10 and 3.4).
      • Review the year-2 map every six months to determine if any changes are necessary. As you cycle through this, your vantage point of year 2 will be 6 months or 12 months away from the beginning of year 2, and time moves quickly.
      • Review the year-3 map annually, and determine what needs to be added, changed, or deleted. Each time you review year 3, it will be a "new" year 3 that needs to be built.
    • Analyze the impact on the proposed modifications from two perspectives: 1) What is the impact if a requested modification is made? 2) What is the impact if a requested modification is not made?
    • Validate all modifications with leadership and stakeholders before updating the three-year roadmap to ensure internal alignment.

    Step 3.6 – Develop/improve vendor relationships

    Drive better performance through better relationships

    One of the key components of a VMI is relationship management. Good relationships with your vendors provide many benefits for both parties, but they don't happen by accident. Do not assume the relationship will be good or is good merely because your organization is buying products and services from a vendor.

    In many respects, the VMI should mirror a vendor's sales organization by establishing relationships at multiple levels within the vendor organizations, not just with the salesperson or account manager. Building and maintaining relationships is hard work, but the return on investment makes it worthwhile.

    Business relationships are comprised of many components, not all of which must be present to have a great relationship. However, there are some essential components. Whether you are trying to develop, improve, or maintain a relationship with a vendor, make sure you are conscious of the following:

    • Focusing your energies on strategic vendors first and then tactical and operational vendors.
    • Being transparent and honest in your communications.
    • Continuously building trust by being responsive and honoring commitments (timely).
    • Creating a collaborative environment and build upon common ground.
    • Thanking the vendor when appropriate.
    • Resolving disputes early, avoiding the "blame game", and being objective when there are disagreements.

    Phase 4 - Review

    Keep your VMI up to date and running smoothly

    Phase 1

    Phase 2Phase 3Phase 4

    1.1 Mission Statement and Goals

    1.2 Scope

    1.3 Strengths and Obstacles

    1.4 Roles and Responsibilities

    2.1 Classification Model

    2.2 Risk Assessment Tool

    2.3 Scorecards and Feedback

    2.4 Business Alignment Meeting Agenda

    2.5 Relationship Alignment Document

    2.6 Vendor Orientation

    2.7 3-Year Roadmap

    2.8 90-Day Plan

    2.9 Quick Wins

    2.10 Reports

    3.1 Classify Vendors

    3.2 Compile Scorecards

    3.3 Conduct Business Alignment Meetings

    3.4 Work the 90-Day Plan

    3.5 Manage the 3-Year Roadmap

    3.6 Develop/Improve Vendor Relationships

    4.1 Incorporate Leading Practices

    4.2 Leverage Lessons Learned

    4.3 Maintain Internal Alignment

    This phase will walk you through the following activity:

    • Helping the VMI identify what it should stop doing, start doing, and continue doing as it improves and matures. The main outcomes from this phase are ways to advance the VMI and maintain internal alignment.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • VMI team
    • Applicable stakeholders and executives
    • Others as needed

    Vendor Management Initiative Basics for the Small/Medium Businesses

    Phase 4 – Review

    Keep your VMI up to date and running smoothly

    As the adage says, "The only thing constant in life is change." This is particularly true for your VMI. It will continue to mature, people inside and outside of the VMI will change, resources will expand or contract from year to year, your vendor base will change. As a result, your VMI needs the equivalent of a physical every year. In place of bloodwork, x-rays, and the other paces your physician may put you through, you'll assess compliance with your policies and procedures, incorporate leading practices, leverage lessons learned, maintain internal alignment, and update governances.

    Be thorough in your actions during this Phase to get the most out of it. It requires more than the equivalent of gauging a person's health by taking their temperature, measuring their blood pressure, and determining their body mass index. Keeping your VMI up-to-date and running smoothly takes hard work.

    Some of the items presented in this Phase require an annual review; others may require quarterly review or timely review (i.e. when things are top of mind and current). For example, collecting lessons learned should happen on a timely basis rather than annually, and classifying your vendors should occur annually rather than every time a new vendor enters the fold.

    Ultimately, the goal is to improve over time and stay aligned with other areas internally. This won't happen by accident. Being proactive in the review of your VMI further reinforces the nature of the VMI itself – proactive vendor management, not reactive!

    Step 4.1 – Incorporate leading practices

    Identify and evaluate what external VMIs are doing

    The VMI's world is constantly shifting and evolving. Some changes will take place slowly, while others will occur quickly. Think about how quickly the cloud environment has changed over the past five years versus the 15 years before that; or think about issues that have popped up and instantly altered the landscape (we're looking at you COVID and ransomware). As a result, the VMI needs to keep pace, and one of the best ways to do that is to incorporate leading practices.

    At a high level, a leading practice is a way of doing something that is better at producing a particular outcome or result or performing a task or activity than other ways of proceeding. The leading practice can be based on methodologies, tools, processes, procedures, and other items. Leading practices change periodically due to innovation, new ways of thinking, research, and other factors. Consequently, a leading practice is to identify and evaluate leading practices each year.

    Step 4.1 – Incorporate leading practices (cont'd)

    Update your VMI based on your research

    • A simple approach for incorporating leading practices into your regular review process is set out below:
    • Research:
      • What other VMIs in your industry are doing.
      • What other VMIs outside your industry are doing.
      • Vendor management in general.
    • Based on your results, list specific leading practices others are doing that would improve your VMI (be specific – e.g. other VMIs are incorporating risk into their classification process).
    • Evaluate your list to determine which of these potential changes fit or could be modified to fit your culture and environment.
    • Recommend the proposed changes to leadership (with a short business case or explanation/justification, as needed) and gain approval.

    Remember: Leading practices or best practices may not be what is best for you. In some instances, you will have to modify them to fit in your culture and environment; in other instances, you will elect not to implement them at all (in any form).

    Step 4.2 – Leverage lessons learned

    Tap into the collective wisdom and experience of your team members

    There are many ways to keep your VMI running smoothly, and creating a lessons learned library is a great complement to the other ways covered in this Phase 4 - Review. By tapping into the collective wisdom of the team and creating a safe feedback loop, the VMI gains the following benefits:

    • Documented institutional wisdom and knowledge normally found only in the team members' brains.
    • The ability for one team member to gain insights and avoid mistakes without having to duplicate the events leading to the insights or mistakes.
    • Improved methodologies, tools, processes, procedures, skills, and relationships.

    Many of the processes raised in this Phase can be performed annually, but a lessons learned library works best when the information is deposited in a timely manner. How you choose to set up your lessons learned process will depend on the tools you select and your culture. You may want to have regular input meetings to share the lessons as they are being deposited, or you may require team members to deposit lessons learned on a regular basis (within a week after they happen, monthly, or quarterly). Waiting too long can lead to vague or lost memories and specifics; timeliness of the deposits is a crucial element.

    Step 4.2 – Leverage lessons learned (cont'd)

    Create a library to share valuable information across the team

    Lessons learned are not confined to identifying mistakes or dissecting bad outcomes. You want to reinforce good outcomes, as well. When an opportunity for a lessons-learned deposit arises, identify the following basic elements:

    • A brief description of the situation and outcome.
    • What went well (if anything) and why did it go well?
    • What didn't go well (if anything) and why didn't it go well?
    • What would/could you do differently next time?
    • A synopsis of the lesson(s) learned.

    Info-Tech Insights

    The lessons learned library needs to be maintained. Irrelevant material needs to be culled periodically, and older or duplicate material may need to be archived.

    the lessons learned process should be blameless. The goal is to share insightful information, not to reward or punish people based on outcomes or results.

    Step 4.3 – Maintain internal alignment

    Review the plans of other internal areas to stay in sync

    Maintaining internal alignment is essential for the ongoing success of the VMI. Over time, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the VMI does not operate in a vacuum; it is an integral component of a larger organization whose parts must work well together to function optimally. Focusing annually on the VMI's alignment within the enterprise helps reduce any breakdowns that could derail the organization.

    To ensure internal alignment:

    • Review the key components of the applicable materials from Phase 1 - Plan and Phase 2 - Build with the appropriate members of the leadership team (e.g. executives, sponsors, and stakeholders). Not every item from those Phases and Steps needs to be reviewed but err on the side of caution for the first set of alignment discussions, and be prepared to review each item. You can gauge the audience's interest on each topic and move quickly when necessary or dive deeper when needed. Identify potential changes required to maintain alignment.
    • Review the strategic plans (e.g. 1-, 3-, and 5- year plans) for various portions of the organization if you have access to them or gather insights if you don't have access.
      • If the VMI is under the IT umbrella, review the strategic plans for IT and its departments.
      • Review the strategic plans for the areas the VMI works with (e.g. Procurement, Business Units).
      • The organization itself.
    • Create and vet a list of modifications to the VMI and obtain approval.
    • Develop a plan for making the necessary changes.

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Problem solved

    Vendor management is a broad, often overwhelming, comprehensive spectrum that encompasses many disciplines. By now, you should have a great idea of what vendor management can or will look like in your organization. Focus on the basics first: Why does the VMI exist and what does it hope to achieve? What is it's scope? What are the strengths you can leverage, and what obstacles must you manage? How will the VMI work with others? From there, the spectrum of vendor management will begin to clarify and narrow.

    Leverage the tools and templates from this blueprint and adapt them to your needs. They will help you concentrate your energies in the right areas and on the right vendors to maximize the return on your organization's investment in the VMI of time, money, personnel, and other resources. You may have to lead by example internally and with your vendors at first, but they will eventually join you on your path if you stay true to your course.

    At the heart of a good VMI is the relationship component. Don't overlook its value in helping you achieve your vendor management goals. The VMI does not operate in a vacuum, and relationships (internal and external) will be critical.

    Lastly, seek continual improvement from the VMI and from your vendors. Both parties should be held accountable, and both parties should work together to get better. Be proactive in your efforts, and you, the VMI, and the organization will be rewarded.

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech Workshop

    Contact your account representative for more information

    workshops@infotech.com
    1-888-670-8889

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    Bibliography

    Slide 5 – ISG Index 4Q 2021, Information Services Group, Inc., 2022.

    Slide 6 – ISG Index 4Q 2021, Information Services Group, Inc., 2022.

    Slide 7 – Geller & Company. "World-Class Procurement — Increasing Profitability and Quality." Spend Matters. 2003. Web. Accessed 4 Mar. 2019.

    Slide 26 – Guth, Stephen. The Vendor Management Office: Unleashing the Power of Strategic Sourcing. Lulu.com, 2007. Print. Protiviti. Enterprise Risk Management. Web. 16 Feb. 2017.

    Slide 34 – "Why Do We Perform Better When Someone Has High Expectations of Us?" The Decision Lab. Accessed January 31, 2022.

    Slide 56 - Top 10 Tips for Creating Compelling Reports," October 11, 2019, Design Eclectic. Accessed March 29, 2022.

    Slide 56 – "Six Tips for Making a Quality Report Appealing and Easy To Skim," Agency for Health Research and Quality. Accessed March 29, 2022.

    Slide 56 –Tucker, Davis. Marketing Reporting: Tips to Create Compelling Reports, March 28, 2020, 60 Second Marketer. Accessed March 29, 2022.

    Implement Risk-Based Vulnerability Management

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    • Parent Category Name: Threat Intelligence & Incident Response
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    • Vulnerability scanners, industry alerts, and penetration tests are revealing more and more vulnerabilities, and it is unclear how to manage them.
    • Organizations are struggling to prioritize the vulnerabilities for remediation, as there are many factors to consider, including the threat of the vulnerability and the potential remediation option itself.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Patches are often seen as the only answer to vulnerabilities, but these are not always the most suitable solution.
    • Vulnerability management does not equal patch management. It includes identifying and assessing the risk of the vulnerability, and then selecting a remediation option which goes beyond just patching alone.
    • There is more than one way to tackle the problem. Leverage your existing security controls in order to protect the organization.

    Impact and Result

    • At the conclusion of this blueprint, you will have created a full vulnerability management program that will allow you to take a risk-based approach to vulnerability remediation.
    • Assessing a vulnerability’s risk will enable you to properly determine the true urgency of a vulnerability within the context of your organization; this ensures you are not just blindly following what the tool is reporting.
    • The risk-based approach will allow you prioritize your discovered vulnerabilities and take immediate action on critical and high vulnerabilities, while allowing your standard remediation cycle to address the medium to low vulnerabilities.
    • With your program defined and developed, you now need to configure your vulnerability scanning tool, or acquire one if you don’t already have a tool in place.
    • Lastly, while vulnerability management will help address your systems and applications, how do you know if you are secure from external malicious actors? Penetration testing will offer visibility, allowing you to plug those holes and attain an environment with a smaller risk surface.

    Implement Risk-Based Vulnerability Management Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should design and implement a vulnerability management program, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Identify vulnerability sources

    Begin the project by creating a vulnerability management team and determine how vulnerabilities will be identified through scanners, penetration tests, third-party sources, and incidents.

    • Vulnerability Management SOP Template

    2. Triage vulnerabilities and assign priorities

    Determine how vulnerabilities will be triaged and evaluated based on intrinsic qualities and how they may compromise business functions and data sensitivity.

    • Vulnerability Tracking Tool
    • Vulnerability Management Risk Assessment Tool
    • Vulnerability Management Workflow (Visio)
    • Vulnerability Management Workflow (PDF)

    3. Remediate vulnerabilities

    Address the vulnerabilities based on their level of risk. Patching isn't the only risk mitigation action; some systems simply cannot be patched, but other options are available. Reduce the risk down to medium/low levels and engage your regular operational processes to deal with the latter.

    4. Measure and formalize

    Evolve the program continually by developing metrics and formalizing a policy.

    • Vulnerability Management Policy Template
    • Vulnerability Scanning Tool RFP Template
    • Penetration Test RFP Template

    Infographic

    Workshop: Implement Risk-Based Vulnerability Management

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Identify Vulnerability Sources

    The Purpose

    Establish a common understanding of vulnerability management, and define the roles, scope, and information sources of vulnerability detection.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Attain visibility on all of the vulnerability information sources, and a common understanding of vulnerability management and its scope.

    Activities

    1.1 Define the scope & boundary of your organization’s security program.

    1.2 Assign responsibility for vulnerability identification and remediation.

    1.3 Develop a monitoring and review process of third-party vulnerability sources.

    1.4 Review incident management and vulnerability management

    Outputs

    Defined scope and boundaries of the IT security program

    Roles and responsibilities defined for member groups

    Process for review of third-party vulnerability sources

    Alignment of vulnerability management program with existing incident management processes

    2 Triage and Prioritize

    The Purpose

    We will examine the elements that you will use to triage and analyze vulnerabilities, prioritizing using a risk-based approach and prepare for remediation options.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A consistent, documented process for the evaluation of vulnerabilities in your environment.

    Activities

    2.1 Evaluate your identified vulnerabilities.

    2.2 Determine high-level business criticality.

    2.3 Determine your high-level data classifications.

    2.4 Document your defense-in-depth controls.

    2.5 Build a classification scheme to consistently assess impact.

    2.6 Build a classification scheme to consistently assess likelihood.

    Outputs

    Adjusted workflow to reflect your current processes

    List of business operations and their criticality and impact to the business

    Adjusted workflow to reflect your current processes

    List of defense-in-depth controls

    Vulnerability Management Risk Assessment tool formatted to your organization

    Vulnerability Management Risk Assessment tool formatted to your organization

    3 Remediate Vulnerabilities

    The Purpose

    Identifying potential remediation options.

    Developing criteria for each option in regard to when to use and when to avoid.

    Establishing exception procedure for testing and remediation.

    Documenting the implementation of remediation and verification.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Identifying and selecting the remediation option to be used

    Determining what to do when a patch or update is not available

    Scheduling and executing the remediation activity

    Planning continuous improvement

    Activities

    3.1 Develop risk and remediation action.

    Outputs

    List of remediation options sorted into “when to use” and “when to avoid” lists

    4 Measure and Formalize

    The Purpose

    You will determine what ought to be measured to track the success of your vulnerability management program.

    If you lack a scanning tool this phase will help you determine tool selection.

    Lastly, penetration testing is a good next step to consider once you have your vulnerability management program well underway.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Outline of metrics that you can then configure your vulnerability scanning tool to report on.

    Development of an inaugural policy covering vulnerability management.

    The provisions needed for you to create and deploy an RFP for a vulnerability management tool.

    An understanding of penetration testing, and guidance on how to get started if there is interest to do so.

    Activities

    4.1 Measure your program with metrics, KPIs, and CSFs.

    4.2 Update the vulnerability management policy.

    4.3 Create an RFP for vulnerability scanning tools.

    4.4 Create an RFP for penetration tests.

    Outputs

    List of relevant metrics to track, and the KPIs, CSFs, and business goals for.

    Completed Vulnerability Management Policy

    Completed Request for Proposal (RFP) document that can be distributed to vendor proponents

    Completed Request for Proposal (RFP) document that can be distributed to vendor proponents

    Further reading

    Implement Risk-Based Vulnerability Management

    Get off the patching merry-go-round and start mitigating risk!

    Table of Contents

    4 Analyst Perspective

    5 Executive Summary

    6 Common Obstacles

    8 Risk-based approach to vulnerability management

    16 Step 1.1: Vulnerability management defined

    24 Step 1.2: Defining scope and roles

    34 Step 1.3: Cloud considerations for vulnerability management

    33 Step 1.4: Vulnerability detection

    46 Step 2.1: Triage vulnerabilities

    51 Step 2.2: Determine high-level business criticality

    56 Step 2.3: Consider current security posture

    61 Step 2.4: Risk assessment of vulnerabilities

    71 Step 3.1: Assessing remediation options

    Table of Contents

    80 Step 3.2: Scheduling and executing remediation

    85 Step 3.3: Continuous improvement

    89 Step 4.1: Metrics, KPIs, and CSFs

    94 Step 4.2: Vulnerability management policy

    97 Step 4.3: Select & implement a scanning tool

    107 Step 4.4: Penetration testing

    118 Summary of accomplishment

    119 Additional Support

    120 Bibliography

    Analyst Perspective

    Vulnerabilities will always be present. Know the unknowns!

    In this age of discovery, technology changes at such a rapid pace. New things are discovered, both in new technology and in old. The pace of change can often be very confusing as to where to start and what to do.

    The ever-changing nature of technology means that vulnerabilities will always be present. Taking measures to address these completely will consume all your department’s time and resources. That, and your efforts will quickly become stale as new vulnerabilities are uncovered. Besides, what about the systems that simply can’t be patched? The key is to understand the vulnerabilities and the levels of risk they pose to your organization, to prioritize effectively and to look beyond patching.

    A risk-based approach to vulnerability management will ensure you are prioritizing appropriately and protecting the business. Reduce the risk surface!

    Vulnerability management is more than just systems and application patching. It is a full process that includes patching, compensating controls, segmentation, segregation, and heightened diligence in security monitoring.

    Jimmy Tom, Research Advisor – Security, Privacy, Risk, and Compliance, Info-Tech Research Group.Jimmy Tom
    Research Advisor – Security, Privacy, Risk, and Compliance
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Vulnerability scanners, industry alerts, and penetration tests are revealing more and more vulnerabilities, and it is unclear how to manage them.

    Organizations are struggling to prioritize the vulnerabilities for remediation, as there are many factors to consider, including the threat of the vulnerability and the potential remediation option.

    Common Obstacles

    Patches are often seen as the answer to vulnerabilities, but these are not always the most suitable solution.

    Some systems deemed vulnerable simply cannot be patched or easily replaced.

    Companies are unaware of the risk implications that come from leaving the vulnerability open and from the remediation option itself.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    Design and implement a vulnerability management program that identifies, prioritizes, and remediates vulnerabilities.

    Understand what needs to be considered when implementing remediation options, including patches, configuration changes, and defense-in-depth controls.

    Build a process that is easy to understand and allows vulnerabilities to be remediated proactively, instead of in an ad hoc fashion.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Vulnerability management does not always equal patch management. There is more than one way to tackle the problem, particularly if a system cannot be easily patched or replaced. If a vulnerability cannot be completely remediated, steps to reduce the risk to a tolerable level must be taken.

    Common obstacles

    These barriers make vulnerability management difficult to address for many organizations:
    • The value of vulnerability management is not well articulated in many organizations. As a result, investment in vulnerability scanning technology is often insufficient.
    • Many organizations feel that a “patch everything” approach is the most effective path.
    • Vulnerability management is commonly misunderstood as being a process that only supports patch management.
    • There is often misalignment between SecOps and ITOps in remediation action and priority, affecting the timeliness of remediation.
    CVSS Score Distribution From the National Vulnerability Database: Pie Charts presenting the CVSS Core Distribution for the National Vulnerability Database. The left circle represents 'V3' and the right 'V2', where V3 has an extra option for 'Critical', above 'High', 'Medium', and 'Low', and V2 does not.
    (Source: NIST National Vulnerability Database Dashboard)

    Leverage risk to sort, triage, and prioritize vulnerabilities

    Reduce your risk surface to avoid cost to your business; everything else is table stakes.

    Reduce the critical and high vulnerabilities below the risk threshold and operationalize the remediation of medium/low vulnerabilities by following your effective vulnerability management program cycles.

    Identify vulnerability sources

    An inventory of your scanning tool and vulnerability threat intelligence data sources will help you determine a viable strategy for addressing vulnerabilities. Defining roles and responsibilities ahead of time will ensure you are not left scrambling when dealing with vulnerabilities.

    Triage and prioritize

    Bring the vulnerabilities into context by assessing vulnerabilities based on your security posture and mechanisms and not just what your data sources report. This will allow you to gauge the true urgency of the vulnerabilities based on risk and determine an effective mitigation plan.

    Remediate vulnerabilities

    Address the vulnerabilities based on their level of risk. Patching isn't the only risk mitigation action; some systems simply cannot be patched, but other options are available.

    Reduce the risk down to medium/low levels and engage your regular operational processes to deal with the latter.

    Measure and formalize

    Upon implementation of the program, measure with metrics to ensure that the program is successful. Improve the program with each iteration of vulnerability mitigation to ensure continuous improvement.

    Tactical Insight 1

    All actions to address vulnerabilities should be based on risk and the organization’s established risk tolerance.

    Tactical Insight 2

    Reduce the risk surface down below the risk threshold.

    The industry has shifted to a risk-based approach

    Traditional vulnerability management is no longer viable.

    “For those of us in the vulnerability management space, ensuring that money, resources, and time are strategically spent is both imperative and difficult. Resources are dwindling fast, but the vulnerability problem sure isn’t.” (Kenna Security)

    “Using vulnerability scanners to identify unpatched software is no longer enough. Keeping devices, networks, and digital assets safe takes a much broader, risk-based vulnerability management strategy – one that includes vulnerability assessment and mitigation actions that touch the entire ecosystem.” (Balbix)

    “Unlike legacy vulnerability management, risk-based vulnerability management goes beyond just discovering vulnerabilities. It helps you understand vulnerability risks with threat context and insight into potential business impact.” (Tenable)

    “A common mistake when prioritizing patching is equating a vulnerability’s Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score with risk. Although CVSS scores can provide useful insight into the anatomy of a vulnerability and how it might behave if weaponized, they are standardized and thus don’t reflect either of the highly situational variables — namely, weaponization likelihood and potential impact — that factor into the risk the vulnerability poses to an organization.” (SecurityWeek)

    Why a take risk-based approach?

    Vulnerabilities, by the numbers

    60% — In 2019, 60% of breaches were due to unpatched vulnerabilities.

    74% — In the same survey, 74% of survey responses said they cannot take down critical applications and systems to patch them quickly. (Source: SecurityBoulevard, 2019)

    Info-Tech Insight

    Taking a risk-based approach will allow you to focus on mitigating risk, rather than “just patching” your environment.

    The average cost of a breach in 2020 is $3.86 million, and “…the price tag was much less for mature companies and industries and far higher for firms that had lackluster security automation and incident response processes.” (Dark Reading)

    Vulnerability Management

    A risk-based approach

    Reduce the risk surface to avoid cost to your business, everything else is table stakes

    Logo for Info-Tech.
    Logo for #iTRG.

    1

    Identify

    4

    Address

    Mitigate the risk surface by reducing the time across the phases ›Mitigate the risk by implementing:
    • patch systems & apps
    • compensating controls
    • systems and apps hardening
    • systems segregation
    Chart presenting an example of 'Risk Surface' with the axes 'Risk Level' and 'Time' with lines created by individual risks. The highlighted line begins in 'Critical' and eventually drops to low. The area between the line and your organization's risk tolerance is labelled 'Risk Surface'.

    Objective: reduce risk surface by reducing time to address

    Your organization's risk tolerance threshold

    Identify vulnerability management scanning tools & external threat intel sources (Mitre CVE, US-CERT, vendor alerts, etc.)Vulnerability information feeds:
    • scanning tool
    • external threat intel
    • internal threat intel

    2

    Analyze

    Assign actual risk (impact x urgency) to the organization based on current security posture

    Triage based on risk ›

    Your organization's risk tolerance threshold

    Risk tolerance threshold map with axes 'Impact' and 'Likelihood'. High levels of one and low levels of the other, or medium levels of both, is 'Medium', High level of one and Medium levels of the other is 'High', and High levels of both is 'Critical'.

    3

    Assess

    Plan risk mitigation strategy ›Consider:
    • risk tolerance
    • compensating controls
    • business impact

    Info-Tech’s vulnerability management methodology

    Focus on developing the most efficient processes.

    Vulnerability management isn’t “old school.”

    The vulnerability management market is relatively mature; however, vulnerability management remains a very relevant and challenging topic.

    Security practitioners are inundated with the advice they need to prioritize their vulnerabilities. Every vulnerability scanning vendor will proclaim their ability to prioritize the identified vulnerabilities.

    Third-party prioritization methodology can’t be effectively applied across all organizations. Each organization is too unique with different constraints. No tool or service can account for these variables.

    Equation to find 'Vulnerability Priority'.

    When patching is not possible, other options exist: configuration changes (hardening), defense-in-depth, compensating controls, and even elevated security monitoring are possible options.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Vulnerability management is not only patch management. Patching is only one aspect.

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    Key deliverable:

    Vulnerability Management SOP

    The Standard operating procedure (SOP) will comprise the end-to-end description of the program: roles & responsibilities, data flow, and expected outcomes of the program.

    Sample of the key deliverable, Vulnerability Management SOP.
    Vulnerability Management Policy

    Template for your vulnerability management policy.

    Sample of the Vulnerability Management Policy blueprint.Vulnerability Tracking Tool

    This tool offers a template to track vulnerabilities and how they are remedied.

    Sample of the Vulnerability Tracking Tool blueprint.
    Vulnerability Scanning RFP Template

    Request for proposal template for the selection of a vulnerability scanning tool.

    Sample of the Vulnerability Scanning RFP Template blueprint.Vulnerability Risk Assessment Tool

    Methodology to assess vulnerability risk by determining impact and likelihood.

    Sample of the Vulnerability Risk Assessment Tool blueprint.

    Blueprint benefits

    IT Benefits

    • A standardized, consistent methodology to assess, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities.
    • A risk-based approach that aligns with what’s important to the business.
    • A way of dealing with the high volumes of vulnerabilities that your scanning tool is reporting.
    • Identification of “where to start” in terms of vulnerability management.
    • Ability to not lose yourself in the patch madness but rather take a sound approach to scheduling and prioritizing patches and updates.
    • Knowledge of what to do when patching is simply not possible or feasible.

    Business Benefits

    • Alignment with IT in ensuring that business processes are only interrupted when absolutely necessary while maintaining a regular cadence of vulnerability remediation.
    • A consistent program that the business can plan around and predict when interruptions will occur.
    • IT’s new approach being integrated with existing IT operations processes, offering the most efficient yet expedient method of dealing with vulnerabilities.

    Info-Tech’s process can save significant financial resources

    PhaseMeasured Value
    Phase 1: Identify vulnerability sources
      Define the process, scope, roles, vulnerability sources, and current state
      • Consultant at $100 an hour for 16 hours = $1,600
    Phase 2: Triage vulnerabilities and assign urgencies
      Establish triaging and vulnerability evaluation process
      • Consultant at $100 an hour for 16 hours = $1,600
      Determine high-level business criticality and data classifications
      • Consultant at $100 an hour for 40 hours = $4,000
      Assign urgencies to vulnerabilities
      • Consultant at $100 an hour for 8 hours = $800
    Phase 3: Remediate vulnerabilities
      Prepare documentation for the vulnerability process
      • Consultant at $100 an hour for 8 hours = $800
      Establish defense-in-depth modelling
      • Consultant at $100 an hour for 24 hours = $2,400
      Identify remediation options and establish criteria for use
      • Consultant at $100 an hour for 40 hours = $4,000
      Formalize backup and testing procedures, including exceptions
      • Consultant at $100 an hour for 8 hours = $800
      Remediate vulnerabilities and verify
      • Consultant at $100 an hour for 24 hours = $2,400
    Phase 4: Continually improve the vulnerability management process
      Establish a metrics program for vulnerability management
      • Consultant at $100 an hour for 16 hours = $1,600
      Update vulnerability management policy
      • Consultant at $100 an hour for 8 hours = $800
      Develop a vulnerability scanning tool RFP
      • Consultant at $100 an hour for 40 hours = $4,000
      Develop a penetration test RFP
      • Consultant at $100 an hour for 40 hours = $4,000
    Potential financial savings from using Info-Tech resourcesPhase 1 ($1,600) + Phase 2 ($6,400) + Phase 3 ($10,400) + Phase 4 ($10,400) = $28,800

    Guided Implementation

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    A typical GI is between 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Phase 3

    Phase 4

    Call #1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges.

    Call #2: Discuss current state and vulnerability sources.

    Call #3: Identify triage methods and business criticality.

    Call #4:Review current defense-in-depth and discuss risk assessment.

    Call #5: Discuss remediation options and scheduling.

    Call #6: Review release and change management and continuous improvement.

    Call #7: Identify metrics, KPIs, and CSFs.

    Call #8: Review vulnerability management policy.

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Day 1Day 2Day 3Day 4Day 5
    Activities
    Identify vulnerability sources

    1.1 What is vulnerability management?

    1.2 Define scope and roles

    1.3 Cloud considerations for vulnerability management

    1.4 Vulnerability detection

    Triage and prioritize

    2.1 Triage vulnerabilities

    2.2 Determine high-level business criticality

    2.3 Consider current security posture

    2.4 Risk assessment of vulnerabilities

    Remediate vulnerabilities

    3.1 Assess remediation options

    3.2 Schedule and execute remediation

    3.3 Drive continuous improvement

    Measure and formalize

    4.1 Metrics, KPIs & CSFs

    4.2 Vulnerability Management Policy

    4.3 Select & implement a scanning tool

    4.4 Penetration testing

    Next Steps and Wrap-Up (offsite)

    5.1 Complete in-progress deliverables from previous four days

    5.2 Set up review time for workshop deliverables and to discuss next steps

    Deliverables
    1. Scope and boundary definition of vulnerability management program
    2. Responsibility assignment for vulnerability identification and remediation
    3. Monitoring and review process of third-party vulnerability sources
    4. Incident management and vulnerability convergence
    1. Methodology for evaluating identified vulnerabilities
    2. Identification of high-level business criticality
    3. Defined high-level data classifications
    4. Documented defense-in-depth controls
    5. Risk assessment criteria for impact and likelihood
    1. Documented risk assessment methodology and remediation options
    1. Defined metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs), and critical success factors (CSFs)
    2. Initial draft of vulnerability management policy
    3. Scanning tool selection criteria
    4. Introduction to penetration testing
    1. Completed vulnerability management standard operating procedure
    2. Defined vulnerability management risk assessment criteria
    3. Vulnerability management policy draft

    Implement Risk-Based Vulnerability Management

    Phase 1

    Identify Vulnerability Sources

    Phase 1

    1.1 What is vulnerability management?
    1.2 Define scope and roles
    1.3 Cloud considerations for vulnerability management
    1.4 Vulnerability detection

    Phase 2

    2.1 Triage vulnerabilities
    2.2 Determine high-level business criticality
    2.3 Consider current security posture
    2.4 Risk assessment of vulnerabilities

    Phase 3

    3.1 Assessing remediation options
    3.2 Scheduling and executing remediation
    3.3 Continuous improvement

    Phase 4

    4.1 Metrics, KPIs & CSFs
    4.2 Vulnerability management policy
    4.3 Select and implement a scanning tool
    4.4 Penetration testing

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    Establish a common understanding of vulnerability management, define the roles, scope, and information sources of vulnerability detection.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Security operations team
    • IT Security Manager
    • IT Director
    • CISO

    Step 1.1

    Vulnerability Management Defined

    Activities

    None for this section

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Establish a common understanding of vulnerability management and its place in the IT organization.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Security operations team
    • IT Security Manager
    • IT Director
    • CISO

    Outcomes of this step

    Foundational knowledge of vulnerability management in your organization.

    Identify vulnerability sources
    Step 1.1Step 1.2Step 1.3Step 1.4

    What is vulnerability management?

    It’s more than just patching.

    • Vulnerability management is the regular and ongoing practice of scanning an operating environment to uncover vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities can be outdated applications, unpatched operating systems and software, open ports, obsolete hardware, or any combination of these.
    • The scanning and detection of vulnerabilities is the first step. Planning and executing of remediation is next, along with the approach, prioritized sequence of events, and timing.
    • A vendor-supplied software patch or firmware update is often the easy answer, however, this is not always a viable solution. What if you can’t patch in a timely fashion? What if patching is not possible as it will break the application and bring down operations? What if no patch exists due to the age of the application or operating platform?

    “Most organizations do not have a formal process for vulnerability management.” (Morey Haber, VP of Technology, BeyondTrust, 2016)

    Effective vulnerability management

    It’s not easy, but it’s much harder without a process in place.
    • Effective vulnerability management requires a formal process for organizations to follow; without one, vulnerabilities are dealt with in an ad hoc fashion.
    • Patching isn’t the only solution, but it’s the one that often draws focus.
    • Responsibilities for the different aspects of vulnerability management are often unclear, such as for testing, remediation, and implementation.
    • Identifying new threats without proper vulnerability scanning tools can be a near-impossible task.
    • Determining which vulnerabilities are most urgent can be an inconsistent process, increasing the organizational risk.
    • Measuring the effectiveness of your vulnerability remediation activities can help you better manage resources in SecOps and ITOps. Your staff will be spending the appropriate effort on vulnerabilities that warrant that level of attention.

    You’re not just doing this for yourself. It’s also for your auditors.

    Many compliance and regulatory obligations require organizations to have thorough documentation of their vulnerability management practices.

    Vulnerability management revolves around your asset security services

    Diagram with 'Asset Security Services' at the center. On either side are 'Network Security Services' and 'Identity Security Services', all three of which flow up into 'Security Analytics | Security Incident Response', and all four share a symbiotic flow with 'Management' below and contribute to 'Mega Trend Mapping' above. Management is supported by 'Governance'.Vulnerabilities can be found primarily within your assets but also connect to your information risk management. These must be effectively managed as part of a holistic security program.

    Without management, vulnerabilities left unattended can be easy for attackers to exploit. It becomes difficult to identify the correct remediation option to mitigate against the vulnerabilities.

    Vulnerability management works in tandem with SecOps and ITOps

    Vulnerability Management Process Inputs/Outputs:
    'Vulnerability Management (Process and Tool)' outputs are 'Incident Management', 'Release Management', 'Change Management', 'IT Asset Management', 'Application Security Testing', 'Threat Intelligence', and 'Security Risk Management'; inputs are 'Vulnerability Disclosure', 'Threat Intelligence', and 'Security Risk Management'.

    Arrows denote direction of information feed

    Vulnerability management serves as the input into a number of processes for remediation, including:
    • Incident management, to deal with issues
    • Release management, for patch management
    • Change management, for change control
    • IT asset management, to track version information, e.g. for patching
    • Application security testing, for the verification of vulnerabilities

    A two-way data flow exists between vulnerability management and:

    • Security risk management, for the overall risk posture of the organization
    • Threat intelligence, as vulnerability management reveals only one of several threat vectors

    For additional information please refer to Info-Tech’s research for each area:

    • Vulnerability management can leverage your existing processes to gain an operational element for the program.
    • As you strive to mature each of the processes on their own, vulnerability management will benefit accordingly.
    • Review our research for each of these areas and speak to one of our analysts if you wish to improve any of the listed processes.

    Info-Tech’s Information Security Program Framework

    Vulnerability management is a component of the Infrastructure Security section of Security Management

    Information Security Framework with Level 1 and Level 2 capabilities in two main sections, 'Management' and 'Governance'. Level 2 capabilities are grouped within Level 1 capabilities.For more information, review our Build an Information Security Strategy blueprint, or speak to one of our analysts.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Vulnerability management is but one piece of the information security puzzle. Ensure that you have all the pieces!

    Case Study

    Logo for Cimpress.
    INDUSTRY: Manufacturing
    SOURCE: Cimpress, 2016

    One organization is seeing immediate benefits by formalizing its vulnerability management program.

    Challenge

    Cimpress was dealing with many challenges in regards to vulnerability management. Vulnerability scanning tools were used, but the reports that were generated often gave multiple vulnerabilities that were seen as critical or high and required many resources to help address them. Scanning was done primarily in an attempt to adhere to PCI compliance rather than to effectively enable security. After re-running some scans, Cimpress saw that some vulnerabilities had existed for an extended time period but were deemed acceptable.

    Solution

    The Director of Information Security realized that there was a need to greatly improve this current process. Guidelines and policies were formalized that communicated when scans should occur and what the expectations for remediations should be. Cimpress also built a tiered approach to prioritize vulnerabilities for remediation that is specific to Cimpress instead of relying on scanning tool reports.

    Results

    Cimpress found better management of the vulnerabilities within its system. There was no pushback to the adoption of the policies, and across the worldwide offices, business units have been proactively trying to understand if there are vulnerabilities. Vulnerability management has been expanded to vendors and is taken into consideration when doing any mergers and acquisitions. Cimpress continues to expand its program for vulnerability management to include application development and vulnerabilities within any existing legacy systems.

    Step 1.2

    Defining the scope and roles

    Activities
    • 1.2.1 Define the scope and boundary of your organization’s security program
    • 1.2.2 Assign responsibility for vulnerability identification and remediation

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Define and understand the scope and boundary of the security program. For example, does it include OT? Define roles and responsibilities for vulnerability identification and remediation

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Security operations team
    • IT Security Manager
    • IT Director
    • CISO

    Outcomes of this step

    Understand how far vulnerability management extends and what role each person in IT plays in the remediation of vulnerabilities

    Identify vulnerability sources
    Step 1.1Step 1.2Step 1.3Step 1.4

    Determine the scope of your security program

    This will help you adjust the depth and breadth of your vulnerability management program.
    • Determining the scope will help you decide how much organizational risk the vulnerability management program will oversee.
    • Scope can be defined along four aspects:
      • Data Scope – What data elements in your organization does your security program cover? How is data classified?
      • Physical Scope – What physical scope, such as geographies, does the security program cover?
      • Organizational Scope – How are business units engaged with security initiatives? Does the scope cover all subsidiary organizations?
      • IT Scope – What parts of the organization does IT cover? Does their coverage include operational technology (OT) and industrial control systems (ICS)?
    Stock image of figures standing in connected circles.

    1.2.1 Define the scope and boundary of your organization’s security program

    60 minutes

    Input: List of Data Scope, Physical Scope, Organization Scope, and IT Scope

    Output: Defined scope and boundaries of the IT security program

    Materials: Whiteboard/Flip Charts, Sticky Notes, Markers, Vulnerability Management SOP Template

    Participants: Business stakeholders, IT leaders, Security team members

    1. On a whiteboard, write the headers: Data Scope, Physical Scope, Organizational Scope, and IT Scope.
    2. Give each group member a handful of sticky notes. Ask them to write down as many items as possible for the organization that could fall under one of the four scope buckets.
    3. In a group, discuss the sticky notes and the rationale for including them. Discuss your security-related locations, data, people, and technologies, and define their scope and boundaries.

    The goal is to identify what your vulnerability management program is responsible for and document it.

    Consider the following:

    How is data being categorized and classified? How are business units engaged with security initiatives? How are IT systems connected to each other? How are physical locations functioning in terms of information security management?

    Download the Vulnerability Management SOP Template

    Assets are part of the scope definition

    An inventory of IT assets is necessary if there is to be effective vulnerability management.

    • Organizations need an up-to-date and comprehensive asset inventory for vulnerability management. This is due to multiple reasons:
      • When vulnerabilities are announced, they will need to be compared to an inventory to determine if the organization has any relevant systems or versions.
      • It indicates where all IT assets can be found both physically and logically.
      • Asset inventories typically have owners assigned to the assets and systems whose responsibility it is to carry out remediations for vulnerabilities.
    • Furthermore, asset inventories can provide insight into where data can be found within the organization. This is extremely useful within a formal data classification program, which plays a large factor in vulnerability management.
    If you need assistance building your asset inventory, review Info-Tech’s Implement Hardware Asset Management and Implement Software Asset Management blueprints.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Create a formal IT asset inventory before continuing with the rest of this project. Otherwise, you risk being at the mercy of a weak vulnerability management program.

    Assign responsibility for vulnerability identification and remediation

    Determine who is critical to effectively detecting and managing vulnerabilities.
    • Some of the remediation steps will involve members of IT management to identify the true organizational risk of a vulnerability.
    • Vulnerability remediation comes in different shapes and sizes. In addition to patching, this can include implementing compensating controls, server and application hardening, or the segregating of vulnerable systems.
      • Who carries out each of these activities? Who coordinates the activities and tracks them to ensure completion?
    • The people involved may be members outside of the security team, such as members from IT operations, infrastructure, and applications. The specific roles that each of these groups play should be clearly identified.
    Stock image of many connected profile photos in a cloud network.

    1.2.2 Assign responsibility for vulnerability identification and remediation

    60 minutes

    Input: Sample list of vulnerabilities and requisite actions from each group, High-level organizational chart with area functions

    Output: Defined set of roles and responsibilities for member groups

    Materials: Vulnerability Management SOP Template

    Participants: CIO, CISO, IT Management representatives for each area of IT

    1. Display the table of responsibilities that need to be assigned.
    2. List all the positions within the IT security team.
    3. Map these to the positions that require IT security team members.
    4. List all positions that are part of the IT team.
    5. Map these to the positions that require IT team members.

    If your organization does not have a dedicated IT security team, you can perform this exercise by mapping the relevant IT staff to the different positions shown on the right.

    Download the Vulnerability Management SOP TemplateSample of the Roles and Responsibilities table from the Vulnerability Management SOP Template.

    Step 1.3

    Cloud considerations for vulnerability management

    Activities

    None for this section.

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Review cloud considerations for vulnerability management

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Security operations team
    • IT Security Manager
    • IT Director
    • CISO

    Outcomes of this step

    Understand the various types of cloud offerings and the implications (and limitations) of vulnerability management in a cloud environment.

    Identify vulnerability sources
    Step 1.1Step 1.2Step 1.3Step 1.4

    Cloud considerations

    Cloud will change your approach to vulnerability management.
    • There will be a heavy dependence on the cloud service provider to ensure that vulnerabilities in their foundational technologies have been addressed.
    • Depending on the level of “as-a-Service,” customers will have varying degrees of control and visibility into the underlying operations.
    • With vendor acquiescence, you can set your tool to scan a given cloud environment, depending on how much visibility you have into their environment based on the service you have purchased.
    • Due to compliance obligations of their customers, there is a growing trend among cloud providers to allow more scanning of cloud environments.
    • In the absence of customer scanning capability, vendors may offer attestation of vulnerability management and remediation.
    Table outlining who has control, between the 'Organization' and the 'Vendor', of different cloud capabilities in different cloud strategies.

    For more information, see Info-Tech Research Group’s Document Your Cloud Strategy blueprint.

    Cloud environment scanning

    Cloud scanning is becoming a more common necessity but still requires special consideration.

    An organization’s cloud environment is just an extension of its own environment. As such, cloud environments need to be scanned for vulnerabilities.

    Private Cloud
    If your organization owns a private cloud, these environments can be tested normally.
    Public Cloud
    Performing vulnerability testing against public, third-party cloud environments is an area experiencing rapid growth and general acceptance, although customer visibility will still be limited.

    In many cases, a customer must rely on the vendor’s assurance that vulnerabilities are being addressed in a sufficient manner.

    Security standards’ compliance requirements are driving the need for cloud suppliers to validate and assure that they are appropriately scanning for and remediating vulnerabilities.

    Infrastructure- or Platform-as-a-Service (IaaS or PaaS) Environments
    • There is a general trend for PaaS and IaaS vendors to allow testing if given due notice.
    • Your contract with the cloud vendor or the vendor’s terms and conditions will outline the permissibility of customer vulnerability scanning. In some cases, a cloud vendor will deny the ability to do vulnerability scanning if they already provide a solution as part of their service.
    • Always ensure that the vendor is aware of your vulnerability scanning activity so that false positives aren’t triggering their security measures as possible denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
    Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Environments
    • SaaS offers very limited visibility to the services behind the software that the customer sees. You therefore cannot test for patch levels or vulnerabilities.
    • SaaS customers must rely exclusively on the provider for the regular scanning and remediation of vulnerabilities in the back-end technologies supporting the SaaS application.
    • You can only test the connection points to SaaS environments. This involves trying to figure out what you can see, e.g. looking for encrypted traffic.

    Certain testing (e.g. DoS or load testing) will be very limited by your cloud vendor. Cloud vendors won’t open themselves to testing that would possibly impact their operations.

    Step 1.4

    Vulnerability detection

    Activities
    • 1.4.1 Develop a monitoring and review process of third-party vulnerability sources
    • 1.4.2 Incident management and vulnerability management

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Create an inventory of your vulnerability monitoring capability and third-party vulnerability information sources.

    Determine how incident management and vulnerability management interoperate.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Security operations team
    • IT Security Manager
    • IT Director
    • CISO

    Outcomes of this step

    Catalog of vulnerability information data sources. Understanding of the intersection of incident management and vulnerability management.

    Identify vulnerability sources
    Step 1.1Step 1.2Step 1.3Step 1.4

    Vulnerability detection

    Vulnerabilities can be identified through numerous mediums.

    Info-Tech has determined the following to be the four most common ways to identify vulnerabilities.

    Vulnerability Assessment and Scanning Tools
    • Computer programs that function to identify and assess security vulnerabilities and weaknesses within computers, computer systems, applications, or networks.
    • Using a known vulnerability database, the tool scans targeted hosts or systems to identify flaws and generate reports and recommendations based on the results.
    • There are four main types of tools under this category: network and operating system vulnerability scanners, application scanning and testing tools, web application scanners, and exploitation tools.
    Penetration Tests
    • The act of identifying vulnerabilities on computers, computer systems, applications, or networks followed by testing of the vulnerability to validate the findings.
    • Penetration tests are considered a service that is offered by third-parties in which a variety of products, tools, and methods are used to exploit systems and gain access to data.
    Open Source Monitoring
    • New vulnerabilities are detected daily with each vulnerability’s information being uploaded to an information-sharing platform to enable other organizations to be able to identify the same vulnerability on their systems.
    • Open source platforms are used to alert and distribute information on newly discovered vulnerabilities to security professionals.
    Security Incidents
    • Any time an incident response plan is called into action to mitigate an incident, there should be formal communication with the vulnerability management team.
    • Any IT incident an organization experiences should provide a feed for analysis into your vulnerability management program.

    Automate with a vulnerability scanning tool

    Vulnerabilities are too numerous for manual scanning and detection.
    • Vulnerability management is not only the awareness of the existence of vulnerabilities but that they are actively present in your environment.
    • A vulnerability scanner will usually report dozens, if not hundreds, of vulnerabilities on a regular and recurring basis. Typical IT environments have several dozen, if not hundreds, of servers. We haven’t even considered the amount of network equipment or the hundreds of user workstations in an environment.
    • This tool will give you information of the presence of a vulnerability in your environment and the host on which the vulnerability exists. This includes information on the version of software that contains a vulnerability and whether you are running that version. The tool will also report on the criticality of the vulnerability based on industry criticality ratings.
    • The tools are continually updated by the vendor with the latest definition updates for the latest vulnerabilities out there. This ensures you are always scanning for the greatest number of potential vulnerabilities.
    Automation requires oversight.
    1. Vulnerability scanners bring great automation to the task of scanning and detecting vulnerabilities in high numbers.
    2. Vulnerability scanners, however, do not have your level of intelligence. Any compensating controls, network segregation, or other risk mitigation features that you have in place will not be known by the tool.
    3. Determining the risk and urgency of a vulnerability within the context of your specific environment will still require internal review by you or your SecOps team.

    For guidance on tool selection

    Refer to section 4.3 Selecting and Implement a Scanning Tool in this blueprint.

    Vulnerability scanning tool considerations

    Select a vulnerability scanning tool with the features you need to be effective.
    • Vulnerability scanning tool selection can be an exciting and confusing process. You will need to consider what features you desire in a tool and whether you want the tool to go beyond just scanning and reporting.
    • In addition to vulnerability scanning, some tools will integrate with your IT service management (service desk ticketing system) tool and asset, configuration, and change management modules. This can facilitate the necessary workflow that the remediation process follows once a vulnerability is discovered.
    • A number of vulnerability scanning tool vendors have started offering remediation as part of their software features. This includes the automation and orchestration functionality and configuration and asset management to track its remediation activities.
    • A side benefit of the asset discovery feature in vulnerability scanning tools is that it can help enhance an organization’s asset inventory and license compliance, particularly in cases where end users are able to install software on their workstations.
    Stock photo of a smartphone scanning a barcode.

    For guidance on tool vendors

    Visit SoftwareReviews for information on vulnerability management tools and vendors.

    Vulnerability scanning tool best practices

    How often should scans be performed?

    One-off scans provide snapshots in time. Repeated scans over time provide tracking for how systems are changing and how well patches are being applied and software is being updated.

    The results of a scan (asset inventory, configuration data, and vulnerability data) are basic information needed to understand your security posture. This data needs to be as up to date as possible.

    ANALYST PERSPECTIVE: Organizations should look for continuous scanning

    Continuous scanning is the concept of providing continual scanning of your systems so any asset, configuration, or vulnerability information is up to date. Most vendors will advertise continuous scanning but you need to be skeptical of how this feature is met.

    Continuous Scanning Methods

    Continuous agent scanning

    Real-time scanning that is completed through agent-based scanning. Provides real-time understanding of system changes.

    On-demand scanning

    Cyclical scanning is the method where once you’re done scanning an area, you start it again. This is usually done because doing some scans on some areas of your network take time. How long the scan takes depends on the scan itself. How often you perform a scan depends on how long a scan takes. For example, if a scan takes a day, you perform a daily scan.

    Cloud-based scanning

    Cloud-scanning-as-a-Service can provide hands-free continuous monitoring of your systems. This is usually priced as a subscription model.

    Vulnerability scanning tool best practices

    Where to perform a scan.

    What should be scannedHow to point a scanner
    The general idea is that you want to scan pretty much everything. Here are considerations for three environments:
    Mobile Devices

    You need to scan mobile devices for vulnerabilities, but the problem is these can be hard to scan and often come and go on your network. There are always going to be some devices that aren’t on the network when scanning occurs.

    Several ways to scan mobile devices:

    • Intercept the device when it remotes into your network using a VPN. You catch the device with a remote scan. This can only be done if a VPN is required.
    • An agent-based approach can be used for mobile devices. Locally installed software gives the information needed to evaluate the security posture of a device. Discernibly, concerns around device processing, memory, and network bandwidth come into play. Ease of installation becomes key for agents.
    Virtualization
    • In a virtual environment, you will have servers being dynamically spun up. Ensure your tool is able to scan these new servers automatically.
    • Often, vulnerability scanning tool providers will restrict scanning to preapproved scanners. Look for tools that are preapproved by the VM vendors.
    Cloud Environments
    • You can set your tool to scan a given cloud environment. The main concern here is who owns the cloud. If it is a private cloud, there is little concern.
    • If it is a third-party cloud (AWS, Azure, etc.) you need to confirm with the cloud service provider that scanning of your cloud environment can occur.
    • There is a trend to allow more scanning of cloud environments.
    • You need to tell the scanner an IP address, a group of IP addresses, an asset group, or a combination of those.
    • You can categorize by functional classifications – internet-facing servers, workstations, network devices, etc., or by organizational structure – Finance, HR, Legal, etc.
    • If you have a strong change management system, you can better hone when and where to perform a scan based on actual changes.
    • You can set the number of concurrent outbound TCP connections that are being made. For example, set the tool so it sends out to 10 ports at a time, rather than pinging at 64k ports on a machine, which would flood the NIC.
    • Side Note: Flooding a host with pings from a scanning tool can be done to find out DoS thresholds on a machine. There are no bandwidth concerns for a network DoS, however, because the packets are so small.

    Vulnerability scanning tool best practices

    Communication and measurement

    Pre-Scan Communication With Users

    • It is always important to inform owners and users of systems that a scan will be happening.
    • Although it is unlikely any performance issues will arise, it is important to notify end users of potential impact.
    • Local admins or system owners may have controls in place that stop vulnerability scans and you need to inform the owners so that they can safelist the scanner you will be using.
    Vulnerability Scanning Tool Tracking Metrics
    • Vulnerability score by operating system, application, or organization division.
      • This provides a look at the widely accepted severity of the vulnerability as it relates across the organization’s systems.
    • Most vulnerable applications and application version.
      • This provides insight into how outdated applications are creating risk exposure for an organization.
      • This will also provide metrics on the effectiveness of your patching program.
    • Number of assets scanned within the last number of days.
      • This provides visibility into how often your assets are being scanned and thus protected.
    • Number of unowned devices or unapproved applications.
      • This metric will track how many unowned devices or unapproved applications may be on your network. Unowned devices may be rogue devices or just consultant/contractor devices.

    Third-party vulnerability information sources

    IT security forums and mailing lists are another source of vulnerability information.

    Proactively identify new vulnerabilities as they are announced.

    By monitoring for vulnerabilities as they are announced through industry alerts and open-source mechanisms, it is possible to identify vulnerabilities beyond your scanning tool’s penetration tests.

    Common sources:
    • Vendor websites and mailing lists
      • Vendors are the trusted sources for vulnerability and patch information on their products, particularly with new industry vulnerability disclosure requirements. Vendors are the most familiar with their products, downloads are most likely malware free, and additional information is often included.
      • There are some issues: vendors won’t announce a vulnerability until a patch is created, which creates a potential unknown risk exposure; numerous vendor sites will have to be monitored continually.
    • Third-party websites
      • A non-vendor site providing information on vulnerabilities. They often will cover a specific technology or an industry section, becoming a potential “one-stop shop” for some. They will often provide vulnerability information that is augmented with different remediation recommendations faster than vendors.
      • However, it’s more likely that malicious code could be downloaded and it will often not be comprehensive information on patching.
    • Third-party mailing lists, newsgroups, live paid subscriptions, and live open-source feeds
      • These are alerting and notification services for the detection and dissemination of vulnerability information. They provide information on the latest and most critical vulnerabilities, e.g. US-CERT Cybersecurity Alerts.
    • Vulnerability databases
      • These usually consist of dedicated databases on vulnerabilities. They perform the hard work of identifying and aggregating vulnerability and patch information into a central repository for end-user consumption. The commentary features on these databases provide excellent insight for practitioners, e.g. National Vulnerability Database (NVD).
    Stock photo of a student checking a bulletin board.

    Third-party vulnerability information sources

    IT security forums and mailing lists are another source of vulnerability information.

    Third-party sources for vulnerabilities

    • Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB)
      • An open-source database that is run independently of any vendors.
    • Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE)
      • Free, international dictionary of publicly known information security vulnerabilities and exposures.
    • National Vulnerability Database (NVD)
      • Through NIST, the NVD is the US government’s repository of vulnerabilities and includes product names, flaws, and any impact metrics.
      • The National Checklist Repository Program (NCRP), also provided by NIST, provides security checklists for configurations of operating systems and applications.
      • The Center for Internet Security, a separate entity unrelated to NIST, provides configuration benchmarks that are often referenced by the NCRP.
    • Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP)
      • OWASP is another free project helping to expose vulnerabilities within software.
    • US-CERT National Cyber Alert System (US-CERT Alerts)
      • Cybersecurity Alerts – Provide timely information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits.
      • Cybersecurity Tips – Provide advice about common security issues for the general public.
      • Cybersecurity Bulletins – Provide weekly summaries of new vulnerabilities. Patch information is provided when available.
    • US-CERT Vulnerability Notes Database (US-CERT Vulnerability Notes)
      • Database of searchable security vulnerabilities that were deemed not critical enough to be covered under US-CERT Alerts. Note that the NVD covers both US-CERT Alerts and US-CERT Notes.
    • Open Vulnerability Assessment Language (OVAL)
      • Coding language for security professionals to discuss vulnerability checking and configuration issues. Vulnerabilities are identified using tests that are disseminated in OVAL definitions (XML executables that can be used by end users).

    1.4.1 Develop a monitoring and review process for third-party vulnerability sources

    60 minutes

    Input: Third-party resources list

    Output: Process for review of third-party vulnerability sources

    Materials: Whiteboard, Whiteboard markers, Vulnerability Management SOP Template

    Participants: IT Security Manager, SecOps team members, ITOps team members, CISO

    1. Identify what third-party resources are useful and relevant.
    2. Shortlist your third-party sources.
    3. Identify what is the best way to receive information from a third party.
    4. Document the method to receive or check information from the third-party source.
    5. Identify who is responsible for maintaining third-party vulnerability information sources
    6. Capture this information in the Vulnerability Management SOP Template.
    Download the Vulnerability Management SOP TemplateSample of the Third Party Vulnerability Monitoring tables from the Vulnerability Management SOP Template.

    Incidents and vulnerability management

    Incidents can also be a sources of vulnerabilities.

    When any incident occurs, for example:

    • A security incident, such as malware detected on a machine
    • An IT incident, such as an application becomes unresponsive
    • A crisis occurs, like a worker accident

    There can be underlying vulnerabilities that need to be processed.

    Three Types of IT Incidents exist:
    1. Information Security Incident
    2. IT Incident and/or Problem
    3. Crisis

    Note: You need to have developed your various incident response plans to develop information feeds to the vulnerability mitigation process.
    If you are missing an incident response plan, take a look at Info-Tech’s Related Resources.

    Info-Tech Related Resources:
    If you do not have a formalized information security incident management program, take a look at Info-Tech’s blueprint Develop and Implement a Security Incident Management Program.

    If you do not have a formalized problem management process, take a look at Info-Tech’s blueprint Incident and Problem Management.

    If you do not have a formalized IT incident management process, take a look at Info-Tech’s blueprint Develop and Implement a Security Incident Management Program.

    If you do not have formalized crisis management, take a look at Info-Tech’s blueprint Implement Crisis Management Best Practices.

    1.4.2 Incident management and vulnerability management

    60 minutes

    Input: Existing incident response processes, Existing crisis communications plans

    Output: Alignment of vulnerability management program with existing incident management processes

    Materials: Whiteboard, Whiteboard markers, Vulnerability Management SOP Template

    Participants: IT Security Manager, SecOps team members, ITOps team members, including tiers 1, 2, and 3, CISO, CIO

    1. Inventory what incident response plans the organization has. These include:
      1. Information Security Incident Response Plan
      2. IT Incident Plan
      3. Problem Management Plan
      4. Crisis Management Plan
    2. Identify what part of those plans contains the post-response recap or final analysis.
    3. Formalize a communication process between the incident response plan and the vulnerability mitigation process.

    Note: Most incident processes will cover some sort of root cause analysis and investigation of the incident. If a vulnerability of any kind is detected within this analysis it needs to be reported on and treated as a detected vulnerability, thus warranting the full vulnerability mitigation process.

    Download the Vulnerability Management SOP Template

    Implement Risk-Based Vulnerability Management

    Phase 2

    Triage & prioritize

    Phase 1

    1.1 What is vulnerability management?
    1.2 Define scope and roles
    1.3 Cloud considerations for vulnerability management
    1.4 Vulnerability detection

    Phase 2

    2.1 Triage vulnerabilities
    2.2 Determine high-level business criticality
    2.3 Consider current security posture
    2.4 Risk assessment of vulnerabilities

    Phase 3

    3.1 Assessing remediation options
    3.2 Scheduling and executing remediation
    3.3 Continuous improvement

    Phase 4

    4.1 Metrics, KPIs & CSFs
    4.2 Vulnerability management policy
    4.3 Select and implement a scanning tool
    4.4 Penetration testing

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    Examine the elements that you will use to triage and analyze vulnerabilities, prioritizing using a risk-based approach, and prepare for remediation options.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • IT Security Manager
    • SecOps team members
    • ITOps team members, including tiers 1, 2, and 3
    • CISO
    • CIO

    Step 2.1

    Triage vulnerabilities

    Activities
    • 2.1.1 Evaluate your identified vulnerabilities

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Review your vulnerability information sources and determine a methodology that will be used to consistently evaluate vulnerabilities as your scanning tool alerts you to them.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Security Manager
    • SecOps team members
    • ITOps team members, including tiers 1, 2, and 3
    • CISO
    • CIO

    Outcomes of this step

    A consistent, documented process for the evaluation of vulnerabilities in your environment.

    Triage & prioritize
    Step 2.1Step 2.2Step 2.3Step 2.4

    Triaging vulnerabilities

    Use Info-Tech’s methodology to allocate urgencies to your vulnerabilities to assign the appropriate resources to each one.

    When evaluating numerous vulnerabilities, use the following three factors to help determine the urgency of vulnerabilities:

    • The intrinsic qualities of the vulnerability
    • The business criticality of the affected asset
    • The sensitivity of the data stored on the affected asset

    Intrinsic qualities of the vulnerability — Vulnerabilities need to be examined for the inherent risk they pose specifically to the organization, which includes if an exploit has been identified or if the industry views this as a serious and likely threat.

    Business criticality of the affected asset — Assets with vulnerabilities need to be assessed for their criticality to the business. Vulnerabilities on systems that are critical to business operations or customer interactions are usually top of mind.

    Sensitivity of the data of the affected asset — Beyond just the criticality of the business, there must be consideration of the sensitivity of the data that may be compromised or modified as a result of any vulnerabilities.

    Info-Tech Insight

    This methodology allows you to determine urgency of vulnerabilities, but your remediation approach needs to be risk-based, within the context of your organization.

    Triage your vulnerabilities, filter out the noise

    Triaging enables your vulnerability management program to focus on what it should focus on.

    Use the Info-Tech Vulnerability Mitigation Process Template to define how to triage vulnerabilities as they first appear.

    Triaging is an important step in vulnerability management, whether you are facing ten to tens of thousands of vulnerability notifications.
    Many scanning tools already provide the capability to compare known vulnerabilities against existing assets through integration with the asset inventory.

    There are two major use cases for this process:
    1. For organizations that have identified vulnerabilities but do not know their own systems well enough. This can be due to a lack of a formal asset inventory.
    2. For proactive organizations that are regularly staying up to date with industry announcements regarding vulnerabilities. Once an alert has been made publicly, this process can assist in confirming if the vulnerability is relevant to the organization.
    The Info-Tech methodology for initial triaging of vulnerabilities:
    Flowchart of the Info-Tech methodology for initial triaging of vulnerabilities, beginning with 'Vulnerability has been identified' and ending with either 'Vulnerability has been triaged' or 'No action needed'.

    Even if neither of these use cases apply to your organization, triaging still addresses the issues of false positives. Triaging provides a quick way to determine if vulnerabilities are relevant.

    After eliminating the noise, evaluate your vulnerabilities to determine urgency

    Consider the intrinsic risk to the organization.

    Is there an associated, verified exploit?
    • For a vulnerability to become a true threat to the organization, it must be exploited to cause damage. In today’s threat landscape, exploit kits are sold online that allow individuals with low technical knowledge to exploit a vulnerability.
    • Not all vulnerabilities have an associated exploit, but this does not mean that these vulnerabilities can be left alone. In many cases, it is just a matter of time before an exploit is created.
    • Another point to consider is that while exploits can exist theoretically, they may not be verified. Vulnerabilities always pose some level of risk, but if there are no known verified exploits, there is less risk attached.
    Is there a CVSS base score of 7.0 or higher?
    • Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is an open-source industry scoring method to assess the potential severity of vulnerabilities.
    • CVSS takes into account: attack vector, complexity, privileges required, user interaction, scope, confidentiality impact, integrity impact, and availability impact.
    • Vulnerabilities that have a score of 4.0 or lower are classified as low vulnerabilities, while scores between 4.0 and 6.9 are put in the medium category. Scores of 7 or higher are in the high and critical categories. As we will review in the Risk Assessment section, you will want to immediately deal with high and critical vulnerabilities.
    Is there potential for significant lateral movement?
    • Even though a vulnerability may appear to be part of an inconsequential asset, it is important to consider whether it can be leveraged to gain access to other areas of the network or system by an attacker.
    • Another consideration should be whether the vulnerability can be exploited by remote or local access. Remote exploits pose a greater risk as this can mean that attackers can perform an exploit from any location. Local exploits carry less risk, although the risk of insider threats should be considered here as well.

    2.1.1 Evaluate your identified vulnerabilities

    60 minutes

    Input: Visio workflow of Info-Tech’s vulnerability management process

    Output: Adjusted workflow to reflect your current processes, Vulnerability Tracking Tool

    Materials: Whiteboard, Whiteboard markers, Vulnerability Management SOP Template

    Participants: IT Security Manager, SecOps team members, ITOps team members, including tiers 1, 2, and 3, CISO, CIO

    Using the criteria from the previous slide, Info-Tech has created a methodology to evaluate your vulnerabilities by examining their intrinsic qualities.

    The methodology categorizes the vulnerabilities into high, medium, and low risk importance categorizations, before assigning final urgency scores in the later steps.

    1. Review the evaluation process in the Vulnerability Management Workflow library.
    2. Determine if this process makes sense for the organization; otherwise, change the flow to include any other considerations of process flows.
    3. As this process is used to evaluate vulnerabilities, document vulnerabilities to an importance category. This can be done in the Vulnerability Tracking Tool or using a similar internal vulnerability tracking document, if one exists.

    Download the Vulnerability Management SOP Template

    Step 2.2

    Determine high-level business criticality

    Activities
    • 2.2.1 Determine high-level business criticality
    • 2.2.2 Determine your high-level data classifications

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Determining high-level business criticality and data classifications will help ensure that IT security is aligned with what is critical to the business. This will be very important when decisions are made around vulnerability risk and the urgency of remediation action.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Security Manager
    • SecOps team members
    • CISO

    Outcomes of this step

    Understanding and consistency in how business criticality and business data is assessed by IT in the vulnerability management process.

    Triage & prioritize
    Step 2.1Step 2.2Step 2.3Step 2.4

    Understanding business criticality is key to determining vulnerability urgency

    Prioritize operations that are truly critical to the operation of the business, and understand how they would be impacted by an exploited vulnerability.

    Use the questions below to help assess which operations are critical for the business to continue functioning.

    For example, email is often thought of as a business-critical operation when this is not always the case. It is important to the business, but as regular operations can continue for some time without it, it would not be considered extremely business critical.

    Questions to askDescription
    Is there a hard-dollar impact from downtime?This refers to when revenue or profits are directly impacted by a business disruption. For example, when an online ordering system is compromised and shut down, it impacts sales, and therefore, revenue.
    Is there an impact on goodwill/ customer trust?If downtime means delays in service delivery or otherwise impacts goodwill, there is an intangible impact on revenue that may make the associated systems mission critical.
    Is regulatory compliance a factor?Depending on the circumstances of the vulnerabilities, it can be a violation of regulatory compliance and would cause significant fines.
    Is there a health or safety risk?Some operations are critical to health and safety. For example, medical organizations have operations that are necessary to ensure that individuals’ health and safety are maintained. An exploited vulnerability that prevents these operations can directly impact the lives of these individuals.
    Don’t start from scratch – your disaster recovery plan (DRP) may have a business impact analysis (BIA) that can provide insight into which applications and operations are considered business critical.

    Analyst Perspective

    When assessing the criticality of business operations, most core business applications may be deemed business critical over the long term.

    Consider instead what the impact is over the first 24 or 48 hours of downtime.

    2.2.1 Determine high-level business criticality

    120 minutes; less time if a Disaster recovery plan business impact analysis exists

    Input: List of business operations, Insight into business operations impacts to the business

    Output: List of business operations and their criticality and impact to the business

    Materials: Vulnerability Management SOP Template

    Participants: Participants from the business, IT Security Manager, CISO, CIO

    1. List your core business operations at a high level.
    2. Use a High, Medium, or Low ranking to prioritize the business operations based on mission-critical criteria and the impact of the vulnerability.
    3. When using the process flow, consider if the vulnerability directly affects any of these business operations and move through the process flow based on the corresponding High, Medium, or Low ranking.
    Example prioritization of business operations for a manufacturing company:Questions to ask:
    1. Is there a hard-dollar impact from downtime?
    2. Is there impact on goodwill or customer trust?
    3. Is regulatory compliance a factor?
    4. Is there a health or safety risk?

    Download the Vulnerability Management SOP Template

    Determine vulnerability urgency by its data classification

    Consider how to classify your data based on if the Confidentiality, Integrity, or Availability (CIA) is compromised.

    To properly classify your data, consider how the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of that data would be affected if it were to be exploited by a vulnerability. Review the table below for an explanation for each objective.
    Confidentiality

    Preserving authorized restrictions on information access and disclosure, including means for protecting personal privacy and proprietary information.

    Integrity

    Guarding against improper information modification or destruction, and ensuring information non-repudiation and authenticity.

    Availability

    Ensuring timely and reliable access to and use of information.

    Each piece of data should be ranked as High, medium, or low across confidentiality, integrity, and availability based on adverse effect.Arrow pointing right.Low — Limited adverse effect

    Moderate — Serious adverse effect

    High — Severe or catastrophic adverse effect

    If you wish to build a whole data classification methodology, refer to our Discover and Classify Your Data blueprint.

    How to determine data classification when CIA differs:

    The overall ranking of the data will be impacted by the highest objective’s ranking.

    For example, if confidentiality and availability are low, but integrity is high, the overall impact is high.

    This process was developed in part by Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 199.

    2.2.2 Determine your high-level data classifications

    120 minutes, less time if data classification already exists

    Input: Knowledge of data use and sensitivity

    Output: Adjusted workflow to reflect your current processes, Vulnerability Tracking Tool

    Materials: Whiteboard, Whiteboard markers, Vulnerability Management SOP Template

    Participants: IT Security Manager, CISO, CIO

    If your organization has formal data classification in place, it should be leveraged to determine the high, medium, and low rankings necessary for the process flows. However, if there is no formal data classification in place, the process below can be followed:

    1. List common assets or applications that are prone to vulnerabilities.
    2. Consider the data that is on these devices and provide a high (severe or catastrophic adverse effect), medium (serious adverse effect), or low (limited adverse effect) ranking based on confidentiality, availability, and integrity.
      1. Use the table on the previous slide to assist in providing the ranking.
      2. Remember that it is the highest ranking that dictates the overall ranking of the data.
    3. Document which data belongs in each of the categories to provide contextual evidence.

    Download the Vulnerability Management SOP Template

    This process should be part of your larger data classification program. If you need assistance in building this out, review the Info-Tech research, Discover and Classify Your Data.

    Step 2.3

    Consider current security posture

    Activities
    • 2.3.1 Document your defense-in-depth controls

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Your defense-in-depth controls are the existing layers of security technology that protects your environment. These are relevant when considering the urgency and risk of vulnerabilities in your environment, as they will mitigate some of the risk.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Security Manager
    • SecOps team members
    • ITOps team members, including tiers 1, 2, and 3
    • CISO
    • CIO

    Outcomes of this step

    Understanding and documentation of your current defense-in-depth controls.

    Triage & prioritize
    Step 2.1Step 2.2Step 2.3Step 2.4

    Review your current security posture

    What you have today matters.
    • In most cases, your vulnerability scanning tool alone will not have the context of your security posture in the results of its scans. This can skew the true urgency of detected vulnerabilities in your environment.
    • What you have in place today is what comprises your organization’s overall security posture. This bears high relevance to the determination of the risk that a vulnerability poses to your environment.
    • Elements such as enterprise architecture and defense in depth mechanisms should be factored into determining the risk of a vulnerability and what kind of immediacy is warranted to address it.
    • Details of your current security posture will also contribute to the assessment and selection of remediation options.
    Stock image of toy soldiers split into two colours, facing eachother down.

    Enterprise architecture considerations

    What does your network look like?
    • Most organizations have a network topology that has been put in place with operational needs in mind. These includes specific vLANs or subnets, broadcast domains, or other methods of traffic segregation.
    • The firewall and network ACLs (access control lists) will manage traffic and the routes that data packets follow to traverse a network.
    • Organizations may physically separate data network types, for example, a network for IT services and one for operational technology (OT)(OT is often known as ICS (industrial control systems) or SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition)) or other types of production technology.
    • The deployment of distribution and access switches across an enterprise can also be a factor, where a flatter network will have fewer network devices within the topology.
    • In a directory services environment such as Windows Active Directory, servers and applications can be segregated by domains and trust relationships, organizational units, and security groups.
    What’s the relevance to vulnerability management?

    For a vulnerability to be exploited, a malicious actor must find a way to access the vulnerable system to make use of the vulnerability in question.

    Any enterprise architecture characteristics that you have in place may lessen the probability of a successful vulnerability exploit.

    This may potentially “buy time” for SecOps to address and remediate the vulnerability.

    Defense-in-depth

    Defense-in-depth provides extra layers of protection to the organization.

    • Defense-in-depth refers to the coordination of security controls to add layers of security to the organization.
      • This means that even if attackers are able to get past one control or layer, they are hindered by additional security.
    • Defense-in-depth is distinct from the previous section on enterprise architecture as these are security controls put in place with the purpose of being lines of defense within your security posture.
    • This can be extremely useful in managing vulnerabilities; thus, it is important to establish the existing defense-in-depth controls. By establishing the base model for your defense-in-depth, it will allow you to leverage these controls to manage vulnerabilities.
    • Controls are typically distributed across endpoints, network infrastructure, servers, and physical security.

    Note: Defense-in-depth controls do not entirely mitigate vulnerability risk. They provide a way in which the vulnerability cannot be exploited, but it continues to exist on the application. This must be kept in mind as the controls or applications themselves change, as it can re-open the vulnerability and cause potential problems.

    Examples of defense-in-depth controls can consist of any of the following:
    • Antivirus software
    • Authentication security
    • Multi-factor authentication
    • Firewalls
    • Demilitarized zones (DMZ)
    • Sandboxing
    • Network zoning
    • Application whitelisting
    • Access control lists
    • Intrusion detection & prevention systems
    • Airgapping
    • User security awareness training

    2.3.1 Document your defense-in-depth controls

    2 hours, less time if a security services catalog exists

    Input: List of technologies within your environment, List of IT security controls that are in place

    Output: List of defense-in-depth controls

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts, Vulnerability Management SOP Template

    Participants: IT Security Manager, Infrastructure Manager, IT Director, CISO

    1. Document the existing defense-in-depth controls within your system.
    2. Review the initial list that has been provided and see if these are controls that currently exist.
    3. Indicate any other controls that are being used by the organization. This may already exist if you have a security services catalog.
    4. Indicate who the owners of the different controls are.
    5. Track the information in the Vulnerability Management SOP Template.

    Download the Vulnerability Management SOP Template

    Sample table of security controls within a Defense-in-depth model with column headers 'Defense-in-depth control', 'Description', 'Workflow', and 'Control Owner'.

    Step 2.4

    Risk assessment of vulnerabilities

    Activities
    • 2.4.1 Build a classification scheme to consistently assess impact
    • 2.4.2 Build a classification scheme to consistently assess likelihood

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Assessing risk will be the cornerstone of how you evaluate vulnerabilities and what priority you place on remediation. This is actual risk to the organization and not simply what the tool reports without the context of your defense-in-depth controls.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Security Manager
    • IT Operations Management
    • CISO
    • CIO

    Outcomes of this step

    A risk matrix tailored to your organization, based on impact and likelihood. This will provide a consistent, unambiguous way to assess risk across the vulnerability types that is reported by your scanning tool.

    Triage & prioritize
    Step 2.1Step 2.2Step 2.3Step 2.4

    Vulnerabilities and risk

    Vulnerabilities must be addressed to mitigate risk to the business.
    • Vulnerabilities are a concern because they are potential threats to the business. Vulnerabilities that are not addressed can turn from potential threats into actual threats; it is only a matter of time and opportunity.
    • Your organization will already be familiar with risk management, as every decision carries a business risk component. There may even be a senior manager assigned as corporate risk officer to manage organizational risk.
    • The organization likely has a risk tolerance level that defines the organization’s risk appetite. This may be measured in dollars, non-productivity time, or other units of inefficiency.
    • The risk of a vulnerability can be calculated using impact and likelihood. Impact is the effect that the vulnerability will have if it is exploited by a malicious actor. Likelihood is the degree to which a vulnerability exploit can possibly occur.
    Stock image of a cartoon character in a tie hanging on the needle of a 'RISK' meter as it sits at 'LOW'.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Risk to the organization is business language that everyone can understand. This is particularly true when the risk is to productivity or to the company’s bottom line.

    A risk-based approach to vulnerability management

    CVSS scores are just the starting point!

    Vulnerabilities are constant.
    • There will always be vulnerabilities in the environment, many of which won’t be reported as they are currently unknown.
    • Don’t focus on trying to resolve all vulnerabilities in your environment. You are neither resourced for it nor can the business tolerate the downtime needed to remediate every single vulnerability.
      • The constant follow of new vulnerabilities will quickly render your efforts useless and it will become a game of “whack-a-mole.”
    • Being able to prioritize which vulnerabilities require appropriate levels of response is crucial to ensuring that an organization stays ahead of the continual flow.
    • Your vulnerability scanning tool will report the severity of a vulnerability, often using an industry Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) system ranging from 0 to 10. It will then scan your environment for the presence of the vulnerability and report accordingly.
      • Your vulnerability scanning tool will not be aware of any mitigation components in your environment, such as compensating controls, network segregation, server/application hardening, or any other measures that can reduce the risk. That is why determining actual risk is a crucial step.

    Stock image of a whack-a-mole game.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Vulnerability scanning is a valuable function, but it does not tell the full picture. You must determine how urgent a vulnerability truly is, based on your specific environment.

    Prioritize remediation by levels of risk

    Address critical and high risk with high immediacy.

    • Addressing the critical and high-risk vulnerabilities with urgency will ensure that you are addressing a more manageable number of vulnerabilities.
    • An optimized vulnerability management process will address the medium and low risk vulnerabilities within the regular cycle.
    • This may be very similar to what you do today in an ad hoc fashion:
      • Zero-day vulnerabilities tend to warrant a stop in operations and are dealt with immediately (or as soon as a vendor has a fix).
      • The standard remediation process (patching/updating, change of configuration, etc.) happens within a regular controlled time cycle.
    • Formalizing this process will ensure that appropriate attention is given to vulnerabilities that warrant it and that the remaining vulnerabilities are dealt with as a regular, recurring activity.

    Mitigate the risk surface by reducing the time across the phases

    Chart titled 'Mitigate the risk surface by reducing the time across the phases' with the axes 'Risk Level' and 'Time' with lines created by individual risks. The highlighted line begins in 'Critical' and eventually drops to low. A note on the line reads 'Objective: Reduce risk surface by reducing time to address'. The area between the line and your organization's risk tolerance is labelled 'Risk Surface, to be addressed with high priority'. A bracket around Risk levels 'High' and 'Critical' reads 'Priority focus zone (risk surface)'. Risk lines within levels 'Low' and 'Medium' read 'Follow standard vulnerability management cycles'.

    Risk matrix

    Risk = Impact x Likelihood
    • Info-Tech’s Vulnerability Management Risk Assessment Tool provides a method of calculating the risk of a vulnerability. The risk rating is assigned using the impact of the risk and the likelihood or probability that the event may occur.
    • The tool puts the vulnerability into your organization’s context: How many people will be affected? What service types are vulnerable and how does that impact the business? Is there an anticipated update from the vendor of the system being affected?
    • Urgency of remediation should be based on the business consequences if the vulnerability were to be exploited, relative to the business’ risk tolerance.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Risk determination should be done within the context of your current environment and not simply based on what your vulnerability tool is reporting.

    A risk matrix is useful in calculating a risk rating for vulnerabilities. Risk matrix with axes 'Impact' and 'Time' and individual vulnerabilities mapped onto it via their risk rating. The example 'Organizational Risk Tolerance Threshold' line runs diagonally through the 'Medium' squares.

    2.4.1 Build a classification scheme to consistently assess impact

    60 minutes

    Input: Knowledge of IT environment, Knowledge of business impact for each IT component or service

    Output: Vulnerability Management Risk Assessment Tool formatted to your organization

    Materials: Vulnerability Management Risk Assessment Tool

    Participants: Functional Area Managers, IT Security Manager, CISO

    Risk always has a negative impact, but the size of the impact can vary considerably in terms of cost, number of people or sites affected, and the severity of the impact. Impact questions tend to be more objective and quantifiable than likelihood questions.

    1. Define a set of questions to measure risk impact or edit existing questions in the tool.
    2. For each question, assign a weight that should be placed on that factor.
    3. Define criteria for each question that would categorize the risk. The drop-down box content can be modified in the hidden Labels tab.

    Note that you are looking to baseline vulnerability types, rather than categorizing every single vulnerability your scanning tool reports. The volume of vulnerabilities will be high, but vulnerabilities can be categorized into types on a regular basis.

    Download the Vulnerability Management Risk Assessment Tool

    Screenshot of table from Info-Tech's Vulnerability Management Risk Assessment Tool for assessing Impact. Column headers are 'Weight', 'Question', 'OS vulnerability', 'Application vulnerability', 'Network vulnerability', and 'Vendor patch release'.

    2.4.2 Build a classification scheme to consistently assess likelihood

    60 minutes

    Input: Knowledge of IT environment, Knowledge of business impact for each IT component or service

    Output: Vulnerability Management Risk Assessment Tool formatted to your organization

    Materials: Vulnerability Management Risk Assessment Tool

    Participants: Functional Area Managers, IT Security Manager, CISO

    Risk always has a negative impact, but the size of the impact can vary considerably in terms of cost, number of people or sites affected, and the severity of the impact. Impact questions tend to be more objective and quantifiable than likelihood questions.

    1. Define a set of questions to measure risk impact or edit existing questions in the tool.
    2. For each question, assign a weight that should be placed on that factor.
    3. Define criteria for each question that would categorize the risk. The drop-down box content can be modified in the hidden Labels tab.

    Note that you are looking to baseline vulnerability types, rather than categorizing every single vulnerability that your scanning tool reports. The volume of vulnerabilities will be high, but vulnerabilities can be categorized into types on a regular basis.

    Download the Vulnerability Management Risk Assessment Tool

    Screenshot of table from Info-Tech's Vulnerability Management Risk Assessment Tool for assessing Likelihood. Column headers are 'Weight', 'Question', 'OS vulnerability', 'Application vulnerability', and 'Network vulnerability'.

    Prioritize based on risk

    Select the best remediation option to minimize risk.

    Through the combination of the identified risk and remediation steps in this phase, the prioritization for vulnerabilities will become clear. Vulnerabilities will be assigned a priority once their intrinsic qualities and threat potential to business function and data have been identified.

    • Remediation options will be identified for the higher urgency vulnerabilities.
    • Options will be assessed for whether they are appropriate.
    • They will be further tested to determine if they can be used adequately prior to full implementation.
    • Based on the assessments, the remediation will be implemented or another option will be considered.
    Prioritization
    1. Assignment of risk
    2. Identification of remediation options
    3. Assessment of options
    4. Implementation

    Remediation plays an incredibly important role in the entire program. It plays a large part in wider risk management when you must consider the risk of the vulnerability, the risk of the remediation option, and the risk associated with the overall process.

    Implement Risk-Based Vulnerability Management

    Phase 3

    Remediate vulnerabilities

    Phase 1

    1.1 What is vulnerability management?
    1.2 Define scope and roles
    1.3 Cloud considerations for vulnerability management
    1.4 Vulnerability detection

    Phase 2

    2.1 Triage vulnerabilities
    2.2 Determine high-level business criticality
    2.3 Consider current security posture
    2.4 Risk assessment of vulnerabilities

    Phase 3

    3.1 Assessing remediation options
    3.2 Scheduling and executing remediation
    3.3 Continuous improvement

    Phase 4

    4.1 Metrics, KPIs & CSFs
    4.2 Vulnerability management policy
    4.3 Select and implement a scanning tool
    4.4 Penetration testing

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Identifying potential remediation options.
    • Developing criteria for each option with regards to when to use and when to avoid.
    • Establishing exception procedure for testing and remediation.
    • Documenting the implementation of remediations and verification.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CISO, or equivalent
    • Security Manager/Analyst
    • Network, Administrator, System, Database Manager
    • Other members of the vulnerability management team
    • Risk managers for the risk-related steps

    Determining how to remediate

    Patching is only one option.

    This phase will allow organizations to build out the specific processes for remediating vulnerabilities. The overall process will be the same but what will be critical is the identification of the correct material. This includes building the processes around:
    • Identifying and selecting the remediation option to be used.
    • Determining what to do when a patch or update is not available.
    • Scheduling and executing the remediation activity.
    • Continuous improvement.

    Each remediation option carries a different level of risk that the organization needs to consider and accept by building out this program.

    It is necessary to be prepared to do this in real time. Careful documentation is needed when dealing with vulnerabilities. Use the Vulnerability Tracking Tool to assist with documentation in real time. This is separate from using the process template but can assist in the documentation of vulnerabilities.

    Step 3.1

    Assessing remediation options

    Activities
    • 3.1.1 Develop risk and remediation action

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    With the risk assessment from the previous activity, we can now examine remediation options and make a decision. This activity will guide us through that.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Security Manager
    • SecOps team members
    • ITOps team members, including tiers 1, 2, and 3
    • CISO
    • CIO

    Outcomes of this step

    List of remediation options and criteria on when to consider each.

    Remediate vulnerabilities
    Step 3.1Step 3.2Step 3.3

    Identify remediation options

    There are four options when it comes to vulnerability remediation.

    Patches and Updates

    Patches are software or pieces of code that are meant to close vulnerabilities or provide fixes to any bugs within existing software. These are typically provided by the vendor to ensure that any deployed software is properly protected after vulnerabilities have been detected.

    Configuration Changes

    Configuration changes involve administrators making significant changes to the system or network to remediate against the vulnerability. This can include disabling the vulnerable application or specific element and can even extend to removing the application altogether.

    Remediation

    Compensating Controls

    By leveraging security controls, such as your IDS/IPS, firewalls, or access control, organizations can have an added layer of protection against vulnerabilities beyond the typical patches and configuration changes. This can be used as a measure while waiting to implement another option (if one exists) to reduce the risk of the vulnerability in the short or long term.

    Risk Acceptance

    Whenever a vulnerability is not remediated, either indefinitely or for a short period of time, the organization is accepting the associated risk. Segregation of the vulnerable system can occur in this instance. This can occur in cases where a system or application cannot be updated without detrimental effect to the business.

    Patches and updates

    Patches are often the easiest and most common method of remediation.

    Patches are usually the most desirable remediation solution when it comes to vulnerability management. They are typically provided by the vendor of the vulnerable application or system and are meant to eliminate the existing vulnerability.

    When to use

    • When adequate testing can be performed on the patch to be implemented.
    • When there is a change window approaching for the affected systems.
    • When there is standardization across the IT assets to allow for easier installation of patches.

    When to avoid

    • When the patch cannot be adequately tested.
    • When a patch has been tested, but it caused an unfavorable consequence such as a system or application failure.
    • When there is no near change window in which to install the patches, which is often the case for critical systems.
    When to consider other remediation options
    • For critical systems, it can be difficult to implement a patch as they often require the system to be rebooted or go through some downtime. There must be consideration towards whether there is a change window approaching if a patch is to be implemented on a business-critical system.
      • If there is no opportunity to implement the patch, or no approaching change window, it is wise to leverage another remediation option.
    • When patches are not currently available from the vendor or they are in production, other remediation options are needed.
    • Other remediation options can be used in tandem with the patch. For example, if a patch is being deferred until the change window, it would be wise to use alternate remediation options to close the vulnerability.

    Compensating controls

    Compensating controls can decrease the risk of vulnerabilities that cannot be (immediately) remediated.

    • Compensating controls are measures put in place when direct remediation measures are impractical or non-existent.
    • Similar to the payment card industry’s PCI DSS 1.0 provision of compensating controls, these are meant to meet the intent or rigor of the original requirement; unlike PCI DSS, these measures are to mitigate risk rather than meet compliance.
    • The compensating control should be viewed as only a temporary measure for dealing with a vulnerability, although circumstances may dictate a degree of permanence in the application of the compensating control.
    • Examples where compensating controls may be needed are:
      • The software vendor is developing an update or patch to address a vulnerability.
      • Through your testing process, a patch will adversely affect the performance or operation of the target system and be detrimental to the business.
      • A critical application will only run on a legacy operating system, the latter of which is no longer supported by the vendor.
      • A legacy application is no longer being supported but is critical to your operations. A replacement, if one exists, will take time to implement.
    Examples of compensating controls
    • Segregating a vulnerable server or application on the network, physically or logically.
    • Hardening the operating system or application.
    • Restricting user logins to the system or application.
    • Implementing access controls on the network route to the system.
    • Instituting application whitelisting.

    Configuration changes

    Configuration changes involve making changes directly to the application or system in which there is a vulnerability. This can vary from disabling or removing the vulnerable element or, in the case of applications built in-house, changing the coding of the application itself. These are commonly used in network vulnerabilities such as open ports.

    When to use

    • A patch is not available.
    • The vulnerable element can be significantly changed, or even disabled, without significantly disrupting the business.
    • The application is built in-house, as the vulnerability must be closed internally.
    • There is adequate testing to ensure that the configuration change does not affect the business.
    • A configuration change in your network or system can affect numerous endpoints or systems, reducing endpoint patching or use of defense-in-depth controls.

    When to avoid

    • When a suitable patch is available.
    • When the vulnerability is on a business-critical element with no nearby change window or it cannot be disabled.
    • When there is no opportunity in which to perform testing to ensure that there are no unintended consequences.
    When to consider other remediation options
    • Configuration changes require careful documentation as changes are occurring to the system and applications. If there is a need to perform a back-out process and return to the original configuration, this can be extremely difficult without clear documentation of what occurred.
    • If business systems are too critical or important to the regular business function to perform any changes, it is necessary to consider other options.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Remember your existing processes: configuration changes may need to be approved and orchestrated through your organization’s configuration and change management processes.

    Case Study

    Remediation options do not have to be used separately. Use the Shellshock 2014 case as an example.

    INDUSTRY: All
    SOURCE: Public Domain
    Challenge

    Bashdoor, more commonly known as Shellshock, was announced on September 24, 2014.

    This bug involved the Bash shell, which normally executes user commands, but this vulnerability meant that malicious attackers could exploit it.

    This was rated a 10/10 by CVSS – the highest possible score.

    Within hours of the announcement, hackers began to exploit this vulnerability across many organizations.

    Solution

    Organizations had to react quickly and multiple remediation options were identified:

    • Configuration changes – Companies were recommended to use other shells instead of the Bash shell.
    • Defense-in-depth controls – Using HTTP server logs, it could be possible to identify if the vulnerability had been exploited.
    • Patches – Many vendors released patches to close this vulnerability including Debian, Ubuntu, and Red Hat.
    Results

    Companies began to protect themselves against these vulnerabilities.

    While many organizations installed patches as quickly as possible, some also wished to test the patch and leveraged defense-in-depth controls in the interim.

    However, even today, many still have the Shellshock vulnerability and exploits continue to occur.

    Accept the risk and do nothing

    By choosing not to remediate vulnerabilities, you must accept the associated risk. This should be your very last option.

    Every time that a vulnerability is not remediated, it continues to pose a risk to the organization. While it may seem that every vulnerability needs to be remediated, this is simply not possible due to limited resources. Further, it can take away resources from other security initiatives as opposed to low-priority vulnerabilities that are extremely unlikely to be exploited.

    Common criteria for vulnerabilities that are not remediated:
    • Affected systems are of extremely low criticality.
    • Affected systems are deemed too critical to take offline to perform adequate remediation.
    • Low urgency is assigned to those vulnerabilities.
    • Cost and time required for the remediation are too high.
    • No adequate solutions exist – the vendor has not released a patch, there are weak defense-in-depth controls, and it is not possible to perform a configuration change.

    Risk acceptance is not uncommon…

    • With an ever-increasing number of vulnerabilities, organizations are struggling to keep up and often, intentionally or unintentionally, accept the risk associated.
    • In the end, non-remediation means full acceptance of the risk and any consequences.

    Enterprise risk management
    Arrow pointing up.
    Risk acceptance of vulnerabilities

    While these are common criteria, they must be aligned to the enterprise risk management framework and approved by management.

    Don’t forget the variables that were assessed in Phase 2. This includes the risk from potential lateral movement or if there is an existing exploit.

    Risk considerations

    When determining if risk acceptance is appropriate, consider the cost of not mitigating vulnerabilities.

    Don’t accept the risk because it seems easy. Consider the financial impact of leaving vulnerabilities open.

    With risk acceptance, it is important to review the financial impact of a security incident resulting from that vulnerability. There is always the possibility of exploitation for vulnerabilities. A simple metric taken from NIST SP800-40 to use for this is:

    Cost not to mitigate = W * T * R

    Where (W) is the number of work stations, (T) is the time spent fixing systems or lost in productivity, and (R) is the hourly rate of the time spent.

    As an example provided by NIST SP800-40 Version 2.0, Creating a Patch and Vulnerability Management Program:

    “For an organization where there are 1,000 computers to be fixed, each taking an average of 8 hours of down time (4 hours for one worker to rebuild a system, plus 4 hours the computer owner is without a computer to do work) at a rate of $70/hour for wages and benefits:

    1,000 computers * 8 hours * $70/hour = $560,000”

    Info-Tech Insight

    Always consider the financial impact that can occur from an exploited vulnerability that was not remediated.

    3.1.1 Develop risk and remediation action

    90 minutes

    Input: List of remediation options

    Output: List of remediation options sorted into “when to use” and “when to avoid” lists

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts, Vulnerability Management SOP Template

    Participants: IT Security Manager, IT Infrastructure Manager, IT Operations Manager, Corporate Risk Officer, CISO

    It is important to define and document your organization-specific criteria for when a remediation option is appropriate and inappropriate.

    1. List each remediation option on a flip chart and create two headings: “When to use” and “When to avoid.”
    2. Each person will list “when to use” criteria on a green sticky note and “when to avoid” criteria on a red one for each option; these will be placed on the appropriate flip chart.
    3. Discuss as a group which criteria are appropriate and which should be removed.
    4. Move on to the next remediation option when completed.
      • Ensure to include when there are remediation options that will be connected. For example, the risk may be accepted until the next available change window, or a defense-in-depth control is used before a patch can be fully installed.
    5. Once the criteria has been established, document this in the Vulnerability Management SOP Template.
    When to use:
    • When adequate testing can be performed on the patch to be implemented.
    • When there is a change window approaching, especially for critical systems.
    • When there is standardization across the IT assets to allow for easier installation of patches.
    When to avoid:
    • When the patch cannot be adequately tested.
    • When a patch has been tested, but it has caused an unfavorable consequence such as a system or application failure.
    • When there is no near change window in which to install the patches.
    (Example from the Vulnerability Management SOP Template for Patches.)

    Download the Vulnerability Management SOP Template

    Step 3.2

    Scheduling and executing remediation

    Activities

    None for this section.

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Although there are no specific activities for this section, it will walk you through your existing processes configuration and change management to ensure that you are leveraging those activities in your vulnerability remediation actions.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Security Manager
    • SecOps team members
    • ITOps team members, including tiers 1, 2, and 3
    • CISO
    • CIO

    Outcomes of this step

    Gained understanding of how IT operations processes configuration and change management can be leveraged for the vulnerability remediation process. Don’t reinvent the wheel!

    Remediate vulnerabilities
    Step 3.1Step 3.2Step 3.3

    Implementing the remediation

    Vulnerability management converges with your IT operations functions.
    • Once a remediation strategy has been formulated, you can leverage your release and change management processes to orchestrate the testing, version tracking, scheduling, approval, and implementation activities.
    • Each of these processes should exist in your environment in some form. Leveraging these will engage the IT operations team to carry out their tasks in the remediation process.
    • There can be a partial or full handoff to these processes, however, the owner of the vulnerability management program is responsible for verifying the application of the remediation measure and that the overall risk has been reduced.
    • Although full blueprints exist that cover each of these processes in great detail, the following slides provide an overview of each of these IT operations processes and how they intersect with vulnerability management.
    Stock image of a person on a laptop overlaid by an icon with gears indicating settings.

    Release Management

    Control the quality of deployments and releases of software updates.

    • The release management process exists to ensure that new software releases (such as patches and updates) are properly tested and documented with version control prior to their implementation into the production environment.
    • The process should map out the logistics of the deployment process to ensure that it is consistent and controlled.
    • Testing is an important part of release management and the urgency of a vulnerability remediation operation can expedite this process to ensure minimal delays. Once testing has been completed successfully, the update is then “promoted” to production-ready status and submitted into the change management process.
    • Often a separate release team may not exist, however, release management still occurs.

    For guidance on implementing or improving your release management process, refer to Info-Tech’s Stabilize Release and Deployment Management blueprint or speak to one of our experts.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Many organizations don’t have a separate release team. Rather, whomever is doing the deployment will submit a change request and the testing details are vetted through the organization’s change management process.

    For guidance on the change management process review our Optimize Change Management blueprint.

    Change Management

    Leverage change control, interruption management, approval, and scheduling.
    • Change management likely exists in some shape or form in your organization. There is usually someone or a committee, such as a change advisory board (CAB), that gives approval for a change.
    • Leveraging the change management process will ensure that your vulnerability remediation has undergone the proper review and approval before implementation. There will usually be business sign-off as part of a change management approval process.
    • Communication will also be integrated in the change management process, so the change manager will ensure that appropriate, timely communications are sent to the proper key stakeholders.
    • The change management process will link to release management and configuration management processes if they exist.

    For further guidance on implementing or improving your change management process, refer to Info-Tech’s Optimize Change Management blueprint or speak to one of our experts.

    “With no controls in place, IT gets the blame for embarrassing outages. Too much control, and IT is seen as a roadblock to innovation.” (VP IT, Federal Credit Union)

    Post-implementation activities

    Vulnerability remediation isn’t a “set it and forget it” activity.
    • Once vulnerability remediation has occurred, it is imperative that the results are reported back to the vulnerability management program manager. This ensures that the loop is closed and the tracking of the remediation activity is done properly.
      • Organizations that are subject to audit by external entities will understand the importance of such documentation.
    • The results of post-implementation review from the change management process will be of great interest, particularly if there was any deviation from the planned activities.
    • Although change execution will usually undergo some form of testing during the maintenance window, there is always the possibility that something has broken as a result of the software update. Be quick to respond to these types of incidents!
      • One example of an issue that is near impossible to test during a maintenance window is one that manifests only when the system or software comes under load. This is what makes for busy Monday mornings after a weekend change window.
    A scan with your vulnerability management software after remediation can be a way to verify that the overall risk has been reduced, if remediation was done by way of patching/updates.

    Info-Tech Insight

    After every change completion, whether due to vulnerability remediation or not, it is a good idea to ensure that your infrastructure team increases its monitoring diligence and that your service desk is ready for any sudden influx of end-user calls.

    Step 3.3

    Continuous improvement

    Activities

    None for this section.

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    Although this section has no activities, it will review the process by which you may continually improve vulnerability management.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Security Manager
    • SecOps team members
    • ITOps team members, including tiers 1, 2, and 3
    • CISO
    • CIO

    Outcomes of this step

    An understanding of the importance of ongoing improvements to the vulnerability management program.

    Remediate vulnerabilities
    Step 3.1Step 3.2Step 3.3

    Drive continuous improvement

    • Also known as “Continual Improvement” within the ITIL best practice framework.
    • Your vulnerability management program will not be perfect on first launch. In fact, due to the ever-changing nature of vulnerabilities and the technology designed to detect and combat vulnerabilities, the processes within your vulnerability management program will need to be tweaked from time to time.
    • Continuous improvement is a sustained, proactive approach to process improvement. The practice allows for all process participants to observe and suggest incremental improvements that can help improve the overall process.
    • In many cases, continuous improvement can be triggered by changes in the environment. This makes perfect sense for vulnerability management process improvement as a change in the environment will require vulnerability scanning to ensure that such changes have not introduced new vulnerabilities into the environment, increasing your risk surface.
    • One key method to tracking continuous improvement is through the effective use of metrics, covered in Section 4.1 of this blueprint.
    “The success rate for continual improvement efforts is less than 60 percent. A major – if not the biggest – factor affecting the deployment of long-term continual improvement initiatives today is the fundamental change taking place in the way companies manage and execute work.” (Industry analyst at a consulting firm, 2014)

    Continuous Improvement

    Continuously re-evaluate the vulnerability management process.

    As your systems and assets change, your vulnerability management program may need updates in two ways.

    When new assets and systems are introduced:

    • When new systems and assets are introduced, it is important for organizations to recognize how these can affect vulnerability management.
    • It will be necessary to identify the business criticality of the new assets and systems and the sensitivity of the data that can be found on them.
    • Without doing so, these will be considered rogue systems or assets – there is no clear process for assigning urgencies.
    • This will only cause problems as actions may be taken that are not aligned with the organization’s risk management framework.

    Effective systems and asset management are needed to track this. Review Info-Tech’s Implement Systems Management to Improve Availability and Visibility blueprint for more help.

    Document any changes to the vulnerability management program in the Vulnerability Management SOP Template.

    When defense-in-depth capabilities are modified:

    • As you build an effective security program, more controls will be added that can be used to protect the organization.
    • These should be documented and evaluated based on ability to mitigate against vulnerabilities.
    • The defense-in-depth model that was previously established should be updated to include the new capabilities that can be used.
    • Defense-in-depth models are continually evolving as the security landscape evolves, and organizations must be ready for this.

    To assist in building a defense-in-depth model, review Build an Information Security Strategy.

    Implement Risk-Based Vulnerability Management

    Phase 4

    Measure and formalize

    Phase 1

    1.1 What is vulnerability management?
    1.2 Define scope and roles
    1.3 Cloud considerations for vulnerability management
    1.4 Vulnerability detection

    Phase 2

    2.1 Triage vulnerabilities
    2.2 Determine high-level business criticality
    2.3 Consider current security posture
    2.4 Risk assessment of vulnerabilities

    Phase 3

    3.1 Assessing remediation options
    3.2 Scheduling and executing remediation
    3.3 Continuous improvement

    Phase 4

    4.1 Metrics, KPIs & CSFs
    4.2 Vulnerability management policy
    4.3 Select and implement a scanning tool
    4.4 Penetration testing

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • You will determine what ought to be measured to track the success of your vulnerability management program.
    • If you lack a scanning tool this phase will help you determine tool selection.
    • Lastly, penetration testing is a good next step to consider once you have your vulnerability management program well underway.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • IT Security Manager
    • SecOps team members
    • Procurement representatives
    • CISO
    • CIO

    Step 4.1

    Metrics, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and Critical Success Factors (CSFs)

    Activities
    • 4.1.1 Measure your program with metrics, KPIs, and CSFs

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    After a review of the differences between raw metrics, key performance indicators (KPI), and critical success factors (CSF), compile a list of what metrics you will be tracking, why, and the business goals for each.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Security Manager
    • SecOps team members
    • CISO
    • CIO

    Outcomes of this step

    Outline of metrics you can configure your vulnerability scanning tool to report on.

    Measure and formalize
    Step 4.1Step 4.2Step 4.3Step 4.4

    You can’t manage what you can’t measure

    Metrics provides visibility.

    • Management consultant Peter Drucker introduced the concept of metrics tied to key performance indicators (KPIs), and the concept holds true: without metrics, you lack the visibility to manage or improve a process.
    • Metrics aren’t just a collection of statistics, they have to be meaningful, they have to tell the story, and most importantly, they have to answer the “so what?” question. What is the significance of a metric – do they illustrate a trend or an anomaly? What actions should be carried out when a metric hits a certain threshold?
    • It would be prudent to track several metrics that can be combined to tell the full story. For example, tracking the number of critical vulnerabilities alone does not give a sense of the overall risk to the organization, nor does it offer any information on how quickly they have been remediated or what amount of effort was invested.
    Stock image of measuring tape.

    Metrics, KPIs, and CSFs

    Tracking the right information and making the information relevant.
    • There is often confusion between raw metrics, key performance indicators, and critical success factors.
    • Raw metrics are what is trackable from your systems and processes as a set of measurements without any context. Raw metrics in themselves are useful in telling the story of “what are we doing?”
    • KPIs are the specific metric or combination of metrics that help you track or gauge performance. KPIs tell the story of “how are we doing?” or “how well are we doing?”
    • CSFs are the specific KPIs that track the activities that are absolutely critical to accomplish for the business or business unit to be successful.
    The activity tracker on your wrist is a wealth of metrics, KPIs, and CSFs.

    If you wear an activity tracker, you are likely already familiar with the differences between metrics, key performance indicators, and critical success factors:

    • The raw metrics are your heart rate, step count, hours of sleep, caloric intake, etc.
    • KPIs are the individual goals that you have set: maintain a heart rate within the appropriate range for your age/activity level, achieve a step count goal per day, get x hours of sleep per night, consume a calorie range of y per day, etc.
    • CSFs are your overall goal: increase your cardiovascular capacity, lose weight, feel more energetic, etc.

    Your security systems can be similarly measured and tracked – transfer this skill!

    Tracking relevant information

    Tell the story in the numbers.

    Below are a number of suggested metrics to track, and why.

    Business Goal

    Critical Success Factor

    Key Performance Indicator

    Metric to track

    Minimize overall risk exposureReduction of overall risk due to vulnerabilitiesDecrease in vulnerabilitiesTrack the number of vulnerabilities year after year.
    Appropriate allocation of time and resourcesProper prioritization of vulnerability mitigation activitiesDecrease of critical and high vulnerabilitiesTrack the number of high-urgency vulnerabilities.
    Consistent timely remediation of threats to the businessMinimize risk when vulnerabilities are detectedRemediate vulnerabilities more quicklyMean time to detect: track the average time between the identification to remediation.
    Track effectiveness of scanning toolMinimize the ratio, indicating that the tool sees everythingRatio between known assets and what the scanner tracksScanner coverage compared to known assets in the organization.
    Having effective tools to track and addressAccuracy of the scanning toolDifference or ratio between reported vulnerabilities and verified onesNumber of critical or high vulnerabilities verified, between the scanning tool’s criticality rating and actual criticality.
    Reduction of exceptions to ensure minimal exposureVisibility into persistent vulnerabilities and risk mitigation measuresNumber of exceptions grantedNumber of vulnerabilities in which little or no remediation action was taken.

    4.1.1 Measure your program with metrics, KPIs, and CSFs

    60 minutes

    Input: List of metrics current being measured by the vulnerability management tool

    Output: List of relevant metrics to track, and the KPIs, CSFs, and business goals related to the metric

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts, Vulnerability Management SOP Template

    Participants: IT Security Manager, IT operations management, CISO

    Metrics can offer a way to view how the organization is dealing with vulnerabilities and if there is improvement.

    1. Determine the high-level vulnerability management goals for the organization.
    2. Even with a formal process in place, the organization should be considering ways it can improve.
    3. Determine metrics that can help quantify those goals and how they can be measured.
    4. Metrics should always be easy to measure. If it’s a complex process to find the information required, it means that it is not a metric that should be used.
    5. Document your list of metrics in the Vulnerability Management SOP Template.

    Download the Vulnerability Management SOP Template

    Step 4.2

    Vulnerability Management Policy

    Activities
    • 4.2.1 Update the vulnerability management program policy

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    If you have a vulnerability management policy, this activity may help augment it. Otherwise, if you don’t have one, this would be a great starting point.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Security Manager
    • CISO
    • CIO
    • Human resources representative

    Outcomes of this step

    An inaugural policy covering vulnerability management

    Measure and formalize
    Step 4.1Step 4.2Step 4.3Step 4.4

    Vulnerability Management Program Policy

    Policies provide governance and enforcement of processes.
    • Policies offer formal guidance on the “rules” of a program, describing its purpose, scope, detailed program description, and consequences of non-compliance. Often they will have a employee sign-off acknowledging understanding.
    • In many organizations, policies are endorsed by senior executives, which gives the policy its “teeth” across the company. The human resources department will always have input due to the implications of the non-compliance aspect.
    • Policies are written to ensure an outcome of consistent expected behavior and are often written to protect the company from liability.
    • Policies should be easy to understand and unambiguous, reflect the current state, and be enforceable. Enforceability can come in the form of audit, technology, or any other means of determining compliance and enforcing behavior.
    Stock image of a judge's gavel.

    4.2.1 Update the vulnerability management policy

    60 minutes

    Input: Vulnerability Management SOP, HR guidance on policy creation and approval

    Output: Completed Vulnerability Management Policy

    Materials: Vulnerability Management SOP, Vulnerability Management Policy Template

    Participants: IT Security Manager, IT operations management, CISO, Human resources representative

    After having built your entire process in this project, formalize it into a vulnerability management policy. This will set the standards and expectations for vulnerability management in the organization, while the process will be around the specific actions that need to be taken around vulnerability management.

    This is separate and distinct from the Vulnerability Management SOP Template, which is a process and procedure document.
    1. Review Info-Tech’s Vulnerability Management Policy and customize it to your organization’s specifications.
    2. Use your Vulnerability Management SOP as a resource when specifying some of the details within the policy.
    Sample of Info-Tech's Vulnerability Management Policy Template

    Download the Vulnerability Management Policy Template

    Step 4.3

    Select and implement a scanning tool

    Activities
    • 4.3.1 Create an RFP for vulnerability scanning tools

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    If you need to select a new vulnerability scanning tool, or replace your existing one, this activity will help set up a request for proposal (RFP).

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Security Manager
    • SecOps team members
    • CISO

    Outcomes of this step

    The provisions needed for you to create and deploy an RFP for a vulnerability management tool.

    Measure and formalize
    Step 4.1Step 4.2Step 4.3Step 4.4

    Vulnerability management and penetration testing

    Similar in nature, yet provide different security functions.

    Vulnerability Scanning Tools

    Scanning tools focus on the network and operating systems. These tools look for items such as missing patches or open ports. They won’t detect specific application vulnerabilities.

    Exploitation Tools

    These tools will look to exploit a detected vulnerability to validate it.

    Penetration Tests

    A penetration test simulates the actions of an external or internal cyber attacker that aims to breach the information security of the organization. (Formal definition of penetration test)

    ‹————— What’s the difference again? —————›
    Vulnerability scanning tools are just one type of tool.When you add an exploitation tool to the mix, you move down the spectrum.Penetration tests will use scanning tools, exploitation tools, and people.

    What is the value of each?

    • For vulnerability scans, the person performing the scan provides the value – value comes from the organization itself.
    • For exploitation tools on their own, the value comes from the tool itself being used in a safe environment.
    • For penetration tests, the tester is providing the value. They are the value add.

    What’s the implication for me?

    Info-Tech Recommends:
    • A combination of vulnerability scanning and penetration testing. This will improve your security posture through systematic risk reduction and improve your security program through the testing of prevention, detection, and response capabilities with unique recommendations being generated.
    • Start with as much vulnerability scanning as possible to identify gaps to fix and then move onto a penetration test to do a more robust and validated assessment.
    • For penetration tests, start with a transparent box test first, then move to an opaque box. Ideally, this is done with different third parties.

    Vulnerability scanning software

    All organizations can benefit from having one.

    Scanning tools will benefit areas beyond just vulnerability management

    • Network security: It improves the accuracy and granularity of your network security technologies such as WAFs, NGFWs, IDPS, and SIEM.
    • Asset management: Vulnerability scanning can identify new or unknown assets and provide current status information on assets.
    • System management: Information from a vulnerability scan supports baselining activities and determination of high-value and high-risk assets.

    Vulnerability Detection Use Case

    Most organizations use scanners to identify and assess system vulnerabilities and prioritize efforts.

    Compliance Use Case

    Others will use scanners just for compliance, auditing, or larger GRC reasons.

    Asset Discovery Use Case

    Many organizations will use scanners to perform active host and application identification.

    Scanning Tool Market Trends

    Vulnerability scanning tools have expanded value from conventional checking for vulnerabilities to supporting configuration checking, asset discovery, inventory management, patch management, SSL certificate validation, and malware detection.

    Expect to see network and system vulnerability scanners develop larger vulnerability management functions and develop exploitation tool functionality. This will become a table stakes option enabling organizations to provide higher levels of validation of detected vulnerabilities. Some tools already possess these capabilities:

    • Core Impact is an exploitation tool with vulnerability scanning aspects.
    • Metasploit is an exploitation tool with some new vulnerability scanning aspects.
    • Nessus is mainly a vulnerability scanning tool but has some exploitation aspects.

    Device proliferation (BYOD, IoT, etc.) is increasing the need for stronger vulnerability management and scanners. This is driving the need for numerous device types and platform support and the development of baseline and configuration norms to support system management.

    Increased regulatory or compliance controls are also stipulating the need for vulnerability scanning, especially by a trusted third party.

    Organizations are outsourcing security functions or moving to cloud-based deployment options for any security technology they can. Expect to see massive growth of vulnerability scanning as a service.

    Vulnerability scanning market

    There are several technology types or functional differentiators that divide the market up.

    Vulnerability Exploitation Tools

    • These will actually test defences and better emulate real life than just scanning. These tools include packet manipulation tools (such as hping) and password cracking tools (such as John the Ripper or Cain and Abel).
    • These tools will provide much more granular information on your network, operations systems, and applications.
    • The main limitation of these tools is how to use them. If you do not have development or test environments that mimic your real production environments to run the exploit tools, these tools may not be appropriate. It may work if you can find some downtime on production systems, but only in very specific and careful instances.
    • Lower maturity security programs usually just do network and application vulnerability scanning. Higher maturity programs will also use penetration testing, application testing, and vulnerability exploitation tools.
    • Network vulnerability scanning tools should always be used. Once you identify any servers or ports running web applications, then you run a web application vulnerability scanner.
    • Exploitation tools and application testing tools are used in more specific use cases that are often related to more-demanding security programs.

    Scanning Tool Market Trends

    • These are considered baseline tools and are near commoditization.
    • Vulnerability scanning tools are not granular enough to detect application-level vulnerabilities (thus the need for application scanners and testing tools) and they don’t validate the exploitability of the vulnerability (thus the need for exploit tools).

    Web Application Scanning Tools

    These tools perform dynamic application security testing (DAST) and static application security testing (SAST).

    Application Scanning and Testing Tools

    • These perform a detailed scan against an application to detect any problematic or malicious code and try to break the application using known vulnerabilities.
    • These tools will identify if something is vulnerable to an exploit but won’t actually run the exploit.
    • These tools are evaluated based on their ability to detect application-specific issues and validate them.

    Vulnerability scanning tool features

    Evaluate vulnerability scanning tools on specific features or functions that are the best differentiators.

    Differentiator

    Description

    Deployment OptionsDo you want a traditional on-premises, cloud-based, or managed service?
    Vulnerability Database CoverageScanners use a library of known vulnerabilities to test for. Evaluate based on the amount of exploits/vulnerabilities the tool can scan for.
    Scanning MethodEvaluate if you want agent-based, authenticated active, unauthenticated active, passive, or some combination of those scanning methods.
    IntegrationWhat is the breadth of other security and non-security technologies the tool can integrate with?
    RemediationHow detailed are the recommended remediation actions? The more granular, the better.

    Differentiator

    Description

    PrioritizationDoes the tool evaluate vulnerabilities based on commonly accepted methods or through a custom-designed prioritization methodology?
    Platform SupportWhat is the breadth of environment, application, and device support in the tool? Consider your need for virtual support, cloud support, device support, and application-specific support. Also consider how often new scanning modules are supported (e.g. how quickly Windows 10 was supported).
    PricingAs with many security controls that have been around for a long time and are commonly used, pricing becomes a main consideration, especially when there are so many open-source options available.

    Common areas people mistake as tool differentiators:

    • Accuracy – Scanning tools are evaluated more on efficiency than effectiveness. Evaluate on the ability to detect, remediate, and manage vulnerabilities rather than real vulnerability detection and the number of false positives. To reduce false positives, you need to use exploitation tools.
    • Performance – Scanning tools have such a small footprint in an environment and the actual scanning itself is such a small impact that evaluation on performance doesn’t matter.

    For more information on vulnerability scanning tools and how they rate, review the Vulnerability Management category on SoftwareReviews.

    Vulnerability scanning deployment options

    Understand the different deployment options to identify which is best for your security program.

    Option

    Description

    Pros

    Cons

    Use Cases

    On-PremisesEither an on-premises appliance or an on-premises virtualized machine that performs external and internal scanning.
    • Small resource need, so limited network impact.
    • Strong internal scanning.
    • Easier integration with other technologies.
    • Network footprint and resource usage.
    • Maintenance and support costs.
    • Most common deployment option.
    • Appropriate if you have cloud concerns or strong internal network scanning, or if you require strong integration with other systems.
    CloudEither hosted on a public cloud infrastructure or hosted by a third party and offered “as a service.”
    • Small network footprint.
    • On-demand scanning as needed.
    • Optimal external scanning capabilities.
    • Can only do edge-related scanning unless authenticated or agent based.
    • No internal network scanning with passive or unauthenticated active scanning methods.
    • Very limited network resources.
    • Compliance obligations that dictate external vulnerability scanning.
    ManagedA third party is contracted to manage and maintain your vulnerability scanner so you can dedicate resources elsewhere.
    • Expert management of environment scanning, optimizing tool usage.
    • Most scanning work time is report customization and tuning and remediation efforts; thus, managed doesn’t provide sizable resource alleviation.
    • Third party has and owns the vulnerability information.
    • Limited staff resources or expertise to maintain and manage scanner.

    Vulnerability scanning methods

    Understand the different scanning methods to identify which tool best supports your needs.

    Method

    Description

    Pros

    Cons

    Use Cases

    Agent-Based ScanningLocally installed software gives the information needed to evaluate the security posture of a device.
    • Provides information that can’t be discovered remotely such as installed applications that aren’t running at a given time.
    • Device processing, memory, and network bandwidth impact.
    • Asset without an agent is not scanned.
    • Need for continuous scanning.
    • Organization has strong asset management
    Authenticated Active ScanningTool uses authenticated credentials to log in to a device or application to perform scanning.
    • Provides information that can’t be discovered remotely such as installed applications that aren’t running at a given time.
    • Best accuracy for vulnerability detection across a network.
    • Aggregation and centralization of authenticated credentials creates a major risk.
    • All use cases.
    Unauthenticated Active ScanningScanning of devices without any authentication.
    • Emulates realistic scan by an attacker.
    • Provides limited scope of scanning.
    • Some compliance use cases.
    • Perform after either agent or authenticated scanning.
    Passive ScanningScanning of network traffic.
    • Lowest resource impact.
    • Not enough information can be provided for true prioritization and remediation.
    • Augmenting scanning technique to agent or authenticated scanning.

    IP Management and IPv6

    IP management and the ability to manage IPv6 is a new area for scanning tool evaluation.

    Scanning on IPv4

    Scanning tools create databases of systems and devices with IP addresses.
    Info-Tech Recommends:

    • It is easier to do discovery by directing the scanner at a set IP address or range of IP addresses; thus, it’s useful to organize your database by IPs.
    • Do discovery by phases: Start with internet-facing systems. Your perimeter usually is well-defined by IP addresses and system owners and is most open to attack.
    • Stipulate a list of your known IP addresses through the DHCP registration and perform a scan on that.
    • Depending on your IP address space, another option is to scan your entire IP address space.

    Current Problem With IP Addresses

    IP addresses are becoming no longer manageable or even owned by organizations. They are often provided by ISPs or other third parties.

    Even if it is your range, chances are you don't do static IP ranges today.

    Info-Tech Recommends:

    • Agent-based scanning or MAC address-based scanning
    • Use your DHCP for scanning

    Scanning on IPv6

    First, you need to know if your organization is moving to IPv6. IPv6 is not strategically routed yet for most organizations.

    If you are moving to IPv6, Info-Tech recommends the following:

    • Because you cannot point a scanner at an IPv6 IP range, any scanning tool needs to have a strategy around how to handle IPv6 and properly scan based on IP ranges.
    • You need to know IPv4 to IPv6 translations.
    • Evaluate vulnerability scanning tools on whether any IPv6 features are on par with IPv4 features.

    If you are already on IPv6, Info-Tech recommends the following:

    • If you are on an IPv6 native network, it is nearly impossible to scan the network. You have to always scan your known addresses from your DHCP.

    4.3.1 Create an RFP for vulnerability scanning tools

    2 hours

    Input: List of key feature requirements for the new tool, List of intersect points with current software, Network topology and layout of servers and applications

    Output: Completed RFP document that can be distributed to vendor proponents

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts, Vulnerability Scanning Tool RFP Template

    Participants: IT Security Manager, IT operations managers, CISO, Procurement department representative

    Use a request for proposal (RFP) template to convey your desired scanning tool requirements to vendors and outline the proposal and procurement steps set by your organization.

    1. Determine what kind of requirements will be needed for your scanning tool RFP, based on people, process, and technology requirements.
    2. Consider items such as the desired capabilities and the scope of the scanning.
    3. Conduct interviews with relevant stakeholders to determine the exact requirements needed.
    4. Use Info-Tech’s Vulnerability Scanning Tool RFP Template. It lists many requirements but can be customized to your organization’s specific needs.

    Download the Vulnerability Scanning Tool RFP Template

    4.3.1 Create an RFP for vulnerability scanning tools (continued)

    Things to Consider:
    • Ensure there is adequate resource dedication to support and maintenance for vulnerability scanning.
    • Consider if you will benefit from an RFP. If there is a more appropriate option for your need and your organization, consider that instead.
    • If you don’t know the product you want, then perform an RFI.
    • In the RFP, you need to express your driving needs for the tool so the vendor can best understand your use case.
    • Identify who should participate in the RFP creation and evaluation. Make sure they have time available and it does not conflict with other items.
    • Determine if you want to send it to a select few or if you want to send it to a lot of vendors.
    • Determine a response date so you can know who is soliciting your business.
    • You need to have a process to handle questions from vendors.
    Info-Tech RFP Table of Contents:
    1. Statement of Work
    2. General Information
    3. Proposal Preparation Instructions
    4. Scope of Work, Specifications, and Requirements
    5. Vendor Qualifications and References
    6. Budget and Estimated Pricing
    7. Vendor Certification

    Download the Vulnerability Scanning Tool RFP Template

    Step 4.4

    Penetration testing

    Activities
    • 4.1.1 Create an RFP for penetration tests

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    We will review penetration testing, its distinction from vulnerability management, and why you may want to engage a penetration testing service.

    We provide a request for proposal (RFP) template that we can review if this is an area of interest.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Security Manager
    • SecOps team members
    • CISO
    • CIO

    Outcomes of this step

    An understanding of penetration testing, and guidance on how to get started if there is interest to do so.

    Measure and formalize
    Step 4.1Step 4.2Step 4.3Step 4.4

    Penetration testing

    Penetration tests are critical parts of any strong security program.

    Penetration testing will emulate the methods an attacker would use in the real world to circumvent your security controls and gain access to systems and data.

    Penetration testing is much more than just running a scanner or other automated tools and then generating a report. Penetration testing performs critical exploit validation to create certainty around your vulnerability.

    The primary objective of a penetration test is to identify and validate security weaknesses in an organization’s security systems.

    Reasons to Test:

    • Assess current security control effectiveness
    • Develop an action plan of items
    • Build a business case for a better security program
    • Increased security budget through vulnerability validation
    • Third-party, unbiased validation
    • Adhere to compliance or regulatory requirements
    • Raise security awareness
    • Demonstrate how an attacker can escalate privileges
    • Effective way to test incident response

    Regulatory Considerations:

    • There is a lot of regulatory wording saying that organizations can’t get a system that is managed, integrated, and supported by one vendor and then have it tested by the same vendor.
    • There is the need for separate third-party testing.
    • Penetration testing is required for PCI, cloud providers, and federal entities.

    How and where is the value being generated?

    Penetration testing is a service provided by trained and tested professionals with years of experience. The person behind the test is the most important part of the test. The person is able to emulate a real-life attacker better than any computer. It is just a vulnerability scan if you use tools or executables alone.

    “A penetration test is an audit with validation.” (Joel Shapiro, Vice President Sales, Digital Boundary Group)

    Start by considering the spectrum of penetration tests

    Network Penetration Tests

    Conventional testing of network defences.

    Testing vectors include:

    • Perimeter infrastructure
    • Wireless, WEP/WPA cracking
    • Cloud penetration testing
    • Telephony systems or VoIP
    Types of tests:
    • Denial-of-service testing
    • Out-of-band attacks
    • War dialing
    • Wireless network testing/war driving
    • Spoofing
    • Trojan attacks
    • Brute force attacks
    • Watering hole attacks
    • Honeypots
    • Cloud-penetration testing
    Application Penetration Tests

    Core business functions are now being provided through web applications, either to external customers or to internal end users.

    Types: Web apps, non-web apps, mobile apps

    Application penetration and security testing encompasses:

    • Code review – analyzing the application code for sensitive information of vulnerabilities in the code.
    • Authorization testing – testing systems responsible for user session management to see if unauthorized access can be permitted.
    • Authentication process for user testing.
    • Functionality testing – test the application functionality itself.
    • Website pen testing – active analysis of weaknesses or vulnerabilities.
    • Encryption testing – testing things like randomness or key strength.
    • User-session integrity testing.
    Human-Centric Testing
    • Penetration testing is developing a people aspect as opposed to just being technology focused.
    • End users and their susceptibility to social engineering attacks (spear phishing, phone calls, physical site testing, etc.) is now a common area to test.
    • Social engineering penetration testing is not only about identifying your human vulnerabilities, but also about proactively training your end users. As well as discovering and fixing potential vulnerabilities, social engineering penetration testing will help to raise security awareness within an organization.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your pen test should use multiple methods. Demonstrating weakness in one area is good but easy to identify. When you blend techniques, you get better success at breaching and it becomes more life-like. Think about prevention, detection, and response testing to provide full insight into your security defenses.

    Penetration testing types

    Evaluate four variables to determine which type of penetration test is most appropriate for your organization.

    Evaluate these dimensions to determine relevant penetration testing.

    Network, Application, or Human

    Evaluate your need to perform different types of penetration testing.

    Some level of network and application testing is most likely appropriate.

    The more common decision point is to consider to what degree your organization requires human-centric penetration testing.

    External or Internal

    External: Attacking an organization’s perimeter and internet-facing systems. For these, you generally provide some level of information to the tester. The test will begin with publicly available information gathering followed by some kind of network scanning or probing against externally visible servers or devices (DNS server, email server, web server, firewall, etc.)

    Internal: Carried out within the organization’s network. This emulates an attack originating from an internal point (disgruntled employee, authorized user, etc.). The idea is to see what could happen if the perimeter is breached.

    Transparent, Semi-Transparent, or Opaque Box

    Opaque Box: The penetration tester is not provided any information. This emulates a real-life attack. Test team uses publicly available information (corporate website, DNS, USENET, etc.) to start the test. These tests are more time consuming and expensive. They often result in exploitation of the easiest vulnerability.
    Use cases: emulating a real-life attack; testing detection and response capabilities; limited network segmentation.

    Transparent Box: Tester is provided full disclosure of information. The tester will have access to everything they need: building floor plans, data flow designs, network topology, etc. This represents what a credentialed and knowledgeable insider would do.
    Use cases: full assessment of security controls; testing of attacker traversal capabilities.

    Aggressiveness of the Test

    Not Aggressive: Very slow and careful penetration testing. Usually spread out in terms of packets being sent and number of calls to individuals. It attempts to not set off any alarm bells.

    Aggressive: A full DoS attack or something similar. These would be DoS attacks that take down systems or full SQL injection attacks all at once versus small injections over time. Testing options cover anything including physical tests, network tests, social engineering, and data extraction and exfiltration. This is more costly and time consuming.

    Assessing Aggressiveness: How aggressive the test should be is based on the threats you are concerned with. Assess who you are concerned with: random individuals on the internet, state-sponsored attacks, criminals, hacktivists, etc. Who you are concerned with will determine the appropriate aggressiveness of the test.

    Penetration testing scope

    Establish the scope of your penetration test before engaging vendors.

    Determining the scope of what is being tested is the most important part of a penetration test. Organizations need to be as specific as possible so the vendor can actually respond or ask questions.

    Organizations need to define boundaries, objectives, and key success factors.

    For scope:
    • If you go too narrow, the realism of the test suffers.
    • If you go too broad, it is more costly and there’s a possible increase in false positives.
    • Balance scope vs. budget.
    Boundaries to scope before a test:
    • IP addresses
    • URLs
    • Applications
    • Who is in scope for social engineering
    • Physical access from roof to dumpsters defined
    • Scope prioritized for high-value assets
    Objectives and key success factors to scope:
    • When is the test complete? Is it at the point of validated exploitation?
    • Are you looking for as many holes as possible, or are you looking for how many ways each hole can be exploited?

    What would be out of scope?

    • Are there systems, IP addresses, or other things you want out of scope? These are things you don’t explicitly want any penetration tester to touch.
    • Are there third-party connections to your environment that you don’t want to be tested? These are instances such as cloud providers, supply chain connections, and various services.
    • Are there things that would be awkward to test? For example, determine if you include high-level people in a social engineering test. Do you conduct social engineering for the CEO? If you get their credentials, it could be an awkward moment.

    Ways to break up a penetration test:

    • Location – This is the most common way to break up a penetration test.
    • Division – Self-contained business units are often done as separate tests so you can see how each unit does.
    • IT systems – For example, you put certain security controls in a firewall and want to test its effectiveness.
    • Applications – For example, you are launching a new website or a new portal and you want to test it.

    Penetration testing appropriateness

    Determine your penetration testing appropriateness.

    Usual instances to conduct a penetration test:
    • Setting up a new physical office. Penetration testing will not only test security capabilities but also resource availability and map out network flows.
    • New infrastructure hardware implemented. All new infrastructure needs to be tested.
    • Changes or upgrades to existing infrastructure. Need for testing varies depending on the size of the change.
    • New application deployment. Need to test before being pushed to production environments.
    • Changes or upgrades to existing applications. When fundamental functional changes occur, perform testing:
      • Before upgrades or patching
      • After upgrades or patching
    • Periodic testing. It is a best practice to periodically test your security control effectiveness. Consider at least an annual test.

    Specific timing considerations: Testing should be completed during non-production times of day. Testing should be completed after a backup has been performed.

    Assess your threats to determine your appropriate test type:

    Penetration testing is about what threats you are concerned about. Understand your risk profile, risk tolerance level, and specific threats to see how relevant penetration tests are.

    • Are external attackers concerning to you? Are you distressed about how an attacker can use brute force to enter your network? If so, focus on ingress points, such as FWs, routers, and DMZ.
    • Is social engineering a concern for you (i.e. phone-based or email-based)? Then you are concerned about a credentialed hacker.
    • Is it an insider threat, a disgruntled employee, etc.? This also includes an internal system that is under command and control (C&C).

    ANALYST PERSPECTIVE: Do a test only after you take a first pass.
    If you have not done some level of vulnerability assessment on your own (performing a scan, checking third-party sources, etc.) don’t waste your money on a penetration test. Only perform a penetration test after you have done a first pass and identified and remediated all the low-hanging fruit.

    4.4.1 Create an RFP for penetration tests

    2 hours

    Input: List of criteria and scope for the penetration test, Systems and application information if white box

    Output: Completed RFP document that can be distributed to vendor proponents

    Materials: Whiteboard/flip charts, Penetration Test RFP Template

    Participants: IT Security Manager, IT operations managers, CISO, Procurement department representative

    Use an RFP template to convey your desired penetration test requirements to vendors and outline the proposal and procurement steps set by your organization.

    1. Determine what kind of requirements will be needed for your penetration test RFP based on people, process, and technology requirements.
      • Consider items such as your technology environment and the scope of the penetration tests.
    2. Conduct an interview with relevant stakeholders to determine the exact requirements needed.
    3. Use Info-Tech’s Penetration Test RFP Template, which lists many requirements but can be customized to your organization’s specific needs.

    Download the Penetration Test RFP Template

    4.4.1 Create an RFP for penetration tests (continued)

    Steps of a penetration test:
    1. Determine scope
    2. Gather targeted intelligence
    3. Review exploit attempts, such as access and escalation
    4. Test the collection of sensitive data
    5. Run reporting
    Info-Tech RFP Table of Contents:
    1. Statement of Work
    2. General Information
    3. Proposal Preparation Instructions
    4. Scope of Work, Specifications, and Requirements
    5. Vendor Qualifications and References
    6. Budget and Estimated Pricing
    7. Vendor Certification

    Download the Penetration Test RFP Template

    Penetration testing considerations – service providers

    Consider what type of penetration testing service provider is best for your organization

    Professional Service Providers

    Professional Services Firms. These firms will often provide a myriad of professional services across auditing, financial, and consulting services. If they offer security-related consulting services, they will most likely offer some level of penetration testing.

    Security Service Firms. These are dedicated security consulting or advisory firms that will offer a wide spectrum of security-related services. Penetration testing may be one aspect of larger security assessments and strategy development services.

    Dedicated Penetration Testing Firms. These are service providers that will often offer the full gamut of penetration testing services.

    Integrators

    Managed Security Service Providers. These providers will offer penetration testing. For example, Dell SecureWorks offers numerous services including penetration testing. For organizations like this, you need to be skeptical of ulterior motives. For example, expect recommendations around outsourcing from Dell SecureWorks.

    Regional or Small Integrators. These are service providers that provide security services of some kind. For example, they would help in the implementation of a firewall and offer penetration testing services as well.

    Info-Tech Recommends:

    • Always be conscientious of who is conducting the testing and what else they offer. Even if you get another party to test rather than your technology provider, they will try to obtain you as a client. Remember that for larger technology vendors, security testing is a small revenue stream for them and it’s a way to find technology clients. They may offer penetration testing for free to obtain other business.
    • Most of the penetration testers were systems administrators (for network testing) or application developers (for application testing) at some point before becoming penetration testers. Remember this when evaluating providers and evaluating remediation recommendations.
    • Evaluate what kind of open-source tools, commercial tools, and proprietary tools are being used. In general, you don’t want to rely on an open-source scanner. For open source, they will have more outdated vulnerability databases, system identification can also be limited compared to commercial, and reporting is often lacking.
    • Above all else, ensure your testers are legally capable, experienced, and abide by non-disclosure agreements.

    Penetration testing best practices – communications

    Communication With Service Provider

    • During testing there should be designated points of contact between the service provider and the client.
    • There needs to be secure channels for communication of information between the tester and the client both during the test and for any results.
    • Results should always be explained to the client by the tester, regardless of the content or audience.
    • There should be a formal debrief with the results report.
    Immediate reporting of issues
    • Before any testing commences, immediate reporting conditions need to be defined. These are instances when you would want immediate notification of something occurring.
    • Stipulate certain systems or data types that if broken into or compromised, you would want to be notified right away.
    • Example:
      • If you are conducting social engineering, require notification for all account credentials that are compromised. Once credentials are compromised, it destroys all accountability for those credentials and the actions associated with those credentials by any user.
      • Require immediate reporting of specific high-critical systems that are compromised or if access is even found.
      • Require immediate reporting when regulated data is discovered or compromised in any way.

    Communication With Internal Staff

    Do you tell your internal staff that this is happening?

    This is sometimes called a “double blind test” when you don’t let your IT team know of the test occurring.

    Pros to notifying:
    • This tests the organization’s security monitoring, incident detection, and response capabilities.
    • Letting the team know they are going to see some activity will make sure they don’t get too worried about it.
    • There may be systems you can’t jeopardize but still need to test so notification beforehand is essential (e.g. you wouldn’t allow ERP testing with notification).
    Cons:
    • It does not give you a real-life example of how you respond if something happens.
    • Potential element of disrespect to IT people.

    Penetration testing best practices – results and remediation

    What to expect from penetration test results report:

    A final results report will state all findings including what was done by the testers, what vulnerabilities or exploitations were detected, how they were compromised, the related risk, and related remediation recommendations.

    Expect four major sections:
    • Introduction. An overview of the penetration test methodology including rating methodology of vulnerabilities.
    • Executive Summary. A management-level description of the test, often including a summary of any recommendations.
    • Technical Review. An overview of each item that was looked at and touched. This area breaks down what was done, how it was done, what was found, and any related remediation recommendations. Expect graphs and visuals in this section.
    • Detailed Findings. An in-depth breakdown of all testing methods used and results. Each vulnerability will be explained regarding how it was detected, what the risk is, and what the remediation recommendation is.
    Two areas that will vary by service provider:

    Prioritization

    • Most providers will boast their unique prioritization methodology.
    • A high, medium, and low rating scale based on some combination of variables (e.g. ease of exploitation, breadth of hole, information accessed resulting in further exploitation).
    • The prioritization won’t take into account asset value or criticality.
    • Keep in mind the penetration test is not an input into ultimate vulnerability prioritization, but it can help determine your urgency.

    Remediation

    • Remediation recommendations will vary across providers.
    • Generally, fairly generic recommendations are provided (e.g. remove your old telnet and input up-to-date SSH).
    • Most of the time, it is along the lines of “we found a hole; close the hole.”

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Problem Solved

    At the conclusion of this blueprint, you will have created a full vulnerability management program that will allow you to take a risk-based approach to vulnerability remediation.

    Assessing a vulnerability’s risk will enable you to properly determine the true urgency of a vulnerability within the context of your organization; this ensures you are not just blindly following what the tool is reporting.

    The risk-based approach will allow you to prioritize your discovered vulnerabilities and take immediate action on critical and high vulnerabilities while allowing your standard remediation cycle to address the medium to low vulnerabilities.

    With your program defined and developed, you now need to configure your vulnerability scanning tool or acquire one if you don’t already have a tool in place.

    Lastly, while vulnerability management will help address your systems and applications, how do you know if you are secure from external malicious actors? Penetration testing will offer visibility, allowing you to plug those holes and attain an environment with a smaller risk surface.

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop.

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Additional Support

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop.

    Photo of Jimmy Tom.

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.

    Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.

    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

    Sample of the Implement Vulnerability Management storyboard.
    Review of the Implement Vulnerability Management storyboard
    Sample of the Vulnerability Mitigation SOP template.
    Build your vulnerability management SOP

    Contributors

    Contributors from 2016 version of this project:

    • Morey Haber, Vice President of Technology, BeyondTrust
    • Richard Barretto, Manager, Information Privacy and Security, Cimpress
    • Joel Shapiro, Vice President Sales, Digital Boundary Group

    Contributors from current version of this project:

    • 2 anonymous contributors from the manufacturing sector
    • 1 anonymous contributor from a US government agency
    • 2 anonymous contributors from the financial sector
    • 1 anonymous contributor from the medical technology industry
    • 2 anonymous contributors from higher education
    • 1 anonymous contributor from a Canadian government agency
    • 7 anonymous others; information gathered from advisory calls

    Bibliography

    Arya. “COVID-19 Impact: Vulnerability Management Solution Market | Strategic Industry Evolutionary Analysis Focus on Leading Key Players and Revenue Growth Analysis by Forecast To 2028 – FireMon, Digital Shadows, AlienVault.” Bulletin Line, 6 Aug. 2020. Accessed 6 Aug. 2020.

    Campagna, Rich. “The Lean, Mean Vulnerability Management Machine.” Security Boulevard, 31 Mar. 2020. Accessed 15 Aug. 2020.

    Constantin, Lucian. “What are vulnerability scanners and how do they work?” CSO Online, 10 Apr. 2020. Accessed 1 Sept. 2020.

    “CVE security vulnerabilities published in 2019.” CVE Details. Accessed 22 Sept. 2020.

    Garden, Paul, et al. “2019 Year End Report – Vulnerability QuickView.” Risk Based Security, 2020. Accessed 22 Sept. 2020.

    Keary, Eoin. “2019 Vulnerability Statistics Report.” Edgescan, Feb. 2019. Accessed 22 Sept. 2020.

    Lefkowitz, Josh. ““Risk-Based Vulnerability Management is a Must for Security & Compliance.” SecurityWeek, 1 July 2019. Accessed 1 Nov. 2020.

    Mell, Peter, Tiffany Bergeron, and David Henning. “Creating a Patch and Vulnerability Management Program.” Creating a Patch and Vulnerability Management Program. NIST, Nov. 2005. Web.

    “National Vulnerability Database.” NIST. Accessed 18 Oct. 2020.

    “OpenVAS – Open Vulnerability Assessment Scanner.” OpenVAS. Accessed 14 Sept. 2020.

    “OVAL.” OVAL. Accessed 21 Oct. 2020.

    Paganini, Pierluigi. “Exploiting and Verifying Shellshock: CVE-2014-6271.” INFOSEC, 27 Sept. 2014. Web.

    Pritha. “Top 10 Metrics for your Vulnerability Management Program.” CISO Platform, 28 Nov. 2019. Accessed 25 Oct. 2020.

    “Risk-Based Vulnerability Management: Understanding Vulnerability Risk With Threat Context And Business Impact.” Tenable. Accessed 21 Oct. 2020.

    Stone, Mark. “Shellshock In-Depth: Why This Old Vulnerability Won’t Go Away.” SecurityIntelligence, 6 Aug. 2020. Web.

    “The Role of Threat Intelligence in Vulnerability Management.” NOPSEC, 18 Sept. 2014. Accessed 18 Aug. 2020.

    “Top 15 Paid and Free Vulnerability Scanner Tools in 2020.” DNSstuff, 6 Jan. 2020. Accessed 15 Sept. 2020.

    Truta, Filip. “60% of Breaches in 2019 Involved Unpatched Vulnerabilities.” Security Boulevard, 31 Oct. 2019. Accessed 2 Nov. 2020.

    “Vulnerability Management Program.” Core Security. Accessed 15 Sept. 2020.

    “What is Risk-Based Vulnerability Management?” Balbix. Accessed 15 Sept. 2020.

    White, Monica. “The Cost Savings of Effective Vulnerability Management (Part 1).” Kenna Security, 23 April 2020. Accessed 20 Sept. 2020.

    Wilczek, Marc. “Average Cost of a Data Breach in 2020: $3.86M.” Dark Reading, 24 Aug. 2020. Accessed 5 Nov 2020.

    Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}353|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): N/A
    • member rating average dollars saved: N/A
    • member rating average days saved: N/A
    • Parent Category Name: Development
    • Parent Category Link: /development
    • You need to clearly convey the direction and strategy of your product portfolio to gain alignment, support, and funding from your organization.
    • IT organizations are traditionally organized to deliver initiatives in specific periods of time. This conflicts with product delivery, which continuously delivers value over the lifetime of a product.
    • Delivering multiple products together creates additional challenges because each product has its own pedigree, history, and goals.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Empowered product managers and product owners are the key to ensuring your delivery teams are delivering the right value at the right time to the right stakeholders.
    • Establishing operationally aligned product families helps bridge the gap between enterprise priorities and product enhancements.
    • Leadership must be aligned to empower and support Agile values and product teams to unlock the full value realization within your organization.

    Impact and Result

    • Common understanding of product management and Agile delivery.
    • Commitment to support and empower product teams.

    Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Enabling Product Delivery – Executive workshop to align senior leadership with their transition to product management and delivery.

    • Enabling Product Delivery – Executive Workshop Storyboard

    2. Enabling Product Delivery –Executive Workshop Outcomes.

    • Enabling Product Delivery – Executive Workshop Outcomes
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Understanding Your Top Challenges

    The Purpose

    Understand the drivers for your product transformation.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Define the drivers for your transition to product-centric delivery.

    Activities

    1.1 What is driving your organization to become product focused?

    Outputs

    List of challenges and drivers

    2 Transitioning From Projects to Product-Centric Delivery

    The Purpose

    Understand the product transformation journey and differences.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Identify the cultural, behavioral, and leadership changes needed for a successful transformation.

    Activities

    2.1 Define the differences between projects and product delivery

    Outputs

    List of differences

    3 Enterprise Agility and the Value of Change

    The Purpose

    Understand why smaller iterations increase value realization and decrease accumulated risk.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Leverage smaller iterations to reduce time to value and accumulated risk to core operations.

    Activities

    3.1 What is business agility?

    Outputs

    Common understanding about the value of smaller iterations

    4 Defining Products and Product Management in Your Context

    The Purpose

    Establish an organizational starting definition of products.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Tailor product management to meet the needs and vision of your organization.

    Activities

    4.1 What is a product? Who are your consumers?

    4.2 Identify enablers and blockers of product ownership

    4.3 Define a set of guiding principles for product management

    Outputs

    Product definition

    List of enablers and blockers of product ownership

    Set of guiding principles for product management

    5 Connecting Product Management to Agile Practices

    The Purpose

    Understand the relationship between product management and product delivery.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Optimize product management to prioritize the right changes for the right people at the right time.

    Activities

    5.1 Discussions

    Outputs

    Common understanding

    6 Commit to Empowering Agile Product Teams

    The Purpose

    Personalize and commit to supporting product teams.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Embrace leadership and cultural changes needed to empower and support teams.

    Activities

    6.1 Your management culture

    6.2 Personal Cultural Stop, Start, and Continue

    6.3 Now, Next, Later to support product owners

    Outputs

    Your management culture map

    Personal Cultural Stop, Start, and Continue list

    Now, Next, Later roadmap

    Further reading

    Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop

    Strengthen product management in your organization through effective executive leadership by focusing on product teams, core capabilities, and proper alignment.

    Objective of this workshop

    To develop a common understanding and foundation for product management so we, as leaders, better understand how to lead product owners, product managers, and their teams.

    Enable Product Delivery - Executive Leadership Workshop

    Learn how enterprise agility can provide lasting value to the organization

    Clarify your role in supporting your teams to deliver lasting value to stakeholders and customers

    1. Understanding Your Top Challenges
      • Define your challenges, goals, and opportunities Agile and product management will impact.
    2. Transitioning from Projects to Product-centric Delivery
      • Understand the shift from fixed delivery to continuous improvement and delivery of value.
    3. Enterprise Agility and the Value of Change
      • Organizations need to embrace change and leverage smaller delivery cycles.
    4. Defining Your "Products" and Product Management
      • Define products in your culture and how to empower product delivery teams.
    5. Connecting Product Management to Agile Practices
      • Use product ownership to drive increased ROI into your product delivery teams and lifecycles.
    6. Commit to Empowering Agile Product Teams
      • Define the actions and changes you must make for this transformation to be successful.

    Your Product Transformation Journey

    1. Make the Case for Product Delivery
      • Align your organization with the practices to deliver what matters most
    2. Enable Product Delivery – Executive Workshop
      • One-day executive workshop – align and prepare your leadership
      • Audience: Senior executives and IT leadership.
        Size: 8-16 people
        Time: 6 hours
    3. Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision
      • Enhance product backlogs, roadmapping, and strategic alignment
      • Audience: Product Owners/Mangers
        Size: 10-20 people
        Time: 3-4 days
    4. Deliver Your Digital Products at Scale
      • Scale Product Families to Align Enterprise Goals
      • Audience: Product Owners/Mangers
        Size: 10-20 people
        Time: 3-4 days
    5. Mature and Scale Product Ownership
      • Align and mature your product owners
      • Audience: Product Owners/Mangers
        Size: 8-16 people
        Time: 2-4 days

    Repeat workshops with different companies, operating units, departments, or teams as needed.

    What is a workshop?

    We WILL ENGAGE in discussions and activities:

    • Flexible, to accommodate the needs of the group.
    • Open forum for discussion and questions.
    • Share your knowledge, expertise, and experiences (roadblocks and success stories).
    • Everyone is part of the process.
    • Builds upon itself.

    This workshop will NOT be:

    • A lecture or class.
    • A monologue that never ends.
    • Technical training.
    • A presentation.
    • Us making all the decisions.

    Roles within the workshop

    We each have a role to play to make our workshop successful!

    Facilitators

    • Introduce the best practice framework used by Info-Tech.
    • Ask questions about processes, procedures, and assumptions.
    • Guide for the methodology.
    • Liaison for any other relevant Info-Tech research or services.

    Participants

    • Contribute and speak out as much as needed.
    • Provide expertise on the current processes and technology.
    • Ask questions.
    • Provide feedback.
    • Collaborate and work together to produce solutions.

    Understanding Your Top Challenges

    • Understanding Your Top Challenges
    • Transitioning From Projects to Product-Centric Delivery
    • Enterprise Agility and the Value of Change
    • Defining Your Products and Product Management
    • Connecting Product Management to Agile Practices
    • Commit to Empowering Agile Product Teams
    • Wrap-Up and Retrospective

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    • Products are the lifeblood of an organization. They deliver the capabilities needed to deliver value to customers, internal users, and stakeholders.
    • The shift to becoming a product organization is intended to continually increase the value you provide to the broader organization as you grow and evolve.
    • You need to clearly convey the direction and strategy of your product portfolio to gain alignment, support, and funding from your organization.

    Common Obstacles

    • IT organizations are traditionally organized to deliver initiatives in specific periods of time. This conflicts with product delivery, which continuously delivers value over the lifetime of a product.
    • Delivering multiple products together creates additional challenges because each product has its own pedigree, history, and goals.
    • Product owners struggle to prioritize changes to deliver product value. This creates a gap and conflict between product and enterprise goals.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    Info-Tech's approach will guide you through:

    • Understanding the top challenges driving your product initiative.
    • Improving your transitioning from projects to product-centric delivery.
    • Enhancing enterprise agility and the value of change.
    • Defining products and product management in your context.
    • Connecting product management to Agile practices.
    • Committing to empowering Agile Product teams.
    This is an image of an Info-Tech Thought Map for Accelerate Your Transition to Product Delivery
    This is an image of an Info-Tech Thought Map for Delier on your Digital Product Vision
    This is an image of an Info-Tech Thought Map for Deliver Digital Products at Scale via Enterprise Product Families.
    This is an image of an Info-Tech Thought Map for What We Mean by an Applcation Department Strategy.

    What is driving your organization to become product focused?

    30 minutes

    • Team introductions:
      • Share your name and role
      • What are the key challenges you are looking to solve around product management?
      • What blockers or challenges will we need to overcome?

    Capture in the Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop Outcomes and Next Steps.

    Input

    • Organizational knowledge
    • Goals and challenges

    Output

    • List of key challenges
    • List of workshop expectations
    • Parking lot items

    Transitioning From Projects to Product-Centric Delivery

    • Understanding Your Top Challenges
    • Transitioning From Projects to Product-Centric Delivery
    • Enterprise Agility and the Value of Change
    • Defining Your Products and Product Management
    • Connecting Product Management to Agile Practices
    • Commit to Empowering Agile Product Teams
    • Wrap-Up and Retrospective

    Define the differences between projects and product delivery

    30 minutes

    • Consider project delivery and product delivery.
    • Discussion:
      • What are some differences between the two?

    Capture in the Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop Outcomes and Next Steps.

    Input

    • Organizational knowledge
    • Internal terms and definitions

    Output

    • List of differences between projects and product delivery

    Define the differences between projects and product delivery

    15 minutes

    Project Delivery

    vs

    Product Delivery

    Point in time

    What is changed

    Method of funding changes

    Needs an owner

    Input

    • Organizational knowledge
    • Internal terms and definitions

    Output

    • List of differences between projects and product delivery

    Capture in the Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop Outcomes and Next Steps.

    Identify the differences between a project-centric and a product-centric organization

    Project

    Product

    Fund Projects

    Funding

    Fund Products or Teams

    Line of Business Sponsor

    Prioritization

    Product Owner

    Makes Specific Changes
    to a Product

    Product Management

    Improve Product Maturity
    and Support

    Assign People to Work

    Work Allocation

    Assign Work
    to Product Teams

    Project Manager Manages

    Capacity Management

    Team Manages Capacity

    Info-Tech Insight

    Product delivery requires significant shifts in the way you complete development work and deliver value to your users. Make the changes that support improving end user value and enterprise alignment.

    Projects can be a mechanism for funding product changes and improvements

    This is an image showing the relationship between the project lifecycle, a hybrid lifecycle, and a product lifecycle.

    Projects within products

    Regardless of whether you recognize yourself as a "product-based" or "project-based" shop, the same basic principles should apply.

    You go through a period or periods of project-like development to build a version of an application or product.

    You also have parallel services along with your project development, which encompass the more product-based view. These may range from basic support and maintenance to full-fledged strategy teams or services like sales and marketing.

    While Agile and product are intertwined, they are not the same!

    Delivering products does not necessarily require an Agile mindset. However, Agile methods help facilitate the journey because product thinking is baked into them.

    This image shows the product delivery maturity process from waterfall to continuous integration and delivery.

    Product roadmaps guide delivery and communicate your strategy

    In Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision, we demonstrate how the product roadmap is core to value realization. The product roadmap is your communicated path, and as a product owner, you use it to align teams and changes to your defined goals while aligning your product to enterprise goals and strategy.

    This is an image adapted from Pichler, What is Product Management.

    Adapted from: Pichler, "What Is Product Management?"

    Info-Tech Insight

    The quality of your product backlog – and your ability to realize business value from your delivery pipeline – is directly related to the input, content, and prioritization of items in your product roadmap.

    Develop a Cloud Testing Strategy for Today's Apps

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    • Parent Category Name: Cloud Strategy
    • Parent Category Link: /cloud-strategy
    • The growth of the Cloud and the evolution of business operations have shown that traditional testing strategies do not work well with modern applications.
    • Organizations require a new framework around testing cloud applications that account for on-demand scalability and self-provisioning.
    • Expectations of application consumers are continually increasing with speed-to-market and quality being the norm.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Cloud technology does not change the traditional testing processes that many organizations have accepted and adopted. It does, however, enhance traditional practices with increased replication capacity, execution speed, and compatibility through its virtual infrastructure and automated processes. Consider these factors when developing the cloud testing strategy.
    • Involving the business in strategy development will keep them engaged and align business drivers with technical initiatives.
    • Implement cloud testing solutions in a well-defined rollout process to ensure business objectives are realized and cloud testing initiatives are optimized.
    • Cloud testing is green and dynamic. Realize the limitations of cloud testing and play on its strengths.

    Impact and Result

    • Engaging in a formal and standardized cloud testing strategy and consistently meeting business needs throughout the organization maintains business buy-in.
    • The Cloud compounds the benefits from virtualization and automation because of the Cloud’s scalability, speed, and off-premise and virtual infrastructure and data storage attributes.
    • Cloud testing presents a new testing avenue. Realize that only certain tests are optimized in the Cloud, i.e., load, stress, and functional testing.

    Develop a Cloud Testing Strategy for Today's Apps Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Develop a cloud testing strategy.

    Obtain organizational buy-ins and build a standardized and formal cloud testing strategy.

    • Storyboard: Develop a Cloud Testing Strategy for Today's Apps
    • None

    2. Assess the organization's readiness for cloud testing.

    Assess your people, process, and technology for cloud testing readiness and realize areas for improvement.

    • Cloud Testing Readiness Assessment Tool

    3. Plan and manage the resources allocated to each project task.

    Organize and monitor cloud project planning tasks throughout the project's duration.

    • Cloud Testing Project Planning and Monitoring Tool
    [infographic]

    Beyond Survival

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    • Parent Category Name: Big Data
    • Parent Category Link: /big-data
    • Consumer, customer, employee, and partner behavior has changed; new needs have arisen as a result of COVID-19. Entire business models had to be rethought and revised – in real time with no warning.
    • And worse, no one knows when (or even if) the pandemic will end. The world and the economy will continue to be highly uncertain, unpredictable, and vulnerable for some time.
    • Business leaders need to continue experimenting to stay in business, protect employees and supply chains, manage financial obligations, allay consumer and employee fears, rebuild confidence, and protect trust.
    • How do organizations know whether their new business tactics are working?

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • We can learn many lessons from those who have survived and are succeeding.
    • They have one thing in common though – they rely on data and analytics to help people think and know how to respond, evaluate effectiveness of new business tactics, uncover emerging trends to feed innovation, and minimize uncertainty and risk.
    • This mini-blueprint highlights organizations and use cases where data, analytics, and AI deliver tangible business and human value now and in the future.

    Impact and Result

    • Learn from the pandemic survivors and super-achievers so that you too can hit the ground running in the new normal. Even better – go beyond survival, like many of them have done. Create your future by leveraging and scaling up your data and analytics investments. It is not (yet) too late, and Info-Tech can help.

    Beyond Survival Research & Tools

    Beyond Survival

    Use data, analytics, and AI to reimagine the future and thrive in the new normal.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    • Beyond Survival Storyboard
    [infographic]

    Enable Organization-Wide Collaboration by Scaling Agile

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    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): 8.3/10 Overall Impact
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    • Parent Category Name: Architecture & Strategy
    • Parent Category Link: /architecture-and-strategy
    • Your organization is realizing benefits from adopting Agile principles and practices in pockets of your organization.
    • You are starting to investigate opportunities to extend Agile beyond these pilot implementations into other areas of the organization. You are looking for a coordinated approach aligned to business priorities.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Not all lessons from a pilot project are transferable. Pilot processes are tailored to a specific project’s scope, team, and tools, and they may not account for the diverse attributes in your organization.
    • Control may be necessary for coordination. More moving parts means enforcing consistent cadences, reporting, and communication is a must if teams are not disciplined or lack good governance.
    • Scale Agile in departments tolerable to change. Incrementally roll Agile out in departments where its principles are accepted (e.g. a culture of continuous improvement, embracing failures as lessons).

    Impact and Result

    • Complete an Agile capability assessment of your pilot functional group to gauge anticipated Agile benefits. Identify the business objectives and the group drivers that are motivating a scaled Agile implementation.
    • Understand the challenges that you may face when scaling Agile. Investigate the root causes of inefficiencies that can derail your scaling initiatives.
    • Brainstorm solutions to your scaling challenges and envision a target state for your growing Agile environment. Your target state will discover new opportunities to drive more business value and eliminate current activities driving down productivity.
    • Coordinate the implementation and execution of scaling Agile initiatives with a Scaling Agile Playbook. This organic and collaborative document will lay out the process, roles, goals, and objectives needed to successfully manage your Agile environment.

    Enable Organization-Wide Collaboration by Scaling Agile Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should scale up Agile, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Gauge readiness to scale up Agile

    Evaluate the readiness of the pilot functional group and Agile development processes to adopt scaled Agile practices.

    • Enable Organization-Wide Collaboration by Scaling Agile – Phase 1: Gauge Readiness to Scale Up Agile
    • Scaling Agile Playbook Template
    • Scrum Development Process Template

    2. Define scaled Agile target state

    Alleviate scaling issues and risks and introduce new opportunities to enhance business value delivery with Agile practices.

    • Enable Organization-Wide Collaboration by Scaling Agile – Phase 2: Define Scaled Agile Target State

    3. Create implementation plan

    Roll out scaling Agile initiatives in a gradual, iterative approach and define the right metrics to demonstrate success.

    • Enable Organization-Wide Collaboration by Scaling Agile – Phase 3: Create Implementation Plan
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Enable Organization-Wide Collaboration by Scaling Agile

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Gauge Your Readiness to Scale Up Agile

    The Purpose

    Identify the business objectives and functional group drivers for adopting Agile practices to gauge the fit of scaling Agile.

    Select the pilot project to demonstrate the value of scaling Agile.

    Review and evaluate your current Agile development process and functional group structure.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understanding of the notable business and functional group gaps that can derail the scaling of Agile.

    Selection of a pilot program that will be used to gather metrics to continuously improve implementation and obtain buy-in for wider rollout.

    Realization of the root causes behind functional group and process issues in the current Agile implementation.

    Activities

    1.1 Assess your pilot functional group

    Outputs

    Fit assessment of functional group to pilot Agile scaling

    Selection of pilot program

    List of critical success factors

    2 Define Your Scaled Agile Target State

    The Purpose

    Think of solutions to address the root causes of current communication and process issues that can derail scaling initiatives.

    Brainstorm opportunities to enhance the delivery of business value to customers.

    Generate a target state for your scaled Agile implementation.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Defined Agile capabilities and services of your functional group.

    Optimized functional group team structure, development process, and program framework to support scaled Agile in your context.

    Identification and accommodation of the risks associated with implementing and executing Agile capabilities.

    Activities

    2.1 Define Agile capabilities at scale

    2.2 Build your scaled Agile target state

    Outputs

    Solutions to scaling issues and opportunities to deliver more business value

    Agile capability map

    Functional group team structure, Agile development process and program framework optimized to support scaled Agile

    Risk assessment of scaling Agile initiatives

    3 Create Your Implementation Plan

    The Purpose

    List metrics to gauge the success of your scaling Agile implementation.

    Define the initiatives to scale Agile in your organization and to prepare for a wider rollout.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Strategic selection of the right metrics to demonstrate the value of scaling Agile initiatives.

    Scaling Agile implementation roadmap based on current resource capacities, task complexities, and business priorities.

    Activities

    3.1 Create your implementation plan

    Outputs

    List of metrics to gauge scaling Agile success

    Scaling Agile implementation roadmap

    First 30 Days Pandemic Response Plan

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    • Parent Category Name: DR and Business Continuity
    • Parent Category Link: /business-continuity
    • Given the speed and scope of the spread of the pandemic, governments are responding with changes almost daily as to what organizations and people can and can’t do. This volatility and uncertainty challenges organizations to respond, particularly in the absence of a business continuity or crisis management plan.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Assess the risk to and viability of your organization in order to create appropriate action and communication plans quickly.

    Impact and Result

    • HR departments must be directly involved in developing the organization’s pandemic response plan. Use Info-Tech's Risk and Viability Matrix and uncover the crucial next steps to take during the first 30 days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    First 30 Days Pandemic Response Plan Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Create a response plan for the first 30 days of a pandemic

    Manage organizational risk and viability during the first 30 days of a crisis.

    • First 30 Days Pandemic Response Plan Storyboard
    • Crisis Matrix Communications Template: Business As Usual
    • Crisis Matrix Communications Template: Organization Closing
    • Crisis Matrix Communications Template: Manage Risk and Leverage Resilience
    • Crisis Matrix Communications Template: Reduce Labor and Mitigate Risk
    [infographic]

    Configuration management

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    • Download01-Title: Harness the power of Configuration Management Executive Brief
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    • Parent Category Name: Infra and Operations
    • Parent Category Link: /infra-and-operations
    Configuration management is all about being able to manage your assets within the support processes. That means to record what you need. Not less than that, and not more either.

    Asset Management, Configuration Management, Lifecycle Management

    Optimize IT Change Management

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    • Parent Category Name: Operations Management
    • Parent Category Link: /i-and-o-process-management
    • Infrastructure managers and change managers need to re-evaluate their change management processes due to slow change turnaround time, too many unauthorized changes, too many incidents and outages because of poorly managed changes, or difficulty evaluating and prioritizing changes.
    • IT system owners often resist change management because they see it as slow and bureaucratic.
    • Infrastructure changes are often seen as different from application changes, and two (or more) processes may exist.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • ITIL provides a usable framework for change management, but full process rigor is not appropriate for every change request.
    • You need to design a process that is flexible enough to meet the demand for change, and strict enough to protect the live environment from change-related incidents.
    • A mature change management process will minimize review and approval activity. Counterintuitively, with experience in implementing changes, risk levels decline to a point where most changes are “pre-approved.”

    Impact and Result

    • Create a unified change management process that reduces risk. The process should be balanced in its approach toward deploying changes while also maintaining throughput of innovation and enhancements.
    • Categorize changes based on an industry-standard risk model with objective measures of impact and likelihood.
    • Establish and empower a change manager and change advisory board with the authority to manage, approve, and prioritize changes.
    • Integrate a configuration management database with the change management process to identify dependencies.

    Optimize IT Change Management Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should optimize change management, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    • Optimize IT Change Management – Phases 1-4

    1. Define change management

    Assess the maturity of your existing change management practice and define the scope of change management for your organization.

    • Change Management Maturity Assessment Tool
    • Change Management Risk Assessment Tool

    2. Establish roles and workflows

    Build your change management team and standardized process workflows for each change type.

    • Change Manager
    • Change Management Process Library – Visio
    • Change Management Process Library – PDF
    • Change Management Standard Operating Procedure

    3. Define the RFC and post-implementation activities

    Bookend your change management practice by standardizing change intake, implementation, and post-implementation activities.

    • Request for Change Form Template
    • Change Management Pre-Implementation Checklist
    • Change Management Post-Implementation Checklist

    4. Measure, manage, and maintain

    Form an implementation plan for the project, including a metrics evaluation, change calendar inputs, communications plan, and roadmap.

    • Change Management Metrics Tool
    • Change Management Communications Plan
    • Change Management Roadmap Tool
    • Optimize IT Change Management Improvement Initiative: Project Summary Template

    [infographic]

    Workshop: Optimize IT Change Management

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Define Change Management

    The Purpose

    Discuss the existing challenges and maturity of your change management practice.

    Build definitions of change categories and the scope of change management.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understand the starting point and scope of change management.

    Understand the context of change request versus other requests such as service requests, projects, and operational tasks.

    Activities

    1.1 Outline strengths and challenges

    1.2 Conduct a maturity assessment

    1.3 Build a categorization scheme

    1.4 Build a risk assessment matrix

    Outputs

    Change Management Maturity Assessment Tool

    Change Management Risk Assessment Tool

    2 Establish Roles and Workflows

    The Purpose

    Define roles and responsibilities for the change management team.

    Develop a standardized change management practice for approved changes, including process workflows.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Built the team to support your new change management practice.

    Develop a formalized and right-sized change management practice for each change category. This will ensure all changes follow the correct process and core activities to confirm changes are completed successfully.

    Activities

    2.1 Define the change manager role

    2.2 Outline the membership and protocol for the Change Advisory Board (CAB)

    2.3 Build workflows for normal, emergency, and pre-approved changes

    Outputs

    Change Manager Job Description

    Change Management Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)

    Change Management Process Library

    3 Define the RFC and Post-Implementation Activities

    The Purpose

    Create a new change intake process, including a new request for change (RFC) form.

    Develop post-implementation review activities to be completed for every IT change.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Bookend your change management practice by standardizing change intake, implementation, and post-implementation activities.

    Activities

    3.1 Define the RFC template

    3.2 Determine post-implementation activities

    3.3 Build your change calendar protocol

    Outputs

    Request for Change Form Template

    Change Management Post-Implementation Checklist

    Project Summary Template

    4 Measure, Manage, and Maintain

    The Purpose

    Develop a plan and project roadmap for reaching your target for your change management program maturity.

    Develop a communications plan to ensure the successful adoption of the new program.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A plan and project roadmap for reaching target change management program maturity.

    A communications plan ready for implementation.

    Activities

    4.1 Identify metrics and reports

    4.2 Build a communications plan

    4.3 Build your implementation roadmap

    Outputs

    Change Management Metrics Tool

    Change Management Communications Plan

    Change Management Roadmap Tool

    Further reading

    Optimize IT Change Management

    Right-size IT change management practice to protect the live environment.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    Balance risk and efficiency to optimize IT change management.

    Change management (change enablement, change control) is a balance of efficiency and risk. That is, pushing changes out in a timely manner while minimizing the risk of deployment. On the one hand, organizations can attempt to avoid all risk and drown the process in rubber stamps, red tape, and bureaucracy. On the other hand, organizations can ignore process and push out changes as quickly as possible, which will likely lead to change related incidents and debilitating outages.

    Right-sizing the process does not mean adopting every recommendation from best-practice frameworks. It means balancing the efficiency of change request fulfillment with minimizing risk to your organization. Furthermore, creating a process that encourages adherence is key to avoid change implementers from skirting your process altogether.

    Benedict Chang, Research Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations, Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Infrastructure and application change occurs constantly and is driven by changing business needs, requests for new functionality, operational releases and patches, and resolution of incidents or problems detected by the service desk.

    IT managers need to follow a standard change management process to ensure that rogue changes are never deployed while the organization remains responsive to demand.

    Common Obstacles

    IT system owners often resist change management because they see it as slow and bureaucratic.

    At the same time, an increasingly interlinked technical environment may cause issues to appear in unexpected places. Configuration management systems are often not kept up-to-date and do not catch the potential linkages.

    Infrastructure changes are often seen as “different” from application changes and two (or more) processes may exist.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    Info-Tech’s approach will help you:

    • Create a unified change management practice that balances risk and throughput of innovation.
    • Categorize changes based on an industry-standard risk model with objective measures of impact and likelihood.
    • Establish and empower a Change Manager and Change Advisory Board (CAB) with the authority to manage, approve, and prioritize changes.

    Balance Risk and Efficiency to Optimize IT Change Management

    Two goals of change management are to protect the live environment and deploying changes in a timely manner. These two may seem to sometimes be at odds against each other, but assessing risk at multiple points of a change’s lifecycle can help you achieve both.

    Your challenge

    This research is designed to help organizations who need to:

    • Build a right-sized change management practice that encourages adherence and balances efficiency and risk.
    • Integrate the change management practice with project management, service desk processes, configuration management, and other areas of IT and the business.
    • Communicate the benefits and impact of change management to all the stakeholders affected by the process.

    Change management is heavily reliant on organizational culture

    Having a right-sized process is not enough. You need to build and communicate the process to gather adherence. The process is useless if stakeholders are not aware of it or do not follow it.

    Increase the Effectiveness of Change Management in Your Organization

    The image is a bar graph, with the segments labelled 1 and 2. The y-axis lists numbers 1-10. Segment 1 is at 6.2, and segment 2 is at 8.6.

    Of the eight infrastructure & operations processes measured in Info-Tech’s IT Management and Governance Diagnostic (MGD) program, change management has the second largest gap between importance and effectiveness of these processes.

    Source: Info-Tech 2020; n=5,108 IT professionals from 620 organizations

    Common obstacles

    These barriers make this challenge difficult to address for many organizations:

    • Gaining buy-in can be a challenge no matter how well the process is built.
    • The complexity of the IT environment and culture of tacit knowledge for configuration makes it difficult to assess cross-dependencies of changes.
    • Each silo or department may have their own change management workflows that they follow internally. This can make it difficult to create a unified process that works well for everyone.

    “Why should I fill out an RFC when it only takes five minutes to push through my change?”

    “We’ve been doing this for years. Why do we need more bureaucracy?”

    “We don’t need change management if we’re Agile.”

    “We don’t have the right tools to even start change management.”

    “Why do I have to attend a CAB meeting when I don’t care what other departments are doing?”

    Info-Tech’s approach

    Build change management by implementing assessments and stage gates around appropriate levels of the change lifecycle.

    The image is a circle, comprised of arrows, with each arrow pointing to the next, forming a cycle. Each arrow is labelled, as follows: Improve; Request; Assess; Plan; Approve; Implement

    The Info-Tech difference:

    1. Create a unified change management process that balances risk and throughput of innovation.
    2. Categorize changes based on an industry-standard risk model with objective measures of impact and likelihood.
    3. Establish and empower a Change Manager and Change Advisory Board (CAB) with the authority to manage, approve, and prioritize changes.

    IT change is constant and is driven by:

    Change Management:

    1. Operations - Operational releases, maintenance, vendor-driven updates, and security updates can all be key drivers of change. Example: ITSM version update
      • Major Release
      • Maintenance Release
      • Security Patch
    2. Business - Business-driven changes may include requests from other business departments that require IT’s support. Examples: New ERP or HRIS implementation
      • New Application
      • New Version
    3. Service desk → Incident & Problem - Some incident and problem tickets require a change to facilitate resolution of the incident. Examples: Outage necessitating update of an app (emergency change), a user request for new functionality to be added to an existing app
      • Workaround
      • Fix
    4. Configuration Management Database (CMDB) ↔ Asset Management - In addition to software and hardware asset dependencies, a configuration management database (CMDB) is used to keep a record of changes and is queried to assess change requests.
      • Hardware
      • Software

    Insight summary

    “The scope of change management is defined by each organization…the purpose of change management is to maximize the number of successful service and product changes by ensuring that the risk have been properly assessed, authorizing changes to process, and managing the change schedule.” – ALEXOS Limited, ITIL 4

    Build a unified change management process balancing risk and change throughput.

    Building a unified process that oversees all changes to the technical environment doesn’t have to be burdensome to be effective. However, the process is a necessary starting point to identifying cross dependencies and avoiding change collisions and change-related incidents.

    Use an objective framework for estimating risk

    Simply asking, “What is the risk?” will result in subjective responses that will likely minimize the perceived risk. The level of due diligence should align to the criticality of the systems or departments potentially impacted by the proposed changes.

    Integrate your change process with your IT service management system

    Change management in isolation will provide some stability, but maturing the process through service integrations will enable data-driven decisions, decrease bureaucracy, and enable faster and more stable throughput.

    Change management and DevOps can work together effectively

    Change and DevOps tend to be at odds, but the framework does not have to change. Lower risk changes in DevOps are prime candidates for the pre-approved category. Much of the responsibility traditionally assigned to the CAB can be diffused throughout the software development lifecycle.

    Change management and DevOps can coexist

    Shift the responsibility and rigor to earlier in the process.

    • If you are implementing change management in a DevOps environment, ensure you have a strong DevOps lifecycle. You may wish to refer to Info-Tech’s research Implementing DevOps Practices That Work.
    • Consider starting in this blueprint by visiting Appendix II to frame your approach to change management. Follow the blueprint while paying attention to the DevOps Callouts.

    DEVOPS CALLOUTS

    Look for these DevOps callouts throughout this storyboard to guide you along the implementation.

    The image is a horizontal figure eight, with 7 arrows, each pointing into the next. They are labelled are follows: Plan; Create; Verify; Package; Release; Configure; Monitor. At the centre of the circles are the words Dev and Ops.

    Successful change management will provide benefits to both the business and IT

    Respond to business requests faster while reducing the number of change-related disruptions.

    IT Benefits

    • Fewer change-related incidents and outages
    • Faster change turnaround time
    • Higher rate of change success
    • Less change rework
    • Fewer service desk calls related to poorly communicated changes

    Business Benefits

    • Fewer service disruptions
    • Faster response to requests for new and enhanced functionalities
    • Higher rate of benefits realization when changes are implemented
    • Lower cost per change
    • Fewer “surprise” changes disrupting productivity

    IT satisfaction with change management will drive business satisfaction with IT. Once the process is working efficiently, staff will be more motivated to adhere to the process, reducing the number of unauthorized changes. As fewer changes bypass proper evaluation and testing, service disruptions will decrease and business satisfaction will increase.

    Change management improves core benefits to the business: the four Cs

    Most organizations have at least some form of change control in place, but formalizing change management leads to the four Cs of business benefits:

    Control

    Change management brings daily control over the IT environment, allowing you to review every relatively new change, eliminate changes that would have likely failed, and review all changes to improve the IT environment.

    Collaboration

    Change management planning brings increased communication and collaboration across groups by coordinating changes with business activities. The CAB brings a more formalized and centralized communication method for IT.

    Consistency

    Request for change templates and a structured process result in implementation, test, and backout plans being more consistent. Implementing processes for pre-approved changes also ensures these frequent changes are executed consistently and efficiently.

    Confidence

    Change management processes will give your organization more confidence through more accurate planning, improved execution of changes, less failure, and more control over the IT environment. This also leads to greater protection against audits.

    You likely need to improve change management more than any other infrastructure & operations process

    The image shows a vertical bar graph. Each segment of the graph is labelled for an infrastructure/operations process. Each segment has two bars one for effectiveness, and another for importance. The first segment, Change Management, is highlighted, with its Effectiveness at a 6.2 and Importance at 8.6

    Source: Info-Tech 2020; n=5,108 IT Professionals from 620 organizations

    Of the eight infrastructure and operations processes measured in Info-Tech’s IT Management and Governance Diagnostic (MGD) program, change management consistently has the second largest gap between importance and effectiveness of these processes.

    Executives and directors recognize the importance of change management but feel theirs is currently ineffective

    Info-Tech’s IT Management and Governance Diagnostic (MGD) program assesses the importance and effectiveness of core IT processes. Since its inception, the MGD has consistently identified change management as an area for immediate improvement.

    The image is a vertical bar graph, with four segments, each having 2 bars, one for Effectiveness and the other for Importance. The four segments are (with Effectiveness and Importance ratings in brackets, respectively): Frontline (6.5/8.6); Manager (6.6/8.9); Director (6.4/8.8); and Executive (6.1/8.8)

    Source: Info-Tech 2020; n=5,108 IT Professionals from 620 organizations

    Importance Scores

    No importance: 1.0-6.9

    Limited importance: 7.0-7.9

    Significant importance: 8.0-8.9

    Critical importance: 9.0-10.0

    Effectiveness Scores

    Not in place: n/a

    Not effective: 0.0-4.9

    Somewhat Ineffective: 5.0-5.9

    Somewhat effective: 6.0-6.9

    Very effective: 7.0-10.0

    There are several common misconceptions about change management

    Which of these have you heard in your organization?

     Reality
    “It’s just a small change; this will only take five minutes to do.” Even a small change can cause a business outage. That small fix could impact a large system connected to the one being fixed.
    “Ad hoc is faster; too many processes slow things down.” Ad hoc might be faster in some cases, but it carries far greater risk. Following defined processes keeps systems stable and risk-averse.
    “Change management is all about speed.” Change management is about managing risk. It gives the illusion of speed by reducing downtime and unplanned work.
    “Change management will limit our capacity to change.” Change management allows for a better alignment of process (release management) with governance (change management).

    Overcome perceived challenges to implementing change management to reap measurable reward

    Before: Informal Change Management

    Change Approval:

    • Changes do not pass through a formal review process before implementation.
    • 10% of released changes are approved.
    • Implementation challenge: Staff will resist having to submit formal change requests and assessments, frustrated at the prospect of having to wait longer to have changes approved.

    Change Prioritization

    • Changes are not prioritized according to urgency, risk, and impact.
    • 60% of changes are urgent.
    • Implementation challenge: Influential stakeholders accustomed to having changes approved and deployed might resist having to submit changes to a standard cost-benefit analysis.

    Change Deployment

    • Changes often negatively impact user productivity.
    • 25% of changes are realized as planned.
    • Implementation challenge: Engaging the business so that formal change freeze periods and regular maintenance windows can be established.

    After: Right-Sized Change Management

    Change Approval

    • All changes pass through a formal review process. Once a change is repeatable and well-tested, it can be pre-approved to save time. Almost no unauthorized changes are deployed.
    • 95% of changes are approved.
    • KPI: Decrease in change-related incidents

    Change Prioritization

    • The CAB prioritizes changes so that the business is satisfied with the speed of change deployment.
    • 35% of changes are urgent.
    • KPI: Decrease in change turnaround time.

    Change deployment

    • Users are always aware of impending changes and changes don’t interrupt critical business activities.
    • Over 80% of changes are realized as planned
    • KPI: Decrease in the number of failed deployments.

    Info-Tech’s methodology for change management optimization focuses on building standardized processes

     1. Define Change Management2. Establish Roles and Workflows3. Define the RFC and Post-Implementation Activities4. Measure, Manage, and Maintain
    Phase Steps

    1.1 Assess Maturity

    1.2 Categorize Changes and Build Your Risk Assessment

    2.1 Determine Roles and Responsibilities

    2.2 Build Core Workflows

    3.1 Design the RFC

    3.2 Establish Post-Implementation Activities

    4.1 Identify Metrics and Build the Change Calendar

    4.2 Implement the Project

      Change Management Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) Change Management Project Summary Template
    Phase Deliverables
    • Change Management Maturity Assessment Tool
    • Change Management Risk Assessment Tool
    • Change Manager Job Description
    • Change Management Process Library
    • Request for Change (RFC) Form Template
    • Change Management Pre-Implementation Checklist
    • Change Management Post-Implementation Checklist
    • Change Management Metrics Tool
    • Change Management
    • Communications Plan
    • Change Management Roadmap Tool

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    Change Management Process Library

    Document your normal, pre-approved, and emergency change lifecycles with the core process workflows .

    Change Management Risk Assessment Tool

    Test Drive your impact and likelihood assessment questionnaires with the Change Management Risk Assessment Tool.

    Project Summary Template

    Summarize your efforts in the Optimize IT Change Management Improvement Initiative: Project Summary Template.

    Change Management Roadmap Tool

    Record your action items and roadmap your steps to a mature change management process.

    Key Deliverable:

    Change Management SOP

    Document and formalize your process starting with the change management standard operating procedure (SOP).

    These case studies illustrate the value of various phases of this project

    Define Change Management

    Establish Roles and Workflows

    Define RFC and Post-Implementation Activities

    Measure, Manage, and Maintain

    A major technology company implemented change management to improve productivity by 40%. This case study illustrates the full scope of the project.

    A large technology firm experienced a critical outage due to poor change management practices. This case study illustrates the scope of change management definition and strategy.

    Ignorance of change management process led to a technology giant experiencing a critical cloud outage. This case study illustrates the scope of the process phase.

    A manufacturing company created a makeshift CMDB in the absence of a CMDB to implement change management. This case study illustrates the scope of change intake.

    A financial institution tracked and recorded metrics to aid in the success of their change management program. This case study illustrates the scope of the implementation phase.

    Working through this project with Info-Tech can save you time and money

    Engaging in a Guided Implementation doesn’t just offer valuable project advice, it also results in significant cost savings.

    Guided ImplementationMeasured Vale
    Phase 1: Define Change Management
    • We estimate Phase 1 activities will take 2 FTEs 10 days to complete on their own, but the time saved by using Info-Tech’s methodology will cut that time in half, thereby saving $3,100 (2 FTEs * 5 days * $80,000/year).

    Phase 2: Establish Roles and Workflows

    • We estimate Phase 2 will take 2 FTEs 10 days to complete on their own, but the time saved by using Info-Tech’s methodology will cut that time in half, thereby saving $3,100 (2 FTEs * 5 days * $80,000/year).
    Phase 3: Define the RFC and Post-Implementation Activities
    • We estimate Phase 3 will take 2 FTEs 10 days to complete on their own, but the time saved by using Info-Tech’s methodology will cut that time in half, thereby saving $3,100 (2 FTEs * 5 days * $80,000/year).

    Phase 4: Measure, Manage, and Maintain

    • We estimate Phase 4 will take 2 FTEs 5 days to complete on their own, but the time saved by using Info-Tech’s methodology will cut that time in half, thereby saving $1,500 (2 FTEs * 2.5 days * $80,000/year).
    Total Savings $10,800

    Case Study

    Industry: Technology

    Source: Daniel Grove, Intel

    Intel implemented a robust change management program and experienced a 40% improvement in change efficiency.

    Founded in 1968, the world’s largest microchip and semiconductor company employs over 100,000 people. Intel manufactures processors for major players in the PC market including Apple, Lenovo, HP, and Dell.

    ITIL Change Management Implementation

    With close to 4,000 changes occurring each week, managing Intel’s environment is a formidable task. Before implementing change management within the organization, over 35% of all unscheduled downtime was due to errors resulting from change and release management. Processes were ad hoc or scattered across the organization and no standards were in place.

    Results

    After a robust implementation of change management, Intel experienced a number of improvements including automated approvals, the implementation of a formal change calendar, and an automated RFC form. As a result, Intel improved change productivity by 40% within the first year of the program’s implementation.

    Define Change Management

    Establish Roles and Workflows

    Define RFC and Post-Implementation Activities

    Measure, Manage, and Maintain

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

    Guided Implementation

    "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

    Workshop

    "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

    Consulting

    "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    A typical GI is between 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

    Define Change Management

    • Call #1: Introduce change concepts.
    • Call #2: Assess current maturity.
    • Call #3: Identify target-state capabilities.

    Establish Roles and Workflows

    • Call #4: Review roles and responsibilities.
    • Call #5: Review core change processes.

    Define RFC and Post- Implementation Activities

    • Call #6: Define change intake process.
    • Call #7: Create pre-implementation and post-implementation checklists.

    Measure, Manage, and Maintain

    • Call #8: Review metrics.
    • Call #9: Create roadmap.

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

     Day 1Day 2Day 3Day 4Day 5
    Activities

    Define Change Management

    1.1 Outline Strengths and Challenges

    1.2 Conduct a Maturity Assessment

    1.3 Build a Change Categorization Scheme

    1.4 Build Your Risk Assessment

    Establish Roles and Workflows

    2.1 Define the Change Manager Role

    2.2 Outline CAB Protocol and membership

    2.3 Build Normal Change Process

    2.4 Build Emergency Change Process

    2.5 Build Pre-Approved Change Process

    Define the RFC and Post-Implementation Activities

    3.1 Create an RFC Template

    3.2 Determine Post-Implementation Activities

    3.3 Build a Change Calendar Protocol

    Measure, Manage, and Maintain

    4.1 Identify Metrics and Reports

    4.2 Create Communications Plan

    4.3 Build an Implementation Roadmap

    Next Steps and Wrap-Up (offsite)

    5.1 Complete in-progress deliverables from previous four days

    5.2 Set up review time for workshop deliverables and to discuss next steps

    Deliverables
    1. Maturity Assessment
    2. Risk Assessment
    1. Change Manager Job Description
    2. Change Management Process Library
    1. Request for Change (RFC) Form Template
    2. Pre-Implementation Checklist
    3. Post-Implementation Checklist
    1. Metrics Tool
    2. Communications Plan
    3. Project Roadmap
    1. Change Management Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)
    2. Workshop Summary Deck

    Phase 1

    Define Change Management

    Define Change Management

    1.1 Assess Maturity

    1.2 Categorize Changes and Build Your Risk Assessment

    Establish Roles and Workflows

    2.1 Determine Roles and Responsibilities

    2.2 Build Core Workflows

    Define the RFC and Post-Implementation Activities

    3.1 Design the RFC

    3.2 Establish Post-Implementation Activities

    Measure, Manage, and Maintain

    4.1 Identify Metrics and Build the Change Calendar

    4.2 Implement the Project

    This phase will guide you through the following steps:

    • Assess Maturity
    • Categorize Changes and Build Your Risk Assessment

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board

    Step 1.1

    Assess Maturity

    Activities

    1.1.1 Outline the Organization’s Strengths and Challenges

    1.1.2 Complete a Maturity Assessment

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board

    Outcomes of this step

    • An understanding of maturity change management processes and frameworks
    • Identification of existing change management challenges and potential causes
    • A framework for assessing change management maturity and an assessment of your existing change management processes

    Define Change Management

    Step 1.1: Assess Maturity → Step 1.2: Categorize Changes and Build Your Risk Assessment

    Change management is often confused with release management, but they are distinct processes

    Change

    • Change management looks at software changes as well as hardware, database, integration, and network changes, with the focus on stability of the entire IT ecosystem for business continuity.
    • Change management provides a holistic view of the IT environment, including dependencies, to ensure nothing is negatively affected by changes.
    • Change documentation is more focused on process, ensuring dependencies are mapped, rollout plans exist, and the business is not at risk.

    Release

    • Release and deployment are the detailed plans that bundle patches, upgrades, and new features into deployment packages, with the intent to change them flawlessly into a production environment.
    • Release management is one of many actions performed under change management’s governance.
    • Release documentation includes technical specifications such as change schedule, package details, change checklist, configuration details, test plan, and rollout and rollback plans.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Ensure the Release Manager is present as part of your CAB. They can explain any change content or dependencies, communicate business approval, and advise the service desk of any defects.

    Integrate change management with other IT processes

    As seen in the context diagram, change management interacts closely with many other IT processes including release management and configuration management (seen below). Ensure you delineate when these interactions occur (e.g. RFC updates and CMDB queries) and which process owns each task.

    The image is a chart mapping the interactions between Change Management and Configuration Management (CMDB).

    Avoid the challenges of poor change management

    1. Deployments
      • Too frequent: The need for frequent deployments results in reduced availability of critical business applications.
      • Failed deployments or rework is required: Deployments are not successful and have to be backed out of and then reworked to resolve issues with the installation.
      • High manual effort: A lack of automation results in high resource costs for deployments. Human error is likely, which adds to the risk of a failed deployment.
    2. Incidents
      • Too many unauthorized changes: If the process is perceived as cumbersome and ineffective, people will bypass it or abuse the emergency designation to get their changes deployed faster.
      • Changes cause incidents: When new releases are deployed, they create problems with related systems or applications.
    3. End Users
      • Low user satisfaction: Poor communication and training result in surprised and unhappy users and support staff.

    “With no controls in place, IT gets the blame for embarrassing outages. Too much control, and IT is seen as a roadblock to innovation.” – Anonymous, VP IT of a federal credit union

    1.1.1 Outline the Organization’s Strengths and Challenges

    Input

    • Current change documentation (workflows, SOP, change policy, etc.)
    • Organizational chart(s)

    Output

    • List of strengths and challenges for change management

    Materials

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board
    1. As group, discuss and outline the change management challenges facing the organization. These may be challenges caused by poor change management processes or by a lack of process.
    2. Use the pain points found on the previous slide to help guide the discussion.
    3. As a group, also outline the strengths of change management and the strengths of the current organization. Use these strengths as a guide to know what practices to continue and what strengths you can leverage to improve the change management process.
    4. Record the activity results in the Project Summary Template.

    Download the Optimize IT Change Management Improvement Initiative: Project Summary Template

    Assess current change management maturity to create a plan for improvement

     ChaosReactiveControlled

    Proactive

    Optimized
    Change Requests No defined processes for submitting changes Low process adherence and no RFC form RFC form is centralized and a point of contact for changes exists RFCs are reviewed for scope and completion RFCs trend analysis and proactive change exists
    Change Review Little to no change risk assessment Risk assessment exists for each RFC RFC form is centralized and a point of contact for changes exists Change calendar exists and is maintained System and component dependencies exist (CMDB)
    Change Approval No formal approval process exists Approval process exists but is not widely followed Unauthorized changes are minimal or nonexistent Change advisory board (CAB) is established and formalized Trend analysis exists increasing pre-approved changes
    Post-Deployment No post-deployment change review exists Process exists but is not widely followed Reduction of change-related incidents Stakeholder satisfaction is gathered and reviewed Lessons learned are propagated and actioned
    Process Governance Roles & responsibilities are ad hoc Roles, policies & procedures are defined & documented Roles, policies & procedures are defined & documented KPIs are tracked, reported on, and reviewed KPIs are proactively managed for improvement

    Info-Tech Insight

    Reaching an optimized level is not feasible for every organization. You may be able to run a very good change management process at the Proactive or even Controlled stage. Pay special attention to keeping your goals attainable.

    1.1.2 Complete a Maturity Assessment

    Input

    • Current change documentation (workflows, SOP, change policy, etc.)

    Output

    • Assessment of current maturity level and goals to improve change management

    Materials

    Participants

    • Change Manager
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Operations (optional)
    1. Use Info-Tech’s Change Management Maturity Assessment Tool to assess the maturity and completeness of your change process.
    2. Significant gaps revealed in this assessment should be the focal points of your discussion when investigating root causes and brainstorming remediation activities:
      1. For each activity of each process area of change management, determine the degree of completeness of your current process.
      2. Review your maturity assessment results and discuss as a group potential reasons why you arrived at your maturity level. Identify areas where you should focus your initial attention for improvement.
      3. Regularly review the maturity of your change management practices by completing this maturity assessment tool periodically to identify other areas to optimize.

    Download the Change Management Maturity Assessment Tool

    Case Study

    Even Google isn’t immune to change-related outages. Plan ahead and communicate to help avoid change-related incidents

    Industry: Technology

    Source: The Register

    As part of a routine maintenance procedure, Google engineers moved App Engine applications between data centers in the Central US to balance out traffic.

    Unfortunately, at the same time that applications were being rerouted, a software update was in progress on the traffic routers, which triggered a restart. This temporarily diminished router capacity, knocking out a sizeable portion of Google Cloud.

    The server drain resulted in a huge spike in startup requests, and the routers simply couldn’t handle the traffic.

    As a result, 21% of Google App Engine applications hosted in the Central US experienced error rates in excess of 10%, while an additional 16% of applications experienced latency, albeit at a lower rate.

    Solution

    Thankfully, engineers were actively monitoring the implementation of the change and were able to spring into action to halt the problem.

    The change was rolled back after 11 minutes, but the configuration error still needed to be fixed. After about two hours, the change failure was resolved and the Google Cloud was fully functional.

    One takeaway for the engineering team was to closely monitor how changes are scheduled. Ultimately, this was the result of miscommunication and a lack of transparency between change teams.

    Step 1.2

    Categorize Changes and Build Your Risk Assessment

    Activities

    1.2.1 Define What Constitutes a Change

    1.2.2 Build a Change Categorization Scheme

    1.2.3 Build a Classification Scheme to Assess Impact

    1.2.4 Build a Classification Scheme to Define Likelihood

    1.2.5 Evaluate and Adjust Your Risk Assessment Scheme

    Define Change Management

    Step 1.1: Assess Maturity → Step 1.2: Categorize Changes and Build Your Risk Assessment

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Infrastructure/Applications Manager
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board

    Outcomes of this step

    • A clear definition of what constitutes a change in your organization
    • A defined categorization scheme to classify types of changes
    • A risk assessment matrix and tool for evaluating and prioritizing change requests according to impact and likelihood of risk

    Change must be managed to mitigate risk to the infrastructure

    Change management is the gatekeeper protecting your live environment.

    Successfully managed changes will optimize risk exposure, severity of impact, and disruption. This will result in the bottom-line business benefits of removal of risk, early realization of benefits, and savings of money and time.

    • IT change is constant; change requests will be made both proactively and reactively to upgrade systems, acquire new functionality, and to prevent or resolve incidents.
    • Every change to the infrastructure must pass through the change management process before being deployed to ensure that it has been properly assessed and tested, and to check that a backout /rollback plan is in place.
    • It will be less expensive to invest in a rigorous change management process than to resolve incidents, service disruptions, and outages caused by the deployment of a bad change.
    • Change management is what gives you control and visibility regarding what is introduced to the live environment, preventing incidents that threaten business continuity.

    80%

    In organizations without formal change management processes, about 80% (The Visible Ops Handbook) of IT service outage problems are caused by updates and changes to systems, applications, and infrastructure. It’s crucial to track and systematically manage change to fully understand and predict the risks and potential impact of the change.

    Attributes of a change

    Differentiate changes from other IT requests

    Is this in the production environment of a business process?

    The core business of the enterprise or supporting functions may be affected.

    Does the task affect an enterprise managed system?

    If it’s for a local application, it’s a service request

    How many users are impacted?

    It should usually impact more than a single user (in most cases).

    Is there a configuration, or code, or workflow, or UI/UX change?

    Any impact on a business process is a change; adding a user or a recipient to a report or mailing list is not a change.

    Does the underlying service currently exist?

    If it’s a new service, then it’s better described as a project.

    Is this done/requested by IT?

    It needs to be within the scope of IT for the change management process to apply.

    Will this take longer than one week?

    As a general rule, if it takes longer than 40 hours of work to complete, it’s likely a project.

    Defining what constitutes a change

    Every change request will initiate the change management process; don’t waste time reviewing requests that are out of scope.

    ChangeService Request (User)Operational Task (Backend)
    • Fixing defects in code
    • Changing configuration of an enterprise system
    • Adding new software or hardware components
    • Switching an application to another VM
    • Standardized request
    • New PC
    • Permissions request
    • Change password
    • Add user
    • Purchases
    • Change the backup tape
    • Delete temporary files
    • Maintain database (one that is well defined, repeatable, and predictable)
    • Run utilities to repair a database

    Do not treat every IT request as a change!

    • Many organizations make the mistake of calling a standard service request or operational task a “change.”
    • Every change request will initiate the change management process; don’t waste time reviewing requests that are out of scope.
    • While the overuse of RFCs for out-of-scope requests is better than a lack of process, this will slow the process and delay the approval of more critical changes.
    • Requiring an RFC for something that should be considered day-to-day work will also discourage people from adhering to the process, because the RFC will be seen as meaningless paperwork.

     

    1.2.1 Define What Constitutes a Change

    Input

    • List of examples of each category of the chart

    Output

    • Definitions for each category to be used at change intake

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/flip charts (or shared screen if working remotely)
    • Service catalog (if applicable)
    • Sticky notes
    • Markers/pens
    • Change Management SOP

    Participants

    • Infrastructure Manager
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board
    1. As a group, brainstorm examples of changes, projects, service requests (user), operational tasks (backend), and releases. You may add additional categories as needed (e.g. incidents).
    2. Have each participant write the examples on sticky notes and populate the following chart on the whiteboard/flip chart.
    3. Use the examples to draw lines and define what defines each category.
      • What makes a change distinct from a project?
      • What makes a change distinct from a service request?
      • What makes a change distinct from an operational task?
      • When do the category workflows cross over with other categories? (For example, when does a project interact with change management?)
    4. Record the definitions of requests and results in section 2.3 of the Change Management Standard Operating Procedure (SOP).
    ChangeProjectService Request (User)Operational Task (Backend)Release
    Changing Configuration ERP upgrade Add new user Delete temp files Software release

    Download the Change Management Standard Operating Procedure (SOP).

    Each RFC should define resources needed to effect the change

    In addition to assigning a category to each RFC based on risk assessment, each RFC should also be assigned a priority based on the impact of the change on the IT organization, in terms of the resources needed to effect the change.

    Categories include

    Normal

    Emergency

    Pre-Approved

    The majority of changes will be pre-approved or normal changes. Definitions of each category are provided on the next slide.

    Info-Tech uses the term pre-approved rather than the ITIL terminology of standard to more accurately define the type of change represented by this category.

    A potential fourth change category of expedited may be employed if you are having issues with process adherence or if you experience changes driven from outside change management’s control (e.g. from the CIO, director, judiciary, etc.) See Appendix I for more details.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Do not rush to designate changes as pre-approved. You may have a good idea of which changes may be considered pre-approved, but make sure they are in fact low-risk and well-documented before moving them over from the normal category.

    The category of the change determines the process it follows

     Pre-ApprovedNormalEmergency
    Definition
    • Tasks are well-known, documented, and proven
    • Budgetary approval is preordained or within control of change requester
    • Risk is low and understood
    • There’s a low probability of failure
    • All changes that are not pre-approved or emergency will be classified as normal
    • Further categorized by priority/risk
    • The change is being requested to resolve a current or imminent critical/severity-1 incident that threatens business continuity
    • Associated with a critical incident or problem ticket
    Trigger
    • The same change is built and changed repeatedly using the same install procedures and resulting in the same low-risk outcome
    • Upgrade or new functionality that will capture a business benefit
    • A fix to a current problem
    • A current or imminent critical incident that will impact business continuity
    • Urgency to implement the change must be established, as well as lack of any alternative or workaround
    Workflow
    • Pre-established
    • Repeatable with same sequence of actions, with minimal judgment or decision points
    • Dependent on the change
    • Different workflows depending on prioritization
    • Dependent on the change
    Approval
    • Change Manager (does not need to be reviewed by CAB)
    • CAB
    • Approval from the Emergency Change Advisory Board (E-CAB) is sufficient to proceed with the change
    • A retroactive RFC must be created and approved by the CAB

    Pay close attention to defining your pre-approved changes. They are going to be critical for running a smooth change management practice in a DevOps Environment

    1.2.2 Build a Change Categorization Scheme

    Input

    • List of examples of each change category

    Output

    • Definitions for each change category

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/flip charts (or shared screen if working remotely)
    • Service catalog (if applicable)
    • Sticky notes
    • Markers
    • Change Management SOP

    Participants

    • Infrastructure Manager
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board
    1. Discuss the change categories on the previous slide and modify the types of descriptions to suit your organization.
    2. Once the change categories or types are defined, identify several examples of change requests that would fall under each category.
    3. Types of normal changes will be further defined in the next activity and can be left blank for now.
    4. Examples are provided below. Capture your definitions in section 4 of your Change Management SOP.
    Pre-Approved (AKA Standard)NormalEmergency
    • Microsoft patch management/deployment
    • Windows update
    • Minor form changes
    • Service pack updates on non-critical systems
    • Advance label status on orders
    • Change log retention period/storage
    • Change backup frequency

    Major

    • Active directory server upgrade
    • New ERP

    Medium

    • Network upgrade
    • High availability implementation

    Minor

    • Ticket system go-live
    • UPS replacement
    • Cognos update
    • Any change other than a pre-approved change
    • Needed to resolve a major outage in a Tier 1 system

    Assess the risk for each normal change based on impact (severity) and likelihood (probability)

    Create a change assessment risk matrix to standardize risk assessment for new changes. Formalizing this assessment should be one of the first priorities of change management.

    The following slides guide you through the steps of formalizing a risk assessment according to impact and likelihood:

    1. Define a risk matrix: Risk matrices can either be a 3x3 matrix (Minor, Medium, or High Risk as shown on the next slide) or a 4x4 matrix (Minor, Medium, High, or Critical Risk).
    2. Build an impact assessment: Enable consistent measurement of impact for each change by incorporating a standardized questionnaire for each RFC.
    3. Build a likelihood assessment: Enable the consistent measurement of impact for each change by incorporating a standardized questionnaire for each RFC.
    4. Test drive your risk assessment and make necessary adjustments: Measure your newly formed risk assessment questionnaires against historical changes to test its accuracy.

    Consider risk

    1. Risk should be the primary consideration in classifying a normal change as Low, Medium, High. The extent of governance required, as well as minimum timeline to implement the change, will follow from the risk assessment.
    2. The business benefit often matches the impact level of the risk – a change that will provide a significant benefit to a large number of users may likely carry an equally major downside if deviations occur.

    Info-Tech Insight

    All changes entail an additional level of risk. Risk is a function of impact and likelihood. Risk may be reduced, accepted, or neutralized through following best practices around training, testing, backout planning, redundancy, timing and sequencing of changes, etc.

    Create a risk matrix to assign a risk rating to each RFC

    Every normal RFC should be assigned a risk rating.

    How is risk rating determined?

    • Priority should be based on the business consequences of implementing or denying the change.
    • Risk rating is assigned using the impact of the risk and likelihood/probability that the event may occur.

    Who determines priority?

    • Priority should be decided with the change requester and with the CAB, if necessary.
    • Don’t let the change requester decide priority alone, as they will usually assign it a higher priority than is justified. Use a repeatable, standardized framework to assess each request.

    How is risk rating used?

    • Risk rating is used to determine which changes should be discussed and assessed first.
    • Time frames and escalation processes should be defined for each risk level.

    RFCs need to clearly identify the risk level of the proposed change. This can be done through statement of impact and likelihood (low/medium/high) or through pertinent questions linked with business rules to assess the risk.

    Risk always has a negative impact, but the size of the impact can vary considerably in terms of cost, number of people or sites affected, and severity of the impact. Impact questions tend to be more objective and quantifiable than likelihood questions.

    Risk Matrix

    Risk Matrix. Impact vs. Likelihood. Low impact, Low Likelihood and Medium Impact, Medium Likelihood are minor risks. High Likelihood, Low Impact; Medium Likelihood, Medium Impact; and Low Likelihood, High Impact are Medium Risk. High Impact, High Likelihood; High Impact, Medium Likelihood; and Medium Impact, High Likelihood are Major risk.

    1.2.3 Build a Classification Scheme to Assess Impact

    Input

    • Current risk assessment (if available)

    Output

    • Tailored impact assessment

    Materials

    Participants

    • CIO
    • Infrastructure Manager
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board
    1. Define a set of questions to measure risk impact.
    2. For each question, assign a weight that should be placed on that factor.
    3. Define criteria for each question that would categorize the risk as high, medium, or low.
    4. Capture your results in section 4.3.1 of your Change Management SOP.
    Impact
    Weight Question High Medium Low
    15% # of people affected 36+ 11-35 <10
    20% # of sites affected 4+ 2-3 1
    15% Duration of recovery (minutes of business time) 180+ 30-18 <3
    20% Systems affected Mission critical Important Informational
    30% External customer impact Loss of customer Service interruption None

    1.2.4 Build a Classification Scheme to Define Likelihood

    Input

    • Current risk assessment (if available)

    Output

    • Tailored likelihood assessment

    Materials

    Participants

    • CIO
    • Infrastructure Manager
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board
    1. Define a set of questions to measure risk likelihood.
    2. For each question, assign a weight that should be placed on that factor.
    3. Define criteria for each question that would categorize the risk as high, medium, or low.
    4. Capture your results in section 4.3.2 of your Change Management SOP.
    LIKELIHOOD
    Weight Question High Medium Low
    25% Has this change been tested? No   Yes
    10% Have all the relevant groups (companies, departments, executives) vetted the change? No Partial Yes
    5% Has this change been documented? No   Yes
    15% How long is the change window? When can we implement? Specified day/time Partial Per IT choice
    20% Do we have trained and experienced staff available to implement this change? If only external consultants are available, the rating will be “medium” at best. No   Yes
    25% Has an implementation plan been developed? No   Yes

    1.2.5 Evaluate and Adjust Your Risk Assessment Scheme

    Input

    • Impact and likelihood assessments from previous two activities

    Output

    • Vetted risk assessment

    Materials

    Participants

    • CIO
    • Infrastructure Manager
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board
    1. Draw your risk matrix on a whiteboard or flip chart.
    2. As a group, identify up to 10 examples of requests for changes that would apply within your organization. Depending on the number of people participating, each person could identify one or two changes and write them on sticky notes.
    3. Take turns bringing your sticky notes up to the risk matrix and placing each where it belongs, according to the assessment criteria you defined.
    4. After each participant has taken a turn, discuss each change as a group and adjust the placement of any changes, if needed. Update the risk assessment weightings or questions, if needed.

    Download the Change Management Rick Assessment Tool.

    #

    Change Example

    Impact

    Likelihood

    Risk

    1

    ERP change

    High

    Medium

    Major

    2

    Ticket system go-live

    Medium

    Low

    Minor

    3

    UPS replacement

    Medium

    Low

    Minor

    4

    Network upgrade

    Medium

    Medium

    Medium

    5

    AD upgrade

    Medium

    Low

    Minor

    6

    High availability implementation

    Low

    Medium

    Minor

    7

    Key-card implementation

    Low

    High

    Medium

    8

    Anti-virus update

    Low

    Low

    Minor

    9

    Website

    Low

    Medium

    Minor

     

    Case Study

    A CMDB is not a prerequisite of change management. Don’t let the absence of a configuration management database (CMDB) prevent you from implementing change management.

    Industry: Manufacturing

    Source: Anonymous Info-Tech member

    Challenge

    The company was planning to implement a CMDB; however, full implementation was still one year away and subject to budget constraints.

    Without a CMDB, it would be difficult to understand the interdependencies between systems and therefore be able to provide notifications to potentially affected user groups prior to implementing technical changes.

    This could have derailed the change management project.

    Solution

    An Excel template was set up as a stopgap measure until the full implementation of the CMDB. The template included all identified dependencies between systems, along with a “dependency tier” for each IT service.

    Tier 1: The dependent system would not operate if the upstream system change resulted in an outage.

    Tier 2: The dependent system would suffer severe degradation of performance and/or features.

    Tier 3: The dependent system would see minor performance degradation or minor feature unavailability.

    Results

    As a stopgap measure, the solution worked well. When changes ran the risk of degrading downstream dependent systems, the impacted business system owner’s authorization was sought and end users were informed in advance.

    The primary takeaway was that a system to manage configuration linkages and system dependencies was key.

    While a CMDB is ideal for this use case, IT organizations shouldn’t let the lack of such a system stop progress on change management.

    Case Study (part 1 of 4)

    Intel used a maturity assessment to kick-start its new change management program.

    Industry: Technology

    Source: Daniel Grove, Intel

    Challenge

    Founded in 1968, the world’s largest microchip and semiconductor company employs over 100,000 people. Intel manufactures processors for major players in the PC market including Apple, Lenovo, HP, and Dell.

    Intel IT supports over 65,000 servers, 3.2 petabytes of data, over 70,000 PCs, and 2.6 million emails per day.

    Intel’s change management program is responsible for over 4,000 changes each week.

    Solution

    Due to the sheer volume of change management activities present at Intel, over 35% of unscheduled outages were the result of changes.

    Ineffective change management was identified as the top contributor of incidents with unscheduled downtime.

    One of the major issues highlighted was a lack of process ownership. The change management process at Intel was very fragmented, and that needed to change.

    Results

    Daniel Grove, Senior Release & Change Manager at Intel, identified that clarifying tasks for the Change Manager and the CAB would improve process efficiency by reducing decision lag time. Roles and responsibilities were reworked and clarified.

    Intel conducted a maturity assessment of the overall change management process to identify key areas for improvement.

    Phase 2

    Establish Roles and Workflows

    For running change management in DevOps environment, see Appendix II.

    Define Change Management

    1.1 Assess Maturity

    1.2 Categorize Changes and Build Your Risk Assessment

    Establish Roles and Workflows

    2.1 Determine Roles and Responsibilities

    2.2 Build Core Workflows

    Define RFC and Post-Implementation Activities

    3.1 Design the RFC

    3.2 Establish Post-Implementation Activities

    Measure, Manage, and Maintain

    4.1 Identify Metrics and Build the Change Calendar

    4.2 Implement the Project

    This phase will guide you through the following steps:

    • Determine Roles and Responsibilities
    • Build Core Workflows

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board

    Step 2.1

    Determine Roles and Responsibilities

    Activities

    2.1.1 Capture Roles and Responsibilities Using a RACI Chart

    2.1.2 Determine Your Change Manager’s Responsibilities

    2.1.3 Define the Authority and Responsibilities of Your CAB

    2.1.4 Determine an E-CAB Protocol for Your Organization

    Establish Roles and Workflows

    Step 2.1: Determine Roles and Responsibilities → Step 2.2: Build Core Workflows

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board

    Outcomes of this step

    • Clearly defined responsibilities to form the job description for a Change Manager
    • Clearly defined roles and responsibilities for the change management team, including the business system owner, technical SME, and CAB members
    • Defined responsibilities and authority of the CAB
    • Protocol for an emergency CAB (E-CAB) meeting

    Identify roles and responsibilities for your change management team

    Business System Owner

    • Provides downtime window(s)
    • Advises on need for change (prior to creation of RFC)
    • Validates change (through UAT or other validation as necessary)
    • Provides approval for expedited changes (needs to be at executive level)

    Technical Subject Matter Expert (SME)

    • Advises on proposed changes prior to RFC submission
    • Reviews draft RFC for technical soundness
    • Assesses backout/rollback plan
    • Checks if knowledgebase has been consulted for prior lessons learned
    • Participates in the PIR, if necessary
    • Ensures that the service desk is trained on the change

    CAB

    • Approves/rejects RFCs for normal changes
    • Reviews lessons learned from PIRs
    • Decides on the scope of change management
    • Reviews metrics and decides on remedial actions
    • Considers changes to be added to list of pre-approved changes
    • Communicates to organization about upcoming changes

    Change Manager

    • Reviews RFCs for completeness
    • Ensures RFCs brought to the CAB have a high chance of approval
    • Chairs CAB meetings, including scheduling, agenda preparation, reporting, and follow-ups
    • Manages post-implementation reviews and reporting
    • Organizes internal communications (within IT)

    2.1.1 Capture Roles and Responsibilities Using a RACI Chart

    Input

    • Current SOP

    Output

    • Documented roles and responsibilities in change management in a RACI chart

    Materials

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board
    1. As a group, work through developing a RACI chart to determine the roles and responsibilities of individuals involved in the change management practice based on the following criteria:
      • Responsible (performs the work)
      • Accountable (ensures the work is done)
      • Consulted (two-way communication)
      • Informed (one-way communication)
    2. Record your results in slide 14 of the Project Summary Template and section 3.1 of your Change Management SOP.
    Change Management TasksOriginatorSystem OwnerChange ManagerCAB MemberTechnical SMEService DeskCIO/ VP ITE-CAB Member
    Review the RFC C C A C R C R  
    Validate changes C C A C R C R  
    Assess test plan A C R R C   I  
    Approve the RFC I C A R C   I  
    Create communications plan R I A     I I  
    Deploy communications plan I I A I   R    
    Review metrics   C A R   C I  
    Perform a post implementation review   C R A     I  
    Review lessons learned from PIR activities     R A   C    

    Designate a Change Manager to own the process, change templates, and tools

    The Change Manager will be the point of contact for all process questions related to change management.

    • The Change Manager needs the authority to reject change requests, regardless of the seniority of the requester.
    • The Change Manager needs the authority to enforce compliance to a standard process.
    • The Change Manager needs enough cross-functional subject-matter expertise to accurately evaluate the impact of change from both an IT and business perspective.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Some organizations will not be able to assign a dedicated Change Manager, but they must still task an individual with change review authority and with ownership of the risk assessment and other key parts of the process.

    Responsibilities

    1. The Change Manager is your first stop for change approval. Both the change management and release and deployment management processes rely on the Change Manager to function.
    2. Every single change that is applied to the live environment, from a single patch to a major change, must originate with a request for change (RFC), which is then approved by the Change Manager to proceed to the CAB for full approval.
    3. Change templates and tools, such as the change calendar, list of preapproved changes, and risk assessment template are controlled by the Change Manager.
    4. The Change Manager also needs to have ownership over gathering metrics and reports surrounding deployed changes. A skilled Change Manager needs to have an aptitude for applying metrics for continual improvement activities.

    2.1.2 Document Your Change Manager’s Responsibilities

    Input

    • Current Change Manager job description (if available)

    Output

    • Change Manager job description and list of responsibilities

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/flip charts (or shared screen if working remotely)
    • Markers/pens
    • Info-Tech’s Change Manager Job Description
    • Change Management SOP

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board

    1.Using the previous slide, Info-Tech’s Change Manager Job Description, and the examples below, brainstorm responsibilities for the Change Manager.

    2.Record the responsibilities in Section 3.2 of your Change Management SOP.

    Example:

    Change Manager: James Corey

    Responsibilities

    1. Own the process, tools, and templates.
    2. Control the Change Management SOP.
    3. Provide standard RFC forms.
    4. Distribute RFCs for CAB review.
    5. Receive all initial RFCs and check them for completion.
    6. Approve initial RFCs.
    7. Approve pre-approved changes.
    8. Approve the conversion of normal changes to pre-approved changes.
    9. Assemble the Emergency CAB (E-CAB) when emergency change requests are received.
    10. Approve submission of RFCs for CAB review.
    11. Chair the CAB:
      • Set the CAB agenda and distribute it at least 24 hours before the meeting.
      • Ensure the agenda is adhered to.
      • Make the final approval/prioritization decision regarding a change if the CAB is deadlocked and cannot come to an agreement.
      • Distribute CAB meeting minutes to all members and relevant stakeholders.

    Download the Change Manager Job Description

    Create a Change Advisory Board (CAB) to provide process governance

    The primary functions of the CAB are to:

    1. Protect the live environment from poorly assessed, tested, and implemented changes.
      • CAB approval is required for all normal and emergency changes.
      • If a change results in an incident or outage, the CAB is effectively responsible; it’s the responsibility of the CAB to assess and accept the potential impact of every change.
    2. Prioritize changes in a way that fairly reflects change impact and urgency.
      • Change requests will originate from multiple stakeholders, some of whom have competing interests.
      • It’s up to the CAB to prioritize these requests effectively so that business need is balanced with any potential risk to the infrastructure.
      • The CAB should seek to reduce the number of emergency/expedited changes.
    3. Schedule deployments in a way that minimizes conflict and disruption.
      • The CAB uses a change calendar populated with project work, upcoming organizational initiatives, and change freeze periods. They will schedule changes around these blocks to avoid disrupting user productivity.
      • The CAB should work closely with the release and deployment management teams to coordinate change/release scheduling.

    See what responsibilities in the CAB’s process are already performed by the DevOps lifecycle (e.g. authorization, deconfliction etc.). Do not duplicate efforts.

    Use diverse representation from the business to form an effective CAB

    The CAB needs insight into all areas of the business to avoid approving a high-risk change.

    Based on the core responsibilities you have defined, the CAB needs to be composed of a diverse set of individuals who provide quality:

    • Change need assessments – identifying the value and purpose of a proposed change.
    • Change risk assessments – confirmation of the technical impact and likelihood assessments that lead to a risk score, based on the inputs in RFC.
    • Change scheduling – offer a variety of perspectives and responsibilities and will be able to identify potential scheduling conflicts.
     CAB RepresentationValue Added
    Business Members
    • CIO
    • Business Relationship Manager
    • Service Level Manager
    • Business Analyst
    • Identify change blackout periods, change impact, and business urgency.
    • Assess impact on fiduciary, legal, and/or audit requirements.
    • Determine acceptable business risk.
    IT Operations Members
    • Managers representing all IT functions
    • IT Directors
    • Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
    • Identify dependencies and downstream impacts.
    • Identify possible conflicts with pre-existing OLAs and SLAs.
    CAB Attendees
    • Specific SMEs, tech specialists, and business and vendor reps relevant to a particular change
    • Only attend meetings when invited by the Change Manager
    • Provide detailed information and expertise related to their particular subject areas.
    • Speak to requirements, change impact, and cost.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Form a core CAB (members attend every week) and an optional CAB (members who attend only when a change impacts them or when they can provide value in discussions about a change). This way, members can have their voice heard without spending every week in a meeting where they do not contribute.

    2.1.3 Define the Authority and Responsibilities of Your CAB

    Input

    • Current SOP or CAB charter (if available)

    Output

    • Documented list of CAB authorities and responsibilities

    Materials

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board

    1.Using the previous slide and the examples below, list the authorities and responsibilities of your CAB.

    2.Record the responsibilities in section 3.3.2 of your Change Management SOP and the Project Summary Template.

    Example:

    CAP AuthorityCAP Responsibilities
    • Final authority over the deployment of all normal and emergency changes.
    • Authority to absorb the risk of a change.
    • Authority to set the change calendar:
      • Maintenance windows.
      • Change freeze periods.
      • Project work.
      • Authority to delay changes.
    • Evaluate all normal and emergency changes.
    • Verify all normal change test, backout, and implementation plans.
    • Verify all normal change test results.
    • Approve all normal and emergency changes.
    • Prioritize all normal changes.
    • Schedule all normal and emergency changes.
    • Review failed change deployments.

    Establish an emergency CAB (E-CAB) protocol

    • When an emergency change request is received, you will not be able to wait until the regularly scheduled CAB meeting.
    • As a group, decide who will sit on the E-CAB and what their protocol will be when assessing and approving emergency changes.

    Change owner conferences with E-CAB (best efforts to reach them) through email or messaging.

    E-CAB members and business system owners are provided with change details. No decision is made without feedback from at least one E-CAB member.

    If business continuity is being affected, the Change Manager has authority to approve change.

    Full documentation of the change (a retroactive RFC) is done after the change and is then reviewed by the CAB.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Members of the E-CAB should be a subset of the CAB who are typically quick to respond to their messages, even at odd hours of the night.

    2.1.4 Determine an E-CAB Protocol for Your Organization

    Input

    • Current SOP or CAB charter (if available)

    Output

    • E-CAB protocol

    Materials

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board
    1. Gather the members of the E-CAB and other necessary representatives from the change management team.
    2. Determine the order of operations for the E-CAB in the event that an emergency change is needed.
    3. Consult the example emergency protocol below. Determine what roles and responsibilities are involved at each stage of the emergency change’s implementation.
    4. Document the E-CAB protocol in section 3.4 of your Change Management SOP.

    Example

    Assemble E-CAB

    Assess Change

    Test (if Applicable)

    Deploy Change

    Create Retroactive RFC

    Review With CAB

    Step 2.2

    Build Core Workflows

    Activities

    2.2.1 Build a CMDB-lite as a Reference for Requested Changes

    2.2.2 Create a Normal Change Process

    2.2.3 Create a Pre-Approved Change Process

    2.2.4 Create an Emergency Change Process

    Establish Roles and Workflows

    Step 2.1: Determine Roles and Responsibilities → Step 2.2: Build Core Workflows

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board

    Outcomes of this step

    • Emergency change workflow
    • Normal process workflow
    • Pre-approved change workflow

    Establishing Workflows: Change Management Lifecycle

    Improve

    • A post-implementation review assesses the value of the actual change measured against the proposed change in terms of benefits, costs, and impact.
    • Results recorded in the change log.
    • Accountability: Change Manager Change Implementer

    Request

    • A change request (RFC) can be submitted via paper form, phone, email, or web portal.
    • Accountability: Change requester/Initiator

    Assess

    • The request is screened to ensure it meets an agreed-upon set of business criteria.
    • Changes are assessed on:
      • Impact of change
      • Risks or interdependencies
      • Resourcing and costs
    • Accountability: Change Manager

    Plan

    • Tasks are assigned, planned, and executed.
    • Change schedule is consulted and necessary resources are identified.
    • Accountability: Change Manager

    Approve

    • Approved requests are sent to the most efficient channel based on risk, urgency, and complexity.
    • Change is sent to CAB members for final review and approval
    • Accountability: Change Manager
      • Change Advisory Board

    Implement

    • Approved changes are deployed.
    • A rollback plan is created to mitigate risk.
    • Accountability: Change Manager Change Implementer

    Establishing workflows: employ a SIPOC model for process definition

    A good SIPOC (supplier, input, process, output, customer) model helps establish the boundaries of each process step and provides a concise definition of the expected outcomes and required inputs. It’s a useful and recommended next step for every workflow diagram.

    For change management, employ a SIPOC model to outline your CAB process:

    Supplier

    • Who or what organization provides the inputs to the process? The supplier can be internal or external.

    Input

    • What goes into the process step? This can be a document, data, information, or a decision.

    Process

    • Activities that occur in the process step that’s being analyzed.

    Output

    • What does the process step produce? This can be a document, data, information, or a decision.

    Customer

    • Who or what organization(s) takes the output of the process? The customer can be internal or external.

    Optional Fields

    Metrics

    • Top-level indicators that usually relate to the input and output, e.g. turnaround time, risk matrix completeness.

    Controls

    • Checkpoints to ensure process step quality.

    Dependencies

    • Other process steps that require the output.

    RACI

    • Those who are Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, or Informed (RACI) about the input, output, and/or process.

    Establish change workflows: assess requested changes to identify impact and dependencies

    An effective change assessment workflow is a holistic process that leaves no stone unturned in an effort to mitigate risk before any change reaches the approval stage. The four crucial areas of risk in a change workflow are:

    Dependencies

    Identify all components of the change.

    Ask how changes will affect:

    • Services on the same infrastructure?
    • Applications?
    • Infrastructure/app architecture?
    • Security?
    • Ability to support critical systems?

    Business Impact

    Frame the change from a business point of view to identify potential disruptions to business activities.

    Your assessment should cover:

    • Business processes
    • User productivity
    • Customer service
    • BCPs

    SLA Impact

    Each new change can impact the level of service available.

    Examine the impact on:

    • Availability of critical systems
    • Infrastructure and app performance
    • Infrastructure and app capacity
    • Existing disaster recovery plans and procedures

    Required Resources

    Once risk has been assessed, resources need to be identified to ensure the change can be executed.

    These include:

    • People (SMEs, tech support, work effort/duration)
    • System time for scheduled implementation
    • Hardware or software (new or existing, as well as tools)

    Establishing workflows: pinpoint dependencies to identify the need for additional changes

    An assessment of each change and a query of the CMDB needs to be performed as part of the change planning process to mitigate outage risk.

    • A version upgrade on one piece of software may require another component to be upgraded as well. For example, an upgrade to the database management system requires that an application that uses the database be upgraded or modified.
    • The sequence of the release must also be determined, as certain components may need to be upgraded before others. For example, if you upgrade the Exchange Server, a Windows update must be installed prior to the Exchange upgrade.
    • If you do not have a CMDB, consider building a CMDB-lite, which consists of a listing of systems, primary users, SMEs, business owners, and system dependencies (see next slide).

    Services Impacted

    • Have affected services been identified?
    • Have supporting services been identified?
    • Has someone checked the CMDB to ensure all dependencies have been accounted for?
    • Have we referenced the service catalog so the business approves what they’re authorizing?

    Technical Teams Impacted

    • Who will support the change throughout testing and implementation?
    • Will additional support be needed?
    • Do we need outside support from eternal suppliers?
    • Has someone checked the contract to ensure any additional costs have been approved?

    Build a dependency matrix to avoid change related collisions (optional)

    A CMDB-lite does not replace a CMDB but can be a valuable tool to leverage when requesting changes if you do not currently have configuration management. Consider the following inputs when building your own CMDB-lite.

    • System
      • To build a CMDB-lite, start with the top 10 systems in your environment that experience changes. This list can always be populated iteratively.
    • Primary Users
      • Listing the primary users will give a change requester a first glance at the impact of the change.
      • You can also use this information when looking at the change communication and training after the change is implemented.
    • SME/Backup
      • These are the staff that will likely build and implement the change. The backup is listed in case the primary is on holiday.
    • Business System Owner
      • The owner of the system is one of the people needed to sign off on the change. Having their support from the beginning of a change is necessary to build and implement it successfully.
    • Tier 1 Dependency
      • If the primary system experiences and outage, Tier 1 dependency functionality is also lost. To request a change, include the business system owner signoffs of the Tier 1 dependencies of the primary system.
    • Tier 2 Dependency
      • If the primary system experiences an outage, Tier 2 dependency functionality is lost, but there is an available workaround. As with Tier 1, this information can help you build a backout plan in case there is a change-related collision.
    • Tier 3 Dependency
      • Tier 3 functionality is not lost if the primary system experiences an outage, but nice-to-haves such as aesthetics are affected.

    2.2.1 Build a CMDB-lite as a Reference for Requested Changes

    Input

    • Current system ownership documentation

    Output

    • Documented reference for change requests (CMDB-lite)

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/flip charts (or shared screen if working remotely)
    • Sticky notes
    • Markers/pens

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board
    1. Start with a list of your top 10-15 systems/services with the highest volume of changes.
    2. Using a whiteboard, flip chart, or shared screen, complete the table below by filling the corresponding Primary Users, SMEs, Business System Owner, and Dependencies as shown below. It may help to use sticky notes.
    3. Iteratively populate the table as you notice gaps with incoming changes.
    SystemPrimary UsersSMEBackup SME(s)Business System OwnerTier 1 Dependency (system functionality is down)Tier 2 (impaired functionality/ workaround available)Tier 3 Dependency (nice to have)
    Email Enterprise Naomi Amos James
    • ITSMs
    • Scan-to-email
    • Reporting
     
    • Lots
    Conferencing Tool Enterprise Alex Shed James
    • Videoconferencing
    • Conference rooms (can use Facebook messenger instead in worst case scenario)
    • IM
    ITSM (Service Now) Enterprise (Intl.) Anderson TBD Mike
    • Work orders
    • Dashboards
    • Purchasing
     
    ITSM (Manage Engine) North America Bobbie Joseph Mike
    • Work orders
    • Dashboards
    • Purchasing
     

    Establishing workflows: create standards for change approvals to improve efficiency

    • Not all changes are created equal, and not all changes require the same degree of approval. As part of the change management process, it’s important to define who is the authority for each type of change.
    • Failure to do so can create bureaucratic bottlenecks if each change is held to an unnecessary high level of scrutiny, or unplanned outages may occur due to changes circumventing the formal approval process.
    • A balance must be met and defined to ensure the process is not bypassed or bottlenecked.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Define a list pre-approved changes and automate them (if possible) using your ITSM solution. This will save valuable time for more important changes in the queue.

    Example:

    Change CategoryChange Authority
    Pre-approved change Department head/manager
    Emergency change E-CAB
    Normal change – low and medium risk CAB
    Normal change – high risk CAB and CIO (for visibility)

    Example process: Normal Change – Change Initiation

    Change initiation allows for assurance that the request is in scope for change management and acts as a filter for out-of-scope changes to be redirected to the proper workflow. Initiation also assesses who may be assigned to the change and the proper category of the change, and results in an RFC to be populated before the change reaches the build and test phase.

    The image is a horizontal flow chart, depicting an example of a change process.

    The change trigger assessment is critical in the DevOps lifecycle. This can take a more formal role of a technical review board (TRB) or, with enough maturity, may be automated. Responsibilities such as deconfliction, dependency identification, calendar query, and authorization identification can be done early in the lifecycle to decrease or eliminate the burden on CAB.

    For the full process, refer to the Change Management Process Library.

    Example process: Normal Change – Technical Build and Test

    The technical build and test stage includes all technical prerequisites and testing needed for a change to pass before proceeding to approval and implementation. In addition to a technical review, a solution consisting of the implementation, rollback, communications, and training plan are also built and included in the RFC before passing it to the CAB.

    The image is a flowchart, showing the process for change during the technical build and test stage.

    For the full process, refer to the Change Management Process Library.

    Example process: Normal Change – Change Approval (CAB)

    Change approval can start with the Change Manager reviewing all incoming RFCs to filter them for completeness and check them for red flags before passing them to the CAB. This saves the CAB from discussing incomplete changes and allows the Change Manager to set a CAB agenda before the CAB meeting. If need be, change approval can also set vendor communications necessary for changes, as well as the final implementation date of the change. The CAB and Change Manager may follow up with the appropriate parties notifying them of the approval decision (accepted, rescheduled, or rejected).

    The image shows a flowchart illustrating the process for change approval.

    For the full process, refer to the Change Management Process Library.

    Example process: Normal Change – Change Implementation

    Changes should not end at implementation. Ensure you define post-implementation activities (documentation, communication, training etc.) and a post-implementation review in case the change does not go according to plan.

    The image is a flowchart, illustrating the work process for change implementation and post-implementation review.

    For the full process, refer to the Change Management Process Library.

    2.2.2 Create a Normal Change Process

    Input

    • Current SOP/workflow library

    Output

    • Normal change process

    Materials

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board
    1. Gather representatives from the change management team.
    2. Using the examples shown on the previous few slides, work as a group to determine the workflow for a normal change, with particular attention to the following sub-processes:
      1. Request
      2. Assessment
      3. Plan
      4. Approve
      5. Implementation and Post-Implementation Activities
    3. Optionally, you may create variations of the workflow for minor, medium, and major changes (e.g. there will be fewer authorizations for minor changes).
    4. For further documentation, you may choose to run the SIPOC activity for your CAB as outlined on this slide.
    5. Document the resulting workflows in the Change Management Process Library and section 11 of your Change Management SOP.

    Download the Change Management Process Library.

    Identify and convert low-risk normal changes to pre-approved once the process is established

    As your process matures, begin creating a list of normal changes that might qualify for pre-approval. The most potential for value in gains from change management comes from re-engineering and automating of high-volume changes. Pre-approved changes should save you time without threatening the live environment.

    IT should flag changes they would like pre-approved:

    • Once your change management process is firmly established, hold a meeting with all staff that make change requests and build changes.
    • Run a training session detailing the traits of pre-approved changes and ask these individuals to identify changes that might qualify.
    • These changes should be submitted to the Change Manager and reviewed, with the help of the CAB, to decide whether or not they qualify for pre-approval.

    Pre-approved changes are not exempt from due diligence:

    • Once a change is designated as pre-approved, the deployment team should create and compile all relevant documentation:
      • An RFC detailing the change, dependencies, risk, and impact.
      • Detailed procedures and required resources.
      • Implementation and backout plan.
      • Test results.
    • When templating the RFC for pre-approved changes, aim to write the documentation as if another SME were to implement it. This reduces confusion, especially if there’s staff turnover.
    • The CAB must approve, sign off, and keep a record of all documents.
    • Pre-approved changes must still be documented and recorded in the CMDB and change log after each deployment.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    At the beginning of a change management process, there should be few active pre-approved changes. However, prior to launch, you may have IT flag changes for conversion.

    Example process: Pre-Approved Change Process

    The image shows two horizontal flow charts, the first labelled Pre-Approval of Recurring RFC, and the second labelled Implementation of Child RFC.

    For the full process, refer to the Change Management Process Library.

    Review the pre-approved change list regularly to ensure the list of changes are still low-risk and repeatable.

    IT environments change. Don’t be caught by surprise.

    • Changes which were once low-risk and repeatable may cause unforeseen incidents if they are not reviewed regularly.
    • Dependencies change as the IT environment changes. Ensure that the changes on the pre-approved change list are still low-risk and repeatable, and that the documentation is up to date.
    • If dependencies have changed, then move the change back to the normal category for reassessment. It may be redesignated as a pre-approved change once the documentation is updated.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Other reasons for moving a pre-approved change back to the normal category is if the change led to an incident during implementation or if there was an issue during implementation.

    Seek new pre-approved change submissions. → Re-evaluate the pre-approved change list every 4-6 months.

    The image shows a horizontal flow chart, depicting the process for a pre-approved change list review.

    For the full process, refer to the Change Management Process Library.

    2.2.3 Create a Pre-Approved Change Process

    Input

    • Current SOP/workflow library

    Output

    • Pre-approved change process

    Materials

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board
    1. Gather representatives from the change management team.
    2. Using the examples shown on the previous few slides, work as a group to determine the workflow for a pre-approved change, with particular attention to the following sub-processes:
      1. Request
      2. Assessment
      3. Plan
      4. Approve
    3. Document the process of a converting a normal change to pre-approved. Include the steps from flagging a low-risk change to creating the related RFC template.
    4. Document the resulting workflows in the Change Management Process Library and sections 4.2 and 13 of your Change Management SOP.

    Reserve the emergency designation for real emergencies

    • Emergency changes have one of the following triggers:
      • A critical incident is impacting user productivity.
      • An imminent critical incident will impact user productivity.
    • Unless a critical incident is being resolved or prevented, the change should be categorized as normal.
    • An emergency change differs from a normal change in the following key aspects:
      • An emergency change is required to recover from a major outage – there must be a validated service desk critical incident ticket.
      • An urgent business requirement is not an “emergency.”
      • An RFC is created after the change is implemented and the outage is over.
      • A review by the full CAB occurs after the change is implemented.
      • The first responder and/or the person implementing the change may not be the subject matter expert for that system.
    • In all cases, an RFC must be created and the change must be reviewed by the full CAB. The review should occur within two business days of the event.
    Sample ChangeQuick CheckEmergency?
    Install the latest critical patches from the vendor. Are the patches required to resolve or prevent an imminent critical incident? No
    A virus or worm invades the network and a patch is needed to eliminate the threat. Is the patch required to resolve or prevent an imminent critical incident? Yes

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Change requesters should be made aware that senior management will be informed if an emergency RFC is submitted inappropriately. Emergency requests trigger urgent CAB meetings, are riskier to deploy, and delay other changes waiting in the queue.

    Example process: Emergency Change Process

    The image is a flowchart depicting the process for an emergency change process

    When building your emergency change process, have your E-CAB protocol from activity 2.1.4 handy.

    • Focus on the following requirements for an emergency process:
      • E-CAB protocol and scope: Does the SME need authorization first before working on the change or can the SME proceed if no E-CAB members respond?
      • Documentation and communication to stakeholders and CAB after the emergency change is completed.
      • Input from incident management.

    For the full process, refer to the Change Management Process Library.

    2.2.4 Create an Emergency Change Process

    Input

    • Current SOP/workflow library

    Output

    • Emergency change process

    Materials

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board
    1. Gather representatives from the change management team.
    2. Using the examples shown on the previous few slides, work as a group to determine the workflow for an emergency change, with particular attention to the following sub-processes:
      1. Request
      2. Assessment
      3. Plan
      4. Approve
    3. Ensure that the E-CAB protocol from activity 2.1.4 is considered when building your process.
    4. Document the resulting workflows in the Change Management Process Library and section 12 of your Change Management SOP.

    Case Study (part 2 of 4)

    Intel implemented a robust change management process.

    Industry: Technology

    Source: Daniel Grove, Intel

    Challenge

    Founded in 1968, the world’s largest microchip and semiconductor company employs over 100,000 people. Intel manufactures processors for major players in the PC market including Apple, Lenovo, HP, and Dell.

    Intel IT supports over 65,000 servers, 3.2 petabytes of data, over 70,000 PCs, and 2.6 million emails per day.

    Intel’s change management program is responsible for over 4,000 changes each week.

    Solution

    Intel identified 37 different change processes and 25 change management systems of record with little integration.

    Software and infrastructure groups were also very siloed, and this no doubt contributed to the high number of changes that caused outages.

    The task was simple: standards needed to be put in place and communication had to improve.

    Results

    Once process ownership was assigned and the role of the Change Manager and CAB clarified, it was a simple task to streamline and simplify processes among groups.

    Intel designed a new, unified change management workflow that all groups would adopt.

    Automation was also brought into play to improve how RFCs were generated and submitted.

    Phase 3

    Define the RFC and Post-Implementation Activities

    Define Change Management

    1.1 Assess Maturity

    1.2 Categorize Changes and Build Your Risk Assessment

    Establish Roles and Workflows

    2.1 Determine Roles and Responsibilities

    2.2 Build Core Workflows

    Define the RFC and Post-Implementation Activities

    3.1 Design the RFC

    3.2 Establish Post-Implementation Activities

    Measure, Manage, and Maintain

    4.1 Identify Metrics and Build the Change Calendar

    4.2 Implement the Project

    This phase will guide you through the following activities:

    • Design the RFC
    • Establish Post-Implementation Activities

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • IT Director
    • Infrastructure Manager
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board

    Step 3.1

    Design the RFC

    Activities

    3.1.1 Evaluate Your Existing RFC Process

    3.1.2 Build the RFC Form

    Define the RFC and Post-Implementation Activities

    Step 3.1: Design the RFC

    Step 3.2: Establish Post-Implementation Activities

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board

    Outcomes of this step

    • A full RFC template and process that compliments the workflows for the three change categories

    A request for change (RFC) should be submitted for every non-standard change

    An RFC should be submitted through the formal change management practice for every change that is not a standard, pre-approved change (a change which does not require submission to the change management practice).

    • The RFC should contain all the information required to approve a change. Some information will be recorded when the change request is first initiated, but not everything will be known at that time.
    • Further information can be added as the change progresses through its lifecycle.
    • The level of detail that goes into the RFC will vary depending on the type of change, the size, and the likely impact of the change.
    • Other details of the change may be recorded in other documents and referenced in the RFC.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Keep the RFC form simple, especially when first implementing change management, to encourage the adoption of and compliance with the process.

    RFCs should contain the following information, at a minimum:

    1. Contact information for requester
    2. Description of change
    3. References to external documentation
    4. Items to be changed, reason for the change, and impact of both implementing and not implementing the change
    5. Change type and category
    6. Priority and risk assessment
    7. Predicted time frame, resources, and cost
    8. Backout or remediation plan
    9. Proposed approvers
    10. Scheduled implementation time
    11. Communications plan and post-implementation review

    3.1.1 Evaluate Your Existing RFC Process

    Input

    • Current RFC form or stock ITSM RFC
    • Current SOP (if available)

    Output

    • List of changes to the current RFC form and RFC process

    Materials

    Participants

    • IT Director
    • Infrastructure Manager
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board
    1. If the organization is already using an RFC form, review it as a group now and discuss its contents:
      • Does this RFC provide adequate information for the Change Manager and/or CAB to review?
      • Should any additional fields be added?
    2. Show the participants Info-Tech’s Request for Change Form Template and compare it to the one the organization is currently using.
    3. As a group, finalize an RFC table of contents that will be used to formalize a new or improved RFC.
    4. Decide which fields should be filled out by the requester before the initial RFC is submitted to the Change Manager:
      • Many sections of the RFC are relevant for change assessment and review. What information does the Change Manager need when they first receive a request?
      • The Change Manager needs enough information to ensure that the change is in scope and has been properly categorized.
    5. Decide how the RFC form should be submitted and reviewed; this can be documented in section 5 of your Change Management SOP.

    Download the Request for Change Form Template.

    Design the RFC to encourage process buy-in

    • When building the RFC, split the form up into sections that follow the normal workflow (e.g. Intake, Assessment and Build, Approval, Implementation/PIR). This way the form walks the requester through what needs to be filled and when.
    • Revisit the form periodically and solicit feedback to continually improve the user experience. If there’s information missing on the RFC that the CAB would like to know, add the fields. If there are sections that are not used or not needed for documentation, remove them.
    • Make sure the user experience surrounding your RFC form is a top priority – make it accessible, otherwise change requesters simply will not use it.
    • Take advantage of your ITSM’s dropdown lists, automated notifications, CMDB integrations, and auto-generated fields to ease the process of filling the RFC

    Draft:

    • Change requester
    • Requested date of deployment
    • Change risk: low/medium/high
    • Risk assessment
    • Description of change
    • Reason for change
    • Change components

    Technical Build:

    • Assess change:
      • Dependencies
      • Business impact
      • SLA impact
      • Required resources
      • Query the CMS
    • Plan and test changes:
      • Test plan
      • Test results
      • Implementation plan
      • Backout plan
      • Backout plan test results

    CAB:

    • Approve and schedule changes:
      • Final CAB review
      • Communications plan

    Complete:

    • Deploy changes:
      • Post-implementation review

    Designing your RFC: RFC draft

    • Change requester – link your change module to the active directory to pull the change requester’s contact information automatically to save time.
    • A requested date of deployment gives approvers information on timeline and can be used to query the change calendar for possible conflicts
    • Information about risk assessment based on impact and likelihood questionnaires are quick to fill out but provide a lot of information to the CAB. The risk assessment may not be complete at the draft stage but can be updated as the change is built. Ensure this field is up-to- date before it reaches CAB.
    • If you have a technical review stage where changes are directed to the proper workflow and resourcing is assessed, the description, reason, and change components are high-level descriptors of the change that will aid in discovery and lining the change up with the business vision (viability from both a technical and business standpoint).
    • Change requester
    • Requested date of deployment
    • Change Risk: low/medium/high
    • Risk assessment
    • Description of change
    • Reason for change
    • Change components

    Use the RFC to point to documentation already gathered in the DevOps lifecycle to cut down on unnecessary manual work while maintaining compliance.

    Designing your RFC: technical build

    • Dependencies and CMDB query, along with the proposed implementation date, are included to aid in calendar deconfliction and change scheduling. If there’s a conflict, it’s easier to reschedule the proposed change early in the lifecycle.
    • Business, SLA impact, and required resources can be tracked to provide the CAB with information on the business resources required. This can also be used to prioritize the change if conflicts arise.
    • Implementation, test, and backout plans must be included and assessed to increase the probability that a change will be implemented without failure. It’s also useful in the case of PIRs to determine root causes of change-related incidents.
    • Assess change:
      • Dependencies
      • Business impact
      • SLA impact
      • Required resources
      • Query the CMS
    • Plan and test changes:
      • Test plan
      • Test results
      • Implementation plan
      • Backout plan
      • Backout plan test results

    Designing your RFC: approval and deployment

    • Documenting approval, rejection, and rescheduling gives the change requester the go-ahead to proceed with the change, rationale on why it was prioritized lower than another change (rescheduled), or rationale on rejection.
    • Communications plans for appropriate stakeholders can also be modified and forwarded to the communications team (e.g. service desk or business system owners) before deployment.
    • Post-implementation activities and reviews can be conducted if need be before a change is closed. The PIR, if filled out, should then be appended to any subsequent changes of the same nature to avoid making the same mistake twice.
    • Approve and schedule changes:
      • Final CAB review
      • Communications plan
    • Deploy changes:
      • Post-implementation review

    Standardize the request for change protocol

    1. Submission Standards
      • Electronic submission will make it easier for CAB members to review the documentation.
      • As the change goes through the assessment, plan, and test phase, new documentation (assessments, backout plans, test results, etc.) can be attached to the digital RFC for review by CAB members prior to the CAB meeting.
      • Change management software won’t be necessary to facilitate the RFC submission and review; a content repository system, such as SharePoint, will suffice.
    2. Designate the first control point
      • All RFCs should be submitted to a single point of contact.
      • Ideally, the Change Manager or Technical Review Board should fill this role.
      • Whoever is tasked with this role needs the subject matter expertise to ensure that the change has been categorized correctly, to reject out-of-scope requests, or to ask that missing information be provided before the RFC moves through the full change management practice.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Technical and SME contacts should be noted in each RFC so they can be easily consulted during the RFC review.

    3.1.2 Build the RFC Form

    Input

    • Current RFC form or stock ITSM RFC
    • Current SOP (if available)

    Output

    • List of changes to the current RFC and RFC process

    Materials

    Participants

    • IT Director
    • Infrastructure Manager
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board
    1. Use Info-Tech’s Request for Change Form Template as a basis for your RFC form.
    2. Use this template to standardize your change request process and ensure that the appropriate information is documented effectively each time a request is made. The change requester and Change Manager should consolidate all information associated with a given change request in this form. This form will be submitted by the change requester and reviewed by the Change Manager.

    Case Study (part 3 of 4)

    Intel implemented automated RFC form generation.

    Industry: Technology

    Source: Daniel Grove, Intel

    Challenge

    Founded in 1968, the world’s largest microchip and semiconductor company employs over 100,000 people. Intel manufactures processors for major players in the PC market including Apple, Lenovo, HP, and Dell.

    Intel IT supports over 65,000 servers, 3.2 petabytes of data, over 70,000 PCs, and 2.6 million emails per day.

    Intel’s change management program is responsible for over 4,000 changes each week.

    Solution

    One of the crucial factors that was impacting Intel’s change management efficiency was a cumbersome RFC process.

    A lack of RFC usage was contributing to increased ad hoc changes being put through the CAB, and rescheduled changes were quite high.

    Additionally, ad hoc changes were also contributing heavily to unscheduled downtime within the organization.

    Results

    Intel designed and implemented an automated RFC form generator to encourage end users to increase RFC usage.

    As we’ve seen with RFC form design, the UX/UI of the form needs to be top notch, otherwise end users will simply circumvent the process. This will contribute to the problems you are seeking to correct.

    Thanks to increased RFC usage, Intel decreased emergency changes by 50% and reduced change-caused unscheduled downtime by 82%.

    Step 3.2

    Establish Post-Implementation Activities

    Activities

    3.2.1 Determine When the CAB Would Reject Tested Changes

    3.2.2 Create a Post-Implementation Activity Checklist

    Define the RFC and Post-Implementation Activities

    Step 3.1: Design RFC

    Step 3.2: Establish Post-Implementation Activities

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board

    Outcomes of this step

    • A formalized post-implementation process for continual improvement

    Why would the CAB reject a change that has been properly assessed and tested?

    Possible reasons the CAB would reject a change include:

    • The product being changed is approaching its end of life.
    • The change is too costly.
    • The timing of the change conflicts with other changes.
    • There could be compliance issues.
    • The change is actually a project.
    • The risk is too high.
    • There could be regulatory issues.
    • The peripherals (test, backout, communication, and training plans) are incomplete.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Many reasons for rejection (listed above) can be caught early on in the process during the technical review or change build portion of the change. The earlier you catch these reasons for rejection, the less wasted effort there will be per change.

    Sample RFCReason for CAP Rejection
    There was a request for an update to a system that a legacy application depends on and only a specific area of the business was aware of the dependency. The CAB rejects it due to the downstream impact.
    There was a request for an update to a non-supported application, and the vendor was asking for a premium support contract that is very costly. It’s too expensive to implement, despite the need for it. The CAB will wait for an upgrade to a new application.
    There was a request to update application functionality to a beta release. The risk outweighs the business benefits.

    Determine When the CAB Would Reject Tested Changes

    Input

    • Current SOP (if available)

    Output

    • List of reasons to reject tested changes

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/flip charts (or shared screen if working remotely)
    • Projector
    • Markers/pens
    • Laptop with ITSM admin access
    • Project Summary Template

    Participants

    • IT Director
    • Infrastructure Manager
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board

    Avoid hand-offs to ensure a smooth implementation process

    The implementation phase is the final checkpoint before releasing the new change into your live environment. Once the final checks have been made to the change, it’s paramount that teams work together to transition the change effectively rather than doing an abrupt hand-off. This could cause a potential outage.

    1.

    • Deployment resources identified, allocated, and scheduled
    • Documentation complete
    • Support team trained
    • Users trained
    • Business sign-off
    • Target systems identified and ready to receive changes
    • Target systems available for installation maintenance window scheduled
    • Technical checks:
      • Disk space available
      • Pre-requisites met
      • Components/Services to be updated are stopped
      • All users disconnected
    • Download Info-Tech’sChange Management Pre-Implementation Checklist

    Implement change →

    2.

    1. Verification – once the change has been implemented, verify that all requirements are fulfilled.
    2. Review – ensure that all affected systems and applications are operating as predicted. Update change log.
    3. Transition – a crucial phase of implementation that’s often overlooked. Once the change implementation is complete from a technical point of view, it’s imperative that the team involved with the change inform and train the group responsible for managing the new change.

    Create a backout plan to reduce the risk of a failed change

    Every change process needs to plan for the potential for failure and how to address it effectively. Change management’s solution to this problem is a backout plan.

    A backout plan needs to contain a record of the steps that need to be taken to restore the live environment back to its previous state and maintain business continuity. A good backout plan asks the following questions:

    1. How will failure be determined? Who will make the determination to back out of a change be made and when?
    2. Do we fix on fail or do we rollback to the previous configuration?
    3. Is the service desk aware of the impending change? Do they have proper training?

    Notify the Service Desk

    • Notify the Service Desk about backout plan initiation.

    Disable Access

    • Disable user access to affected system(s).

    Conduct Checks

    • Conduct checks to all affected components.

    Enable User Access

    • Enable user access to affected systems.

    Notify the Service Desk

    • Notify the service desk that the backout plan was successful.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    As part of the backout plan, consider the turnback point in the change window. That is, the point within the change window where you still have time to fully back out of the change.

    Ensure the following post-implementation review activities are completed

    Service Catalog

    Update the service catalog with new information as a result of the implemented change.

    CMDB

    Update new dependencies present as a result of the new change.

    Asset DB

    Add notes about any assets newly affected by changes.

    Architecture Map

    Update your map based on the new change.

    Technical Documentation

    Update your technical documentation to reflect the changes present because of the new change.

    Training Documentation

    Update your training documentation to reflect any information about how users interact with the change.

    Use a post-implementation review process to promote continual improvement

    The post-implementation review (PIR) is the most neglected change management activity.

    • All changes should be reviewed to understand the reason behind them, appropriateness, and recommendations for next steps.
    • The Change Manager manages the completion of information PIRs and invites RFC originators to present their findings and document the lessons learned.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Review PIR reports at CAB meetings to highlight the root causes of issues, action items to close identified gaps, and back-up documentation required. Attach the PIR report to the relevant RFC to prevent similar changes from facing the same issues in the future.

    1. Why do a post-implementation review?
      • Changes that don’t fail but don’t perform well are rarely reviewed.
      • Changes may fail subtly and still need review.
      • Changes that cause serious failures (i.e. unplanned downtime) receive analysis that is unnecessarily in-depth.
    2. What are the benefits?
      • A proactive, post-implementation review actually uses less resources than reactionary change reviews.
      • Root-cause analysis of failed changes, no matter what the impact.
      • Insight into changes that took longer than projected.
      • Identification of previously unidentified risks affecting changes.

    Determine the strategy for your PIR to establish a standardized process

    Capture the details of your PIR process in a table similar to the one below.

    Frequency Part of weekly review (IT team meeting)
    Participants
    • Change Manager
    • Originator
    • SME/supervisor/impacted team(s)

    Categories under review

    Current deviations and action items from previous PIR:

    • Complete
    • Partially complete
    • Complete, late
    • Change failed, rollback succeeded
    • Change failed, rollback failed
    • Major deviation from implementation plan
    Output
    • Root cause or failure or deviation
    • External factors
    • Remediation focus areas
    • Remediation timeline (follow-up at appropriate time)
    Controls
    • Reviewed at next CAB meeting
    • RFC close is dependent on completion of PIR
    • Share with the rest of the technical team
    • Lessons learned stored in the knowledgebase and attached to RFC for easy search of past issues.

    3.2.2 Create a Post-Implementation Activity Checklist

    Input

    • Current SOP (if available)

    Output

    • List of reasons to reject tested changes

    Materials

    Participants

    • CIO
    • IT Managers
    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board
    1. Gather representatives from the change management team.
    2. Brainstorm duties to perform following the deployment of a change. Below is a sample list:
      • Example:
        • Was the deployment successful?
          • If no, was the backout plan executed successfully?
        • List change-related incidents
        • Change assessment
          • Missed dependencies
          • Inaccurate business impact
          • Incorrect SLA impact
          • Inaccurate resources
            • Time
            • Staff
            • Hardware
        • System testing
        • Integration testing
        • User acceptance testing
        • No backout plan
        • Backout plan failure
        • Deployment issues
    3. Record your results in the Change Management Post-Implementation Checklist.

    Download the Change Management Post-Implementation Checklist

    Case Study

    Microsoft used post-implementation review activities to mitigate the risk of a critical Azure outage.

    Industry: Technology

    Source: Jason Zander, Microsoft

    Challenge

    In November 2014, Microsoft deployed a change intended to improve Azure storage performance by reducing CPU footprint of the Azure Table Front-Ends.

    The deployment method was an incremental approach called “flighting,” where software and configuration deployments are deployed incrementally to Azure infrastructure in small batches.

    Unfortunately, this software deployment caused a service interruption in multiple regions.

    Solution

    Before the software was deployed, Microsoft engineers followed proper protocol by testing the proposed update. All test results pointed to a successful implementation.

    Unfortunately, engineers pushed the change out to the entire infrastructure instead of adhering to the traditional flighting protocol.

    Additionally, the configuration switch was incorrectly enabled for the Azure Blob storage Front-Ends.

    A combination of the two mistakes exposed a bug that caused the outage.

    Results

    Thankfully, Microsoft had a backout plan. Within 30 minutes, the change was rolled back on a global scale.

    It was determined that policy enforcement was not integrated across the deployment system. An update to the system shifted the process of policy enforcement from human-based decisions and protocol to automation via the deployment platform.

    Defined PIR activities enabled Microsoft to take swift action against the outage and mitigate the risk of a serious outage.

    Phase 4

    Measure, Manage, and Maintain

    Define Change Management

    1.1 Assess Maturity

    1.2 Categorize Changes and Build Risk Assessment

    Establish Roles and Workflows

    2.1 Determine Roles and Responsibilities

    2.2 Build Core Workflows

    Define RFC and Post-Implementation Activities

    3.1 Design RFC

    3.2 Establish post-implementation activities

    Measure, Manage, and Maintain

    4.1 Identify Metrics and Build the Change Calendar

    4.2 Implement the Project

    This phase will guide you through the following activities:

    • Identify Metrics and Build the Change Calendar
    • Implement the Project

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO/IT Director
    • IT Managers
    • Change Manager

    Step 4.1

    Identify Metrics and Build the Change Calendar

    Activities

    4.1.1 Create an Outline for Your Change Calendar

    4.1.2 Determine Metrics, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and Critical Success Factors (CSFs)

    4.1.3 Track and Record Metrics Using the Change Management Metrics Tool

    Measure, Manage, and Maintain

    Step 4.1: Identify Metrics and Build the Change Calendar

    Step 4.2: Implement the Project

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO/IT Director
    • IT Managers
    • Change Manager

    Outcomes of this step

    • Clear definitions of change calendar content
    • Guidelines for change calendar scheduling
    • Defined metrics to measure the success of change management with associated reports, KPIs, and CSFs

    Enforce a standard method of prioritizing and scheduling changes

    The impact of not deploying the change and the benefit of deploying it should determine its priority.

    Risk of Not Deploying

    • What is the urgency of the change?
    • What is the risk to the organization if the change is not deployed right away?
    • Will there be any lost productivity, service disruptions, or missed critical business opportunities?
      • Timing
        • Does the proposed timing work with the approved changes already on the change schedule?
        • Has the change been clash checked so there are no potential conflicts over services or resources?
      • Once prioritized, a final deployment date should be set by the CAB. Check the change calendar first to avoid conflicts.

    Positive Impact of Deployment

    • What benefits will be realized once the change is deployed?
    • How significant is the opportunity that triggered the change?
    • Will the change lead to a positive business outcome (e.g. increased sales)?

    “The one who has more clout or authority is usually the one who gets changes scheduled in the time frame they desire, but you should really be evaluating the impact to the organization. We looked at the risk to the business of not doing the change, and that’s a good way of determining the criticality and urgency of that change.” – Joseph Sgandurra, Director, Service Delivery, Navantis

    Info-Tech Insight

    Avoid a culture where powerful stakeholders are able to push change deployment on an ad hoc basis. Give the CAB the full authority to make approval decisions based on urgency, impact, cost, and availability of resources.

    Develop a change schedule to formalize the planning process

    A change calendar will help the CAB schedule changes more effectively and increase visibility into upcoming changes across the organization.

    1. Establish change windows in a consistent change schedule:
      • Compile a list of business units that would benefit from a change.
      • Look for conflicts in the change schedule.
      • Avoid scheduling two or more major business units in a day.
      • Consider clients when building your change windows and change schedule.
    2. Gain commitments from key participants:
      • These individuals can confirm if there are any unusual or cyclical business requirements that will impact the schedule.
    3. Properly control your change calendar to improve change efficiency:
      • Look at the proposed start and end times: Are they sensible? Does the implementation window leave time for anything going wrong or needing to roll back the change?
      • Special considerations: Are there special circumstances that need to be considered? Ask the business if you don’t know.
      • The key principle is to have a sufficient window available for implementing changes so you only need to set up calendar freezes for sound business or technical reasons.

    Our mantra is to put it on the calendar. Even if it’s a preapproved change and doesn’t need a vote, having it on the calendar helps with visibility. The calendar is the one-stop shop for scheduling and identifying change dependencies.“ – Wil Clark, Director of Service and Performance Management, University of North Texas Systems

    Provide clear definitions of what goes on the change calendar and who’s responsible

    Roles

    • The Change Manager will be responsible for creating and maintaining a change calendar.
    • Only the Change Manager can physically alter the calendar by adding a new change after the CAB has agreed upon a deployment date.
    • All other CAB members, IT support staff, and other impacted stakeholders should have access to the calendar on a read-only basis to prevent people from making unauthorized changes to deployment dates.

    Inputs

    • Freeze periods for individual business departments/applications (e.g. finance month-end periods, HR payroll cycle, etc. – all to be investigated).
    • Maintenance windows and planned outage periods.
    • Project schedules, and upcoming major/medium changes.
    • Holidays.
    • Business hours (some departments work 9-5, others work different hours or in different time zones, and user acceptance testing may require business users to be available).

    Guidelines

    • Business-defined freeze periods are the top priority.
    • No major or medium normal changes should occur during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
    • Vendor SLA support hours are the preferred time for implementing changes.
    • The vacation calendar for IT will be considered for major changes.
    • Change priority: High > Medium > Low.
    • Minor changes and preapproved changes have the same priority and will be decided on a case-by-case basis.

    The change calendar is a critical pre-requisite to change management in DevOps. Use the calendar to be proactive with proposed implementation dates and deconfliction before the change is finished.

    4.1.1 Create Guidelines for Your Change Calendar

    Input

    • Current change calendar guidelines

    Output

    • Change calendar inputs and schedule checklist

    Materials

    Participants

    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Operations (optional)
    1. Gather representatives from the change management team.
      • Example:
        • The change calendar/schedule includes:
          • Approved and scheduled normal changes.
          • Scheduled project work.
          • Scheduled maintenance windows.
          • Change freeze periods with affected users noted:
            • Daily/weekly freeze periods.
            • Monthly freeze periods.
            • Annual freeze periods.
            • Other critical business events.
    2. Create a checklist to run through before each change is scheduled:
      • Check the schedule and assess resource availability:
        • Will user productivity be impacted?
        • Are there available resources (people and systems) to implement the change?
        • Is the vendor available? Is there a significant cost attached to pushing change deployment before the regularly scheduled refresh?
        • Are there dependencies? Does the deployment of one change depend on the earlier deployment of another?
    3. Record your results in your Project Summary Template.

    Start measuring the success of your change management project using three key metrics

    Number of change-related incidents that occur each month

    • Each month, record the number of incidents that can be directly linked to a change. This can be done using an ITSM tool or manually by service desk staff.
    • This is a key success metric: if you are not tracking change-related incidents yet, start doing so as soon as possible. This is the metric that the CIO and business stakeholders will be most interested in because it impacts users directly.

    Number of unauthorized changes applied each month

    • Each month, record the number of changes applied without approval. This is the best way to measure adherence to the process.
    • If this number decreases, it demonstrates a reduction in risk, as more changes are formally assessed and approved before being deployed.

    Percentage of emergency changes

    • Each month, compare the number of emergency change requests to the total number of change requests.
    • Change requesters often designate changes as emergencies as a way of bypassing the process.
    • A reduction in emergency changes demonstrates that your process is operating smoothly and reduces the risk of deploying changes that have not been properly tested.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Start simple. Metrics can be difficult to tackle if you’re starting from scratch. While implementing your change management practice, use these three metrics as a starting point, since they correlate well with the success of change management overall. The following few slides provide more insight into creating metrics for your change process.

    If you want more insight into your change process, measure the progress of each step in change management with metrics

    Improve

    • Number of repeat failures (i.e. making the same mistake twice)
    • Number of changes converted to pre-approved
    • Number of changes converted from pre-approved back to normal

    Request

    • What percentage of change requests have errors or lack appropriate support?
    • What percentage of change requests are actually projects, service requests, or operational tasks?
    • What percentage of changes have been requested before (i.e. documented)?

    Assess

    • What percentage of change requests are out of scope?
    • What percentage of changes have been requested before (i.e. documented)?
    • What are the percentages of changes by category (normal, pre-approved, emergency)?

    Plan

    • What percentage of change requests are reviewed by the CAB that should have been pre-approved or emergency (i.e. what percentage of changes are in the wrong category)?

    Approve

    • Number of changes broken down by department (business unit/IT department to be used in making core/optional CAB membership more efficient)
    • Number of workflows that can be automated

    Implement

    • Number of changes completed on schedule
    • Number of changes rolled back
    • What percentage of changes caused an incident?

    Use metrics to inform project KPIs and CSFs

    Leverage the metrics from the last slide and convert them to data communicable to IT, management, and leadership

    • To provide value, metrics and measurements must be actionable. What actions can be taken as a result of the data being presented?
    • If the metrics are not actionable, there is no value and you should question the use of the metric.
    • Data points in isolation are mostly meaningless to inform action. Observe trends in your metrics to inform your decisions.
    • Using a framework to develop measurements and metrics provides a defined methodology that enables a mapping of base measurements through CSFs.
    • Establishing the relationship increases the value that measurements provide.

    Purposely use SDLC and change lifecycle metrics to find bottlenecks and automation candidates.

    Metrics:

    Metrics are easily measured datapoints that can be pulled from your change management tool. Examples: Number of changes implemented, number of changes without incident.

    KPIs:

    Key Performance Indicators are metrics presented in a way that is easily digestible by stakeholders in IT. Examples: Change efficiency, quality of changes.

    CSFs:

    Critical Success Factors are measures of the business success of change management taken by correlating the CSF with multiple KPIs. Examples: consistent and efficient change management process, a change process mapped to business needs

    List in-scope metrics and reports and align them to benefits

    Metric/Report (by team)Benefit
    Total number of RFCs and percentages by category (pre-approved, normal, emergency, escalated support, expedited)
    • Understand change management activity
    • Tracking maturity growth
    • Identifying “hot spots”
    Pre-approved change list (and additions/removals from the list) Workload and process streamlining (i.e. reduce “red tape” wherever possible)
    Average time between RFC lifecycle stages (by service/application) Advance planning for proposed changes
    Number of changes by service/application/hardware class
    • Identifying weaknesses in the architecture
    • Vendor-specific TCO calculations
    Change triggers Business- vs. IT-initiated change
    Number of RFCs by lifecycle stage Workload planning
    List of incidents related to changes Visible failures of the CM process
    Percentage of RFCs with a tested backout/validation plan Completeness of change planning
    List of expedited changes Spotlighting poor planning and reducing the need for this category going forward (“The Hall of Shame”)
    CAB approval rate Change coordinator alignment with CAB priorities – low approval rate indicates need to tighten gatekeeping by the change coordinator
    Calendar of changes Planning

    4.1.2 Determine Metrics, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and Critical Success Factors (CSFs)

    Input

    • Current metrics

    Output

    • List of trackable metrics, KPIs and CSFs

    Materials

    Participants

    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Operations (optional)
    1. Draw three tables for metrics, KPIs, and CSFs.
    2. Starting with the CSF table, fill in all relevant CSFs that your group wishes to track and measure.
    3. Next, work to determine relevant KPIs correlated with the CSFs and metrics needed to measure the KPIs. Use the tables included below (taken from section 14 of the Change Management SOP) to guide the process.
    4. Record the results in the tables in section 14 of your Change Management SOP.
    5. Decide on where and when to review the metrics to discuss your change management strategy. Designate and owner and record in the RACI and Communications section of your Change Management SOP.
    Ref #Metric

    M1

    Number of changes implemented for a time period
    M2 Number of changes successfully implemented for a time period
    M3 Number of changes implemented causing incidents
    M4 Number of accepted known errors when change is implemented
    M5 Total days for a change build (specific to each change)
    M6 Number of changes rescheduled
    M7 Number of training questions received following a change
    Ref#KPIProduct
    K1 Successful changes for a period of time (approach 100%) M2 / M1 x 100%
    K2 Changes causing incidents (approach 0%) M3 / M1 x 100%
    K3 Average days to implement a change ΣM5 / M1
    K4 Change efficiency (approach 100%) [1 - (M6 / M1)] x 100%
    K5 Quality of changes being implemented (approach 100%) [1 - (M4 / M1)] x 100%
    K6 Change training efficiency (approach 100%) [1 - (M7 / M1)] x 100%
    Ref#CSFIndicator
    C1 Successful change management process producing quality changes K1, K5
    C2 Consistent efficient change process K4, K6
    C3 Change process maps to business needs K5, K6

    Measure changes in selected metrics to evaluate success

    Once you have implemented a standardized change management practice, your team’s goal should be to improve the process, year over year.

    • After a process change has been implemented, it’s important to regularly monitor and evaluate the CSFs, KPIs, and metrics you chose to evaluate. Examine whether the process change you implemented has actually resolved the issue or achieved the goal of the critical success factor.
    • Establish a schedule for regularly reviewing the key metrics. Assess changes in those metrics and determine progress toward reaching objectives.
    • In addition to reviewing CSFs, KPIs, and metrics, check in with the release management team and end users to measure their perceptions of the change management process once an appropriate amount of time has passed.
    • Ensure that metrics are telling the whole story and that reporting is honest in order to be informative.

    Outcomes of standardizing change management should include:

    1. Improved efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of changes.
    2. Changes and processes are more aligned with the business needs and strategy.
    3. Improved maturity of change processes.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Make sure you’re measuring the right things and considering all sources of information. It’s very easy to put yourself in a position where you’re congratulating yourselves for improving on a specific metric such as number of releases per month, but satisfaction remains low.

    4.1.3 Track and Record Metrics Using the Change Management Metrics Tool

    Input

    • Current metrics

    Output

    • List of trackable metrics, KPIs and CSFs to be observed over the length of a year

    Materials

    Participants

    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Operations (optional)

    Tracking the progress of metrics is paramount to the success of any change management process. Use Info-Tech’s Change Management Metrics Tool to record metrics and track your progress. This tool is intended to be a substitute for organizations who do not have the capability to track change-related metrics in their ITSM tool.

    1. Input metrics from the previous activity to track over the course of a year.
    2. To record your metrics, open the tool and go to tab 2. The tool is currently primed to record and track five metrics. If you need more than that, you can edit the list in the hidden calculations tab.
    3. To see the progress of your metrics, move to tab 3 to view a dashboard of all metrics in the tool.

    Download the Change Management Metrics Tool

    Case Study

    A federal credit union was able to track maturity growth through the proper use of metrics.

    Industry: Federal Credit Union (anonymous)

    Source: Info-Tech Workshop

    Challenge

    At this federal credit union, the VP of IT wanted a tight set of metrics to engage with the business, communicate within IT, enable performance management of staff, and provide visibility into workload demands, among other requirements.

    The organization was suffering from “metrics fatigue,” with multiple reports being generated from all groups within IT, to the point that weekly/monthly reports were being seen as spam.

    Solution

    Stakeholders were provided with an overview of change management benefits and were asked to identify one key attribute that would be useful to their specific needs.

    Metrics were designed around the stakeholder needs, piloted with each stakeholder group, fine-tuned, and rolled out.

    Some metrics could not be automated off-the-shelf and were rolled out in a manual fashion. These metrics were subsequently automated and finally made available through a dashboard.

    Results

    The business received clear guidance regarding estimated times to implement changes across different elements of the environment.

    The IT managers were able to plan team workloads with visibility into upstream change activity.

    Architects were able to identify vendors and systems that were the leading source of instability.

    The VP of IT was able to track the maturity growth of the change management process and proactively engage with the business on identified hot spots.

    Step 4.2

    Implement the Project

    Activities

    4.2.1 Use a Communications Plan to Gain End User Buy-In

    4.2.2 Create a Project Roadmap to Track Your Implementation Progress

    Measure, Manage, and Maintain

    Step 4.1: Identify Metrics and Build the Change Calendar

    Step 3.2: Implement the Project

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO/IT Director
    • IT Managers
    • Change Manager

    Outcomes of this step

    • A communications plan for key messages to communicate to relevant stakeholders and audiences
    • A roadmap with assigned action items to implement change management

    Success of the new process will depend on introducing change and gaining acceptance

    Change management provides value by promptly evaluating and delivering changes required by the business and by minimizing disruption and rework caused by failed changes. Communication of your new change management process is key. If people do not understand the what and why, it will fail to provide the desired value.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Gather feedback from end users about the new process: if the process is too bureaucratic, end users are more likely to circumvent it.

    Main Challenges with Communication

    • Many people fail before they even start because they are buried in a mess created before they arrived – either because of a failed attempt to get change management implemented or due to a complicated system that has always existed.
    • Many systems are maintained because “that’s the way it’s always been done.”
    • Organizations don’t know where to start; they think change management is too complex a process.
    • Each group needs to follow the same procedure – groups often have their own processes, but if they don’t agree with one another, this could cause an outage.

    Educate affected stakeholders to prepare for organizational change

    An organizational change management plan should be part of your change management project.

    • Educate stakeholders about:
      • The process change (describe it in a way that the user can understand and is clear and concise).
        • IT changes will be handled in a standardized and repeatable fashion to minimize change-related incidents.
      • Who is impacted?
        • All users.
      • How are they impacted?
        • All change requests will be made using a standard form and will not be deployed until formal approval is received.
      • Change messaging.
        • How to communicate the change (benefits).
      • Learning and development – training your users on the change.
        • Develop and deliver training session on the Change Management SOP to familiarize users with this new method of handling IT change.

    Host a lunch-and-learn session

    • For the initial deployment, host a lunch-and-learn session to educate the business on the change management practice. Relevant stakeholders of affected departments should host it and cover the following topics:
    • What is change management (change management/change control)?
    • The value of change management.
    • What the Change Management SOP looks like.
    • Who is involved in the change management process (the CAB, etc.)?
    • What constitutes a pre-approved change and an emergency change?
    • An overview of the process, including how to avoid unauthorized changes.
    • Who should they contact in case of questions?

    Communicate the new process to all affected stakeholders

    Do not surprise users or support staff with changes. This will result in lost productivity and low satisfaction with IT services.

    • User groups and the business need to be given sufficient notice of an impending change.
    • This will allow them to make appropriate plans to accept the change, minimizing the impact of the change on productivity.
    • A communications plan will be documented in the RFC while the release is being built and tested.
    • It’s the responsibility of the change team to execute on the communications plan.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The success of change communication can be measured by monitoring the number of service desk tickets related to a change that was not communicated to users.

    Communication is crucial to the integration and overall implementation of your change management initiative. An effective communications plan will:

    • Gain support from management at the project proposal phase.
    • Create end-user buy-in once the program is set to launch.
    • Maintain the presence of the program throughout the business.
    • Instill ownership throughout the business from top-level management to new hires.

    Create your communications plan to anticipate challenges, remove obstacles, and ensure buy-in

    Management

    Technicians

    Business Stakeholders

    Provide separate communications to key stakeholder groups

    Why? What problems are you trying to solve?

    What? What processes will it affect (that will affect me)?

    Who? Who will be affected? Who do I go to if I have issues with the new process?

    When? When will this be happening? When will it affect me?

    How? How will these changes manifest themselves?

    Goal? What is the final goal? How will it benefit me?

    Info-Tech Insight

    Pay close attention to the medium of communication. For example, stakeholders on their feet all day would not be as receptive to an email communication compared to those who primarily work in front of a computer. Put yourself into various stakeholders’ shoes to craft a tailored communication of change management.

    4.2.1 Use a Communications Plan to Gain End User Buy-In

    Input

    • List of stakeholder groups for change management

    Output

    • Tailored communications plans for various stakeholder groups

    Materials

    Participants

    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Operations (optional)
    1. Using Info-Tech’s Change Management Communications Plan, identify key audiences or stakeholder groups that will be affected by the new change management practice.
    2. For each group requiring a communications plan, identify the following:
      • The benefits for that group of individuals.
      • The impact the change will have on them.
      • The best communication method(s) for them.
      • The time frame of the communication.
    3. Complete this information in a table like the one below:
    GroupBenefitsImpactMethodTimeline
    IT Standardized change process All changes must be reviewed and approved Poster campaign 6 months
    End Users Decreased wait time for changes Formal process for RFCs Lunch-and-learn sessions 3 months
    Business Reduced outages Increased involvement in planning and approvals Monthly reports 1 year
    1. Discuss the communications plan:
      • Will this plan ensure that users are given adequate opportunities to accept the changes being deployed?
      • Is the message appropriate for each audience? Is the format appropriate for each audience?
      • Does the communication include training where necessary to help users adopt any new functions/workflows being introduced?

    Download the Change Management Communications Plan

    Present your SOP to key stakeholders and obtain their approval

    Now that you have completed your Change Management SOP, the final step is to get sign-off from senior management to begin the rollout process.

    Know your audience:

    • Determine the service management stakeholders who will be included in the audience for your presentation.
    • You want your presentation to be succinct and hard hitting. Management’s time is tight and they will lose interest if you drag out the delivery.
    • Briefly speak about the need for more formal change management and emphasize the benefits of implementing a more formal process with a SOP.
    • Present your current state assessment results to provide context before presenting the SOP itself.
    • As with any other foundational activity, be prepared with some quick wins to gain executive attention.
    • Be prepared to review with both technical and less technical stakeholders.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The support of senior executive stakeholders is critical to the success of your SOP rollout. Try to wow them with project benefits and make sure they know about the risks/pain points.

    Download the Change Management Project Summary Template

    4.2.2 Create a Project Roadmap to Track Your Implementation Progress

    Input

    • List of implementation tasks

    Output

    • Roadmap and timeline for change management implementation

    Materials

    Participants

    • Change Manager
    • Members of the Change Advisory Board
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Operations (optional)
    1. Info-Tech’s Change Management Roadmap Tool helps you identify and prioritize tasks that need to be completed for the change management implementation project.
    2. Use this tool to identify each action item that will need to be completed as part of the change management initiative. Chart each action item, assign an owner, define the duration, and set a completion date.
    3. Use the resulting rocket diagram as a guide to task completion as you work toward your future state.

    Download the Change Management Roadmap Tool

    Case Study (part 4 of 4)

    Intel implemented a robust change management process.

    Industry: Technology

    Source: Daniel Grove, Intel

    Challenge

    Founded in 1968, the world’s largest microchip and semiconductor company employs over 100,000 people. Intel manufactures processors for major players in the PC market including Apple, Lenovo, HP, and Dell.

    Intel IT supports over 65,000 servers, 3.2 petabytes of data, over 70,000 PCs, and 2.6 million emails per day.

    Intel’s change management program is responsible for over 4,000 changes each week.

    Solution

    Intel had its new change management program in place and the early milestones planned, but one key challenge with any new project is communication.

    The company also needed to navigate the simplification of a previously complex process; end users could be familiar with any of the 37 different change processes or 25 different change management systems of record.

    Top-level buy-in was another concern.

    Results

    Intel first communicated the process changes by publishing the vision and strategy for the project with top management sponsorship.

    The CIO published all of the new change policies, which were supported by the Change Governance Council.

    Intel cited the reason for success as the designation of a Policy and Guidance Council – a group designed to own communication and enforcement of the new policies and processes put in place.

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Problem Solved

    You now have an outline of your new change management process. The hard work starts now for an effective implementation. Make use of the communications plan to socialize the new process with stakeholders and the roadmap to stay on track.

    Remember as you are starting your implementation to keep your documents flexible and treat them as “living documents.” You will likely need to tweak and refine the processware and templates several times to continually improve the process. Furthermore, don’t shy away from seeking feedback from your stakeholders to gain buy-in.

    Lastly, keep an eye on your progress with objective, data-driven metrics. Leverage the trends in your data to drive your decisions. Be sure to revisit the maturity assessment not only to measure and visualize your progress, but to gain insight into your next steps.

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop.

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com

    1-888-670-8889

    Additional Support

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop.

    To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.

    Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic office in Toronto, Ontario, Canada to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

    1.1.2 Complete a Change Management Maturity Assessment

    Run through the change management maturity assessment with tailored commentary for each action item outlining context and best practices.

    2.2.1 Plot the Process for a Normal Change

    Build a normal change process using Info-Tech’s Change Management Process Library template with an analyst helping you to right size the process for your organization.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Standardize the Service Desk

    Improve customer service by driving consistency in your support approach and meeting SLAs.

    Stabilize Release and Deployment Management

    Maintain both speed and control while improving the quality of deployments and releases within the infrastructure team.

    Incident and Problem Management

    Don’t let persistent problems govern your department.

    Select Bibliography

    AXELOS Limited. ITIL Foundation: ITIL 4th edition. TSO, 2019, pp. 118–120.

    Behr, Kevin and George Spafford. The Visible Ops Handbook: Implementing ITIL in 4 Practical and Auditable Steps. IT Revolution Press. 2013.

    BMC. “ITIL Change Management.” BMC Software Canada, 22 December 2016.

    Brown, Vance. “Change Management: The Greatest ROI of ITIL.” Cherwell Service Management.

    Cisco. “Change Management: Best Practices.” Cisco, 10 March 2008.

    Grove, Daniel. “Case Study ITIL Change Management Intel Corporation.” PowerShow, 2005.

    ISACA. “COBIT 5: Enabling Processes.” ISACA, 2012.

    Jantti, M. and M. Kainulainen. “Exploring an IT Service Change Management Process: A Case Study.” ICDS 2011: The Fifth International Conference on Digital Society, 23 Feb. 2011.

    Murphy, Vawns. “How to Assess Changes.” The ITSM Review, 29 Jan. 2016.

    Nyo, Isabel. “Best Practices for Change Management in the Age of DevOps.” Atlassian Engineering, 12 May 2021.

    Phillips, Katherine W., Katie A. Liljenquist, and Margaret A. Neale. “Better Decisions Through Diversity.” Kellogg Insight, 1 Oct. 2010.

    Pink Elephant. “Best Practices for Change Management.” Pink Elephant, 2005.

    Sharwood, Simon. “Google broke its own cloud by doing two updates at once.” The Register, 24 Aug. 2016.

    SolarWinds. “How to Eliminate the No: 1 Cause of Network Downtime.” SolarWinds Tech Tips, 25 Apr. 2014.

    The Stationery Office. “ITIL Service Transition: 2011.” The Stationary Office, 29 July 2011.

    UCISA. “ITIL – A Guide to Change Management.” UCISA.

    Zander, Jason. “Final Root Cause Analysis and Improvement Areas: Nov 18 Azure Storage Service Interruption.” Microsoft Azure: Blog and Updates, 17 Dec. 2014.

    Appendix I: Expedited Changes

    Employ the expedited change to promote process adherence

    In many organizations, there are changes which may not fit into the three prescribed categories. The reason behind why the expedited category may be needed generally falls between two possibilities:

    1. External drivers dictate changes via mandates which may not fall within the normal change cycle. A CIO, judge, state/provincial mandate, or request from shared services pushes a change that does not fall within a normal change cycle. However, there is no imminent outage (therefore it is not an emergency). In this case, an expedited change can proceed. Communicate to the change requester that IT and the change build team will still do their best to implement the change without issue, but any extra risk of implementing this expedited change (compared to an normal change) will be absorbed by the change requester.
    2. The change requester did not prepare for the change adequately. This is common if a new change process is being established (and stakeholders are still adapting to the process). Change requesters or the change build team may request the change to be done by a certain date that does not fall within the normal change cycle, or they simply did not give the CAB enough time to vet the change. In this case, you may use the expedited category as a metric (or a “Hall of Shame” example). If you identify a department or individual that frequently request expedited changes, use the expedited category as a means to educate them about the normal change to discourage the behavior moving forward.

    Two possible ways to build an expedited change category”

    1. Build the category similar to an emergency change. In this case, one difference would be the time allotted to fully obtain authorization of the change from the E-CAB and business owner before implementing the change (as opposed to the emergency change workflow).
    2. Have the expedited change reflect the normal change workflow. In this case, all the same steps of the normal change workflow are followed except for expedited timelines between processes. This may include holding an impromptu CAB meeting to authorize the change.

    Example process: Expedited Change Process

    The image is a flowchart, showing the process for Expedited Change.

    For the full process, refer to the Change Management Process Library.

    Appendix II: Optimize IT Change Management in a DevOps Environment

    Change Management cannot be ignored because you are DevOps or Agile

    But it can be right-sized.

    The core tenets of change management still apply no matter the type of development environment an organization has. Changes in any environment carry risk of degrading functionality, and must therefore be vetted. However, the amount of work and rigor put into different stages of the change life cycle can be altered depending on the maturity of the development workflows. The following are several stage gates for change management that MUST be considered if you are a DevOps or Agile shop:

    • Intake assessment (separation of changes from projects, service requests, operational tasks)
      • Within a DevOps or Agile environment, many of the application changes will come directly from the SDLC and projects going live. It does not mean a change must go through CAB, but leveraging the pre-approved category allows for an organization to stick to development lifecycles without being heavily bogged down by change bureaucracy.
    • Technical review
      • Leveraging automation, release contingencies, and the current SDLC documentation to decrease change risk allows for various changes to be designated as pre-approved.
    • Authorization
      • Define the authorization and dependencies of a change early in the lifecycle to gain authorization and necessary signoffs.
    • Documentation/communication
      • Documentation and communication are post-implementation activities that cannot be ignored. If documentation is required throughout the SDLC, then design the RFC to point to the correct documentation instead of duplicating information.

    "Understand that process is hard and finding a solution that fits every need can be tricky. With this change management process we do not try to solve every corner case so much as create a framework by which best judgement can be used to ensure maximum availability of our platforms and services while still complying with our regulatory requirements and making positive changes that will delight our customers.“ -IT Director, Information Cybersecurity Organization

    Five principals for implementing change in DevOps

    Follow these best practices to make sure your requirements are solid:

    People

    The core differences between an Agile or DevOps transition and a traditional approach are the restructuring and the team behind it. As a result, the stakeholders of change management must be onboard for the process to work. This is the most difficult problem to solve if it’s an issue, but open avenues of feedback for a process build is a start.

    DevOps Lifecycles

    • Plan the dev lifecycle so people can’t skirt it. Ensure the process has automated checks so that it’s more work to skirt the system than it is to follow it. Make the right process the process of least resistance.
    • Plan changes from the start to ensure that cross-dependencies are identified early and that the proposed implementation date is deconflicted and visible to other change requesters and change stakeholders.

    Automation

    Automation comes in many forms and is well documented in many development workflows. Having automated signoffs for QA/security checks and stakeholders/cross dependency owner sign offs may not fully replace the CAB but can ease the burden on discussions before implementation.

    Contingencies

    Canary releases, phased releases, dark releases, and toggles are all options you can employ to reduce risk during a release. Furthermore, building in contingencies to the test/rollback plan decreases the risk of the change by decreasing the factor of likelihood.

    Continually Improve

    Building change from the ground up doesn’t meant the process has to be fully fledged before launch. Iterative improvements are possible before achieving an optimal state. Having the proper metrics on the pain points and bottlenecks in the process can identify areas for automation and improvement.

    Increasing the proportion of pre-approved changes

    Leverage the traditional change infrastructure to deploy changes quickly while keeping your risk low.

    • To designate a change as a pre-approved change it must have a low risk rating (based on impact and likelihood). Fortunately, many of the changes within the Agile framework are designed to be small and lower risk (at least within application development). Putting in the work ahead of time to document these changes, template RFCs, and document the dependencies for various changes allows for a shift in the proportion of pre-approved changes.
    • The designation of pre-approved changes is an ongoing process. This is not an overnight initiative. Measure the proportion of changes by category as a metric, setting goals and interim goals to shift the change proportion to a desired ratio.

    The image is a bar graph, with each bar having 3 colour-coded sections: Emergency, Normal, and Pre-Approved. The first bar is before, where the largest change category is Normal. The second bar is after, and the largest change category is Pre-Approved.

    Turn your CAB into a virtual one

    • The CAB does not have to fully disappear in a DevOps environment. If the SDLC is built in a way that authorizes changes through peer reviews and automated checks, by the time it’s deployed, the job of the CAB should have already been completed. Then the authorization stage-gate (traditionally, the CAB) shifts to earlier in the process, reducing the need for an actual CAB meeting. However, the change must still be communicated and documented, even if it’s a pre-approved change.
    • As the proportion of changes shifts from a high degree of normal changes to a high degree of pre-approved changes, the need for CAB meetings should decrease even further. As an end-state, you may reserve actual CAB meetings for high-profile changes (as defined by risk).
    • Lastly, change management does not disappear as a process. Periodic reviews of change management metrics and the pre-approved change list must still be completed.

    2021 IT Talent Trend Report

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    • Parent Category Name: Lead
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    • In March 2020, many organizations were forced to switch to a virtual working world. IT enabled organizations to be successful while working from home. Ultimately, this shift changed the way that we all work, and in turn, the way IT leaders manage talent.
    • Many organizations are considering long-term remote work (Kelly, 2020).
    • Change is starting but is lagging.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Increase focus on employee experience to navigate new challenges.
    • A good employee experience is what is best for the IT department.

    Impact and Result

    • The data shows IT is changing in the area of talent management.
    • IT has a large role in enabling organizations to work from home, especially from a technological and logistics perspective. There is evidence to show that they are now expanding their role to better support employees when working from home.
    • Survey respondents identified efforts already underway for IT to improve employee experience and subsequently, IT effectiveness.

    2021 IT Talent Trend Report Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should focus on the employee experience and get an overview of what successful IT leaders are doing differently heading into 2021 – the five new talent management trends.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. DEI: A top talent objective

    The focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives spans the entire organization beyond just HR. Learn which DEI efforts are underway with IT.

    • 2021 IT Talent Trend Report – Trend 1: DEI: A Top Talent Objective

    2. Remote work is here to stay

    Forced work-from-home demonstrated to organizations that employees can be productive while working away from the physical office. Learn more about how remote work is changing work.

    • 2021 IT Talent Trend Report – Trend 2: Remote Work Is Here to Stay

    3. A greater emphasis on wellbeing

    When the pandemic hit, organizations were significantly concerned about how employees were doing. Learn more about wellbeing.

    • 2021 IT Talent Trend Report – Trend 3: A Greater Emphasis on Wellbeing

    4. A shift in skills priorities

    Upskilling and finding sought after skills were challenging before the pandemic. How has it changed since? Learn more about skills priorities.

    • 2021 IT Talent Trend Report – Trend 4: A Shift in Skills Priorities

    5. Uncertainty unlocks performance

    The pandemic and remote work has affected performance. Learn about how uncertainty has impacted performance management.

    • 2021 IT Talent Trend Report – Trend 5: Uncertainty Unlocks Performance
    [infographic]

    Master Your Security Incident Response Communications Program

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    • Parent Category Name: Threat Intelligence & Incident Response
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    • When a significant security incident is discovered, usually very few details are known for certain. Nevertheless, the organization will need to say something to affected stakeholders.
    • Security incidents tend to be ongoing situations that last considerably longer than other types of crises, making communications a process rather than a one-time event.
    • Effective incident response communications require collaboration from: IT, Legal, PR, and HR – groups that often speak “different languages.”

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • There’s no such thing as successful incident response communications; strive instead for effective communications. There will always be some fallout after a security incident, but it can be effectively mitigated through honesty, transparency, and accountability.
    • Effective external communications begin with effective internal communications. Security Incident Response Team members come from departments that don’t usually work closely with each other. This means they often have different ways of thinking and speaking about issues. Be sure they are familiar with each other before a crisis occurs.
    • You won’t save face by withholding embarrassing details. Lying only makes a bad situation worse, but coming clean and acknowledging shortcomings (and how you’ve fixed them) can go a long way towards restoring stakeholders’ trust.

    Impact and Result

    • Effective and efficient management of security incidents involves a formal process of preparation, detection, analysis, containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident activities: communications must be integrated into each of these phases.
    • Understand that prior planning helps to take the guesswork out of incident response communications. By preparing for several different types of security incidents, the communications team will get used to working with each other, as well as learning what strategies are and are not effective. Remember, the communications team contains diverse members from various departments, and each may have different ideas about what information is important to release.

    Master Your Security Incident Response Communications Program Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should implement a security incident response communications plan, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Dive into communications planning

    This phase addresses the benefits and challenges of incident response communications and offers advice on how to assemble a communications team and develop a threat escalation protocol.

    • Master Your Security Incident Response Communications Program – Phase 1: Dive Into Communications Planning
    • Security Incident Management Plan

    2. Develop your communications plan

    This phase focuses on creating an internal and external communications plan, managing incident fallout, and conducting a post-incident review.

    • Master Your Security Incident Response Communications Program – Phase 2: Develop Your Communications Plan
    • Security Incident Response Interdepartmental Communications Template
    • Security Incident Communications Policy Template
    • Security Incident Communications Guidelines and Templates
    • Security Incident Metrics Tool
    • Tabletop Exercises Package
    [infographic]

    Design a Tabletop Exercise to Support Your Security Operation

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    • Threat management has become resource intensive, requiring continuous monitoring, collection, and analysis of massive volumes of security event data.
    • Security incidents are inevitable, but how they are handled is critical.
    • The increasing use of sophisticated malware is making it difficult for organizations to identify the true intent behind the attack campaign.
    • The incident response is often handled in an ad hoc or ineffective manner.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Establish communication processes and channels well in advance of a crisis. Don’t wait until a state of panic. Collaborate and share information mutually with other organizations to stay ahead of incoming threats.
    • Security operations is no longer a center, but a process. The need for a physical security hub has evolved into the virtual fusion of prevention, detection, analysis, and response efforts. When all four functions operate as a unified process, your organization will be able to proactively combat changes in the threat landscape.
    • You might experience a negative return on your security control investment. As technology in the industry evolves, threat actors will adopt new tools, tactics, and procedures; a tabletop exercise will help ensure teams are leveraging your security investment properly and providing relevant situational awareness to stay on top of the rapidly evolving threat landscape.

    Impact and Result

    Establish and design a tabletop exercise capability to support and test the efficiency of the core prevention, detection, analysis, and response functions that consist of an organization's threat intelligence, security operations, vulnerability management, and incident response functions.

    Design a Tabletop Exercise to Support Your Security Operation Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should design a tabletop exercise, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Plan

    Evaluate the need for a tabletop exercise.

    • Design a Tabletop Exercise to Support Your Security Operation – Phase 1: Plan

    2. Design

    Determine the topics, scope, objectives, and participant roles and responsibilities.

    • Design a Tabletop Exercise to Support Your Security Operation – Phase 2: Design

    3. Develop

    Create briefings, guides, reports, and exercise injects.

    • Design a Tabletop Exercise to Support Your Security Operation – Phase 3: Develop
    • Design a Tabletop Exercise to Support Your Security Operation – Inject Examples

    4. Conduct

    Host the exercise in a conference or classroom setting.

    • Design a Tabletop Exercise to Support Your Security Operation – Phase 4: Conduct

    5. Evaluate

    Plan to ensure measurement and continued improvement.

    • Design a Tabletop Exercise to Support Your Security Operation – Phase 5: Evaluate
    [infographic]

    Disaster Recovery Planning

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    • Teaser Video Title: Disaster Recovery Planning
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    The show must go on. Make sure your IT has right-sized DR capabilities.

    Reimagine Learning in the Face of Crisis

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    • As organizations re-evaluate their priorities and shift to new ways of working, leaders and employees are challenged to navigate unchartered territory and to adjust quickly to ever-evolving priorities.
    • Learning how to perform effectively through the crisis and deliver on new priorities is crucial to the success of all employees and the organization.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    The most successful organizations recognize that learning is critical to adjusting quickly and effectively to their new reality. This requires L&D to reimagine their approach to deliver learning that enables the organization’s immediate and evolving priorities.

    Impact and Result

    • L&D teams should focus on how to support employees and managers to develop the critical competencies they need to successfully perform through the crisis, enabling organizations to survive and thrive during and beyond the crisis.
    • Ensure learning needs align closely with evolving organizational priorities, collaborate cross-functionally, and curate content to provide the learning employees and leaders need most, when they need it.

    Reimagine Learning in the Face of Crisis Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Prioritize

    Involve key stakeholders, identify immediate priorities, and conduct high-level triage of L&D.

    • Reimagine Learning in the Face of Crisis Storyboard
    • Reimagine Learning in the Face of Crisis Workbook

    2. Reimagine

    Determine learning needs and ability to realistically deliver learning. Leverage existing or curate learning content that can support learning needs.

    3. Transform

    Identify technical requirements for the chosen delivery method and draft a four- to six-week action plan.

    • How to Curate Guide
    • Tips for Building an Online Learning Community
    • Ten Tips for Adapting In-Person Training During a Crisis
    • Tips for Remote Learning in the Face of Crisis
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    Build Your IT Cost Optimization Roadmap

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    Cost optimization is misunderstood and inadequately tackled. IT departments face:

    • Top-down budget cuts within a narrow time frame
    • Absence of adequate governance: financial, project, data, etc.
    • Long-standing bureaucratic practices slowing down progress
    • Short-term thinking

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Cost optimization is not just about reducing costs. In fact, you should aim to achieve three objectives:

    • Reduce your unwarranted IT spending.
    • Optimize your cost-to-value.
    • Sustain your cost optimization.

    Impact and Result

    • Follow Info-Tech’s approach to develop a 12-month cost optimization roadmap.
    • Develop an IT cost optimization strategy based on your specific circumstances and timeline.
    • Info-Tech’s methodology helps you maintain sustainable cost optimization across IT by focusing on four levers: assets, vendors, project portfolio, and workforce.

    Build Your IT Cost Optimization Roadmap Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. IT Cost Optimization Roadmap Deck – A step-by-step methodology to achieve sustainable cost optimization and effectively communicate your strategy to stakeholders.

    This blueprint will help you understand your IT cost optimization mandate, identify your journey, assess your IT spend across four levers, develop your IT cost optimization roadmap, and craft a related communication strategy.

    • Build Your IT Cost Optimization Roadmap – Phases 1-4

    2. IT Cost Optimization Workbook – A structured tool to help you document your IT cost optimization goals and outline related initiatives to develop an effective 12-month roadmap.

    This tool guides an IT department in planning and prioritization activities to build an effective IT cost optimization strategy. The outputs include visual charts and a 12-month roadmap to showcase the implementation timelines and potential cost savings.

    • IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    3. IT Cost Optimization Roadmap Samples and Templates – A proactive journey template to help you communicate your IT cost optimization strategy to stakeholders in a clear, concise, and compelling manner.

    This presentation template uses sample data from "Acme Corp" to demonstrate an IT cost optimization strategy following a proactive journey. Use this template to document your final IT cost optimization strategy outputs, including the adopted journey, IT cost optimization goals, related key initiatives, potential cost savings, timelines, and 12-month roadmap.

    • IT Cost Optimization Roadmap Samples and Templates

    Infographic

    Workshop: Build Your IT Cost Optimization Roadmap

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Understand Your Mandate & Objectives

    The Purpose

    Determine your organization’s current context and its cost optimization objectives, IT’s corresponding cost optimization journey, and goals.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A business-aligned set of specific IT cost optimization goals.

    Activities

    1.1 Understand your organization’s cost optimization objectives and how this impacts IT.

    1.2 Review potential cost optimization target areas based on your ITFM Benchmarking Report.

    1.3 Identify factors constraining cost optimization options.

    1.4 Set concrete IT cost optimization goals.

    1.5 Identify inputs required for decision making.

    Outputs

    IT cost optimization journey and guiding principles for making corresponding decisions

    2 Outline Initiatives for Vendors & Assets

    The Purpose

    Create a longlist of potential cost optimization initiatives focused on two cost optimization levers: assets and vendors.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A comprehensive list of potential asset- and vendor-focused initiatives including cost savings estimates.

    Activities

    2.1 Identify a longlist of possible initiatives around asset lifecycle management, investment deferral, repurposing, etc., and vendor contract renegotiation, cancelation, etc.

    2.2 Estimate the cost savings of cost optimization initiatives.

    Outputs

    Longlist of potential vendor management and asset optimization IT cost optimization initiatives

    3 Outline Initiatives for Projects & Workforce

    The Purpose

    Create a longlist of potential cost optimization initiatives focused on two cost optimization levers: project portfolio and workforce.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A comprehensive list of potential initiatives focused on project portfolio and workforce including cost savings estimates.

    Activities

    3.1 Identify a longlist of possible initiatives around project priorities, project backlog reduction, project intake restructuring, etc., and workforce productivity, skills, redeployment, etc.

    3.2 Estimate the cost savings of cost optimization initiatives.

    Outputs

    Longlist of possible cost optimization initiatives and their potential cost savings for project portfolio and workforce levers.

    4 Build an IT Cost Optimization Roadmap

    The Purpose

    Develop a visual IT cost optimization roadmap.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A prioritized, business-aligned IT cost optimization roadmap

    Activities

    4.1 Assess feasibility of each initiative (effort and risk profile) given cost optimization goals.

    4.2 Prioritize cost optimization initiatives to create a final shortlist.

    4.3 Fine-tune key information about your final cost optimization initiatives and develop a cost optimization roadmap for proposal.

    Outputs

    Prioritized list of key cost optimization initiatives, descriptions, estimated impact, and roadmap.

    5 Communicate & Execute

    The Purpose

    Develop a communication plan and executive presentation.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A boardroom-ready set of communication materials for gaining buy-in and support for your IT cost optimization roadmap.

    Activities

    5.1 Outline components of a communication plan, including approvers, stakeholders, and governance and management mechanisms to be used.

    5.2 Create an executive presentation.

    5.3 Set up review time for workshop deliverables and post-workshop activities.

    Outputs

    IT cost optimization communication plan and presentation strategy.

    IT Cost Optimization Executive Presentation

    Further reading

    Build Your IT Cost Optimization Roadmap

    Improve cost-to-value in a sustainable manner.

    Analyst Perspective

    Optimize your cost sustainably.

    Whether the industry is in an economic downturn, or your business is facing headwinds in the market, pressure to reduce spending across organizations is inevitable. When it comes to the IT organization, it is often handled as a onetime event. Cost optimization is an industry standard term, but it usually translates into cost cutting. How do you manage this challenge given the day-to-day demands placed on IT? Do you apply cost reduction equally across the IT landscape, or do you apply reductions using a targeted approach? How do you balance the business demands regarding innovation with keeping the lights on? What is the best path forward?

    While the situation isn't unique, all too often the IT organization response is too shortsighted.

    By using the Info-Tech methodology and tools, you will be able to develop an IT cost optimization roadmap based on your specific circumstances and timeline.

    A well-thought-out strategy should help you achieve three objectives:

    1. Reduce your unwarranted IT spending.
    2. Optimize your cost-to-value.
    3. Sustain your cost optimization.

    This blueprint will guide you to understand your mandate, identify your cost optimization journey (reactive, proactive, or strategic), and assess your IT spend across four levers (assets, vendors, project portfolio, and workforce).

    Finally, keep in mind that cost optimization is not a project to be completed, but an ongoing process to be exercised.

    Bilal Alberto Saab, Research Director, IT Financial Management

    Bilal Alberto Saab
    Research Director, IT Financial Management
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Cost optimization is misunderstood and inadequately tackled Common obstacles Follow Info-Tech's approach to develop a 12-month cost optimization roadmap
    • Top-down budget cut within a narrow time frame.
    • Absence of adequate governance: financial, project, data, etc.
    • Long-standing bureaucratic practices slowing down progress.
    • Short-term thinking.
    • Lack of alignment and collaboration among stakeholders: communication and relationships.
    • Absence of a clear plan and adequate process.
    • Lack of knowledge, expertise, and skill set.
    • Inadequate funding and no financial transparency.
    • Poor change management practices.

    Develop an IT cost optimization strategy based on your specific circumstances and timeline.

    Info-Tech's methodology helps you maintain sustainable cost optimization across IT by focusing on four levers:

    1. Assets
    2. Vendors
    3. Project Portfolio
    4. Workforce

    Info-Tech Insight
    Cost optimization is not just about reducing costs. In fact, you should aim to achieve three objectives: (1) reduce your unwarranted IT spending, (2) optimize your cost-to-value, and (3) sustain your cost optimization.

    Your challenge

    IT leaders are often asked to cut costs.

    • Cost management is a long-term challenge. Businesses and IT departments look to have a flexible cost structure focused on maximizing business value while maintaining the ability to adapt to market pressure. However, businesses must also be able to respond to unexpected events.
    • In times of economic downturn, many CEOs and CFOs shift their thinking from growth to value protection. This can force a round of cost cutting across all departments focused on short-term, immediate, and measurable objectives.
    • Many IT departments are then faced with the challenge of meeting cost cutting targets. No one knows exactly how markets will behave, but the effects of rising inflation and increasing interest rates, for example, can manifest very quickly.

    When crisis hits, does IT's hard-won gains around being seen as a partner to the business suddenly disappear and IT becomes just a cost center all over again?

    In times of economic slowdown or downturn, the key challenge of IT leaders is to optimize costs without jeopardizing their strategic and innovative contribution.

    Common obstacles

    The 90% of the budget you keep is more important than the 10% of the budget you cut.

    • While the business responds to fluctuating economic conditions, IT must ensure that its budget remains fully aligned with business strategy and expected business value.
    • However, in the face of sudden pressures, a common tendency is to make quick decisions without fully considering their long-term implications.
    • Avoid costly mistakes with a proactive and strategic mindset. Put in place a well-communicated cost optimization strategy rather than hastily cutting back the biggest line items in your budget.

    How can IT optimize costs to achieve a corporate impact, but not cut so deep that the organization can't take advantage of opportunities to recover and thrive?

    Know how you will strategically optimize IT costs before you are forced to cut cost aggressively in a reactive fashion.

    What is cost optimization?

    It's not just about cutting costs

    • While cost optimization may involve cutting costs, it is more about making smart spend and investment decisions.
    • At its core, cost optimization is a strategic decision-making process that sets out to minimize waste and get the most value for money.
    • Cost optimization encompasses near-term, mid-term, and long-term objectives, all of which are related and build upon one another. It is an accumulative practice, not a onetime exercise.
    • A sound cost optimization practice is inherently flexible, sustainable, and consequence-oriented with the positive goal of generating net benefit for the organization over time.

    Change your mindset ...

    An Info-Tech survey of IT staff reveals that while most agree that cost optimization is an important IT process, nearly 20% fewer of them agree that it's being managed well.

    Chart of cost optimization

    Info-Tech IT Management & Governance Diagnostic, 2022.

    A starting point for cost optimization improvement is adjusting your frame of mind. Know that it's not just about making difficult cuts - in reality, it's a creative pursuit that's about thriving in all circumstances, not just surviving.

    Slow revenue growth expectations generate urgency

    Many IT organizations will be directed to trim costs during turbulent times.

    • Cost optimization implies continuous cost management, which entails long-term strategic initiatives (i.e. organizations and their IT departments seek flexible cost structures and practices focused on maximizing business value while maintaining the ability to adapt to changes in the broader economic environment). However, organizations must also be able to respond to unexpected events.
    • During times of turmoil – poor economic outlook expected to negatively impact an organization's bottom line – CEOs and CFOs think more about survival than growth, driving cost cutting across all departments to create short-term, immediate, and measurable financial benefits.
    • In such situations, many IT departments will be hard-pressed to meet cost cutting targets at short notice. If not planned correctly, with a tunnel vision focus instead of a strategic one, you can end up hurting yourself in the not-so-distant future.

    Build Your IT Cost Optimization Roadmap

    Insight summary

    Sustain an optimal cost-to-value ratio across four levers:

    1. Assets
    2. Vendors
    3. Project Portfolio
    4. Workforce

    Cost optimization is not just about reducing costs

    In fact, you should aim to achieve three objectives:
    (1) reduce your unwarranted IT spending, (2) optimize your cost-to-value, and (3) sustain your cost optimization.

    Reduce unwarranted IT spending

    Stop the bleeding or go for quick wins
    Start by reducing waste and bad spending habits while clearly communicating your intentions to your stakeholders – get buy-in.

    Optimize cost-to-value

    Value means tradeoffs
    Pursue value but know that it will lead you to make tradeoffs between cost, performance, and risk.

    Sustain cost optimization

    Think about tomorrow: reduce, reuse, recalibrate, and repeat
    Standardize and automate your cost optimization processes around a proper governance framework. Cost optimization is not a onetime exercise.

    Info-Tech's methodology for building your IT cost optimization roadmap

    Phase 1: Understand Your Mandate & Objectives

    Know where you stand and where you're going.

    Understand your cost optimization mandate within the context of your organization's situation and direction.

    Phase 2: Outline Your Initiatives

    Evaluate many, pick a few.

    Think of all possible cost optimization initiatives across the four optimization levers (Assets, Vendors, Project Portfolio, and Workforce), but only keep the ones that best help you fulfill your goals.

    Phase 3: Develop Your Roadmap

    Keep one eye on today and the other on tomorrow.

    Prioritize cost optimization initiatives that would help you achieve your near-term objectives first, but don't forget about the medium and long term.

    Phase 4: Communicate and Execute

    Communicate and collaborate - you are not a one-person show.

    Reach out to other business units where necessary. Your success relies on getting buy-in from various stakeholders, especially when cost optimization initiatives impact them in one way or another.

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    IT Cost Optimization Roadmap Samples and Templates
    Templates including an abbreviated executive presentation and a final communication presentation based on a 12-month cost optimization roadmap.

    IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    A workbook generating a 12-month cost optimization roadmap.

    Measure the value of this blueprint

    Maintain an optimal IT cost-to-organization revenue ratio.

    This blueprint will guide you to set cost optimization goals across one to three main objectives, depending on your identified journey (reactive, proactive, or strategic):

    • Reduce unwarranted IT spending.
    • Optimize cost-to value.
    • Sustain cost optimization.

    In phase 1 of this blueprint, we will help you establish your goals to satisfy your organization's needs.

    In phase 3, we will help you develop a game plan and a roadmap for achieving those metrics.

    Once you implement your 12-month roadmap, start tracking the metrics below over the next fiscal year (FY) to assess the effectiveness of undertaken measures.

    Cost Optimization Objective Key Success Metric
    Reduce unwarranted IT spending Decrease IT cost in identified key areas
    Optimize cost-to-value Decrease IT cost per IT employee
    Sustain cost optimization Decrease IT cost-to-organization revenue

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit
    "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."
    Guided Implementation
    "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."
    Workshop
    "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.
    Consulting
    "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

    Guided implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4
    Call #1:
    • Identify cost optimization scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges.
    • Review and assess cost optimization goals and objectives.
    Call #2:

    Review potential cost optimization initiatives for assets and vendors levers.

    Call #3:

    Assess cost optimization initiatives' cost and feasibility - for assets and vendors levers.

    Call #4:

    Review potential cost optimization initiatives for project portfolio and workforce levers.

    Call #5:

    Assess cost optimization initiatives' cost and feasibility - for project portfolio and workforce levers.

    Call #6:
    • Identify final decision criteria for cost optimization prioritization.
    • Review prioritized cost optimization initiatives and roadmap outputs.
    Call #7:
    • Review the Cost Optimization Communication Plan and IT Cost Optimization Executive Presentation.
    • Discuss next steps.

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    A typical GI will include multiple calls over the course of one to two months.

    IT cost analysis and optimization workshop overview

    Session 1 Session 2 Session 3 Session 4 Session 5
    Activities Understand Your Mandate and Objectives Outline Initiatives for Assets and Vendors Outline Initiatives for Projects and Workforce Develop an IT Cost Optimization Roadmap Communicate and Execute
    1.1 Understand your organization's cost optimization objectives and how this impacts IT.
    1.2 Review potential cost optimization target areas based on your IT financial management benchmarking report.
    1.3 Identify factors constraining cost optimization options.
    1.4 Set concrete IT cost optimization goals.
    1.5 Identify inputs required for decision making.
    2.1 Identify a longlist of possible initiatives around:
    1. Asset lifecycle management, investment deferral, repurposing, etc.
    2. Vendor contract renegotiation, cancelation, etc.
    2.2 Estimate the cost savings of cost optimization initiatives.
    3.1 Identify a longlist of possible initiatives around:
    1. Project priorities, project backlog reduction, project intake restructuring, etc.
    2. Workforce productivity, skills, redeployment, etc.
    3.2 Estimate the cost savings of cost optimization initiatives.
    4.1 Assess the feasibility of each initiative (effort and risk profile) given cost optimization goals.
    4.2 Prioritize cost optimization initiatives to create a final shortlist.
    4.3 Fine-tune key information about your final cost optimization initiatives and develop a cost optimization roadmap for proposal.
    5.1 Outline components of a communication plan, including approvers, stakeholders, and governance and management mechanisms to be used.
    5.2 Create an executive presentation.
    5.3 Set up review time for workshop deliverables and post-workshop activities.
    Output
    • IT cost optimization journey and guiding principles for making corresponding decisions.
    • Long list of possible cost optimization initiatives and their potential cost savings for assets and vendors levers.
    • Long list of possible cost optimization initiatives and their potential cost savings for project portfolio and workforce levers.
    • Prioritized list of key cost optimization initiatives, descriptions, estimated impact, and roadmap.
    • IT cost optimization communication plan and presentation strategy.

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Phase 1

    Understand Your Mandate and Objectives

    Phase 1
    Understand Your Mandate and Objectives

    Phase 2
    Outline Your Cost Optimization Initiatives

    Phase 3
    Develop Your IT Cost Optimization Roadmap

    Phase 4
    Communicate and Execute

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Business context and cost optimization journey
    • Cost constraints and parameters
    • Cost optimization goals

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead

    1.1 Gain consensus on the business context and IT cost optimization journey

    60 minutes

    • Using the questions on slide 20, conduct a brief journey assessment to ensure consensus on the direction you are planning to take.
    • Document your findings in the provided template.
    Input Output
    • Understanding business objectives and identifying your IT mandate
    • Determining the cost optimization journey: reactive, proactive, or strategic
    Materials Participants
    • Whiteboard or flip charts
    • Journey assessment template
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead

    See the next three slides for guidelines and the journey assessment questions and template.

    Distinguishing between three journeys

    By considering business objectives without forgoing your IT mandate.

    Journey Reactive Proactive Strategic
    Description
    • Business objectives are closely tied to cost reduction, forcing cost cutting across IT.
    • Typically occurs during turbulent economic times, when slow revenue growth is expected.
    • Business objectives do not include clear cost optimization initiatives but mandates IT to be fiscally conservative.
    • Typically occurs when economic turbulence is on the horizon and the organization's revenue is stable - executives only have a fiscal discipline guidance.
    • Business objectives do not include clear cost optimization initiatives.
    • Typically occurs when the overall economy is in good shape and the organization is in positive revenue growth territory.
    Main Focus
    • Quick-to-execute measures with few dependencies and concrete impact in response to business urgency and/or executive directive.
    • Enabling the organization to respond to different types and magnitudes of business change in a more planned and controlled manner.
    • Establishing an efficient, agile, sustainable, and strategically aligned cost optimization practice across all stages of the business cycle, regardless of business conditions.

    Questions to help determine your journey

    Business Objectives Business Strategy
    • What are the current business objectives?
    • Are there any stated cost-related objectives? If yes, what cost-related objectives have been stated by organizational leadership, such as cuts, areas of investment, and any targets for both?
    • Does the organization have a business strategy in place?
    • Was the business strategy reviewed or revised recently?
    • What's the business strategy focus for the next 12 months?
    • Are there any cost optimization implications within the current business strategy?
    IT Objectives IT Strategy and Mandate
    • What are your current IT objectives?
    • Are your IT objectives aligned to business objectives?
    • Do you have any IT cost-related objectives? If yes, what are your current IT cost-related objectives?
    • Are your IT cost-related objectives aligned to business objectives?
    • Do you have an IT strategy in place?
    • Is your IT strategy aligned to your organization's business strategy?
    • Do you have a cost optimization mandate? If yes, what is your cost optimization mandate?
    • What's the fiscal guidance and direction in IT?
    Journey
    Agreed-upon journey: reactive, proactive, or strategic.

    Template & Example

    Journey assessment

    Business Objectives Business Strategy
    • The founder's mission around quality persists despite ownership/leadership changes. Reliability and dependability are really important to everyone.
    • Increase visibility and interconnectivity across the supply chain.
    • Increase market share: younger markets and emerging foreign markets.
    • Economic outlook expected to negatively affect the bottom line - will need to trim and protect the core.
    • Grow Gizmo product sales by 10%.
    • Lower production cost of Gizmo product by 5%.
    IT Objectives IT Strategy and Mandate
    • IT/OT convergence, process automation, and modernization are major opportunities to better position the business for the future and introduce more agility into operations and reduce production cost.
    • Very mature and stable production processes with 100% uptime is a priority.
    • Lower IT cost related to Gizmo product.
    • There's no clear cost optimization mandate, but a fiscally conservative budget is recommended.
    Journey
    Agreed-upon journey: proactive.

    1.2 Review internal and external benchmarking reports

    60-90 minutes

    1. Review the IT spend and staffing results, summarized in your Info-Tech IT Spend & Staffing Benchmarking report.
    2. Identify areas where your IT spend is disproportionately high or low in comparison with your industry peers.
    3. Review and document any causes or rationales for high or low spend in each area identified. Do not be specific about any actual optimization targets or actions at this stage - simply make notes.
    4. Start a list of potential cost optimization initiatives to be further analyzed and investigated for feasibility at a later stage (see next slides for guidance, example, and template).
    InputOutput
    • IT Spend & Staffing Benchmarking report
    • A list of potential cost optimization focus areas
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard or flip charts
    • Potential cost optimization initiatives list template
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead

    Info-Tech's approach

    Our IT cost model maps your IT spending and staffing according to four key views, putting IT spend in language that stakeholders across the organization can relate to.

    IT cost model maps

    Template & Example

    Potential cost optimization initiatives list

    Brainstorm and list potential cost optimization initiatives at a macro level.

    Potential Initiative Source Source Contact Notes
    Reduce application maintenance cost Internal Benchmarking Report CIO Based on current year report
    Rationalize software applications Info-Tech IT Benchmarking Report CIO Based on current year report
    Migrate key business applications to the cloud Latest iteration of the IT strategy CIO New IT strategy will be in development concurrent with cost optimization strategy development
    Align job roles to the current IT structure IT org. chart and salaries HR, CIO Based on information of the current year and will likely change in a few months (beginning of a new year)
    Renegotiate the top five vendor contracts up for renewal this year List of IT vendors Procurement office, CIO, IT infrastructure director, IT applications director, IT services manager Based on a list consolidated last week

    Want help with your IT spend transparency and benchmarking efforts?

    Let us fast-track your IT spend journey.

    The path to IT financial management maturity starts with knowing exactly where your money is going. To streamline this effort, Info-Tech offers an IT Spend & Staffing Benchmarking service that provides full transparency into where your money is going without any heavy lifting on your part.

    This unique service features:

    • A client-proven approach to meet your IT spend transparency goals.
    • Spend and staff mapping that reveals business consumption of IT.
    • Industry benchmarking to compare your spending and staffing to that of your peers.
    • Results in a fraction of the time with much less effort than going it alone.
    • Expert review of results and ongoing discussions with Info-Tech analysts.

    If you'd like Info-Tech to pave the way to IT spend transparency, contact your account manager for more information - we're happy to talk anytime.

    1.3 Identify your overarching constraints

    30 minutes

    1. Assess where spend change opportunities are currently limited or nonexistent due to organization edict or policy, industry regulatory requirements, or active contracts. Ask yourself:
      1. Where do IT spend bottlenecks exist and what are they?
      2. What IT spend objectives and practices are absolutely mandatory and nonnegotiable from both a business and an IT perspective?
      3. Are there areas where spend change is possible but would be very difficult to execute due to the stakeholders involved, governance processes, time frames, or another constraining factor?
    2. Identify where reduction or elimination of an IT service would negatively affect required service levels and business continuity or recovery.
    3. List constraints as negotiable or nonnegotiable on the template provided.
    4. Remove areas of focus from your cost optimization scope that land outside achievable parameters, and flag those that are difficult but still possible.
    InputOutput
    • Situational awareness and current state understanding
    • List of negotiable constraints to act on
    • Delimiting the cost optimization scope
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard or flip charts
    • Constraints assessment template
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead

    See the next slides for additional guidance and a constraints assessment template.

    Acknowledge your limitations

    By recognizing your constraints, which will lead you to define your cost optimization scope.

    Constraints Organizational Legal/Regulatory Other
    What An organizational constraint is any work condition that hinders an employee's performance - be it physical, emotional, or otherwise. A legal or regulatory constraint is any law, rule, standard, or regulation - be it industry specific or otherwise - limiting the ability of any stakeholder to get the most out of a certain activity, initiative, or project. Other types of constraints affecting business units.
    Who Collaborate with your IT leaders and business partners to identify all major constraints that would affect cost optimization initiatives.
    How Discussions and information sessions to distinguish between negotiable and nonnegotiable constraints that would thwart cost optimization efforts:
    • Legal/regulatory requirements and related initiatives (past, ongoing, and planned/expected).
      Example: projects cannot be delayed, processes are difficult to simplify, etc.
    • Operational governance - organization policies, processes, methodologies, structure, etc.
      Example: adopting a waterfall model for development instead of an agile one.
    • Financial and accounting practices.
      Example: capital expenditure and operational expenditure classification.
    Challenge Degree to which you can influence certain outcomes within a set time frame:
    • Prioritize negotiating constraints where you can influence the outcome or maximize cost optimization benefits.

    We define a constraint as a restriction controlling the behavior of any of your stakeholders, hence preventing a desired outcome.

    In our context, constraints will determine your playing field: the boundaries of your cost optimization scope.

    Distinguish between constraints

    Negotiable vs. nonnegotiable to delimit your cost optimization scope.

    Distinguish between constraints

    Template & Example

    Constraints assessment

    List high-level limitations that hinder your cost optimization options.

    Nonnegotiable constraints
    Organizational Legal/Regulatory IT/Other
    Prioritization of sales/customer service activities SEC compliance/reporting mandates Production unit incident response service levels
    [Constraint] [Constraint] [Constraint]
    [Constraint] [Constraint] [Constraint]
    [Constraint] [Constraint] [Constraint]
    Negotiable constraints
    Organizational Legal/Regulatory IT/Other
    Core business operations process design Vendor contracts up for near-term renewal Current capital project commitments
    [Constraint] [Constraint] [Constraint]
    [Constraint] [Constraint] [Constraint]
    [Constraint] [Constraint] [Constraint]

    1.4 Establish overarching cost optimization goals

    60-90 minutes

    1. Establish specific IT cost optimization goals. Depending on your journey, step 1.1. You will have one to three overarching cost optimization goals, as follows:
      1. Reactive: Cost-cutting goal to reduce unwarranted IT spending.
      2. Proactive: Cost-to-value optimization goal.
      3. Strategic: Cost optimization sustainability goal.
      Consider amounts and time frames, as well as likely/suitable approaches you plan to employ to achieve these goals.
    2. Document your final cost optimization goals in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook.
    3. Revisit your goals after outlining your initiatives (phase 2) to ensure feasibility depending on your journey.

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    InputOutput
    • Situational awareness and current state understanding
    • Defined goals for IT cost optimization
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard or flip charts
    • Set Cost Optimization Goals tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead

    Template & Example

    Document your overarching goals

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization – Set Optimization Goals Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to document your goals based on your journey:

    Table of Overarching Goals

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    B Dropdown Select the appropriate journey: Reactive, Proactive, or Strategic.
    C Dropdown Select the appropriate cost optimization objective: Reduce Unwarranted IT Spending, Optimize Cost-to-Value, Sustain Cost Optimization.
    D Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. Reduce Unwarranted IT Spending goal is the first priority, followed by Optimize Cost-to-Value, and Sustain Cost Optimization goals, respectively.
    E Text Enter the overarching goal related to each objective.

    Complete the following fields for each goal depending on your journey in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Set Cost Optimization Goals tab.
    2. Identify your journey and objective for each goal.
    3. Document your goal(s).

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    Template & Example

    Break down your goals per quarter

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization - Set Cost Optimization Goals Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to break down your goals per quarter and track your progress:

    Table break down your goals per quarter

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    F, G, H, I Text Enter the target per quarter: It could be a percentage, dollar amount, or description of the breakdown, depending on the cost optimization goal and objective.

    Complete the following fields for each goal depending on your journey in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Set Cost Optimization Goals tab.
    2. Determine your target per quarter for every goal.
    3. Document your targets.

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    1.5 Identify inputs required for decision making

    60-90 minutes

    1. Each of the optimization levers (assets, vendors, project portfolio, and workforce) will require specific and unique sources of information which you will need to collect before moving forward. Examples of important sources of information include:
      1. Latest iteration of the IT strategy.
      2. List of IT assets (hardware, software).
      3. List of IT services or IT service catalog.
      4. List of current and planned IT projects and their resourcing allocations.
      5. List of largest vendor contracts and their key details, such as their expiration/renewal date.
      6. IT department organizational chart and salaries (by role).
    2. Review and analyze each of the documents.
    3. Continue to list potential cost optimization initiatives (step 1.2) to be further analyzed and investigated for feasibility at a later stage.
    InputOutput
    • IT strategy
    • Lists of IT assets, services, and projects
    • Top vendor contracts
    • IT org. chart and salaries
    • Macrolevel list of potential cost optimization initiatives
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Potential cost optimization initiatives list template (slide 24)
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead

    Prepare all pertinent sources of information

    And start drafting your cost optimization laundry list.

    Documents Benchmarking IT Strategy Other Information Sources
    What
    • Review:
      • Your IT spend trend across several years (ideally three to five years): internal benchmarking report.
      • Your IT spend compared to industry peers: external benchmarking report.
    • Analyze your internal and external benchmarking reports across the four views: service, expense, business, and innovation.
    • Review your business aligned IT strategy to identify cost optimization related initiatives.
    • At a later stage, exploit your IT strategy to prioritize cost optimization initiatives as needed.
    • Review your IT organization chart and salaries to determine whether the IT organization structure is optimal, job descriptions are mapped to the desired structure, employee skillsets and salary scale are adequate and aligned to the job description, etc.
    • Compile and examine lists of assets, vendors, projects, and services.
    • Prepare any other information sources you deem meaningful.
    Who Collaborate with your IT leaders and business partners to:
    • Prepare the necessary reports, documents, and required sources of information.
    • Identify potential cost optimization initiatives around areas of improvement.
    How Discussions and information sessions to analyze and deep dive on raw findings.
    Challenge Time to compile and analyze reports without affecting day-to-day operations:
    • Outsource some activities such as external benchmarking to organizations like Info-Tech.
    • Get consulting support on specific reports or tasks through workshops, calls, etc.

    Phase 2

    Outline Your Cost Optimization Initiatives

    Phase 1
    Understand Your Mandate and Objectives

    Phase 2
    Outline Your Cost Optimization Initiatives

    Phase 3
    Develop Your IT Cost Optimization Roadmap

    Phase 4
    Communicate and Execute

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • IT cost optimization initiatives
    • IT cost optimization workbook

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • IT asset manager
    • IT infrastructure manager
    • IT vendor management lead
    • PMO lead
    • IT talent management representative
    • Other IT management

    Outline your cost optimization initiatives

    Across Info-Tech's four levers.

    Levers ASSETS VENDORS PROJECT PORTFOLI WORKFORCE
    What
    • Maintain trustworthy data to optimize cost, reduce risk, and improve services in line with business priorities and requirements:
      • Optimize cost: reallocate unused hardware and software, end unneeded service agreements, and manage renewals and audits.
      • Reduce risk: provide comprehensive asset data for security controls development and incident management - manage equipment disposal.
      • Improve IT service: support incident, problem, request, and change management with ITAM data.
    • Examine your vendor contracts and vendor management practices to optimize your expected value from every IT provider you deal with.
    • Treat vendor management as a proactive, cross-functional practice aiming to create value by improving communication, relationships, processes, performance, and ultimately reducing cost.
    • Reassess your project portfolio to maximize total value in line with business objectives and strategy.
    • Reduce resource waste with a strategic approach to project portfolio management:
      • Ensure that approved projects can be completed by aligning intake with real project capacity.
      • Minimize over-allocation of resources by allocating based on the proportion of project vs. non-project work.
      • Forecast future resource requirements by maintaining accurate resource capacity data.
    • Review your strategic workforce plan to identify cost optimization opportunities.
    • Determine capability gaps to train or develop current staff and minimize the need for severance payouts and hiring costs, while providing clear career paths to retain high performers.
    • Link workforce planning with strategic planning to ensure that you have the right people in the right positions, in the right places, at the right time, with the knowledge, skills, and attributes to deliver on strategic business goals.
    Who Collaborate with your IT leaders and business partners to:
    • Prepare the necessary reports, documents, and required sources of information.
    • Determine cost optimization initiatives across the four levers.
    How You will decide on the best course of action depending on your journey.

    Most common cost optimization challenges

    Across Info-Tech's four levers.

    Levers ASSETS VENDORS PROJECT PORTFOLI WORKFORCE
    Challenge
    • Incomplete or inaccurate data, poor processes, inadequate tools, and lack of support across the organization is leading to bad decision making while damaging value.
    • Spending on IT providers is increasing while vendor contract expected value - results, output, performance, solutions, or outcomes - is not realized.
    • Poor planning, conflicting priorities, and resource scarcity is affecting project outcomes, resulting in suboptimal value.
    • Talent shortages, lack of prioritization, and experience in managing an IT workforce is leading to higher costs and a loss in value.
    Solution
    • Develop a sustainable IT asset management (ITAM) strategy aligned with your business priorities.
    • Establish a vendor management initiative (VMI) with a solid foundation to fit your organization's culture, environment, and goals.
    • Create a coherent strategy to maximize the total value that projects deliver as a portfolio, rather than a collection of individual projects.
    • Develop a strategic workforce plan (SWP) to ensure you have the right people in place at the right time.
    Related Info-Tech Research Develop an IT Asset Management Strategy Jump-start Your Vendor Management Initiative Develop a Project Portfolio Management Strategy Build a Strategic IT Workforce Plan

    2.1 Determine your cost optimization initiatives

    8 hours

    Now that you have identified your journey and understood your constraints:

    1. Review your list of potential cost optimization initiatives and document viable ones in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook.
    2. Think of potential cost optimization initiatives within the four levers: assets, vendors, project portfolio, and workforce. The following slides will help you in this endeavor.

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    Input Output
    • Potential cost optimization initiatives list
    • Outline Initiatives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    Materials Participants
    • Whiteboard or flip charts
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • Other IT management - depending on the optimization lever (Assets, Vendors, Project Portfolio, or Workforce)

    Plan your cost optimization initiatives

    Your initiatives will differ depending on your journey

    In terms of aggressiveness and objectives.

    Plan cost optimization initiatives

    Cost optimization initiatives pertaining to a reactive journey are characterized by aggressive cost reduction.

    On the other hand, cost optimization initiatives within a strategic journey can vary in aggressiveness across objectives.

    2.1.1 Identify asset optimization initiatives

    2 hours

    1. Review the IT asset management strategy if available. Compile a list of all hardware, software, and facility asset costs for delivery of IT services.
    2. Analyze hardware and software assets for opportunities to consolidate, reduce, eliminate, and/or enhance functionality/automation. Look for:
      1. Redundancy or duplication of functionality not necessary for disaster recovery or business continuity purposes.
      2. Low or no-use software.
      3. Homegrown or legacy systems with high maintenance/support burdens.
      4. Multiple, old, or unsupported versions of current-use software.
      5. Opportunities to delay hardware/software refreshes or upgrades.
      6. Cloud/outsourced options.
      7. Instances of unsanctioned shadow IT.
    3. Reassess your in-house asset management processes to see where efficiency and effectiveness could be improved overall.
    4. Document cost optimization initiatives that could be driven by asset optimization objectives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook.

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    InputOutput
    • IT asset management strategy
    • List of current assets including hardware, software, and facilities
    • Outline Initiatives driven by asset optimization objectives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard or flip charts
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • IT asset manager
    • IT infrastructure manager
    • Other IT management

    Example

    Asset optimization

    Some examples to get you started

    Journey Reactive, Proactive, or Strategic Proactive or Strategic Strategic
    Initiatives
    • Validate the license cost of performance optimization.
    • Review the utilization of software/hardware before renewal or purchase of additional hardware or software.
    • Assess new license cost against projects to determine possibility of differing or canceling software.
    • Postpone the purchases of hardware.
    • Extend the life of hardware.
    • Consolidate and reconfigure hardware.
    • Return damaged/malfunctioning hardware under warranty.
    • Consolidate and reconfigure software.
    • Optimize software/hardware functionality.
    • Implement hardware/software standard or policy.
    • Develop an infrastructure management outsourcing strategy.
    • Optimize cloud management: review utilization, licensing, cost, etc.
    • Develop a sustainable IT asset management (ITAM) strategy aligned with your business priorities.
    • Minimize shadow IT by creating a policy and improving the service request process.
    • Develop or assess a cloud strategy for a certain service.
    No initiatives for the reactive journey. No initiatives for the reactive or proactive journeys.
    Objective Reduce Unwarranted IT Spending Optimize Cost-to-Value Sustain Cost Optimization

    Template & Example

    List your objectives and initiatives

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization – Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to input your asset optimization initiatives and related objectives:

    List your objectives and initiatives

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    B Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. The ID will update once there's an input in column E.
    C Dropdown Select an optimization lever: Assets, Vendors, Project Portfolio, or Workforce.
    D Dropdown Select an initiative focus from the dropdown list - this will help you think of initiatives.
    E Text Enter your initiative.
    F Text Write a brief description per initiative, providing a cost optimization rationale.
    G Dropdown Select the cost type per initiative: OpEx (operating expenditure) or CapEx (capital expenditure).
    H Dropdown Select 1 of 3 objectives for each initiative: Reduce Unwarranted IT Spending, Optimize Cost-to-Value, or Sustain Cost Optimization.

    List your initiatives in the provided Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Enter all your initiatives driven by the asset optimization lever.
    3. Determine the cost optimization objective per initiative.

    2.1.2 Identify vendor optimization initiatives

    2 hours

    1. Revisit the IT vendor classification if available. Identify all existing vendor contracts up for renewal within the current fiscal year and create an inventory.
    2. Examine your vendor contracts to optimize your expected value from every IT provider you deal with. For each contract:
      1. Identify the business purpose/drivers.
      2. Identify the expiration/renewal date to determine time frames for action.
      3. Determine if there is an opportunity to rightsize, cancel, renegotiate costs/service levels, or postpone renewal/purchase.
      4. Identify integrations and interdependencies with other hardware and software systems to understand scope and impact of potential changes.
    3. Reassess your in-house vendor management processes to see where efficiency and effectiveness could be improved overall.
    4. Document cost optimization initiatives that could be driven by vendor optimization objectives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook.

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    InputOutput
    • Vendor classification
    • Vendors contracts
    • Outline Initiatives driven by vendor optimization objectives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard or flip charts
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • IT vendor management lead
    • Other IT management

    Example

    Vendor optimization

    Some examples to get you started.

    Journey Reactive, Proactive, or Strategic Proactive or Strategic Strategic
    Initiatives
    • Renegotiate and rightsize a vendor contract:
      • Cancel vendor/service/type application contract.
      • Renegotiate vendor/service/type contract.
      • Cancel vendor/service/type licenses.
      • Rationalize number of vendor/service/type licenses.
    • Consolidate vendors/resellers with similar services, products and features.
    • Implement a vendor management initiative to maximize value and minimize risk.
    • Consolidate contracts to take advantage of spending power and volume.
    • Set up custom vendor performance metrics.
    • Establish ongoing monitoring of vendor risk (financial, security, etc.).
    No initiatives for the reactive journey. No initiatives for the reactive or proactive journeys.
    Objective Reduce Unwarranted IT Spending Optimize Cost-to-Value Sustain Cost Optimization

    Template & Example

    List your objectives and initiatives

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization – Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to input your vendor optimization initiatives and related objectives:

    List your objectives and initiatives

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    B Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. The ID will update once there's an input in column E.
    C Dropdown Select an optimization lever: Assets, Vendors, Project Portfolio, or Workforce.
    D Dropdown Select an initiative focus from the dropdown list - this will help you think of initiatives.
    E Text Enter your initiative.
    F Text Write a brief description per initiative, providing a cost optimization rationale.
    G Dropdown Select the cost type per initiative: OpEx (operating expenditure) or CapEx (capital expenditure).
    H Dropdown Select 1 of 3 objectives for each initiative: Reduce Unwarranted IT Spending, Optimize Cost-to-Value, or Sustain Cost Optimization.

    List your initiatives in the provided Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Enter all your initiatives driven by the vendor optimization lever.
    3. Determine the cost optimization objective per initiative.

    2.1.3 Identify project portfolio optimization initiatives

    2 hours

    1. Review the IT Project Portfolio Strategy if available, and the list of both in-flight and planned projects.
    2. Reassess your project portfolio to maximize total value in line with business objectives and strategy. For each current and pending project on the list, identify a cost optimization initiative, including:
      1. Revisiting, confirming, and documenting actual project rationale with the business in relation to strategic goals.
      2. Rescoping existing projects that are underway.
      3. Accelerating planned or existing projects that enable business cost savings or competitive advantage and revenue growth.
      4. Canceling or postponing projects that are underway or haven't started.
      5. Identifying net-new projects that enhance business capabilities or save business costs.
    3. Reassess your in-house project management and project portfolio management processes to see where efficiency and effectiveness could be improved overall.
    4. Document cost optimization initiatives that could be driven by project portfolio optimization objectives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook.

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    Input Output
    • Project Portfolio Management Strategy
    • List of current and pending projects
    • Outline Initiatives driven by project portfolio optimization objectives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    Materials Participants
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • PMO lead
    • Other IT management

    Example

    Project portfolio optimization

    Some examples to get you started.

    Journey Reactive, Proactive, or Strategic Proactive or Strategic Strategic
    Initiatives
    • Cancel projects with no executive sponsor.
    • Cancel projects with unacceptable timelines.
    • Postpone projects where there is a more urgent need for related resources.
    • Rescope projects where a more effective business case has been identified.
    • Freeze projects where scope and resourcing are uncertain.
    • Accelerate projects that enable business cost savings or a competitive advantage with revenue growth.
    • Combine projects that are better managed by realigning project managers and coordinators.
    • Break projects into phases to front-load realized value.
    • Outsource projects with commoditized skillset requirements.
    • Reassess the technology requirements when multiple vendors are involved.
    • Reexamine project rationale with the business in relation to strategic goals.
    • Identify net-new projects that offer improved value in relation to current economics.
    • Reassess the strategic drivers for project spending in the face of shifting priorities.
    • Implement a project portfolio governance function.
    • Introduce a benefits realization discipline in relation to the benefits forecasted during project approval.
    No initiatives for the reactive journey. No initiatives for the reactive or proactive journeys.
    Objective Reduce Unwarranted IT Spending Optimize Cost-to-Value Sustain Cost Optimization

    Template & Example

    List your objectives and initiatives

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization – Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to input your project portfolio optimization initiatives and related objectives:

    List your objectives and initiatives

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    B Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. The ID will update once there's an input in column E.
    C Dropdown Select an optimization lever: Assets, Vendors, Project Portfolio, or Workforce.
    D Dropdown Select an initiative focus from the dropdown list - this will help you think of initiatives.
    E Text Enter your initiative.
    F Text Write a brief description per initiative, providing a cost optimization rationale.
    G Dropdown Select the cost type per initiative: OpEx (operating expenditure) or CapEx (capital expenditure).
    H Dropdown Select 1 of 3 objectives for each initiative: Reduce Unwarranted IT Spending, Optimize Cost-to-Value, or Sustain Cost Optimization.

    List your initiatives in the provided Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Enter all your initiatives driven by the project portfolio optimization lever.
    3. Determine the cost optimization objective per initiative.

    2.1.4 Identify workforce optimization initiatives

    2 hours

    1. Review the IT department's strategic workforce plan (SWP) if available, organizational chart, and salaries by role. Do not review IT staffing in terms of named individuals who occupy a given role - focus on functions, roles, and job descriptions.
    2. Determine capability gaps:
      1. Rectify efficiency, effectiveness, and other performance issues.
      2. Train IT staff to enhance or improve skills and effectiveness.
      3. Add roles, skills, or headcount to improve effectiveness.
      4. Integrate teams to improve collaboration and reduce redundancies or break out new ones to increase focus/specialization.
      5. Redesign job roles and responsibilities.
      6. Redeploy/reassign staff to other teams.
      7. Conduct layoff (as a last resort, starting by assessing contractual employees).
    3. Document cost optimization initiatives that could be driven by workforce optimization objectives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook.

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    InputOutput
    • Strategic workforce plan (SWP)
    • Organizational charts
    • Staff lists
    • Outline Initiatives driven by workforce optimization objectives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • Talent management representative
    • Other IT management

    Example

    Workforce optimization

    Some examples to get you started.

    Journey Reactive, Proactive, or Strategic Proactive or Strategic Strategic
    Initiatives
    • Defer vacancy, position, or role.
    • Freeze all overnight and unessential IT staff travel.
    • Outsource project/function to free internal resources.
    • Postpone nonessential IT staff training as per training plans.
    • Suspend IT team discretionary spend.
    • Streamline workforce related to department/service (develop the process).
    • Relocate role or function from division or group to division or group.
    • Adjust framework and level assignments.
    • Promote and train employees for a certain objective.
    • Implement a strategic workforce plan (SWP) to ensure you have the right people in place, at the right time.
    • Set up a workforce performance monitoring framework or process to optimize staffing capabilities aligned with business value.
    No initiatives for the reactive journey. No initiatives for the reactive or proactive journeys.
    Objective Reduce Unwarranted IT Spending Optimize Cost-to-Value Sustain Cost Optimization

    Template & Example

    List your objectives and initiatives

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization – Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to input your workforce optimization initiatives and related objectives:

    List your objectives and initiatives

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    B Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. The ID will update once there's an input in column E.
    C Dropdown Select an optimization lever: Assets, Vendors, Project Portfolio, or Workforce.
    D Dropdown Select an initiative focus from the dropdown list - this will help you think of initiatives.
    E Text Enter your initiative.
    F Text Write a brief description per initiative, providing a cost optimization rationale.
    G Dropdown Select the cost type per initiative: OpEx (operating expenditure) or CapEx (capital expenditure).
    H Dropdown Select 1 of 3 objectives for each initiative: Reduce Unwarranted IT Spending, Optimize Cost-to-Value, or Sustain Cost Optimization.

    List your initiatives in the provided Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Enter all your initiatives driven by the workforce optimization lever.
    3. Determine the cost optimization objective per initiative.

    2.2 Estimate the cost savings of cost optimization initiatives

    8 hours

    Now that you have identified your initiatives:

    1. Review your cost optimization initiatives per lever (Assets, Vendors, Project Portfolio, and Workforce).
    2. Determine whether the implementation cost of each of your initiatives is included as part of your budget.
    3. Estimate your cost savings.
    4. Document your assessment in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook.

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    InputOutput
    • Potential cost optimization initiatives list
    • Outline Initiatives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard or flip charts
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • Other IT management - depending on the optimization lever (Assets, Vendors, Project Portfolio, or Workforce)

    2.2.1 Estimate the costs impacting your asset optimization initiatives

    2 hours

    1. Review each asset optimization initiative to estimate cost implications.
    2. Consider implementation cost in terms of your budget, and document it in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides). Is the implementation cost of the underlying initiative considered in your current budget? If not, move to the next initiative. You will assess the flagged initiative independently at a later stage if deemed necessary.
    3. Estimate the current cost related to the initiative (including implementation cost), and document it in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides). This will be the first of two inputs needed to calculate the initiative's potential cost savings.
    4. Estimate the expected cost, post initiative execution, of the underlying initiative, and document it in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides). This will be the second and last input needed to calculate the initiative's potential cost savings.

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    InputOutput
    • Asset optimization initiatives
    • Cost and budget information
    • Cost estimates of asset optimization initiatives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • IT asset manager
    • IT infrastructure manager
    • Other IT management

    Template & Example

    Estimate your cost

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization – Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to complete cost estimates for each asset optimization initiative:

    Estimate your cost

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    I Dropdown Select if the implementation cost is considered within your budget or not. If not, the initiative will be flagged to be reviewed, and no further entry is required; move to the next initiative. Implementation cost represents your cost for planning, executing, and monitoring the related initiative.
    J, K Whole Number Input a dollar amount. Current cost represents the yearly cost including implementing the initiative, while the expected cost represents the yearly cost after implementing the initiative.
    L Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. The difference between current cost and expected cost.

    Complete the following fields for each initiative in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Determine if the implementation cost is considered within the budget.
    3. If yes, estimate the current cost, and expected cost of the underlying initiative.

    2.2.2 Estimate the costs impacting your vendor optimization initiatives

    2 hours

    1. Review each vendor optimization initiative to estimate cost implications.
    2. Consider implementation cost in terms of your budget, and document it in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides). Is the implementation cost of the underlying initiative considered in your current budget? If not, move to the next initiative. You will assess the flagged initiative independently at a later stage if deemed necessary.
    3. Estimate the current cost related to the initiative (including implementation cost), and document it in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides). This will be the first of two inputs needed to calculate the initiative's potential cost savings.
    4. Estimate the expected cost, post initiative execution, of the underlying initiative, and document it in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides). This will be the second and last input needed to calculate the initiative's potential cost savings.

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    InputOutput
    • Vendor optimization initiatives
    • Cost and budget information
    • Cost estimates of vendor optimization initiatives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • IT vendor management lead
    • Other IT management

    Template & Example

    Estimate your cost

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization – Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to complete cost estimates for each vendor optimization initiative:

    Estimate your cost

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    I Dropdown Select if the implementation cost is considered within your budget or not. If not, the initiative will be flagged to be reviewed, and no further entry is required; move to the next initiative. Implementation cost represents your cost for planning, executing, and monitoring the related initiative.
    J, K Whole Number Input a dollar amount. Current cost represents the yearly cost including implementing the initiative, while the expected cost represents the yearly cost after implementing the initiative.
    L Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. The difference between current cost and expected cost.

    Complete the following fields for each initiative in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Determine if the implementation cost is considered within the budget.
    3. If yes, estimate the current cost, and expected cost of the underlying initiative.

    2.2.3 Estimate the costs impacting your project portfolio optimization initiatives

    2 hours

    1. Review each project portfolio optimization initiative to estimate cost implications.
    2. Consider implementation cost in terms of your budget, and document it in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides). Is the implementation cost of the underlying initiative considered in your current budget? If not, move to the next initiative. You will assess the flagged initiative independently at a later stage if deemed necessary.
    3. Estimate the current cost related to the initiative (including implementation cost), and document it in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides). This will be the first of two inputs needed to calculate the initiative's potential cost savings.
    4. Estimate the expected cost, post initiative execution, of the underlying initiative, and document it in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides). This will be the second and last input needed to calculate the initiative's potential cost savings.

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    InputOutput
    • Project portfolio optimization initiatives
    • Cost and budget information
    • Cost estimates of project portfolio optimization initiatives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • PMO lead
    • Other IT management

    Template & Example

    Estimate your cost

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization – Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to complete cost estimates for each project portfolio optimization initiative:

    Estimate your cost

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    I Dropdown Select if the implementation cost is considered within your budget or not. If not, the initiative will be flagged to be reviewed, and no further entry is required; move to the next initiative. Implementation cost represents your cost for planning, executing, and monitoring the related initiative.
    J, K Whole Number Input a dollar amount. Current cost represents the yearly cost including implementing the initiative, while the expected cost represents the yearly cost after implementing the initiative.
    L Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. The difference between current cost and expected cost.

    Complete the following fields for each initiative in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Determine if the implementation cost is considered within the budget.
    3. If yes, estimate the current cost, and expected cost of the underlying initiative.

    2.2.4 Estimate the costs impacting your workforce optimization initiatives

    2 hours

    1. Review each workforce optimization initiative to estimate cost implications.
    2. Consider implementation cost in terms of your budget, and document it in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides). Is the implementation cost of the underlying initiative considered in your current budget? If not, move to the next initiative. You will assess the flagged initiative independently at a later stage if deemed necessary.
    3. Estimate the current cost related to the initiative (including implementation cost), and document it in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides). This will be the first of two inputs needed to calculate the initiative's potential cost savings.
    4. Estimate the expected cost, post initiative execution, of the underlying initiative, and document it in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides). This will be the second and last input needed to calculate the initiative's potential cost savings.

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    InputOutput
    • Workforce optimization initiatives
    • Cost and budget information
    • Cost estimates of workforce optimization initiatives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • Talent management representative
    • Other IT management

    Template & Example

    Estimate your cost

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization –i Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to complete cost estimates for each workforce optimization initiative:

    Estimate your cost

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    I Dropdown Select if the implementation cost is considered within your budget or not. If not, the initiative will be flagged to be reviewed, and no further entry is required; move to the next initiative. Implementation cost represents your cost for planning, executing, and monitoring the related initiative.
    J, K Whole Number Input a dollar amount. Current cost represents the yearly cost including implementing the initiative, while the expected cost represents the yearly cost after implementing the initiative.
    L Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. The difference between current cost and expected cost.

    Complete the following fields for each initiative in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Determine if the implementation cost is considered within the budget.
    3. If yes, estimate the current cost, and expected cost of the underlying initiative.

    Phase 3

    Develop Your IT Cost Optimization Roadmap

    Phase 1
    Understand Your Mandate and Objectives

    Phase 2
    Outline Your Cost Optimization Initiatives

    Phase 3
    Develop Your IT Cost Optimization Roadmap

    Phase 4
    Communicate and Execute

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • IT cost optimization workbook
    • IT cost optimization roadmap

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • IT asset manager
    • IT infrastructure manager
    • IT vendor management lead
    • PMO lead
    • IT talent management representative
    • Other IT management

    Develop your prioritized and aligned cost optimization roadmap

    The process of developing your roadmap is where you set final cost optimization priorities, conduct a final rationalization to decide what's in and what's out, and document your proposed plan of action.

    First, take a moment to consider if you missed anything. Too often, only the cost cutting elements of the cost optimization equation get attention. Remember that cost optimization also includes making smart investments. Sometimes adding and expanding is better for the business than removing or contracting.

    • Do your proposed initiatives help position the organization to recover quickly if you're dealing with a downturn or recession scenario?
    • Have you fully considered growth or innovation opportunities that will help optimize costs in the long run?

    Feasibility
    Eliminate initiatives from the longlist of potential initiatives that cannot be achieved given the cost optimization goals you determined at the beginning of this exercise.

    Priority
    Rank order the remaining initiatives according to their ability to contribute to goal attainment and dependency relationships with external constraints and one another.

    Action Plan
    Create an overarching visual roadmap that shows how you intend to achieve your cost optimization goals over the short, medium, and long-term.

    3.1 Assess the feasibility of your cost optimization initiatives

    4 hours

    Now that you have identified your initiatives across the four levers and understood the business impacts:

    1. Review each of your cost optimization initiatives and estimate the feasibility in terms of:
      1. Effort required to implement.
      2. Risk: Likelihood of failure and impact on performance.
      3. Approval rights: Within the IT or finance's accountability/domain or not.
    2. Document your assessment in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook.

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    InputOutput
    • Cost optimization initiatives
    • Feasibility estimates of cost optimization initiatives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Define Variables tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • Other IT management - depending on the optimization lever (Assets, Vendors, Project Portfolio, or Workforce)

    3.1.1 Estimate the feasibility of your asset optimization initiatives

    1 hour

    1. Review each asset optimization initiative to estimate feasibility implications.
    2. Start by defining the effort required variables. Think in terms of how many dedicated full-time employees you would need to implement the initiative. Document your definition for each of the three variables (High, Medium, or Low) in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides). Then, estimate the effort required to implement the related initiative. Consider complexity, scope, and resource availability, before you document it in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).
    3. Define your likelihood of failure variables. Think in terms of probability of failure or percent chance the underlying initiative will not succeed. Document your definition for each of the three variables (High, Medium, or Low) in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides). Then, estimate the likelihood of failure to implement the related initiative, and document it in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).
    4. Consider the initiative's impact on performance. Would implementing the initiative hinder IT or business performance? If you are on a reactive journey, would it impede business recovery in any way, shape, or form? Document the impact (Positive Impact, No Impact, or Negative Impact) in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).
    5. Determine who is responsible for approving the initiative. Does it fall within your jurisdiction, responsibility, or accountability? If not, it would mean that it might be more difficult to implement the initiative. Document approval rights (within accountability or not within accountability) in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    Input Output
    • Asset optimization initiatives
    • Feasibility estimates of asset optimization initiatives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    Materials Participants
    • Define Variables tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • IT asset manager
    • IT infrastructure manager
    • Other IT management

    Template & Example

    Define your feasibility variables

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization – Define Variables Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to define your feasibility variables for standardization purposes. You can adopt a different definition per optimization lever (Assets, Vendors, Project Portfolio, and Workforce), or maintain the same one across initiatives, depending on what makes sense for your organization:

    Define your feasibility variables

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    B, G Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. The ID will populate automatically.
    C, H Text No entry required. Three variables identified: High, Medium, Low.
    D, E Whole Number Review and input the range of each effort required variable, based on the number of dedicated full-time employees needed to implement an initiative, as it works best for your organization.
    I, J Whole Number Review and input the range of each likelihood of failure variable, based on the probability of failure of an initiative, as it works best for your organization. This example should work for most organizations.

    Define your feasibility variables in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Define Variables tab.
    2. Review and enter the range of each effort required and likelihood of failure variable as you see fit for your organization.

    Template & Example

    Estimate your feasibility

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization – Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to complete feasibility estimates for each asset optimization initiative:

    Estimate your feasibility

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    M Dropdown Select the effort required estimate based on your defined variables. Effort required represents the number of dedicated employees needed to plan, execute, and monitor the underlying initiative, based on the level of maturity and readiness; consider complexity, scope, and resource availability.
    N Dropdown Select the likelihood of failure estimate based on your defined variables. Likelihood of failure represents the probability of failure of the underlying initiative.
    O Dropdown Select the impact on performance estimate related to the implementation of the underlying initiative. Consider the impact on IT and on business (including business recovery if on a reactive journey).
    P Dropdown Select the appropriate approval right related to the underlying initiative. Determine if the initiative's approval falls within your accountability or not.
    Q Text Write a brief description per initiative, providing an impact rationale and identifying the approver where possible.

    Complete the following fields for each initiative in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Determine the appropriate effort required to implement the underlying initiative.
    3. Identify the risk of each initiative: likelihood of failure and impact on performance.
    4. Choose the adequate approval right classification for each initiative.

    3.1.2 Estimate the feasibility of your vendor optimization initiatives

    1 hour

    1. Review each vendor optimization initiative to estimate feasibility implications, along with previously defined variables (see slides 64 and 65).
    2. Consider the initiative's impact on performance. Would implementing the initiative hinder IT or business performance? If you are on a reactive journey, would it impede business recovery in any way, shape, or form? Document the impact (Positive Impact, No Impact, or Negative Impact) in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).
    3. Determine who is responsible for approving the initiative. Does it fall within your jurisdiction, responsibility, or accountability? If not, it would mean that it might be more difficult to implement the initiative. Document approval rights (within accountability or not within accountability) in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    InputOutput
    • Vendor optimization initiatives
    • Feasibility estimates of vendor optimization initiatives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Define Variables tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • IT vendor management lead
    • Other IT management

    Template & Example

    Estimate your feasibility

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization – Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to complete feasibility estimates for each vendor optimization initiative:

    Estimate your feasibility

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    M Dropdown Select the effort required estimate based on your defined variables. Effort required represents the number of dedicated employees needed to plan, execute, and monitor the underlying initiative, based on the level of maturity and readiness; consider complexity, scope, and resource availability.
    N Dropdown Select the likelihood of failure estimate based on your defined variables. Likelihood of failure represents the probability of failure of the underlying initiative.
    O Dropdown Select the impact on performance estimate related to the implementation of the underlying initiative. Consider the impact on IT and on business (including business recovery if on a reactive journey).
    P Dropdown Select the appropriate approval right related to the underlying initiative. Determine if the initiative's approval falls within your accountability or not.
    Q Text Write a brief description per initiative, providing an impact rationale and identifying the approver where possible.

    Complete the following fields for each initiative in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Determine the appropriate effort required to implement the underlying initiative.
    3. Identify the risk of each initiative: likelihood of failure and impact on performance.
    4. Choose the adequate approval right classification for each initiative.

    3.1.3 Estimate the feasibility of your project portfolio optimization initiatives

    1 hour

    1. Review each project portfolio optimization initiative to estimate feasibility implications, along with previously defined variables (see slides 64 and 65).
    2. Consider the initiative's impact on performance. Would implementing the initiative hinder IT or business performance? If you are on a reactive journey, would it impede business recovery in any way, shape, or form? Document the impact (Positive Impact, No Impact, or Negative Impact) in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).
    3. Determine who is responsible for approving the initiative. Does it fall within your jurisdiction, responsibility, or accountability? If not, it would mean that it might be more difficult to implement the initiative. Document approval rights (within accountability or not within accountability) in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    InputOutput
    • Project portfolio optimization initiatives
    • Feasibility estimates of vendor optimization initiatives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Define Variables tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • PMO lead
    • Other IT management

    Template & Example

    Estimate your feasibility

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization – Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to complete feasibility estimates for each project portfolio optimization initiative:

    Estimate your feasibility

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    M Dropdown Select the effort required estimate based on your defined variables. Effort required represents the number of dedicated employees needed to plan, execute, and monitor the underlying initiative, based on the level of maturity and readiness; consider complexity, scope, and resource availability.
    N Dropdown Select the likelihood of failure estimate based on your defined variables. Likelihood of failure represents the probability of failure of the underlying initiative.
    O Dropdown Select the impact on performance estimate related to the implementation of the underlying initiative. Consider the impact on IT and on business (including business recovery if on a reactive journey).
    P Dropdown Select the appropriate approval right related to the underlying initiative. Determine if the initiative's approval falls within your accountability or not.
    Q Text Write a brief description per initiative, providing an impact rationale and identifying the approver where possible.

    Complete the following fields for each initiative in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Determine the appropriate effort required to implement the underlying initiative.
    3. Identify the risk of each initiative: likelihood of failure and impact on performance.
    4. Choose the adequate approval right classification for each initiative.

    3.1.4 Estimate the feasibility of your workforce optimization initiatives

    1 hour

    1. Review each workforce optimization initiative to estimate feasibility implications, along with previously defined variables (see slides 64 and 65).
    2. Consider the initiative's impact on performance. Would implementing the initiative hinder IT or business performance? If you are on a reactive journey, would it impede business recovery in any way, shape, or form? Document the impact (Positive Impact, No Impact, or Negative Impact) in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).
    3. Determine who is responsible for approving the initiative. Does it fall within your jurisdiction, responsibility, or accountability? If not, it would mean that it might be more difficult to implement the initiative. Document approval rights (within accountability or not within accountability) in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    InputOutput
    • Workforce optimization initiatives
    • Feasibility estimates of workforce optimization initiatives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Define Variables tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • Talent management representative
    • Other IT management

    Template & Example

    Estimate your feasibility

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization – Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to complete feasibility estimates for each workforce optimization initiative:

    Estimate your feasibility

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    M Dropdown Select the effort required estimate based on your defined variables. Effort required represents the number of dedicated employees needed to plan, execute, and monitor the underlying initiative, based on the level of maturity and readiness; consider complexity, scope, and resource availability.
    N Dropdown Select the likelihood of failure estimate based on your defined variables. Likelihood of failure represents the probability of failure of the underlying initiative.
    O Dropdown Select the impact on performance estimate related to the implementation of the underlying initiative. Consider the impact on IT and on business (including business recovery if on a reactive journey).
    P Dropdown Select the appropriate approval right related to the underlying initiative. Determine if the initiative's approval falls within your accountability or not.
    Q Text Write a brief description per initiative, providing an impact rationale and identifying the approver where possible.

    Complete the following fields for each initiative in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Determine the appropriate effort required to implement the underlying initiative.
    3. Identify the risk of each initiative: likelihood of failure and impact on performance.
    4. Choose the adequate approval right classification for each initiative.

    3.2 Prioritize cost optimization initiatives to create a final shortlist

    4 hours

    Now that you have your cost and feasibility for each cost optimization initiative:

    1. Review each of your cost optimization initiatives and estimate the time and priority by considering:
      1. Preliminary priority assessment based on your cost and feasibility input.
      2. Time frame: start and end date of each initiative.
      3. Current budget cycle: time remaining in the current budget cycle and potential cost savings in this fiscal year.
    2. Determine the final priority of the initiative and decide whether you want to include it in your 12-month roadmap.
    3. Document your assessment in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook.

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    InputOutput
    • Cost optimization initiatives
    • Time and priority estimates of cost optimization initiatives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Define Priority Threshold tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • Other IT management - depending on the optimization lever (Assets, Vendors, Project Portfolio, or Workforce)

    3.2.1 Prioritize your asset optimization initiatives

    1 hour

    1. Review each asset optimization initiative to set the priority.
    2. Validate your cost and feasibility estimates and consider the automated evaluation, in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook, providing you with a preliminary priority based on your cost and feasibility estimates (see next slides).
    3. Revisit your overarching goals (step 1.4) as you will assess the time it will take you to complete your initiatives and prioritize accordingly.
    4. Determine your start and end date for each initiative based on your journey, objectives, and overarching goals. Consider the urgency of each initiative. Document the quarter and year for your start and end dates in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).
    5. Identify the time remaining in your current budget cycle after the completion of each initiative to get a cost savings estimate for the current fiscal year. Document the number of remaining quarters (0, 1, 2, 3, or 4) in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).
    6. Decide on the priority of each initiative (High, Medium, or Low), and document it in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).
    7. Revisit the priority decision after prioritizing all your initiatives and determine which ones to include in your 12-month roadmap; consider the number of initiatives you can tackle at the same time within a 12-month period. Document your final decision (Yes or No) in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    InputOutput
    • Asset optimization initiatives
    • Time and priority estimates of cost optimization initiatives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Define Priority Threshold tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • IT asset manager
    • IT infrastructure manager
    • Other IT management

    Template & Example

    Understand your priority assessment

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization – Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how the preliminary priority assessment is assigned, for each asset optimization initiative, noting that columns Q to X are hidden automatic calculations and should not be touched:

    Understand your priority assessment

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    R Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. Rank of estimate cost savings (per year) in ascending order (higher cost savings implies a higher rank).
    S Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. Cost Savings Score on a scale of 1 to 3, where the top third in Cost Savings Rank are assigned a score of 1, the bottom third a score of 3, and in between a score of 2, noting that negative cost savings would imply a -1 score.
    T Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. Cost Score adds 1 to the Cost Savings Score if the underlying initiative is within the budget.
    U, V, W Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. A score on a scale of 1 to 3 based on input of columns M, N, and O, where Low or Positive Impact is assigned a score of 3, Medium or No Impact a score of 2, and High or Negative Impact a score of 1.
    X Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. The rounding of the average of columns U, V, and W, adding 1 to the result if the initiative's approval falls within your accountability (column P).
    Y Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. The sum of columns T and X, adding 3 for Reduce Unwarranted IT Spending, and 1 to Optimize Cost-to-value (column H).
    Z Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. Preliminary priority assessment based on the Define Priority Threshold worksheet (hidden, see next slide).

    Review the following fields for each initiative in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Validate cost and feasibility estimates (columns I to P previously filled - steps 2.2 and 3.1) driving the Priority Score and Preliminary Priority Assessment.

    Template & Example

    Priority threshold rationale

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization – Define Priority Threshold Worksheet

    Refer to the screenshot of the Define Priority Threshold worksheet below to understand the rationale behind the priority score and priority level:

    Priority threshold rationale

    Template & Example

    Estimate your timeline

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization – Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to complete timeline estimates for each asset optimization initiative:

    Estimate your timeline

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    AA, AC Dropdown Select the quarter(s) in which you plan to begin and complete your initiative.
    AB, AD Dropdown Select the year(s) in which you plan to begin and complete your initiative.
    AE Dropdown Select the number of remaining quarters, in the current fiscal year, after you complete the initiative (0 to 4); based on columns AA to AD.
    AF Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. Estimate of cost savings in the current fiscal year, based on the remaining quarters after implementation. The entry in column AE is divided by 4, and the result is multiplied by the related estimated cost savings per year (entry in column L).
    AG Dropdown Select if cost savings after the implementation of the underlying initiative will be permanent or temporary.

    Complete the following fields for each initiative in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Determine the appropriate quarter and year to start and complete the initiative.
    3. Identify the time remaining in your current budget cycle after the completion of the initiative.

    Template & Example

    Make your final decisions

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization – Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to assign the final priority for each asset optimization initiative, and include it in your 12-month roadmap:

    Make your final decisions

    Column ID Row ID Input Type Guidelines
    AH - Dropdown Select your final priority decision after reviewing the preliminary priority assessment (column Z) and timeline estimates (columns AA to AG).
    AI - Dropdown Select whether you want to include the initiative in your 12-month roadmap (Yes or No).
    AK, AL 5 Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. The total number of initiatives you decided to include in your 12-month roadmap; based on column AI when Yes is selected.
    AK, AL 6 Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. Total estimated cost savings per year after the initiative's completion; based on column L when included in the 12-month roadmap (column AI when Yes is selected)
    AK, AL 7 Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. Total estimated cost savings in the current fiscal year; based on column AF when included in the 12-month roadmap (column AI when Yes is selected)
    • Estimated cost savings per year refer to cost savings fully realized by the end of the upcoming fiscal year, following the initiatives' implementation.
    • Estimated cost savings in the current budget cycle, refer to cost savings partially realized in the current fiscal year, after the initiatives' implementation.

    Complete the following fields for each initiative in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Determine the final priority of the initiative.
    3. Decide whether you want to include the initiative in your 12-month roadmap.

    3.2.2 Prioritize your vendor optimization initiatives

    1 hour

    1. Review each vendor optimization initiative to set the priority.
    2. Validate your cost and feasibility estimates and consider the automated evaluation, in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook, providing you with a preliminary priority based on your cost and feasibility estimates (see next slides).
    3. Revisit your overarching goals (step 1.4) as you will assess the time it will take you to complete your initiatives and prioritize accordingly.
    4. Determine your start and end date for each initiative based on your journey, objectives, and overarching goals. Consider the urgency of each initiative. Document the quarter and year for your start and end dates in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).
    5. Identify the time remaining in your current budget cycle after the completion of each initiative to get a cost savings estimate for the current fiscal year. Document the number of remaining quarters (0, 1, 2, 3, or 4) in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).
    6. Decide on the priority of each initiative (High, Medium, or Low), and document it in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).
    7. Revisit the priority decision after prioritizing all your initiatives and determine which ones to include in your 12-month roadmap; consider the number of initiatives you can tackle at the same time within a 12-month period. Document your final decision (Yes or No) in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    Input Output
    • Vendor optimization initiatives
    • Time and priority estimates of cost optimization initiatives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    Materials Participants
    • Define Priority Threshold tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • IT vendor management lead
    • Other IT management

    Template & Example

    Understand your priority assessment

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization – Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how the preliminary priority assessment is assigned, for each vendor optimization initiative, noting that columns Q to X are hidden automatic calculations and should not be touched:

    Understand your priority assessment

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    R Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. Rank of estimate cost savings (per year) in ascending order (higher cost savings implies a higher rank).
    S Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. Cost Savings Score on a scale of 1 to 3, where the top third in Cost Savings Rank are assigned a score of 1, the bottom third a score of 3, and in between a score of 2, noting that negative cost savings would imply a -1 score.
    T Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. Cost Score adds 1 to the Cost Savings Score if the underlying initiative is within the budget.
    U, V, W Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. A score on a scale of 1 to 3 based on input of columns M, N, and O, where Low or Positive Impact is assigned a score of 3, Medium or No Impact a score of 2, and High or Negative Impact a score of 1.
    X Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. The rounding of the average of columns U, V, and W, adding 1 to the result if the initiative's approval falls within your accountability (column P).
    Y Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. The sum of columns T and X, adding 3 for Reduce Unwarranted IT Spending, and 1 to Optimize Cost-to-Value (column H).
    Z Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. Preliminary priority assessment based on the Define Priority Threshold worksheet (hidden, see next slide).

    Review the following fields for each initiative in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Validate cost and feasibility estimates (columns I to P previously filled - steps 2.2 and 3.1) driving the Priority Score and Preliminary Priority Assessment.

    Template & Example

    Priority Threshold Rationale

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization – Define Priority Threshold Worksheet

    Refer to the screenshot of the Define Priority Threshold worksheet below to understand the rationale behind the Priority Score and Priority Level:

    Priority Threshold Rationale

    Template & Example

    Estimate your timeline

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization – Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to complete timeline estimates for each vendor optimization initiative:

    Estimate your timeline

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    AA, AC Dropdown Select the quarter(s) in which you plan to begin and complete your initiative.
    AB, AD Dropdown Select the year(s) in which you plan to begin and complete your initiative.
    AE Dropdown Select the number of remaining quarters, in the current fiscal year, after you complete the initiative (0 to 4); based on columns AA to AD.
    AF Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. Estimate of cost savings in the current fiscal year, based on the remaining quarters after implementation. The entry in column AE is divided by 4, and the result is multiplied by the related estimated cost savings per year (entry in column L).
    AG Dropdown Select if cost savings after the implementation of the underlying initiative will be Permanent or Temporary.

    Complete the following fields for each initiative in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Determine the appropriate quarter and year to start and complete the initiative.
    3. Identify the time remaining in your current budget cycle after the completion of the initiative.

    Template & Example

    Make your final decisions

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization - Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to assign the final priority for each vendor optimization initiative, and include it in your 12-month roadmap:

    Make your final decisions

    Column ID Row ID Input Type Guidelines
    AH - Dropdown Select your final priority decision after reviewing the preliminary priority assessment (column Z) and timeline estimates (columns AA to AG).
    AI - Dropdown Select whether you want to include the initiative in your 12-month roadmap (Yes or No).
    AK, AL 5 Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. The total number of initiatives you decided to include in your 12-month roadmap; based on column AI when Yes is selected.
    AK, AL 6 Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. Total estimated cost savings per year after the initiative's completion; based on column L when included in the 12-month roadmap (column AI when Yes is selected)
    AK, AL 7 Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. Total estimated cost savings in the current fiscal year; based on column AF when included in the 12-month roadmap (column AI when Yes is selected)
    • Estimated cost savings per year refer to cost savings fully realized by the end of the upcoming fiscal year, following the initiatives' implementation.
    • Estimated cost savings in the current budget cycle, refer to cost savings partially realized in the current fiscal year, after the initiatives' implementation.

    Complete the following fields for each initiative in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Determine the final priority of the initiative.
    3. Decide whether you want to include the initiative in your 12-month roadmap.

    3.2.3 Prioritize your project portfolio optimization initiatives

    1 hour

    1. Review each project portfolio optimization initiative to set the priority.
    2. Validate your cost and feasibility estimates and consider the automated evaluation, in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook, providing you with a preliminary priority based on your cost and feasibility estimates (see next slides).
    3. Revisit your overarching goals (step 1.4) as you will assess the time it will take you to complete your initiatives and prioritize accordingly.
    4. Determine your start and end date for each initiative based on your journey, objectives, and overarching goals. Consider the urgency of each initiative. Document the quarter and year for your start and end dates in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).
    5. Identify the time remaining in your current budget cycle after the completion of each initiative to get a cost savings estimate for the current fiscal year. Document the number of remaining quarters (0, 1, 2, 3, or 4) in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).
    6. Decide on the priority of each initiative (High, Medium, or Low), and document it in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).
    7. Revisit the priority decision after prioritizing all your initiatives and determine which ones to include in your 12-month roadmap; consider the number of initiatives you can tackle at the same time within a 12-month period. Document your final decision (Yes or No) in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    InputOutput
    • Project portfolio optimization initiatives
    • Time and priority estimates of cost optimization initiatives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Define Priority Threshold tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • PMO lead
    • Other IT management

    Template & Example

    Understand your priority assessment

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization - Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how the preliminary priority assessment is assigned, for each project portfolio optimization initiative, noting that columns Q to X are hidden automatic calculations and should not be touched:

    Understand your priority assessment

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    R Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. Rank of Estimate Cost Savings (per year) in ascending order (higher cost savings implies a higher rank).
    S Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. Cost Savings Score on a scale of 1 to 3, where the top third in Cost Savings Rank are assigned a score of 1, the bottom third a score of 3, and in between a score of 2, noting that negative cost savings would imply a -1 score.
    T Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. Cost Score adds 1 to the Cost Savings Score if the underlying initiative is within the budget.
    U, V, W Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. A score on a scale of 1 to 3 based on input of columns M, N, and O, where Low or Positive Impact is assigned a score of 3, Medium or No Impact a score of 2, and High or Negative Impact a score of 1.
    X Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. The rounding of the average of columns U, V, and W, adding 1 to the result if the initiative's approval falls within your accountability (column P).
    Y Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. The sum of columns T and X, adding 3 for Reduce Unwarranted IT Spending, and 1 to Optimize Cost-to-Value (column H).
    Z Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. Preliminary Priority Assessment based on the Define Priority Threshold worksheet (hidden, see next slide).

    Review the following fields for each initiative in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Validate cost and feasibility estimates (columns I to P previously filled - steps 2.2 and 3.1) driving the Priority Score and Preliminary Priority Assessment.

    Template & Example

    Priority Threshold Rationale

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization - Define Priority Threshold Worksheet

    Refer to the screenshot of the Define Priority Threshold worksheet below to understand the rationale behind the Priority Score and Priority Level:

    Priority threshold rationale

    Template & Example

    Estimate your timeline

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization - Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to complete timeline estimates for each project portfolio optimization initiative:

    Estimate your timeline

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    AA, AC Dropdown Select the quarter(s) in which you plan to begin and complete your initiative.
    AB, AD Dropdown Select the year(s) in which you plan to begin and complete your initiative.
    AE Dropdown Select the number of remaining quarters, in the current fiscal year, after you complete the initiative (0 to 4); based on columns AA to AD.
    AF Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. Estimate of cost savings in the current fiscal year, based on the remaining quarters after implementation. The entry in column AE is divided by 4, and the result is multiplied by the related estimated cost savings per year (entry in column L).
    AG Dropdown Select if cost savings after the implementation of the underlying initiative will be Permanent or Temporary.

    Complete the following fields for each initiative in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Determine the appropriate quarter and year to start and complete the initiative.
    3. Identify the time remaining in your current budget cycle after the completion of the initiative.

    Template & Example

    Make your final decisions

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization - Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to assign the final priority for each project portfolio optimization initiative and include it in your 12-month roadmap:

    Make your final decisions

    Column ID Row ID Input Type Guidelines
    AH - Dropdown Select your final priority decision after reviewing the preliminary priority assessment (column Z) and timeline estimates (columns AA to AG).
    AI - Dropdown Select whether you want to include the initiative in your 12-month roadmap (Yes or No).
    AK, AL 5 Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. The total number of initiatives you decided to include in your 12-month roadmap; based on column AI when Yes is selected.
    AK, AL 6 Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. Total estimated cost savings per year after the initiative's completion; based on column L when included in the 12-month roadmap (column AI when Yes is selected)
    AK, AL 7 Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. Total estimated cost savings in the current fiscal year; based on column AF when included in the 12-month roadmap (column AI when Yes is selected)
    • Estimated cost savings per year refer to cost savings fully realized by the end of the upcoming fiscal year, following the initiatives' implementation.
    • Estimated cost savings in the current budget cycle, refer to cost savings partially realized in the current fiscal year, after the initiatives' implementation.

    Complete the following fields for each initiative in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Determine the final priority of the initiative.
    3. Decide whether you want to include the initiative in your 12-month roadmap.

    3.2.4 Prioritize your workforce optimization initiatives

    1 hour

    1. Review each workforce optimization initiative to set the priority.
    2. Validate your cost and feasibility estimates and consider the automated evaluation, in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook, providing you with a preliminary priority based on your cost and feasibility estimates (see next slides).
    3. Revisit your overarching goals (step 1.4) as you will assess the time it will take you to complete your initiatives and prioritize accordingly.
    4. Determine your start and end date for each initiative based on your journey, objectives, and overarching goals. Consider the urgency of each initiative. Document the quarter and year for your start and end dates in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).
    5. Identify the time remaining in your current budget cycle after the completion of each initiative to get a cost savings estimate for the current fiscal year. Document the number of remaining quarters (0, 1, 2, 3, or 4) in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).
    6. Decide on the priority of each initiative (High, Medium, or Low), and document it in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).
    7. Revisit the priority decision after prioritizing all your initiatives and determine which ones to include in your 12-month roadmap; consider the number of initiatives you can tackle at the same time within a 12-month period. Document your final decision (Yes or No) in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    InputOutput
    • Workforce optimization initiatives
    • Time and priority estimates of cost optimization initiatives in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Define Priority Threshold tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • Talent management representative
    • Other IT management

    Template & Example

    Understand your priority assessment

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization - Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how the preliminary priority assessment is assigned, for each workforce optimization initiative, noting that columns Q to X are hidden automatic calculations and should not be touched:

    Understand your priority assessment

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    R Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. Rank of Estimate Cost Savings (per year) in ascending order (higher cost savings implies a higher rank).
    S Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. Cost Savings Score on a scale of 1 to 3, where the top third in Cost Savings Rank are assigned a score of 1, the bottom third a score of 3, and in between a score of 2, noting that negative cost savings would imply a -1 score.
    T Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. Cost Score adds 1 to the Cost Savings Score if the underlying initiative is within the budget.
    U, V, W Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. A score on a scale of 1 to 3 based on input of columns M, N, and O, where Low or Positive Impact is assigned a score of 3, Medium or No Impact a score of 2, and High or Negative Impact a score of 1.
    X Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. The rounding of the average of columns U, V, and W, adding 1 to the result if the initiative's approval falls within your accountability (column P).
    Y Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. The sum of columns T and X, adding 3 for Reduce Unwarranted IT Spending, and 1 to Optimize Cost-to-Value (column H).
    Z Formula Hidden automatic calculation, no entry required. Preliminary Priority Assessment based on the Define Priority Threshold worksheet (hidden, see next slide).

    Review the following fields for each initiative in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Validate cost and feasibility estimates (columns I to P previously filled - steps 2.2 and 3.1) driving the Priority Score and Preliminary Priority Assessment.

    Template & Example

    Priority Threshold Rationale

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization - Define Priority Threshold

    Refer to the screenshot of the Define Priority Threshold worksheet below to understand the rationale behind the Priority Score and Priority Level:

    Priority Threshold Rationale

    Template & Example

    Estimate your timeline

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization - Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to complete timeline estimates for each workforce optimization initiative:

    Estimate your timeline

    Column ID Input Type Guidelines
    AA, AC Dropdown Select the quarter(s) in which you plan to begin and complete your initiative.
    AB, AD Dropdown Select the year(s) in which you plan to begin and complete your initiative.
    AE Dropdown Select the number of remaining quarters, in the current fiscal year, after you complete the initiative (0 to 4); based on columns AA to AD.
    AF Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. Estimate of cost savings in the current fiscal year, based on the remaining quarters after implementation. The entry in column AE is divided by 4, and the result is multiplied by the related estimated cost savings per year (entry in column L).
    AG Dropdown Select if cost savings after the implementation of the underlying initiative will be Permanent or Temporary.

    Complete the following fields for each initiative in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Determine the appropriate quarter and year to start and complete the initiative.
    3. Identify the time remaining in your current budget cycle after the completion of the initiative.

    Template & Example

    Make your final decisions

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization - Outline Initiatives Worksheet

    Refer to the example and guidelines below on how to assign the final priority for each workforce optimization initiative, and include it in your 12-month roadmap:

    Make your final decisions

    Column ID Row ID Input Type Guidelines
    AH - Dropdown Select your final priority decision after reviewing the preliminary priority assessment (column Z) and timeline estimates (columns AA to AG).
    AI - Dropdown Select whether you want to include the initiative in your 12-month roadmap (Yes or No).
    AK, AL 5 Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. The total number of initiatives you decided to include in your 12-month roadmap; based on column AI when Yes is selected.
    AK, AL 6 Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. Total estimated cost savings per year after the initiative's completion; based on column L when included in the 12-month roadmap (column AI when Yes is selected)
    AK, AL 7 Formula Automatic calculation, no entry required. Total estimated cost savings in the current fiscal year; based on column AF when included in the 12-month roadmap (column AI when Yes is selected)
    • Estimated cost savings per year refer to cost savings fully realized by the end of the upcoming fiscal year, following the initiatives' implementation.
    • Estimated cost savings in the current budget cycle, refer to cost savings partially realized in the current fiscal year, after the initiatives' implementation.

    Complete the following fields for each initiative in the Excel Workbook as per guidelines:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives tab.
    2. Determine the final priority of the initiative.
    3. Decide whether you want to include the initiative in your 12-month roadmap.

    3.3 Develop your cost optimization roadmap

    1 hour

    1. Conduct a final evaluation of your timeline, priority decision, and initiatives you wish to include in your 12-month roadmap. Do they make sense, are they achievable, and do they all contribute individually and collectively to reaching your cost optimization goals?
    2. Review your 12-month roadmap outputs in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slides).
    3. Make adjustments to your 12-month roadmap by adding or removing initiatives as you deem necessary (step 3.2).
    4. Document your final roadmap - including initiatives and relative time frames for execution - in the IT Cost Optimization Roadmap templates provided (see slide 97). The 12-month roadmap outputs from the IT Cost Optimization Workbook (see next slide) can facilitate this task.

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    Input Output
    • Outline Initiatives tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook, output from previous steps
    • IT Cost Optimization Roadmap
    Materials Participants
    • Outline Initiatives Charts tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • Diagram Results tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • List Results tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • Timeline Result tab in the IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT financial lead
    • Other IT management

    Template & Example

    Potential Cost Savings Per Year

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization - Outline Initiatives Charts Worksheet

    Refer to the example below on charts depicting different views of estimated cost savings per year across the four optimization levers (Assets, Vendors, Project Portfolio, and Workforce) that could help you in your assessment and decision making.

    Potential cost savings per year

    From the Excel Workbook, after completing your potential initiatives and filling all related entries in the Outline Initiatives tab:

    1. Navigate to the Outline Initiatives Charts tab.
    2. Review each of the charts.
    3. Navigate back to the Outline Initiatives tab to examine, drill down, and amend individual initiative entries or final decisions as you deem necessary.

    Template & Example

    12-month Roadmap Outputs

    Excel Workbook: IT Cost Optimization - Diagram Results, List Results, and Timeline Result Worksheets

    Refer to the example below depicting different roadmap output that could help you in presentations, assessment, and decision making.

    12-month Roadmap Outputs

    From the Excel Workbook:

    1. Navigate to the Diagram Results tab. This bubble diagram represent cost optimization initiatives by objective where each bubble size is determined by its estimated cost saving per year.
    2. Navigate to the List Results tab. You will find a list of the cost optimizations initiatives you've chosen to include in your roadmap and related charts.
    3. Navigate to the Timeline Result tab. This Gantt chart is a timeline view of the cost optimizations initiatives you've chosen to include in your roadmap.

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    IT cost optimization roadmap

    Phase 4

    Communicate and Execute

    Phase 1
    Understand Your Mandate and Objectives

    Phase 2
    Outline Your Cost Optimization Initiatives

    Phase 3
    Develop Your IT Cost Optimization Roadmap

    Phase 4
    Communicate and Execute

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Cost optimization communication plan
    • Cost optimization executive presentation

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO/IT director
    • IT finance lead
    • PMO lead
    • Other IT management

    Build Your IT Cost Optimization Roadmap

    4.1 Build the communication plan

    45 to 60 minutes

    1. Use the Cost Optimization Communication Plan templates and guidance on the following slides.
    2. Complete the template to develop your communication plan for your cost optimization proposal and initiatives. At a minimum, it should include:
      1. Steps for preparing and presenting your proposal to decision-makers, sponsors, and other stakeholders, including named presenters and points of contact in IT.
      2. Checkpoints for communication throughout the execution of each initiative and the cost optimization roadmap overall, including target audiences, accountabilities, modes and methods of communication, type/scope of information to be communicated at each checkpoint, and any decision/approval steps.

    Download the IT Cost Optimization Workbook

    InputOutput
    • Cost optimization roadmap
    • Completed draft of the Cost Optimization Communication Plan
    MaterialsParticipants
    • IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • IT Cost Optimization Roadmap
    • Info-Tech's Cost Optimization Communication Plan template
    • CIO/IT director
    • IT financial lead
    • Other IT management

    Understand a communication strategy's purpose

    Put as much effort into developing your communication strategy as you would into planning and executing the cost optimization initiatives themselves. Don't skip this part.

    Your communication strategy has two major components ...

    1. A tactical plan for how and when you'll communicate with stakeholders about your proposals, activities, and progress toward meeting cost optimization goals.
    2. An executive or board presentation that outlines your final proposed cost optimization initiatives, their respective business cases, and resources/support required with the goal of gaining approval to execute.

    Your communication strategy will need to ...

    • Provide answers to the "What's in it for me?" question from all impacted stakeholders.
    • Roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities before, during, and after initiatives are completed.
    • Descriptions and high-level information about dates, deliverables, and impacts of the specific changes being made.

    You will also develop more detailed operational and project plans for each initiative. IT will use these plans to manage and track the execution of individual initiatives when the time comes.

    Template & Example

    Document the overall what and why of your planned communications

    Component Purpose Context Key Messages Intended Outcomes
    Definition Description of the topic and why you're communicating with this specific audience right now. Background information about the broader situation and how you got to where you are today. The main points you want your target audience to hear/read, absorb, and remember. What you hope you and your audience will get at the end of the communication or effort.
    Our Language
    • IT is proposing an organization-wide array of initiatives in order to reduce IT costs. We are seeking your approval and support to carry out these initiatives.
    • [Purpose]
    • The economy is in active downturn and may become a full recession.
    • IT is anticipating mandatory cost reductions and has opted to take a proactive position.
    • We used an analytical framework to look at all areas of the organization to identify and prioritize IT cost-reduction opportunities.
    • [Context]
    • IT is being proactive.
    • IT is sensitive to the business.
    • IT needs your support.
    • IT is committed to keeping you informed at every step.
    • IT wants to position the organization for rapid recovery when the economy improves.
    • [Message]
    • Buy-in, approval, and ongoing support for cost optimization initiatives proposed.
    • Update on the status of specific initiatives, including what's happened, progress, and what's coming next.
    • [Outcome]

    Template & Example

    Next, note the who, how, and when of your communication plan

    Stakeholder/Approver Initiatives Impact Format Time frame Messenger
    CEO
    • Reduce number of Minitab licenses
    • Defer hiring of new data architecture position
    • Cancel VR simulation project
    Indefinitely delays current strategic projects Monthly meeting discussion Last Wednesday of every month starting Oct. 26, FY1 CIO, IT data analytics project lead, IT VR project lead
    IT Steering Committee
    • Adjust service level framework and level assignments
    • Postpone purchases for network modernization
    • Postpone workstation/laptop upgrades for non-production functions
    • Outsource data analytics project
    Nearly all of these initiatives are enterprise-wide or affect multiple departments. Varying direct and indirect impacts will need to be independently communicated for each initiative if approved by the ITS.

    Formal presentation at quarterly ITS meetings

    Monthly progress updates via email bulletin

    Approval presentation: Oct. 31, FY1

    Quarterly updates: Jan. 31, Apr. 28, and Jul. 28, FY2

    CIO, IT service director, IT infrastructure director, IT data analytics project lead
    VP of Sales
    • Pause Salesforce view redesign project
    Delays new sales tool efficiency improvement. Meeting discussion Nov. FY1 CIO, IT Salesforce view redesign project lead
    [Name/Title/Group]
    • [Initiative]
    • [Initiative]
    [Impact statement] [Format] [Date/Period] [Name/Title]
    [Name/Title/Group]
    • [Initiative]
    • [Initiative]
    [Impact statement] [Format] [Date/Period] [Name/Title]
    [Name/Title/Group]
    • [Initiative]
    • [Initiative]
    [Impact statement] [Format] [Date/Period] [Name/Title]

    4.2 Build the executive presentation

    45-60 minutes

    1. Download Info-Tech's IT Cost Optimization Roadmap Samples and Templates.
    2. Update the content with the outputs of your cost optimization roadmap and data/graph elements from the IT Cost Optimization Workbook. Refer to your organization's standards and norms for executive-level presentations and adapt accordingly.

    Download IT Cost Optimization Roadmap Samples and Templates

    Input Output
    • IT Cost Optimization Roadmap
    • IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • Completed draft of the IT Cost Optimization Executive Presentation
    Materials Participants
    • IT Cost Optimization Workbook
    • IT Cost Optimization Roadmap Samples and Templates
    • CIO/IT directors
    • IT financial lead
    • Other IT management

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Congratulations! You now have an IT cost optimization strategy and a communication plan.

    Throughout this blueprint, you have:

    1. Identified your IT mandate and cost optimization journey.
    2. Outlined your initiatives across the four levers (assets, vendors, project portfolio, and workforce).
    3. Put together a 12-month IT cost optimization roadmap.
    4. Developed a communication strategy and crafted an executive presentation - your initial step to communicate and discuss IT cost optimization initiatives with your key stakeholders.

    What's next?

    Communicate with your stakeholders, then follow your internal project policies and procedures to get the necessary approvals as required. Once obtained, you can start the execution and implementation of your IT cost optimization strategy.

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop.

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com
    1-888-670-8889

    Research Contributors and Experts

    Jennifer Perrier, Principal Research Director, IT Financial Management

    Jennifer Perrier
    Principal Research Director, IT Financial Management
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Jack Hakimian, Senior Vice President, Research Development

    Jack Hakimian
    Senior Vice President, Research Development
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Graham Price, Senior Executive Counselor, Executive Services

    Graham Price
    Senior Executive Counselor, Executive Services
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Travis Duncan, Research Director, Project & Portfolio Management

    Travis Duncan
    Research Director, Project & Portfolio Management
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Dave Kish, Practice Lead, IT Financial Management

    Dave Kish
    Practice Lead, IT Financial Management
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Baird Miller, PhD, Senior Executive Advisor, Executive Services

    Baird Miller, PhD
    Senior Executive Advisor, Executive Services
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Other Research Contributors and Experts

    Monica Braun
    Research Director, IT Financial Management
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Sandi Conrad
    Principal Advisory Director, Infrastructure & Operations
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Phil Bode
    Principal Advisory Director, Vendor Management
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Donna Glidden
    Advisory Director, Vendor Management
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Barry Cousins
    Distinguished Analyst & Research Fellow
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Andrew Sharp
    Research Director, Infrastructure & Operations Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Frank Sewell
    Advisory Director, Vendor Management
    Info-Tech Research Group

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    Bibliography

    "A Short Guide to Structured Cost Reduction." National Audit Office, 18 June 2010. Web.

    "IT Cost Savings: A Guide to Application Rationalization." LeanIX, 2021. Web.

    Jouravlev, Roman. "Service Financial Management: ITIL 4 Practice Guide." Axelos, 30 April 2020. Web.

    Leinwand, Paul, and Vinay Couto. "How to Cut Costs More Strategically." Harvard Business Review, March 2017. Web.

    "Role & Influence of the Technology Decision-Maker 2022." Foundry, 2022. Web.

    "State of the CIO 2022." CIO, 2022. Web.

    "The Definitive Guide to IT Cost Optimization." LeanIX, n.d. Web.

    "Understand the Principles of Cost Optimization." Google Cloud, n.d. Web.

    Design and Build a User-Facing Service Catalog

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}395|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): 9.3/10 Overall Impact
    • member rating average dollars saved: $62,821 Average $ Saved
    • member rating average days saved: 29 Average Days Saved
    • Parent Category Name: Service Management
    • Parent Category Link: /service-management
    • Business users don’t know what breadth of services are available to them.
    • It is difficult for business users to obtain useful information regarding services because they are often described in technical language.
    • Business users have unrealistic expectations of what IT can do for them.
    • There is no defined agreement on what is available, so the business assumes everything is.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Define services from the business user’s perspective, not IT’s perspective.
      • A service catalog is of no use if a user looks at it and sees a significant amount of information that doesn’t apply to them.
    • Separate the enterprise services from the Line of Business (LOB) services.
      • This will simplify the process of documenting your service definitions and make it easier for users to navigate, which leads to a higher chance of user acceptance.

    Impact and Result

    • Our program helps you organize your services in a way that is relevant to the users, and practical and manageable for IT.
    • Our approach to defining and categorizing services ensures your service catalog remains a living document. You may add or revise your service records with ease.
    • Our program creates a bridge between IT and the business. Begin transforming IT’s perception within the organization by communicating the benefits of the service catalog.

    Design and Build a User-Facing Service Catalog Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise executive brief to understand why building a Service Catalog is a good idea for your business, and how following our approach will help you accomplish this difficult task.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Launch the project

    The Launch the Project phase will walk through completing Info-Tech's project charter template. This phase will help build a balanced project team, create a change message and communication plan, and achieve buy-in from key stakeholders.

    • Design & Build a User-Facing Service Catalog – Phase 1: Launch the Project
    • Service Catalog Project Charter

    2. Identify and define enterprise services

    The Identify and Define Enterprise Services phase will help to target enterprise services offered by the IT team. They are offered to everyone in the organization, and are grouped together in logical categories for users to access them easily.

    • Design & Build a User-Facing Service Catalog – Phase 2: Identify and Define Enterprise Services
    • Sample Enterprise Services

    3. Identify and define Line of Business (LOB) services

    After completing this phase, all services IT offers to each LOB or functional group should have been identified. Each group should receive different services and display only these services in the catalog.

    • Design & Build a User-Facing Service Catalog – Phase 3: Identify and Define Line of Business Services
    • Sample LOB Services – Industry Specific
    • Sample LOB Services – Functional Group

    4. Complete the Services Definition Chart

    Completing the Services Definition Chart will help the business pick which information to include in the catalog. This phase also prepares the catalog to be extended into a technical service catalog through the inclusion of IT-facing fields.

    • Design & Build a User-Facing Service Catalog – Phase 4: Complete Service Definitions
    • Services Definition Chart
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Design and Build a User-Facing Service Catalog

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Launch the Project

    The Purpose

    The purpose of this module is to help engage IT with business decision making.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    This module will help build a foundation for the project to begin. The buy-in from key stakeholders is key to having them take onus on the project’s completion.

    Activities

    1.1 Assemble the project team.

    1.2 Develop a communication plan.

    1.3 Establish metrics for success.

    1.4 Complete the project charter.

    Outputs

    A list of project members, stakeholders, and a project leader.

    A change message, communication strategy, and defined benefits for each user group.

    Metrics used to monitor the usefulness of the catalog, both from a performance and monetary perspective.

    A completed project charter to engage users in the initiative.

    2 Identify and Define Enterprise Services

    The Purpose

    The purpose of this module is to review services which are offered across the entire organization.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A complete list of enterprise services defined from the user’s perspective to help them understand what is available to them.

    Activities

    2.1 Identify enterprise services used by almost everyone across the organization.

    2.2 Categorize services into logical groups.

    2.3 Define the services from the user’s perspective.

    Outputs

    A complete understanding of enterprise services for both IT service providers and business users.

    Logical groups for organizing the services in the catalog.

    Completed definitions in business language, preferably reviewed by business users.

    3 Identify and Define Line of Business (LOB) Services

    The Purpose

    The purpose of this module is to define the remaining LOB services for business users, and separate them into functional groups.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Business users are not cluttered with LOB definitions that do not pertain to their business activities.

    Business users are provided with only relevant IT information.

    Activities

    3.1 Identify the LOBs.

    3.2 Determine which one of two methodologies is more suitable.

    3.3 Identify LOB services using appropriate methodology.

    3.4 Define services from a user perspective.

    Outputs

    A structured view of the different functional groups within the business.

    An easy to follow process for identifying all services for each LOB.

    A list of every service for each LOB.

    Completed definitions in business language, preferably reviewed by business users.

    4 Complete the Full Service Definitions

    The Purpose

    The purpose of this module is to guide the client to completing their service record definitions completely.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    This module will finalize the deliverable for the client by defining every user-facing service in novice terms.

    Activities

    4.1 Understand the components to each service definition (information fields).

    4.2 Pick which information to include in each definition.

    4.3 Complete the service definitions.

    Outputs

    A selection of information fields to be included in the service catalog.

    A selection of information fields to be included in the service catalog.

    A completed service record design, ready to be implemented with the right tool.

    Further reading

    Design and Build a User-Facing Service Catalog

    Improve user satisfaction with IT with a convenient menu-like catalog.

    Our understanding of the problem

    This Research Is Designed For:

    • CIOs
    • Directors and senior managers within IT and the business

    This Research Will Help You:

    • Articulate all of the services IT provides to the business in a language the business users understand.
    • Improve IT and business alignment through a common understanding of service features and IT support.

    This Research Will Help Them

    • Standardize and communicate how users request access to services.
    • Standardize and communicate how users obtain support for services.
    • Clearly understand IT’s role in providing each service.

    What is a service catalog?

    The user-facing service catalog is the go-to place for IT service-related information.

    The catalog defines, documents, and organizes the services that IT delivers to the organization. The catalog also describes the features of the services and how the services are intended to be used.

    The user-facing service catalog creates benefits for both the business and IT.

    For business users, the service catalog:

    1. Documents how to request access to the service, hours of availability, delivery timeframes, and customer responsibilities.
    2. Specifies how to obtain support for the services, support hours, and documentation.

    For IT, the service catalog:

    1. Identifies who owns the services and who is authorized to use the services.
    2. Specifies IT support requirements for the services, including support hours and documentation.

    What is the difference between a user-facing service catalog and a technical service catalog?

    This blueprint is about creating a user-facing service catalog written and organized in a way that focuses on the services from the business’ view.

    User facing

    User-friendly, intuitive, and simple overview of the services that IT provides to the business.

    The items you would see on the menu at a restaurant are an example of User Facing. The content is relatable and easy to understand.

    Technical

    Series of technical workflows, supporting services, and the technical components that are required to deliver a service.

    The recipe book with cooking instructions is an example of Technical Facing. This catalog is intended for the IT teams and is “behind the scene.”

    What is a service and what does it mean to be service oriented?

    The sum of the people, processes, and technologies required to enable users to achieve a business outcome is a Service.

    A service is used directly by the end users and is perceived as a coherent whole.

    Business Users →Service = Application & Systems + People & Processes

    Service Orientation is…

    • A focus on business requirements and business value, rather than IT driven motives.
    • Services are designed to enable required business activities.
    • Services are defined from the business perspective using business language.

    In other words, put on your user hat and leave behind the technical jargons!

    A lack of a published user-facing service catalog could be the source of many pains throughout your organization

    IT Pains

    • IT doesn’t understand all the services they provide.
    • Business users would go outside of IT for solutions, proliferating shadow IT.
    • Business users have a negative yet unrealistic perception of what IT is capable of.
    • IT has no way of managing expectations for their users, which tend to inflate.
    • There is often no defined agreement on services; the business assumes everything is available.

    Business Pains

    • Business users don’t know what services are available to them.
    • It is difficult to obtain useful information regarding a service because IT always talks in technical language.
    • Without a standard process in place, business users don’t know how to request access to a service with multiple sources of information available.
    • Receiving IT support is a painful, long process and IT doesn’t understand what type of support the business requires.

    An overwhelming majority of IT organizations still need to improve how they demonstrate their value to the business

    This image contains a pie chart with a slice representing 23% of the circle This image contains a pie chart with a slice representing 47% of the circle This image contains a pie chart with a slice representing 92% of the circle

    23% of IT is still viewed as a cost center.

    47% of business executives believe that business goals are going unsupported by IT.

    92% of IT leaders see the need to prove the business value of IT’s contribution.

    How a Service Catalog can help:

    Use the catalog to demonstrate how IT is an integral part of the organization and IT services are essential to achieve business objectives.

    Source: IT Communication in Crisis Report

    Transform the perception of IT by articulating all the services that are provided through the service catalog in a user-friendly language.

    Source: Info-Tech Benchmarking and Diagnostic Programs

    Increase IT-business communication and collaboration through the service catalog initiative. Move from technology focused to service-oriented.

    Source: IT Communication in Crisis Report

    Project Steps

    Phase 1 – Project Launch

    1.2 Project Team

    The team must be balanced between representatives from the business and IT.

    1.2 Communication Plan

    Communication plan to facilitate input from both sides and gain adoption.

    1.3 Identify Metrics

    Metrics should reflect the catalog benefits. Look to reduced number of service desk inquiries.

    1.4 Project Charter

    Project charter helps walk you through project preparation.

    This blueprint separates enterprise service from line of business service.

    This image contains a comparison between Enterprise IT Service and Line of Business Service, which will be discussed in further detail later in this blueprint.

    Project steps

    Phase 2 – Identify and Define Enterprise Services

    2.1 Identify the services that are used across the entire organization.

    2.2 Users must be able to identify with the service categories.

    2.3 Create basic definitions for enterprise services.

    Phase 3 – Identify and Define Line of Business Services

    3.1 Identify the different lines of business (LOBs) in the organization.

    3.2 Understand the differences between our two methodologies for identifying LOB services.

    3.3 Use methodology 1 if you have thorough knowledge of the business.

    3.4 Use methodology 2 if you only have an IT view of the LOB.

    Phase 4 – Complete Service Definitions

    4.1 Understand the different components to each service definition, or the fields in the service record.

    4.2 Identify which information to include for each service definition.

    4.3 Define each enterprise service according to the information and field properties.

    4.3 Define each LOB service according to the information and field properties.

    Define your service catalog in bundles to achieve better catalog design in the long run

    Trying to implement too many services at once can be overwhelming for both IT and the users. You don’t have to define and implement all of your services in one release of the catalog.

    Info-Tech recommends implementing services themselves in batches, starting with enterprise, and then grouping LOB services into separate releases. Why? It benefits both IT and business users:

    • It enables a better learning experience for IT – get to test the first release before going full-scale. In other words, IT gets a better understanding of all components of their deliverable before full adoption.
    • It is easier to meet customer agreements on what is to be delivered early, and easier to be able to meet those deadlines.
    This image depicts how you can use bundles to simplify the process of catalog design using bundles. The cycle includes the steps: Identify Services; Select a Service Bundle; Review Record Design; followed by a cycle of: Pick a service; Service X; Service Data Collection; Create Service Record, followed by Publish the bundle; Communicate the bundle; Rinse and Repeat.

    After implementing a service catalog, your IT will be able to:

    Use the service catalog to communicate all the services that IT provides to the business.

    Improve IT’s visibility within the organization by creating a single source of information for all the value creating services IT has to offer. The service catalog helps the business understand the value IT brings to each service, each line of business, and the overall organization.

    Concentrate more on high-value IT services.

    The service catalog contains information which empowers business users to access IT services and information without the help of IT support staff. The reduction in routine inquiries decreases workload and increases morale within the IT support team, and allows IT to concentrate on providing higher value services.

    Reduce shadow IT and gain control of services.

    Service catalog brings more control to your IT environment by reducing shadow IT activities. The service catalog communicates business requests responsively in a language the business users understand, thus eliminating the need for users to seek outside help.

    After implementing a service catalog, your business will be able to:

    Access IT services with ease.

    The language of IT is often confusing for the business and the users don’t know what to do when they have a concern. With a user-facing service catalog, business users can access information through a single source of information, and better understand how to request access or receive support for a service through clear, consistent, and business-relevant language.

    Empower users to self-serve.

    The service catalog enables users to “self-serve” IT services. Instead of calling the service desk every time an issue occurs, the users can rely on the service catalog for information. This simplified process not only reduces routine service requests, but also provides information in a faster, more efficient manner that increases productivity for both IT and the business.

    Gain transparency on the IT services provided.

    With every service clearly defined, business users can better understand the current support level, communicate their expectation for IT accountability, and help IT align services with critical business strategies.

    Leverage the different Info-Tech deliverable tools to help you along the way

    1. Project Charter

    A project charter template with a few samples completed. The project charter helps you govern the project progress and responsibilities.

    2. Enterprise Service Definitions

    A full list of enterprise definitions with features and descriptions pre-populated. These are meant to get you on your feet defining your own enterprise services, or editing the ones already there.

    3. Basic Line of Business Service Definitions

    Similar to the enterprise services deliverable, but with two separate deliverables focusing on different perspectives – functional groups services (e.g. HR and finance) and industry-specific services (e.g. education and government).

    Service Definitions & Service Record Design

    Get a taste of a completed service catalog with full service definitions and service record design. This is the final product of the service catalog design once all the steps and activities have been completed.

    The service catalog can be the foundation of your future IT service management endeavors

    After establishing a catalog of all IT services, the following projects are often pursued for other objectives. Service catalog is a precursor for all three.

    1. Technical Service Catalog

    Need an IT-friendly breakdown of each service?
    Keep better record of what technical components are required to deliver a service. The technical service catalog is the IT version of a user-facing catalog.

    2. Service-Based Costing

    Want to know how much each IT service is costing you?
    Get a better grip on the true cost of IT. Using service-based costing can help justify IT expenses and increase budgetary allotment.

    3. Chargeback

    Want to hold each business unit accountable for the IT services they use?
    Some business units abuse their IT services because they are thought to be free. Keep them accountable and charge them for what they use.

    The service catalog need not be expensive – organizations of all sizes (small, medium, large) can benefit from a service catalog

    No matter what size organization you may be, every organization can create a service catalog. Small businesses can benefit from the catalog the same way a large organization can. We have an easy step-by-step methodology to help introduce a catalog to your business.

    It is common that users do not know where to go to obtain services from IT… We always end up with a serious time-crunch at the beginning of a new school year. With automated on- and off-boarding services, this could change for the better.Dean Obermeyer, Technology Coordinator, Los Alamos Public Schools

    CIO Call to Action

    As the CIO and the project sponsor, you need to spearhead the development of the service catalog and communicate support to drive engagement and adoption.

      Start

    1. Select an experienced project leader
    2. Identify stakeholders and select project team members with the project leader
    3. Throughout the project

    4. Attend or lead the project kick-off meeting
    5. Create checkpoints to regularly touch base with the project team
    6. Service catalog launch

    7. Communicate the change message from beginning to implementation

    Identify a project leader who will drive measurable results with this initiative

    The project leader acts on behalf of the CIO and must be a senior level staff member who has extensive knowledge of the organization and experiences marshalling resources.

    Influential & Impactful

    Developing a service catalog requires dedication from many groups within IT and outside of IT.
    The project leader must hold a visible, senior position and can marshal all the necessary resources to ensure the success of the project. Ability to exert impact and influence around both IT and the business is a must.

    Relationship with the Business

    The user-facing service catalog cannot be successful if business input is not received.
    The project leader must leverage his/her existing relationship with the business to test out the service definitions and the service record design.

    Results Driven

    Creating a service catalog is not an easy job and the project leader must continuously engage the team members to drive results and efficiency.
    The highly visible nature of the service catalog means the project leader must produce a high-quality outcome that satisfies the business users.

    Info-Tech’s methodology helps organization to standardize how to define services

    CASE STUDY A
    Industry Municipal Government
    Source Onsite engagement

    Municipal Government
    The IT department of a large municipal government in the United States provides services to a large number of customers in various government agencies.
    Service Catalog Initiative
    The municipal government allocated a significant amount of resources to answer routine inquiries that could have been avoided through user self-service. The government also found that they do not organize all the services IT provides, and they could not document and publish them to the customer. The government has already begun the service catalog initiative, but was struggling with how to identify services. Progress was slow because people were arguing amongst themselves – the project team became demoralized and the initiative was on the brink of failure.
    Results
    With Info-Tech’s onsite support, the government was able to follow a standardized methodology to identify and define services from the user perspective. The government was able to successfully communicate the initiative to the business before the full adoption of the service catalog.

    We’re in demos with vendors right now to purchase an ITSM tool, and when the first vendor looked at our finished catalog, they were completely impressed.- Client Feedback

    [We feel] very confident. The group as a whole is pumped up and empowered – they're ready to pounce on it. We plan to stick to the schedule for the next three months, and then review progress/priorities. - Client Feedback

    CASE STUDY B
    Industry Healthcare
    Source Onsite engagement

    Healthcare Provider
    The organization is a healthcare provider in Canada. It treats patients with medical emergencies, standard operations, and manages a faculty of staff ranging from nurses and clerks, to senior doctors. This organization is run across several hospitals, various local clinics, and research centers.
    Service Catalog Initiative
    Because the organization is publicly funded, it is subject to regular audit requirements – one of which is to have a service catalog in place.
    The organization also would like to charge back its clients for IT-related costs. In order to do this, the organization must be able to trace it back to each service. Therefore, the first step would be to create a user-facing service catalog, followed by the technical service catalog, which then allows the organization to do service-based costing and chargeback.
    Results
    By leveraging Info-Tech’s expertise on the subject, the healthcare provider was able to fast-track its service catalog development and establish the groundwork for chargeback abilities.

    "There is always some reticence going in, but none of that was apparent coming out. The group dynamic was very good. [Info-Tech] was able to get that response, and no one around the table was silent.
    The [expectation] of the participants was that there was a purpose in doing the workshop. Everybody knew it was for multiple reasons, and everyone had their own accountability/stakes in the development of it. Highly engaged."
    - Client Feedback

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    “Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

    Guided Implementation

    “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

    Workshop

    “We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

    Consulting

    “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Launch the Project

    Identify Enterprise Services

    Identify Line of Business Services

    Complete Service Definitions

    Best-Practice Toolkit

    1.1 Assemble the project team.

    1.2 Develop a communication plan.

    1.3 Establish metrics for success.

    1.4 Complete the project charter.

    2.1 Identify services available organization-wide.

    2.2 Categorize services into logical groups.

    2.3 Define the services.

    3.1 Identify different LOBs.

    3.2 Pick one of two methodologies.

    3.3 Use method to identify LOB services.

    4.1 Learn components to each service definition.

    4.2 Pick which information to include in each definition.

    4.3 Define each service accordingly.

    Guided Implementations Identify the project leader with the appropriate skills.

    Assemble a well-rounded project team.

    Develop a mission statement and change messages.

    Create a comprehensive list of enterprise services that are used across the organization.

    Create a categorization scheme that is based on the needs of the business users.

    Walk through the two Info-Tech methodologies and understand which one is applicable.

    Define LOB services using the appropriate methodology.

    Decide what should be included and what should be kept internal for the service record design.

    Complete the full service definitions.

    Onsite Workshop Phase 1 Results:

    Clear understanding of project objectives and support obtained from the business.

    Phase 2 Results:

    Enterprise services defined and categorized.

    Phase 3 Results:

    LOB services defined based on user perspective.

    Phase 4 Results:

    Service record designed according to how IT wishes to communicate to the business.

    Workshop overview

    Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Workshop Day 1 Workshop Day 2 Workshop Day 3 Workshop Day 4
    Activities

    Launch the Project

    Identify Enterprise Services

    Identify Line of Business Services

    Complete Service Definitions

    1.1 Assemble the project team.

    1.2 Develop a communication plan.

    1.3 Establish metrics for success.

    1.4 Complete the project charter.

    2.1 Identify services available organization-wide.

    2.2 Categorize services into logical groups.

    2.3 Define the services.

    3.1 Identify different LOBs.

    3.2 Pick one of two methodologies.

    3.3 Use method to identify LOB services.

    4.1 Learn components to each service definition.

    4.2 Pick which information to include in each definition.

    4.3 Define each service accordingly.

    Deliverables
    • Service Catalog Project Charter
    • Enterprise Service Definitions
    • LOB Service Definitions – Functional groups
    • LOB Service Definitions – Industry specific
    • Service Definitions Chart

    PHASE 1

    Launch the Project

    Design & Build a User-Facing Service Catalog

    Step 1 – Create a project charter to launch the initiative

    1. Complete the Project Charter
    2. Create Enterprise Services Definitions
    3. Create Line of Business Services Definitions
    4. Complete Service Definitions

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Develop a mission statement to obtain buy-ins from both IT and business stakeholders.
    • Assemble a well-rounded project team to increase the success of the project.
    • Identify and obtain support from stakeholders.
    • Create an impactful change message to the organization to promote the service catalog.
    • Determine project metrics to measure the effectiveness and value of the initiative.

    Step Insights

    • The project leader must have a strong relationship with the business, the ability to garner user input, and the authority to lead the team in creating a user-facing catalog that is accessible and understandable to the user.
    • Having two separate change messages prepared for IT and the business is a must. The business change message advocates how the catalog will make IT more accessible to users, and the IT message centers around how the catalog will make IT’s life easier through a standardized request process.

    Phase 1 outline

    Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

    Guided Implementation 1: Launch the project
    Proposed Time to Completion: 2 weeks
    Step 1.2: Create change messages

    Step 1.2: Create change messages

    Start with an analyst kick off call:

    • Identify the key objectives of creating a user-facing service catalog.
    • Identify the necessary members of the project team.

    Review findings with analyst:

    • Prioritize project stakeholders according to their involvement and influence.
    • Create a change message for IT and the business articulating the benefits.

    Then complete these activities…

  • Assemble a team with representatives from all areas of IT.
  • Identify the key project stakeholders.
  • Create a project mission statement.
  • Then complete these activities…

  • Create a separate change message for IT and the business.
  • Determine communication methods and channels.
  • With these tools & templates: Service

    Catalog Project Charter

    With these tools & templates:

    Service Catalog Project Charter

    Use Info-Tech’s Service Catalog Project Charter to begin your initiative

    1.1 Project Charter

    The following section of slides outline how to effectively use Info-Tech’s sample project charter.

    The Project Charter is used to govern the initiative throughout the project. IT should provide the foundation for project communication and monitoring.

    It has been pre-populated with information appropriate for Service Catalog projects. Please review this sample text and change, add, or delete information as required.

    Building the charter as a group will help you to clarify your key messages and help secure buy-in from critical stakeholders upfront.

    You may feel like a full charter isn’t necessary, and depending on your organizational size, it might not be. However, the exercise of building the charter is important none-the-less. No matter your current climate, some elements of communicating the value and plans for implementing the catalog will be necessary.

    The Charter includes the following sections:

    • Mission Statement
    • Project team members
    • Project stakeholders
    • Change message
    • Communication and organizational plan
    • Metrics

    Use Info-Tech’s Service Catalog Project Charter.

    Create a mission statement to articulate the purpose of this project

    The mission statement must be compelling because embarking on creating a service catalog is no easy task. It requires significant commitment from different people in different areas of the business.

    Good mission statements are directive, easy to understand, narrow in focus, and favor substance over vagueness.

    While building your mission statement, think about what it is intended to do, i.e. keep the project team engaged and engage others to adopt the service catalog. Included in the project charter’s mission statement section is a brief description of the goals and objectives of the service catalog.

    Ask yourself the following questions:

    1. What frustrations does your business face regarding IT services?
    2. f our company continues growing at this rate, will IT be able to manage service levels?
    3. How has IT benefited from consolidating IT services into a user perspective?

    Project Charter

    Info-Tech’s project charter contains two sample mission statements, along with additional tips to help you create yours.

    Tackle the project with a properly assembled team to increase the speed and quality in which the catalog will be created

    Construct a well-balanced project team to increase your chances of success.

    Project Leader

    Project leader will be the main catalyst for the creation of the catalog. This person is responsible for driving the whole initiative.

    Project Participants

    IT project participants’ input and business input will be pivotal to the creation of the catalog.

    Project Stakeholders

    The project stakeholders are the senior executives who have a vested interest in the service catalog. IT must produce periodic and targeted communication to these stakeholders.

    Increase your chances of success by creating a dynamic group of project participants

    Your project team will be a major success factor for your service catalog. Involvement from IT management and the business is a must.

    IT Team Member

    IT Service Desk Manager

    • The Service Desk team will be an integral part of the service catalog creation. Because of their client-facing work, service desk technicians can provide real feedback about how users view and request services.

    Senior Manager/Director of Application

    • The Application representative provides input on how applications are used by the business and supported by IT.

    Senior Manager/Director of Infrastructure

    • The infrastructure representative provides input on services regarding data storage, device management, security, etc.

    Business Team Member

    Business IT Liaison

    • This role is responsible for bridging the communication between IT and the business. This role could be fulfilled by the business relationship manager, service delivery manager, or business analyst. It doesn’t have to be a dedicated role; it could be part of an existing role.

    Business representatives from different LOBs

    • Business users need to validate the service catalog design and ensure the service definitions are user facing and relevant.

    Project Charter

    Input your project team, their roles, and relevant contact information into your project charter, Section 2.

    Identify the senior managers who are the stakeholders for the service catalog

    Obtain explicit buy-in from both IT and business stakeholders.

    The stakeholders could be your biggest champions for the service catalog initiative, or they could pull you back significantly. Engage the stakeholders at the start of the project and communicate the benefits of the service catalog to them to gain their approval.

    Stakeholders

    Benefits

    CIO
    • Improved visibility and perception for IT
    • Ability to better manage business expectation

    Manager of Service Desk

    • Reduced number of routine inquires
    • Respond to business needs faster and uniformly

    Senior Manager/Director of Application & Infrastructure

    • Streamlined and standardized request/support process
    • More effective communication with the business

    Senior Business Executives from Major LOBs

    • Self-service increases user productivity for business users
    • Better quality of services provided by IT

    Project Charter

    Document a list of stakeholders, their involvement in the process (why they are stakeholders), and their contact information in Section 3.

    Articulate the creation of the service catalog to the organization

    Spread the word of service catalog implementation. Bring attention to your change message through effective mediums and organizational changes.

    Key aspects of a communication plan

    The methods of communication (e.g. newsletters, email broadcast, news of the day, automated messages) notify users of implementation.

    In addition, it is important to know who will deliver the message (delivery strategy). Talking to the business leaders is very important, and you need IT executives to deliver the message. Work hard on obtaining their support as they are the ones communicating to their staff and could be your project champions.

    Recommended organizational changes

    The communication plan should consist of changes that will affect the way users interact with the catalog. Users should know of any meetings pertinent to the maintenance and improvement of the catalog, and ways to access the catalog (e.g. link on desktop/start menu).

    This image depicts the cycle of communicating change. the items in the cycle include: What is the change?; Why are we doing it?; How are we going to go about it?; What are we trying to achieve?; How often will we be updated?

    The Qualities of Leadership: Leading Change

    Project Charter

    Your communication plan should serve as a rough guide. Communication happens in several unpredictable happenstances, but the overall message should be contained within.

    Ensure you get the whole company on board for the service catalog with a well practiced change message

    The success of your catalog implementation hinges on the business’ readiness.

    One of the top challenges for organizations that are implementing a service catalog is the acceptance and adoption of the change. Effective planning for implementation and communication is pivotal. Ensure you create tailored plans for communication and understand how the change will impact staff.

    1. Draft your change message
    2. “Better Service, Better Value.” It is important to have two change messages prepared: one for the IT department and one for business users.
      Outline a few of the key benefits each user group will gain from adopting the service catalog (e.g. Faster, ease of use, convenient, consistent…)

    3. Address feedback
    4. Anticipate some resistances of service catalog adoption and prepare responses. These may be the other benefits which were not included in the change message (e.g. IT may be reluctant to think in business language.)

    5. Conduct training sessions
    6. Host lunch & learns to demonstrate the value of the service catalog to both business and IT user groups.
      These training sessions also serve as a great way to gather feedback from users regarding style and usability.

    Project Charter

    Pick your communication medium, and then identify your target audience. You should have a change message for each: the IT department and the business users. Pay careful consideration to wording and phrasing with regard for each.

    Track metrics throughout the project to keep stakeholders informed

    In order to measure the success of your service catalog, you must establish baseline metrics to determine how much value the catalog is creating for your business.

    1. Number of service requests via the service catalog
    2. The number of service catalog requests should be carefully monitored so that it does not fluctuate too greatly. In general, the number of requests via the service catalog should increase, which indicates a higher level of self-serve.

    3. Number of inquiry calls to the service desk
    4. The number of inquiry calls should decrease because customers are able to self-serve routine IT inquiries that would otherwise have gone through the service desk.

    5. Customer satisfaction – specific questions
    6. The organization could adopt the following sample survey questions:
      From 0-5: How satisfied are you with the functionality of the service catalog? How often do you turn to the service catalog first to solve IT problems?

    7. Number of non-standard requests
    8. The number of non-standard requests should decrease because a majority of services should eventually be covered in the service catalog. Users should be able to solve nearly any IT related problem through navigating the service catalog.

    Metric Description Current Metric Future Goal
    Number of service requests via the Service Catalog
    Number of inquiry calls to the service desk
    Customer Satisfaction – specific question
    Number of non-standard requests

    Use metrics to monitor the monetary improvements the service catalog creates for the business

    When measuring against your baseline, you should expect to see the following two monetary improvements:

    1. Improved service desk efficiency
    2. (# of routine inquiry calls reduced) x (average time for a call) x (average service desk wage)

      Routine inquiries often take up a significant portion of the service desk’s effort, and the majority of them can be answered via the service catalog, thus reducing the amount of time required for a service desk employee to engage in routine solutions. The reduction in routine inquiries allows IT to allocate resources to high-value services and provide higher quality of support.

    Example

    Originally, the service desk of an organization answers 850 inquiries per month, and around 540 of them are routine inquiries requesting information on when a service is available, who they can contact if they want to receive a service, and what they need to do if they want access to a service, etc.

    IT successfully communicated the introduction of the service catalog to the business and 3 months after the service catalog was implemented, the number of routine inquiries dropped to 60 per month. Given that the average time for IT to answer the inquiry is 10 minutes (0.167 hour) and the hourly wage of a service desk technician is $25, the monthly monetary cost saving of the service catalog is:

    (540 – 60) x 0.167 x 25 = $2004.00

    • Reduced expense by eliminating non-standard requests

    (Average additional cost of non-standard request) x (Reduction of non-standard request)
    +
    (Extra time IT spends on non-standard request fulfilment) x (Average wage)

    Non-standard requests require a lot of time, and often a lot of money. IT frequently incurs additional cost because the business is not aware of how to properly request service or support. Not only can the service catalog standardize and streamline the service request process, it can also help IT define its job boundary and say no to the business if needed.

    Example

    The IT department of an organization often finds itself dealing with last-minute, frustrating service requests from the business. For example, although equipment requests should be placed a week in advance, the business often requests equipment to be delivered the next day, leaving IT to pay for additional expedited shipping costs and/or working fanatically to allocate the equipment. Typically, these requests happen 4 times a month, with an additional cost of $200.00. IT staff work an extra 6 hours per each non-standard request at an hourly wage of $30.00.

    With the service catalog, the users are now aware of the rules that are in place and can submit their request with more ease. IT can also refer the users to the service catalog when a non-standard request occurs, which helps IT to charge the cost to the department or not meet the terms of the business.

    The monthly cost saving in this case is:

    $200.00 x 4 + 6 hours x 30 = $980.00

    Create your project charter for the service catalog initiative to get key stakeholders to buy in

    1.1 2-3 hours

    The project charter is an important document to govern your project process. Support from the project sponsors is important and must be documented. Complete the following steps working with Info-Tech’s sample Project Charter.

    1. The project leader and the core project team must identify key reasons for creating a service catalog. Document the project objectives and benefits in the mission statement section.
    2. Identify and document your project team. The team must include representatives from the Infrastructure, Applications, Service desk, and a Business-IT Liaison.
    3. Identify and document your project stakeholders. The stakeholders are those who have interest in seeing the service catalog completed. Stakeholders for IT are the CIO and management of different IT practices. Stakeholders for the business are executives of different LOBs.
    4. Identify your target audience and choose the communication medium most effective to reach them. Draft a communication message hitting all key elements.
      Info-Tech’s project charter contains sample change messages for the business and IT.
    5. Develop a strategy as to how the change message will be distributed, i.e. the communication and organizational change plan.
    6. Use the metrics identified as a base to measure your service catalog’s implementation. If you have identified any other objectives, add new metrics to monitor your progress from the baseline to reaching those objectives.
    7. Sign and date the project charter to officiate commitment to completing the project and reaching your objectives. Have the signed and dated charter available to members of the project team.

    INPUT

    • A collaborative discussion between team members

    OUTPUT

    • Thorough briefing for project launch
    • A committed team

    Materials

    • Communication message and plan
    • Metric tracking

    Participants

    • Project leader
    • Core project team

    Obtain buy-in from business users at the beginning of the service catalog initiative

    CASE STUDY A
    Industry Government
    Source Onsite engagement

    Challenge

    The nature of government IT is quite complex: there are several different agencies located in a number of different areas. It is extremely important to communicate the idea of the service catalog to all the users, no matter the agency or location.

    The IT department had yet to let business leaders of the various agencies know about the initiative and garner their support for the project. This has proven to be prohibitive for gaining adoption from all users.

    Solution

    The IT leaders met and identified all the opportunities to communicate the service catalog to the business leaders and end users.

    To meet with the business leaders, IT leaders hosted a service level meeting with the business directors and managers. They adopted a steering committee for the continuation of the project.

    To communicate with business users, IT leaders published announcements on the intranet website before releasing the catalog there as well.

    Results

    Because IT communicated the initiative, support from business stakeholders was obtained early and business leaders were on board shortly after.

    IT also managed to convince key business stakeholders to become project champions, and leveraged their network to communicate the initiative to their employees.

    With this level of adoption, it meant that it was easier for IT to garner business participation in the project and to obtain feedback throughout.

    Info-Tech assists project leader to garner support from the project team

    CASE STUDY A
    Industry Government
    Source Onsite engagement

    Challenge

    The project received buy-in from the CIO and director of infrastructure. Together they assembled a team and project leader.

    The two struggled to get buy-in from the rest of the team, however. They didn’t understand the catalog or its benefits and objectives. They were reluctant to change their old ways. They didn’t know how much work was required from them to accomplish the project.

    Solution

    With the Info-Tech analyst on site, the client was able to discuss the benefits within their team as well as the project team responsibilities.

    The Info-Tech analyst convinced the group to move towards focusing on a business- and service-oriented mindset.

    The workshop discussion was intended to get the entire team on board and engaged with meeting project objectives.

    Results

    The project team had experienced full buy-in after the workshop. The CIO and director relived their struggles of getting project members on-board through proper communication and engagement.

    Engaging the members of the project team with the discussion was key to having them take ownership in accomplishing the project.

    The business users understood that the service catalog was to benefit their long-term IT service development.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts

    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
    • Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.
    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:
    1.1 this image contains a screenshot from section 1.1 of this blueprint. Begin your project with a mission statement
    A strong mission statement that outlines the benefits of the project is needed to communicate the purpose of the project. The onsite Info-Tech analysts will help you customize the message and establish the foundation of the project charter.
    1.2 this image contains a screenshot from section 1.2 of this blueprint.

    Identify project team members

    Our onsite analysts will help you identify high-value team members to contribute to this project.

    1.3 This image contains a screenshot from section 1.3 of this blueprint.

    Identify important business and IT stakeholders

    Buy-in from senior IT and business management is a must. Info-Tech will help you identify the stakeholders and determine their level of influence and impact.

    1.4 This image contains a screenshot from section 1.4 of this blueprint.

    Create a change message for the business and IT

    It is important to communicate changes early and the message must be tailored for each target audience. Our analysts will help you create an effective message by articulating the benefits of the service catalog to the business and to IT.

    1.5 This image contains a screenshot from section 1.5 of this blueprint.

    Determine service project metrics

    To demonstrate the value of the service catalog, IT must come up with tangible metrics. Info-Tech’s analysts will provide some sample metrics as well as facilitate a discussion around which metrics should be tracked and monitored.

    PHASE 2

    Identify and Define Enterprise Services

    Design & Build a User-Facing Service Catalog

    Step 2 – Create Enterprise Services Definitions

    1. Complete the Project Charter
    2. Create Enterprise Services Definitions
    3. Create Line of Business Services Definitions
    4. Complete Service Definitions

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Identify and define enterprise services that are commonly used across the organization.
    • Create service descriptions and features to accurately sum up the functionality of each service.
    • Create service categories and assign each service to a category.

    Step Insights

    • When defining services, be sure to carefully distinguish between what is a feature and what is a service. Often, separate services are defined in situations when they would be better off as features of existing services, and vice versa.
    • When coming up with enterprise services categories, ensure the categories group the services in a way that is intuitive. The users should be able to find a service easily based on the names of the categories.

    Phase 2 outline

    Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

    Guided Implementation 2: Define Enterprise Services
    Proposed Time to Completion: 4 weeks

    Step 2.1: Identify enterprise services

    Step 2.2: Create service categories

    Start with an analyst kick off call:

    • Identify enterprise services that are commonly used.
    • Ensure the list is comprehensive and capture common IT needs.
    • Create service descriptions and features.

    Review findings with analyst:

    • Review full list of identified enterprise services.
    • Identify service categories that are intuitive to the users.

    Then complete these activities…

    • Use Info-Tech’s sample enterprise service definitions as a guide, and change/add/delete the service definitions to customize them to your organization.

    Then complete these activities…

    • Group identified services into categories that are intuitive to the users.

    With these tools & templates: Service

    Sample Enterprise Services

    With these tools & templates:

    Sample Enterprise Services

    Identify enterprise services in the organization apart from the services available to lines of business

    Separating enterprise services from line of business services helps keep things simple to organize the service catalog. -

    Documentation of all business-facing IT services is an intimidating task, and a lack of parameters around this process often leads to longer project times and unsatisfactory outcomes.

    To streamline this process, separating enterprise services from line of business services allows IT to effectively and efficiently organize these services. This method increases the visibility of the service catalog through user-oriented communication plans.

    Enterprise Services are common services that are used across the organization.

    1. Common Services for all users within the organization (e.g. Email, Video Conferencing, Remote Access, Guest Wireless)
    2. Service Requests organized into Service Offerings (e.g. Hardware Provisioning, Software Deployment, Hardware Repair, Equipment Loans)
    3. Consulting Services (e.g. Project Management, Business Analysis, RFP Preparation, Contract Negotiation)

    All user groups access Enterprise Services

    Enterprise Services

    • Finance
    • IT
    • Sales
    • HR

    Ensure your enterprise services are defined from the user perspective and are commonly used

    If you are unsure whether a service is enterprise wide, ask yourself these two questions:

    This image contains an example of how you would use the two questions: Does the user directly use the service themselves?; and; Is the service used by the entire organization (or nearly everyone)?. The examples given are: A. Video Conferencing; B. Exchange Server; C. Email & Fax; D. Order Entry System

    Leverage Info-Tech’s Sample Enterprise Services definition

    2.1 Info-Tech’s Sample Enterprise Services definitions

    Included with this blueprint is Info-Tech’s Sample Enterprise Services definitions.

    The sample contains dozens of services common across most organizations; however, as a whole, they are not complete for every organization. They must be modified according to the business’ needs. Phase two will serve as a guide to identifying an enterprise service as well as how to fill out the necessary fields.

    This image contains a screenshot of definitions from Info-Tech's Sample Enterprises services

    Info-Tech Insight

    Keep track of which services you either modify or delete. You will have to change the same services in the final Info-Tech deliverable.

    The next slide will introduce you to the information for each service record that can be edited.

    Info-Tech’s Sample Enterprise Services definitions is designed to be easily customized

    2.1 Info-Tech’s Sample Enterprise Services definitions

    Below is an example of a service record and its necessary fields of information. This is information that can be kept, deleted, or expanded upon.

    Name the service unambiguously and from the user’s perspective.

    Brief description of how the service allows users to perform tasks.

    Describe the functionality of the service and how it helps users to achieve their business objectives.

    Cluster the services into logical groups.

    Service Name Description Features Category
    Email Email communication to connect with other employees, suppliers, and customers
    • Inbox
    • Calendar
    • Resource Scheduling (meeting rooms)
    • Access to shared mailboxes
    • Limit on mailbox size (‘x’ GB)
    • Address book/external contacts
    • Spam filtering, virus protection
    • Archiving and retrieval of older emails
    • Web/browser access to email
    • Mass email/notification (emergency, surveys, reporting)
    • Setting up a distribution list
    • Setting up Active Sync for email access on mobile devices
    Communications

    Distinguish between a feature and a unique service

    It can be difficult to determine what is considered a service itself, and what is a feature of another service. Use these tips and examples below to help you standardize this judgement.

    Example 1

    Web Conferencing has already been defined as a service. Is Audio Conferencing its own service or a feature of Web Conferencing?

    Info-Tech Tip: Is Audio Conferencing run by the same application as the Web Conferencing? Does it use the same equipment? If not, Audio Conferencing is probably its own service.

    Example 2

    Web Conferencing has already been defined as a service. Is “Screen Sharing” its own service or a feature of Web Conferencing?

    Info-Tech Tip: It depends on how the user interacts with Screen Sharing. Do they only screen share when engaged in a Web Conference? If so, Screen Sharing is a feature and not a service itself.

    Example 3

    VoIP is a popular alternative to landline telephone nowadays, but should it be part of the telephony service or a separate service?

    Info-Tech Tip: It depends on how the VoIP phone is set up.

    If the user uses the VoIP phone the same way they would use a landline phone – because the catalog is user facing – consider the VoIP as part of the telephone service.

    If the user uses their computer application to call and receive calls, consider this a separate service on its own.

    Info-Tech Insight

    While there are some best practices for coming up with service definitions, it is not an exact science and you cannot accommodate everyone. When in doubt, think how most users would perceive the service.

    Change or delete Info-Tech’s enterprise services definitions to make them your own

    2.1 3 hours

    You need to be as comprehensive as possible and try to capture the entire breadth of services IT provides to the business.

    To achieve this, a three-step process is recommended.

    1. First, assemble your project team. It is imperative to have representatives from the service desk. Host two separate workshops, one with the business and one with IT. These workshops should take the form of focus groups and should take no more than 1-2 hours.
    2. Business Focus Group:
    • In an open-forum setting, discuss what the business needs from IT to carry out their day-to-day activities.
    • Engage user-group representatives and business relationship managers.

    IT Focus Group:

    • In a similar open-forum setting, determine what IT delivers to the business. Don’t think about it from a support perspective, but from an “ask” perspective – e.g. “Service Requests.
    • Engage the following individuals: team leads, managers, directors.
  • Review results from the focus groups and compare with your service desk tickets – are there services users inquire about frequently that are not included? Finalize your list of enterprise services as a group.
  • INPUT

    • Modify Info-Tech’s sample services

    OUTPUT

    • A list of some of your business’ enterprise services

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/marker
    • Info-Tech sample enterprise services

    Participants

    • Key members of the project team
    • Service desk rep
    • Business rep

    Using Info-Tech’s Sample Enterprise Services, expand upon the services to add those that we did not include

    2.2 1-3 hours (depending on size and complexity of the IT department)

    Have your user hat on when documenting service features and descriptions. Try to imagine how the users interact with each service.

    1. Once you have your service name, start with the service feature. This field lists all the functionality the service provides. Think from the user’s perspective and document the IT-related activities they need to complete.
    2. Review the service feature fields with internal IT first to make sure there isn’t any information that IT doesn’t want to publish. Afterwards, review with business users to ensure the language is easy to understand and the features are relatable.
    3. Lastly, create a high-level service description that defines the nature of the service in one or two sentences.

    INPUT

    • Collaborate and discuss to expand on Info-Tech’s example

    OUTPUT

    • A complete list of your business’ enterprise services

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/marker
    • Info-Tech sample enterprise services

    Participants

    • Key members of the project team
    • Service desk rep
    • Business rep

    Follow Info-Tech’s guidelines to establish categories for the enterprise services that IT provides to the business

    Similar to the services and their features, there is no right or wrong way to categorize. The best approach is to do what makes sense for your organization and understand what your users think.

    What are Service Categories?

    Categories organize services into logical groups that the users can identify with. Services with similar functions are grouped together in a common category.

    When deciding your categories, think about:

    • What is best for the users?
    • Look at the workflows from the user perspective: how and why do they use the service?
    • Will the user connect with the category name?
    • Will they think about the services within the category?
    Enterprise Service Categories
    Accounts and Access
    Collaboration
    Communication
    Connectivity
    Consulting
    Desktop, Equipment, & Software
    Employee Services
    Files and Documents
    Help & Support
    Training

    Sample categories

    Categorize the services from the list below; how would you think to group them?

    There is no right or wrong way to categorize services; it is subjective to how they are provided by IT and how they are used by the business. Use the aforementioned categories to group the following services. Sample solutions are provided on the following slide.

    Service Name
    Telephone
    Email
    Remote access
    Internet
    BYOD (wireless access)
    Instant Messaging
    Video Conferencing
    Audio Conferencing
    Guest Wi-Fi
    Document Sharing

    Tips and tricks:

    1. Think about the technology behind the service. Is it the same application that provides the services? For example: is instant messaging run by the same application as email?
    2. Consider how the service is used by the business. Are two services always used together? If instant messaging is always used during video conferencing, then they belong in the same category.
    3. Consider the purpose of the services. Do they achieve the same outcomes? For example, document sharing is different from video conferencing, though they both support a collaborative working environment.

    This is a sample of different categorizations – use these examples to think about which would better suit your business

    Example 1 Example 2

    Desktop, Equipment, & Software Services

    Connectivity

    Mobile Devices

    Communications

    Internet

    Telephone

    BYOD (wireless access)

    Telephone

    Guest Wi-Fi

    Internet

    Email

    Remote Access

    Instant Messaging

    Video Conferencing

    Audio Conferencing

    Communications

    Collaboration

    Storage and Retrieval

    Accounts and Access

    Telephone

    Email

    Document Sharing

    Remote access

    Email

    Instant Messaging

    Connectivity

    Mobile Devices

    Video Conferencing

    Internet

    BYOD (wireless access)

    Audio Conferencing

    Guest Wi-Fi

    Guest Wi-Fi

    Document Sharing

    Info-Tech Insight

    Services can have multiple categories only if it means the users will be better off. Try to limit this as much as possible.

    Neither of these two examples are the correct answer, and no such thing exists. The answers you came up with may well be better suited for the users in your business.

    With key members of your project team, categorize the list of enterprise services you have created

    2.3 1 hour

    Before you start, you must have a modified list of all defined enterprise services and a modified list of categories.

    1. Write down the service names on sticky notes and write down the categories either on the whiteboard or on the flipchart.
    2. Assign the service to a category one at a time. For each service, obtain consensus on how the users would view the service and which category would be the most logical choice. In some cases, discuss whether a service should be included in two categories to create better searchability for the users.
    3. If a consensus could not be reached on how to categorize a service, review the service features and category name. In some cases, you may go back and change the features or modify or create new categories if needed.

    INPUT

    • Collaborate and discuss to expand on Info-Tech’s example

    OUTPUT

    • A complete list of your business’ enterprise services

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/marker
    • Info-Tech sample enterprise services

    Participants

    • Key members of the project team
    • Service desk rep
    • Business rep

    Accounts & Access Services

    • User ID & Access
    • Remote Access
    • Business Applications Access

    Communication Services

    • Telephone
    • Email
    • Mobile devices

    Files & Documents

    • Shared Folders
    • File Storage
    • File Restoration
    • File Archiving

    Collaboration

    • Web Conferencing
    • Audio Conferencing
    • Video Conferencing
    • Chat
    • Document Sharing

    Employee Services

    • Onboarding & Off Boarding
    • Benefits Self Service
    • Time and Attendance
    • Employee Records Management

    Help & Support

    • Service Desk
    • Desk Side Support
    • After Hours Support

    Desktop, Equipment, & Software

    • Printing
    • Hardware Provisioning
    • Software Provisioning
    • Software Support
    • Device Move
    • Equipment Loaner

    Education & Training Services

    • Desktop Application Training
    • Corporate Application Training
    • Clinical Application Training
    • IT Training Consultation

    Connectivity

    • BYOD (wireless access)
    • Internet
    • Guest Wi-Fi

    IT Consulting Services

    • Project Management
    • Analysis
    • RFP Reviews
    • Solution Development
    • Business Analysis/Requirements Gathering
    • RFI/RFP Evaluation
    • Security Consulting & Assessment
    • Contract Management
    • Contract Negotiation

    IT department identifies a comprehensive list of enterprise services

    CASE STUDY A
    Industry Government
    Source Onsite engagement

    Challenge

    Because of the breadth of services IT provides across several agencies, it was challenging to identify what was considered enterprise beyond just the basic ones (email, internet, etc.)

    IT recognized that although the specific tasks of service could be different, there are many services that are offered universally across the organization and streamlining the service request and delivery process would reduce the burden on IT.

    Solution

    The client began with services that users interact with on a daily basis; this includes email, wireless, telephone, internet, printing, etc.

    Then, they focused on common service requests from the users, such as software and hardware provisioning, as well as remote access.

    Lastly, they began to think of other IT services that are provided across the organization, such as RFP/RFI support, project management analysis, employee onboarding/off-boarding, etc.

    Results

    By going through the lists and enterprise categories, the government was able to come up with a comprehensive list of all services IT provides to the business.

    Classifying services such as onboarding meant that IT could now standardize IT services for new recruits and employee termination.

    By capturing all enterprise services offered to the organization, IT centralized its management of services instead of having scattered request processes.

    Organization distinguishes features from services using Info-Tech’s tips and techniques

    CASE STUDY B
    Industry Government
    Source Onsite engagement

    Challenge

    For some services, the project team had difficulty deciding on what was a service and what was a feature. They found it hard to distinguish between a service with features or multiple services.

    For example, the client struggled to define the Wi-Fi services because they had many different user groups and different processes to obtain the service. Patients, visitors, doctors, researchers, and corporate employees all use Wi-Fi, but the service features for each user group were different.

    Solution

    The Info-Tech analyst came on-site and engaged the project team in a discussion around how the users would view the services.

    The analyst also provided tips and techniques on identifying services and their features.

    Because patients and visitors do not access Wi-Fi or receive support for the service in the same way as clinical or corporate employees, Wi-Fi was separated into two services (one for each user group).

    Results

    Using the tips and techniques that were provided during the onsite engagement, the project team was able to have a high degree of clarity on how to define the services by articulating who the authorized users are, and how to access the process.

    This allowed the group to focus on the users’ perspective and create clear, unambiguous service features so that users could clearly understand eligibility requirements for the service and how to request them.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts

    this is a picture of an Info-Tech Analyst

    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
    • Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.
    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:
    2.1 This image contains a screenshot from section 2.1 of this blueprint.

    Understand what enterprise services are

    The project team must have a clear understanding of what qualifies as an enterprise service. The onsite analysts will also promote a user-oriented mindset so the catalog focuses on business needs.

    2.2 this image contains a screenshot from section 2.2 of this blueprint.

    Identify enterprise services

    The Info-Tech analysts will provide a list of ready-to-use services and will work with the project team to change, add, and delete service definitions and to customize the service features.

    2.3 this image contains a screenshot from section 2.3 of this blueprint.

    Identify categories for enterprise services

    The Info-Tech analyst will again emphasize the importance of being service-oriented rather than IT-oriented. This will allow the group to come up with categories that are intuitive to the users.

    PHASE 3

    Identify and Define Line of Business Services

    Design & Build a User-Facing Service Catalog

    Step 3 – Create Line of Business Services Definitions

    1. Complete the Project Charter
    2. Create Enterprise Services Definitions
    3. Create Line of Business Services Definitions
    4. Complete Service Definitions

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Identify lines of business (LOB) within the organization as well as the user groups within the different LOBs.
    • Determine which one of Info-Tech’s two approaches is more suitable for your IT organization.
    • Define and document LOB services using the appropriate approach.
    • Categorize the LOB services based on the organization’s functional structure.

    Step Insights

    • Collaboration with the business significantly strengthens the quality of line of business service definitions. A significant amount of user input is crucial to create impactful and effective service definitions.
    • If a strong relationship with the business is not in place, IT can look at business applications and the business activities they support in order to understand how to define line of business services.

    Phase 3 outline

    Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

    Guided Implementation 3: Define LOB Services

    Proposed Time to Completion: 4 weeks

    Step 3.1: Identify LOB services

    Step 3.2: Define LOB services

    Start with an analyst kick off call:

    • Identify enterprise services that are commonly used.
    • Ensure the list is comprehensive and capture common IT needs.
    • Create service descriptions and features.

    Review findings with analyst:

    • Use either the business view or the IT view methodology to identify and define LOB services.

    Then complete these activities…

    • Select one of the methodologies and either compile a list of business applications or a list of user groups/functional departments.

    Then complete these activities…

    • Validate the service definitions and features with business users.

    With these tools & templates: Service

    LOB Services – Functional Group
    LOB Services – Industry Specific

    With these tools & templates:

    LOB Services – Functional Group
    LOB Services – Industry Specific

    Communicate with your business users to get a clear picture of each line of business

    Within a business unit, there are user groups that use unique applications and IT services to perform business activities. IT must understand which group is consuming each service to document to their needs and requirements. Only then is it logical to group services into lines of business.

    Covering every LOB service is a difficult task. Info-Tech offers two approaches to identifying LOB services, though we recommend working alongside business user groups to have input on how each service is used directly from the users. Doing so makes the job of completing the service catalog easier, and the product more detailed and user friendly.

    Some helpful questions to keep in mind when characterizing user groups:

    • Where do they fall on the organizational chart?
    • What kind of work do they do?
    • What is included in their job description?
    • What are tasks that they do in addition to their formal responsibilities?
    • What do they need from IT to do their day-to-day tasks?
    • What does their work day look like?
    • When, why, and how do they use IT services?

    Info-Tech Insight

    With business user input, you can answer questions as specific as “What requirements are necessary for IT to deliver value to each line of business?” and “What does each LOB need in order to run their operation?”

    Understand when it is best to use one of Info-Tech’s two approaches to defining LOB services

    1. Business View

    Business View is the preferred method for IT departments with a better understanding of business operations. This is because they can begin with input from the user, enabling them to more successfully define every service for each user group and LOB.

    In addition, IT will also have a chance to work together with the business and this will improve the level of collaboration and communication. However, in order to follow this methodology, IT needs to have a pre-established relationship with the business and can demonstrate their knowledge of business applications.

    2. IT View

    The IT view begins with considering each business application used within the organization’s lines of business. Start with a broad view, following with a process of narrowing down, and then iterate for each business application.

    This process leads to each unique service performed by every application within the business’ LOBs.

    The IT view does not necessarily require a substantial amount of information about the business procedures. IT staff are capable of deducing what business users often require to maintain their applications’ functionality.

    Use one of Info-Tech’s two methodologies to help you identify each LOB service

    Choose the methodology that fits your IT organization’s knowledge of the business.

    This image demonstrates a comparison between the business view of service and the IT View of Service. Under the Business View, the inputs are LOB; User Groups; and Business Activity. Under the IT View, the inputs are Business Application and Functionality, and the outputs are Business Activity; User Groups; and LOB.

    1. Business View

    If you do have knowledge of business operations, using the business view is the better option and the service definition will be more relatable to the users.

    2. IT View

    For organizations that don’t have established relationships with the business or detailed knowledge of business activities, IT can decompose the application into services. They have more familiarity and comfort with the business applications than with business activities.

    It is important to continue after the service is identified because it helps confirm and solidify the names and features. Determining the business activity and the user groups can help you become more user-oriented.

    Identifying LOB services using Info-Tech’s Business View method

    We will illustrate the two methodologies with the same example.

    If you have established an ongoing relationship with the business and you are familiar with their business operations, starting with the LOB and user groups will ensure you cover all the services IT provides to the business and create more relatable service names.

    This is a screenshot of an example of the business view of Service.

    Identifying LOB services using Info-Tech’s IT View method

    If you want to understand what services IT provides to the Sales functional group, and you don’t have comprehensive knowledge of the department, you need to start with the IT perspective.

    This is a screenshot of an example of the business view of Service.

    Info-Tech Insight

    If you are concerned about the fact that people always associate a service with an application, you can include the application in the service name or description so users can find the service through a search function.

    Group LOB services into functional groups as you did enterprise services into categories

    3.1 Sample Line of Business Services Definitions – Functional Groups & Industry Examples

    Like categories for enterprise services in Phase Two, LOB services are grouped into functional groups. Functional groups are the components of an organizational chart (HR, Finance, etc.) that are found in a company’s structure.

    Functional Groups

    Functional groups enable a clear view for business users of what services they need, while omitting services that do not apply to them. This does not overwhelm them, and provides them with only relevant information.

    Industry Services

    To be clear, industry services can be put into functional groups.

    Info-Tech provides a few sample industry services (without their functional group) to give an idea of what LOB service is specific to these industries. Try to extrapolate from these examples to create LOB services for your business.

    Use Info-Tech’s Sample LOB Services – Functional Group and Sample LOB Services – Industry Specific documents.

    This is a screenshot of Info-Tech's Functional Group Services

    Info-Tech Insight

    Keep track of which services you either modify or delete. You will have to change the same services in the final Info-Tech deliverable.

    Identify the user group and business activity within each line of business – Business view

    3.1 30-45 minutes per line of business

    Only perform this activity if you have a relationship with the business that can enable you to generate business input on service identifications and definitions.

    In a group of your project participants, repeat the sequence for each LOB.

    1. Brainstorm each user group within the LOB that is creating value for the business by performing functional activities.
    2. Think of what each individual end user must do to create their value. Think of the bigger picture rather than specifics at this point. For example, sales representatives must communicate with clients to create value.
    3. Now that you have each user group and the activities they perform, consider the specifics of how they go about doing that activity. Consider each application they use and how much they use that application. Think of any and all IT services that could occur as a result of that application usage.

    INPUT

    • A collaborative discussion (with a business relationship)

    OUTPUT

    • LOB services defined from the business perspective

    Materials

    • Sticky notes
    • Whiteboard/marker

    Participants

    • Members of the project team
    • Representatives from the LOBs

    Identify the user group and business activity within each line of business – IT view

    3.1 30-45 minutes per application

    Only perform this activity if you cannot generate business input through your relationships, and must begin service definitions with business applications.

    In a group of your project participants, repeat the sequence for each application.

    1. Brainstorm all applications that the business provides through IT. Cross out the ones that provide enterprise services.
    2. In broad terms, think about what the application is accomplishing to create value for the business from IT’s perspective. What are the modules? Is it recording interactions with the clients? Each software can have multiple functionalities.
    3. Narrow down each functionality performed by the application and think about how IT helps deliver that value. Create a name for the service that the users can relate to and understand.
    4. → Optional

    5. Now go beyond the service and think about the business activities. They are always similar to IT’s application functionality, but from the user perspective. How would the user think about what the application’s functionality to accomplish that particular service is? At this point, focus on the service, not the application.
    6. Determine the user groups for each service. This step will help you complete the service record design in phase 4. Keep in mind that multiple user groups may access one service.

    INPUT

    • A collaborative discussion (without a business relationship)

    OUTPUT

    • LOB services defined from the IT perspective

    Materials

    • Sticky notes
    • Whiteboard/marker

    Participants

    • Members of the project team

    You must review your LOB service definitions with the business before deployment

    Coming up with LOB service definitions is challenging for IT because it requires comprehension of all lines of business within the organization as well as direct interaction with the business users.

    After completing the LOB service definitions, IT must talk to the business to ensure all the user groups and business activities are covered and all the features are accurate.

    Here are some tips to reviewing your LOB Service Catalog generated content:

    • If you plan to talk to a business SME, plan ahead to help complete the project in time for rollout.
    • Include a business relationship manager on the project team to facilitate discussion if you do not have an established relationship with the business.

    Sample Meeting Agenda

    Go through the service in batches. Present 5-10 related services to the business first. Start with the service name and then focus on the features.

    In the meeting, discuss whether the service features accurately sum up the business activities, or if there are missing key activities. Also discuss whether certain services should be split up into multiple services or combined into one.

    Organization identifies LOB services using Info-Tech’s methodologies

    CASE STUDY A
    Industry Government
    Source Onsite engagement

    Challenge

    There were many users from different LOBs, and IT provided multiple services to all of them. Tracking them and who had access to what was difficult.

    IT didn’t understand who provided the services (service owner) and who the customers were (business owner) for some of the services.

    Solution

    After identifying the different Lines of Business, they followed the first approach (Business View) for those that IT had sufficient knowledge of in terms of business operations:

    1. Identified lines of business
    2. Identified user groups
    3. Identified business activities

    For the LOBs they weren’t familiar with, they used the IT view method, beginning with the application:

    1. Identified business apps
    2. Deduced the functionalities of each application
    3. Traced the application back to the service and identified the service owner and business owner

    Results

    Through these two methodologies, IT was able to define services according to how the users both perceive and utilize them.

    IT was able to capture all the services it provides to each line of business effectively without too much help from the business representatives.

    By capturing all enterprise services offered to the organization, IT centralized its management of services instead of having scattered request processes.

    Info-Tech helps organization to identify LOB services using the IT View

    CASE STUDY B
    Industry Healthcare
    Source Onsite engagement

    Challenge
    The organization uses a major application containing several modules used by different users for various business activities.

    The challenge was to break down the application into multiple services in a way that makes sense to the business users. Users should be able to find services specific to them easily.

    Therefore, the project team must understand how to map the modules to different services and user groups.


    Solution
    The project team identified the major lines of business and took various user groups such as nurses and doctors, figured out their daily tasks that require IT services, and mapped each user-facing service to the functionality of the application.

    The project team then went back to the application to ensure all the modules and functionalities within the application were accounted for. This helped to ensure that services for all user groups were covered and prepared to be released in the catalog.


    Results
    Once the project team had come up with a comprehensive list of services for each line of business, they were able to sit with the business and review the services.

    IT was also able to use this opportunity to demonstrate all the services it provides. Having all the LOB services demonstrates IT has done its preparation and can show the value they help create for the business in a language the users can understand. The end result was a strengthened relationship between the business and the IT department.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts

    This is a picture of an Info-Tech Analyst

    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
    • Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.
    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:
    3.1 this image contains a screenshot from section 3.1 of this blueprint.

    Understand what Line of Business services are

    The onsite analysts will provide a clear distinction between enterprise services and LOB services. The analysts will also articulate the importance of validating LOB services with the business.

    3.2 this image contains a screenshot from section 3.2 of this blueprint.

    Identify LOB services using the business’ view

    There are two methods for coming up with LOB services. If IT has comprehensive knowledge of the business, they can identify the services by outlining the user groups and their business activities.

    3.3 This image contains a screenshot from section 3.3 of this blueprint.

    Identify LOB services using IT’s view

    If IT does not understand the business and cannot obtain business input, Info-Tech’s analysts will present the second method, which allows IT to identify services with more comfortability through business applications/systems.

    3.4 This image contains a screenshot from section 3.4 of this blueprint.

    Categorize the LOB services into functional groups

    The analysts will help the project team categorize the LOB services based on user groups or functional departments.

    PHASE 4

    Complete Service Definitions

    Design & Build a User-Facing Service Catalog

    Step 4: Complete service definitions and service record design

    1. Complete the Project Charter
    2. Create Enterprise Services Definitions
    3. Create Line of Business Services Definitions
    4. Complete Service Definitions

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Select which fields of information you would like to include in your service catalog design.
    • Determine which fields should be kept internal for IT use only.
    • Complete the service record design with business input if possible.

    Step Insights

    • Don’t overcomplicate the service record design. Only include the pieces of information the users really need to see.
    • Don’t publish anything that you don’t want to be held accountable for. If you are not ready, keep the metrics and costs internal.
    • It is crucial to designate a facilitator and a decision maker so confusions and disagreements regarding service definitions can be resolved efficiently.

    Phase 3 outline

    Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

    Guided Implementation 4: Complete service definitions
    Proposed Time to Completion (in weeks): 4 weeks

    Step 4.1: Design service record

    Step 4.2: Complete service definitions

    Start with an analyst kick off call:

    • Review Info-Tech’s sample service record and determine which fields to add/change/delete.
    • Determine which fields should be kept internal.

    Review findings with analyst:

    • Complete all fields in the service record for each identified service.

    Then complete these activities…

    • Finalize the design of the service record and bring over enterprise services and LOB services.

    Then complete these activities…

    • Test the service definitions with business users prior to catalog implementation.

    With these tools & templates: Service

    Services Definition Chart

    With these tools & templates:

    Services Definition Chart

    Utilize Info-Tech’s Services Definition Chart to map out your final service catalog design

    Info-Tech’s Sample Services Definition Chart

    Info-Tech has provided a sample Services Definition Chart with standard service definitions and pre-populated fields. It is up to you throughout this step to decide which fields are necessary to your business users, as well as how much detail you wish to include in each of them.

    This image contains a screenshot from Info-Tech's Services Definition Chart.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Keep track of which services you either modify or delete. You will have to change the same services in the final Info-Tech deliverable.

    Tips and techniques for service record design

    The majority of the fields in the service catalog are user facing, which means they must be written in business language that the users can understand.

    If there is any confusion or disagreement in filling out the fields, a facilitator is required to lead the working groups in coming up with a definitive answer. If a decision is still not reached, it should be escalated to the decision maker (usually the service owner).

    IT-Facing Fields

    There are IT facing fields that should not be published to the business users – they are for the benefit of IT. For example, you may want to keep Performance Metrics internal to IT until you are ready to discuss it with the business.

    If the organization is interested in creating a Technical Service Catalog following this initiative, these fields will provide a helpful starting place for IT to identify the people, process, and technology required to support user-facing services.

    Info-Tech Insight

    It is important for IT-facing fields to be kept internal. If business users are having trouble with a service and the service owner’s name is available to them, they will phone them for support even if they are not the support owner.

    Design your service catalog with business input: have the user in mind

    When completing the service record, adopt the principle that “Less is More.” Keep it simple and write the service description from the user’s perspective, without IT language. From the list below, pick which fields of information are important to your business users.

    What do the users need to access the service quickly and with minimal assistance?

    The depicted image contains an example of an analysis of what users need to access the service quickly and with minimal assistance. The contents are as follows. Under Service Overview, Name; Description; Features; Category; and Supporting Services. Under Owners, are Service Owner; Business Owner. Under Access Policies and Procedures, are Authorized Users; Request Process; Approval Requirements/Process; Turnaround Time; User Responsibility. Under Availability and Service Levels are Support Hours; Hours of Availability; Planned Downtime; and Metrics. Under Support Policies & Procedures are Support Process; Support Owner; Support Documentation. Under Costs are Internal Cost; Customer Cost. The items which are IT Facing are coloured Red. These include Supporting Services; Service Owner; Business Owner; Metrics; Support Owner; and Internal Cost.

    Identify service overview

    “What information must I have in each service record? What are the fundamentals required to define a service?”

    Necessary Fields – Service Description:

    • Service name → a title for the service that gives a hint of its purpose.
    • Service description → what the service does and expected outcomes.
    • Service features → describe functionality of the service.
    • Service category → an intuitive way to group the service.
    • Support services → applications/systems required to support the service.

    Description: Delivers electronic messages to and from employees.

    Features:

    • Desk phone
    • Teleconference phones (meeting rooms)
    • Voicemail
    • Recover deleted voicemails
    • Team line: call rings multiple phones/according to call tree
    • Employee directory
    • Caller ID, Conference calling

    Category: Communications

    This image contains an example of a Service overview table. The headings are: Description; Features; Category; Supporting Services (Systems, Applications).

    Identify owners

    Who is responsible for the delivery of the service and what are their roles?

    Service Owner and Business Owner

    Service owner → the IT member who is responsible and accountable for the delivery of the service.

    Business owner → the business partner of the service owner who ensures the provided service meets business needs.

    Example: Time Entry

    Service Owner: Manager of Business Solutions

    Business Owner: VP of Human Resources

    This image depicts a blank table with the headings Service Owner, and Business Owner

    Info-Tech Insight

    For enterprise services that are used by almost everyone in the organization, the business owner is the CIO.

    Identify access policies and procedures

    “Who is authorized to access this service? How do they access it?”

    Access Policies & Procedures

    Authorized users → who can access the service.

    Request process → how to request access to the service.

    Approval requirement/process → what the user needs to have in place before accessing the service.

    Example: Guest Wi-Fi

    Authorized Users: All people on site not working for the company

    Request Process: Self-Service through website for external visitors

    Approval Requirement/Process: N/A

    This image depicts a blank table with the headings: Authorized Users; Request Process; Approval Requirement/Process

    Info-Tech Insight

    Clearly defining how to access a service saves time and money by decreasing calls to the service desk and getting users up and running faster. The result is higher user productivity.

    Identify access policies and procedures

    “Who is authorized to access this service? How do they access it?”

    Access Policies & Procedures

    Requirements & pre-requisites → details of what must happen before a service can be provided.

    Turnaround time → how much time it will take to grant access to the service.

    User responsibility → What the user is expected to do to acquire the service.

    Example: Guest Wi-Fi

    Requirements & Pre-requisites: Disclaimer of non-liability and acceptance

    Turnaround time: Immediate

    User Responsibility: Adhering to policies outlined in the disclaimer

    This image depicts a blank table with the headings: Authorized Users; Request Process; Approval Requirement/Process

    Info-Tech Insight

    Clearly defining how to access a service saves time and money by decreasing calls to the service desk and getting users up and running faster. The result is higher user productivity.

    Identify availability and service levels

    “When is this service available to users? What service levels can the user expect?”

    Availability & Service Levels

    Support hours → what days/times is this service available to users?

    Hours of availability/planned downtime → is there scheduled downtime for maintenance?

    Performance metrics → what level of performance can the user expect for this service?

    Example: Software Provisioning

    Support Hours: Standard business hours

    Hours of Availability/Planned Downtime: Standard business hours; can be agreed to work beyond operating hours either earlier or later

    Performance Metrics: N/A

    This image depicts a blank table with the headings: Support hours; Hours of availability/planned downtime; Performance Metrics.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Manage user expectations by clearly documenting and communicating service levels.

    Identify support policies and procedures

    “How do I obtain support for this service?”

    Support Policies & Procedures

    Support process → what is the process for obtaining support for this service?

    Support owner → who can users contact for escalations regarding this service?

    Support documentation → where can users find support documentation for this service?

    Example: Shared Folders

    Support Process: Contact help desk or submit a ticket via portal

    Support Owner: Manager, client support

    Support Documentation: .pdf of how-to guide

    This image depicts a blank table with the headings: Support Process; Support Owner; Support Documentation

    Info-Tech Insight

    Clearly documenting support procedures enables users to get the help they need faster and more efficiently.

    Identify service costs and approvals

    “Is there a cost for this service? If so, how much and who is expensing it?”

    Costs

    Internal Cost → do we know the total cost of the service?

    Customer Cost → a lot of services are provided without charge to the business; however, certain service requests will be charged to a department’s budget.

    Example: Hardware Provisioning

    Internal Cost: For purposes of audit, new laptops will be expensed to IT.

    Customer Cost: Cost to rush order 10 new laptops with retina displays for the graphics team. Charged for extra shipment cost, not for cost of laptop.

    This image depicts a blank table with the headings: Internal Costs; Customer costs

    Info-Tech Insight

    Set user expectations by clearly documenting costs associated with a service and how to obtain approval for these costs if required.

    Complete the service record design fields for every service

    4.1 3 Hours

    This is the final activity to completing the service record design. It has been a long journey to make it here; now, all that is left is completing the fields and transferring information from previous activities.

    1. Organize the services however you think is most appropriate. A common method of organization is alphabetically by enterprise category, and then each LOB functional group.
    2. Determine which fields you would like to keep or edit to be part of your design. Also add any other fields you can think of which will add value to the user or IT. Remember to keep them IT facing if necessary.
    3. Complete the fields for each service one by one. Keep in mind that for some services, a field or two may not apply to the nature of that service and may be left blank or filled with a null value (e.g. N/A).

    INPUT

    • A collaborative discussion

    OUTPUT

    • Completed service record design ready for a catalog

    Materials

    • Info-Tech sample service record design.

    Participants

    • Project stakeholders, business representatives

    Info-Tech Insight

    Don’t forget to delete or bring over the edited LOB and Enterprise services from the phase 2 and 3 deliverables.

    Complete the service definitions and get them ready for publication

    Now that you have completed the first run of service definitions, you can go back and complete the rest of the identified services in batches. You should observe increased efficiency and effectiveness in filling out the service definitions.

    This image depicts how you can use bundles to simplify the process of catalog design using bundles. The cycle includes the steps: Identify Services; Select a Service Bundle; Review Record Design; followed by a cycle of: Pick a service; Service X; Service Data Collection; Create Service Record, followed by Publish the bundle; Communicate the bundle; Rinse and Repeat.

    This blueprint’s purpose is to help you design a service catalog. There are a number of different platforms to build the catalog offered by application vendors. The sophistication of the catalog depends on the size of your business. It may be as simple as an Excel book, or something as complex as a website integrated with your service desk.

    Determine how you want to publish the service catalog

    There are various levels of maturity to consider when you are thinking about how to deploy your service catalog.

    1. Website/User Portal 2. Catalog Module Within ITSM Tool

    3. Homegrown Solution

    Prerequisite

    An internet website, or a user portal

    An existing ITSM tool with a built-in service catalog module

    Database development capabilities

    Website development capabilities

    Pros

    Low cost

    Low effort

    Easy to deploy

    Customized solution tailored for the organization

    High flexibility regarding how the service catalog is published

    Cons

    Not aesthetically appealing

    Lacking sophistication

    Difficult to customize to organization’s needs

    Limitation on how the service catalog info is published

    High effort

    High cost

    → Maturity Level →

    Organization uses the service catalog to outline IT’s and users’ responsibilities

    CASE STUDY A
    Industry Government
    Source Onsite engagement

    Challenge

    The client had collected a lot of good information, but they were not sure about what to include to ensure the users could understand the service clearly.

    They were also not sure what to keep internal so the service catalog did not increase IT’s workload. They want to help the business, but not appear as if they are capable of solving everything for everyone immediately. There was a fear of over-commitment.

    Solution

    The government created a Customer Responsibility field for each service, so it was not just IT who was providing solutions. Business users needed to understand what they had to do to receive some services.

    The Service Owner and Business Owner fields were also kept internal so users would go through the proper request channel instead of calling Service Owners directly.

    Lastly, the Performance Metrics field was kept internal until IT was ready to present service metrics to the business.

    Results

    The business was provided clarity on their responsibility and what was duly owed to them by IT staff. This established clear boundaries on what was to be expected of IT services projected into the future.

    The business users knew what to do and how to obtain the services provided to them. In the meantime, they didn’t feel overwhelmed by the amount of information provided by the service catalog.

    Organization leverages the service catalog as a tool to define IT workflows and business processes

    CASE STUDY B
    Industry Healthcare
    Source Onsite engagement

    Challenge

    There is a lack of clarity and a lack of agreement between the client’s team members regarding the request/approval processes for certain services. This was an indication that there is a level of ambiguity around process. Members were not sure what was the proper way to access a service and could not come up with what to include in the catalog.

    Different people from different teams had different ways of accessing services. This could be true for both enterprise and LOB services.

    Solution

    The Info-Tech analyst facilitated a discussion about workflows and business processes.

    In particular, the discussion focused around the approval/authorization process, and IT’s workflows required to deliver the service. The Info-Tech analyst on site walked the client through their different processes to determine which one should be included in the catalog.

    Results

    The discussion brought clarity to the project team around both IT and business process. Using this new information, IT was able to communicate to the business better, and create consistency for IT and the users of the catalog.

    The catalog design was a shared space where IT and business users could confer what the due process and responsibilities were from both sides. This increased accountability for both parties.

    If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts

    this is a picture of an Info-Tech Analyst

    • To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    • Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
    • Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.
    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:
    4.1 this image contains a screenshot from section 4.1 of this blueprint.

    Determine which fields should be included in the record design

    The analysts will present the sample service definitions record and facilitate a discussion to customize the service record so unique business needs are captured.

    4.2 this image contains a screenshot from section 4.2.1 of this blueprint.

    Determine which fields should be kept internal

    The onsite analysts will explain why certain fields are used but not published. The analysts will help the team determine which fields should be kept internal.

    4.3 this image contains a screenshot from section 4.3 of this blueprint.

    Complete the service definitions

    The Info-Tech analysts will help the group complete the full service definitions. This exercise will also provide the organization with a clear understanding of IT workflows and business processes.

    Summary of accomplishment

    Knowledge Gained

    • Understanding why it is important to identify and define services from the user’s perspective.
    • Understand the differences between enterprise services and line of business services.
    • Distinguish service features from services.
    • Involve the business users to define LOB services using either IT’s view or LOB’s view.

    Processes Optimized

    • Enterprise services identification and documentation.
    • Line of business services identification and documentation.

    Deliverables Completed

    • Service catalog project charter
    • Enterprise services definitions
    • Line of business service definitions – functional groups
    • Line of business service definitions – industry specific
    • Service definition chart

    Project step summary

    Client Project: Design and Build a User-Facing Service Catalog

    1. Launch the Project – Maximize project success by assembling a well-rounded team and managing all important stakeholders.
    2. Identify Enterprise Services – Identify services that are used commonly across the organization and categorize them in a user-friendly way.
    3. Identify Line of Business Services – Identify services that are specific to each line of business using one of two Info-Tech methodologies.
    4. Complete the Service Definitions – Determine what should be presented to the users and complete the service definitions for all identified services.

    Info-Tech Insight

    This project has the ability to fit the following formats:

    • Onsite workshop by Info-Tech Research Group consulting analysts.
    • Do-it-yourself with your team.
    • Remote delivery (Info-Tech Guided Implementation).

    Related Info-Tech research

    Establish a Service-Based Costing Model

    Develop the right level of service-based costing capability by applying our methodology.

    Optimize the Mentoring Program to Build a High-Performing Learning Organization

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    • Parent Category Name: Employee Development
    • Parent Category Link: /train-and-develop
    • Many organizations have introduced mentoring programs without clearly defining and communicating the purpose and goals around having a program; they simply jumped on the mentoring bandwagon.
    • As a result, these programs have little impact. They don’t add value for mentors, mentees, or the organization.
    • It can be difficult to design a program that is well-suited to your organization, will be adopted by employees, and will drive the results you are looking for.
    • In particular, it is difficult to successfully match mentors and mentees so both derive maximum value from the endeavor.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • As workforce composition shifts, there is a need for mentoring programs to move beyond the traditional senior–junior format option; organizational culture and goals will dictate the best approach.
    • An organization’s mentoring program doesn’t need to be restricted to one format; individual preferences and goals should also factor in. Be open to choosing format on a case-by-case basis.
    • Be sure to gain upper management buy-in and support early to ensure mentoring becomes a valued part of your organization.
    • Ensure that goal setting, communication, ongoing support for participants, and evaluation all play a role in your mentoring program.

    Impact and Result

    • Mentoring can have a significant positive impact on mentor, mentee, and organization.
    • Mentees gain guidance and advice on their career path and skill development. Mentors often experience re-engagement with their job and the satisfaction of helping another person.
    • Mentoring participants benefit from obtaining different perspectives of both the business and work-related problems. Participation in a mentoring program has been linked to greater access to promotions, pay raises, and increased job satisfaction.
    • Mentoring can have a number of positive outcomes for the organization, including breaking down silos, transferring institutional knowledge, accelerating leadership skills, fostering open communication and dialogue, and resolving conflict.

    Optimize the Mentoring Program to Build a High-Performing Learning Organization Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Align the mentoring program with the organizational culture and goals

    Build a best-fit program that creates a learning culture.

    • Storyboard: Optimize the Mentoring Program to Build a High Performing Learning Organization

    2. Assess the organizational culture and current mentoring program

    Align mentoring practices with culture to improve the appropriateness and effectiveness of the program.

    • Mentoring Program Diagnostic

    3. Align mentoring practices with culture to improve the appropriateness and effectiveness of the program.

    Track project progress and have all program details defined in a central location.

    • Mentoring Project Plan Template
    • Peer Mentoring Guidelines
    • Mentoring Program Guidelines

    4. Gather feedback from the mentoring program participants

    Evaluate the success of the program.

    • Mentoring Project Feedback Surveys Template

    5. Get mentoring agreements in place

    Improve your mentoring capabilities.

    • Mentee Preparation Checklist
    • Mentoring Agreement Template
    [infographic]

    Document Business Goals and Capabilities for Your IT Strategy

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    • Parent Category Name: IT Strategy
    • Parent Category Link: /it-strategy
    • As a strategic driver, IT needs to work with the business. Yet, traditionally IT has not worked hand-in-hand with the business. IT does not know what information it needs from the business to execute on its initiatives.
    • A faster time to new investment decisions mean that IT needs a repeatable and efficient process to understand what the business needs.
    • CIOs must execute strategic initiatives to create an IT function that can support the business. Most CIOs fail because of low business support.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Understanding the business context is a must for all strategic IT initiatives. At its core, each strategic IT project requires answers to a specific set of questions regarding the business.
    • An effective CIO understands which part of the business context applies to which strategic IT project and, in turn, what questions to ask to uncover those insights.

    Impact and Result

    • Uncover what IT knows and needs to know about the business context. This is a necessary first step to begin each of Info-Tech’s strategic IT initiatives, which any CIO should complete.
    • Conduct efficient and repeatable business context discovery activities to uncover business context gaps.
    • Document the business context you have uncovered and streamline the process for executing on Info-Tech’s strategic CIO blueprints.

    Document Business Goals and Capabilities for Your IT Strategy Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should define the business context, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand how we can support you in completing key CIO strategic initiatives.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Identify and document the business needs of the organization

    Define the business context needed to complete strategic IT initiatives.

    • Document Business Goals and Capabilities for Your IT Strategy – Storyboard
    • Business Context Discovery Tool
    • Business Context Discovery Record Template
    • PESTLE Analysis Template
    • Strategy Alignment Map Template
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Document Business Goals and Capabilities for Your IT Strategy

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Identify the Missing Business Context (pre-work)

    The Purpose

    Conduct analysis and facilitate discussions to uncover business needs for IT.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A baseline understanding of what business needs mean for IT

    Activities

    1.1 Define the strategic CIO initiatives our organization will pursue.

    1.2 Complete the Business Context Discovery Tool.

    1.3 Schedule relevant interviews.

    1.4 Select relevant Info-Tech diagnostics to conduct.

    Outputs

    Business context scope

    Completed Business Context Discovery Tool

    Completed Info-Tech diagnostics

    2 Uncover and Document the Missing Context

    The Purpose

    Analyze the outputs from step 1 and uncover the business context gaps.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A thorough understanding of business needs and why IT should pursue certain initiatives

    Activities

    2.1 Conduct group or one-on-one interviews to identify the missing pieces of the business context.

    Outputs

    Documentation of answers to business context gaps

    3 Uncover and Document the Missing Context

    The Purpose

    Analyze the outputs from step 1 and uncover the business context gaps.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A thorough understanding of business needs and why IT should pursue certain initiatives

    Activities

    3.1 Conduct group or one-on-one interviews to identify the missing pieces of the business context.

    Outputs

    Documentation of answers to business context gaps

    4 Review Business Context and Next Steps

    The Purpose

    Review findings and implications for IT’s strategic initiative.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A thorough understanding of business needs and how IT’s strategic initiatives addresses those needs

    Activities

    4.1 Review documented business context with IT team.

    4.2 Discuss next steps for strategic CIO initiative execution.

    Outputs

    Finalized version of the business context

    Create a Work-From-Anywhere Strategy

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    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): 9.0/10 Overall Impact
    • member rating average dollars saved: 33 Average Days Saved
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    • Parent Category Name: IT Strategy
    • Parent Category Link: /it-strategy

    Work-from-anywhere isn’t going anywhere. During the initial rush to remote work, tech debt was highlighted and the business lost faith in IT. IT now needs to:

    • Rebuild trust with the CXO.
    • Identify gaps created from the COVID-19 rush to remote work.
    • Identify how IT can better support remote workers.

    IT went through an initial crunch to enable remote work. It’s time to be proactive and learn from our mistakes.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • It’s not about embracing the new normal; it’s about resiliency and long-term success. Your strategy needs to not only provide short-term operational value but also make the organization more resilient for the unknown risks of tomorrow.
    • The nature of work has fundamentally changed. IT departments must ensure service continuity, not for how the company worked in 2019, but for how the company is working now and will be working tomorrow.
    • Ensure short-term survival. Don’t focus on becoming an innovator until you are no longer stuck in firefighting.
    • Aim for near-term innovation. Once you’re a trusted operator, become a business partner by helping the business better adapt business processes and operations to work-from-anywhere.

    Impact and Result

    Follow these steps to build a work-from-anywhere strategy that resonates with the business:

    • Identify a vision that aligns with business goals.
    • Design the work-from-anywhere value proposition for critical business roles.
    • Benchmark your current maturity.
    • Build a roadmap for bridging the gap.

    Benefit employees’ remote working experience while ensuring that IT heads in a strategic direction.

    Create a Work-From-Anywhere Strategy Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should create a work-from-anywhere strategy, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Define a target state

    Identify a vision that aligns with business goals, not for how the company worked in 2019, but for how the company is working now and will be working tomorrow.

    • Work-From-Anywhere Strategy Template
    • Work-From-Anywhere Value Proposition Template

    2. Analyze current fitness

    Don’t focus on becoming an innovator until you are no longer stuck in firefighting mode.

    3. Build a roadmap for improving enterprise apps

    Use these blueprints to improve your enterprise app capabilities for work-from-anywhere.

    • Microsoft Teams Cookbook – Sections 1-2
    • Rationalize Your Collaboration Tools – Phases 1-3
    • Adapt Your Customer Experience Strategy to Successfully Weather COVID-19 Storyboard
    • The Rapid Application Selection Framework Deck

    4. Build a roadmap for improving strategy, people & leadership

    Use these blueprints to improve IT’s strategy, people & leadership capabilities for work-from-anywhere.

    • Define Your Digital Business Strategy – Phases 1-4
    • Training Deck: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams
    • Sustain Work-From-Home in the New Normal Storyboard
    • Develop a Targeted Flexible Work Program for IT – Phases 1-3
    • Maintain Employee Engagement During the COVID-19 Pandemic Storyboard
    • Adapt Your Onboarding Process to a Virtual Environment Storyboard
    • Manage Poor Performance While Working From Home Storyboard
    • The Essential COVID-19 Childcare Policy for Every Organization, Yesterday Storyboard

    5. Build a roadmap for improving infrastructure & operations

    Use these blueprints to improve infrastructure & operations capabilities for work-from-anywhere.

    • Stabilize Infrastructure & Operations During Work-From-Anywhere – Phases 1-3
    • Responsibly Resume IT Operations in the Office – Phases 1-5
    • Execute an Emergency Remote Work Plan Storyboard
    • Build a Digital Workspace Strategy – Phases 1-3

    6. Build a roadmap for improving IT security & compliance capabilities

    Use these blueprints to improve IT security & compliance capabilities for work-from-anywhere.

    • Cybersecurity Priorities in Times of Pandemic Storyboard
    • Reinforce End-User Security Awareness During Your COVID-19 Response Storyboard

    Infographic

    Workshop: Create a Work-From-Anywhere Strategy

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Define a Target State

    The Purpose

    Define the direction of your work-from-anywhere strategy and roadmap.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Base your decisions on senior leadership and user needs.

    Activities

    1.1 Identify drivers, benefits, and challenges.

    1.2 Perform a goals cascade to align benefits to business needs.

    1.3 Define a vision and success metrics.

    1.4 Define the value IT brings to work-from-anywhere.

    Outputs

    Desired benefits for work-from-anywhere

    Vision statement

    Mission statement

    Success metrics

    Value propositions for in-scope user groups

    2 Review In-Scope Capabilities

    The Purpose

    Focus on value. Ensure that major applications and IT capabilities will relieve employees’ pains and provide them with gains.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Learn from past mistakes and successes.

    Increase adoption of resulting initiatives.

    Activities

    2.1 Review work-from-anywhere framework and identify capability gaps.

    2.2 Review diagnostic results to identify satisfaction gaps.

    2.3 Record improvement opportunities for each capability.

    2.4 Identify deliverables and opportunities to provide value for each.

    2.5 Identify constraints faced by each capability.

    Outputs

    SWOT assessment of work-from-anywhere capabilities

    Projects and initiatives to improve capabilities

    Deliverables and opportunities to provide value for each capability

    Constraints with each capability

    3 Build the Roadmap

    The Purpose

    Build a short-term plan that allows you to iterate on your existing strengths and provide early value to your users.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Provide early value to address operational pain points.

    Build a plan to provide near-term innovation and business value.

    Activities

    3.1 Organize initiatives into phases.

    3.2 Identify tasks for short-term initiatives.

    3.3 Estimate effort with Scrum Poker.

    3.4 Build a timeline and tie phases to desired business benefits.

    Outputs

    Prioritized list of initiatives and phases

    Profiles for short-term initiatives

    Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure

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    • Parent Category Name: Organizational Design
    • Parent Category Link: /organizational-design

    Most organizations go through an organizational redesign to:

    • Better align to the strategic objectives of the organization.
    • Increase the effectiveness of IT as a function.
    • Provide employees with clarity in their roles and responsibilities.
    • Support new capabilities.
    • Better align IT capabilities to suit the vision.
    • Ensure the IT organization can support transformation initiatives.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Organizational redesign is only as successful as the process leaders engage in. It shapes a story framed in a strong foundation of need and a method to successfully implement and adopt the new structure.
    • Benchmarking your organizational redesign to other organizations will not work. Other organizations have different strategies, drivers, and context. It’s important to focus on your organization, not someone else's.
    • You could have the best IT employees in the world, but if they aren’t structured well your organization will still fail in reaching its vision.

    Impact and Result

    • We are often unsuccessful in organizational redesign because we lack an understanding of why this initiative is required or fail to recognize that it is a change initiative.
    • Successful organizational design requires a clear understanding of why it is needed and what will be achieved by operating in a new structure.
    • Additionally, understanding the impact of the change initiative can lead to greater adoption by core stakeholders.

    Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure Deck – A defined method of redesigning your IT structure that is founded by clear drivers and consistently considering change management practices.

    The purpose of this storyboard is to provide a four-phased approach to organizational redesign.

    • Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure – Phases 1-4

    2. Communication Deck – A method to communicate the new organizational structure to critical stakeholders to gain buy-in and define the need.

    Use this templated Communication Deck to ensure impacted stakeholders have a clear understanding of why the new organizational structure is needed and what that structure will look like.

    • Organizational Design Communications Deck

    3. Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure Executive Summary Template – A template to secure executive leadership buy-in and financial support for the new organizational structure to be implemented.

    This template provides IT leaders with an opportunity to present their case for a change in organizational structure and roles to secure the funding and buy-in required to operate in the new structure.

    • Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure Executive Summary

    4. Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure Workbook – A method to document decisions made and rationale to support working through each phase of the process.

    This Workbook allows IT and business leadership to work through the steps required to complete the organizational redesign process and document key rationale for those decisions.

    • Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure Workbook

    5. Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure Operating Models and Capability Definitions – A tool that can be used to provide clarity on the different types of operating models that exist as well as the process definitions of each capability.

    Refer to this tool when working through the redesign process to better understand the operating model sketches and the capability definitions. Each capability has been tied back to core frameworks that exist within the information and technology space.

    • Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure Operating Models and Capability Definitions

    Infographic

    Workshop: Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Establish the Organizational Design Foundation

    The Purpose

    Lay the foundation for your organizational redesign by establishing a set of organizational design principles that will guide the redesign process.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Clearly articulate why this organizational redesign is needed and the implications the strategies and context will have on your structure.

    Activities

    1.1 Define the org design drivers.

    1.2 Document and define the implications of the business context.

    1.3 Align the structure to support the strategy.

    1.4 Establish guidelines to direct the organizational design process.

    Outputs

    Clear definition of the need to redesign the organizational structure

    Understanding of the business context implications on the organizational structure creation.

    Strategic impact of strategies on organizational design.

    Customized Design Principles to rationalize and guide the organizational design process.

    2 Create the Operating Model Sketch

    The Purpose

    Select and customize an operating model sketch that will accurately reflect the future state your organization is striving towards. Consider how capabilities will be sourced, gaps in delivery, and alignment.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A customized operating model sketch that informs what capabilities will make up your IT organization and how those capabilities will align to deliver value to your organization.

    Activities

    2.1 Augmented list of IT capabilities.

    2.2 Capability gap analysis

    2.3 Identified capabilities for outsourcing.

    2.4 Select a base operating model sketch.

    2.5 Customize the IT operating model sketch.

    Outputs

    Customized list of IT processes that make up your organization.

    Analysis of which capabilities require dedicated focus in order to meet goals.

    Definition of why capabilities will be outsourced and the method of outsourcing used to deliver the most value.

    Customized IT operating model reflecting sourcing, centralization, and intended delivery of value.

    3 Formalize the Organizational Structure

    The Purpose

    Translate the operating model sketch into a formal structure with defined functional teams, roles, reporting structure, and responsibilities.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A detailed organizational chart reflecting team structures, reporting structures, and role responsibilities.

    Activities

    3.1 Categorize your IT capabilities within your defined functional work units.

    3.2 Create a mandate statement for each work unit.

    3.3 Define roles inside the work units and assign accountability and responsibility.

    3.4 Finalize your organizational structure.

    Outputs

    Capabilities Organized Into Functional Groups

    Functional Work Unit Mandates

    Organizational Chart

    4 Plan for the Implementation & Change

    The Purpose

    Ensure the successful implementation of the new organizational structure by strategically communicating and involving stakeholders.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A clear plan of action on how to transition to the new structure, communicate the new organizational structure, and measure the effectiveness of the new structure.

    Activities

    4.1 Identify and mitigate key org design risks.

    4.2 Define the transition plan.

    4.3 Create the change communication message.

    4.4 Create a standard set of FAQs.

    4.5 Align sustainment metrics back to core drivers.

    Outputs

    Risk Mitigation Plan

    Change Communication Message

    Standard FAQs

    Implementation and sustainment metrics.

    Further reading

    Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure

    Designing an IT structure that will enable your strategic vision is not about an org chart – it’s about how you work.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    Structure enables strategy.

    The image contains a picture of Allison Straker.

    Allison Straker

    Research Director,

    Organizational Transformation

    The image contains a picture of Brittany Lutes.

    Brittany Lutes

    Senior Research Analyst,

    Organizational Transformation

    An organizational structure is much more than a chart with titles and names. It defines the way that the organization operates on a day-to-day basis to enable the successful delivery of the organization’s information and technology objectives. Moreover, organizational design sees beyond the people that might be performing a specific role. People and role titles will and often do change frequently. Those are the dynamic elements of organizational design that allow your organization to scale and meet specific objectives at defined points of time. Capabilities, on the other hand, are focused and related to specific IT processes.

    Redesigning an IT organizational structure can be a small or large change transformation for your organization. Create a structure that is equally mindful of the opportunities and the constraints that might exist and ensure it will drive the organization towards its vision with a successful implementation. If everyone understands why the IT organization needs to be structured that way, they are more likely to support and adopt the behaviors required to operate in the new structure.

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Your organization needs to reorganize itself because:

    • The current IT structure does not align to the strategic objectives of the organization.
    • There are inefficiencies in how the IT function is currently operating.
    • IT employees are unclear about their role and responsibilities, leading to inconsistencies.
    • New capabilities or a change in how the capabilities are organized is required to support the transformation.

    Common Obstacles

    Many organizations struggle when it comes redesigning their IT organizational structure because they:

    • Jump right into creating the new organizational chart.
    • Do not include the members of the IT leadership team in the changes.
    • Do not include the business in the changes.
    • Consider the context in which the change will take place and how to enable successful adoption.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    Successful IT organization redesign includes:

    • Understanding the drivers, context, and strategies that will inform the structure.
    • Remaining objective by focusing on capabilities over people or roles.
    • Identifying gaps in delivery, sourcing strategies, customers, and degrees of centralization.
    • Remembering that organizational design is a change initiative and will require buy-in.

    Info-Tech Insight

    A successful redesign requires a strong foundation and a plan to ensure successful adoption. Without these, the organizational chart has little meaning or value.

    Your challenge

    This research is designed to help organizations who are looking to:

    • Redesign the IT structure to align to the strategic objectives of the enterprise.
    • Increase the effectiveness in how the IT function is operating in the organization.
    • Provide clarity to employees around their roles and responsibilities.
    • Ensure there is an ability to support new IT capabilities and/or align capabilities to better support the direction of the organization.
    • Align the IT organization to support a business transformation such as becoming digitally enabled or engaging in M&A activities.

    Organizational design is a challenge for many IT and digital executives

    69% of digital executives surveyed indicated challenges related to structure, team silos, business-IT alignment, and required roles when executing on a digital strategy.

    Source: MIT Sloan, 2020

    Common obstacles

    These barriers make IT organizational redesign difficult to address for many organizations:

    • Confuse organizational design and organizational charts as the same thing.
    • Start with the organizational chart, not taking into consideration the foundational elements that will make that chart successful.
    • Fail to treat organizational redesign as a change management initiative and follow through with the change.
    • Exclude impacted or influential IT leaders and/or business stakeholders from the redesign process.
    • Leverage an operating model because it is trending.

    To overcome these barriers:

    • Understand the context in which the changes will take place.
    • Communicate the changes to those impacted to enable successful adoption and implementation of a new organizational structure.
    • Understand that organizational design is for more than just HR leaders now; IT executives should be driving this change.

    Succeed in Organizational Redesign

    75% The percentage of change efforts that fail.

    Source: TLNT, 2019

    55% The percentage of practitioners who identify how information flows between work units as a challenge for their organization.

    Source: Journal of Organizational Design, 2019

    Organizational design defined

    If your IT strategy is your map, your IT organizational design represents the optimal path to get there.

    IT organizational design refers to the process of aligning the organization’s structure, processes, metrics, and talent to the organization’s strategic plan to drive efficiency and effectiveness.

    Why is the right IT organizational design so critical to success?

    Adaptability is at the core of staying competitive today

    Structure is not just an organizational chart

    Organizational design is a never-ending process

    Digital technology and information transparency are driving organizations to reorganize around customer responsiveness. To remain relevant and competitive, your organizational design must be forward looking and ready to adapt to rapid pivots in technology or customer demand.

    The design of your organization dictates how roles function. If not aligned to the strategic direction, the structure will act as a bungee cord and pull the organization back toward its old strategic direction (ResearchGate.net, 2014). Structure supports strategy, but strategy also follows structure.

    Organization design is not a one-time project but a continuous, dynamic process of organizational self-learning and continuous improvement. Landing on the right operating model will provide a solid foundation to build upon as the organization adapts to new challenges and opportunities.

    Understand the organizational differences

    Organizational Design

    Organizational design the process in which you intentionally align the organizational structure to the strategy. It considers the way in which the organization should operate and purposely aligns to the enterprise vision. This process often considers centralization, sourcing, span of control, specialization, authority, and how those all impact or are impacted by the strategic goals.

    Operating Model

    Operating models provide an architectural blueprint of how IT capabilities are organized to deliver value. The placement of the capabilities can alter the culture, delivery of the strategic vision, governance model, team focus, role responsibility, and more. Operating model sketches should be foundational to the organizational design process, providing consistency through org chart changes.

    Organizational Structure

    The organizational structure is the chosen way of aligning the core processes to deliver. This can be strategic, or it can be ad hoc. We recommend you take a strategic approach unless ad hoc aligns to your culture and delivery method. A good organizational structure will include: “someone with authority to make the decisions, a division of labor and a set of rules by which the organization operates” (Bizfluent, 2019).

    Organizational Chart

    The capstone of this change initiative is an easy-to-read chart that visualizes the roles and reporting structure. Most organizations use this to depict where individuals fit into the organization and if there are vacancies. While this should be informed by the structure it does not necessarily depict workflows that will take place. Moreover, this is the output of the organizational design process.

    Sources: Bizfluent, 2019; Strategy & Business, 2015; SHRM, 2021

    The Technology Value Trinity

    The image contains a diagram of the Technology Value Trinity as described in the text below.

    All three elements of the Technology Value Trinity work in harmony to delivery business value and achieve strategic needs. As one changes, the others need to change as well.

    How do these three elements relate?

    • Digital and IT strategy tells you what you need to achieve to be successful.
    • Operating model and organizational design align resources to deliver on your strategy and priorities. This is done by strategically structuring IT capabilities in a way that enables the organizations vision and considers the context in which the structure will operate.
    • I&T governance is the confirmation of IT’s goals and strategy, which ensures the alignment of IT and business strategy and is the mechanism by which you continuously prioritize work to ensure that what is delivered is in line with the strategy.

    Too often strategy, organizational design, and governance are considered separate practices – strategies are defined without teams and resources to support. Structure must follow strategy.

    Info-Tech’s approach to organizational design

    Like a story, a strategy without a structure to deliver on it is simply words on paper.

    Books begin by setting the foundation of the story.

    Introduce your story by:

    • Defining the need(s) that are driving this initiative forward.
    • Introducing the business context in which the organizational redesign must take place.
    • Outlining what’s needed in the redesign to support the organization in reaching its strategic IT goals.

    The plot cannot thicken without the foundation. Your organizational structure and chart should not exist without one either.

    The steps to establish your organizational chart - with functional teams, reporting structure, roles, and responsibilities defined – cannot occur without a clear definition of goals, need, and context. An organizational chart alone won’t provide the insight required to obtain buy-in or realize the necessary changes.

    Conclude your story through change management and communication.

    Good stories don’t end without referencing what happened before. Use the literary technique of foreshadowing – your change management must be embedded throughout the organizational redesign process. This will increase the likelihood that the organizational structure can be communicated, implemented, and reinforced by stakeholders.

    Info-Tech uses a capability-based approach to help you design your organizational structure

    Once your IT strategy is defined, it is critical to identify the capabilities that are required to deliver on those strategic initiatives. Each initiative will require a combination of these capabilities that are only supported through the appropriate organization of roles, skills, and team structures.

    The image contains a diagram of the various services and blueprints that Info-Tech has to offer.

    Embed change management into organizational design

    Change management practices are needed from the onset to ensure the implementation of an organizational structure.

    For each phase of this blueprint, its important to consider change management. These are the points when you need to communicate the structure changes:

    • Phase 1: Begin to socialize the idea of new organizational structure with executive leadership and explain how it might be impactful to the context of the organization. For example, a new control, governance model, or sourcing approach could be considered.
    • Phase 2: The chosen operating model will influence your relationships with the business and can create/eliminate silos. Ensure IT and business leaders have insight into these possible changes and a willingness to move forward.
    • Phase 3: The new organizational structure could create or eliminate teams, reduce or increase role responsibilities, and create different reporting structures than before. It’s time to communicate these changes with those most impacted and be able to highlight the positive outcomes of the various changes.
    • Phase 4: Should consider the change management practices holistically. This includes the type of change and length of time to reach the end state, communication, addressing active resistors, acquiring the right skills, and measuring the success of the new structure and its adoption.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Do not undertake an organizational redesign initiative if you will not engage in change management practices that are required to ensure its successful adoption.

    Measure the value of the IT organizational redesign

    Given that the organizational redesign is intended to align with the overall vision and objectives of the business, many of the metrics that support its success will be tied to the business. Adapt the key performance indicators (KPIs) that the business is using to track its success and demonstrate how IT can enable the business and improve its ability to reach those targets.

    Strategic Resources

    The percentage of resources dedicated to strategic priorities and initiatives supported by IT operating model. While operational resources are necessary, ensuring people are allocating time to strategic initiatives as well will drive the business towards its goal state. Leverage Info-Tech’s IT Staffing Assessment diagnostic to benchmark your IT resource allocation.

    Business Satisfaction

    Assess the improvement in business satisfaction overall with IT year over year to ensure the new structure continues to drive satisfaction across all business functions. Leverage Info-Tech’s CIO Business Vision diagnostic to see how your IT organization is perceived.

    Role Clarity

    The degree of clarity that IT employees have around their role and its core responsibilities can lead to employee engagement and retention. Consider measuring this core job driver by leveraging Info-Tech’s Employee Engagement Program.

    Customer & User Satisfaction

    Measure customer satisfaction with technology-enabled business services or products and improvements in technology-enabled client acquisition or retention processes. Assess the percentage of users satisfied with the quality of IT service delivery and leverage Info-Tech’s End-User Satisfaction Survey to determine improvements.

    Info-Tech’s methodology for Redesigning Your IT Organization

    Phase

    1. Establish the Organizational Design Foundation

    2. Create the Operating Model Sketch

    3. Formalize the Organizational Structure

    4. Plan for Implementation and Change

    Phase Outcomes

    Lay the foundation for your organizational redesign by establishing a set of organizational design principles that will guide the redesign process.

    Select and customize an operating model sketch that will accurately reflect the future state your organization is striving towards. Consider how capabilities will be sourced, gaps in delivery, and alignment.

    Translate the operating model sketch into a formal structure with defined functional teams, roles, reporting structure, and responsibilities.

    Ensure the successful implementation of the new organizational structure by strategically communicating and involving stakeholders.

    Insight summary

    Overarching insight

    Organizational redesign processes focus on defining the ways in which you want to operate and deliver on your strategy – something an organizational chart will never be able to convey.

    Phase 1 insight

    Focus on your organization, not someone else's’. Benchmarking your organizational redesign to other organizations will not work. Other organizations have different strategies, drivers, and context.

    Phase 2 insight

    An operating model sketch that is customized to your organization’s specific situation and objectives will significantly increase the chances of creating a purposeful organizational structure.

    Phase 3 insight

    If you follow the steps outlined in the first three phases, creating your new organizational chart should be one of the fastest activities.

    Phase 4 insight

    Throughout the creation of a new organizational design structure, it is critical to involve the individuals and teams that will be impacted.

    Tactical insight

    You could have the best IT employees in the world, but if they aren’t structured well your organization will still fail in reaching its vision.

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:


    Communication Deck

    Communicate the changes to other key stakeholders such as peers, managers, and staff.

    Workbook

    As you work through each of the activities, use this workbook as a place to document decisions and rationale.

    Reference Deck

    Definitions for every capability, base operating model sketches, and sample organizational charts aligned to those operating models.

    Job Descriptions

    Key deliverable:

    Executive Presentation

    Leverage this presentation deck to gain executive buy-in for your new organizational structure.

    Blueprint benefits

    IT Benefits

    • Create an organizational structure that aligns to the strategic goals of IT and the business.
    • Provide IT employees with clarity on their roles and responsibilities to ensure the successful delivery of IT capabilities.
    • Highlight and sufficiently staff IT capabilities that are critical to the organization.
    • Define a sourcing strategy for IT capabilities.
    • Increase employee morale and empowerment.

    Business Benefits

    • IT can carry out the organization’s strategic mission and vision of all technical and digital initiatives.
    • Business has clarity on who and where to direct concerns or questions.
    • Reduce the likelihood of turnover costs as IT employees understand their roles and its importance.
    • Create a method to communicate how the organizational structure aligns with the strategic initiatives of IT.
    • Increase ability to innovate the organization.

    Executive Brief Case Study

    IT design needs to support organizational and business objectives, not just IT needs.

    INDUSTRY: Government

    SOURCE: Analyst Interviews and Working Sessions

    Situation

    IT was tasked with providing equality to the different business functions through the delivery of shared IT services. The government created a new IT organizational structure with a focus on two areas in particular: strategic and operational support capabilities.

    Challenge

    When creating the new IT structure, an understanding of the complex and differing needs of the business functions was not reflected in the shared services model.

    Outcome

    As a result, the new organizational structure for IT did not ensure adequate meeting of business needs. Only the operational support structure was successfully adopted by the organization as it aligned to the individual business objectives. The strategic capabilities aspect was not aligned to how the various business lines viewed themselves and their objectives, causing some partners to feel neglected.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs.

    DIY Toolkit

    "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

    Guided Implementation

    "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

    Workshop

    "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

    Consulting

    "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization. A typical GI is 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

    Phase 1

    Call #1: Define the process, understand the need, and create a plan of action.

    Phase 2

    Call #2: Define org. design drivers and business context.

    Call #3: Understand strategic influences and create customized design principles.

    Call #4: Customize, analyze gaps, and define sourcing strategy for IT capabilities.

    Call #5: Select and customize the IT operating model sketch.

    Phase 3

    Call #6: Establish functional work units and their mandates.

    Call #7: Translate the functional organizational chart to an operational organizational chart with defined roles.

    Phase 4

    Call #8: Consider risks and mitigation tactics associated with the new structure and select a transition plan.

    Call #9: Create your change message, FAQs, and metrics to support the implementation plan.

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Day 1

    Day 2

    Day 3

    Day 4

    Day 5

    Establish the Organizational Redesign Foundation

    Create the Operating Model Sketch

    Formalize the Organizational Structure

    Plan for Implementation and Change

    Next Steps and
    Wrap-Up (offsite)

    Activities

    1.1 Define the org. design drivers.

    1.2 Document and define the implications of the business context.

    1.3 Align the structure to support the strategy.

    1.4 Establish guidelines to direct the organizational design process.

    2.1 Augment list of IT capabilities.

    2.2 Analyze capability gaps.

    2.3 Identify capabilities for outsourcing.

    2.4 Select a base operating model sketch.

    2.5 Customize the IT operating model sketch.

    3.1 Categorize your IT capabilities within your defined functional work units.

    3.2 Create a mandate statement for each work unit.

    3.3 Define roles inside the work units and assign accountability and responsibility.

    3.4 Finalize your organizational structure.

    4.1 Identify and mitigate key org. design risks.

    4.2 Define the transition plan.

    4.3 Create the change communication message.

    4.4 Create a standard set of FAQs.

    4.5 Align sustainment metrics back to core drivers.

    5.1 Complete in-progress deliverables from previous four days.

    5.2 Set up review time for workshop deliverables and to discuss next steps.

    Deliverables

    1. Foundational components to the organizational design
    2. Customized design principles
    1. Heat mapped IT capabilities
    2. Defined outsourcing strategy
    3. Customized operating model
    1. Capabilities organized into functional groups
    2. Functional work unit mandates
    3. Organizational chart
    1. Risk mitigation plan
    2. Change communication message
    3. Standard FAQs
    4. Implementation and sustainment metrics
    1. Completed organizational design communications deck

    This blueprint is part one of a three-phase approach to organizational transformation

    PART 1: DESIGN

    PART 2: STRUCTURE

    PART 3: IMPLEMENT

    IT Organizational Architecture

    Organizational Sketch

    Organizational Structure

    Organizational Chart

    Transition Strategy

    Implement Structure

    1. Define the organizational design drivers, business context, and strategic alignment.

    2. Create customized design principles.

    3. Develop and customize a strategically aligned operating model sketch.

    4. Define the future-state work units.

    5. Create future-state work unit mandates.

    6. Define roles by work unit.

    7. Turn roles into jobs with clear capability accountabilities and responsibilities.

    8. Define reporting relationships between jobs.

    9. Assess options and select go-forward organizational sketch.

    11. Validate organizational sketch.

    12. Analyze workforce utilization.

    13. Define competency framework.

    14. Identify competencies required for jobs.

    15. Determine number of positions per job

    16. Conduct competency assessment.

    17. Assign staff to jobs.

    18. Build a workforce and staffing plan.

    19. Form an OD implementation team.

    20. Develop change vision.

    21. Build communication presentation.

    22. Identify and plan change projects.

    23. Develop organizational transition plan.

    24. Train managers to lead through change.

    25. Define and implement stakeholder engagement plan.

    26. Develop individual transition plans.

    27. Implement transition plans.

    Risk Management: Create, implement, and monitor risk management plan.

    HR Management: Develop job descriptions, conduct job evaluation, and develop compensation packages.

    Monitor and Sustain Stakeholder Engagement

    Phase 1

    Establish the Organizational Redesign Foundation

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    1.1 Define the organizational redesign driver(s)

    1.2 Create design principles based on the business context

    1.3a (Optional Exercise) Identify the capabilities from your value stream

    1.3b Identify the capabilities required to deliver on your strategies

    1.4 Finalize your list of design principles

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Leadership
    • Business Leadership

    Embed change management into the organizational design process

    Articulate the Why

    Changes are most successful when leaders clearly articulate the reason for the change – the rationale for the organizational redesign of the IT function. Providing both staff and executive leaders with an understanding for this change is imperative to its success. Despite the potential benefits to a redesign, they can be disruptive. If you are unable to answer the reason why, a redesign might not be the right initiative for your organization.

    Employees who understand the rationale behind decisions made by executive leaders are 3.6 times more likely to be engaged.

    McLean & Company Engagement Survey Database, 2021; N=123,188

    Info-Tech Insight

    Successful adoption of the new organizational design requires change management from the beginning. Start considering how you will convey the need for organizational change within your IT organization.

    The foundation of your organizational design brings together drivers, context, and strategic implications

    All aspects of your IT organization’s structure should be designed with the business’ context and strategic direction in mind.

    Use the following set of slides to extract the key components of your drivers, business context, and strategic direction to land on a future structure that aligns with the larger strategic direction.

    REDESIGN DRIVERS

    Driver(s) can originate from within the IT organization or externally. Ensuring the driver(s) are easy to understand and articulate will increase the successful adoption of the new organizational structure.

    BUSINESS CONTEXT

    Defines the interactions that occur throughout the organization and between the organization and external stakeholders. The context provides insight into the environment by both defining the purpose of the organization and the values that frame how it operates.

    STRATEGY IMPLICATIONS

    The IT strategy should be aligned to the overall business strategy, providing insight into the types of capabilities required to deliver on key IT initiatives.

    Understand IT’s desired maturity level, alignment with business expectations, and capabilities of IT

    Where are we today?

    Determine the current overall maturity level of the IT organization.

    Where do we want to be as an organization?

    Use the inputs from Info-Tech’s diagnostic data to determine where the organization should be after its reorganization.

    How can you leverage these results?

    The result of these diagnostics will inform the design principles that you’ll create in this phase.

    Leverage Info-Tech’s diagnostics to provide an understanding of critical areas your redesign can support:

    CIO Business Vision Diagnostic

    Management & Governance Diagnostic

    IT Staffing Diagnostic

    The image contains a picture of Info-Tech's maturity ladder.

    Consider the organizational design drivers

    Consider organizational redesign if …

    Effectiveness is a concern:

    • Insufficient resources to meet demand
    • Misalignment to IT (and business) strategies
    • Lack of clarity around role responsibility or accountability
    • IT functions operating in silos

    New capabilities are needed:

    • Organization is taking on new capabilities (digital, transformation, M&A)
    • Limited innovation
    • Gaps in the capabilities/services of IT
    • Other external environmental influences or changes in strategic direction

    Lack of business understanding

    • Misalignment between business and IT or how the organization does business
    • Unhappy customers (internal or external)

    Workforce challenges

    • Frequent turnover or inability to attract new skills
    • Low morale or employee empowerment

    These are not good enough reasons …

    • New IT leader looking to make a change for the sake of change or looking to make their legacy known
    • To work with specific/hand-picked leaders over others
    • To “shake things up” to see what happens
    • To force the organization to see IT differently

    Info-Tech Insight

    Avoid change for change’s sake. Restructuring could completely miss the root cause of the problem and merely create a series of new ones.

    1.1 Define the organizational redesign driver(s)

    1-2 hours

    1. As a group, brainstorm a list of current pain points or inhibitors in the current organizational structure, along with a set of opportunities that can be realized during your restructuring. Group these pain points and opportunities into themes.
    2. Leverage the pain points and opportunities to help further define why this initiative is something you’re driving towards. Consider how you would justify this initiative to different stakeholders in the organization.
    3. Questions to consider:
      1. Who is asking for this initiative?
      2. What are the primary benefits this is intended to produce?
      3. What are you optimizing for?
      4. What are we capable of achieving as an IT organization?
      5. Are the drivers coming from inside or outside the IT organization?
    4. Once you’ve determined the drivers for redesigning the IT organization, prioritize those drivers to ensure there is clarity when communicating why this is something you are focusing time and effort on.

    Input

    Output

    • Knowledge of the current organization
    • Pain point and opportunity themes
    • Defined drivers of the initiative

    Materials

    Participants
    • Whiteboard/flip charts (physical or electronic)
    • CIO
    • IT Leadership
    • Business Leadership

    Record the results in the Organizational Design Communications Deck

    Frame the organizational design within the context of the business

    Workforce Considerations:

    • How does your organization view its people resources? Does it have the capacity to increase the number of resources?
    • Do you currently have sufficient staff to meet the demands of the organization? Are you able to outsource resources when demand requires it?
    • Are the members of your IT organization unionized?
    • Is your workforce distributed? Do time zones impact how your team can collaborate?

    Business Context Consideration

    IT Org. Design Implication

    Culture:

    Culture, "the way we do things here,” has huge implications for executing strategy, driving engagement, and providing a guiding force that ensures organizations can work together toward common goals.

    • What is the culture of your organization? Is it cooperative, traditional, competitive, or innovative? (See appendix for details.)
    • Is this the target culture or a stepping-stone to the ideal culture?
    • How do the attitudes and behaviors of senior leaders in the organization reinforce this culture?

    Consider whether your organization’s culture can accept the operating model and organizational structure changes that make sense on paper.

    Certain cultures may lean toward particular operating models. For example, the demand-develop-service operating model may be supported by a cooperative culture. A traditional organization may lean towards the plan-build-run operating model.

    Ensure you have considered your current culture and added exercises to support it.

    If more capacity is required to accomplish the goals of the organization, you’ll want to prepare the leaders and explain the need in your design principles (to reflect training, upskilling, or outsourcing). Unionized environments require additional consideration. They may necessitate less structural changes, and so your principles will need to reflect other alternatives (hiring additional resources, creative options) to support organizational needs. Hybrid or fully remote workforces may impact how your organization interacts.

    Business context considerations

    Business Context Consideration

    IT Org. Design Implication

    Control & Governance:

    It is important to consider how your organization is governed, how decisions are made, and who has authority to make decisions.

    Strategy tells what you do, governance validates you’re doing the right things, and structure is how you execute on what’s been approved.

    • How do decisions get considered and approved in your organization? Are there specific influences that impact the priorities of the organization?
    • Are those in the organization willing to release decision-making authority around specific IT components?
    • Should the organization take on greater accountability for specific IT components?

    Organizations that require more controls may lean toward more centralized governance. Organizations that are looking to better enable and empower their divisions (products, groups, regions, etc.) may look to embed governance in these parts of the organization.

    For enterprise organizations, consider where IT has authority to make decisions (at the global, local, or system level). Appropriate governance needs to be built into the appropriate levels.

    Business context considerations

    Business Context Consideration

    IT Org. Design Implication

    Financial Constraints:

    Follow the money: You may need to align your IT organization according to the funding model.

    • Do partners come to IT with their budgets, or does IT have a central pool that they use to fund initiatives from all partners?
    • Are you able to request finances to support key initiatives/roles prioritized by the organization?
    • How is funding aligned: technology, data, digital, etc.? Is your organization business-line funded? Pooled?
    • Are there special products or digital transformation initiatives with resources outside IT? Product ownership funding?
    • How are regulatory changes funded?
    • Do you have the flexibility to adjust your budget throughout the fiscal year?
    • Are chargebacks in place? Are certain services charged back to business units

    Determine if you can move forward with a new model or if you can adjust your existing one to suit the financial constraints.

    If you have no say over your funding, pre-work may be required to build a business case to change your funding model before you look at your organizational structure – without this, you might have to rule out centralized and focus on hybrid/centralized. If you don’t control the budget (funding comes from your partners), it will be difficult to move to a more centralized model.

    A federated business organization may require additional IT governance to help prioritize across the different areas.

    Budgets for digital transformation might come from specific areas of the business, so resources may need to be aligned to support that. You’ll have to consider how you will work with those areas. This may also impact the roles that are going to exist within your IT organization – product owners or division owners might have more say.

    Business context considerations

    Business Context Consideration

    IT Org. Design Implication

    Business Perspective of IT:

    How the business perceives IT and how IT perceives itself are sometimes not aligned. Make sure the business’ goals for IT are well understood.

    • Are your business partners satisfied if IT is an order taker? Do they agree with the need for IT to become a business partner? Is IT expected to innovate and transform the organization?
    • Is what the business needs from IT the same as what IT is providing currently?

    Business Organization Structure and Growth:

    • How is the overall organization structured: Centralized/decentralized? Functionally aligned? Divided by regions?
    • In what areas does the organization prioritize investments?
    • Is the organization located across a diverse geography?
    • How big is the organization?
    • How is the organization growing and changing – by mergers and acquisitions?

    If IT needs to become more of a business partner, you’ll want to define what that means to your organization and focus on the capabilities to enable this. Educating your partners might also be required if you’re not aligned.

    For many organizations, this will include stakeholder management, innovation, and product/project management. If IT and its business partners are satisfied with an order-taker relationship, be prepared for the consequences of that.

    A global organization will require different IT needs than a single location. Specifically, site reliability engineering (SRE) or IT support services might be deployed in each region. Organizations growing through mergers and acquisitions can be structured differently depending on what the organization needs from the transaction. A more centralized organization may be appropriate if the driver is reuse for a more holistic approach, or the organization may need a more decentralized organization if the acquisitions need to be handled uniquely.

    Business context considerations

    Business Context Consideration

    IT Org. Design Implication

    Sourcing Strategy:

    • What are the drivers for sourcing? Staff augmentation, best practices, time zone support, or another reason?
    • What is your strategy for sourcing?
    • Does IT do all of your technology work, or are parts being done by business or other units?
    • Are we willing/able to outsource, and will that place us into non-compliance (regulations)?
    • Do you have vendor management capabilities in areas that you might outsource?
    • How cloud-driven is your organization?
    • Do you have global operations?

    Change Tolerance:

    • What’s your organization’s tolerance to make changes around organizational design?
    • What's the appetite and threshold for risk?

    Your sourcing strategy affects your organizational structure, including what capabilities you group together. Since managing outsourced capabilities also includes the need for vendor management, you’ll need to ensure there aren’t too many capabilities required per leader. Look closely at what can be achieved through your operating model if IT is done through other groups. Even though these groups may not be in scope of your organization changes, you need to ensure your IT team works with them effectively.

    If your organization is going to push back if there are big structural changes, consider whether the changes are truly necessary. It may be preferred to take baby steps – use an incremental versus big-bang approach.

    A need for incremental change might mean not making a major operating model change.

    Business context considerations

    Business Context Consideration

    IT Org Design. Implication

    Stakeholder Engagement & Focus:

    Identify who your customers and stakeholders are; clarify their needs and engagement model.

    • Who is the customer for IT products and services?
    • Is your customer internal? External? Both?
    • How much of a priority is customer focus for your organization?
    • How will IT interact with customers, end users, and partners? What is the engagement model desired?

    Business Vision, Services, and Products:

    Articulate what your organization was built to do.

    • What does the organization create or provide?
    • Are these products and services changing?
    • What are the most critical capabilities to your organization?
    • What makes your organization a success? What are critical success factors of the organization and how are they measuring this to determine success?

    For a customer or user focus, ensure capabilities related to understanding needs (stakeholder, UX, etc.) are prioritized. Hybrid, decentralized, or demand-develop-service models often have more of a focus on customer needs.

    Outsourcing the service desk might be a consideration if there’s a high demand for the service. A differentiation between these users might mean there’s a different demand for services.

    Think broadly in terms of your organizational vision, not just the tactical (widget creation). You might need to choose an operating model that supports vision.

    Do you need to align your organization with your value stream? Do you need to decentralize specific capabilities to enable prioritization of the key capabilities?

    1.2 Create design principles based on the business context

    1-3 hours

    1. Discuss the business context in which the IT organizational redesign will be taking place. Consider the following standard components of the business context; include other relevant components specific to your organization:
    • Culture
    • Workforce Considerations
    • Control and Governance
    • Financial Constraints
    • Business Perspective of IT
    • Business Organization Structure and Growth
    • Sourcing Strategy
    • Change Tolerance
    • Stakeholder Engagement and Focus
    • Business Vision, Services, and Products
  • Different stakeholders can have different perspectives on these questions. Be sure to consider a holistic approach and engage these individuals.
  • Capture your findings and use them to create initial design principles.
  • Input

    Output

    • Business context
    • Design principles reflecting how the business context influences the organizational redesign for IT

    Materials

    Participants

    • Whiteboard/flip charts (physical or electronic)
    • List of Context Questions
    • CIO
    • IT Leadership
    • Business Leadership

    Record the results in the Organizational Design Communications Deck

    How your IT organization is structured needs to reflect what it must be built to do

    Structure follows strategy – the way you design will impact what your organization can produce.

    Designing your IT organization requires an assessment of what it needs to be built to do:

    • What are the most critical capabilities that you need to deliver, and what does success look like in those different areas?
    • What are the most important things that you deliver overall in your organization?

    The IT organization must reflect your business needs:

    • Understand your value stream and/or your prioritized business goals.
    • Understand the impact of your strategies – these can include your overall digital strategy and/or your IT strategy

    1.3a (Optional Exercise) Identify the capabilities from your value stream

    1 hour

    1. Identify your organization’s value stream – what your overall organization needs to do from supplier to consumer to provide value. Leverage Info-Tech’s industry reference architectures if you haven’t identified your value stream, or use the Document Your Business Architecture blueprint to create yours.
    2. For each item in your value stream, list capabilities that are critical to your organizational strategy and IT needs to further invest in to enable growth.
    3. Also, list those that need further support, e.g. those that lead to long wait times, rework time, re-tooling, down-time, unnecessary processes, unvaluable processes.*
    4. Capture the IT capabilities required to enable your business in your draft principles.
    The image contains a screenshot of the above activity: Sampling Manufacturing Business Capabilities.
    Source: Six Sigma Study Guide, 2014
    Input Output
    • Organization’s value stream
    • List of IT capabilities required to support the IT strategy
    Materials Participants
    • Whiteboard/flip charts (physical or electronic)
    • CIO
    • IT Leadership
    • Business Leadership

    Record the results in the Organizational Design Communications Deck

    Your strategy will help you decide on your structure

    Ensure that you have a clear view of the goals and initiatives that are needed in your organization. Your IT, digital, business, and/or other strategies will surface the IT capabilities your organization needs to develop. Identify the goals of your organization and the initiatives that are required to deliver on them. What capabilities are required to enable these? These capabilities will need to be reflected in your design principles.

    Sample initiatives and capabilities from an organization’s strategies

    The image contains a screenshot of sample initiatives and capabilities from an organization's strategies.

    1.3b Identify the capabilities required to deliver on your strategies

    1 hour

    1. For each IT goal, there may be one or more initiatives that your organization will need to complete in order to be successful.
    2. Document those goals and infinitives. For each initiative, consider which core IT capabilities will be required to deliver on that goal. There might be one IT capability or there might be several.
    3. Identify which capabilities are being repeated across the different initiatives. Consider whether you are currently investing in those capabilities in your current organizational structure.
    4. Highlight the capabilities that require IT investment in your design principles.
    InputOutput
    • IT goals
    • IT initiatives
    • IT, digital, and business strategies
    • List of IT capabilities required to support the IT strategy
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard/flip charts (physical or electronic)
    • CIO
    • IT Leadership
    • Business Leadership

    Record the results in the Organizational Design Communications Deck

    Create your organizational design principles

    Your organizational design principles should define a set of loose rules that can be used to design your organizational structure to the specific needs of the work that needs to be done. These rules will guide you through the selection of the appropriate operating model that will meet your business needs. There are multiple ways you can hypothetically organize yourself to meet these needs, and the design principles will point you in the direction of which solution is the most appropriate as well as explain to your stakeholders the rationale behind organizing in a specific way. This foundational step is critical: one of the key reasons for organizational design failure is a lack of requisite time spent on the front-end understanding what is the best fit.

    The image contains an example of organizing design principles as described above.

    1.4 Finalize your list of design principles

    1-3 hours

    1. As a group, review the key outputs from your data collection exercises and their implications.
    2. Consider each of the previous exercises – where does your organization stand from a maturity perspective, what is driving the redesign, what is the business context, and what are the key IT capabilities requiring support. Identify how each will have an implication on your organizational redesign. Leverage this conversation to generate design principles.
    3. Vote on a finalized list of eight to ten design principles that will guide the selection of your operating model. Have everyone leave the meeting with these design principles so they can review them in more detail with their work units or functional areas and elicit any necessary feedback.
    4. Reconvene the group that was originally gathered to create the list of design principles and make any final amendments to the list as necessary. Use this opportunity to define exactly what each design principle means in the context of your organization so everyone has the same understanding of what this means moving forward.
    InputOutput
    • Organizational redesign drivers
    • Business context
    • IT strategy capabilities
    • Organizational design principles to help inform the selection of the right operating model sketch
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard/flip charts (physical or electronic)
    • CIO
    • IT Leadership
    • Business Leadership

    Record the results in the Organizational Design Communications Deck

    Example design principles

    Your eight to ten design principles will be those that are most relevant to YOUR organization. Below are samples that other organizations have created, but yours will not be the same.

    Design Principle

    Description

    Decision making

    We will centralize decision making around the prioritization of projects to ensure that the initiatives driving the most value for the organization as a whole are executed.

    Fit for purpose

    We will build and maintain fit-for-purpose solutions based on business units’ unique needs.

    Reduction of duplication

    We will reduce role and application duplication through centralized management of assets and clearly differentiated roles that allow individuals to focus within key capability areas.

    Managed security

    We will manage security enterprise-wide and implement compliance and security governance policies.

    Reuse > buy > build

    We will maximize reuse of existing assets by developing a centralized application portfolio management function and approach.

    Managed data

    We will create a specialized data office to provide data initiatives with the focus they need to enable our strategy.

    Design Principle

    Description

    Controlled technical diversity

    We will control the variety of technology platforms we use to allow for increased operability and reduction of costs.

    Innovation

    R&D and innovation are critical – we will build an innovation team into our structure to help us meet our digital agenda.

    Resourcing

    We will separate our project and maintenance activities to ensure each are given the dedicated support they need for success and to reduce the firefighting mentality.

    Customer centricity

    The new structure will be directly aligned with customer needs – we will have dedicated roles around relationship management, requirements, and strategic roadmapping for business units.

    Interoperability

    We will strengthen our enterprise architecture practices to best prepare for future mergers and acquisitions.

    Cloud services

    We will move toward hosted versus on-premises infrastructure solutions, retrain our data center team in cloud best practices, and build roles around effective vendor management, cloud provisioning, and architecture.

    Phase 2

    Create the Operating Model Sketch

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    2.1 Augment the capability list

    2.2 Heatmap capabilities to determine gaps in service

    2.3 Identify the target state of sourcing for your IT capabilities

    2.4 Review and select a base operating model sketch

    2.5 Customize the selected overlay to reflect the desired future state

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Leadership

    Embed change management into the organizational design process

    Gain Buy-In

    Obtain desire from stakeholders to move forward with organizational redesign initiative by involving them in the process to gain interest. This will provide the stakeholders with assurance that their concerns are being heard and will help them to understand the benefits that can be anticipated from the new organizational structure.

    “You’re more likely to get buy-in if you have good reason for the proposed changes – and the key is to emphasize the benefits of an organizational redesign.”

    Source: Lucid Chart

    Info-Tech Insight

    Just because people are aware does not mean they agree. Help different stakeholders understand how the change in the organizational structure is a benefit by specifically stating the benefit to them.

    Info-Tech uses capabilities in your organizational design

    We differentiate between capabilities and competencies.

    Capabilities

    • Capabilities are focused on the entire system that would be in place to satisfy a particular need. This includes the people who are competent to complete a specific task and also the technology, processes, and resources to deliver.
    • Capabilities work in a systematic way to deliver on specific need(s).
    • A functional area is often made up of one or more capabilities that support its ability to deliver on that function.
    • Focusing on capabilities rather then the individuals in organizational redesign enables a more objective and holistic view of what your organization is striving toward.

    Competencies

    • Competencies on the other hand are specific to an individual. It determines if the individual poses the skills or ability to perform.
    • Competencies are rooted in the term competent, which looks to understand if you are proficient enough to complete the specific task at hand.
    • Source: The People Development Magazine, 2020

    Use our IT capabilities to establish your IT organization design

    The image contains a diagram of the various services and blueprints that Info-Tech has to offer.

    2.1 Augment the capability list

    1-3 hours

    1. Using the capability list on the previous slide, go through each of the IT capabilities and remove any capabilities for which your IT organization is not responsible and/or accountable. Refer to the Operating Model and Capability Definition List for descriptions of each of the IT capabilities.
    2. Augment the language of specific capabilities that you feel are not directly reflective of what is being done within your organizational context or that you feel need to be changed to reflect more specifically how work is being done in your organization.
    • For example, some organizations may refer to their service desk capability as help desk or regional support. Use a descriptive term that most accurately reflects the terminology used inside the organization today.
  • Add any core capabilities from your organization that are missing from the provided IT capability list.
    • For example, organizations that leverage DevOps capabilities for their product development may desire to designate this in their operating model.
  • Document the rationale for decisions made for future reference.
  • Input Output
    • Baseline list of IT capabilities
    • IT capabilities required to support IT strategy
    • Customized list of IT capabilities
    Materials Participants
    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts
    • CIO
    • IT Leadership

    Record the results in the Organizational Design Workbook

    Gaps in delivery

    Identify areas that require greater focus and attention.

    Assess the gaps between where you currently are and where you need to be. Evaluate how critical and how effective your capabilities are:

    • Criticality = Importance
      • Try to focus on those which are highly critical to the organization.
      • These may be capabilities that have been identified in your strategies as areas to focus on.
    • Effectiveness = Performance
      • Identify those where the process or system is broken or ineffective, preventing the team from delivering on the capability.
      • Effectiveness could take into consideration how scalable, adaptable, or sustainable each capability is.
      • Focus on the capabilities that are low or medium in effectiveness but highly critical. Addressing the delivery of these capabilities will lead to the most positive outcomes in your organization.

    Remember to identify what allows the highly effective capabilities to perform at the capacity they are. Leverage this when increasing effectiveness elsewhere.

    High Gap

    There is little to no effectiveness (high gap) and the capability is highly important to your organization.

    Medium Gap

    Current ability is medium in effectiveness (medium gap) and there might be some priority for that capability in your organization.

    Low Gap

    Current ability is highly effective (low gap) and the capability is not necessarily a priority for your organization.

    2.2 Heatmap capabilities to determine gaps in delivery

    1-3 hours

    1. At this point, you should have identified what capabilities you need to have to deliver on your organization's goals and initiatives.
    2. Convene a group of the key stakeholders involved in the IT organizational design initiative.
    3. Review your IT capabilities and color each capability border according to the effectiveness and criticality of that capability, creating a heat map.
    • Green indicates current ability is highly effective (low gap) and the capability is not necessarily a priority for your organization.
    • Yellow indicates current ability is medium in effectiveness (medium gap) and there might be some priority for that capability in your organization.
    • Red indicates that there is little to no effectiveness (high gap) and the capability is highly important to your organization.
    Input Output
    • Selected capabilities from activity 2.1
    • Gap analysis in delivery of capabilities currently
    Materials Participants
    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts
    • CIO
    • IT Leadership

    Record the results in the Organizational Design Workbook

    Don’t forget the why: why are you considering outsourcing?

    There are a few different “types” of outsourcing:

    1. Competitive Advantage – Working with a third-party organization for the knowledge, insights, and best practices they can bring to your organization.
    2. Managed Service– The third party manages a capability or function for your organization.
    3. Staff Augmentation – Your organization brings in contractors and third-party organizations to fill specific skills gaps.

    Weigh which sourcing model(s) will best align with the needed capabilities to deliver effectively

    Insourcing

    Staff Augmentation

    Managed Service

    Competitive Advantage

    Description

    The organization maintains full responsibility for the management and delivery of the IT capability or service.

    Vendor provides specialized skills and enables the IT capability or service together with the organization to meet demand.

    Vendor completely manages the delivery of value for the IT capability, product or service.

    Vendor has unique skills, insights, and best practices that can be taught to staff to enable insourced capability and competency.

    Benefits

    • Retains in-house control over proprietary knowledge and assets that provide competitive or operational advantage.
    • Gains efficiency due to integration into the organization’s processes.
    • Provision of unique skills.
    • Addresses variation in demand for resources.
    • Labor cost savings.
    • Improves use of internal resources.
    • Improves effectiveness due to narrow specialization.
    • Labor cost savings.
    • Gain insights into aspects that could provide your organization with advantages over competitors.
    • Long-term labor cost savings.
    • Short-term outsourcing required.
    • Increase in-house competencies.

    Drawbacks

    • Quality of services/capabilities might not be as high due to lack of specialization.
    • No labor cost savings.
    • Potentially inefficient distribution of labor for the delivery of services/capabilities.
    • Potential conflicts in management or delivery of IT services and capabilities.
    • Negative impact on staff morale.
    • Limited control over services/capabilities.
    • Limited integration into organization’s processes.
    • Short-term labor expenses.
    • Requires a culture of continuous learning and improvement.

    Your strategy for outsourcing will vary with capability and capacity

    The image contains a diagram to show the Develop Vendor Management Capabilities, as described in the text below.

    Capability

    Capacity

    Outsourcing Model

    Low

    Low

    Your solutions may be with you for a long time, so it doesn’t matter whether it is a strategic decision to outsource development or if you are not able to attract the talent required to deliver in your market. Look for a studio, agency, or development shop that has a proven reputation for long-term partnership with its clients.

    Low

    High

    Your team has capacity but needs to develop new skills to be successful. Look for a studio, agency, or development shop that has a track record of developing its customers and delivering solutions.

    High

    Low

    Your organization knows what it is doing but is strapped for people. Look at “body shops” and recruiting agencies that will support short-term development contracts that can be converted to full-time staff or even a wholesale development shop acquisition.

    High

    High

    You have capability and capacity for delivering on your everyday demands but need to rise to the challenge of a significant, short-term rise in demand on a critical initiative. Look for a major system integrator or development shop with the specific expertise in the appropriate technology.

    Use these criteria to inform your right sourcing strategy

    Sourcing Criteria

    Description

    Determine whether you’ll outsource using these criteria

    1. Critical or commodity

    Determine whether the component to be sourced is critical to your organization or if it is a commodity. Commodity components, which are either not strategic in nature or related to planning functions, are likely candidates for outsourcing. Will you need to own the intellectual property created by the third party? Are you ok if they reuse that for their other clients?

    2. Readiness to outsource

    Identify how easy it would be to outsource a particular IT component. Consider factors such as knowledge transfer, workforce reassignment or reduction, and level of integration with other components.

    Vendor management readiness – ensuring that you have sufficient capabilities to manage vendors – should also be considered here.

    3. In-house capabilities

    Determine if you have the capability to deliver the IT solutions in-house. This will help you establish how easy it would be to insource an IT component.

    4. Ability to attract resources (internal vs. outsourced)

    Determine if the capability is one that is easily sourced with full-time, internal staff or if it is a specialty skill that is best left for a third-party to source.

    Determine your sourcing model using these criteria

    5. Cost

    Consider the total cost (investment and ongoing costs) of the delivery of the IT component for each of the potential sourcing models for a component.

    6. Quality

    Define the potential impact on the quality of the IT component being sourced by the possible sourcing models.

    7. Compliance

    Determine whether the sourcing model would fit with regulations in your industry. For example, a healthcare provider would only go for a cloud option if that provider is HIPAA compliant.

    8. Security

    Identify the extent to which each sourcing option would leave your organization open to security threats.

    9. Flexibility

    Determine the extent to which the sourcing model will allow your organization to scale up or down as demand changes.

    2.3 Identify capabilities that could be outsourced

    1-3 hours

    1. For each of the capabilities that will be in your future-state operating model, determine if it could be outsourced. Review the sourcing criteria available on the previous slide to help inform which sourcing strategy you will use for each capability.
    2. When looking to outsource or co-source capabilities, consider why that capability would be outsourced:
    • Competitive Advantage – Work with a third-party organization for the knowledge, insights, and best practices they can bring to your organization.
    • Managed Service – The third party manages a capability or function for your organization.
    • Staff Augmentation – Your organization brings in contractors and third-party organizations to fill specific skills gaps.
  • Place an asterisk (*) around the capabilities that will be leveraging one of the three previous sourcing options.
  • InputOutput
    • Customized IT capabilities
    • Sourcing strategy for each IT capability
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts
    • CIO
    • IT Leadership

    Record the results in the Organizational Design Workbook

    What is an operating model?

    Leverage a cohesive operating model throughout the organizational design process.

    An IT operating model sketch is a visual representation of the way your IT organization needs to be designed and the capabilities it requires to deliver on the business mission, strategic objectives, and technological ambitions. It ensures consistency of all elements in the organizational structure through a clear and coherent blueprint.

    The visual should be the optimization and alignment of the IT organization’s structure to deliver the capabilities required to achieve business goals. Additionally, it should clearly show the flow of work so that key stakeholders can understand where inputs flow in and outputs flow out of the IT organization. Investing time in the front end getting the operating model right is critical. This will give you a framework to rationalize future organizational changes, allowing you to be more iterative and your model to change as the business changes.

    The image contains an example of an operating model as described in the text above.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Every structure decision you make should be based on an identified need, not on a trend.Build your IT organization to enable the priorities of the organization.

    Each IT operating model is characterized by a variety of advantages and disadvantages

    Centralized

    Hybrid

    Decentralized

    Advantages
    • Maximum flexibility to allocate IT resources across business units.
    • Low-cost delivery model and greatest economies of scale.
    • Control and consistency offers opportunity for technological rationalization and standardization and volume purchasing at the highest degree.
    • Centralizes processes and services that require consistency across the organization.
    • Decentralizes processes and services that need to be responsive to local market conditions.
    • Eliminates duplication and redundancy by allowing effective use of common resources (e.g. shared services, standardization).
    • Goals are aligned to the distinct business units or functions.
    • Greater flexibility and more timely delivery of services.
    • Development resources are highly knowledgeable about business-unit-specific applications.
    • Business unit has greatest control over IT resources and can set and change priorities as needed.

    Disadvantages

    • Less able to respond quickly to local requirements with flexibility.
    • IT can be resistant to change and unwilling to address the unique needs of end users.
    • Business units can be frustrated by perception of lack of control over resources.
    • Development of special business knowledge can be limited.
    • Requires the most disciplined governance structure and the unwavering commitment of the business; therefore, it can be the most difficult to maintain.
    • Requires new processes as pooled resources must be staffed to approved projects.
    • Redundancies, conflicts, and incompatible technologies can result from business units having differentiated services and applications – increasing cost.
    • Ability to share IT resources is low due to lack of common approaches.
    • Lack of integration limits the communication of data between businesses and reduces common reporting.

    Decentralization can take many forms – define what it means to your organization

    Decentralization can take a number of different forms depending on the products the organization supports and how the organization is geographically distributed. Use the following set of explanations to understand the different types of decentralization possible and when they may make sense for supporting your organizational objectives.

    Line of Business

    Decentralization by lines of business (LoB) aligns decision making with business operating units based on related functions or value streams. Localized priorities focus the decision making from the CIO or IT leadership team. This form of decentralization is beneficial in settings where each line of business has a unique set of products or services that require specific expertise or flexible resourcing staffing between the teams.

    Product Line

    Decentralization by product line organizes your team into operationally aligned product families to improve delivery throughput, quality, and resource flexibility within the family. By adopting this approach, you create stable product teams with the right balance between flexibility and resource sharing. This reinforces value delivery and alignment to enterprise goals within the product lines.

    Geographical

    Geographical decentralization reflects a shift from centralized to regional influences. When teams are in different locations, they can experience a number of roadblocks to effective communication (e.g. time zones, regulatory differences in different countries) that may necessitate separating those groups in the organizational structure, so they have the autonomy needed to make critical decisions.

    Functional

    Functional decentralization allows the IT organization to be separated by specialty areas. Organizations structured by functional specialization can often be organized into shared service teams or centers of excellence whereby people are grouped based on their technical, domain, or functional area within IT (Applications, Data, Infrastructure, Security, etc.). This allows people to develop specialized knowledge and skills but can also reinforce silos between teams.

    2.4 Review and select a base operating model sketch

    1 hour

    1. Review the set of base operating model sketches available on the following slides.
    2. For each operating model sketch, there are benefits and risks to be considered. Make an informed selection by understanding the risks that your organization might be taking on by adopting that particular operating model.
    3. If at any point in the selection process the group is unsure about which operating model will be the right fit, refer back to your design principles established in activity 1.4. These should guide you in the selection of the right operating model and eliminate those which will not serve the organization.
    InputOutput
    • Organizational design principles
    • Customized list of IT capabilities
    • Operating model sketch examples
    • Selected operating model sketch
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts
    • CIO
    • IT Leadership

    Record the results in the Organizational Design Workbook

    Centralized Operating Model #1: Plan-Build-Run

    I want to…

    • Establish a formalized governance process that takes direction from the organization on which initiatives should be prioritized by IT.
    • Ensure there is a clear separation between teams that are involved in strategic planning, building solutions, and delivering operational support.
    • Be able to plan long term by understanding the initiatives that are coming down the pipeline and aligning to an infrequent budgeting plan.

    BENEFITS

    • Effective at implementing long-term plans efficiently; separates maintenance and projects to allow each to have the appropriate focus.
    • More oversight over financials; better suited for fixed budgets.
    • Works across centralized technology domains to better align with the business’ strategic objectives – allows for a top-down approach to decision making.
    • Allows for economies of scale and expertise pooling to improve IT’s efficiency.
    • Well-suited for a project-driven environment that employs waterfall or a hybrid project management methodology that is less iterative.

    RISKS

    • Creates artificial silos between the build (developers) and run (operations staff) teams, as both teams focus on their own responsibilities and often fail to see the bigger picture.
    • Miss opportunities to deliver value to the organization or innovate due to an inability to support unpredictable/shifting project demands as decision making is centralized in the plan function.
    • The portfolio of initiatives being pursued is often determined before requirements analysis takes place, meaning the initiative might be solving the wrong need or problem.
    • Depends on strong hand-off processes to be defined and strong knowledge transfer from build to run functions in order to be successful.
    The image contains an example of a Centralized Operating Model: Plan-Build-Run.

    Centralized Operating Model #2: Demand-Develop-Service

    I want to…

    • Listen to the business to understand new initiatives or service enhancements being requested.
    • Enable development and operations to work together to seamlessly deliver in a DevOps culture.
    • Govern and confirm that initiatives being requested by the business are still aligned to IT’s overarching strategy and roadmap before prioritizing those initiatives.

    BENEFITS

    • Aligns well with an end-to-end services model; constant attention to customer demand and service supply.
    • Centralizes service operations under one functional area to serve shared needs across lines of business.
    • Allows for economies of scale and expertise pooling to improve IT’s efficiency.
    • Elevates sourcing and vendor management as its own strategic function; lends well to managed service and digital initiatives.
    • Development and operations housed together; lends well to DevOps-related initiatives and reduces the silos between these two core groups.

    RISKS

    • IT prioritizes the initiatives it thinks are a priority to the business based on how well it establishes good stakeholder relations and communications.
    • Depends on good governance to prevent enhancements and demands from being prioritized without approval from those with accountability and authority.
    • This model thrives in a DevOps culture but does not mean it ensures your organization is a “DevOps” organization. Be sure you're encouraging the right behaviors and attitudes.

    The image contains an example of a Centralized Operating Model: Demand, Develop, Service.

    Hybrid Operating Model #1: LOB/Functional Aligned

    I want to…

    • Better understand the various needs of the organization to align IT priorities and ensure the right services can be delivered.
    • Keep all IT decisions centralized to ensure they align with the overarching strategy and roadmap that IT has set.
    • Organize your shared services in a strategic manner that enables delivery of those services in a way that fits the culture of the organization and the desired method of operating.

    BENEFITS

    • Best of both worlds of centralization and decentralization; attempts to channel benefits from both centralized and decentralized models.
    • Embeds key IT functions that require business knowledge within functional areas, allowing for critical feedback and the ability to understand those business needs.
    • Places IT in a position to not just be “order takers” but to be more involved with the different business units and promote the value of IT.
    • Achieves economies of scale where necessary through the delivery of shared services that can be requested by the function.
    • Shared services can be organized to deliver in the best way that suits the organization.

    RISKS

    • Different business units may bypass governance to get their specific needs met by functions – to alleviate this, IT must have strong governance and prioritize amongst demand.
    • Decentralized role can be viewed as an order taker by the business if not properly embedded and matured.
    • No guaranteed synergy and integration across functions; requires strong communication, collaboration, and steering.
    • Cannot meet every business unit’s needs – can cause tension from varying effectiveness of the IT functions.

    The image contains an example of a Hybrid Operating Model: LOB/Functional Aligned.

    Hybrid Model #2: Product-Aligned Operating Model

    I want to…

    • Align my IT organization into core products (services) that IT provides to the organization and establish a relationship with those in the organization that have alignment to that product.
    • Have roles dedicated to the lifecycle of their product and ensure the product can continuously deliver value to the organization.
    • Maintain centralized set of standards as it applies to overall IT strategy, security, and architecture to ensure consistency across products and reduce silos.

    BENEFITS

    • Focus is on the full lifecycle of a product – takes a strategic view of how technology enables the organization.
    • Promotes centralized backlog around a specific value creator, rather than a traditional project focus that is more transactional.
    • Dedicated teams around the product family ensure you have all of the resources required to deliver on your product roadmap.
    • Reduces barriers between IT and business stakeholders; focuses on technology as a key strategic enabler.
    • Delivery is largely done through frequent releases that can deliver value.

    RISKS

    • If there is little or no business involvement, it could prevent IT from truly understanding business demand and prioritizing the wrong work.
    • A lack of formal governance can create silos between the IT products, causing duplication of efforts, missed opportunities for collaboration, and redundancies in application or vendor contracts.
    • Members of each product can interpret the definition of standards (e.g. architecture, security) differently.

    The image contains an example of the Hybrid Operating Model: Product-Aligned Operating Model.

    Hybrid Operating Model #3: Service-Aligned Operating Model

    I want to…

    • Decentralize the IT organization by the various IT services it offers to the organization while remaining centralized with IT strategy, governance, security and operational services.
    • Ensure IT services are defined and people resources are aligned to deliver on those services.
    • Enable each of IT’s services to have the autonomy to understand the business needs and be able to manage the operational and new project initiatives with a dedicated service owner or business relationship manager.

    BENEFITS

    • Strong enabler of agility as each service has the autonomy to make decisions around operational work versus project work based on their understanding of the business demand.
    • Individuals in similar roles that are decentralized across services are given coaching to provide common direction.
    • Allows teams to efficiently scale with service demand.
    • This is a structurally baseline DevOps model. Each group will have services built within that have their own dedicated teams that will handle the full gambit of responsibilities, from new features to enhancements and maintenance.

    RISKS

    • Service owners require a method to collaborate to avoid duplication of efforts or projects that conflict with the efforts of other IT services.
    • May result in excessive cost through role redundancies across different services, as each will focus on components like integration, stakeholder management, project management, and user experiences.
    • Silos cause a high degree of specialization, making it more difficult for team members to imagine moving to another defined service group, limiting potential career advancement opportunities.
    • The level of complex knowledge required by shared services (e.g. help desk) is often beyond what they can provide, causing them to rely on and escalate to defined service groups more than with other operating models.

    The image contains an example of the Hybrid Operating Model: Service-Aligned Operating Model.

    Decentralized Model: Division Decentralization (LoB, Geography, Function, Product)

    I want to…

    • Decentralize the IT organization to enable greater autonomy within specific groups that have differing customer demands and levels of support.
    • Maintain a standard level of service that can be provided by IT for all divisions.
    • Ensure each division has access to critical data and reports that supports informed decision making.

    BENEFITS

    • Organization around functions allows for diversity in approach in how areas are run to best serve a specific business unit’s needs.
    • Each functional line exists largely independently, with full capacity and control to deliver service at the committed SLAs.
    • Highly responsive to shifting needs and demands with direct connection to customers and all stages of the solution development lifecycle.
    • Accelerates decision making by delegating authority lower into the function.
    • Promotes a flatter organization with less hierarchy and more direct communication with the CIO.

    RISKS

    • Requires risk and security to be centralized and have oversight of each division to prevent the decisions of one division from negatively impacting other divisions or the enterprise.
    • Less synergy and integration across what different lines of business are doing can result in redundancies and unnecessary complexity.
    • Higher overall cost to the IT group due to role and technology duplication across different divisions.
    • It will be difficult to centralize aspects of IT in the future, as divisions adopt to a culture of IT autonomy.

    The image contains an example of the Decentralized Model: Division Decentralization.

    Enterprise Model: Multi-Modal

    I want to…

    • Have an organizational structure that leverages several different operating models based on the needs and requirements of the different divisions.
    • Provide autonomy and authority to the different divisions so they can make informed and necessary changes as they see fit without seeking approval from a centralized IT group.
    • Support the different initiatives the enterprise is focused on delivering and ensure the right model is adopted based on those initiatives.

    BENEFITS

    • Allows for the organization to work in ways that best support individual areas; for example, areas that support legacy systems can be supported through traditional operating models while areas that support digital transformations may be supported through more flexible operating models.
    • Enables a specialization of knowledge related to each division.

    RISKS

    • Inconsistency across the organization can lead to confusion on how the organization should operate.
    • Parts of the organization that work in more traditional operating models may feel limited in career growth and innovation.
    • Cross-division initiatives may require greater oversight and a method to enable operations between the different focus areas.

    The image contains an example of the Enterprise Model: Multi-Modal.

    Create enabling teams that bridge your divisions

    The following bridges might be necessary to augment your divisions:

    • Specialized augmentation: There might not be a sufficient number of resources to support each division. These teams will be leveraged across the divisions; this means that the capabilities needed for each division will exist in this bridge team, rather than in the division.
    • Centers of Excellence: Capabilities that exist within divisions can benefit from shared knowledge across the enterprise. Your organization might set up centers of excellence to support best practices in capabilities organization wide. These are Forums in the unfix model, or communities of practice and support capability development rather than deliveries of each division.
    • Facilitation teams might be required to support divisions through coaching. This might include Agile or other coaches who can help teams adopt practices and embed learnings.
    • Holistic teams provide an enterprise view as they work with various divisions. This can include capabilities like user experience, which can benefit from the holistic perspective rather than a siloed one. People with these capabilities augment the divisions on an as-needed basis.
    The image contains a diagram to demonstrate the use of bridges on divisions.

    2.5 Customize the selected sketch to reflect the desired future state

    1-3 hours

    1. Using the baseline operating model sketch, walk through each of the IT capabilities. Based on the outputs from activity 2.1:
      1. Remove any capabilities for which your IT organization is not responsible and/or accountable.
      2. Augment the language of specific capabilities that you feel are not directly reflective of what is being done within your organizational context or that you feel need to be changed to reflect more specifically how work is being done in your organization.
      3. Add any core capabilities from your organization that are missing from the provided IT capability list.
    2. Move capabilities to the right places in the operating model to reflect how each of the core IT processes should interact with one another.
    3. Add bridges as needed to support the divisions in your organization. Identify which capabilities will sit in these bridges and define how they will enable the operating model sketch to deliver.
    InputOutput
    • Selected base operating model sketch
    • Customized list of IT capabilities
    • Understanding of outsourcing and gaps
    • Customized operating model sketch
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Operating model sketch examples
    • CIO
    • IT Leadership

    Record the results in the Organizational Design Workbook

    Document the final operating model sketch in the Communications Deck

    Phase 3

    Formalize the Organizational Structure

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    3.1 Create work units

    3.2 Create work unit mandates

    3.3 Define roles inside the work units

    3.4 Finalize the organizational chart

    3.5 Identify and mitigate key risks

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Leadership
    • Business Leadership

    Embed change management into the organizational design process

    Enable adoption of the new structure.

    You don’t have to make the change in one big bang. You can adopt alternative transition plans such as increments or pilots. This allows people to see the benefits of why you are undergoing the change, allows the change message to be repeated and applied to the individuals impacted, and provides people with time to understand their role in making the new organizational structure successful.

    “Transformational change can be invigorating for some employees but also highly disruptive and stressful for others.”

    Source: OpenStax, 2019

    Info-Tech Insight

    Without considering the individual impact of the new organizational structure on each of your employees, the change will undoubtedly fail in meeting its intended goals and your organization will likely fall back into old structured habits.

    Use a top-down approach to build your target-state IT organizational sketch

    The organizational sketch is the outline of the organization that encompasses the work units and depicts the relationships among them. It’s important that you create the structure that’s right for your organization, not one that simply fits with your current staff’s skills and knowledge. This is why Info-Tech encourages you to use your operating model as a mode of guidance for structuring your future-state organizational sketch.

    The organizational sketch is made up of unique work units. Work units are the foundational building blocks on which you will define the work that IT needs to get done. The number of work units you require and their names will not match your operating model one to one. Certain functional areas will need to be broken down into smaller work units to ensure appropriate leadership and span of control.

    Use your customized operating model to build your work units

    WHAT ARE WORK UNITS?

    A work unit is a functional group or division that has a discrete set of processes or capabilities that it is responsible for, which don’t overlap with any others. Your customized list of IT capabilities will form the building blocks of your work units. Step one in the process of building your structure is grouping IT capabilities together that are similar or that need to be done in concert in the case of more complex work products. The second step is to iterate on these work units based on the organizational design principles from Phase 1 to ensure that the future-state structure is aligned with enablement of the organization’s objectives.

    Work Unit Examples

    Here is a list of example work units you can use to brainstorm what your organization’s could look like. Some of these overlap in functionality but should provide a strong starting point and hint at some potential alternatives to your current way of organizing.

    • Office of the CIO
    • Strategy and Architecture
    • Architecture and Design
    • Business Relationship Management
    • Projection and Portfolio Management
    • Solution Development
    • Solution Delivery
    • DevOps
    • Infrastructure and Operations
    • Enterprise Information Security
    • Security, Risk & Compliance
    • Data and Analytics

    Example of work units

    The image contains an example of work units.

    3.1 Create functional work units

    1-3 hours

    1. Using a whiteboard or large tabletop, list each capability from your operating model on a sticky note and recreate your operating model. Use one color for centralized activities and a second color for decentralized activities.
    2. With the group of key IT stakeholders, review the operating model and any important definitions and rationale for decisions made.
    3. Starting with your centralized capabilities, review each in turn and begin to form logical groups of compatible capabilities. Review the decentralized capabilities and repeat the process, writing additional sticky notes for capabilities that will be repeated in decentralized units.
    4. Note: Not all capabilities need to be grouped. If you believe that a capability has a high enough priority, has a lot of work, or is significantly divergent from others put this capability by itself.
    5. Define a working title for each new work unit, and discuss the pros and cons of the model. Ensure the work units still align with the operating model and make any changes to the operating model needed.
    6. Review your design principles and ensure that they are aligned with your new work units.
    InputOutput
    • Organizational business objectives
    • Customized operating model
    • Defined work units
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts
    • CIO
    • IT Leadership
    • Business Leadership

    Record the results in the Organizational Design Workbook

    Group formation

    Understand the impact of the functional groups you create.

    A group consists of two or more individuals who are working toward a common goal. Group formation is how those individuals are organized to deliver on that common goal. It should take into consideration the levels of hierarchy in your structure, the level of focus you give to processes, and where power is dispersed within your organizational design.

    Importance: Balance highly important capabilities with lower priority capabilities

    Specialization: The scope of each role will be influenced by specialized knowledge and a dedicated leader

    Effectiveness: Group capabilities that increase their efficacy

    Span of Control: Identify the right number of employees reporting to a single leader

    Choose the degree of specialization required

    Be mindful of the number of hats you’re placing on any one role.

    • Specialization exists when individuals in an organization are dedicated to performing specific tasks associated with a common goal and requiring a particular skill set. Aligning the competencies required to carry out the specific tasks based on the degree of complexity associated with those tasks ensures the right people and number of people can be assigned.
    • When people are organized by their specialties, it reduces the likelihood of task switching, reduces the time spent training or cross-training, and increases the focus employees can provide to their dedicated area of specialty.
    • There are disadvantages associated with aligning teams by their specialization, such as becoming bored and seeing the tasks they are performing as monotonous. Specialization doesn’t come without its problems. Monitor employee motivation

    Info-Tech Insight

    Smaller organizations will require less specialization simply out of necessity. To function and deliver on critical processes, some people might be asked to wear several hats.

    Avoid overloading the cognitive capacity of employees

    Cognitive load refers to the number of responsibilities that one can successfully take on.

    • When employees are assigned an appropriate number of responsibilities this leads to:
      • Engaged employees
      • Less task switching
      • Increased effectiveness on assigned responsibilities
      • Reduced bottlenecks
    • While this cognitive load can differ from employee to employee, when assigning role responsibilities, ensure each role isn’t being overburdened and spreading their focus thin.
    • Moreover, capable does not equal successful. Just because someone has the capability to take on more responsibilities doesn’t mean they will be successful.
    • Leverage the cognitive load being placed on your team to help create boundaries between teams and demonstrate clear role expectations.
    Source: IT Revolution, 2021

    Info-Tech Insight

    When you say you are looking for a team that is a “jack of all trades,” you are likely exceeding appropriate cognitive loads for your staff and losing productivity to task switching.

    Factors to consider for span of control

    Too many and too few direct reports have negative impacts on the organization.

    Complexity: More complex work should have fewer direct reports. This often means the leader will need to provide lots of support, even engaging in the work directly at times.

    Demand: Dynamic shifts in demand require more managerial involvement and therefore should have a smaller span of control. Especially if this demand is to support a 24/7 operation.

    Competency Level: Skilled employees should require less hands-on assistance and will be in a better position to support the business as a member of a larger team than those who are new to the role.

    Purpose: Strategic leaders are less involved in the day-to-day operations of their teams, while operational leaders tend to provide hands-on support, specifically when short-staffed.

    Group formation will influence communication structure

    Pick your poison…

    It’s important to understand the impacts that team design has on your services and products. The solutions that a team is capable of producing is highly dependent on how teams are structured. For example, Conway’s Law tells us that small distributed software delivery teams are more likely to produce modular service architecture, where large collocated teams are better able to create monolithic architecture. This doesn’t just apply to software delivery but also other products and services that IT creates. Note that small distributed teams are not the only way to produce quality products as they can create their own silos.

    Sources: Forbes, 2017

    Create mandates for each of your identified work units

    WHAT ARE WORK UNIT MANDATES?

    The work unit mandate should provide a quick overview of the work unit and be clear enough that any reader can understand why the work unit exists, what it does, and what it is accountable for.

    Each work unit will have a unique mandate. Each mandate should be distinguishable enough from your other work units to make it clear why the work is grouped in this specific way, rather than an alternative option. The mandate will vary by organization based on the agreed upon work units, design archetype, and priorities.

    Don’t just adopt an example mandate from another organization or continue use of the organization’s pre-existing mandate – take the time to ensure it accurately depicts what that group is doing so that its value-added activities are clear to the larger organization.

    Examples of Work Unit Mandates

    The Office of the CIO will be a strategic enabler of the IT organization, driving IT organizational performance through improved IT management and governance. A central priority of the Office of the CIO is to ensure that IT is able to respond to evolving environments and challenges through strategic foresight and a centralized view of what is best for the organization.

    The Project Management Office will provide standardized and effective project management practices across the IT landscape, including an identified project management methodology, tools and resources, project prioritization, and all steps from project initiation through to evaluation, as well as education and development for project managers across IT.

    The Solutions Development Group will be responsible for the high-quality development and delivery of new solutions and improvements and the production of customized business reports. Through this function, IT will have improved agility to respond to new initiatives and will be able to deliver high-quality services and insights in a consistent manner.

    3.2 Create work unit mandates

    1-3 hours

    1. Break into teams of three to four people and assign an equal number of work units to each team.
    2. Have each team create a set of statements that describe the overall purpose of that working group. Each mandate statement should:
    • Be clear enough that any reader can understand.
    • Explain why the work unit exists, what it does, and what it is accountable for.
    • Be distinguishable enough from your other work units to make it clear why the work is grouped in this specific way, rather than an alternative option.
  • Have each group present their work unit mandates and make changes wherever necessary.
  • InputOutput
    • Work units
    • Work unit mandates
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts
    • CIO
    • IT Leadership
    • Business Leadership

    Record the results in the Organizational Design Workbook

    Identify the key roles and responsibilities for the target IT organization

    Now that you have identified the main units of work in the target IT organization, it is time to identify the roles that will perform that work. At the end of this step, the key roles will be identified, the purpose statement will be built, and accountability and responsibility for roles will be clearly defined. Make sure that accountability for each task is assigned to one role only. If there are challenges with a role, change the role to address them (e.g. split roles or shift responsibilities).

    The image contains an example of two work units: Enterprise Architecture and PMO. It then lists the roles of the two work units.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Do not bias your role design by focusing on your existing staff’s competencies. If you begin to focus on your existing team members, you run the risk of artificially narrowing the scope of work or skewing the responsibilities of individuals based on the way it is, rather than the way it should be.

    3.3 Define roles inside the work units

    1-3 hours

    1. Select a work unit from the organizational sketch.
    2. Describe the most senior role in that work unit by asking, “what would the leader of this group be accountable or responsible for?” Define this role and move the capabilities they will be accountable for under that leader. Repeat this activity for the capabilities this leader would be responsible for.
    3. Continue to define each role that will be required in that work unit to deliver or provide oversight related to those capabilities.
    4. Continue until key roles are identified and the capabilities each role will be accountable or responsible for are clarified.
    5. Remember, only one role can have accountability for each capability but several can have responsibility.
    6. For each role, use the list of capabilities that the position will be accountable, responsible, or accountable and responsible for to create a job description. Leverage your own internal job descriptions or visit our Job Descriptions page.
    InputOutput
    • Work units
    • Work unit mandates
    • Responsibilities
    • Accountabilities
    • Roles with clarified responsibilities and accountabilities
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts
    • CIO
    • IT Leadership
    • Business Leadership

    Record the results in the Organizational Design Workbook

    Delivery model for product or solution development

    Can add additional complexity or clarity

    • Certain organizational structures will require a specific type of resourcing model to meet expectations and deliver on the development or sustainment of core products and solutions.
    • There are four common methods that we see in IT organizations:
      • Functional Roles: Completed work is handed off from functional team to functional team sequentially as outlined in the organization’s SDLC.
      • Shared Service & Resource Pools (Matrix): Resources are pulled whenever the work requires specific skills or pushed to areas where product demand is high.
      • Product or System: Work is directly sent to the teams who are directly managing the product or directly supporting the requestor.
      • Skills & Competencies: Work is directly sent to the teams who have the IT and business skills and competencies to complete the work.
    • Each of these will lead to a difference in how the functional team is skilled. They could have a great understanding of their customer, the product, the solution, or their service.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Despite popular belief, there is no such thing as the Spotify model, and organizations that structured themselves based on the original Spotify drawing might be missing out on key opportunities to obtain productivity from employees.

    Sources: Indeed, 2020; Agility Scales

    There can be different patterns to structure and resource your product delivery teams

    The primary goal of any product delivery team is to improve the delivery of value for customers and the business based on your product definition and each product’s demand. Each organization will have different priorities and constraints, so your team structure may take on a combination of patterns or may take on one pattern and then transform into another.

    Delivery Team Structure Patterns

    How Are Resources and Work Allocated?

    Functional Roles

    Teams are divided by functional responsibilities (e.g. developers, testers, business analysts, operations, help desk) and arranged according to their placement in the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

    Completed work is handed off from team to team sequentially as outlined in the organization’s SDLC.

    Shared Service and Resource Pools

    Teams are created by pulling the necessary resources from pools (e.g. developers, testers, business analysts, operations, help desk).

    Resources are pulled whenever the work requires specific skills or pushed to areas where product demand is high.

    Product or System

    Teams are dedicated to the development, support, and management of specific products or systems.

    Work is directly sent to the teams who are directly managing the product or directly supporting the requester.

    Skills and Competencies

    Teams are grouped based on skills and competencies related to technology (e.g. Java, mobile, web) or familiarity with business capabilities (e.g. HR, Finance).

    Work is directly sent to the teams who have the IT and business skills and competencies to complete the work.

    Delivery teams will be structured according to resource and development needs

    Functional Roles

    Shared Service and Resource Pools

    Product or System

    Skills and Competencies

    When your people are specialists versus having cross-functional skills

    Leveraged when specialists such as Security or Operations will not have full-time work on the product

    When you have people with cross-functional skills who can self-organize around a product’s needs

    When you have a significant investment in a specific technology stack

    The image contains a diagram of functional roles.The image contains a diagram of shared service and resource pools.The image contains a diagram of product or system.The image contains a diagram of skills and competencies.

    For more information about delivering in a product operating model, refer to our Deliver Digital Products at Scale blueprint.

    3.4 Finalize the organizational chart

    1-3 hours

    1. Import each of your work units and the target-state roles that were identified for each.
    2. In the place of the name of each work unit in your organizational sketch, replace the work unit name with the prospective role name for the leader of that group.
    3. Under each of the leadership roles, import the names of team members that were part of each respective work unit.
    4. Validate the final structure as a group to ensure each of the work units includes all the necessary roles and responsibilities and that there is clear delineation of accountabilities between the work units.

    Input

    Output

    • Work units
    • Work unit mandates
    • Roles with accountabilities and responsibilities
    • Finalized organizational chart

    Materials

    Participants

    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts
    • CIO
    • IT Leadership
    • Business Leadership

    Record the results in the Organizational Design Workbook & Executive Communications Deck

    Proactively consider and mitigate redesign risks

    Every organizational structure will include certain risks that should have been considered and accepted when choosing the base operating model sketch. Now that the final organizational structure has been created, consider if those risks were mitigated by the final organizational structure that was created. For those risks that weren’t mitigated, have a tactic to control risks that remain present.

    3.5 Identify and mitigate key risks

    1-3 hours

    1. For each of the operating model sketch options, there are specific risks that should have been considered when selecting that model.
    2. Take those risks and transfer them into the correct slide of the Organizational Design Workbook.
    3. Consider if there are additional risks that need to be considered with the new organizational structure based on the customizations made.
    4. For each risk, rank the severity of that risk on a scale of low, medium, or high.
    5. Determine one or more mitigation tactic(s) for each of the risks identified. This tactic should reduce the likelihood or impact of the risk event happening.
    InputOutput
    • Final organizational structure
    • Operating model sketch benefits and risks
    • Redesign risk mitigation plan
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts
    • CIO
    • IT Leadership
    • Business Leadership

    Record the results in the Organizational Design Workbook

    Phase 4

    Plan for Implementation & Change

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    4.1 Select a transition plan

    4.2 Establish the change communication messages

    4.3 Be consistent with a standard set of FAQs

    4.4 Define org. redesign resistors

    4.5 Create a sustainment plan

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Leadership
    • Business Leadership
    • HR Business Partners

    All changes require change management

    Change management is:

    Managing a change that requires replanning and reorganizing and that causes people to feel like they have lost control over aspects of their jobs.

    – Padar et al., 2017
    People Process Technology

    Embedding change management into organizational design

    PREPARE A

    Awareness: Establish the need for organizational redesign and ensure this is communicated well.

    This blueprint is mostly focused on the prepare and transition components.

    D

    Desire: Ensure the new structure is something people are seeking and will lead to individual benefits for all.

    TRANSITION K

    Knowledge: Provide stakeholders with the tools and resources to function in their new roles and reporting structure.

    A

    Ability: Support employees through the implementation and into new roles or teams.

    FUTURE R

    Reinforcement: Emphasize and reward positive behaviors and attitudes related to the new organizational structure.

    Implementing the new organizational structure

    Implementing the organizational structure can be the most difficult part of the process.

    • To succeed in the process, consider creating an implementation plan that adequately considers these five components.
    • Each of these are critical to supporting the final organizational structure that was established during the redesign process.

    Implementation Plan

    Transition Plan: Identify the appropriate approach to making the transition, and ensure the transition plan works within the context of the business.

    Communication Strategy: Create a method to ensure consistent, clear, and concise information can be provided to all relevant stakeholders.

    Plan to Address Resistance: Given that not everyone will be happy to move forward with the new organizational changes, ensure you have a method to hear feedback and demonstrate concerns have been heard.

    Employee Development Plan: Provide employees with tools, resources, and the ability to demonstrate these new competencies as they adjust to their new roles.

    Monitor and Sustain the Change: Establish metrics that inform if the implementation of the new organizational structure was successful and reinforce positive behaviors.

    Define the type of change the organizational structure will be

    As a result, your organization must adopt OCM practices to better support the acceptance and longevity of the changes being pursued.

    Incremental Change

    Transformational Change

    Organizational change management is highly recommended and beneficial for projects that require people to:

    • Adopt new tools and workflows.
    • Learn new skills.
    • Comply with new policies and procedures.
    • Stop using old tools and workflows.

    Organizational change management is required for projects that require people to:

    • Move into different roles, reporting structures, and career paths.
    • Embrace new responsibilities, goals, reward systems, and values.
    • Grow out of old habits, ideas, and behaviors.
    • Lose stature in the organization.

    Info-Tech Insight

    How you transition to the new organizational structure can be heavily influenced by HR. This is the time to be including them and leveraging their expertise to support the transition “how.”

    Transition Plan Options

    Description

    Pros

    Cons

    Example

    Big Bang Change

    Change that needs to happen immediately – “ripping the bandage off.”

    • It puts an immediate stop to the current way of operating.
    • Occurs quickly.
    • More risky.
    • People may not buy into the change immediately.
    • May not receive the training needed to adjust to the change.

    A tsunami in Japan stopped all imports and exports. Auto manufacturers were unable to get parts shipped and had to immediately find an alternative supplier.

    Incremental Change

    The change can be rolled out slower, in phases.

    • Can ensure that people are bought in along the way through the change process, allowing time to adjust and align with the change.
    • There is time to ensure training takes place.
    • It can be a timely process.
    • If the change is dragged on for too long (over several years) the environment may change and the rationale and desired outcome for the change may no longer be relevant.

    A change in technology, such as HRIS, might be rolled out one application at a time to ensure that people have time to learn and adjust to the new system.

    Pilot Change

    The change is rolled out for only a select group, to test and determine if it is suitable to roll out to all impacted stakeholders.

    • Able to test the success of the change initiative and the implementation process.
    • Able to make corrections before rolling it out wider, to aid a smooth change.
    • Use the pilot group as an example of successful change.
    • Able to gain buy-in and create change champions from the pilot group who have experienced it and see the benefits.
    • Able to prevent an inappropriate change from impacting the entire organization.
    • Lengthy process.
    • Takes time to ensure the change has been fully worked through.

    A retail store is implementing a new incentive plan to increase product sales. They will pilot the new incentive plan at select stores, before rolling it out broadly.

    4.1 Select a transition plan approach

    1-3 hours

    1. List each of the changes required to move from your current structure to the new structure. Consider:
      1. Changes in reporting structure
      2. Hiring new members
      3. Eliminating positions
      4. Developing key competencies for staff
    2. Once you’ve defined all the changes required, consider the three different transition plan approaches: big bang, incremental, and pilot. Each of the transition plan approaches will have drawbacks and benefits. Use the list of changes to inform the best approach.
    3. If you are proceeding with the incremental or the pilot, determine the order in which you will proceed with the changes or the groups that will pilot the new structure first.
    InputOutput
    • Customized operating model sketch
    • New org. chart
    • Current org. chart
    • List of changes to move from current to future state
    • Transition plan to support changes
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts
    • CIO
    • IT Leadership
    • HR Business Partners

    Record the results in the Organizational Design Workbook

    Make a plan to effectively manage and communicate the change

    Success of your new organizational structure hinges on adequate preparation and effective communication.

    The top challenge facing organizations in completing the organizational redesign is their organizational culture and acceptance of change. Effective planning for the implementation and communication throughout the change is pivotal. Make sure you understand how the change will impact staff and create tailored plans for communication.

    65% of managers believe the organizational change is effective when provided with frequent and clear communication.

    Source: SHRM, 2021

    Communicate reasons for organizational structure changes and how they will be implemented

    Leaders of successful change spend considerable time developing a powerful change message, i.e. a compelling narrative that articulates the desired end state, and that makes the change concrete and meaningful to staff.

    The organizational change message should:

    • Explain why the change is needed.
    • Summarize what will stay the same.
    • Highlight what will be left behind.
    • Emphasize what is being changed.
    • Explain how change will be implemented.
    • Address how change will affect various roles in the organization.
    • Discuss the staff’s role in making the change successful.

    Five elements of communicating change

    • What is the change?
    • Why are we doing it?
    • How are we going to go about it?
    • How long will it take us to do it?
    • What will the role be for each department and individual?
    Source: Cornelius & Associates, 2010

    4.2 Establish the change communication messages

    2 hours

    1. The purpose of this activity is to establish a change communication message you can leverage when talking to stakeholders about the new organizational structure.
    2. Review the questions in the Organizational Design Workbook.
    3. Establish a clear message around the expected changes that will have to take place to help realize the new organizational structure.
    InputOutput
    • Customized operating model sketch
    • New org. chart
    • Current org. chart
    • List of changes
    • Transition plan
    • Change communication message for new organizational structure
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts
    • CIO
    • IT Leadership
    • Business Leadership

    Record the results in the Organizational Design Workbook

    Apply the following communication principles to make your IT organization redesign changes relevant to stakeholders

    Be Clear

    • Say what you mean and mean what you say.
    • Choice of language is important: “Do you think this is a good idea? I think we could really benefit from your insights and experience here.” Or do you mean: “I think we should do this. I need you to do this to make it happen.”
    • Don’t use jargon.

    Be Consistent

    • The core message must be consistent regardless of audience, channel, or medium.
    • Test your communication with your team or colleagues to obtain feedback before delivering to a broader audience.
    • A lack of consistency can be interpreted as an attempt at deception. This can hurt credibility and trust.

    Be Concise

    • Keep communication short and to the point so key messages are not lost in the noise.
    • There is a risk of diluting your key message if you include too many other details.

    Be Relevant

    • Talk about what matters to the stakeholder.
    • Talk about what matters to the initiative.
    • Tailor the details of the message to each stakeholder’s specific concerns.
    • IT thinks in processes but stakeholders only care about results: talk in terms of results.
    • IT wants to be understood but this does not matter to stakeholders. Think: “what’s in it for them?”
    • Communicate truthfully; do not make false promises or hide bad news.

    Frequently asked questions (FAQs) provide a chance to anticipate concerns and address them

    As a starting point for building an IT organizational design implementation, look at implementing an FAQ that will address the following:

    • The what, who, when, why, and where
    • The transition process
    • What discussions should be held with clients in business units
    • HR-centric questions

    Questions to consider answering:

    • What is the objective of the IT organization?
    • What are the primary changes to the IT organization?
    • What does the new organizational structure look like?
    • What are the benefits to our IT staff and to our business partners?
    • How will the IT management team share new information with me?
    • What is my role during the transition?
    • What impact is there to my reporting relationship within my department?
    • What are the key dates I should know about?

    4.3 Be consistent with a standard set of FAQs

    1 hour

    1. Beyond the completed communications plans, brainstorm a list of answers to the key “whats” of your organizational design initiative:
    • What is the objective of the IT organization?
    • What are the primary changes to the IT organization?
    • What does the new organizational structure look like?
    • What are the benefits to our IT staff and to our business partners?
  • Think about any key questions that may rise around the transition:
    • How will the IT management team share new information with me?
    • What is my role during the transition?
    • What impact is there to my reporting relationship within my department?
    • What are the key dates I should know about?
  • Determine the best means of socializing this information. If you have an internal wiki or knowledge-sharing platform, this would be a useful place to host the information.
  • InputOutput
    • Driver(s) for the new organizational structure
    • List of changes to move from current to future state
    • Change communication message
    • FAQs to provide to staff about the organizational design changes
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts
    • CIO
    • IT Leadership
    • Business Leadership

    Record the results in the Organizational Design Workbook

    The change reaction model

    The image contains a picture of the change reaction model. The model includes a double arrow pointing in both directions of left and right. On top of the arrow are 4 circles spread out on the arrow. They are labelled: Active Resistance, Detachment, Questioning, Acceptance.

    (Adapted from Cynthia Wittig)

    Info-Tech Insight

    People resist changes for many reasons. When it comes to organizational redesign changes, some of the most common reasons people resist change include a lack of understanding, a lack of involvement in the process, and fear.

    Include employees in the employee development planning process

    Prioritize

    Assess employee to determine competency levels and interests.

    Draft

    Employee drafts development goals; manager reviews.

    Select

    Manager helps with selection of development activities.

    Check In

    Manager provides ongoing check-ins, coaching, and feedback.

    Consider core and supplementary components that will sustain the new organizational structure

    Supplementary sustainment components:

    • Tools & Resources
    • Structure
    • Skills
    • Work Environment
    • Tasks
    • Disincentives

    Core sustainment components:

    • Empowerment
    • Measurement
    • Leadership
    • Communication
    • Incentives

    Sustainment Plan

    Sustain the change by following through with stakeholders, gathering feedback, and ensuring that the change rationale and impacts are clearly understood. Failure to so increases the potential that the change initiative will fail or be a painful experience and cost the organization in terms of loss of productivity or increase in turnover rates.

    Support sustainment with clear measurements

    • Measurement is one of the most important components of monitoring and sustaining the new organizational structure as it provides insight into where the change is succeeding and where further support should be added.
    • There should be two different types of measurements:
    1. Standard Change Management Metrics
    2. Organizational Redesign Metrics
  • When gathering data around metrics, consider other forms of measurement (qualitative) that can provide insights on opportunities to enhance the success of the organizational redesign change.
    1. Every measurement should be rooted to a goal. Many of the goals related to organizational design will be founded in the driver of this change initiative
    2. Once the goals have been defined, create one or more measurements that determines if the goal was successful.
    3. Use specific key performance indicators (KPIs) that contain a metric that is being measured and the frequency of that measurement.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Obtaining qualitative feedback from employees, customers, and business partners can provide insight into where the new organizational structure is operating optimally versus where there are further adjustments that could be made to support the change.

    4.4 Consider sustainment metrics

    1 hour

    1. Establish metrics that bring the entire process together and that will ensure the new organizational design is a success.
    2. Go back to your driver(s) for the organizational redesign. Use these drivers to help inform a particular measurement that can be used to determine if the new organizational design will be successful. Each measurement should be related to the positive benefits of the organization, an individual, or the change itself.
    3. Once you have a list of measurements, use these to determine the specific KPI that can be qualified through a metric. Often you are looking for an increase or decrease of a particular measurement by a dollar or percentage within a set time frame.
    4. Use the example metrics in the workbook and update them to reflect your organization’s drivers.
    InputOutput
    • Driver(s) for the new organizational structure
    • List of changes to move from current to future state
    • Change communication message
    • Sustainment metrics
    MaterialsParticipants
    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts
    • CIO
    • IT Leadership
    • Business Leadership

    Record the results in the Organizational Design Workbook

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Build a Strategic IT Workforce Plan

    • Continue into the second phase of the organizational redesign process by defining the required workforce to deliver.
    • Leveraging trends, data, and feedback from your employees, define the competencies needed to deliver on the defined roles.

    Implement a New IT Organizational Structure

    • Organizational design implementations can be highly disruptive for IT staff and business partners.
    • Without a structured approach, IT leaders may experience high turnover, decreased productivity, and resistance to the change.

    Define the Role of Project Management in Agile and Product-Centric Delivery

    • There are many voices with different opinions on the role of project management. This causes confusion and unnecessary churn.
    • Project management and product management naturally align to different time horizons. Harmonizing their viewpoints can take significant work.

    Research Contributors and Experts

    The image contains a picture of Jardena London.

    Jardena London

    Transformation Catalyst, Rosetta Technology Group

    The image contains a picture of Jodie Goulden.

    Jodie Goulden

    Consultant | Founder, OrgDesign Works

    The image contains a picture of Shan Pretheshan.

    Shan Pretheshan

    Director, SUPA-IT Consulting

    The image contains a picture of Chris Briley.

    Chris Briley

    CIO, Manning & Napier

    The image contains a picture of Dean Meyer.

    Dean Meyer

    President N. Dean Meyer and Associates Inc.

    The image contains a picture of Jimmy Williams.

    Jimmy Williams

    CIO, Chocktaw Nation of Oklahoma

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Cole Cioran, Managing Partner

    Dana Daher, Research Director

    Hans Eckman, Principal Research Director

    Ugbad Farah, Research Director

    Ari Glaizel, Practice Lead

    Valence Howden, Principal Research Director

    Youssef Kamar, Senior Manager, Consulting

    Carlene McCubbin, Practice Lead

    Baird Miller, Executive Counsellor

    Josh Mori, Research Director

    Rajesh Parab, Research Director

    Gary Rietz, Executive Counsellor

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    Appendix

    IT Culture Framework

    This framework leverages McLean & Company’s adaptation of Quinn and Rohrbaugh’s Competing Values Approach.

    The image contains a diagram of the IT Culture Framework. The framework is divided into four sections: Competitive, Innovative, Traditional, and Cooperative, each with their own list of descriptors.

    Integrate Physical Security and Information Security

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    • Parent Category Name: Security Processes & Operations
    • Parent Category Link: /security-processes-and-operations

    Physical security is often managed by facilities, not by IT security, resulting in segmented security systems. Integrating physical and information security introduces challenges in:

    • Understanding the value proposition of investment in governing and managing integrated systems, including migration costs, compared to separated security systems.
    • Addressing complex risks and vulnerabilities of an integrated security system.
    • Operationalizing enhanced capabilities created by adoption of emerging and disruptive technologies.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Integrate security in people, process, and technology to improve your overall security posture. Having siloed systems running security is not beneficial. Many organizations are realizing the benefits of consolidating into a single platform across physical security, cybersecurity, HR, legal, and compliance.
    • Plan and engage stakeholders. Assemble the right team to ensure the success of your integrated security ecosystem, decide the governance model, and clearly define the roles and responsibilities.
    • Enhance strategy and risk management. Strategically, we want a physical security system that is interoperable with most technologies, flexible with minimal customization, functional, and integrated, despite the challenges of proprietary configurations, complex customization, and silos.

    Impact and Result

    Info-Tech's approach is a modular, incremental, and repeatable process to integrate physical and information security to:

    • Ensure the integration will meet the business' needs and determine effort and technical requirements.
    • Establish GRC processes that include integrated risk management and compliance.
    • Design and deploy an integrated security architecture.
    • Establish security metrics of effectiveness and efficiency for senior management and leadership.

    Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Storyboard – A step-by-step document that walks you through how to integrate physical security and information security.

    Info-Tech provides a three-phased framework for integrating physical security and information security: Plan, Enhance, and Monitor & Optimize.

    • Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Storyboard

    2. Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool – A tool to map organizational goals to IT goals, facilities goals, OT goals (if applicable), and integrated security goals.

    This tool serves as a repository for information about security integration elements, compliance, and other factors that will influence your integration of physical security and information security.

    • Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool

    3. Integrate Physical Security and Information Security RACI Chart Tool – A tool to identify and understand the owners of various security integration stakeholders across the organization.

    Populating a RACI chart (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) is a critical step that will assist you in organizing roles for carrying out integration steps. Complete this tool to assign tasks to suitable roles.

    • Integrate Physical Security and Information Security RACI Chart Tool

    4. Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Communication Deck – A tool to present your findings in a prepopulated document that summarizes the work you have completed.

    Complete this template to effectively communicate your integrated security plan to stakeholders.

    • Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Communication Deck
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Integrate Physical Security and Information Security

    Securing information security, physical security, or personnel security in silos may not secure much

    Analyst Perspective

    Ensure integrated security success with close and continual collaboration

    From physical access control systems (PACS) such as electronic locks and fingerprint biometrics to video surveillance systems (VSS) such as IP cameras to perimeter intrusion detection and prevention to fire and life safety and beyond: physical security systems pose unique challenges to overall security. Additionally, digital transformation of physical security to the cloud and the convergence of operational technology (OT), internet of things (IoT), and industrial IoT (IIoT) increase both the volume and frequency of security threats.

    These threats can be safety, such as the health impact when a gunfire attack downed wastewater pumps at Duke Energy Substation, North Carolina, US, in 2022. The threats can also be economic, such as theft of copper wire, or they can be reliability, such as when a sniper attack on Pacific Gas & Electric’s Metcalf Substation in California, US, damaged 17 out of 21 power transformers in 2013.

    Considering the security risks organizations face, many are unifying physical, cyber, and information security systems to gain the long-term overall benefits a consolidated security strategy provides.

    Ida Siahaan
    Ida Siahaan

    Research Director, Security and Privacy Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Physical security is often managed by facilities, not by IT security, resulting in segmented security systems. Meanwhile, integrating physical and information security introduces challenges in:

    • Value proposition of investment in governing and managing integrated systems including the migration costs compared to separated security systems.
    • Addressing complex risks and vulnerabilities of an integrated security system.
    • Operationalizing on enhanced capabilities created by adoption of emerging and disruptive technologies.

    Common Obstacles

    Physical security systems integration is complex due to various components such as proprietary devices and protocols and hybrid systems of analog and digital technology. Thus, open architecture with comprehensive planning and design is important.

    However, territorial protection by existing IT and physical security managers may limit security visibility and hinder security integration.

    Additionally, integration poses challenges in staffing, training and awareness programs, and dependency on third-party technologies and their migration plans.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    Info-Tech’s approach is a modular, incremental, and repeatable process to integrate physical and information security that enables organizations to:

    • Determine effort and technical requirements to ensure the integration will meet the business needs.
    • Establish GRC processes including integrated risk management and compliance.
    • Design and deploy integrated security architecture.
    • Establish metrics to monitor the effectiveness and efficiency of the security program.

    Info-Tech Insight

    An integrated security architecture, including people, process, and technology, will improve your overall security posture. These benefits are leading many organizations to consolidate their siloed systems into a single platform across physical security, cybersecurity, HR, legal, and compliance.

    Existing information security models are not comprehensive

    Current security models do not cover all areas of security, especially if physical systems and personnel are involved and safety is also an important property required.

    • The CIA triad (confidentiality, integrity, availability) is a well-known information security model that focuses on technical policies related to technology for protecting information assets.
    • The US Government’s Five Pillars of Information Assurance includes CIA, authentication, and non-repudiation, but it does not cover people and processes comprehensively.
    • The AAA model, created by the American Accounting Association, has properties of authentication, authorization, and accounting but focuses only on access control.
    • Donn Parker expanded the CIA model with three more properties: possession, authenticity, and utility. This model, which includes people and processes, is known as the Parkerian hexad. However, it does not cover physical and personnel security.

    CIA Triad

    The CIA Triad for Information Security: Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability


    Parkerian Hexad

    The Parkerian Hexad for Security: Confidentiality, Possession, Utility, Availability, Authenticity and Integrity

    Sources: Parker, 1998; Pender-Bey, 2012; Cherdantseva and Hilton, 2015

    Adopt an integrated security model

    Adopt an integrated security model which consists of information security, physical security, personnel security, and organizational security.

    The security ecosystem is shifting from segregation to integration

    Security ecosystem is shifting from the past proprietary model to open interfaces and future open architecture

    Sources: Cisco, n.d.; Preparing for Technology Convergence in Manufacturing, Info-Tech Research Group, 2018

    Physical security includes:

    • Securing physical access,
      e.g. facility access control, alarms, surveillance cameras
    • Securing physical operations
      (operational technology – OT), e.g. programmable logic controllers (PLCs), SCADA

    Info-Tech Insight

    Why is integrating physical and information security gaining more and more traction? Because the supporting technologies are becoming more matured. This includes, for example, migration of physical security devices to IP-based network and open architecture.

    Reactive responses to physical security incidents

    April 1995

    Target: Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma, US. Method: Bombing. Impact: Destroyed structure of 17 federal agencies, 168 casualties, over 800 injuries. Result: Creation of Interagency Security Committee (ISC) in Executive Order 12977 and “Vulnerability Assessment of Federal Facilities” standard.
    (Source: Office of Research Services, 2017)

    April 2013

    Target: Pacific Gas & Electric’s Metcalf Substation, California, US. Method: Sniper attack. Impact: Out of 21 power transformers, 17 were damaged. Result: Creation of Senate Bill No. 699 and NERC- CIP-014 standard.
    (Source: T&D World, 2023)

    Sep. 2022

    Target: Nord Stream gas pipelines connecting Russia to Germany, Baltic sea. Method: Detonations. Impact: Methane leaks (~300,000 tons) at four exclusive economic zones (two in Denmark and two in Sweden). Result: Sweden’s Security Service investigation.
    (Source: CNBC News, 2022)

    Dec. 2022

    Target: Duke Energy Substation, North Carolina, US. Method: Gunfire. Impact: Power outages of ~40,000 customers and wastewater pumps in sewer lift stations down. Result: State of emergency was declared.
    (Source: CBS News, 2022)

    Info-Tech Insight

    When it comes to physical security, we have been mostly reactive. Typically the pattern starts with physical attacks. Next, the impacted organization mitigates the incidents. Finally, new government regulatory measures or private sector or professional association standards are put in place. We must strive to change our pattern to become more proactive.

    Physical security market forecast and top physical security challenges

    Physical security market forecast
    (in billions USD)

    A forecast by MarketsandMarkets projected growth in the physical security market, using historical data from 2015 until 2019, with a CAGR of 6.4% globally and 5.2% in North America.

    A forecast by MarketsandMarkets projected growth in the physical security market, using historical data from 2015 until 2019, with a CAGR of 6.4% globally and 5.2% in North America.

    Source: MarketsandMarkets, 2022

    Top physical security challenges

    An Ontic survey (N=359) found that threat data management (40%) was the top physical security challenge in 2022, up from 33% in 2021, followed by physical security threats to the C-suite and company leadership (35%), which was a slight increase from 2021. An interesting decrease is data protection and privacy (32%), which dropped from 36% in 2021.

    An Ontic survey (N=359) found that threat data management (40%) was the top physical security challenge in 2022, up from 33% in 2021, followed by physical security threats to the C-suite and company leadership (35%), which was a slight increase from 2021. An interesting decrease is data protection and privacy (32%), which dropped from 36% in 2021.

    Source: Ontic Center for Protective Intelligence, 2022

    Info-Tech Insight

    The physical security market is growing in systems and services, especially the integration of threat data management with cybersecurity.

    Top physical security initiatives and operations integration investments

    We know the physical security challenges and how the physical security market is growing, but what initiatives are driving this growth? These are the top physical security initiatives and top investments for physical security operations integration:

    Top physical security initiatives

    The number one physical security initiative is integrating physical security systems. Other initiatives with similar concerns included data and cross-functional integration

    A survey by Brivo asked 700 security professionals about their top physical security initiatives. The number one initiative is integrating physical security systems. Other initiatives with similar concerns included data and cross-functional integration.

    Source: Brivo, 2022

    Top investments for physical security operations integration

    The number one investment is on access control systems with software to identify physical threat actors. Another area with similar concern is integration of digital physical security with cybersecurity.

    An Ontic survey (N=359) on areas of investment for physical security operations integration shows the number one investment is on access control systems with software to identify physical threat actors. Another area with similar concern is integration of digital physical security with cybersecurity.

    Source: Ontic Center for Protective Intelligence, 2022

    Evaluate security integration opportunities with these guiding principles

    Opportunity focus

    • Identify the security integration problems to solve with visible improvement possibilities
    • Don’t choose technology for technology’s sake
    • Keep an eye to the future
    • Use strategic foresight

    Piece by piece

    • Avoid taking a big bang approach
    • Test technologies in multiple conditions
    • Run inexpensive pilots
    • Increase flexibility
    • Build a technology ecosystem

    Buy-in

    • Collaborate with stakeholders
    • Gain and sustain support
    • Maintain transparency
    • Increase uptake of open architecture

    Key Recommendations:

    Focus on your master plan

    Build a technology ecosystem

    Engage stakeholders

    Info-Tech Insight

    When looking for a quick win, consider learning the best internal or external practice. For example, in 1994 IBM reorganized its security operation by bringing security professionals and non-security professionals in one single structure, which reduced costs by approximately 30% in two years.

    Sources: Create and Implement an IoT Strategy, Info-Tech Research Group, 2022; Baker and Benny, 2013; Erich Krueger, Omaha Public Power District (contributor); Doery Abdou, March Networks Corporate (contributor)

    Case Study

    4Wall Entertainment – Asset Owner

    Industry: Architecture & Engineering
    Source: Interview

    4Wall Entertainment is quite mature in integrating its physical and information security; physical security has always been under IT as a core competency.

    4Wall Entertainment is a provider of entertainment lighting and equipment to event venues, production companies, lighting designers, and others, with a presence in 18 US and UK locations.

    After many acquisitions, 4Wall Entertainment needed to standardize its various acquired systems, including physical security systems such as access control. In its integrated security approach, IT owns the integrated security, but they interface with related entities such as HR, finance, and facilities management in every location. This allows them to obtain information such as holidays, office hours, and what doors need to be accessed as inputs to the security system and to get sponsorship in budgeting.

    In the past, 4Wall Entertainment tried delegating specific physical security to other divisions, such as facilities management and HR. This approach was unsuccessful, so IT took back the responsibility and accountability.

    Currently, 4Wall Entertainment works with local vendors, and its biggest challenge is finding third-party vendors that can provide nationwide support.

    In the future, 4Wall Entertainment envisions physical security modernization such as camera systems that allow more network accessibility, with one central system to manage and IoT device integration with SIEM and MDR.

    Results

    Lessons learned in integrating security from 4Wall Entertainment include:

    • Start with forming relationships with related divisions such as HR, finance, and facilities management to build trust and encourage sponsorship across management.
    • Create policies, procedures, and standards to deploy in various systems, especially when acquiring companies with low maturity in security.
    • Select third-party providers that offer the required functionalities, good customer support, and standard systems interoperability.
    • Close skill gaps by developing training and awareness programs for users, especially for newly acquired systems and legacy systems, or by acquiring expertise from consulting services.
    • Complete cost-benefit analysis for solutions on legacy systems to determine whether to keep them and create interfacing with other systems, upgrade them, or replace them entirely with newer systems.
    • Delegate maintenance of specific highly regulated systems, such as fire alarms and water sprinklers, to facilities management.
    Integration of Physical and Information Security Framework. Inputs: Integrated Items, Stakeholders, and Security Components. Phases, Outcomes and Benefits: Plan, Enhance and Monitor & Optimize.

    Tracking progress of physical and information security integration

    Physical security is often part of facilities management. As a result, there are interdependencies with both internal departments (such as IT, information security, and facilities) and external parties (such as third-party vendors). IT leaders, security leaders, and operational leaders should keep the big picture in mind when designing and implementing integration of physical and information security. Use this checklist as a tool to track your security integration journey.

    Plan

    • Engage stakeholders and justify value for the business.
    • Define roles and responsibilities.
    • Establish/update governance for integrated security.
    • Identify integrated elements and compliance obligations.

    Enhance

    • Determine the level of security maturity and update security strategy for integrated security.
    • Assess and treat risks of integrated security.
    • Establish/update integrated physical and information security policies and procedures.
    • Update incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity plan.

    Monitor & Optimize

    • Identify skill requirements and close skill gaps for integrating physical and information security.
    • Design and deploy integrated security architecture and controls.
    • Establish, monitor, and report integrated security metrics on effectiveness and efficiency.

    Benefits of the security integration framework

    Today’s matured technology makes security integration possible. However, the governance and management of single integrated security presents challenges. These can be overcome using a multi-phased framework that enables a modular, incremental, and repeatable integration process, starting with planning to justify the value of investment, then enhancing the integrated security based on risks and open architecture. This is followed by using metrics for monitoring and optimization.

    1. Modular

      • Implementing a consolidated security strategy is complex and involves the integration of process, software, data, hardware, and network and infrastructure.
      • A modular framework will help to drive value while putting in appropriate guardrails.
    2. Incremental

      • Integration of physical security and information security involves many components such as security strategy, risk management, and security policies.
      • An incremental framework will help track, manage, and maintain each step while providing appropriate structure.
    3. Repeatable

      • Integration of physical security and information security is a journey that can be approached with a pilot program to evaluate effectiveness.
      • A repeatable framework will help to ensure quick time to value and enable immediate implementation of controls to meet operational and security requirements.

    Potential risks of the security integration framework

    Just as medicine often comes with side effects, our Integration of Physical and Information Security Framework may introduce risks too. However, as John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth president of the United States, once said, "There are risks and costs to a program of action — but they are far less than the long-range cost of comfortable inaction."

    Plan Phase

    • Lack of transparency in the integration process can lead to lack of trust among stakeholders.
    • Lack of support from leadership results in unclear governance or lack of budget or human resources.
    • Key stakeholders leave the organization during the engagement and their replacements do not understand the organization’s operation yet.

    Enhance Phase

    • The risk assessment conducted focuses too much on IT risk, which may not always be applicable to physical security systems nor OT systems.
    • The integrated security does not comply with policies and regulations.

    Monitor and Optimize Phase

    • Lack of knowledge, training, and awareness.
    • Different testing versus production environments.
    • Lack of collected or shared security metrics.

    Data

    • Data quality issues and inadequate data from physical security, information security, and other systems, e.g. OT, IoT.
    • Too much data from too many tools are complex and time consuming to process.

    Develop an integration of information security, physical security, and personnel security that meets your organization’s needs

    Integrate security in people, process, and technology to improve your overall security posture

    Having siloed systems running security is not beneficial. Many organizations are realizing the benefits of consolidating into a single platform across physical security, cybersecurity, HR, legal, and compliance.

    Plan and engage stakeholders

    Assemble the right team to ensure the success of your integrated security ecosystem, decide the governance model, and clearly define the roles and responsibilities.

    Enhance strategy and risk management

    Strategically, we want a physical security system that is interoperable with most technologies, flexible with minimal customization, functional, and integrated, despite the challenges of proprietary configurations, complex customization, and silos.

    Monitor and optimize

    Find the most optimized architecture that is strategic, realistic, and based on risk. Next, perform an evaluation of the security systems and program by understanding what, where, when, and how to measure and to report the relevant metrics.

    Focus on master plan

    Identify the security integration problems to solve with visible improvement possibilities, and don’t choose technology for technology’s sake. Design first, then conduct market research by comparing products or services from vendors or manufacturers.

    Build a technology ecosystem

    Avoid a big bang approach and test technologies in multiple conditions. Run inexpensive pilots and increase flexibility to build a technology ecosystem.

    Deliverables

    Each step of this framework is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool

    Map organizational goals to IT goals, facilities goals, OT goals (if applicable), and integrated security goals. Identify your security integration elements and compliance.

    Integrate Physical Security and Information Security RACI Chart Tool

    Identify various security integration stakeholders across the organization and assign tasks to suitable roles.

    Key deliverable:

    Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Communication Deck

    Present your findings in a prepopulated document that summarizes the work you have completed.

    Plan

    Planning is foundational to engage stakeholders. Start with justifying the value of investment, then define roles and responsibilities, update governance, and finally identify integrated elements and compliance obligations.

    Plan

    Engage stakeholders

    • To initiate communication between the physical and information security teams and other related divisions, it is important to identify the entities that would be affected by the security integration and involve them in the process to gain support from planning to delivery and maintenance.
    • Possible stakeholders:
      • Executive leadership, Facilities Management leader and team, IT leader, Security & Privacy leader, compliance officer, Legal, Risk Management, HR, Finance, OT leader (if applicable)
    • A successful security integration depends on aligning your security integration initiatives and migration plan to the organization’s objectives by engaging the right people to communicate and collaborate.

    Info-Tech Insight

    It is important to speak the same language. Physical security concerns safety and availability, while information security concerns confidentiality and integrity. Thus, the two systems have different goals and require alignment.

    Similarly, taxonomy of terminologies needs to be managed,1 e.g. facility management with an emergency management background may have a different understanding from a CISO with an information security background when discussing the same term. For example:

    In emergency management prevention means “actions taken to eliminate the impact of disasters in order to protect lives, property and the environment, and to avoid economic disruption.”2

    In information security prevention is “preventing the threats by understanding the threat environment and the attack surfaces, the risks, the assets, and by maintaining a secure system.”3

    Sources: 1 Owen Yardley, Omaha Public Power District (contributor); 2 Translation Bureau, Government of Canada, n.d.; 3 Security Intelligence, 2020


    Map organizational goals to integrated security goals

    Input

    • Corporate, IT, and Facilities strategies

    Output

    • Your goals for the integrated security strategy

    Materials

    • Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool

    Participants

    • Executive leadership
    • Facilities Management leader and team
    • IT leader
    • Security & Privacy leader
    • Compliance officer
    • Legal
    • Risk Management
    • HR & Finance
    • OT leader (if applicable)
    1. As a group, brainstorm organization goals.
      • Review relevant corporate, IT, and facilities strategies.
    2. Record the most important business goals in the “Goals Cascade” tab of the Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool. Try to limit the number of business goals to no more than ten goals. This limitation will be critical to helping focus on your integrated security goals.
    3. For each goal, identify one to two security alignment goals. These should be objectives for the security strategy that will support the identified organization goals.

    Download the Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool.

    Record organizational goals

    A table to identify Organization, IT, OT(if applicable), Facilities, and Security Goals Definitions.

    Refer to the Integration of Physical and Information Security Framework when filling in the table.

    1. Record your identified organizational goals in the “Goals Cascade” tab of the Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool.
    2. For each organizational goal, identify IT alignment goals.
    3. For each organizational goal, identify OT alignment goals (if applicable).
    4. For each organizational goal, identify Facilities alignment goals.
    5. For each organizational goal, select an integrated security goal from the drop-down menu.

    Justify value for the business

    Facilities in most cases have a team that is responsible for physical security installations such as access key controllers. Whenever there is an issue, they contact the provider to fix the error. However, with smart buildings and smart devices, the threat surface grows to include information security threats, and Facilities may not possess the knowledge and skills required to deal with them. At the same time, delegating physical security to IT may add more tasks to their already-too-long list of responsibilities. Consolidating security to a focused security team that covers both physical and information security can help.1 We need to develop the security integration business case beyond physical security "gates, guns, and guards" mentality.2

    An example of a cost-benefit analysis for security integration:

    Benefits

    Metrics

    Operational Efficiency and Cost Savings

    • Reduction in deployment, maintenance, and staff time in manual operations of physical security devices such as logs collection from analog cameras to be automated into digital.
    • Reduction in staffing costs by bringing physical security SOC and information security SOC in one single structure.

    Reliability Improvements

    • Reduction in field crew time by identifying hardware that can be virtualized to have a centralized remote control.
    • Improvement of operating reliability through continuous and real-time monitoring of equipment such as door access control systems and camera surveillance systems.

    Customers & Users Benefits

    • Improvement of customer safety for essential services such as access to critical locations only by authorized personnel.
    • Improvement of reliability of services and address human factor in adoption of change by introducing change as a friendly activity.

    Cost

    Metrics

    Equipment and Infrastructure

    • Upgrade of existing physical security equipment, e.g. replacement of separated access control, video management system (VMS), and physical access control system (PACS) with a unified security platform.
    • Implementation of communication network equipment and labor to install, configure, and maintain the new network component.

    Software and Commission

    • The software and maintenance fee as well as upgrade implementation project cost.
    • Labor cost of field commissioning and troubleshooting.
    • Integration with security systems, e.g. event and log management, continuous monitoring, and investigation.

    Support and Resources

    • Cost to hire/outsource security FTEs for ongoing management and operation of security devices, e.g. SOC, MSSP.
    • Cost to hire/outsource FTEs to analyze, design, and deploy the integrated security architecture, e.g. consulting fee.

    Sources: 1 Andrew Amaro, KLAVAN Security Services (contributor); 2 Baker and Benny, 2013;
    Industrial Control System Modernization, Info-Tech Research Group, 2023; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2021

    Plan

    Define roles and responsibilities

    Input

    • List of relevant stakeholders

    Output

    • Roles and responsibilities for the integration of physical and information security program

    Materials

    • Integrate Physical Security and Information Security RACI Chart Tool

    Participants

    • Executive leadership
    • Facilities Management leader and team
    • HR & Finance
    • IT leader and team
    • OT leader and team
    • Security & Privacy leader and team

    Many factors impact an organization’s level of effectiveness as it relates to integration of physical and information security. How the team interacts, what skill sets exist, the level of clarity around roles and responsibilities, and the degree of executive support and alignment are only a few. Thus, we need to identify stakeholders that are:

    • Responsible: The person(s) who does the work to accomplish the activity; they have been tasked with completing the activity and/or getting a decision made.
    • Accountable: The person(s) who is accountable for the completion of the activity. Ideally, this is a single person and is often an executive or program sponsor.
    • Consulted: The person(s) who provides information. This is usually several people, typically called subject matter experts (SMEs).
    • Informed: The person(s) who is updated on progress. These are resources that are affected by the outcome of the activities and need to be kept up to date.

    Download the Integrate Physical Security and Information Security RACI Chart Tool

    Define RACI chart

    Define Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed (RACI) stakeholders.

    1. Customize the Work Units to best reflect your operation with applicable stakeholders.
    2. Customize the Action rows as required.

    Integrate Physical Security and Information Security RACI Chart

    Sources: ISC, 2015; ISC, 2021

    Info-Tech Insight

    The roles and responsibilities should be clearly defined. For example, IT Security should be responsible for the installation and configuration of all physical access controllers and devices, and facility managers should be responsible for the physical maintenance including malfunctioning such as access device jammed or physically broken.

    Plan

    Establish/update governance for integrated security

    HR & Finance

    HR provides information such as new hires and office hours as input to the security system. Finance assists in budgeting.

    Security & Privacy

    The security and privacy team will need to evaluate solutions and enforce standards on various physical and information security systems and to protect data privacy.

    Business Leaders

    Business stakeholders will provide clarity for their strategy and provide input into how they envision security furthering those goals.

    IT Executives

    IT stakeholders will be a driving force, ensuring all necessary resources are available and funded.

    Facilities/ Operations

    Operational plans will include asset management, monitoring, and support to meet functional goals and manage throughout the asset lifecycle.

    Infrastructure & Enterprise Architects

    Each solution added to the environment will need to be chosen and architected to meet business goals and security functions.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Assemble the right team to ensure the success of your integrated security ecosystem and decide the governance model, e.g. security steering committee (SSC) or a centralized single structure.

    Adapted from Create and Implement an IoT Strategy, Info-Tech Research Group, 2022

    What does the SSC do?

    Ensuring proper governance over your security program is a complex task that requires ongoing care and feeding from executive management to succeed.

    Your SSC should aim to provide the following core governance functions for your security program:

    1. Define Clarity of Intent and Direction

      How does the organization’s security strategy support the attainment of the business, IT, facilities management, and physical and information security strategies? The SSC should clearly define and communicate strategic linkage and provide direction for aligning security initiatives with desired outcomes.
    2. Establish Clear Lines of Authority

      Security programs contain many important elements that need to be coordinated. There must be clear and unambiguous authority, accountability, and responsibility defined for each element so lines of reporting/escalation are clear and conflicting objectives can be mediated.
    3. Provide Unbiased Oversight

      The SSC should vet the organization’s systematic monitoring processes to ensure there is adherence to defined risk tolerance levels and that monitoring is appropriately independent from the personnel responsible for implementing and managing the security program.
    4. Optimize Security Value Delivery

      Optimized value delivery occurs when strategic objectives for security are achieved and the organization’s acceptable risk posture is attained at the lowest possible cost. This requires constant attention to ensure controls are commensurate with any changes in risk level or appetite.

    Adapted from Improve Security Governance With a Security Steering Committee , Info-Tech Research Group, 2018

    Plan

    Identify integrated elements and compliance obligations

    To determine what elements need to be integrated, it’s important to scope the security integration program and to identify the consequences of integration for compliance obligations.

    INTEGRATED ELEMENTS

    What are my concerns?

    Process integrations

    Determine which processes need to be integrated and how

    • Examples: Security prevention, detection, and response; risk assessment

    Software and data integration

    Determine which software and data need to be integrated and how

    • Examples: Threat management tools, SIEM, IDPS, security event logs

    Hardware integration

    Determine which hardware needs to be integrated and how

    • Examples: Sensors, alarms, cameras, keys, locks, combinations, and card readers

    Network and infrastructure

    Determine which network and infrastructure components need to be integrated and how

    • Example: Network segmentation for physical access controllers.

    COMPLIANCE

    How can I address my concerns?

    Regulations

    Adhere to mandatory laws, directives, industry standards, specific contractual obligations, etc.

    • Examples: NERC CIP (North American Utilities), Network and Information Security (NIS) Directive (EU), Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 (UK), Occupational Safety and Health Act, 1970 (US), Emergency Management Act, 2007 (Canada)

    Standards

    Adhere to voluntary standards and obligations

    • Examples: NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), The Risk Management Process for Federal Facilities: An Interagency Security Committee Standard (US), Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), Service Organization Control (SOC 1 and 2)

    Guidelines

    Adopt guidelines that can improve the integrated security program

    • Examples: Best Practices for Planning and Managing Physical Security Resources (US Interagency Security Committee), Information Security Manual - Guidelines for Physical Security (Australian Cyber Security Centre), 1402-2021-Guide for Physical Security of Electric Power Substations (IEEE)

    Record integrated elements

    Scope and Boundaries from the Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool.

    Refer to the “Scope” tab of the Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool when filling in the following elements.

    1. Record your integrated elements, i.e. process integration, software and data integration, hardware integration, network and infrastructure, and physical scope of your security integration, in the “Scope” tab of the Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool.
    2. For each of your scoping give the rationale for including them in the Comments column. Careful attention should be paid to any elements that are not in scope.

    Record your compliance obligations

    Refer to the “Compliance Obligations” tab of the Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool.

    1. Identify your compliance obligations. These can include both mandatory and voluntary obligations. Mandatory obligations include:
      • Laws
      • Government regulations
      • Industry standards
      • Contractual agreements
      Voluntary obligations include standards that the organization has chosen to follow for best practices and any obligations that are required to maintain certifications. Organizations will have many different compliance obligations. For the purposes of your integrated security, include those that include physical security requirements.
    2. Record your compliance obligations, along with any notes, in your copy of the Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool.
    3. Refer to the “Compliance DB” tab for lists of standards/regulations/ guidelines.
    The “Compliance Obligations” tab of the Integrate Physical Security and Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool.

    Remediate third-party compliance gaps

    If you have third-party compliance gaps, there are four primary ways to eliminate them:

    1. Find a New, Compliant Partner

      Terminate existing contract and find another organization to partner with.
    2. Bring the Capability In-House

      Expense permitting, this may be the best way to protect yourself.
    3. Demand Compliance

      Tell the third party they must become compliant. Make sure you set a deadline.
    4. Accept Noncompliance and Assume the Risk

      Sometimes remediation just isn’t cost effective and you have no choice.

    Follow Contracting Best Practices to Mitigate the Risk of Future Third-Party Compliance Gaps

    1. Perform Initial Due Diligence: Request proof of third-party compliance prior to entering into a contract.
    2. Perform Ongoing Due Diligence: Request proof of third-party contractor compliance annually.
    3. Contract Negotiation: Insert clauses requesting periodic assertions of compliance.

    View a sample contract provided by the US Department of Health and Human Services.

    Source: Take Control of Compliance Improvement to Conquer Every Audit, Info-Tech Research Group, 2015

    Pitfalls to avoid when planning security integration

    • No Resources Lineups

      Integration of security needs support from leadership, proper planning, and clear and consistent communication across the organization.
    • Not Addressing Holistic Security

      Create policies and procedures and follow standards that are holistic and based on threats and risks, e.g. consolidated access control policies.
    • Lack of Governance

      While the IT department is a critical partner in cybersecurity, the ownership of such a role sits squarely in the organizational C-suite, with regular reporting to the board of directors (if applicable).
    • Overlooking Business Continuity Effort

      IT and physical security are integral to business continuity and disaster recovery strategies.
    • Not Having Relevant Training and Awareness

      Provide a training and awareness program based on relevant attack vectors. Trained employees are key assets to the development of a safe and secure environment. They must form the base of your security culture.
    • Overbuilding or Underbuilding

      Select third-party providers that offer systems interoperability with other security tools. The intent is to promote a unified approach to security to avoid a cumbersome tooling zoo.

    Sources: Real Time Networks, 2022; Andrew Amaro, KLAVAN Security Services (contributor)

    Enhance

    Enhancing is the development of an integrated security strategy, policies, procedures, BCP, DR, and IR based on the organization’s risks.

    Enhance

    Determine the level of security maturity and update the security strategy

    • Before updating your security strategies, you need to understand the organization’s business strategies, IT strategies, facilities strategies, and physical and information security strategies. The goal is to align your integrated security strategies to contribute to your organization’s success.
    • The integrated security leaders need to understand the direction of the organization. For example:
      • Growth expectation
      • Expansions or mergers anticipation
      • Product or service changes
      • Regulatory requirements
    • Wise security investments depend on aligning your security initiatives to the organization’s objectives by supporting operational performance and ensuring brand protection and shareholder values.
    Integrated security strategies. Consists of an organization’s business strategies, IT strategies, facilities strategies, and physical and information security strategies.

    Sources: Amy L. Meger, Platte River Power Authority (contributor); Baker and Benny, 2013; IFSEC Global, 2023; Security Priorities 2023, Info-Tech Research Group, 2023; Build an Information Security Strategy, Info-Tech Research Group, 2020; ISC, n.d.

    Understanding security maturity

    Maturity models are very effective for determining security states. This table provides examples of general descriptions for physical and information security maturity levels.

    Determine which framework is suitable and select the description that most accurately reflects the ideal state for security in your organization.

    Level 1

    Level 2

    Level 3

    Level 4

    Level 5

    Minimum security with simple physical barriers. Low-level security to prevent and detect some unauthorized external activity. Medium security to prevent, detect, and assess most unauthorized external activity and some unauthorized internal activity. High-level security to prevent, detect, and assess most unauthorized external and internal activity. Maximum security to prevent, detect, assess, and neutralize all unauthorized external and internal activity.

    Physical security maturity level1

    Initial/Ad hoc security programs are reactive. Developing security programs can be effective at what they do but are not holistic. A defined security program is holistic, documented, and proactive. Managed security programs have robust governance and metrics processes. An optimized security program is based on strong risk management practices, including the production of key risk indicators (KRIs).

    Information security maturity level2

    Sources: 1 Fennelly, 2013; 2 Build an Information Security Strategy, Info-Tech Research Group, 2020

    Enhance

    Assess and treat integrated security risks

    The risk assessment conducted consists of analyzing existing inherent risks, existing pressure to the risks such as health and safety laws and codes of practice, new risks from the integration process, risk tolerance, and countermeasures.

    • Some organizations already integrate security into corporate security that consists of risk management, compliance, governance, information security, personnel security, and physical security. However, some organizations are still separating security components, especially physical security and information security, which limits security visibility and the organization’s ability to complete a comprehensive risks assessment.
    • Many vendors are also segregating physical security and information security solutions because their tools do well only on certain aspects. This forces organizations to combine multiple tools, creating a complex environment.
    • Additionally, risks related to people such as mental health issues must be addressed properly. The prevalence of hybrid work post-pandemic makes this aspect especially important.
    • Assess and treat risks based on the organization’s requirements, including its environments. For example, the US federal facility security organization is required to conduct risk assessments at least every five years for Level I (lowest risk) and Level II facilities and at least every three years for Level III, IV, and V (highest risk) facilities.

    Sources: EPA, n.d.; America's Water Infrastructure Act (AWIA), 2018; ISC, 2021

    “In 2022, 95% of US companies are consolidating into a single platform across physical security, cybersecurity, HR, legal and compliance.”

    Source: Ontic Center for Protective Intelligence, 2022; N=359

    Example risk levels

    The risk assessment conducted is based on a combination of physical and information security factors such as certain facilities factors. The risk level can be used to determine the baseline level of protection (LOP). Next, the baseline LOP is customized to the achievable LOP. The following is an example for federal facilities determined by Interagency Security Committee (ISC).

    Risk factor, points and score. Facility security level (FSL), level of risk, and baseline level of protection.

    Source: ISC, 2021

    Example assets

    It is important to identify the organization’s requirements, including its environments (IT, IoT, OT, facilities, etc.), and to measure and evaluate its risks and threats using an appropriate risk framework and tools with the critical step of identifying assets prior to acquiring solutions.

    Organizational requirements including its environments(IT, loT, OT, facilities, etc.)

    Info-Tech Insight

    Certain exceptions must be identified in risk assessment. Usually physical barriers such as gates and intrusion detection sensors are considered as countermeasures,1 however, under certain assessment, e.g. America's Water Infrastructure Act (AWIA),2 physical barriers are also considered assets and as such must also be assessed.

    Compromising a fingerprint scanner

    An anecdotal example of why physical security alone is not sufficient.

    Biometrics: secure access and data security.

    Image by Rawpixel.com on Freepik

    Lessons learned from using fingerprints for authentication:

    • Fingerprint scanners can be physically circumvented by making a copy an authorized user’s fingerprint with 3D printing or even by forcefully amputating an authorized user’s finger.
    • Authorized users may not be given access when the fingerprint cannot be recognized, e.g. if the finger is covered by bandage due to injury.
    • Integration with information security may help detect unauthorized access, e.g. a fingerprint being scanned in a Canadian office when the same user was scanned at a close time interval from an IP in Europe will trigger an alert of a possible incident.

    Info-Tech Insight

    In an ideal world, we want a physical security system that is interoperable with all technologies, flexible with minimal customization, functional, and integrated. In the real world, we may have physical systems with proprietary configurations that are not easily customized and siloed.

    Source: Robert Dang, Info-Tech Research Group

    Use case: Microchip implant

    Microchip implants can be used instead of physical devices such as key cards for digital identity and access management. Risks can be assessed using quantitative or qualitative approaches. In this use case a qualitative approach is applied to impact and likelihood, and a quantitative approach is applied to revenue and cost.

    Asset: Microchip implant

    Benefits

    Impact

    • Improve user satisfaction by removing the need to carry key cards, IDs, etc.
    • Improve operating reliability by reducing the likelihood of losing physical devices such as key cards.
    • Improve reliability of services through continuous and real-time connection with other systems such as payment system.

    Likelihood

    • Improve user satisfaction: High
    • Improve operating reliability: High
    • Improve reliability of services: High

    Revenue

    • Acquire new customers or retain existing customers by making daily lives easier with no need to carry key cards, IDs, etc.
    • Cost reduction in staffing of security personnel, e.g. reducing the staffing of building guards or receptionist.

    Risks

    Impact

    • Security: issues such as biohacking of wearable technology and interconnected devices.
    • Safety: issues such as infections or reactions in the body's immune system.
    • Privacy: issues such as unauthorized surveillance and tracking of activities.

    Likelihood

    • Biohacking: Medium
    • Infections: Low
    • Surveillance: High

    Cost

    • Installation costs and hardware costs.
    • Overall lifecycle cost including estimated software and maintenance costs.
    • Estimated cost of training and estimated increase in productivity.

    Sources: Business Insider, 2018; BBC News, 2022; ISC, 2015

    Enhance

    Update integrated security policies and procedures

    Global policies with local implementation

    This model works for corporate groups with a parent company. In this model, global security policies are developed by a parent company and local policies are applied to the unique business that is not supported by the parent company.

    Update of existing security policies

    This model works for organizations with sufficient resources. In this model, integrated security policies are derived from various policies. For example, physical security in smart buildings/devices (sensors, automated meters, HVAC, etc.) and OT systems (SCADA, PLCs, RTUs, etc.) introduce unique risk exposures, necessitating updates to security policies.

    Customization of information security policies

    This model works for smaller organizations with limited resources. In this model, integrated security policies are derived from information security policies. The issue is when these policies are not applicable to physical security systems or other environments, e.g. OT systems.

    Sources: Kris Krishan, Waymo (contributor); Isabelle Hertanto, Info-Tech Research Group (contributor); Physical and Environmental Security Policy Template, Info-Tech Research Group, 2022.

    Enhance

    Update BCP, DR, IR

    • Physical threats such as theft of material, vandalism, loitering, and the like are also part of business continuity threats.
    • These threats can be carried out by various means such as vehicles breaching perimeter security, bolt cutters used for cutting wire and cable, and ballistic attack.
    • Issues may occur when security operations are owned separately by physical security or information security, thus lacking consistent application of best practices.
    • To overcome this issue, organizations need to update BCP, DR, and IR holistically based on a cost-benefit analysis and the level of security maturity, which can be defined based on the suitable framework.

    Sources: IEEE, 2021; ISC, 2021

    “The best way to get management excited about a disaster plan is to burn down the building across the street.”

    Source: Dan Erwin, Security Officer, Dow Chemical Co., in Computerworld, 2022

    Optimize

    Optimizing means working to make the most effective and efficient use of resources, starting with identifying skill requirements and closing skill gaps, followed by designing and deploying integrated security architecture and controls, and finally monitoring and reporting integrated security metrics.

    Optimize

    Identify skill requirements and close skill gaps

    • The pandemic changed how people work and where they choose to work, and most people still want a hybrid work model. Our survey in July 2022 (N=516) found that 55.8% of employees have the option to work offsite 2-3 days per week, 21.0% can work offsite 1 day per week, and 17.8% can work offsite 4 days per week.
    • The investment (e.g. on infrastructure and networks) to initiate remote work was huge, and the costs didn’t end there; organizations needed to maintain the secure remote work infrastructure to facilitate the hybrid work model.
    • Moreover, roles are evolving due to convergence and modernization. These new roles require an integrative skill set. For example, the grid security and ops team might consist of an IT security specialist, a SCADA technician/engineer, and an OT/IIOT security specialist, where OT/IIOT security specialist is a new role.
    Identify skill gaps that hinder the successful execution of the hybrid work security strategy. Use the identified skill gaps to define the technical skill requirements for current and future work roles. Conduct a skills assessment on your current workforce to identify employee skill gaps. Decide whether to train (including certification), hire, contract, or outsource to close each skill gap.

    Strategic investment in internal security team

    Internal security governance and management using in-house developed tools or off-the-shelf solutions, e.g. security information and event management (SIEM).

    Security management using third parties

    Internal security management using third-party security services, e.g. managed security service providers (MSSPs).

    Outsourcing security management

    Outsourcing the entire security functions, e.g. using managed detection and response (MDR).

    Sources: Info-Tech Research Group’s Security Priorities 2023, Close the InfoSec Skills Gap, Build an IT Employee Engagement Program, and Grid Modernization

    Select the right certifications

    What are the options?

    • One issue in security certification is the complexity of relevancy in topics with respect to roles and levels.
    • The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) takes the approach of analyzing existing certifications of ICS/SCADA professionals' cybersecurity skills by orientation, scope, and supporting bodies that are grouped into specific certifications, relevant certifications, and safety certifications (ENISA, 2015).
    • This approach can also be applied to integrated security certifications.

    Physical security certification

    • Examples: Industrial Security Professional Certification (NCMS-ISP); Physical Security Professional (ASIS-PSP); Physical Security Certification (CDSE-PSC); ISC I-100, I-200, I-300, and I-400

    Cyber physical system security certification

    • Examples: Certified SCADA Security Architect (CSSA), EC-Council ICS/SCADA Cybersecurity Training Course

    Information security certification

    • Examples: Network and Information Security (NIS) Driving License, ISA/IEC 62443 Cybersecurity Certificate Program, GIAC Global Industrial Cyber Security Professional (GICSP)

    Safety Certifications

    • Examples: Board of Certified Safety Professionals (BCSP), European Network of Safety and Health Professional Organizations (ENSHPO)
    Table showing options for Certification orientation, scope and supporting bodies.

    Optimize

    Design and deploy integrated security architecture and controls

    • A survey by Brivo found that 38% of respondents have partly centralized security platforms, 25% have decentralized platforms, and 36% have centralized platforms (Brivo, 2022; N=700).
    • If your organization’s security program is still decentralized or partly centralized and your organization is planning to establish an integrated security program, then the recommendation is to perform a holistic risk assessment based on probability and impact assessments on threats and vulnerabilities.
    • The impacted factors, for example, are customers served, criticality of services, equipment present inside the building, personnel response time for operational recovery and the mitigation of hazards, and costs.
    • Frameworks such as Sherwood Applied Business Security Architecture (SABSA), Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT), and The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) can be used to build security architecture that aligns security goals with business goals.
    • Finally, analyze the security design against the design criteria.

    Sources: ISA and Honeywell Integrated Security Technology Lab, n.d.; IEEE, 2021

    “As long as organizations treat their physical and cyber domains as separate, there is little hope of securing either one.”

    Source: FedTech magazine, 2009

    Analyze architecture design

    Cloud, on-premises, or hybrid? During the pandemic, many enterprises were under tight deadlines to migrate to the cloud. Many did not refactor data and applications correctly for cloud platforms during migration, with the consequence of high cloud bills. This happened because the migrated applications cannot take advantage of on-premises capabilities such as autoscaling. Thus, in 2023, it is plausible that enterprises will bring applications and data back on-premises.

    Below is an example of a security design analysis of platform architecture. Design can be assessed using quantitative or qualitative approaches. In this example, a qualitative approach is applied using high-level advantages and disadvantages.

    Design criteria

    Cloud

    Hybrid

    On-premises

    Effort

    Consumer effort is within a range, e.g. < 60%

    Consumer effort is within a range e.g. < 80%

    100% organization

    Reliability

    High reliability

    High reliability

    Medium reliability that depends on data centers

    Cost

    High cost when data and applications are not correctly designed for cloud

    Optimized cost when data and applications are correctly designed either for cloud or native

    Medium cost when data and applications take advantage of on-prem capabilities

    Info-Tech Insight

    It is important for organizations to find the most optimized architecture to support them, for example, a hybrid architecture of cloud and on-premises based on operations and cost-effectiveness. To help design a security architecture that is strategic, realistic, and based on risk, see Info-Tech’s Identify the Components of Your Cloud Security Architecture research.

    Sources: InfoWorld, 2023; Identify the Components of Your Cloud Security Architecture , Info-Tech Research Group, 2021

    Analyze equipment design

    Below is an example case of a security design analysis of electronic security systems. Design can be assessed using quantitative or qualitative approaches. In this example a qualitative approach is applied using advantages and disadvantages.

    Surveillance design criteria

    Video camera

    Motion detector

    Theft of security system equipment

    Higher economic loss Lower economic loss

    Reliability

    Positive detection of intrusion Spurious indication and lower reliability

    Energy savings and bandwidth

    Only record when motion is detected Detect and process all movement

    Info-Tech Insight

    Once the design has been analyzed, the next step is to conduct market research to analyze the solutions landscape, e.g. to compare products or services from vendors or manufacturers.

    Sources: IEEE, 202; IEC, n.d.; IEC, 2013

    Analyze off-the-shelf solutions

    Criteria to consider when comparing solutions:

    Criteria to consider when comparing solutions: 1 - Visibility and asset management. 2 - Threat detection, mitigation and response. 3 - Risk assessment and vulnerability management. 4 - Usability, architecture, Cost.

    Visibility and Asset Management

    Passively monitoring data using various protocol layers, actively sending queries to devices, or parsing configuration files of physical security devices, OT, IoT, and IT environments on assets, processes, and connectivity paths.

    Threat Detection, Mitigation, and Response (+ Hunting)

    Automation of threat analysis (signature-based, specification-based, anomaly-based, flow-based, content-based, sandboxing) not only in IT but also in relevant environments, e.g. physical, IoT, IIoT, and OT on assets, data, network, and orchestration with threat intelligence sharing and analytics.

    Risk Assessment and Vulnerability Management

    Risk scoring approach (qualitative, quantitative) based on variables such as behavioral patterns and geolocation. Patching and vulnerability management.

    Usability, Architecture, Cost

    The user and administrative experience, multiple deployment options, extensive integration capabilities, and affordability.

    Source: Secure IT/OT Convergence, Info-Tech Research Group, 2022

    Optimize

    Establish, monitor, and report integrated security metrics

    Security metrics serve various functions in a security program.1 For example:

    • As audit requirements. For integrated security, the requirements are derived from mandatory or voluntary compliance, e.g. NERC CIP.
    • As an indicator of maturity level. For integrated security, maturity level is used to measure the state of security, e.g. C2M2, CMMC.
    • As a measurement of effectiveness and efficiency. Security metrics consist of operational metrics, financial metrics, etc.

    Safety

    Physical security interfaces with the physical world. Thus, metrics based on risks related to safety are crucial. These metrics motivate personnel by making clear why they should care about security.
    Source: EPRI, 2017

    Business Performance

    The impact of security on the business can be measured with various metrics such as operational metrics, service level agreements (SLAs), and financial metrics.
    Source: BMC, 2022

    Technology Performance

    Early detection leads to faster remediation and less damage. Metrics such as maximum tolerable downtime (MTD) and mean time to recovery (MTR) indicate system reliability.
    Source: Dark Reading, 2022

    Security Culture

    Measure the overall quality of security culture with indicators such as compliance and audit, vulnerability management, and training and awareness.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Security failure can be avoided by evaluating the security systems and program. Security evaluation requires understanding what, where, when, and how to measure and to report the relevant metrics.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Secure IT/OT Convergence

    The previously entirely separate OT ecosystem is migrating into the IT ecosystem, primarily to improve access via connectivity and to leverage other standard IT capabilities for economic benefit.

    Hence, IT and OT need to collaborate, starting with communication to build trust and to overcome their differences and followed by negotiation on components such as governance and management, security controls on OT environments, compliance with regulations and standards, and establishing metrics for OT security.

    Preparing for Technology Convergence in Manufacturing

    Information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) teams have a long history of misalignment and poor communication.

    Stakeholder expectations and technology convergence create the need to leave the past behind and build a culture of collaboration.

    Build an Information Security Strategy

    Info-Tech has developed a highly effective approach to building an information security strategy – an approach that has been successfully tested and refined for over seven years with hundreds of organizations.

    This unique approach includes tools for ensuring alignment with business objectives, assessing organizational risk and stakeholder expectations, enabling a comprehensive current-state assessment, prioritizing initiatives, and building a security roadmap.

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    Sooknanan, Shastri and Isaac Kinsella. "Identify the Components of Your Cloud Security Architecture." Info-Tech Research Group, 12 March 2021. Accessed 26 Jan. 2023.

    "TC 79 Alarm and electronic security systems." International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), n.d. Accessed 9 Dec. 2022.

    "The Risk Management Process for Federal Facilities: An Interagency Security Committee Standard." Interagency Security Committee (ISC), 2021. Accessed 26 Jan. 2023.

    "The Short Guide to Why Security Programs Can Fail." CyberTalk, 23 Sep. 2021. Accessed 30 Dec. 2022.

    Verton, Dan. "Companies Aim to Build Security Awareness." Computerworld, 27 Nov. 2022. Accessed 26 Jan. 2023.

    "Vulnerability Assessment of Federal Facilities." The United States' Department of Justice, 28 Jun. 1995. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023.

    "What is IEC 61508?" 61508 Association. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023.

    Wolf, Gene. "Better Include Physical Security With Cybersecurity." T&D World 5 Jan. 2023. Accessed 19 Jan. 2023.

    Wood, Kate, and Isaac Kinsella. “Build an Information Security Strategy.” Info-Tech Research Group, 9 Sept. 2020. Web.

    Woolf, Tim, et al. "Benefit-Cost Analysis for Utility-Facing Grid Modernization Investments: Trends, Challenges, and Considerations." Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Feb. 2021. Accessed 15 Nov. 2022.

    "Work Health and Safety Act 2011." The Australian Government. Accessed 13 Jan. 2023.

    Wu, Jing. “Industrial Control System Modernization: Unlock the Value of Automation in Utilities.” Info-Tech Research Group, 6 April 2023. Web.

    Research Contributors and Experts

    Amy L. Meger, IGP

    Information and Cyber Governance Manager
    Platte River Power Authority

    Andrew Amaro

    Chief Security Officer (CSO) & Founder
    KLAVAN Security

    Bilson Perez

    IT Security Manager
    4Wall Entertainment

    Dan Adams

    VP of Information Technology
    4Wall Entertainment

    Doery Abdou

    Senior Manager
    March Networks Corporate

    Erich Krueger

    Manager of Security Engineering
    Omaha Public Power District

    Kris Krishan

    Head of IT
    Waymo

    Owen Yardley

    Director, Facilities Security Preparedness
    Omaha Public Power District

    Corporate security consultancy

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    Implementable advice
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    Engage our corporate security consultancy firm to discover any weaknesses within your company’s security management. Tymans Group has extensive expertise in helping small and medium businesses set up clear security protocols to safeguard their data and IT infrastructure. Read on to discover how our consulting firm can help improve corporate security within your company.

    Why should you hire a corporate security consultancy company?

    These days, corporate security includes much more than just regulating access to your physical location, be it an office or a store. Corporate security increasingly deals in information and data security, as well as general corporate governance and responsibility. Proper security protocols not only protect your business from harm, but also play an important factor in your overall success. As such, corporate security is all about setting up practical and effective strategies to protect your company from harm, regardless of whether the threat comes from within or outside. As such, hiring a security consulting firm to improve corporate security and security management within your company is not an unnecessary luxury, but a must.

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    Improve your corporate security with help from our consulting company

    As a consultancy firm, Tymans Group can help your business to identify possible threats and help set up strategies to avoid them. However, as not all threats can be avoided, our corporate security consultancy firm also helps you set up protocols to mitigate and manage them, as well as help you develop effective incident management protocols. All solutions are practical, people-oriented and based on our extensive experience and thus have proven effectiveness.

    Hire our experienced consultancy firm

    Engage the services of our consulting company to improve corporate security within your small or medium business. Contact us to set up an appointment on-site or book a one-hour talk with expert Gert Taeymans to discuss any security issues you may be facing. We are happy to offer you a custom solution.

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    Stabilize Infrastructure & Operations During Work-From-Anywhere

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    Work-from-anywhere isn’t going anywhere. IT Infrastructure & Operations needs to:

    • Rebuild trust in the stability of IT infrastructure and operations.
    • Identify gaps created from the COVID-19 rush to remote work.
    • Identify how IT can better support remote workers.

    IT went through an initial crunch to enable remote work. It’s time to be proactive and learn from our mistakes.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • The nature of work has fundamentally changed. IT departments must ensure service continuity, not for how the company worked in 2019, but how the company is working now and will be working tomorrow.
    • Revisit the basics. Don’t focus on becoming an innovator until you have improved network access, app access, file access, and collaboration tools.
    • Aim for near-term innovation. Once you’re a trusted operator, become a business partner by directly empowering end users at home and in the office.

    Impact and Result

    Build a work-from-anywhere strategy that resonates with the business.

    • Strengthen the foundations of collaboration tools, app access, file access, network access, and endpoint standards.
    • Explore opportunities to strengthen IT operations.
    • Proactively help the business through employee experience monitoring and facilities optimization.

    Stabilize Infrastructure & Operations During Work-From-Anywhere Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should build a strategy for improving how well IT infrastructure and operations support work-from-anywhere, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Stabilize IT infrastructure

    Ensure your fundamentals are solid.

    2. Update IT operations

    Revisit your practices to ensure you can effectively operate in work-from-anywhere.

    3. Optimize IT infrastructure & operations

    Offer additional value to the business by proactively addressing these items.

    • Roadmap Tool

    Infographic

    Workshop: Stabilize Infrastructure & Operations During Work-From-Anywhere

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Stabilize IT Infrastructure

    The Purpose

    Strengthen the foundations of IT infrastructure.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Improved end-user experience

    Stabilized environment

    Activities

    1.1 Review work-from-anywhere framework and identify capability gaps.

    1.2 Review diagnostic results to identify satisfaction gaps.

    1.3 Record improvement opportunities for foundational capabilities: collaboration, network, file access, app access.

    1.4 Identify deliverables and opportunities to provide value for each.

    Outputs

    Projects and initiatives to stabilize IT infrastructure

    Deliverables and opportunities to provide value for foundational capabilities

    2 Update IT Operations and Optimize

    The Purpose

    Update IT operational practices to support work-from-anywhere more effectively.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Improved IT operations

    Activities

    2.1 Identify IT infrastructure and operational capability gaps.

    2.2 Record improvement opportunities for DRP & BCP.

    2.3 Record improvement opportunities for endpoint and systems management practices.

    2.4 Record improvement opportunities for IT operational practices.

    2.5 Explore office space optimization and employee experience monitoring.

    Outputs

    Projects and initiatives to update IT operations to better support work-from-anywhere

    Longer-term strategic initiatives

    Deliverables and opportunities to provide value for each capability

    Perform an Agile Skills Assessment

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    • Parent Category Name: Development
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    • Your organization is trying to address the key delivery challenges you are facing. Early experiments with Agile are starting to bear fruit.
    • As part of maturing your Agile practice, you want to evaluate if you have the right skills and capabilities in place.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Focusing on the non-technical skills can yield significant returns for your products, your team, and your organization. These skills are what should be considered as the real Agile skills.

    Impact and Result

    • Define the skills and values that are important to your organization to be successful at being Agile.
    • Put together a standard criterion for measurement of the attainment of given skills.
    • Define the roadmap and communication plan around your agile assessment.

    Perform an Agile Skills Assessment Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should perform an agile skills assessment. review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Take stock of the Agile skills and values important to you

    Confirm the list of Agile skills that you wish to measure.

    • Perform an Agile Skills Assessment – Phase 1: Take Stock of the Agile Skills and Values Important to You
    • Agile Skills Assessment Tool
    • Agile Skills Assessment Tool Example

    2. Define an assessment method that works for you

    Define what it means to attain specific agile skills through a defined ascension path of proficiency levels, and standardized skill expectations.

    • Perform an Agile Skills Assessment – Phase 2: Define an Assessment Method That Works for You

    3. Plan to assess your team

    Determine the roll-out and communication plan that suits your organization.

    • Perform an Agile Skills Assessment – Phase 3: Plan to Assess Your Team
    • Agile Skills Assessment Communication and Roadmap Plan
    • Agile Skills Assessment Communication and Roadmap Plan Example
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Perform an Agile Skills Assessment

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Define Agile Skills and Maturity Levels

    The Purpose

    Learn about and define the Agile skills that are important to your organization.

    Define the different levels of attainment when it comes to your Agile skills.

    Define the standards on a per-role basis.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Get a clear view of the Agile skills important into meet your Agile transformation goals in alignment with organizational objectives.

    Set a clear standard for what it means to meet your organizational standards for Agile skills.

    Activities

    1.1 Review and update the Agile skills relevant to your organization.

    1.2 Define your Agile proficiency levels to evaluate attainment of each skill.

    1.3 Define your Agile team roles.

    1.4 Define common experience levels for your Agile roles.

    1.5 Define the skill expectations for each Agile role.

    Outputs

    A list of Agile skills that are consistent with your Agile transformation

    A list of proficiency levels to be used during your Agile skills assessment

    A confirmed list of roles that you wish to measure on your Agile teams

    A list of experience levels common to Agile team roles (example: Junior, Intermediate, Senior)

    Define the skill expectations for each Agile role

    Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

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    • Virtual team members must rely upon collaboration technology to communicate and collaborate.
    • Management practices and approaches that work face to face do not always translate effectively in virtual contexts.
    • Managers cannot rely upon spontaneous social interactions that happen organically when people are colocated to build meaningful and trusting relationships. Space and time need to be created in a virtual environment for this to happen.
    • Observing an employee’s performance or development can be more difficult, and relying on others’ feedback becomes more critical for managing performance and development.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Managing virtual teams does not require developing new manager competencies. Instead, managers need to “dial up” competencies they already have and adjust their approaches.
    • Setting clear expectations with virtual teams creates the foundation needed to manage them effectively.
    • Virtual employees crave more meaningful interactions about performance and development with their managers.

    Impact and Result

    • Create a solid foundation for managing virtual teams by setting clear expectations and taking a more planful approach to managing performance and employee development.
    • Dial up key management competencies that you already have. Managers do not need to develop new competencies; they just need to adjust and refocus their approaches.

    Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Equip managers to effectively manage virtual teams

    Equip managers to become more effective with managing remote teams.

    The workbook serves as a reference guide participants will use to support formal training.

    • Training Deck: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams
    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams
    • Standard Participant Training Session Evaluation Template

    2. Additional Resources

    Many organizations are developing plans to allow employees more flexible work options, including remote work. Use these resources to help managers and employees make the most of remote work arrangements.

    • Work-From-Home Tips for Managers
    • Work-From-Home Tips for Employees
    • Health & Safety at Home Infographic
    • Wellness and Working From Home
    • Ergonomic Workspaces Infographic
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Learning objectives

    Describe the benefits of virtual teams.

    Create a plan for adopting effective management practices and setting clear expectations with virtual teams.

    Identify potential solutions to the challenges of managing performance and developing members of virtual teams.

    Create an action plan to increase effectiveness in managing virtual teams.

    Target audience

    People managers who manage or plan to manage virtual teams.

    Training length

    Two three-hour sessions

    Training material

    • Use the speaker’s notes in the notes pane section of each slide to plan and practice the training session.
    • Activity slides are scattered throughout this training deck and are clearly numbered in the slide title.
    • Notes in italics are written to the facilitator and are not meant to be read aloud.
    • Download the Workbook for participants to use.

    Suggested materials for activities:

    • Index cards or sticky notes
    • Markers
    • Whiteboard/large table space/flip chart

    Agenda & activities

    Section 1

    Section 2

    10 min

    Welcome: Overview & Introductions

    • Introductions
    10 min

    Welcome: Overview & Introductions

    • Session 1 Review
    • Session 2 Overview
    50 min

    1.1 Introduction to virtual teams

    • What kind of virtual team do you lead?
    • Virtual team benefits and challenges
    55 min

    2.1 Managing wellbeing in a virtual team context

    • Share current practices and challenges regarding wellbeing in virtual teams
    • Identify and discuss proposed solutions
    • Develop draft action plan for managing wellbeing in a virtual team context
    5 min

    Break

    5 min Break
    45 min

    1.2 Laying the foundation for a virtual team

    • Identify behaviors to better inform, interact with, and involve team members
    60 min

    2.2 Managing performance in a virtual team context

    • Share current performance management practices for virtual teams
    • Identify challenges of current practices and propose solutions
    • Develop draft action plan for managing performance in a virtual team context
    10 min

    Break

    10 min Break
    55 min

    1.2 Laying the foundation for a virtual team

    • Identify and share ways you prefer to communicate for different activities
    • Develop draft action plan for laying the foundation for a virtual team
    40 min

    Action planning & conclusion

    • Refine consolidated action plan (three parts) and commit to implementing it
    • Key takeaways
    5 min

    Session 1 Wrap-Up

    Recommended Customization

    Review all slides and adjust the language or content as needed to suit your organizational context and culture.

    The pencil icon to the left denotes slides requiring customization of the slide and/or the speaker’s notes, e.g. adding in an organization-specific process.

    Customization instructions are found in the notes pane.

    Tips

    • Adjust the speaker’s notes on the slides before (or after) any slides you modify or delete to ensure logical transitions between slides.
    • Update the agenda to reflect new timings if major modifications are made.
    • Even seasoned leaders need to be reminded of the basics now and again. Rather than delete more basic slides, cut back on the amount of time spent covering them and frame the content as a refresher.
    • Participant Workbooks
    • Relevant organization-specific documents (see side panel)
    • Training Session Feedback Form

    Required Information

    • Communication guidelines for managers (e.g. cadence of manager interactions)
    • Performance management process and guidelines
    • Employee development guidelines
    • List of available resources (e.g. social collaboration tools)

    Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Section 1.1

    Practical foundations for managing teams in a remote environment

    Feasibility of virtual IT teams

    Most organizations are planning some combination of remote and onsite work in 2022.

    This is an image of a bar graph demonstrating the percentage of companies who have the following plans for return to work: Full work-from-home (All employees WFH permanently) - 4% ; No work-from-home permitted	9% ; Partial work-from-home team (Eligible employees can WFH for a certain portion of their work week)	23% ; Balanced work-from-home team (All employees can WFH for a certain portion of their work week)	28% ; Hybrid work-from-home team (Eligible employees WFH on a full-time basis)	37%

    Source: IT Talent Trends, 2022; n=199

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Most organizations are planning some combination of remote and onsite work in 2022 – the highest reported plans for WFH were hybrid, balanced, and partial work-from-home. This builds on our findings in the IT Talent Trends 2022 report.

    Feasibility of virtual IT teams

    What percentage of roles in IT are capable of being performed remotely permanently?

    Approximately what percentage of roles in IT are capable of being performed remotely permanently?

    0% to less than 10%: 3%; 10% to less than 25%: 5%; 25% to less than 50%: 12%; 50% to less than 75%: 30%; 75% to 100%L 50%.

    IT Talent Trends, 2022; n=207

    Speaker’s Notes:

    80% of respondents estimated that 50 to 100% of IT roles can be performed remotely.

    Virtual teams take all kinds of forms

    A virtual team is any team that has members that are not colocated and relies on technology for communications.

    This image depicts the three levels of virtual teams, Municipal; National; Global.

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Before we start, it will be useful to review what we mean by the term “virtual team.” For our purposes we will be defining a virtual team as any team that has members that are not colocated and relies on technology for communications.

    There are a wide variety of virtual work arrangements and a variety of terms used to describe them. For example, some common terms include:

    • “Flexible work arrangements”: Employees have the option to work where they see fit (within certain constraints). They may choose to work from the office, home, a shared office space, the road, etc.
    • “Remote work,” “work from home,” and “telecommuting”: These are just various ways of describing how or where people are working virtually. They all share the idea that these kinds of employees are not colocated.
    • “Multi-office team”: the team members all work in office environments, but they may not always be in the same office as their team members or manager.

    Our definition of virtual work covers all of these terms. It is also distance neutral, meaning that it applies equally to teams that are dispersed globally or regionally or even those working in the same cities but dispersed throughout different buildings. Our definition also applies whether virtual employees work full time or part time.

    The challenges facing managers arise as soon as some team members are not colocated and have to rely on technology to communicate and coordinate work. Greater distances between employees can complicate challenges (e.g. time zone coordination), but the core challenges of managing virtual teams are the same whether those workers are merely located in different buildings in the same city or in different buildings on different continents.

    1.1 What kind of virtual team do you lead?

    15 Minutes

    Working on your own, take five minutes to figure out what kind of virtual team you lead.

    1. How many people on your team work virtually (all, most, or a small percentage)?
    2. How often and how regularly do they tend to work virtually (full time, part time regularly, or part time as needed)?
    3. What kinds of virtual work arrangements are there on your team (multi-site, work from home, mobile employees)?
    4. Where do your workers tend to be physically located (different offices but in the same city/region or globally dispersed)?
    5. Record this information in your workbook.
    6. Discuss as a group.

    Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Input

    • Size of virtual team
    • Current remote work practices

    Output

    • Documented list of current state of remote work

    Materials

    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Participants

    • All managers with direct reports working virtually

    Advantages

    Benefits to the organization

    Benefits to employees

    Operational continuity in disaster situations that prevent employees from coming into the office.

    Cost savings: Employees who WFH half the time can save $2,500 to $4,000 per year (Global Workplace Analytics, 2021).

    Cost savings: Organizations save ~$11,000 annually per employee working from home half the time (Global Workplace Analytics, 2021).

    Time savings: Employees who WFH half the time save on average 11 workdays per year (Global Workplace Analytics, 2021).

    Increased attraction: 71% of employees would likely choose one employer over another based on WFH offerings (Owl Labs, 2021).

    Improved wellbeing:

    83% employees agree that WFH would make them happier.

    80% agree that WFH would decrease their stress.

    81% agree that WFH would improve their ability to manage their work-life balance.

    (Owl Labs, 2021)

    Increased retention: 74% of employees would be less likely to leave their employer if they could WFH (Owl Labs, 2021).

    Increased flexibility: 32% of employees rated the “ability to have a flexible schedule” as the biggest benefit of WFH (OWL Labs, 2021).

    Increased productivity: 50% of employees report they would maintain or increase their productivity while working from home (Glassdoor Team, 2020).

    Increased engagement: Offsite employees tend to have higher overall engagement than onsite employees (McLean & Company Engagement Survey, 2020).

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Remote work arrangements are becoming more and more common, and for good reason: there are a lot of benefits to the organization – and to employees.

    #1: Save Money

    Perhaps one of the most common reasons for opting for remote-work arrangements is the potential cost savings. One study found that organizations could save about $11,000 per employee working from home half the time (Global Workplace Analytics, 2021).

    #2 Increased Attraction

    In addition, supporting remote-work arrangements can attract employees. One study found that 71% of employees would likely choose one employer over another based on WFH offerings (Owl Labs, 2019).

    #3 Improve productivity.

    There are also improvements to productivity. Fifty percent of employees report they would maintain or increase their productivity while working from home (Glassdoor Team, 2020).

    Remote work also has benefits to employees.

    #1: Save Money

    As with organizations, employees also benefit financially from remote work arrangements, saving between $2,500 and $4,000 and on average 11 working days while working from home half of the time.

    #2: Improved Wellbeing

    Most employees agree that working from home makes them happier, reduces stress, and provides an improved work-life balance through increased flexibility.

    Challenges

    Organizations

    • Concerns that WFH may stifle innovation (Scientific American, 2021), likely due to the potential lack of collaboration and knowledge sharing.
    • Fewer organic opportunities for informal interaction between employees working from home means active efforts are required to foster organizational culture.

    Leaders

    • 42% of managers believe that monitoring the productivity of their direct reports is a top challenge of WFH (Ultimate Software, 2019).
    • The lack of in-person supervision compounded with a lack of trust in employees leads many leaders to believe that WFH will result in a drop in productivity.

    Employees

    • 20% of employees report collaboration/communication as their top struggle with WFH (Owl Labs, 2021).
    • Employees often experience burnout from working longer hours due to the lack of commute, blurring of work and home life, and the perceived need to prove their productivity.

    Many of these barriers can be addressed by changing traditional mindsets and finding alternative ways of working, but the traditional approach to work is so entrenched that it has been hard to make the shift.

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Many organizations are still grappling with the challenges of remote work. Some are just perceived challenges, while others are quite real.

    Limited innovation and a lack of informal interaction are a potential consequence of failing to properly adapt to the remote-work environment.

    Leaders also face challenges with remote work. Losing in-person supervision has led to the lack of trust and a perceived drop in productivity.

    A study conducted 2021 asked remote workers to identify their biggest struggle with working remotely. The top three struggles remote workers report facing are unplugging after work, loneliness, and collaborating and/or communicating.

    Seeing the struggles remote workers identify is a good reminder that these employees have a unique set of challenges. They need their managers to help them set boundaries around their work; create feelings of connectedness to the organization, culture, and team; and be expert communicators.

    1.2 Virtual teams: benefits and challenges

    20 Minutes

    1. Discuss and list:
      1. Any positives you’ve experienced since managing virtual employees.
      2. Any challenges you’ve had to manage connected to managing virtual employees.
    2. Record information in the workbook.

    Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Input

    • Personal experiences managing remote teams

    Output

    • List of benefits and challenges of remote work

    Materials

    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Participants

    • All managers with direct reports working virtually

    Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Section 1.2

    Laying the foundations for a virtual team

    The 3i’s: Inform, interact, and involve your way to effective management:

    Inform

    Interact Involve

    ↓ Down

    Connect

    ↑ Up

    Tell employees the whys

    Get to know employees

    Solicit input from employees

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Effectively managing a virtual team really comes down to adopting management approaches that will engage virtual employees.

    Managing a virtual team does not actually require a new management style. The basics of effective management are the same in both colocated and virtual teams; however, the emphasis on certain behaviors and actions we take often differs. Managing a virtual team requires much more thoughtfulness and planning in our everyday interactions with our teams as we cannot rely on the relative ease of face-to-face interactions available to colocated teams.

    The 3i’s Engaging Management Model is useful when interacting with all employees and provides a handy framework for more planful interactions with virtual employees.

    Think of your management responsibilities in these three buckets – they are the most important components of being an effective manager. We’re first going to look at inform and involve before moving on to interact.

    Inform: Relay information down from senior management and leaders to employees. Communicate the rationale behind decisions and priorities, and always explain how they will directly affect employees.

    Why is this important? According to McLean & Company’s Engagement Survey data, employees who say their managers keep them well informed about decisions that affect them are 3.4 times more likely to be engaged (Source: McLean & Company, 2020; N=77,363). Your first reaction to this might be “I already do this,” which may very well be the case. Keep in mind, though, we sometimes tend to communicate on a “need-to-know basis,” especially when we are stressed or short on time. Engaging employees takes more. Always focus on explaining the “why?” or the rationale behind business decisions.

    It might seem like this domain should be the least affected, since important company announcements probably continue in a remote environment. But remember that information like that also flows informally. And even in formal settings, there are question-and-answer opportunities. Or maybe your employee might come to your office to ask for more details. Virtual team members can’t gather around the watercooler. They don’t have the same opportunities to hear information in passing as people who are colocated do, so managers need to make a concerted effort to share information with virtual team members in a clear and timely way.

    Swinging over to the other end, we have involve: Involve your employees. Solicit information and feedback from employees and collaborate with them.

    However, it’s not enough to just solicit their feedback and input; you also need to act on it.

    Make sure you involve your employees in a meaningful way. Such collaboration makes employees feel like a valued part of the team. Not to mention that they often have information and perspectives that can help make your decisions stronger!

    Employees who say their department leaders act on feedback from them are 3.9 times more likely to be engaged than those whose leaders don’t. (Source: McLean & Company, 2020; N=59,779). That is a huge difference!

    Keeping virtual employees engaged and feeling connected and committed to the organization requires planful and regular application of the 3i’s model.

    Finally, Interact: Connect with employees on a personal level; get to know them and understand who they are on a personal and professional level.

    Why? Well, over and above the fact that it can be rewarding for you to build stronger relationships with your team, our data shows that human connection makes a significant difference with employees. Employees who believe their managers care about them as a person are 3.8 times more likely to be engaged than those who do not (Source: McLean & Company, 2017; N=70,927).

    And you might find that in a remote environment, this is the area that suffers the most, since a lot of these interactions tend to be unscripted, unscheduled, and face to face.

    Typically, if we weren’t in the midst of a pandemic, we’d emphasize the importance of allocating some budget to travel and get some face-to-face time with your staff. Meeting and interacting with team members face to face is crucial to building trusting relationships, and ultimately, an effective team, so given the context of our current circumstances, we recommend the use of video when interacting with your employees who are remote.

    Relay information down from senior management to employees.

    Ensure they’ve seen and understand any organization-wide communication.

    Share any updates in a timely manner.

    Connect with employees on a personal level.
    Ask how they’re doing with the new work arrangement.
    Express empathy for challenges (sick family member, COVID-19 diagnosis, etc.).
    Ask how you can support them.
    Schedule informal virtual coffee breaks a couple of times a week and talk about non-work topics.

    Get information from employees and collaborate with them.
    Invite their input (e.g. have a “winning remotely” brainstorming session).
    Escalate any challenges you can’t address to your VP.
    Give them as much autonomy over their work as possible – don’t micromanage.

    1.3 Identify behaviors to inform, interact with, and involve team members

    20 Minutes

    Individually:

    1. Identify one behavior for each of Inform, Interact, and Involve to improve.
    2. Record information in the workbook.

    As a group:

    1. Discuss behaviors to improve for each of Inform, Interact, and Involve and record new ideas to incorporate into your leadership practice.

    Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Input

    • 3i's Model
    • Current leadership behaviors to improve

    Output

    • List of behaviors to better inform, interact, and involve team members

    Materials

    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Participants

    • All managers with direct reports working virtually

    Laying the foundation: Set clear expectations

    Tasks

    • What are the daily and weekly team activities? How do they affect one another?

    Goals

    • Clarify any adjustments to strategy based on the situation; clarify metrics.

    Communication

    • How often and when will you check in? What should they come to you for? What modalities will you use and when?

    Roadblocks

    • Involve your team in deciding how to handle roadblocks and challenges.

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Clear expectations are important in any environment, remote or not. But it is much harder to do in a remote environment. The barrier to seeking clarification is so much higher (For example, email vs. catching someone in hallway, or you can’t notice that a colleague is struggling without them asking).

    Communication – This is one area where the importance actually changes in a remote context. We’ve been talking about a lot of practices that are the same in importance whether you’re in an office or remote, and maybe you just enact them differently. But clarity around communication processes is actually tremendously more important in a remote environment.

    Adopt a five-step process to set specific and documented expectations

    1. Check in with how your team member is doing on a daily basis. Don’t forget to ask how they are doing personally.
    2. Follow up on previously set expectations. Ask how things are going. Discuss if priorities or expectations have changed and update expectations accordingly.
    3. Ask if they are experiencing any roadblocks and collaborate to find solutions.
    4. Provide feedback and recognition as appropriate.
    5. Document newly set expectations – either through a collaboration tool or through email.

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Suggested best practices: Hold daily team check-ins and hold separate individual check-ins. Increase frequency of these.

    During Check-in
    1. Set up a running Teams chat for your team.
    • This is your community. You must be the biggest cheerleader and keep the team feeling like they are contributing. Make sure everyone is involved.
  • Start each workday with a video scrum to discuss what’s coming today for your team.
    • Ask: What are you planning to work on today? Are there any roadblocks I can help with? Technology working OK?
  • Right after your team meeting, set up an “every morning video call” one-on-one meeting with each team member (5-10 minutes max).
    • Ask: What are you working on today? What will your momentum metrics be? What do you need from me?
  • Set up a separate video call at the end of the afternoon to review what everyone did (5 minutes max).
    • Ask: What went well? What went poorly? How can we improve?
  • After a Check-in
    1. Be accessible:
      • Ensure your team knows the best way to get in touch with you.
      • Email is not ideal for informal, frequent contact – use messaging instead.
    2. Be available:
      • Keep a running conversation going in Teams.
      • Respond in a timely manner; address issues quickly so that your team has what they need to succeed.
      • Let your team know if you’ll be away/offline for longer than an hour during the workday and ask them to do the same (e.g. for an appointment).
      • Help address roadblocks, answer questions, clarify priorities, etc.

    Define communication requirements

    • Set up an ongoing communication with your team.
      • E.g. a running conversation on Slack or Teams
    • Schedule daily virtual meetings and check-ins.
      • This can help to maintain a sense of normalcy and conduct a pulse check on your team.
    • Use video for important conversations.
      • Video chat creates better rapport, shows body language, and lessens feelings of isolation, but it can be taxing.
    • Set expectations about communication.
      • Differentiate between day-to-day communication and updates on the state of events.
    • Clearly communicate the collaboration toolkit.
      • What do we have available? What is the purpose of each?

    Speaker’s Notes:

    With organizational expectations set, we need to establish team expectations around how we collaborate and communicate.

    Today there is no lack of technology available to support our virtual communication. We can use the phone, conference calls, videoconferencing, Skype, instant messaging, [insert organization-specific technological tools.], etc.

    However, it is important to have a common understanding of which tools are most appropriate when and for what.

    What are some of the communication channel techniques you’ve found useful in your informal interactions with employees or that you’ve seen work well between employees?

    [Have participants share any technological tools they find useful and why.]

    Check in with your team on communication requirements

    • Should we share our calendars, hours of availability, and/or IM status?
    • How often should we meet as a team and one on one? Should we institute a time when we should not communicate virtually?
    • Which communication channel should we use in what context? How should we decide which communication method to use?
    • Should I share guidelines for email and meeting etiquette (or any other communication methods)?
    • Should we establish a new team charter?
    • What feedback does the team have regarding how we’ve been communicating?

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Whenever we interact, we make the following kinds of social exchanges. We exchange:

    • Information: Data or opinions
    • Emotions: Feelings and evaluations about the data or opinions
    • Motivations: What we feel like doing in response to data or opinions

    We need to make sure that these exchanges are happening as each team member intends. To do this, we have to be sensitive to what information is being conveyed, what emotions are involved in the interaction, and how we are motivating each other to act through the interaction. Every interaction will have intended and unintended effects on others. No one can pay attention to all of these aspects of communication all the time, but if we develop habits that are conducive to successful exchanges in all three areas, we can become more effective.

    In addition to being mindful of the exchange in our communication, as managers it is critical to build trusting relationships and rapport with employees as we saw in the 3i's model. However, in virtual teams we cannot rely on running into someone in the kitchen or hallway to have an informal conversation. We need to be thoughtful and deliberate in our interactions with employees. We need to find alternative ways to build these relationships with and between employees that are both easy and accepted by ourselves and employees. Because of that, it is important to set communication norms and really understand each other’s preferences. For example:

    • Timing of responses. Set the expectation that emails should be responded to within X hours/days unless otherwise noted in the actual email.
    • When it’s appropriate to send an email vs. using instant messaging.
    • A team charter – the team’s objectives, individual roles and responsibilities, and communication and collaboration guidelines.

    1.4 Identify and share ways you prefer to communicate for different activities

    20 Minutes

    1. Brainstorm and list the different types of exchanges you have with your virtual employees and they have with each other.
    2. List the various communication tools in use on your team.
    3. Assign a preferred communication method for each type of exchange

    Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Input

    • Current types of exchanges on team
    • Communication methods used

    Output

    • Defined ways to communicate for each communication method

    Materials

    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Participants

    • All managers with direct reports working virtually

    Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Section 2.1
    Balancing wellbeing and performance in a virtual team context

    The pandemic has taken a significant toll on employees’ mental wellbeing

    44% of employees reported declined mental wellbeing since the start of the pandemic.

    • 44% of those who work from home.
    • 34% of those who have other work arrangements (i.e. onsite).
      (Qualtrics, 2020)

    "If one of our colleagues were to fall, break their leg, and get a cast, colleagues would probably rally around that person signing their cast. But, really, we don’t view the health of our brain the same as we do the health of our body."
    – Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) Employee

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Despite being over two years into the pandemic, we are still seeing its effect on the physical and mental health of employees.

    The mental health aspect has been often overlooked by organizations, but in order to have a safe, happy, and productive team, you need to give mental health the same level of focus as physical heath. This requires a change in mindset in order for you as a leader to support your team's mental wellbeing during the pandemic and beyond.

    Employees are reporting several key mental wellbeing challenges

    Stress: 67%

    Employees report increasingly high levels of stress from the onset of COVID-19, stating that it has been the most stressful time in their careers.
    (Qualtrics, 2020)

    Anxiety: 57%

    Similarly, employees’ anxiety levels have peaked because of the pandemic and the uncertainty it brings.
    (Qualtrics, 2020)

    Four main themes surrounding stress & anxiety

    • Fear of contracting COVID-19
    • Financial pressures
    • Job security and uncertainty
    • Loneliness caused by social isolation

    Speaker’s Notes:

    The stress and uncertainty about the future caused by the pandemic and its fallout are posing the biggest challenges to employees.

    Organizations shutting down operations, moving to fully remote, or requiring some of their employees to be on site based on the current situation causes a lot of anxiety as employees are not able to plan for what is coming next.

    Adding in the loss of social networks and in-person interactions exacerbates the problem employees are facing. As leaders, it is your job to understand and mitigate these challenges wherever possible.

    Re-examine your workplace barriers to mental wellbeing

    New Barriers

    Old Barriers

    • Childcare/eldercare responsibilities
    • Fear of workplace health risks
    • Work location
    • Lost support networks
    • Changed work schedules
    • Social distancing
    • Workload
    • Fear of stigma
    • Benefits limits
    • Limits to paid time off
    • Lack of manager knowledge

    Key considerations:

    • Work Environment
      • Accessibility of mental wellbeing programs and initiatives
    • Organizational Culture
      • Modeling of wellbeing
      • Paid time off
      • Discussions around mental wellbeing
    • Total Rewards
      • Benefits coverage
      • Employee assistance programs (EAPs)
      • Manager knowledge

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Organizational barriers to mental wellbeing are sadly not new. Workloads, stigma around mental health, lack of sick days, and limits to benefits for mental health supports were challenges before the pandemic. Adding in the new barriers can very easily result in a tipping point for many employees who are simply not equipped to deal with or supported in dealing with the added burden of remote work in a post-pandemic world.

    To provide the needed support to your employees, it’s important to be mindful of the key considerations.

    Holistic employee wellbeing has never been more critical than it is right now

    Employee Wellbeing

    Physical

    The physical body; ensuring a person has the freedom, opportunities, and resources needed to sustainably maintain bodily health.

    Mental

    The psychological ability to cope with information, emotions, desires, and stressors (e.g. change, threats, etc.) in a healthy and balanced way. Essential for day-to-day living and functioning.

    Social

    The state of personal and professional relationships, including personal and community engagement. The capability for genuine, authentic, and mutually affirming interactions with others.

    Financial

    The state of a person’s finances; ensuring that a person feels capable to handle their financial situation and behaviors. The ability to live productively without the weight of financial stress.

    Speaker’s Notes:

    As a manager, you need to be mindful of all of these. Create an atmosphere where people are able to come to you for help if they are struggling in one of these areas. For example, some people might be more comfortable raising physical safety or comfort concerns (personal protective equipment, ergonomics) than concerns about mental health. Or they might feel like their feelings of loneliness are not appropriate to bring into their professional life.

    Wellbeing is a delicate subject, and most of the time, people are reluctant to talk about it. It requires vulnerability. And here’s the thing about it: Your staff will not drive a change in your team around making these topics more acceptable. It has to be the manager. You have to be the one to not just tell but show them that it’s OK to talk about this

    Encourage human-centered workplace behaviors

    Promote empathy as a focus value

    • Listen and show compassion.
    • Allow room for emotions.

    Encourage social connection

    • Leverage networks.
    • Infuse fun where possible.
    • Encourage community and sense of joint purpose.

    Cultivate a growth mindset

    • Encourage mindfulness and resilience.
    • Express gratitude.

    Empower others

    • Ask employees what they need and co-create solutions.
    • Integrate needs of personal and family life with work life.
    • Be clear on accountability.

    Speaker’s Notes:

    As a leader, your focus should be on encouraging the right behaviors on your team and in yourself.
    Show empathy; allowing room for emotion and showing you are willing and able to listen goes a long way to establishing trust.

    A growth mindset applies to resilience too. A person with a growth mindset is more likely to believe that even though they’re struggling now, they will get through it.

    Infuse fun – schedule social check-ins. This is not wasted time, or time off work – it is an integral part of the workday. We have less of it now organically, so you must bring it back deliberately. Remember that theme? We are deliberately reinfusing important organic elements into the workday.

    The last item, empowerment, is interesting – being clear on accountability. Have clear performance expectations. It might sound like telling people what to do would be disempowering, but it’s the opposite. By clarifying the goals of what they need to achieve, you empower them to invent their own “how,” because you and they are both sure they will arrive at the place that you agreed on. We will talk more about this in performance management.

    Emphasize the importance of wellbeing by setting the tone for the team

    Managers must…

    • LEAD BY EXAMPLE
      • Employees look to their managers for cues about how to react in a crisis. If the manager reacts with stress and fear, the team will follow.
    • ENCOURAGE OPEN COMMUNICATION
      • Frequent check-ins and transparent communication are essential during a time of crisis, especially when working remotely.
    • ACKNOWLEDGE THE SITUATION
      • Recognizing the stress that teams may be facing and expressing confidence in them goes a long way.
    • PROMOTE WELLBEING
      • Managers who take care of themselves can better support their teams and encourage them to practice good self-care too.
    • REDUCE STIGMA
      • Reducing stigma around mental health encourages people to come forward with their struggles and get the support they need.

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Emphasize the importance of wellbeing with what you do. If you do not model self-care behavior, people will follow what you do, not what you say.

    Lead by example – Live the behaviors you want to see in your employees. If you show confidence, positivity, and resiliency, it will filter down to your team.

    Encourage open communication – Have regular meetings where your team is able to set the agenda, or allow one-on-ones to be guided by the employee. Make sure these are scheduled and keep them a priority.

    Acknowledge the situation – Pretending things are normal doesn’t help the situation. Talk about the stress that the team is facing and express confidence that you will get through it together.

    Promote wellbeing – Take time off, don’t work when you’re sick, and you will be better able to support your team!

    Reduce stigma – Call it out when you see it and be sure to remind people of and provide access to any supports that the organization has.

    Conduct dedicated conversations around wellbeing

    1. Check in with how each team member is doing frequently and ask how they are doing personally.
    2. Discuss how things are going. Ask: “How is your work situation working out for you so far? Do you feel supported? How are you taking care of yourself in these circumstances?”
    3. Ask if there are any stressors or roadblocks that they have experienced and collaborate to find solutions.
    4. Provide reassurance of your support and confidence in them.
    5. Document the plan for managing stressors and roadblocks – either through a collaboration tool or through email.

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Going back to the idea of a growth mindset – this may be uncomfortable for you as a manager. So here’s a step-by-step guide that over time you can morph into your own style.

    With your team – be prepared to share first and to show it is OK to be vulnerable and address wellbeing seriously.

    1. Make sure you make time for the personal. Ask about their lives and show compassion.
    2. Give opportunities for them to bring up things that might stay hidden otherwise. Ask questions that show you care.
    3. Help identify areas they are struggling with and work with them to move past those areas.
    4. Make sure they feel supported in what they are going through and reassured of their place on the team.
    5. Roll wellbeing into your planning process. This signals to team that you see wellbeing as important, not just a checklist to cover during a team meeting, and are ready to follow through on it.

    Recognize when professional help is needed

    SIGNS OF BURNOUT: Overwhelmed; Frequent personal disclosure; Trouble sleeping and focusing; Frequent time off; Strained relationships; Substance abuse; Poor work performance

    Speaker’s Notes:

    As a leader, it is important to be on the lookout for warning signs of burnout and know when to step in and direct individuals to professional help.

    Poor work performance – They struggle to maintain work performance, even after you’ve worked with them to create coping strategies.

    Overwhelmed – They repeatedly tell you that they feel overwhelmed, very stressed, or physically unwell.

    Frequent personal disclosure – They want to discuss their personal struggles at length on a regular basis.

    Trouble sleeping and focusing – They tell you that they are not sleeping properly and are unable to focus on work.

    Frequent time off – They feel the need to take time off more frequently.

    Strained relationships – They have difficulty communicating effectively with coworkers; relationships are strained.

    Substance abuse – They show signs of substance abuse (e.g. drunk/high while working, social media posts about drinking during the day).

    Keeping an eye out for these signs and being able to step in before they become unmanageable can mean the difference between keeping and losing an employee experiencing burnout.

    Remember: Managers also need support

    • Added burden
    • Lead by example
    • Self-care

    Speaker’s Notes:

    If you’ve got managers under you, be mindful of their unique stressors. Don’t forget to check in with them, too.

    If you are a manager, remember to take care of yourself and check in with your own manager about your own wellbeing.

    2.1 Balance wellbeing and performance in a virtual team context

    30 Minutes

    1. Brainstorm and list current practices and challenges connected to wellbeing on your teams.
    2. Choose one or two wellbeing challenges that are most relevant for your team.
    3. Discuss as a group and identify one solution for each challenge that you can put into action with your own virtual team. Document this under “Action plan to move forward” on the workbook slide “2.1 Balancing wellbeing and performance in a virtual team context.”

    Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Input

    • Current practices and challenges connected to wellbeing

    Output

    • Action plan for each challenge listed

    Materials

    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Participants

    • All managers with direct reports working virtually

    Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Section 2.2

    Managing performance in a virtual team context

    Virtual employees are craving more meaningful interactions with their managers

    A survey indicated that, overall, remote employees showed less satisfaction with manager interactions compared to other non-remote employees.

    1. 16% less likely to strongly agree their manager involves them in setting goals at work.
    2. 28% less likely to strongly agree they continually work with their manager to clarify work priorities.
    3. 29% less likely to strongly agree they have reviewed their greatest successes with their manager in the last six months.
    4. 30% less likely to strongly agree they have talked with their manager about progress toward goals in the last six months.

    Speaker’s Notes:

    In many cases, we have put people into virtual roles because they are self-directed and self-motivated workers who can thrive with the kind of autonomy and flexibility that comes with virtual work. As managers, we should expect many of these workers to be proactively interested in how they are performing and in developing their careers.

    It would be a mistake to take a hands-off approach when managing virtual workers. A recent survey indicated that, overall, remote employees showed less satisfaction with manager interactions compared to other non-remote employees. It was also one of the aspects of their work experience they were least satisfied with overall (Gallup, State of the American Workplace, 2017). Simply put, virtual employees are craving more meaningful conversations with their managers.

    While conversations about performance and development are important for all employees (virtual or non-virtual), managers of remote teams can have a significant positive impact on their virtual employees’ experience and engagement at work by making efforts to improve their involvement and support in these areas.

    During this module we will work together to identify ways that each of us can improve how we manage the performance of our virtual employees. At the end of the module everyone will create an action plan that they can put in place with their own teams. In the next module, we go through a similar set of activities to create an action plan for our interactions with employees about their development.

    Building blocks of performance management

    • Goal Setting

    • Setting Expectations

    • Measuring Progress

    • Feedback & Coaching

    Speaker’s Notes:

    [Include a visualization of your existing performance management process in the slide. Walk the participants through the process to remind them of what is expected. While the managers participating in the training should know this, there may be different understandings of it, or it might just be the case that it’s been a while since people looked at the official process. The intention here is merely to ensure everyone is on the same page for the purposes of the activities that follow.]

    Now that we’ve reviewed performance management at a high level, let’s dive into what is currently happening with the performance management of virtual teams.

    I know that you have some fairly extensive material at your organization around how to manage performance. This is fantastic. And we’re going to focus mainly on how things change in a virtual context.

    When measuring progress, how do you as a manager make sure that you are comfortable not seeing your team physically at their desks? This is the biggest challenge for remote managers.

    2.2 Share current performance management practices for virtual teams

    30 Minutes

    1. Brainstorm and list current high-level performance management practices connected to each building block. Record in your workbook.
    2. Discuss current challenges connected to implementing the building blocks with virtual employees.

    Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Input

    • Current performance management practices
    • Challenges surrounding performance management

    Output

    • Current state of virtual performance management defined

    Materials

    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Participants

    • All managers with direct reports working virtually

    Communicate the “why”: Cascade organizational goals

    This image depicts the Cascade of Why- organizational goals. Organizational Mission; Organizational Values; Organizational Goals; Department Goals; Team Goals; Individual Goals

    Speaker’s Notes:

    When assisting your employees with their goals, think about the organization’s overall mission and goals to help you determine team and individual goals.

    • Organizational goals: Employee goals should align with organizational goals. Goals may cascade down through the organization.
    • Department or team goals: Create a clear strategy based on high-level goals for the year so employees can link short-term goals to the larger picture.
    • Individual goals: Employees should draw on their individual development plan to help set performance goals.

    Sometimes it’s difficult to get employees thinking about goals and they need assistance from managers. It’s also important to be clear on team goals to help guide employees in setting individual ones.

    The basic idea is to show people how their individual day-to-day work contributes to the overall success of the organization. It gives them a sense of purpose and a rationale, which translates to motivation. And also helps them problem solve with more autonomy.

    You’re giving people a sense of the importance of their own contribution.

    How to set clear expectations for job performance

    Ensure employees have a clear understanding of what’s expected for their role:

    1. Review their metrics so they understand how they’re being evaluated.
    2. Outline daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals.
    3. If needed, help them plan when and how each part of their job should be done and what to prioritize.
    4. Ask them to come to you early if they experience a roadblock so that you can help rather than having them flounder on their own.
    5. Document instances where employees aren’t meeting role or performance expectations.

    Speaker’s Notes:

    Tailor performance goals to address any root causes of poor performance.

    For example:

    • If personal factors are getting in the way, work with the employee (and HR if necessary) to create a strategy to address any impediments to performing in the role.

    Tips for managing performance remotely

    • Reflect on one key question: What needs to happen for my direct reports to continue their work while working remotely?
    • Manage for results – not employee visibility at the office.
    • Use metrics to measure performance. If you don’t have any, define tasks and deliverables as clearly as possible and conduct regular check-ins.
    • Work with the employee to set goals and metrics to measure progress.

    Focus on results: Be flexible about how and when work gets done, as long as team members are hitting their targets.

    • For example, if they have childcare duties from 3 to 5pm during school closures and want to work later in the evening to make up the time, that’s fine – as long as the work gets done.
    • Set clear expectations about which work must be done during normal work hours (e.g. attend team meetings, client calls) and which can be done at other hours.
    • Team members must arrange with you any nonstandard working hours before they start using an altered schedule. It is your responsibility to keep track of hours and any alternate arrangements.
    • Don’t make team members feel constantly monitored (i.e. “Where were you from 10 to 11am?”); trust them until you have reason not to.

    Encourage your team members to unplug: If they’re sending you emails late at night and they haven’t made an alternate work hours agreement with you, encourage them to take time away from work.

    • It’s harder to unplug when working at home, and everyone needs a break to stay productive.

    Avoid micromanagement with holistic performance measures

    Quality

    How well tasks are accomplished

    Behavior

    Related to specific employee actions, skills, or attitudes

    Quantity

    How much work gets done

    Holistic measures demonstrate all the components required for optimal performance. This is the biggest driver in having comfort as a manager of a remote team and avoiding micromanagement. Typically these are set at the organizational level. You may need to adjust for individual roles, etc.

    Speaker's Notes:

    Metrics come in different types. One way to ensure your metrics capture the full picture is to use a mix of different kinds of metrics.

    Some metrics are quantitative: they describe quantifiable or numerical aspects of the goal. This includes timeliness. On the other hand, qualitative metrics have to do with the final outcome or product. And behavioral metrics have to do with employees' actions, skills, or attitudes. Using different kinds of metrics together helps you set holistic measures, which capture all the components of optimal performance toward your goal and prevent gaming the system.

    Let's take an example:

    A courier might have an objective to do a good job delivering packages. An example of a quantitative measure might be that the courier is required to deliver X number of packages per day on time. The accompanying metrics would be the number of packages delivered per day and the ratio of packages delivered on time vs. late.

    Can you see a problem if we use only these quantitative measures to evaluate the courier's performance?

    Wait to see if anyone volunteers an answer. Discuss suggestions.

    That's right, if the courier's only goal is to deliver more packages, they might start to rush, may ruin the packages, and may offer poor customer service. We can help to guard against this by implementing qualitative and behavioral measures as well. For example, a qualitative measure might be that the courier is required to deliver the packages in mint condition. And the metric would be the number of customer complaints about damaged packages or ratings on a satisfaction survey related to package condition.

    For the behavioral aspect, the courier might be required to provide customer-centric service with a positive attitude. The metrics could be ratings on customer satisfaction surveys related to the courier's demeanor or observations by the manager.

    Managing poor performance virtually: Look for key signs

    It’s crucial to acknowledge that an employee might have an “off week” or need time to balance work and life – things that can be addressed with performance management (PM) techniques. Managers should move into the process for performance improvement when:

    1. Performance fluctuates frequently or significantly.
    2. Performance has dropped for an extended period of time.
    3. Expectations are consistently not being met.

    Key signs to look for:

    • PM data/performance-related assessments
    • Continual absences
    • Decreased quality or quantity of output
    • Frequent excuses (e.g. repeated internet outages)
    • Lack of effort or follow-through
    • Missed deadlines
    • Poor communication or lack of responsiveness
    • Failure to improve

    Speaker’s notes:

    • Let’s talk more about identifying low performance.
    • Everybody has off days or weeks. And what if they are new to the role or new to working remotely? Their performance may be low because they need time to adjust. These sort of situations should be managed, but they don’t require moving into the process for performance improvement.
    • When managing employees who are remote or working in a hybrid situation, it is important to be alert to these signs and check in with your employees on a regular basis. Aim to identify and work with employees on addressing performance issues as they arise rather than waiting until it’s too late. Depending on your availability, the needs of the employee, and the complexity of their role, check-ins could occur daily, weekly, and/or monthly. As I mentioned, for remote employees, it’s often better to check-in more frequently but for a shorter period of time.
    • You want to be present in their work life and available to help them manage through roadblocks and stay on track, but try to avoid over-monitoring employees. Micromanaging can impact the manager-employee relationship and lead to the employee feeling that there is a lack of trust. Remember, the employee needs to be responsible for their own performance and improvement.
    • Check-ins should not just be about the work either. Take some time to check in personally. This is particularly important when managing remotely. It enables you to build a personal relationship with the employee and also keeps you aware if there are other personal issues at play that are impacting their work.
    • So, how do you know what does require performance improvement? There are three key things that you should look for that are clear signals that performance improvement is necessary:
      1. Their performance is fluctuating frequently or significantly.
      2. Their performance has dropped for an extended period of time.
      3. Expectations are consistently not being met.
    • What do you think are some key signs to look for that indicate a performance issue is occurring?

    Managing poor performance virtually: Conducting remote performance conversations

    Video calling

    Always use video calls instead of phone calls when possible so that you don’t lose physical cues and body language.

    Meeting invitations

    Adding HR/your leader to a meeting invite about performance may cause undue stress. Think through who needs to participate and whether they need to be included in the invite itself.

    Communication

    Ensure there are no misunderstandings by setting context for each discussion and having the employee reiterate the takeaways back to you.

    Focus on behavior

    Don’t assume the intent behind the behavior(s) being discussed. Instead, just focus on the behavior itself.

    Policies

    Be sure to adhere to any relevant HR policies and support systems. Working with HR throughout the process will ensure none are overlooked.

    Speaker’s notes:

    There are a few best practices you should follow when having performance conversations:

    • First, if you are in a different work environment than your employee, always use video calls instead of phone calls whenever possible so that you don’t miss out on physical cues and body language. If videoconferencing isn’t the norm, encourage them to turn on their video. Be empathic that it can feel awkward but explain the benefits, and you will both have an easier time communicating and understanding each other.
    • As I’ve mentioned, be considerate of the environment they are in. If they are in the office and you are working remotely, be sure to book a private meeting room for them to go to for the conversation. If they are working from home, be sure to check that they are prepared and able to focus on the conversation.
    • Next, carefully consider who you are adding to the meeting invite and whether it’s necessary for them to be there. Adding HR or your leader to a meeting invite may cause undue stress for the employee.
    • Consider the timing of the invite. Don’t send it out weeks in advance. When a performance problem exists, you’ll want to address it as soon as possible. A day or two of notice would be an ideal approach because it gives them a heads up but will not cause them extended stress or worrying.
    • Be considerate about the timing of the meeting and what else they may have scheduled. For example, a Friday afternoon before they are heading off on vacation or right before they are leading an important client call would not be appropriate timing.
    • As we just mentioned clear communication is critical. Ensure there are no misunderstandings by setting context for each discussion and having the employee reiterate takeaways back to you.
    • Focus on the behavior and don’t assume their intent. It can be tempting to say, “I know you didn’t mean to miss the deadline,” but you don’t know what they intended. Often people are not aware of the impact their behavior can have on others.
    • Lastly, be sure to adhere to any relevant HR policies and support systems. Working with HR throughout the process will ensure nothing is overlooked.

    2.3 Identify challenges of current practices and propose solutions

    30 Minutes

    1. Select one or two challenges from the previous activity.
    2. Identify one solution for each challenge that you can put into action with your own virtual team. Document in the workbook.

    Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Input

    • Current performance management practices
    • Challenges surrounding performance management

    Output

    • Action plan to move forward

    Materials

    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Participants

    • All managers with direct reports working virtually

    Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Optional Section

    Employee development in a virtual team setting

    There are three main development approaches for both colocated and virtual employees

    Formal Training; Relational Learning; Experimental Learning

    Speaker’s Notes:

    As we have seen, our virtual employees crave more meaningful interactions with their managers. In addition to performance conversations, managers should also be having regular discussions with their employees about their employee development plans. One key component of these discussions is career planning. Whether you are thinking shorter term – how to become better at their current role – or longer term – how to advance beyond their current role – discussions about employee development are a great way to engage employees. Employees are ultimately responsible for creating and executing their own development plans, but managers are responsible for making sure that employees have thought through these plans and helping employees identify opportunities for executing those plans.

    To help us think about our own employee development practices, identify challenges they pose when working with virtual employees, and create solutions to these challenges, it is useful to think about employee development opportunities according to three types:

    1. The first kind of development opportunity is formal training. Formal training is organized and has a clearly defined curriculum and desired outcome. It usually takes the form of a group training session (like this one) or training videos or materials that employees can watch individually and on their own time. These opportunities usually end with a test or assignment that can be used to evaluate the degree to which the participant achieved the desired learning outcomes.
    2. The second kind of development opportunity is relational learning. Perhaps the most common form of this type of learning is coaching or mentoring. By establishing a long-term work relationship, checking in with employees about their daily work and development goals, and sharing their own experiences and knowledge, mentors help employees reflect and draw out learning from everyday, on-the-job development activities. Other examples include a peer support group or communities of practice. In these group settings peers share best practices and work together to overcome challenges.
    3. The third kind of development opportunity is experiential learning. This kind of opportunity provides employees the chance to work on real work problems, and the output of the development work can directly benefit the organization. Most people learn best by doing. On-the-job experiences that are challenging or new can force people to use and develop new skills and knowledge based on what worked effectively and what failed. Examples of experiential learning are on-the-job learning for new hires, stretch assignments, or special projects that take the employee beyond their daily routine and allow them to try new activities and develop competencies that they would not have the chance to develop as part of their regular job.

    According to McLean & Company, organizations should use the “70-20-10” rule as a rough guideline when working with employees to create their development plans: 10% of the plan should be dedicated to formal training opportunities, 20% to relational learning, and 70% to experiential learning. Managers should work with employees to identify their performance and career goals, ensure that their development plans are aligned with these goals, and include an appropriate mixture of all three kinds of development opportunities.

    To help identify challenges and solutions, think about how virtual work arrangements will impact the employee’s ability to leverage each type of opportunity at our organization.

    Here are some examples that can help us start thinking about the kinds of challenges virtual employees on our team face:

    Career Planning

    • One challenge can be identifying a career path that is consistent with working virtually. If switching from a virtual arrangement to an onsite arrangement is not a viable option for an employee, some career paths may not feasibly be open to them (at least as the company is currently organized). For example, if an employee would eventually like to be promoted to a senior leadership role in their business function but all senior leaders are required to work onsite at corporate headquarters, the employee will need to consider whether such a move is possible for them. In some cases employees may be willing to do this, but in others they may not. The important thing is to have these conversations with virtual employees and avoid the assumption that all career paths can be done virtually, since that might not be the case

    Formal Training

    • This is probably the least problematic form of employee development for virtual employees. In many cases this kind of training is scheduled well in advance, so virtual employees may be able to join non-virtual employees in person for some group training. When this is not possible (due to distance, budget, or time zone), many forms of group training can be recorded and watched by virtual employees later. Training videos and training materials can also easily be shared with virtual employees using existing collaboration software.

    Relational Learning

    • One major challenge here is developing a mentoring relationship virtually. As we discussed in the module on performance management, developing relationships virtually can be challenging because people cannot rely upon the kind of informal and spontaneous interactions that occur when people are located in the same office. Mentors and mentees will have to put in more effort and planning to get to know each other and they will have to schedule frequent check-ins so that employees can reflect upon their progress and experience (with the help of their mentors) more often.
    • Time zones and technology may pose potential barriers for certain candidates to be mentors. In some cases, employees that are best qualified to be mentors may not be as comfortable with collaborative software as other mentors or their mentees. If there are large time zone differences, some people who would otherwise be interested in acting as a mentor may be dissuaded. Managers need to take this into consideration if they are connecting employees with mentors or if they are thinking of taking on the mentor role themselves.

    Experiential Learning

    • Virtual employees risk being overlooked for special projects due to the “out of sight, out of mind” bias: When special projects come up, the temptation is to look around the room and see who is the best fit. The problem is, however, that in some cases the highest performers or best fit may not physically be in the room. In these cases it is important for managers to take on an advocate role for their employees and remind other managers that they have good virtual employees on their team that should be included or contacted. It is also important for managers to keep their team informed about these opportunities as often as possible.
    • Sometimes certain projects or certain kinds of work just cannot be done virtually in a company for a variety of reasons. The experiential learning opportunities will not be open to virtual employees. If such opportunities are open to the majority of other workers in this role (potentially putting virtual employees’ career development at a disadvantage relative to their peers), managers should work with their virtual employees to identify alternative experiences. Managers may also want to consider advocating for more or for higher quality experiential learning opportunities at the organization.

    Now that we have considered some general examples of challenges and solutions, let’s look at our own employee development practices and think about the practical steps we can take as managers to improve employee development for our virtual employees.

    Employee development basics

    • Career planning & performance improvement
    • Formal training
    • Relational learning
    • Experiential learning

    Speaker’s Notes:

    [Customize this slide according to your organization’s own policies and processes for employee development. Provide useful images that outline this on the slide, and in these notes describe the processes/policies that are in place. Note: In some cases policies or processes may not be designed with virtual employees or virtual teams in mind. That is okay for the purposes of this training module. In the following activities participants will discuss how they apply these policies and processes with their virtual teams. If your organization is interested in adapting its policies/processes to better support virtual workers, it may be useful to record those conversations to supplement existing policies later.]

    Now that we have considered some general examples of challenges and solutions, let’s look at our own employee development practices and think about the practical steps we can take as managers to improve employee development for our virtual employees.

    2.4 Share current practices for developing employees on a virtual team

    30 Minutes

    1. Brainstorm and list current high-level employee development practices. Record in your workbook.
    2. Discuss current challenges connected to developing virtual employees. Record in your workbook.
    3. Identify one solution for each challenge that you can put into action with your own virtual team.
    4. Discuss as a group.

    Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Input

    • Current employee development practices
    • Challenges surrounding employee development

    Output

    • Action plan to move forward

    Materials

    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Participants

    • All managers with direct reports working virtually

    Refine Action Plans

    2.5 Refine your action plan and commit to implementing it

    30 Minutes

    1. Review your action plans for consistency and overlap. Highlight any parts you may struggle to complete.
    2. Meeting with your group, summarize your plans to each other. Provide feedback and discuss each other’s action plans.
    3. Discuss how you can hold each other accountable.

    Download the Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Input

    • Action items from previous activities.

    Output

    • Action plan to move forward

    Materials

    • Workbook: Equip Managers to Effectively Manage Virtual Teams

    Participants

    • All managers with direct reports working virtually

    Summary of Accomplishment

    • We do not need to go out and learn a new set of manager responsibilities to better manage our virtual teams; rather, we have to “dial up” certain responsibilities we already have or adjust certain approaches that we already take.
    • It is important to set clear expectations. While managers are ultimately responsible for making sure expectations are set and are clearly communicated, they are not the only ones with responsibilities. Employees and managers need to work together to overcome the challenges that virtual work involves.
    • Virtual employees crave meaningful interactions with their managers and team. Managers must take charge in fostering an atmosphere of openness around wellbeing and establish effective performance management strategies. By being proactive with our virtual teams’ wellness and mindful of our performance management habits, we can take significant steps toward keeping these employees engaged and productive.
    • Effective management in virtual contexts requires being more deliberate than is typical in non-virtual contexts. By working as a group to identify challenges and propose solutions, we have helped each other create action plans that we can use going forward to continually improve our management practices.

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through an info-tech workshop or guided implementation.

    Contact your account representative for more information

    workshops@infotech.com

    1-888-670-8889

    Speaker’s Notes:

    First, let’s take a moment to summarize the key things we have learned today:

    1. We do not need to go out and learn a new set of manager competencies to better manage our virtual teams; rather, we have to “dial up” certain competencies we already have or adjust certain approaches that we already take. In many cases we just need to be more aware of the challenges that virtual communication poses and be more planful in our approaches.
    2. It is important to set clear expectations. While managers are ultimately responsible for making sure expectations are set and clearly communicated, they are not the only ones with responsibilities. Employees and managers need to work together to overcome the challenges that virtual work involves. Making sure that teams have meaningful conversations about expectations, come to a shared understanding of them, and record them will create a firm foundation for all other interactions on the virtual team.
    3. Virtual employees crave meaningful interactions with their managers related to performance and employee development. By creating action plans for improving these kinds of interactions with our teams, we can take significant steps toward keeping these employees engaged and productive.
    4. Effective performance management and employee development in virtual contexts require more planfulness than is required in non-virtual contexts. By working as a group to identify challenges and propose solutions, we have helped each other create action plans that we can use going forward to continually improve our management practices.

    Is there anything that anyone has learned that is not on this list and that they would like to share with the group?

    Finally, were there any challenges identified today that were not addressed?

    [Note to facilitator: Take note of any challenges not addressed and commit to getting back to the participants with some suggested solutions.]

    Additional resources

    Manager Training: Lead Through Change

    Train managers to navigate the interpersonal challenges associated with change management and develop their communication and leadership skills. Upload this LMS module into your learning management system to enable online training.

    Manager Training: Build a Better Manager: Manage Your People

    Management skills training is needed, but organizations are struggling to provide training that makes a long-term difference in the skills managers use in their day to day.

    Many training programs are ineffective because they offer the wrong content, deliver it in a way that is not memorable, and are not aligned with the IT department’s business objectives.

    Blueprint: Manage Poor Performance While Working From Home

    Assess and improve remote work performance with our ready-to-use tools.

    Works Cited

    April, Richard. “10 KPIs Every Sales Manager Should Measure in 2019.” HubSpot, 24 June 2019. Web.

    Banerjea, Peter. “5 Powerful Strategies for Managing a Remote Sales Team.” Badger - Maps for field sales, n.d. Web.

    Bibby, Adrianne. “5 Employers’ Awesome Quotes about Work Flexibility.” FlexJobs, 9 January 2017. Web.

    Brogie, Frank. “The 14 KPIs every field sales rep should strive to improve.” Repsly, 2018. Web.

    Dunn, Julie. “5 smart tips for leading field sales teams.” LevelEleven, March 2015. Web.

    Edinger, Scott. “How great sales leaders coach.” Forbes, 2013. Web.

    “Employee Outlook: Employee Views on Working Life.” CIPD, April 2016. Web.

    Hall, Becki. “The 5 biggest challenges facing remote workers (and how to solve them).” interact, 7 July 2017. Web.

    Hofstede, Geert. “National Cultural Dimensions.” Hofstede Insights, 2012. Web.

    “Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990-2014 (EPA 430-R-16-002).” Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 15 April 2016.

    “Latest Telecommuting Statistics.” Global Workplace Analytics, June 2021. Web.

    Knight, Rebecca. “How to manage remote direct reports.” Harvard Business Review, 2015. Web.

    “Rewards and Recognition: 5 ways to show remote worker appreciation.” FurstPerson, 2019. Web.

    Palay, Jonathan. "How to build your sales management cadence." CommercialTribe, 22 March 2018. Web.

    “Sales Activity Management Matrix.” Asian Sales Guru, 2019. Web.

    Smith, Simone. “9 Things to Consider When Recognizing Remote Employees.” hppy, 2018. Web.

    “State of Remote Work 2017.” OWL Labs, 2021. Web.

    “State of the American Workplace.” Gallup, 2017. Web.

    “Telework Savings Potential.” Global Workplace Analytics, June 2021. Web.

    “The Future of Jobs Employment Trends.” World Economic Forum, 2016. Web.

    “The other COVID-19 crisis: Mental health.” Qualtrics, 14 April 2020. Web.

    Thompson, Dan. “The straightforward truth about effective sales leadership.” Sales Hacker, 2017. Web.

    Tsipursky, Gleb. “Remote Work Can Be Better for Innovation Than In-Person Meetings.” Scientific American, 14 Oct. 2021. Web.

    Walsh, Kim. “New sales manager? Follow this guide to crush your first quarter.” HubSpot, May 2019. Web.

    “What Leaders Need to Know about Remote Workers: Surprising Differences in Workplace Happiness and Relationships.” TINYpulse, 2016.

    Zenger, Jack, and Joe Folkman. “Feedback: The Leadership Conundrum.” Talent Quarterly: The Feedback Issue, 2015.

    Contributors

    Anonymous CAMH Employee

    Responsibly Resume IT Operations in the Office

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    • Parent Category Name: DR and Business Continuity
    • Parent Category Link: /business-continuity

    Having shifted operations almost overnight to a remote work environment, and with the crisis management phase of the COVID-19 pandemic winding down, IT leaders and organizations are faced with the following issues:

    • A reduced degree of control with respect to the organization’s assets.
    • Increased presence of unapproved workaround methods, including applications and devices not secured by the organization.
    • Pressure to resume operations at pre-pandemic cadence while still operating in recovery mode.
    • An anticipated game plan for restarting the organization’s project activities.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    An organization’s shift back toward the pre-pandemic state cannot be carried out in isolation. Things have changed. Budgets, resource availability, priorities, etc., will not be the same as they were in early March. Organizations must ensure that all departments work collaboratively to support office repatriation. IT must quickly identify the must-dos to allow safe return to the office, while prioritizing tasks relating to the repopulation of employees, technical assets, and operational workloads via an informed and streamlined roadmap.

    As employees return to the office, PMO and portfolio leaders must sift through unclear requirements and come up with a game plan to resume project activities mid-pandemic. You need to develop an approach, and fast.

    Impact and Result

    Responsibly resume IT operations in the office:

    • Evaluate risk tolerance
    • Prepare to repatriate people to the office
    • Prepare to repatriate assets to the office
    • Prepare to repatriate workloads to the office
    • Prioritize your tasks and build your roadmap

    Quickly restart the engine of your PPM:

    • Restarting the engine of the project portfolio won’t be as simple as turning a key and hitting the gas. The right path forward will differ for every project portfolio practice.
    • Therefore, in this publication we put forth a multi-pass approach that PMO and portfolio managers can follow depending on their unique situations and needs.
    • Each approach is accompanied by a checklist and recommendations for next steps to get you on right path fast.

    Responsibly Resume IT Operations in the Office Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    As the post-pandemic landscape begins to take shape, ensure that IT can effectively prepare and support your employees as they move back to the office.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Evaluate your new risk tolerance

    Identify the new risk landscape and risk tolerance for your organization post-pandemic. Determine how this may impact the second wave of pandemic transition tasks.

    • Responsibly Resume IT Operations in the Office – Phase 1: Evaluate Your New Risk Tolerance
    • Resume Operations Information Security Pressure Analysis Tool

    2. Repatriate people to the office

    Prepare to return your employees to the office. Ensure that IT takes into account the health and safety of employees, while creating an efficient and sustainable working environment

    • Responsibly Resume IT Operations in the Office – Phase 2: Repatriate People to the Office
    • Mid-Pandemic IT Prioritization Tool

    3. Repatriate assets to the office

    Prepare the organization's assets for return to the office. Ensure that IT takes into account the off-license purchases and new additions to the hardware family that took place during the pandemic response and facilitates a secure reintegration to the workplace.

    • Responsibly Resume IT Operations in the Office – Phase 3: Repatriate Assets to the Office

    4. Repatriate workloads to the office

    Prepare and position IT to support workloads in order to streamline office reintegration. This may include leveraging pre-existing solutions in different ways and providing additional workstreams to support employee processes.

    • Responsibly Resume IT Operations in the Office – Phase 4: Repatriate Workloads to the Office

    5. Prioritize your tasks and build the roadmap

    Once you've identified IT's supporting tasks, it's time to prioritize. This phase walks through the activity of prioritizing based on cost/effort, alignment to business, and security risk reduction weightings. The result is an operational action plan for resuming office life.

    • Responsibly Resume IT Operations in the Office – Phase 5: Prioritize Your Tasks and Build the Roadmap

    6. Restart the engine of your project portfolio

    Restarting the engine of the project portfolio mid-pandemic won’t be as simple as turning a key and hitting the gas. Use this concise research to find the right path forward for your organization.

    • Restart the Engine of Your Project Portfolio
    [infographic]

    Mature and Scale Product Ownership

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}145|cart{/j2store}
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    • Parent Category Name: Development
    • Parent Category Link: /development
    • Product owners must bridge the gap between the customers, operations, and delivery to ensure products continuously deliver increasing value.
    • Product owners are often assigned to projects or product delivery without proper support, guidance, or alignment.
    • In many organizations, the product owner role is not well-defined, serves as a proxy for stakeholder ownership, and lacks reinforcement of the key skills needed to be successful.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    A product owner is the CEO for their product. Successful product management starts with empowerment and accountability. Product owners own the vision, roadmap, and value realization for their product or family aligned to enterprise goals and priorities.

    • Product and service ownership share the same foundation - underlying capabilities and best practices to own and improve a product or service are identical for both roles. Use the terms that make the most sense for your culture.
    • Product owners represent three primary perspectives: Business (externally facing), Technical (systems and tools), or Operational (manual processes). Although all share the same capabilities, how they approach their responsibilities is influenced by their primary perspective.
    • Product owners are operating under an incomplete understanding of the capabilities needed to succeed. Most product/service owners lack a complete picture of the needed capabilities, skills, and activities to successfully perform their roles.

    Impact and Result

    • Create a culture of product management trust and empowerment with product owners aligned to your operational structure and product needs.
    • Promote and develop true Agile skills among your product owners and family managers.
    • Implement Info-Tech’s product owner capability model to define the role expectations and provide a development path for product owners.

    Mature and Scale Product Ownership Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Mature and Scale Product Ownership Storyboard – Establish a culture of success for product management and mature product owner capabilities.

    Strengthen the product owner role in your organization by focusing on core capabilities and proper alignment.

  • Establish a foundation for empowerment and success.
  • Assign and align product owners with products and stakeholders.
  • Mature product owner capabilities and skills.
    • Mature and Scale Product Ownership Storyboard

    2. Mature and Scale Product Ownership Readiness Assessment – Determine your readiness for a product-centric culture based on Info-Tech’s CLAIM+G model.

    Using Info-Tech’s CLAIM model, quickly determine your organization’s strengths and weaknesses preparing for a product culture. Use the heat map to identify key areas.

    • Mature and Scale Product Ownership Readiness Assessment

    3. Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook – Playbook for product owners and product managers.

    Use the blueprint exercises to build your personal product owner playbook. You can also use the workbook to capture exercise outcomes.

    • Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook

    4. Mature and Scale Product Ownership Workbook – Workbook for product owners and product managers.

    Use this workbook to capture exercise outcomes and transfer them to your Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook (optional).

    • Mature and Scale Product Ownership Workbook

    5. Mature and Scale Product Ownership Proficiency Assessment – Determine your current proficiency and improvement areas.

    Product owners need to improve their core capabilities and real Agile skills. The assessment radar will help identify current proficiency and growth opportunities.

    • Mature and Scale Product Ownership Proficiency Assessment
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Mature and Scale Product Ownership

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Establish the foundation for product ownership

    The Purpose

    Establish the foundation for product ownership.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Product owner playbook with role clarity and RACI.

    Activities

    1.1 Define enablers and blockers of product management.

    1.2 Define your product management roles and names.

    1.3 Assess your product management readiness.

    1.4 Identify your primary product owner perspective.

    1.5 Define your product owner RACI.

    Outputs

    Enablers and blockers

    Role definitions.

    Product culture readiness

    Product owner perspective mapping

    Product owner RACI

    2 Align product owners to products

    The Purpose

    Align product owners to products.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Assignment of resources to open products.

    A stakeholder management strategy.

    Activities

    2.1 Assign resources to your products and families.

    2.2 Visualize relationships to identify key influencers.

    2.3 Group stakeholders into categories.

    2.4 Prioritize your stakeholders.

    Outputs

    Product resource assignment

    Stakeholder management strategy

    Stakeholder management strategy

    Stakeholder management strategy

    3 Mature product owner capabilities

    The Purpose

    Mature product owner capabilities.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Assess your Agile product owner readiness

    Assess and mature product owner capabilities

    Activities

    3.1 Assess your real Agile skill proficiency.

    3.2 Assess your vison capability proficiency.

    3.3 Assess your leadership capability proficiency.

    3.4 Assess your PLM capability proficiency.

    3.5 Assess your value realization capability proficiency.

    3.6 Identify your business value drivers and sources of value.

    Outputs

    Real Agile skill proficiency assessment

    Info-Tech’s product owner capability model proficiency assessment

    Info-Tech’s product owner capability model proficiency assessment

    Info-Tech’s product owner capability model proficiency assessment

    Info-Tech’s product owner capability model proficiency assessment

    Business value drivers and sources of value

    Further reading

    Mature and Scale Product Ownership

    Strengthen the product owner’s role in your organization by focusing on core capabilities and proper alignment.

    Executive Brief

    Analyst Perspective

    Empower product owners throughout your organization.

    Hans Eckman

    Whether you manage a product or service, the fundamentals of good product ownership are the same. Organizations need to focus on three key elements of product ownership in order to be successful.

    • Create an environment of empowerment and service leadership to reinforce product owners and product family managers as the true owners of the vision, improvement, and realized the value of their products.
    • Align product and product family owner roles based on operational alignment and the groups defined when scaling product management.
    • Develop your product owners to improve the quality of roadmaps, alignment to enterprise goals, and profit and loss (P&L) for each product or service.

    By focusing the attention of the teammates serving in product owner or service owner roles, your organization will deliver value sooner and respond to change more effectively.

    Hans Eckman

    Principal Research Director – Application Delivery and Management
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Product owners must bridge the gap between the customers, operations, and delivery to ensure products continuously deliver increasing value.

    Product owners are often assigned to projects or product delivery without proper support, guidance, or alignment.

    In many organizations the product owner role is not well-defined, serves as a proxy for stakeholder ownership, and lacks reinforcement of the key skills needed to be successful.

    Common Obstacles

    Organizations have poor alignment or missing product owners between lines of business, IT, and operations.

    Product owners are aligned to projects and demand management rather than long-term strategic product ownership.

    Product families are not properly defined, scaled, and supported within organizations.

    Individuals in product owner roles have an incomplete understanding of needed capabilities and lack a development path.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    Create a culture of product management trust and empowerment with product owners aligned to your operational structure and product needs.

    Promote and develop true Agile skills among your product owners and family managers.

    Implement Info-Tech’s product owner capability model to define the role expectations and provide a development path for product owners.

    Extend product management success using Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision and Deliver Digital Products at Scale.

    Info-Tech Insight

    There is no single correct approach to product ownership. Product ownership must be tuned and structured to meet the delivery needs of your organization and the teams it serves.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    Product owners make the final decision

    • Establish a foundation for empowerment and success
    • Assign product owners and align with products and stakeholders
    • Mature product owner capabilities and skills
    Product Owner capabilities: Vision, Product Lifecycle Management, Leadership, Value Realization

    The Info-Tech difference

    1. Assign product owners where product decisions are needed, not to match org charts or delivery teams. The product owner has the final word on product decisions.
    2. Organize product owners into related teams to ensure product capabilities delivered are aligned to enterprise strategy and goals.
    3. Shared products and services must support the needs of many product owners with conflicting priorities. Shared service product owners must map and prioritize demand to align to enterprise priorities and goals.
    4. All product owners share the same capability model.

    Insight summary

    There is no single correct approach to product ownership

    Successful product management starts with empowerment and accountability. Product owners own the vision, roadmap, and value realization for their product or family aligned to enterprise goals and priorities.

    Phase 1 insight

    Product owners represent three primary perspectives: business (external-facing), technical (systems and tools), or operational (manual processes). Although all share the same capabilities, how they approach their responsibilities is influenced by their primary perspective.

    Phase 2 insight

    Start with your operational grouping of products and families, identifying where an owner is needed. Then, assign people to the products and families. The owner does not define the product or family.

    Phase 3 insight

    Product owners are operating under an incomplete understanding of the capabilities needed to succeed. Most product/service owners lack a complete picture of the needed capabilities, skills, and activities to successfully perform their roles.

    Product and service ownership share the same foundation

    The underlying capabilities and best practices to own and improve a product or service are identical for both roles. Use the terms that make the most sense for your culture.

    Map product owner roles to your existing job titles

    Identify where product management is needed and align expectations with existing roles. Successful product management does not require a dedicated job family.

    Projects can be a mechanism for funding product changes and improvements

    Projects can be a mechanism for funding product changes and improvements. Shows difference of value for project life-cycles, hybrid life-cycles, and product life-cycles.

    Projects within products

    Regardless of whether you recognize yourself as a product-based or project-based shop, the same basic principles should apply.

    You go through a period or periods of project-like development to build a version of an application or product.

    You also have parallel services along with your project development, which encompass the more product-based view. These may range from basic support and maintenance to full-fledged strategy teams or services like sales and marketing.

    Product and services owners share the same foundation and capabilities

    For the purpose of this blueprint, product/service and product owner/service owner are used interchangeably. The term “product” is used for consistency but would apply to services, as well.

    Product = Service

    Common foundations: Focus on continuous improvement, ROI, and value realization. Clear vision, goals, roadmap, and backlog.

    “Product” and “service” are terms that each organization needs to define to fit its culture and customers (internal and external). The most important aspect is consistent use and understanding of:

    • External products
    • Internal products
    • External services
    • Internal services
    • Products as a service (PaaS)
    • Productizing services (SaaS)

    Recognize the product owner perspectives

    The 3 product owner perspectives. 1. Business: Customer-facing, value-generating. 2. Technical: IT systems and tools. 3. Operations: Keep-the-lights-on processes.

    Product owners represent one of three primary perspectives. Although all share the same capabilities, how they approach their responsibilities is influenced by their primary perspective.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Product owners must translate needs and constraints from their perspective into the language of their audience. Kathy Borneman, Digital Product Owner at SunTrust Bank, noted the challenges of finding a common language between lines of business and IT (e.g. what is a unit?).

    Match your product management role definitions to your product family levels

    Product ownership exists at the different operational tiers or levels in your product hierarchy. This does not imply a management relationship.

    Product portfolio

    Groups of product families within an overall value stream or capability grouping.

    Project portfolio manager

    Product family

    A collection of related products. Products can be grouped along architectural, functional, operational, or experiential patterns.

    Product family manager

    Product

    Single product composed of one or more applications and services.

    Product owner

    Info-Tech Insight

    Define the current roles that will perform the product management function or define consistent role names to product owners and managers.

    Align enterprise value through product families

    Product families are operational groups based on capabilities or business functions. Product family managers translate goals, priorities, and constraints so they are actionable at the next level. Product owners prioritize changes to enhance the capabilities that allow you to realize your product family. Enabling capabilities realize value and help reach your goals.

    Understand special circumstances

    In Deliver Digital Products at Scale, products were grouped into families using Info-Tech’s five scaling patterns. Assigning owners to Enterprise Applications and Shared Services requires special consideration.

    Value stream alignment

    • Business architecture
      • Value stream
      • Capability
      • Function
    • Market/customer segment
    • Line of business (LoB)
    • Example: Customer group > value stream > products

    Enterprise applications

    • Enabling capabilities
    • Enterprise platforms
    • Supporting apps
    • Example: HR > Workday/Peoplesoft > Modules Supporting: Job board, healthcare administrator

    Shared Services

    • Organization of related services into service family
    • Direct hierarchy does not necessarily exist within the family
    • Examples: End-user support and ticketing, workflow and collaboration tools

    Technical

    • Domain grouping of IT infrastructure, platforms, apps, skills, or languages
    • Often used in combination with Shared Services grouping or LoB-specific apps
    • Examples: Java, .NET, low-code, database, network

    Organizational alignment

    • Used at higher levels of the organization where products are aligned under divisions
    • Separation of product managers from organizational structure is no longer needed because the management team owns the product management role

    Map sources of demand and influencers

    Use the stakeholder analysis to define the key stakeholders and sources of demand for enterprise applications and shared services. Extend your mapping to include their stakeholders and influencers to uncover additional sources of demand and prioritization.

    Map of key stakeholders for enterprise applications and shared services.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your product owner map defines the influence landscape your product operates. It is every bit as important as the teams who enhance, support and operate your product directly.

    Combine your product owner map with your stakeholder map to create a comprehensive view of influencers.

    The primary value of the product owner is to fill the backlog with the highest ROI opportunities aligned with enterprise goals.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The product owner owns the direction of the product.

    • Roadmap - Where are we going?
    • Backlog - What changes are needed to get there?
    • Product review - Did we get close enough?

    Product delivery realizes value for your product family

    While planning and analysis are done at the family level, work and delivery are done at the individual product level.

    Product strategy includes: Vision, Goals, Roadmap, backlog and Release plan.

    Product family owners are more strategic

    When assigning resources, recognize that product family owners will need to be more strategic with their planning and alignment of child families and products.

    Product family owners are more strategic. They require a roadmap that is strategic, goal-based, high-level, and flexible.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Roadmaps for your product family are, by design, less detailed. This does not mean they aren’t actionable! Your product family roadmap should be able to communicate clear intentions around the future delivery of value in both the near and long term.

    Connecting your product family roadmaps to product roadmaps

    Your product and product family roadmaps should be connected at an artifact level that is common between both. Typically, this is done with capabilities, but it can be done at a more granular level if an understanding of capabilities isn’t available.

    Product family roadmap versus Product Roadmaps.

    Develop a product owner stakeholder strategy

    Stakeholder management, Product lifecycle, Project delivery, Operational support.

    Stakeholders are a critical cornerstone to product ownership. They provide the context, alignment, and constraints that influence or control what a product owner can accomplish.

    Product owners operate within a network of stakeholders who represent different perspectives within the organization.

    First, product owners must identify members of their stakeholder network. Next, they should devise a strategy for managing stakeholders.

    Without a stakeholder strategy, product owners will encounter obstacles, resistance, or unexpected changes.

    Create a stakeholder network map to product roadmaps and prioritization

    Follow the trail of breadcrumbs from your direct stakeholders to their influencers, to uncover hidden stakeholders.

    Stakeholder network map defines the influence landscape your product operates. Connectors determine who may be influencing your direct stakeholders.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your stakeholder map defines the influence landscape your product operates. It is every bit as important as the teams who enhance, support and operate your product directly.

    Use “connectors” to determine who may be influencing your direct stakeholders. They may not have any formal authority within the organization, but they may have informal yet substantive relationships with your stakeholders.

    Being successful at Agile is more than about just doing Agile

    The following represents the hard skills needed to “Do Agile”:

    Being successful at Agile needs 4 hard skills: 1. Engineering skills, 2. Technician Skills, 3. Framework/Process skills, 4. Tools skills.
    • Engineering skills. These are the skills and competencies required for building brand-new valuable software.
    • Technician skills. These are the skills and competencies required for maintaining and operating the software delivered to stakeholders.
    • Framework/Process skills. These are the specific knowledge skills required to support engineering or technician skills.
    • Tools skills. This represents the software that helps you deliver other software.

    While these are important, they are not the whole story. To effectively deliver software, we believe in the importance of being Agile over simply doing Agile.

    Adapted from: “Doing Agile” Is Only Part of the Software Delivery Pie

    Why focus on core skills?

    They are the foundation to achieve business outcomes

    Skills, actions, output and outcomes

    The right skills development is only possible with proper assessment and alignment against outcomes.

    Focus on these real Agile skills

    Agile skills

    • Accountability
    • Collaboration
    • Comfort with ambiguity
    • Communication
    • Empathy
    • Facilitation
    • Functional decomposition
    • Initiative
    • Process discipline
    • Resilience

    Product capabilities deliver value

    As a product owner, you are responsible for managing these facets through your capabilities and activities.

    The core product and value stream consists of: Funding - Product management and governance, Business functionality - Stakeholder and relationship management, and Technology - Product delivery.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    It is easy to lose sight of what matters when we look at a product from a single point of view. Despite what "The Agile Manifesto" says, working software is not valuable without the knowledge and support that people need in order to adopt, use, and maintain it. If you build it, they will not come. Product owners must consider the needs of all stakeholders when designing and building products.

    Recognize product owner knowledge gaps

    Pulse survey of product owners

    Pulse survey of product owners. Graph shows large percentage of respondents have alignment to common agile definition of product owners. Yet a significant perception gap in P&L, delivery, and analytics.

    Info-Tech Insight

    1. Less than 15% of respondents identified analytics or financial management as a key component of product ownership.
    2. Assess your product owner’s capabilities and understanding to develop a maturity plan.

    Source: Pulse Survey (N=18)

    Implement the Info-Tech product owner capability model

    Unfortunately, most product owners operate with incomplete knowledge of the skills and capabilities needed to perform the role. Common gaps include focusing only on product backlogs, acting as a proxy for product decisions, and ignoring the need for key performance indicators (KPIs) and analytics in both planning and value realization.

    Product Owner capabilities: Vision, Product Lifecycle Management, Leadership, Value Realization

    Vision

    • Market Analysis
    • Business Alignment
    • Product Roadmap

    Leadership

    • Soft Skills
    • Collaboration
    • Decision Making

    Product Lifecycle Management

    • Plan
    • Build
    • Run

    Value Realization

    • KPIs
    • Financial Management
    • Business Model

    Product owner capabilities provide support

    Vision predicts impact of Value realization. Value realization provides input to vision

    Your vision informs and aligns what goals and capabilities are needed to fulfill your product or product family vision and align with enterprise goals and priorities. Each item on your roadmap should have corresponding KPIs or OKRs to know how far you moved the value needle. Value realization measures how well you met your target, as well as the impacts on your business value canvas and cost model.

    Product lifecycle management builds trust with Leadership. Leadership improves quality of Product lifecycle management.

    Your leadership skills improve collaborations and decisions when working with your stakeholders and product delivery teams. This builds trust and improves continued improvements to the entire product lifecycle. A product owner’s focus should always be on finding ways to improve value delivery.

    Product owner capabilities provide support

    Leadership enhances Vision. Vision Guides Product Lifecycle Management. Product Lifecycle Management delivers Value Realization. Leadership enhances Value Realization

    Develop product owner capabilities

    Each capability: Vision, Product lifecycle management, Value realization and Leadership has 3 components needed for successful product ownership.

    Avoid common capability gaps

    Vision

    • Focusing solely on backlog grooming (tactical only)
    • Ignoring or failing to align product roadmap to enterprise goals
    • Operational support and execution
    • Basing decisions on opinion rather than market data
    • Ignoring or missing internal and external threats to your product

    Leadership

    • Failing to include feedback from all teams who interact with your product
    • Using a command-and-control approach
    • Viewing product owner as only a delivery role
    • Acting as a proxy for stakeholder decisions
    • Avoiding tough strategic decisions in favor of easier tactical choices

    Product lifecycle management

    • Focusing on delivery and not the full product lifecycle
    • Ignoring support, operations, and technical debt
    • Failing to build knowledge management into the lifecycle
    • Underestimating delivery capacity, capabilities, or commitment
    • Assuming delivery stops at implementation

    Value realization

    • Focusing exclusively on “on time/on budget” metrics
    • Failing to measure a 360-degree end-user view of the product
    • Skipping business plans and financial models
    • Limiting financial management to project/change budgets
    • Ignoring market analysis for growth, penetration, and threats

    Your product vision is your North Star

    It's ok to dream a little!

    Who is the target customer, what is the key benefit, what do they need, what is the differentiator

    Adapted from: Crossing the Chasm

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    A product vision shouldn’t be so far out that it doesn’t feel real or so short-term that it gets bogged down in minutiae and implementation details. Finding the right balance will take some trial and error and will be different for each organization.

    Leverage the product canvas to state and inform your product vision

    Leverage the product Canvas to state and inform your product vision. Includes: Product name, Tracking info, Vision, List of business objectives or goals, Metrics used to measure value realization, List of groups who consume the product/service, and List of key resources or stakeholders.

    Define product value by aligning backlog delivery with roadmap goals

    In each product plan, the backlogs show what you will deliver. Roadmaps identify when and in what order you will deliver value, capabilities, and goals.

    In each product plan, the backlogs show what you will deliver. Roadmaps identify when and in what order you will deliver value, capabilities, and goals.

    Use a balanced value to establish a common definition of goals and value

    Value drivers are strategic priorities aligned to our enterprise strategy and translated through our product families. Each product and change has an impact on the value driver helping us reach our enterprise goals.

    Importance of the value driver multiplied by the Impact of value score is equal to the Value score.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your value drivers and impact helps estimate the expected value of roadmap items, prioritize roadmap and backlog items, and identify KPIs and OKRs to measure value realization and actual impact.

    Use CLAIM to guide your journey

    Culture, Learning, Automation, Integrated teams, Metrics and governance.

    Value is best created by self-managing teams who deliver in frequent, short increments supported by leaders who coach them through challenges.

    Product-centric delivery and Agile are a radical change in how people work and think. Structured, facilitated learning is required throughout the transformation to help leaders and practitioners make the shift.

    Product management, Agile, and DevOps have inspired SDLC tools that have become a key part of delivery practices and work management.

    Self-organizing teams that cross business, delivery, and operations are essential to gain the full benefits of product-centric delivery.

    Successful implementations require the disciplined use of metrics that support developing better teams

    Communicate reasons for changes and how they will be implemented

    Five elements of communicating change: What is the change? Why are we doing it? How are we going to go about it? How long will it take us to do it? What will the role be for each department individual?

    Leaders of successful change spend considerable time developing a powerful change message; that is, a compelling narrative that articulates the desired end state, and that makes the change concrete and meaningful to staff.

    The organizational change message should:

    • Explain why the change is needed.
    • Summarize what will stay the same.
    • Highlight what will be left behind.
    • Emphasize what is being changed.
    • Explain how the change will be implemented.
    • Address how change will affect various roles in the organization.
    • Discuss the staff’s role in making the change successful.

    Info-Tech’s methodology for mature and scale product ownership

    Phase steps

    1. Establish the foundation for product ownership

    Step 1.1 Establish an environment for product owner success

    Step 1.2 Establish your product ownership model

    2. Align product owners to products

    Step 2.1 Assign product owners to products

    Step 2.2 Manage stakeholder influence

    3. Mature product owner capabilities

    Step 3.1 Assess your Agile product owner readiness

    Step 3.2 Mature product owner capabilities

    Phase outcomes

    1.1.1 Define enablers and blockers of product management

    1.1.2 Define your product management roles and names

    1.2.1 Identify your primary product owner perspective

    1.2.2 Define your product owner RACI

    2.1.1 Assign resources to your products and families

    2.2.1 Visualize relationships to identify key influencers

    2.2.2 Group stakeholders into categories

    2.2.3 Prioritize your stakeholders

    3.1.1 Assess your real Agile skill proficiency

    3.2 Mature product owner capabilities

    3.2.1 Assess your vision capability proficiency

    3.2.2 Assess your leadership capability proficiency

    3.2.3 Assess your PLM capability proficiency

    3.2.4 Identify your business value drivers and sources of value

    3.2.5 Assess your value realization capability proficiency

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals.

    Key deliverable

    Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook

    Capture and organize the outcomes of the activities in the workbook.

    Mature and Scale Product Ownership Workbook

    The workbook helps organize and communicate the outcomes of each activity.

    Mature and Scale Product Ownership Readiness Assessment

    Determine your level of mastery of real Agile skills and product owner capabilities.


    Blueprint benefits

    IT benefits

    • Competent product owner who can support teams operating in any delivery methodology.
    • Representative viewpoint and input from the technical and operational product owner perspectives.
    • Products aligned to business needs and committed work are achievable.
    • Single point of contact with a business representative.
    • Acceptance of product owner role outside the Scrum teams.

    Business benefits

    • Better alignment to enterprise goals, vision, and outcomes.
    • Improved coordination with stakeholders.
    • Quantifiable value realization tied to vision.
    • Product decisions made at the right time and with the right input.
    • Product owner who has the appropriate business, operations, and technical knowledge.

    Measure the value of this blueprint

    Align product owner metrics to product delivery and value realization.

    Member outcome

    Suggested Metric

    Estimated impact

    Increase business application satisfaction Satisfaction of business applications (CIO BV Diagnostic) 20% increase within one year after implementation
    Increase effectiveness of application portfolio management Effectiveness of application portfolio management (M&G Diagnostic) 20% increase within one year after implementation
    Increase importance and effectiveness of application portfolio Importance and effectiveness to business (APA Diagnostic) 20% increase within one year after implementation
    Increase satisfaction of support of business operations Support to business (CIO BV Diagnostic) 20% increase within one year after implementation
    Successfully deliver committed work (productivity) Number of successful deliveries; burndown Reduction in project implementation overrun by 20%

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

    Guided Implementation

    "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

    Workshop

    "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

    Consulting

    "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project"

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    Phase 1 Establish the Foundation for Product Ownership

    Phase 2 Align Product Owners to Products

    Phase 3 Mature Product Owner Capabilities

    • Call #1:
      Scope objectives and your specific challenges
    • Call #2:
      Step 1.1 Establish an environment for product owner success
      Step 1.2 Establish your product ownership model
    • Call #3:
      Step 2.1 Assign product owners to products
    • Call #4:
      Step 2.2 Manage stakeholder influence
    • Call #5:
      Step 3.1 Assess your Agile product owner readiness
    • Call #6:
      Step 3.2 Mature product owner capabilities

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    A typical GI is between 8 and 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Phase 3

    Activities

    Establish the Foundation for Product Ownership

    Step 1.1 Establish an environment for product owner success

    1.1.1 Define enablers and blockers of product management

    1.1.2 Define your product management roles and names

    1.1.3 Assess your product management readiness

    Step 1.2 Establish your product ownership model

    1.2.1 Identify your primary product owner perspective

    1.2.2 Define your product owner RACI

    Align Product Owners to Products

    Step 2.1 Assign product owners to products

    2.1.1 Assign resources to your products and families

    Step 2.2 Manage stakeholder influence

    2.2.1 Visualize relationships to identify key influencers

    2.2.2 Group stakeholders into categories

    2.2.3 Prioritize your stakeholders

    Mature Product Owner Capabilities

    Step 3.1 Assess your Agile product owner readiness

    3.1.1 Assess your real Agile skill proficiency

    Step 3.2 Mature product owner capabilities=

    3.2.1 Assess your Vision capability proficiency

    3.2.2 Assess your Leadership capability proficiency

    3.2.3 Assess your PLM capability proficiency

    3.2.4 Identify your business value drivers and sources of value

    3.2.5 Assess your Value Realization capability proficiency

    Deliverables

    1. Enablers and blockers
    2. Role definitions
    3. Product culture readiness
    4. Product owner perspective mapping
    5. Product owner RACI
    1. Product resource assignment
    2. Stakeholder management strategy
    1. Real Agile skill proficiency assessment
    2. Info-Tech’s product owner capability model proficiency assessment
    3. Business value drivers and sources of value

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Product delivery

    Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision

    Build a product vision your organization can take from strategy through execution.

    Deliver Digital Products at Scale

    Deliver value at the scale of your organization through defining enterprise product families.

    Build Your Agile Acceleration Roadmap

    Quickly assess the state of your Agile readiness and plan your path forward to higher value realization.

    Develop Your Agile Approach for a Successful Transformation

    Understand Agile fundamentals, principles, and practices so you can apply them effectively in your organization.

    Implement DevOps Practices That Work

    Streamline business value delivery through the strategic adoption of DevOps practices.

    Extend Agile Practices Beyond IT

    Further the benefits of Agile by extending a scaled Agile framework to the business.

    Build Your BizDevOps Playbook

    Embrace a team sport culture built around continuous business-IT collaboration to deliver great products.

    Embed Security Into the DevOps Pipeline

    Shift security left to get into DevSecOps.

    Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence

    Facilitate ongoing alignment between Agile teams and the business with a set of targeted service offerings.

    Enable Organization-Wide Collaboration by Scaling Agile

    Execute a disciplined approach to rolling out Agile methods in the organization.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Application portfolio management

    APM Research Center

    See an overview of the APM journey and how we can support the pieces in this journey.

    Application Portfolio Management Foundations

    Ensure your application portfolio delivers the best possible return on investment.

    Streamline Application Maintenance

    Effective maintenance ensures the long-term value of your applications.

    Streamline Application Management

    Move beyond maintenance to ensuring exceptional value from your apps.

    Build an Application Department Strategy

    Delivering value starts with embracing what your department can do.

    Embrace Business-Managed Applications

    Empower the business to implement its own applications with a trusted business-IT relationship.

    Optimize Applications Release Management

    Facilitate ongoing alignment between Agile teams and the business with a set of targeted service offerings.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Value, delivery metrics, estimation

    Build a Value Measurement Framework

    Focus product delivery on business value-driven outcomes.

    Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectively

    Be careful what you ask for, because you will probably get it.

    Application Portfolio Assessment: End User Feedback

    Develop data-driven insights to help you decide which applications to retire, upgrade, re-train on, or maintain to meet the demands of the business.

    Create a Holistic IT Dashboard

    Mature your IT department by measuring what matters.

    Refine Your Estimation Practices With Top-Down Allocations

    Don’t let bad estimates ruin good work.

    Estimate Software Delivery With Confidence

    Commit to achievable software releases by grounding realistic expectations.

    Reduce Time to Consensus With an Accelerated Business Case

    Expand on the financial model to give your initiative momentum.

    Optimize Project Intake, Approval, and Prioritization

    Deliver more projects by giving yourself the voice to say “no” or “not yet” to new projects.

    Enhance PPM Dashboards and Reports

    Facilitate ongoing alignment between Agile teams and the business with a set of targeted service offerings.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Organizational design and performance

    Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure

    Focus product delivery on business value-driven outcomes.

    Build a Strategic Workforce Plan

    Have the right people in the right place, at the right time.

    Implement a New Organizational Structure

    Reorganizations are inherently disruptive. Implement your new structure with minimal pain for staff while maintaining IT performance throughout the change.

    Build an IT Employee Engagement Program

    Don’t just measure engagement, act on it.

    Set Meaningful Employee Performance Measures

    Set holistic measures to inspire employee performance.

    Phase 1

    Establish the Foundation for Product Ownership

    Phase 1: Establish an environment for product owner success, Establish your product ownership model

    Mature and Scale Product Ownership

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    1.1.1 Define enablers and blockers of product management

    1.1.2 Define your product management roles and names

    1.1.3 Assess your product management readiness

    1.2.1 Identify your primary product owner perspective

    1.2.2 Define your product owner RACI

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Product owners
    • Product managers
    • Development team leads
    • Portfolio managers
    • Delivery managers
    • Business analysts

    Step 1.1

    Establish an environment for product owner success

    Activities

    1.1.1 Define enablers and blockers of product management

    1.1.2 Define your product management roles and names

    1.1.3 Assess your product management readiness

    Establish the foundation for product ownership

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners
    • Product managers
    • Development team leads
    • Portfolio managers
    • Delivery managers
    • Business analysts

    Outcomes of this step

    • Enablers and blockers
    • Role definitions

    Empower product owners as the true owners of their product

    Product ownership requires decision-making authority and accountability for the value realization from those decisions. POs are more than a proxy for stakeholders, aggregators for changes, and the communication of someone else’s priorities.

    “A Product Owner in its most beneficial form acts like an Entrepreneur, like a 'mini-CEO'. The Product Owner is someone who really 'owns' the product.”

    – Robbin Schuurman,
    “Tips for Starting Technical Product Managers”

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Implement Info-Tech’s Product Owner Capability Model to help empower and hold product owners accountable for the maturity and success of their product. The product owner must understand how their product fits into the organization’s mission and strategy in order to align to enterprise value.

    Product and service owners share the same foundation and capabilities

    For the purpose of this blueprint, product/service and product owner/service owner are used interchangeably. The term “product” is used for consistency but applies to services, as well.

    Product = Service

    Common foundations: Focus on continuous improvement, ROI, and value realization. Clear vision, goals, roadmap, and backlog.

    “Product” and “service” are terms that each organization needs to define to fit its culture and customers (internal and external). The most important aspect is consistent use and understanding of:

    • External products
    • Internal products
    • External services
    • Internal services
    • Products as a service (PaaS)
    • Productizing services (SaaS)

    Define product ownership to match your culture and customers

    Characteristics of a discrete product:

    • Has end users or consumers
    • Delivers quantifiable value
    • Evolves or changes over time
    • Has predictable delivery
    • Has definable boundaries
    • Has a cost to produce and operate
    • Has a discrete backlog and roadmap of improvements

    What does not need a product owner?

    • Individual features
    • Transactions
    • Unstructured data
    • One-time solutions
    • Non-repeatable processes
    • Solutions that have no users or consumers
    • People or teams

    Info-Tech Insight

    • Products are long-term endeavors that don’t end after the project finishes.
    • Products mature and improve their ability to deliver value.
    • Products have a discrete backlog of changes to improve the product itself, separate from operational requests fulfilled by the product or service.

    Need help defining your products or services? Download our blueprint Deliver Digital Products at Scale.

    Connect roadmaps to value realization with KPIs

    Every roadmap item should have an expected realized value once it is implemented. The associate KPIs or OKRs determine if our goal was met. Any gap in value feedback back into the roadmap and backlog refinement.</p data-verified=

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    Info-Tech Insight

    Every roadmap item should have an expected realized value once it is implemented. The associate KPIs or OKRs determine if our goal was met. Any gap in value feedback back into the roadmap and backlog refinement.

    Identify the differences between a project-centric and a product-centric organization

    Differences between Project centric and Product centric organizations in regards to: Funding, Prioritization, Accountability, Product management, Work allocation, and Capacity management.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Product delivery requires significant shifts in the way you complete development work and deliver value to your users. Make the changes that support improving end-user value and enterprise alignment.

    Projects can be a mechanism for funding product changes and improvements

    Projects lifecycle, hybrid lifecycle and product lifecycle. Period or periods of project development have parallel services that encompass a more product-based view.

    Projects withing products

    Regardless of whether you recognize yourself as a product-based or project-based shop, the same basic principles should apply.

    You go through a period or periods of project-like development to build a version of an application or product.

    You also have parallel services along with your project development, which encompasses a more product-based view. These may range from basic support and maintenance to full-fledged strategy teams or services like sales and marketing.

    Recognize common barriers to product management

    The transition to product ownership is a series of behavioral and cultural changes supported by processes and governance. It takes time and consistency to be successful.

    • Command and control structures
    • Lack of ownership and accountability
    • High instability in the market, demand, or organization
    • Lack of dedicated teams align to delivery, service, or product areas
    • Culture of one-off projects
    • Lack of identified and engaged stakeholders
    • Lack of customer exposure and knowledge

    Agile’s four core values

    “…while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”

    Source: “The Agile Manifesto”

    We value...

    We value being agile: Individuals and interactions, Working Software, Customer collaboration, Responding to change. Versus being prescriptive: Processes and tools, Comprehensive documentation, Contract negotiation, following a plan.

    Exercise 1.1.1 Define enablers and blockers of product management

    1 hour
    1. Identify and mitigate blockers of product management in your organization.
    2. What enablers will support strong product owners?
    3. What blockers will make the transition to product management harder?
    4. For each blocker, also define at least one mitigating step.
    Define enablers e.g. team culture. Define blockers and at least one mitigating step

    Output

    • Enablers and blockers

    Participants

    • Product owners
    • Product managers
    • Development team leads
    • Portfolio managers
    • Business analysts

    Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.

    Align enterprise value through product families

    Product families are operational groups based on capabilities or business functions. Product family managers translate goals, priorities, and constraints so they are actionable at the next level. Product owners prioritize changes to enhance the capabilities that allow you to realize your product family. Enabling capabilities realize value and help reach your goals.

    Effective product delivery requires thinking about more than just a single product

    Good application and product management begins with strengthening good practices for a single or small set of applications, products, and services.

    Product portfolio

    Groups of product families within an overall value stream or capability grouping.

    Project portfolio manager

    Product family

    A collection of related products. Products can be grouped along architectural, functional, operational, or experiential patterns.

    Product family manager

    Product

    Single product composed of one or more applications and services.

    Product owner

    Info-Tech Insight

    Define the current roles that will perform the product management function or define consistent role names to product owners and managers.

    Exercise 1.1.2 Define your product management roles and names

    1-2 hour
    1. Identify the roles in which product management activities will be owned.
    2. Define a common set of role names and describe the role.
    3. Map the level of accountability for each role: Product or Product Family
    4. Product owner perspectives will be defined in the next step.

    Define roles, description and level of product accountability.

    Output

    • Role definitions

    Participants

    • Product owners
    • Product managers
    • Development team leads
    • Portfolio managers
    • Business analysts

    Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.

    Use CLAIM to guide your journey

    Culture, Learning, Automation, Integrated teams, Metrics and governance.

    Value is best created by self-managing teams who deliver in frequent, short increments supported by leaders who coach them through challenges.

    Product-centric delivery and Agile are a radical change in how people work and think. Structured, facilitated learning is required throughout the transformation to help leaders and practitioners make the shift.

    Product management, Agile, and DevOps have inspired SDLC tools that have become a key part of delivery practices and work management.

    Self-organizing teams that cross business, delivery, and operations are essential to gain the full benefits of product-centric delivery.

    Successful implementations require the disciplined use of metrics that support developing better teams

    Exercise 1.1.3 Assess your product management readiness

    1 hour
    1. Open and complete the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Readiness Assessment in your Playbook or the provided Excel tool.
    2. Discuss high and low scores for each area to reach a consensus.
    3. Record your results in your Playbook.

    Assess your culture, learning, automation, Integrated teams, metrics and governance.

    Output

    • Assessment of product management readiness based on Info-Tech’s CLAIM+G model.

    Participants

    • Product owners
    • Product managers
    • Development team leads
    • Portfolio managers
    • Business analysts

    Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Readiness Assessment.

    Communicate reasons for changes and how they will be implemented

    Five elements of communicating change: What is the change? Why are we doing it? How are we going to go about it? How long will it take us to do it? What will the role be for each department individual?

    Leaders of successful change spend considerable time developing a powerful change message; that is, a compelling narrative that articulates the desired end state, and that makes the change concrete and meaningful to staff.

    The organizational change message should:

    Step 1.2

    Establish your product ownership model

    Activities

    1.2.1 Identify your primary product owner perspective

    1.2.2 Define your product owner RACI

    Establish the foundation for product ownership

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners
    • Product managers
    • Development team leads
    • Portfolio managers
    • Delivery managers
    • Business analysts

    Outcomes of this step

    • Product owner perspective mapping
    • Product owner RACI

    Recognize the product owner perspectives

    The 3 product owner perspectives. 1. Business: Customer-facing, value-generating. 2. Technical: IT systems and tools. 3. Operations: Keep-the-lights-on processes.

    Product owners represent one of three primary perspectives. Although all share the same capabilities, how they approach their responsibilities is influenced by their primary perspective.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Product owners must translate needs and constraints from their perspective into the language of their audience. Kathy Borneman, Digital Product Owner at SunTrust Bank, noted the challenges of finding a common language between lines of business and IT (e.g. what is a unit?).

    Identify and align to product owner perspectives to ensure product success

    Product owner perspectives

    The 3 product owner perspectives. 1. Business: Customer-facing, value-generating. 2. Technical: IT systems and tools. 3. Operations: Keep-the-lights-on processes.
    1. Each product owner perspective provides important feedback, demand, and support for the product.
    2. Where a perspective is represented by a distinct role, the perspective is managed with that product owner.
    3. If separate roles don’t exist, the product owner must evaluate their work using two or three perspectives.
    4. The ultimate success of a product, and therefore product owner, is meeting the end-user value of the business product owner, tool support of the technical product owner, and manual processing support of the operations product owner.

    Line of business (LOB) product owners

    LOB product owners focus on the products and services consumed by the organization’s external consumers and users. The role centers on the market needs, competitive landscape, and operational support to deliver products and services.

    Business perspective

    • Alignment to enterprise strategy and priorities
    • Growth: market penetration and/or revenue
    • Perception of product value
    • Quality, stability, and predictability
    • Improvement and innovation
    • P&L
    • Market threats and opportunities
    • Speed to market
    • Service alignment
    • Meet or exceed individual goals

    Relationship to Operations

    • Customer satisfaction
    • Speed of delivery and manual processing
    • Continuity

    Relationship to Technical

    • Enabler
    • Analysis and insight
    • Lower operating and support costs

    Technical product owners

    Technical product owners are responsible for the IT systems, tools, platforms, and services that support business operations. Often they are identified as application or platform managers.

    Technical perspective

    • Application, application suite, or group of applications
    • Core platforms and tools
    • Infrastructure and networking
    • Third-party technology services
    • Enable business operations
    • Direct-to-customer product or service
    • Highly interconnected
    • Need for continuous improvement
    • End-of-life management
    • Internal value proposition and users

    Relationship to Business

    • Direct consumers
    • End users
    • Source of funding

    Relationship to Operations

    • End users
    • Process enablement or automation
    • Support, continuity, and manual intervention

    Operations (service) product owners

    Operational product owners focus on the people, processes, and tools needed for manual processing and decisions when automation is not cost-effective. Operational product owners are typically called service owners due to the nature of their work.

    Operational perspective

    • Business enablement
    • Continuity
    • Problem, incident, issue resolution
    • Process efficiency
    • Throughput
    • Error/defect avoidance
    • Decision enablement
    • Waste reduction
    • Limit time in process
    • Disaster recovery

    Relationship to Business

    • Revenue enablement
    • Manual intervention and processing
    • End-user satisfaction

    Relationship to Technical

    • Process enabler
    • Performance enhancement
    • Threat of automation

    Exercise 1.2.1 Identify your primary product owner perspective

    1 hour
    1. Identify which product owner perspective represents your primary focus.
    2. Determine where the other perspectives need to be part of your product roadmap or if they are managed by other product owners.

    Identify product/service name, identify product owner perspective, determine if other perspectives need to be part of roadmap.

    Output

    • Identification of primary product owner perspective.

    Participants

    • Product owners
    • Product managers
    • Development team leads
    • Portfolio managers
    • Business analysts

    Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.

    Realign differences between project managers and product owners

    Differences between Project Manager and Product Owners in regards to: Funding, Prioritization, Accountability, Product management, Work allocation, and Capacity management.

    Manage and communicate key milestones

    Successful product owners understand and define the key milestones in their product delivery lifecycles. These need to be managed along with the product backlog and roadmap.

    Define key milestones and their product delivery life-cycles.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Product ownership isn’t just about managing the product backlog and development cycles. Teams need to manage key milestones such as learning milestones, test releases, product releases, phase gates, and other organizational checkpoints.

    Define who manages each key milestone

    Key milestones must be proactively managed. If a project manager is not available, those responsibilities need to be managed by the product owner or Scrum Master. Start with responsibility mapping to decide which role will be responsible.

    Example milestones and Project Manager, Product Owner and Team Facilitator.

    *Scrum Master, Delivery Manager, Team Lead

    Exercise 1.2.2 Define your product owner RACI

    60 minutes
    1. Review your product and project delivery methodologies to identify key milestones (including approvals, gates, reviews, compliance checks, etc.). List each milestone on a flip chart or whiteboard.
    2. For each milestone, define who is accountable for the completion.
    3. For each milestone, define who is responsible for executing the milestone activity. (Who does the work that allows the milestone to be completed?)
    4. Review any responsibility and accountability gaps and identify opportunities to better support and execute your operating model.
    5. If you previously completed Deliver Digital Products at Scale , review and update your RACI in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Workbook .

    Define: Milestones, Project Manager, Product/service owner, Team Facilitator, and Other roles.

    Output

    • Product owner RACI

    Participants

    • Product owners
    • Product managers
    • Development team leads
    • Portfolio managers
    • Business analysts

    Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.

    Phase 2

    Align Product Owners to Products

    Phase 2: Assign product owners to products, Manage stakeholder influence

    Mature and Scale Product Ownership

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    2.1.1 Assign resources to your products and families

    2.2.1 Visualize relationships to identify key influencers

    2.2.2 Group stakeholders into categories

    2.2.3 Prioritize your stakeholders

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Product owners
    • Product managers
    • Development team leads
    • Portfolio managers
    • Delivery managers
    • Business analysts

    Step 2.1

    Assign product owners to products

    Activities

    2.1.1 Assign resources to your products and families

    Align product owners to products

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners
    • Product managers
    • Development team leads
    • Portfolio managers
    • Delivery managers
    • Business analysts

    Outcomes of this step

    • Product resource assignment

    Match your product management role definitions to your product family levels

    Using the role definitions, you created in Exercise 1.1.2, determine which roles correspond to which levels of your product families.

    Product portfolio

    Groups of product families within an overall value stream or capability grouping.

    Project portfolio manager

    Product family

    A collection of related products. Products can be grouped along architectural, functional, operational, or experiential patterns.

    Product family manager

    Product

    Single product composed of one or more applications and services.

    Product owner

    Info-Tech Insight

    Define the current roles that will perform the product management function or define consistent role names to product owners and managers.

    Assign resources throughout your product families

    Project families are owned by a product manager. Product owners own each product that has a distinct backlog.

    Info-Tech Insight

    • Start by assigning resources to each product or product family box.
    • A product owner can be responsible for more than one product.
    • Ownership of more than one product does not mean they share the same backlog.
    • For help organizing your product families, please download Deliver Digital Products at Scale.

    Understand special circumstances

    In Deliver Digital Products at Scale , products were grouped into families using Info-Tech’s five scaling patterns. Assigning owners to Enterprise Applications and Shared Services requires special consideration.

    Value stream alignment

    • Business architecture
      • Value stream
      • Capability
      • Function
    • Market/customer segment
    • Line of business (LoB)
    • Example: Customer group > value stream > products

    Enterprise applications

    • Enabling capabilities
    • Enterprise platforms
    • Supporting apps
    • Example: HR > Workday/Peoplesoft > Modules Supporting: Job board, healthcare administrator

    Shared Services

    • Organization of related services into service family
    • Direct hierarchy does not necessarily exist within the family
    • Examples: End-user support and ticketing, workflow and collaboration tools

    Technical

    • Domain grouping of IT infrastructure, platforms, apps, skills, or languages
    • Often used in combination with Shared Services grouping or LoB-specific apps
    • Examples: Java, .NET, low-code, database, network

    Organizational alignment

    • Used at higher levels of the organization where products are aligned under divisions
    • Separation of product managers from organizational structure is no longer needed because the management team owns the product management role

    Map the source of demand to each product

    With enterprise applications and shared services, your demand comes from other product and service owners rather than end customers in a value stream.

    Enterprise applications

    • Primary demand comes from the operational teams and service groups using the platform.
    • Each group typically has processes and tools aligned to a module or portion of the overall platform.
    • Product owners determine end-user needs to assist with process improvement and automation.
    • Product family managers help align roadmap goals and capabilities across the modules and tools to ensure consistency and the alignment of changes.

    Shared services

    • Primary demand for shared services comes from other product owners and service managers whose solution or application is dependent on the shared service platform.
    • Families are grouped by related themes (e.g. workflow tools) to increase reusability, standard enterprise solutions, reduced redundancy, and consistent processes across multiple teams.
    • Product owners manage the individual applications or services within a family.

    Pattern: Enterprise applications

    A division or group delivers enabling capabilities and the team’s operational alignment maps directly to the modules/components of an enterprise application and other applications that support the specific business function.

    Workforce Management, Strategic HR, Talent Management, Core HR

    Example:

    • Human resources is one corporate function. Within HR, however, there are subfunctions that operate independently.
    • Each operational team is supported by one or more applications or modules within a primary HR system.
    • Even though the teams work independently, the information they manage is shared with, or ties into processes used by other teams. Coordination of efforts helps provide a higher level of service and consistency.

    For additional information about HRMS, please download Get the Most Out of Your HRMS.

    Assigning owners to enterprise applications

    Align your enterprise application owners to your operating teams that use the enterprise applications. Effectively, your service managers will align with your platform module owners to provide integrated awareness and planning.

    Family manager (top-level), Family managers (second-level) and Product owners.

    Pattern: Shared services

    Grouping by service type, knowledge area, or technology allows for specialization while families align service delivery to shared business capabilities.

    Grouping by service type, knowledge area, or technology allows for specialization while families align service delivery to shared business capabilities.

    Example:

    • Recommended for governance, risk, and compliance; infrastructure; security; end-user support; and shared platforms (workflow, collaboration, imaging/record retention). Direct hierarchies do not necessarily exist within the shared service family.
    • Service groupings are common for service owners (also known as support managers, operations managers, etc.).
    • End-user ticketing comes through a common request system, is routed to the team responsible for triage, and then is routed to a team for resolution.
    • Collaboration tools and workflow tools are enablers of other applications, and product families might support multiple apps or platforms delivering that shared capability.

    Assigning owners to shared services

    Assign owners by service type, knowledge area, or technology to provide alignment of shared business capabilities and common solutions.

    Family manager (top-level), Family managers (second-level) and Product owners.

    Map sources of demand and influencers

    Use the stakeholder analysis to define the key stakeholders and sources of demand for enterprise applications and shared services. Extend your mapping to include their stakeholders and influencers to uncover additional sources of demand and prioritization.

    Map of key stakeholders for enterprise applications and shared services.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your product owner map defines the influence landscape your product operates. It is every bit as important as the teams who enhance, support, and operate your product directly.

    Combine your product owner map with your stakeholder map to create a comprehensive view of influencers.

    Exercise 2.1.1 Assign resources to your products and families

    1-4 hours
    1. Use the product families you completed in Deliver Digital Products at Scale to determine which products and product families need a resource assigned. Where the same resource fills more than one role, they are the product owner or manager for each independently.
    2. Product families that are being managed as products (one backlog for multiple products) should have one owner until the family is split into separate products later.
    3. For each product and family, define the following:
      • Who is the owner (role or person)?
      • Is ownership clearly defined?
      • Are there other stakeholders who make decisions for the product?
    4. Record the results in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Workbook on the Product Owner Mapping worksheet.

    Output

    • Product owner and manager resource alignment.

    Participants

    • Product owners
    • Product managers
    • Development team leads
    • Portfolio managers
    • Business analysts

    Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.

    Step 2.2

    Manage stakeholder influence

    Activities

    2.2.1 Visualize relationships to identify key influencers

    2.2.2 Group stakeholders into categories

    2.2.3 Prioritize your stakeholders

    Align product owners to products

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners
    • Product managers
    • Development team leads
    • Portfolio managers
    • Delivery managers
    • Business analysts

    Outcomes of this step

    • Stakeholder management strategy

    Develop a product owner stakeholder strategy

    Stakeholder management, Product lifecycle, Project delivery, Operational support.

    Stakeholders are a critical cornerstone to product ownership. They provide the context, alignment, and constraints that influence or control what a product owner can accomplish.

    Product owners operate within a network of stakeholders who represent different perspectives within the organization.

    First, product owners must identify members of their stakeholder network. Next, they should devise a strategy for managing stakeholders.

    Without a stakeholder strategy, product owners will encounter obstacles, resistance, or unexpected changes.

    Create a stakeholder network map to product roadmaps and prioritization

    Follow the trail of breadcrumbs from your direct stakeholders to their influencers to uncover hidden stakeholders.

    Create a stakeholder network map to product roadmaps and prioritization. Use connectors to determine who may be influencing your direct stakeholders.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your stakeholder map defines the influence landscape your product operates. It is every bit as important as the teams who enhance, support, and operate your product directly.

    Use connectors to determine who may be influencing your direct stakeholders. They may not have any formal authority within the organization, but they may have informal yet substantive relationships with your stakeholders.

    Exercise 2.2.1 Visualize relationships to identify key influencers

    1 hour
    1. List direct stakeholders for your product.
    2. Determine the stakeholders of your stakeholders and consider adding each of them to the stakeholder list.
    3. Assess who has either formal or informal influence over your stakeholders; add these influencers to your stakeholder list.
    4. Construct a diagram linking stakeholders and their influencers together.
      • Use black arrows to indicate the direction of professional influence.
      • Use dashed green arrows to indicate informal bidirectional influence relationships.
    5. Record the results in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Workbook .

    Output

    • Relationships among stakeholders and influencers

    Participants

    • Product owners
    • Product managers
    • Development team leads
    • Portfolio managers
    • Business analysts

    Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.

    Categorize your stakeholders with a prioritization map

    A stakeholder prioritization map helps product owners categorize their stakeholders by their level of influence and ownership in the product and/or teams.

    Influence versus Ownership/Interest

    There are four areas on the map, and the stakeholders within each area should be treated differently.

    • Players have a high interest in the initiative and the influence to effect change over the initiative. Their support is critical, and a lack of support can cause significant impediments to the objectives.
    • Mediators have a low interest but significant influence over the initiative. They can help to provide balance and objective opinions to issues that arise.
    • Noisemakers have low influence but high interest. They tend to be very vocal and engaged, either positively or negatively but have little ability to enact their wishes.
    • Spectators are generally apathetic and have little influence over or interest in the initiative.

    Exercise 2.2.2 Group stakeholders into categories

    1 hour
    1. Identify your stakeholders’ interest in and influence on your Agile implementation as high, medium, or low by rating the attributes below.
    2. Map your results to the model below to determine each stakeholder’s category.
    3. Record the results in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Workbook .

    Influence versus Ownership/Interest with CMO, CIO and Product Manager in assigned areas.

    Output

    • Categorization of stakeholders and influencers

    Participants

    • Product owners
    • Product managers
    • Development team leads
    • Portfolio managers
    • Business analysts

    Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.

    Prioritize your stakeholders

    There may be too many stakeholders to be able to manage them all. Focus your attention on the stakeholders that matter most.

    Stakeholder category versus level of support.

    Consider the three dimensions of stakeholder prioritization: influence, interest, and support. Support can be determined by rating the following question: How likely is it that your stakeholder would recommend your product? These parameters are used to prioritize which stakeholders are most important and should receive your focused attention. The table to the right indicates how stakeholders are ranked.

    Exercise 2.2.3 Prioritize your stakeholders

    1 hour
    1. Identify the level of support of each stakeholder by answering the following question: How likely is it that your stakeholder would endorse your product?
    2. Prioritize your stakeholders using the prioritization scheme on the previous slide.
    3. Record the results in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Workbook .

    Stakeholder, Category, level of support, prioritization.

    Output

    • Stakeholder and influencer prioritization

    Participants

    • Product owners
    • Product managers
    • Development team leads
    • Portfolio managers
    • Business analysts

    Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.

    Define strategies for engaging stakeholders by type

    Authority Vs. Ownership/Interest.

    Type

    Quadrant

    Actions

    Players

    High influence, high interest – actively engage Keep them updated on the progress of the project. Continuously involve players in the process and maintain their engagement and interest by demonstrating their value to its success.

    Mediators

    High influence, low interest – keep satisfied They can be the game changers in groups of stakeholders. Turn them into supporters by gaining their confidence and trust and including them in important decision-making steps. In turn, they can help you influence other stakeholders.

    Noisemakers

    Low influence, high interest – keep informed Try to increase their influence (or decrease it if they are detractors) by providing them with key information, supporting them in meetings, and using mediators to help them.

    Spectators

    Low influence, low interest – monitor They are followers. Keep them in the loop by providing clarity on objectives and status updates.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Each group of stakeholders draws attention and resources away from critical tasks. By properly identifying your stakeholder groups, the product owner can develop corresponding actions to manage stakeholders in each group. This can dramatically reduce wasted effort trying to satisfy spectators and noisemakers while ensuring the needs of mediators and players are met.

    Phase 3

    Mature Product Owner Capabilities

    Phase 3: Assess your Agile product owner readiness, Mature product owner capabilities.

    Mature and Scale Product Ownership

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    3.1.1 Assess your real Agile skill proficiency

    3.2.1 Assess your vision capability proficiency

    3.2.2 Assess your leadership capability proficiency

    3.2.3 Assess your PLM capability proficiency

    3.2.4 Identify your business value drivers and sources of value

    3.2.5 Assess your value realization capability proficiency

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Product owners
    • Product managers

    Step 3.1

    Assess your Agile product owner readiness

    Activities

    3.1.1 Assess your real Agile skill proficiency

    Mature product owner capabilities

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners
    • Product managers

    Outcomes of this step

    • Real Agile skill proficiency assessment

    Why focus on core skills?

    They are the foundation to achieve business outcomes

    Skills, actions, output and outcomes

    The right skills development is only possible with proper assessment and alignment against outcomes.

    Being successful at Agile is more than about just doing Agile

    The following represents the hard skills needed to “Do Agile”:

    Being successful at Agile needs 4 hard skills: 1. Engineering skills, 2. Technician Skills, 3. Framework/Process skills, 4. Tools skills.

    • Engineering skills. These are the skills and competencies required for building brand-new valuable software.
    • Technician skills. These are the skills and competencies required for maintaining and operating the software delivered to stakeholders.
    • Framework/Process skills. These are the specific knowledge skills required to support engineering or technician skills.
    • Tools skills. This represents the software that helps you deliver other software.

    While these are important, they are not the whole story. To effectively deliver software, we believe in the importance of being Agile over simply doing Agile.

    Adapted from: “Doing Agile” Is Only Part of the Software Delivery Pie

    Focus on these real Agile skills

    Agile skills

    • Accountability
    • Collaboration
    • Comfort with ambiguity
    • Communication
    • Empathy
    • Facilitation
    • Functional decomposition
    • Initiative
    • Process discipline
    • Resilience

    Info-Tech research shows these are the real Agile skills to get started with

    Skill Name

    Description

    Accountability

    Refers to the state of being accountable. In an Agile context, it implies transparency, dedication, acting responsibly, and doing what is necessary to get the job done.

    Collaboration

    Values diverse perspectives and working with others to achieve the best output possible. Effective at working toward individual, team, department, and organizational goals.

    Comfort with ambiguity

    Allows you to confidently take the next steps when presented with a problem without having all the necessary information present.

    Communication

    Uses different techniques to share information, concerns, or emotions when a situation arises, and it allows you to vary your approach depending on the current phase of development.

    Empathy

    Is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another to better serve your team and your stakeholders.

    Facilitation

    Refers to guiding and directing people through a set of conversations and events to learn and achieve a shared understanding.

    Functional decomposition

    Is being able to break down requirements into constituent epics and stories.

    Initiative

    Is being able to anticipate challenges and then act on opportunities that lead to better business outcomes.

    Process discipline

    Refers to the focus of following the right steps for a given activity at the right time to achieve the right outcomes.

    Resilience

    Refers to the behaviors, thoughts, and actions that allow a person to recover from stress and adversity.

    Accountability

    An accountable person:

    • Takes ownership of their own decisions and actions and is responsible for the quality of results.
    • Recognizes personal accountabilities to others, including customers.
    • Works well autonomously.
    • Ensures that the mutual expectations between themselves and others are clearly defined.
    • Takes the appropriate actions to ensure that obligations are met in a timely manner.
    • As a leader, takes responsibility for those being led.

    Accountability drives high performance in teams and organizations

    • The performance level of teams depends heavily on accountability and who demonstrates it:
      • In weak teams, there is no accountability.
      • In mediocre teams, supervisors demonstrate accountability.
      • In high-performance teams, peers manage most performance problems through joint accountability. (Grenny, 2014)
    • According to Bain & Company, accountability is the third most important attribute of high-performing companies. Some of the other key attributes include honest, performance-focused, collaborative, and innovative. (Mankins, 2013)

    All components of the employee empowerment driver have a strong, positive correlation with engagement.

    Employee empowerment and Correlation with engagement.

    Source: McLean & Company Engagement Database, 2018; N=71,794

    Accountability

    Your Score: ____

    1 - Foundational: Transitioning and Growing

    2 - Capable/Competent: Core Contributor

    3 - Influential: Gifted Improver

    4 - Transformational: Towering Strength

    • Alerts others to possible problems in a timely manner.
    • Seeks appropriate support to solve problems.
    • Actively contributes to the creation and evaluation of possible solutions.
    • Acts on solutions selected and decisions made as directed.
    • Makes effective decisions about how to complete work tasks.
    • Demonstrates the capability of breaking down concrete issues into parts and synthesizing information succinctly.
    • Collects and analyzes information from a variety of sources.
    • Seeks information and input to fully understand the cause of problems.
    • Takes action to address obstacles and problems before they impact performance and results.
    • Initiates the evaluation of possible solutions to problems.
    • Makes effective decisions about work task prioritization.
    • Appropriately assesses risks before deciding.
    • Effectively navigates through ambiguity, using multiple data points to analyze issues and identify trends.
    • Does not jump to conclusions.
    • Draws logical conclusions and provides opinions and recommendations with confidence.
    • Takes ownership over decisions and their consequences.
    • Demonstrates broad knowledge of information sources that can be used to assess problems and make decisions.
    • Invests time in planning, discovery, and reflection to drive better decisions.
    • Effectively leverages hard data as inputs to making decisions.
    • Garners insight from abstract data and makes appropriate decisions.
    • Coaches others in effective decision-making practices.
    • Has the authority to solve problems and make decisions.
    • Thinks several steps ahead in deciding the best course of action, anticipating likely outcomes, risks, or implications.
    • Establishes metrics to aid in decision-making, for self and teams
    • Prioritizes objective and ambiguous information and analyzes this when making decisions.
    • Solicits a diverse range of opinions and perspectives as inputs to decision making.
    • Applies frameworks to decision making, particularly in situations that have little base in prior experience.
    • Makes effective decisions about organizational priorities.
    • Holds others accountable for their decisions and consequences.
    • Creates a culture of empowerment and trust to facilitate effective problem solving and decision making.
    • Makes sound decisions that have organization-wide consequences and that influence future direction.

    Collaboration as a skill

    The principles and values of Agile revolve around collaboration.

    • Works well with others on specialized and cross-functional teams.
    • Can self-organize while part of a team.
    • Respects the commitments that others make.
    • Identifies and articulates dependencies.
    • Values diverse perspectives and works with others to achieve the best output possible.
    • Effective at working toward individual, team, department, and organizational goals.
    The principles and values of Agile revolve around collaboration. Doing what was done before (being prescriptive), going though the motions (doing Agile), living the principles (being Agile)

    Collaboration

    The Agile Manifesto has three principles that focus on collaboration:

    1. The business and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
    2. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need and trust them to get the job done.
    3. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

    Effective collaboration supports Agile behaviors, including embracing change and the ability to work iteratively.

    Collaboration

    Your Score: ____

    1 - Foundational: Transitioning and Growing

    2 - Capable/Competent: Core Contributor

    3 - Influential: Gifted Improver

    4 - Transformational: Towering Strength

    • Understands role on the team and the associated responsibilities and accountabilities.
    • Treats team members with respect.
    • Contributes to team decisions and to the achievement of team goals and objectives.
    • Demonstrates a positive attitude.
    • Works cross-functionally to achieve common goals and to support the achievement of other team/department goals.
    • Values working in a diverse team and understands the importance of differing perspectives to develop unique solutions or ideas.
    • Fosters team camaraderie, collaboration, and cohesion.
    • Understands the impact of one's actions on the ability of team members to do their jobs.
    • Respects the differences other team members bring to the table by openly seeking others' opinions.
    • Helps the team accomplish goals and objectives by breaking down shared goals into smaller tasks.
    • Approaches challenging team situations with optimism and an open mind, focusing on coming to a respectful conclusion.
    • Makes suggestions to improve team engagement and effectiveness.
    • Supports implementation of team decisions.
    • Professionally gives and seeks feedback to achieve common goals.
    • Values working in a diverse team and understands the importance of differing perspectives to develop unique solutions or ideas.
    • Motivates the team toward achieving goals and exceeding expectations.
    • Reaches out to other teams and departments to build collaborative, cross-functional relationships.
    • Creates a culture of collaboration that leverages team members' strengths, even when the team is remote or virtual.
    • Participates and encourages others to participate in initiatives that improve team engagement and effectiveness.
    • Builds consensus to make and implement team decisions, often navigating through challenging task or interpersonal obstacles.
    • Values leading a diverse team and understands the importance of differing perspectives to develop unique solutions or ideas.
    • Creates a culture of collaboration among teams, departments, external business partners, and all employee levels.
    • Breaks down silos to achieve inter-departmental collaboration.
    • Demonstrates ownership and accountability for team/department/ organizational outcomes.
    • Uses an inclusive and consultative approach in setting team goals and objectives and making team decisions.
    • Coaches others on how to identify and proactively mitigate potential points of team conflict.
    • Recognizes and rewards teamwork throughout the organization.
    • Provides the tools and resources necessary for teams to succeed.
    • Values diverse teams and understands the importance of differing perspectives to develop unique solutions or ideas.

    Comfort with ambiguity

    Ability to handle ambiguity is a key factor in Agile success.

    • Implies the ability to maintain a level of effectiveness when all information is not present.
    • Able to confidently act when presented with a problem without all information present.
    • Risk and uncertainty can comfortably be handled.
    • As a result, can easily adapt and embrace change.
    • People comfortable with ambiguity demonstrate effective problem-solving skills.

    Relative importance of traits found in Agile teams

    1. Handles ambiguity
    2. Agreeable
    3. Conscientious

    Comfort with ambiguity

    Your Score: ____

    1 - Foundational: Transitioning and Growing

    2 - Capable/Competent: Core Contributor

    3 - Influential: Gifted Improver

    4 - Transformational: Towering Strength

    • Requires most information to be present before carrying out required activities.
    • Can operate with some information missing.
    • Comfortable asking people within their known circles for help.
    • Significant time is taken to reveal small pieces of information.
    • More adept at operating with information missing.
    • Willing to reach out to people outside of their regular circles for assistance and clarification.
    • Able to apply primary and secondary research methods to fill in the missing pieces.
    • Can operate essentially with a statement and a blank page.
    • Able to build a plan, drive others and themselves to obtain the right information to solve the problem.
    • Able to optimize only pulling what is necessary to answer the desired question and achieve the desired outcome.

    Communication

    Even though many organizations recognize its importance, communication is one of the root causes of project failure.

    Project success vs Communication effectiveness. Effective communications is associated with a 17% increase in finishing projects within budget.

    56%

    56% of the resources spent on a project are at risk due to ineffective communications.

    PMI, 2013.

    29%

    In 29% of projects started in the past 12 months, poor communication was identified as being one of the primary causes of failure.

    PMI, 2013.

    Why are communication skills important to the Agile team?

    It’s not about the volume, it’s about the method.

    • Effectively and appropriately interacts with others to build relationships and share ideas and information.
    • Uses tact and diplomacy to navigate difficult situations.
    • Relays key messages by creating a compelling story, targeted toward specific audiences.

    Communication effectiveness, Activity and Effort required.

    Adapted From: Agile Modeling

    Communication

    Your Score:____

    1 - Foundational: Transitioning and Growing

    2 - Capable/Competent: Core Contributor

    3 - Influential: Gifted Improver

    4 - Transformational: Towering Strength

    • Actively listens, learns through observation, and uses clear and precise language.
    • Possesses an open and approachable demeanor, with a positive and constructive tone.
    • Demonstrates interest in the thoughts and feelings of others.
    • Considers potential responses of others before speaking or acting.
    • Checks own understanding of others’ communication by repeating or paraphrasing.
    • Demonstrates self-control in stressful situations.
    • Provides clear, concise information to others via verbal or written communication.
    • Seeks to understand others' points of view, looking at verbal and non-verbal cues to encourage open and honest discussions.
    • Invites and encourages others to participate in discussions.
    • Projects a sincere and genuine tone.
    • Remains calm when dealing with others who are upset or angry.
    • Provides and seeks support to improve communication.
    • Does not jump to conclusions or act on assumptions.
    • Tailors messages to meet the different needs of different audiences.
    • Accurately interprets responses of others to their words and actions.
    • Provides feedback effectively and with empathy.
    • Is a role model for others on how to effectively communicate.
    • Ensures effective communication takes place at the departmental level.
    • Engages stakeholders using appropriate communication methods to achieve desired outcomes.
    • Creates opportunities and forums for discussion and idea sharing.
    • Demonstrates understanding of the feelings, motivations, and perspectives of others, while adapting communications to anticipated reactions.
    • Shares insights about their own strengths, weaknesses, successes, ad failures to show empathy and help others relate.
    • Discusses contentious issues without getting defensive and maintains a professional tone.
    • Coaches others on how to communicate effectively and craft targeted messages.
    • Sets and exemplifies standards for respectful and effective communications in the organization.
    • Comfortably delivers strategic messages supporting their function and the organization at the enterprise level.
    • Communicates with senior-level executives on complex organizational issues.
    • Promotes inter-departmental communication and transparency.
    • Achieves buy-in and consensus from people who share widely different views.
    • Shares complex messages in clear, understandable language.
    • Accurately interprets how they are perceived by others.
    • Rallies employees to communicate ideas and build upon differing perspectives to drive innovation.

    Empathy

    Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another in order to better serve your team and your stakeholders. There are three kinds:

    Cognitive

    Thought, understanding, intellect

    • Knowing how someone else feels and what they might be thinking.
    • Contributes to more effective communication.

    Emotional

    Feelings, physical sensation

    • You physically feel the emotions of the other person.
    • Helps build emotional connections with others.

    Compassionate

    Intellect, emotion with action

    • Along with understanding, you take action to help.

    How is empathy an Agile skill?

    Empathy enables you to serve your team, your customers, and your organization

    Serving the team

    • Primary types: Emotional and compassionate empathy.
    • The team is accountable for delivery.
    • By being able to empathize with the person you are talking to, complex issues can be addressed.
    • A lack of empathy leads to a lack of collaboration and being able to go forward on a common path.

    Serving your customers and stakeholders

    • Primary type: Cognitive empathy.
    • Agile enables the delivery of the right value at the right time to your stakeholders
    • Translating your stakeholders' needs requires an understanding of who they are as people. This is done through observations, interviews and conversations.
    • Leveraging empathy maps and user-story writing is an effective tool.

    Empathy

    Your Score: ____

    1 - Foundational: Transitioning and Growing

    2 - Capable/Competent: Core Contributor

    3 - Influential: Gifted Improver

    4 - Transformational: Towering Strength

    • Knowing how someone else feels and what they might be thinking.
    • Ability to build emotional connections with others.
    • Able to harness emotional connections to achieve tangible and experiential outcomes.
    • Demonstrates an awareness of different feelings and ways of thinking by both internal and external stakeholders.
    • Limited ability to make social connections with others outside of the immediate team.
    • Able to connect with similarly minded people to improve customer/stakeholder satisfaction. (Insights into action)
    • Able to interact and understand others with vastly different views.
    • Lack of agreement does not stop individual. from asking questions, understanding, and pushing the conversation forward

    Facilitation

    It’s not just your manager’s problem.

    “Facilitation is the skill of moderating discussions within a group in order to enable all participants to effectively articulate their views on a topic under discussion, and to ensure that participants in the discussion are able to recognize and appreciate the differing points of view that are articulated.” (IIBA, 2015)

    • Drives action through influence, often without authority.
    • Leads and impacts others' thinking, decisions, or behavior through inclusive practices and relationship building.
    • Encourages others to self-organize and hold themselves accountable.
    • Identifies blockers and constructively removes barriers to progress.

    Facilitation

    Your Score: ____

    1 - Foundational: Transitioning and Growing

    2 - Capable/Competent: Core Contributor

    3 - Influential: Gifted Improver

    4 - Transformational: Towering Strength

    • Drives action through influence, often without authority.
    • Leads and impacts others' thinking, decisions, or behavior through inclusive practices and relationship building.
    • Encourages others to self-organize and hold themselves accountable.
    • Identifies blockers and constructively removes barriers to progress.
    • Maps and executes processes effectively.
    • Uses facts and concrete examples to demonstrate a point and gain support from others.
    • Openly listens to the perspectives of others.
    • Builds relationships through honest and consistent behavior.
    • Understands the impact of their own actions and how others will perceive it.
    • Identifies impediments to progress.
    • Anticipates the effect of one's approach on the emotions and sensitivities of others.
    • Practices active listening while demonstrating positivity and openness.
    • Customizes discussion and presentations to include "what’s in it for me" for the audience.
    • Presents compelling information to emphasize the value of an idea.
    • Involves others in refining ideas or making decisions in order to drive buy-in and action.
    • Knows how to appropriately use influence to achieve outcomes without formal authority.
    • Seeks ways and the help of others to address barriers or blockers to progress.
    • Leverages a planned approach to influencing others by identifying stakeholder interests, common goals, and potential barriers.
    • Builds upon successes to gain acceptance for new ideas.
    • Facilitates connections between members of their network for the benefit of the organization or others.
    • Demonstrates the ability to draw on trusting relationships to garner support for ideas and action.
    • Encourages a culture that allows space for influence to drive action.
    • Adept at appropriately leveraging influence to achieve business unit outcomes.
    • Actively manages the removal of barriers and blockers for teams.

    Functional decomposition

    It’s not just a process, it’s a skill.

    “Functional decomposition helps manage complexity and reduce uncertainty by breaking down processes, systems, functional areas, or deliverables into their simpler constituent parts and allowing each part to be analyzed independently."

    (IIBA, 2015)

    Being able to break down requirements into constituent consumable items (example: epics and user stories).

    Start: Strategic Initiatives. 1: Epics. 2: Capabilities. 3: Features. End: Stories.

    Use artifact mapping to improve functional decomposition

    In our research, we refer to these items as epics, capabilities, features, and user stories. How you develop your guiding principles and structure your backlog should be based on the terminology and artifact types commonly used in your organization.

    Agile, Waterfall, Relationship, Decomposition skill most in demand, definition.

    Functional Decomposition

    Your Score: ____

    1 - Foundational: Transitioning and Growing

    2 - Capable/Competent: Core Contributor

    3 - Influential: Gifted Improver

    4 - Transformational: Towering Strength

    • Able to decompose items with assistance from other team members.
    • Able to decompose items independently, ensuring alignment with business value.
    • Able to decompose items independently and actively seeks out collaboration opportunities with relevant SME's during and after the refinement process to ensure completion.
    • Able to decompose items at a variety of granularity levels.
    • Able to teach and lead others in their decomposition efforts.
    • Able to quickly operate at different levels of the requirements stack.

    Initiative and self-organization

    A team that takes initiative can self-organize to solve critical problems.

    • "The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams." (Agile Manifesto)
    • In a nutshell, the initiative represents the ability to anticipate challenges and act on opportunities that lead to better business outcomes.
    • Anticipates challenges and acts on opportunities that lead to better business outcomes.
    • Thinks critically and is motivated to use both specialist expertise and general knowledge.
    • Driven by the delivery of business value and better business outcomes.
    • Empowers others to act and is empowered and self-motivated.

    Initiative and self-organization

    Your Score: ____

    1 - Foundational: Transitioning and Growing

    2 - Capable/Competent: Core Contributor

    3 - Influential: Gifted Improver

    4 - Transformational: Towering Strength

    • Demonstrates awareness of an opportunity or issue which is presently occurring or is within the immediate work area.
    • Reports an opportunity or issue to the appropriate person.
    • Acts instead of waiting to be asked.
    • Willingly takes on challenges, even if they fall outside their area of expertise.
    • Is proactive in identifying issues and making recommendations to resolve them.
    • Within the scope of the work environment, takes action to improve processes or results, or to resolve problems.
    • Not deterred by obstacles.
    • Tackles challenges that require risk taking.
    • Procures the necessary resources, team and technical support to enable success.
    • Assists others to get the job done.
    • Demonstrates awareness of an opportunities or issues which are in the future or outside the immediate work area.
    • Typically exceeds the expectations of the job.
    • Learns new technology or skills outside their specialization so that they can be a more effective team member.
    • Recommends solutions to enhance results or prevent potential issues.
    • Drives implementation of new processes within the team to improve results.
    • Able to provide recommendations on plans and decisions that are strategic and future-oriented for the organization.
    • Identifies areas of high risk or of organizational level impact.
    • Able to empower significant recourses from the organization to enable success.
    • Leads long-term engagements that result in improved organizational capabilities and processes.

    Process discipline

    A common misconception is that Agile means no process and no discipline. Effective Agile teams require more adherence to the right processes to create a culture of self-improvement.

    • Refers to the focus of following the right steps for a given activity at the right time to achieve the right outcomes.
    • Focus on following the right steps for a given activity at the right time to achieve desired outcomes.
    Example: Scrum Ceremonies during a sprint (1 - 4 weeks/sprint). 1: Sprint planning, 2: Daily scrum, 3: Sprint review, 4: Sprint retrospective.

    Process discipline

    Your Score: ____

    1 - Foundational: Transitioning and Growing

    2 - Capable/Competent: Core Contributor

    3 - Influential: Gifted Improver

    4 - Transformational: Towering Strength

    • Demonstrates awareness of the key processes and steps that are needed in a given situation.
    • Limited consistency in following processes and limited understanding of the 'why' behind the processes.
    • Aware and follows through with key agile processes in a consistent manner.
    • Demonstrates not only the knowledge of processes but understands the 'why' behind their existence.
    • Aware and follows through with key agile processes in a consistent manner.
    • Demonstrates understanding of not only why specific processes exist but can suggest changes to improve efficiency, consistency, and outcomes.

    N/A -- Maximum level is '3

    Resilience

    If your team hits the wall, don’t let the wall hit them back.

    • Resilience is critical for an effective Agile transformation. A team that demonstrates resilience always exhibits:
    • Evolution over transformation – There is a recognition that changes happen over time.
    • Intensity and productivity – A race is not won by the ones who are the fastest, but by the ones who are the most consistent. Regardless of what comes up, the team can push through.
    • That organizational resistance is futile – Given that it is working on the right objectives, the team needs to demonstrate a consistency of approach and intensity regardless of what may stand in its way.
    • Refers to the behaviors, thoughts, and actions that allow a person to recover from stress and adversity.

    How resilience aligns with Agile

    A team is not “living the principles” without resilience.

    1. Purpose

      Aligns with: “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” The vision or goals may not be clear in certain circumstances and can be difficult to relate to a single work item. Being able to intrinsically source and harness a sense of purpose becomes more important, especially as a self-organizing team.
    2. Perseverance

      Aligns with: “Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.” Perseverance enables teams to continuously deliver at a steady pace, addressing impediments or setbacks and continuing to move forward.
    3. Composure

      Aligns with: “Agile processes promote sustainable development,” and “At regular intervals, the team reflects ... and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”
      When difficult situations arise, composure allows us to understand perspectives, empathize with customers, accept late changes, and sustain a steady pace.
    4. Self-Reliance

      Aligns with: “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” Knowing oneself, recognizing strengths, and drawing on past successes, can be a powerful aid in creating high-performing Agile teams
    5. Authenticity

      Aligns with: “At regular intervals, the team reflects … and adjusts its behavior accordingly,” and “Build projects around motivated individuals.”
      When difficult situations arise, authenticity is crucial. “For example, being able to openly disclose areas outside of your strengths in sprint planning or being able to contribute constructively toward self-organization.”

    Adapted from: Why Innovation, 2019.

    Resilience

    Your Score: ____

    1 - Foundational: Transitioning and Growing

    2 - Capable/Competent: Core Contributor

    3 - Influential: Gifted Improver

    4 - Transformational: Towering Strength

    • Easily distracted and stopped by moderately stressful and challenging situations.
    • Requires significant help from others to get back on track.
    • Not frequently able (or knows) how to ask for help
    • Handles typical stresses and challenges for the given role.
    • Able to get back on track with limited assistance.
    • Able to ask for help when they need it.
    • Quality of work unaffected by an increase in pressures and challenges.
    • Handles stresses and challenges what is deemed above and beyond their given role.
    • Able to provide advice to others on how to handle difficult and challenging situations.
    • Quality of work and outcomes is maintained and sometimes exceeded as pressure increases.
    • Team looks to this individual as being the gold standard on how to approach any given problem or situation.
    • Directly mentors others on approaches in situations regardless of the level of challenge.

    Exercise 1.2.1 Identify your primary product owner perspective

    1 hour
    1. Review each real Agile skill and determine your current proficiency.
    2. Complete your assessment in the Mature and Scale Product Owner Proficiency Assessment tool.
    3. Record the results in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.
    4. Review the skills map to identify strengths and areas of growth.

    Accountability, Collaboration, Comfort in Ambiguity, Communication, Empathy, Facilitation, Functional Decomposition, Initiative, Process Discipline, Resilience.

    Output

    • Agile skills assessment results.

    Participants

    • Product owners
    • Product managers

    Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Owner Proficiency Assessment.

    Determine your Agile skills proficiency: Edit chart data to plot your scores or add your data points and connect the lines.

    Step 3.2

    Mature product owner capabilities

    Activities

    3.2.1 Assess your vision capability proficiency

    3.2.2 Assess your leadership capability proficiency

    3.2.3 Assess your PLM capability proficiency

    3.2.4 Identify your business value drivers and sources of value

    3.2.5 Assess your value realization capability proficiency

    Mature product owner capabilities

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Product owners
    • Product managers

    Outcomes of this step

    • Info-Tech product owner capability model proficiency assessment

    Product capabilities deliver value

    As a product owner, you are responsible for managing these facets through your capabilities and activities.

    The core product and value stream consists of: Funding - Product management and governance, Business functionality - Stakeholder and relationship management, and Technology - Product delivery.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    It is easy to lose sight of what matters when we look at a product from a single point of view . Despite what "The Agile Manifesto" says, working software is not valuable without the knowledge and support that people need in order to adopt, use, and maintain it. If you build it, they will not come. Product owners must consider the needs of all stakeholders when designing and building products.

    Recognize product owner knowledge gaps

    Pulse survey of product owners

    Pulse survey of product owners. Graph shows large percentage of respondents have alignment to common agile definition of product owners. Yet a significant perception gap in P&L, delivery, and analytics.

    Info-Tech Insight

    1. Less than 15% of respondents identified analytics or financial management as a key component of product ownership.
    2. Assess your product owner’s capabilities and understanding to develop a maturity plan.

    Source: Pulse Survey (N=18)

    Implement the Info-Tech product owner capability model

    Unfortunately, most product owners operate with incomplete knowledge of the skills and capabilities needed to perform the role. Common gaps include focusing only on product backlogs, acting as a proxy for product decisions, and ignoring the need for key performance indicators (KPIs) and analytics in both planning and value realization.

    Product Owner capabilities: Vision, Product Lifecycle Management, Leadership, Value Realization

    Vision

    • Market Analysis
    • Business Alignment
    • Product Roadmap

    Leadership

    • Soft Skills
    • Collaboration
    • Decision Making

    Product Lifecycle Management

    • Plan
    • Build
    • Run

    Value Realization

    • KPIs
    • Financial Management
    • Business Model

    Product owner capabilities provide support

    Vision predicts impact of Value realization. Value realization provides input to vision

    Your vision informs and aligns what goals and capabilities are needed to fulfill your product or product family vision and align with enterprise goals and priorities. Each item on your roadmap should have corresponding KPIs or OKRs to know how far you moved the value needle. Value realization measures how well you met your target, as well as the impacts on your business value canvas and cost model.

    Product lifecycle management builds trust with Leadership. Leadership improves quality of Product lifecycle management.

    Your leadership skills improve collaborations and decisions when working with your stakeholders and product delivery teams. This builds trust and improves continued improvements to the entire product lifecycle. A product owner’s focus should always be on finding ways to improve value delivery.

    Product owner capabilities provide support

    Leadership enhances Vision. Vision Guides Product Lifecycle Management. Product Lifecycle Management delivers Value Realization. Leadership enhances Value Realization

    Develop product owner capabilities

    Each capability: Vision, Product lifecycle management, Value realization and Leadership has 3 components needed for successful product ownership.

    Avoid common capability gaps

    Vision

    • Focusing solely on backlog grooming (tactical only)
    • Ignoring or failing to align product roadmap to enterprise goals
    • Operational support and execution
    • Basing decisions on opinion rather than market data
    • Ignoring or missing internal and external threats to your product

    Leadership

    • Failing to include feedback from all teams who interact with your product
    • Using a command-and-control approach
    • Viewing product owner as only a delivery role
    • Acting as a proxy for stakeholder decisions
    • Avoiding tough strategic decisions in favor of easier tactical choices

    Product lifecycle management

    • Focusing on delivery and not the full product lifecycle
    • Ignoring support, operations, and technical debt
    • Failing to build knowledge management into the lifecycle
    • Underestimating delivery capacity, capabilities, or commitment
    • Assuming delivery stops at implementation

    Value realization

    • Focusing exclusively on “on time/on budget” metrics
    • Failing to measure a 360-degree end-user view of the product
    • Skipping business plans and financial models
    • Limiting financial management to project/change budgets
    • Ignoring market analysis for growth, penetration, and threats

    Capabilities: Vision

    Market Analysis

    • Customer Empathy: Identify the target users and unique value your product provides that is not currently being met. Define the size of your user base, segmentation, and potential growth.
    • Customer Journey: Define the future path and capabilities your users will respond to.
    • Competitive analysis: Complete a SWOT analysis for your end-to-end product lifecycle. Use Info-Tech’s Business SWOT Analysis Template.

    Business Alignment

    • Enterprise alignment: Align to enterprise and product family goals, strategies, and constraints.
    • Delivery and release strategy: Develop a delivery strategy to achieve value quickly and adapt to internal and external changes. Value delivery is constrained by your delivery pipeline.
    • OCM and go-to-market strategy: Create organizational change management, communications, and a user implementation approach to improve adoption and satisfaction from changes.

    Product Roadmap

    • Roadmap strategy: Determine the duration, detail, and structure of your roadmap to accurately communicate your vision.
    • Value prioritization: Define criteria used to evaluate and sequence demand items.
    • Release and capacity planning: Build your roadmap with realistic goals and milestones based on your delivery pipeline and dependencies.

    “Customers are best heard through many ears.”

    – Thomas K. Connellan, Inside the Magic Kingdom

    Vision: Market Analysis, Business Alignment, and Product Roadmap.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Data comes from many places and may still not tell the complete story.

    Build your product strategy playbook

    Complete Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision to define your Vision, Goals, Roadmap approach, and Backlog quality filters.

    Digital Product Strategy Supporting Workbook

    Supporting workbook that captures the interim results from a number of exercises that will contribute to your overall digital product vision.

    Product Backlog Item Prioritization Tool

    An optional tool to help you capture your product backlog and prioritize based on your given criteria

    Product Roadmap Tool

    An optional tool to help you build out and visualize your first roadmap.

    Your Digital Product Vision Details Strategy

    Record the results from the exercises to help you define, detail, and make real your digital product vision.

    Your product vision is your North Star

    It's ok to dream a little!

    Who is the target customer, what is the key benefit, what do they need, what is the differentiator

    Adapted from: Geoffrey Moore, 2014.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    A product vision shouldn’t be so far out that it doesn’t feel real or so short-term that it gets bogged down in minutiae and implementation details. Finding the right balance will take some trial and error and will be different for each organization.

    Use product roadmaps to guide delivery

    In Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision, we showed how the product roadmap is key to value realization. As a product owner, the product roadmap is your communicated path to align teams and changes to your defined goals, while aligning your product to enterprise goals and strategy.

    As a product owner, the product roadmap is your communicated path to align teams and changes to your defined goals, while aligning your product to enterprise goals and strategy

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Info-Tech Best Practice Product delivery requires a comprehensive set of business and technical competencies to effectively roadmap, plan, deliver, support, and validate your product portfolio. Product delivery is a “multi-faceted, complex discipline that can be difficult to grasp and hard to master.” It will take time to learn and adopt methods and become a competent product manager or owner (“What Is Product Management?”, Pichler Consulting Limited).

    Match your roadmap and backlog to the needs of the product

    Ultimately, you want products to be able to respond faster to changes and deliver value sooner. The level of detail in the roadmap and backlog is a tool to help the product owner plan for change. The duration of your product roadmap is all directly related to the tier of product owner in the product family.

    The level of detail in the roadmap and backlog is a tool to help the product owner plan for change. The duration of your product roadmap is all directly related to the tier of product owner in the product family.

    Product delivery realizes value for your product family

    While planning and analysis are done at the family level, work and delivery are done at the individual product level.

    Product strategy includes: Vision, Goals, Roadmap, backlog and Release plan.

    Use artifact mapping to improve functional decomposition

    In our research, we refer to these items as epics, capabilities, features, and user stories. How you develop your guiding principles and structure your backlog should be based on the terminology and artifact types commonly used in your organization.

    Agile, Waterfall, Relationship, Decomposition skill most in demand, definition.

    Manage and communicate key milestones

    Successful product owners understand and define the key milestones in their product delivery lifecycles. These need to be managed along with the product backlog and roadmap.

    Define key milestones and their release dates.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Product ownership isn’t just about managing the product backlog and development cycles! Teams need to manage key milestones such as learning milestones, test releases, product releases, phase gates, and other organizational checkpoints!

    Milestones

    • Points in the timeline when the established set of artifacts is complete (feature-based), or checking status at a particular point in time (time-based).
    • Typically assigned a date and used to show the progress of development.
    • Plays an important role when sequencing different types of artifacts.

    Release dates

    • Releases mark the actual delivery of a set of artifacts packaged together in a new version of the product.
    • Release dates, firm or not, allow stakeholders to anticipate when this is coming.

    Leverage the product canvas to state and inform your product vision

    Leverage the product Canvas to state and inform your product vision. Includes: Product name, Tracking info, Vision, List of business objectives or goals, Metrics used to measure value realization, List of groups who consume the product/service, and List of key resources or stakeholders.

    Capability: Vision

    Your Score: ____

    1 - Foundational: Transitioning and Growing

    2 - Capable/Competent: Core Contributor

    3 - Influential: Gifted Improver

    4 - Transformational: Towering Strength

    • Product backlog.
    • Basic roadmap with milestones and releases.
    • Unprioritized stakeholder list.
    • Understanding of product’s purpose and value.
    • Customers and end-users defined with core needs identified.
    • Roadmap with goals and capabilities defined by themes and set to appropriate time horizons.
    • Documented stakeholder management plan with communication and collaboration aligned to the stakeholder strategy.
    • Value drivers traced to product families and enterprise goals.
    • Customer personas defined with pain relievers and value creators defined.
    • Fully-developed roadmap traced to family (and child) roadmaps.
    • Expected ROI for all current and next roadmap items.
    • KPIs/OKRs used to improve roadmap prioritization and sequencing.
    • Proactive stakeholder engagement and reviews.
    • Cross-functional engagement to align opportunities and drive enterprise value.
    • Formal metrics to assess customer needs and value realization.
    • Roadmaps managed in an enterprise system for full traceability, value realization reporting, and views for defined audiences.
    • Proactive stakeholder engagement with regular planning and review ceremonies tied to their roadmaps and goals.
    • Cross-functional innovation to find disruptive opportunities to drive enterprise value.
    • Omni-channel metrics and customer feedback mechanisms to proactively evaluate goals, capabilities, and value realization.

    Exercise 3.2.1 Assess your Vision capability proficiency

    1 hour
    1. Review the expectations for this capability and determine your current proficiency for each skill.
    2. Complete your assessment in the Mature and Scale Product Owner Proficiency Assessment tool.
    3. Record the results in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.
    4. Review the skills map to identify strengths and areas of growth.

    Output

    • Product owner capability assessment

    Participants

    • Product owners
    • Product managers

    Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Owner Proficiency Assessment.

    Capabilities: Leadership

    Soft Skills

    • Communication: Maintain consistent, concise, and appropriate communication using SMART guidelines (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely).
    • Integrity: Stick to your values, principles, and decision criteria for the product to build and maintain trust with your users and teams.
    • Influence: Manage stakeholders using influence and collaboration over contract negotiation.

    Collaboration

    • Stakeholder management: Build a communications strategy for each stakeholder group, tailored to individual stakeholders.
    • Relationship management: Use every interaction point to strengthen relationships, build trust, and empower teams.
    • Team development: Promote development through stretch goals and controlled risks to build team capabilities and performance.

    Decision Making

    • Prioritized criteria: Remove personal bias by basing decisions off data analysis and criteria.
    • Continuous improvement: Balance new features with the need to ensure quality and create an environment of continuous improvement.
    • Team empowerment/negotiation: Push decisions to teams closest to the problem and solution, using Delegation Poker to guide you.

    “Everything walks the walk. Everything talks the talk.”

    – Thomas K. Connellan, Inside the Magic Kingdom

    Leadership: Soft skills, collaboration, decision making.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Product owners cannot be just a proxy for stakeholder decisions. The product owner owns product decisions and management of all stakeholders.

    Capability: Leadership

    Your Score: ____

    1 - Foundational: Transitioning and Growing

    2 - Capable/Competent: Core Contributor

    3 - Influential: Gifted Improver

    4 - Transformational: Towering Strength

    • Activities are prioritized with minimal direction and/or assistance.
    • Progress self-monitoring against objectives with leadership apprised of deviations against plan.
    • Facilitated decisions from stakeholders or teams.
    • Informal feedback on performance and collaboration with teams.
    • Independently prioritized activities and provide direction or assistance to others as needed.
    • Managed issue resolution and provided guidance on goals, priorities, and constraints.
    • Product decision ownership with input from stakeholders, SMEs, and delivery teams.
    • Formal product management retrospectives with tracked and measured changes to improve performance.
    • Consulted in the most challenging situations to provide subject matter expertise on leading practices and industry standards.
    • Provide mentoring and coaching to your peers and/or teammates.
    • Use team empowerment, pushing decisions to the lowest appropriate level based on risk and complexity.
    • Mature and flexible communication.
    • Provide strategies and programs ensuring all individuals in the delivery organization obtain the level of coaching and supervision required for success in their position.
    • Provide leadership to the organization’s coaches ensuring delivery excellence across the organization.
    • Help develop strategic initiatives driving common approaches and utilizing information assets and processes across the enterprise.

    Exercise 3.2.2 Assess your Leadership capability proficiency

    1 hour
    1. Review the expectations for this capability and determine your current proficiency for each skill.
    2. Complete your assessment in the Mature and Scale Product Owner Proficiency Assessment tool.
    3. Record the results in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.
    4. Review the skills map to identify strengths and areas of growth.

    Output

    • Product owner capability assessment

    Participants

    • Product owners
    • Product managers

    Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Owner Proficiency Assessment.

    Capability: Product lifecycle management

    Plan

    • Product backlog: Follow a schedule for backlog intake, grooming, updates, and prioritization.
    • Journey map: Create an end-user journey map to guide adoption and loyalty.
    • Fit for purpose: Define expected value and intended use to ensure product meets your end user’s needs.

    Build

    • Capacity management: Work with operations and delivery teams to ensure consistent and stable outcomes.
    • Release strategy: Build learning, release, and critical milestones into a repeatable release plan.
    • Compliance: Build policy compliance into delivery practices to ensure alignment and reduce avoidable risk (privacy, security).

    Run

    • Adoption: Focus attention on end-user adoption and proficiency to accelerate value and maximize retention.
    • Support: Build operational support and business continuity into every team.
    • Measure: Measure KPIs and validate expected value to ensure product alignment to goals and consistent product quality.

    “Pay fantastic attention to detail. Reward, recognize, celebrate.”

    – Thomas K. Connellan, Inside the Magic Kingdom

    Product Lifecycle Management: Plan, Build, Run

    Info-Tech Insight

    Product owners must actively manage the full lifecycle of the product.

    Define product value by aligning backlog delivery with roadmap goals

    In each product plan, the backlogs show what you will deliver. Roadmaps identify when and in what order you will deliver value, capabilities, and goals.

    In each product plan, the backlogs show what you will deliver. Roadmaps identify when and in what order you will deliver value, capabilities, and goals.

    A backlog stores and organizes PBIs at various stages of readiness

    A backlog stores and organizes PBIs at different levels of readiness. Stage 3 - Ideas are composed of raw, vague ideas that have yet to go through any formal valuation. Stage 2 - Qualified are researched and qualified PBIs awaiting refinement. Stage 1 - Ready are Discrete, refined RBIs that are read to be placed in your development team's sprint plans.

    A well-formed backlog can be thought of as a DEEP backlog:

    Detailed Appropriately: PBIs are broken down and refined, as necessary.

    Emergent: The backlog grows and evolves over time as PBIs are added and removed.

    Estimated: The effort a PBI requires is estimated at each tier.

    Prioritized: The PBI’s value and priority are determined at each tier.

    (Perforce, 2018)

    Distinguish your specific goals for refining in the product backlog vs. planning for a sprint itself

    Often backlog refinement is used interchangeably or considered a part of sprint planning. The reality is they are very similar, as the required participants and objectives are the same; however, there are some key differences.

    Backlog refinement versus Sprint planning. Differences in Objectives, Cadence and Participants

    Use quality filters to promote high value items into the delivery pipeline

    Product backlog has quality filters such as: Backlogged, Qualified and Ready. Sprint backlog has a backlog of accepted PBI's

    Basic scrum process

    The scrum process coordinates multiple stakeholders to deliver on business priorities.

    Prioritized Backlog, Sprint Backlog, Manage Delivery, Sprint Review, Product Release

    Capability: Product lifecycle management

    Your Score: ____

    1 - Foundational: Transitioning and Growing

    2 - Capable/Competent: Core Contributor

    3 - Influential: Gifted Improver

    4 - Transformational: Towering Strength

    • Informal or undocumented intake process.
    • Informal or undocumented delivery lifecycle.
    • Unstable or unpredictable throughput or quality.
    • Informal or undocumented testing and release processes.
    • Informal or undocumented organizational change management planning for each release.
    • Informal or undocumented compliance validation with every release.
    • Documented intake process with stakeholder prioritization of requests.
    • Consistent delivery lifecycle with stable and predictable throughput with an expected range of delivery variance.
    • Formal and documented testing and release processes.
    • Organizational change management planning for each major release.
    • Compliance validation with every major release.
    • Intake process using value drivers and prioritization criteria to sequence all items.
    • Consistent delivery lifecycle with stable and predictable throughput with little variance.
    • Risk-based and partially automated testing and release processes.
    • Organizational change management planning for all releases.
    • Automated compliance validation with every major release.
    • Intake process using enterprise value drivers and prioritization criteria to sequence all items.
    • Stable Agile DevOps with low variability and automation.
    • Risk-based automated and manual testing.
    • Multiple release channels based on risk. Automated build, validation, and rollback capabilities.
    • Cross-channel, integrated organizational change management for all releases.
    • Automated compliance validation with every change or release.

    Exercise 3.2.3 Assess your PLM capability proficiency

    1 hour
    1. Review the expectations for this capability and determine your current proficiency for each skill.
    2. Complete your assessment in the Mature and Scale Product Owner Proficiency Assessment tool.
    3. Record the results in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.
    4. Review the skills map to identify strengths and areas of growth.

    Output

    • Product owner capability assessment

    Participants

    • Product owners
    • Product managers

    Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Owner Proficiency Assessment.

    Capabilities: Value realization

    Key performance indicators (KPIs)

    • Usability and user satisfaction: Assess satisfaction through usage monitoring and end-user feedback.
    • Value validation: Directly measure performance against defined value proposition, goals, and predicted ROI.
    • Fit for purpose: Verify the product addresses the intended purpose better than other options.

    Financial management

    • P&L: Manage each product as if it were its own business with profit and loss statements.
    • Acquisition cost/market growth: Define the cost of acquiring a new consumer, onboarding internal users, and increasing product usage.
    • User retention/market share: Verify product usage continues after adoption and solution reaches new user groups to increase value.

    Business model

    • Defines value proposition: Dedicate your primary focus to understanding and defining the value your product will deliver.
    • Market strategy and goals: Define your acquisition, adoption, and retention plan for users.
    • Financial model: Build an end-to-end financial model and plan for the product and all related operational support.

    “The competition is anyone the customer compares you with.”

    – Thomas K. Connellan, Inside the Magic Kingdom

    Value Realization: KPIs, Financial management, Business model

    Info-Tech Insight

    Most organizations stop with on-time and on-budget. True financial alignment needs to define and manage the full lifecycle P&L.

    Use a balanced value to establish a common definition of goals and value

    Value drivers are strategic priorities aligned to our enterprise strategy and translated through our product families. Each product and change has an impact on the value driver helping us reach our enterprise goals.

    Importance of the value driver multiplied by the Impact of value score is equal to the Value score.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Your value drivers and impact helps estimate the expected value of roadmap items, prioritize roadmap and backlog items, and identify KPIs and OKRs to measure value realization and actual impact.

    Include balanced value as one criteria to guide better decisions

    Your balanced value is just one of many criteria needed to align your product goals and sequence roadmap items. Feasibility, delivery pipeline capacity, shared services, and other factors may impact the prioritization of backlog items.

    Build your balanced business value score by using four key value drivers.

    Determine your value drivers

    Competent organizations know that value cannot always be represented by revenue or reduced expenses. However, it is not always apparent how to envision the full spectrum of sources of value. Dissecting value by benefit type and the value source’s orientation allows you to see the many ways in which a product or service brings value to the organization.

    Business value matrix

    Graph with 4 quadrants representing Outward versus Inward, and Financial benefit versus Human benefit. The quadrants are Reach customers, Increase revenue/demonstrate value, Enhance services, Reduce costs.

    Financial benefits vs. improved capabilities

    Financial benefits refer to the degree to which the value source can be measured through monetary metrics and is often quite tangible.

    Human benefits refer to how a product or service can deliver value through a user’s experience.

    Inward vs. outward orientation

    Inward refers to value sources that have an internal impact and improve your organization’s effectiveness and efficiency in performing its operations.

    Outward refers to value sources that come from your interaction with external factors, such as the market or your customers.

    Exercise 3.2.4 Identify your business value drivers and sources of value

    1 hour
    1. Brainstorm the different types of business value that you produce on the sticky notes (one item per page). Draw from examples of products in your portfolio.
    2. Identify the most important value items for your organization (two to three per quadrant).
    3. Record the results in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Workbook.

    Output

    • Product owner capability assessment

    Participants

    • Product owners
    • Product managers

    Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Workbook.

    My business value sources

    Graph with 4 quadrants representing Outward versus Inward, and Financial benefit versus Human benefit. The quadrants are Reach customers, Increase revenue/demonstrate value, Enhance services, Reduce costs.

    Capability: Value realization

    Your Score: ____

    1 - Foundational: Transitioning and Growing

    2 - Capable/Competent: Core Contributor

    3 - Influential: Gifted Improver

    4 - Transformational: Towering Strength

    • Product canvas or basic product positioning overview.
    • Simple budget or funding mechanism for changes.
    • Product demos and informal user feedback mechanisms.
    • Business value canvas or basic business model tied to roadmap funding.
    • Product funding tied to roadmap milestones and prioritization.
    • Defined KPIs /OKRs for roadmap delivery throughput and value realization measurement.
    • Business model with operating cost structures, revenue/value traceability, and market/user segments.
    • Scenario-based roadmap funding alignment.
    • Roadmap aligned KPIs /OKRs for delivery throughput and value realization measurement as a key factor in roadmap prioritization.
    • Business model tied to enterprise operating costs and value realization KPIs/OKRs.
    • P&L roadmap and cost accounting tied to value metrics.
    • Roadmap aligned enterprise and scenario-based KPIs /OKRs for delivery throughput and value realization measurement as a key factor in roadmap prioritization.

    Exercise 3.2.5 Assess your value realization capability proficiency

    1 hour
    1. Review the expectations for this capability and determine your current proficiency for each skill.
    2. Complete your assessment in the Mature and Scale Product Owner Proficiency Assessment tool.
    3. Record the results in the Mature and Scale Product Ownership Playbook.
    4. Review the skills map to identify strengths and areas of growth.

    Output

    • Product owner capability assessment

    Participants

    • Product owners
    • Product managers

    Capture in the Mature and Scale Product Owner Proficiency Assessment.

    Determine your product owner capability proficiency in regards to: Vision, Leadership, Product Lifecycle, and Value Realization

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Problem solved.

    Product ownership can be one of the most difficult challenges facing delivery and operations teams. By focusing on operational grouping and alignment of goals, organizations can improve their value realization at all levels in the organization.

    The foundation for delivering and enhancing products and services is rooted in the same capability model. Traditionally, product owners have focused on only a subset of skills and capabilities needed to properly manage and grow their products. The product owner capability model is a useful tool to ensure optimal performance from product owners and assess the right level of detail for each product within the product families.

    Congratulations. You’ve completed a significant step toward higher-value products and services.

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as apart of an Info-Tech workshop

    Contact your account representative for more information

    workshops@infotech.com
    1-888-670-8889

    Additional Support

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as apart of an Info-Tech workshop

    Contact your account representative for more information
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

    3.1.1 Assess your real Agile skill proficiency

    Assess your skills and capabilities against the real Agile skills inventory

    2.2.3 Prioritize your stakeholders

    Build a stakeholder management strategy.

    Research Contributors and Experts

    Emily Archer

    Lead Business Analyst,
    Enterprise Consulting, authentic digital agency

    Emily Archer is a consultant currently working with Fortune 500 clients to ensure the delivery of successful projects, products, and processes. She helps increase the business value returned for organizations’ investments in designing and implementing enterprise content hubs and content operations, custom web applications, digital marketing, and e-commerce platforms.

    David Berg

    Founder & CTO
    Strainprint Technologies Inc.

    David Berg is a product commercialization expert who has spent the last 20 years delivering product management and business development services across a broad range of industries. Early in his career, David worked with product management and engineering teams to build core network infrastructure products that secure and power the internet we benefit from today. David’s experience also includes working with clean technologies in the area of clean power generation, agritech, and Internet of Things infrastructure. Over the last five years, David has been focused on his latest venture, Strainprint Technologies, a data and analytics company focused on the medical cannabis industry. Strainprint has built the largest longitudinal medical cannabis dataset in the world, with a goal to develop an understanding of treatment behavior, interactions, and chemical drivers to guide future product development.

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    Kathy Borneman

    Digital Product Owner, SunTrust Bank

    Kathy Borneman is a senior product owner who helps people enjoy their jobs again by engaging others in end-to-end decision making to deliver software and operational solutions that enhance the client experience and allow people to think and act strategically.

    Charlie Campbell

    Product Owner, Merchant e-Solutions

    Charlie Campbell is an experienced problem solver with the ability to quickly dissect situations and recommend immediate actions to achieve resolution, liaise between technical and functional personnel to bridge the technology and communication gap, and work with diverse teams and resources to reach a common goal.

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    Sr. Director, Business Architecture
    Financial Services

    Yarrow Diamond is an experienced professional with expertise in enterprise strategy development, project portfolio management, and business process reengineering across financial services, healthcare and insurance, hospitality, and real estate environments. She has a master’s in Enterprise Architecture from Penn State University, LSSMBB, PMP, CSM, ITILv3.

    Cari J. Faanes-Blakey, CBAP, PMI-PBA

    Enterprise Business Systems Analyst,
    Vertex, Inc.

    Cari J. Faanes-Blakey has a history in software development and implementation as a Business Analyst and Project Manager for financial and taxation software vendors. Active in the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA), Cari participated on the writing team for the BA Body of Knowledge 3.0 and the certification exam.

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    Kieran Gobey

    Senior Consultant Professional Services
    Blueprint Software Systems

    Kieran Gobey is an IT professional with 24 years of experience, focused on business, technology, and systems analysis. He has split his career between external and internal customer-facing roles, and this has resulted in a true understanding of what is required to be a Professional Services Consultant. His problem-solving skills and ability to mentor others have resulted in successful software implementations.

    Kieran’s specialties include deep system troubleshooting and analysis skills, facilitating communications to bring together participants effectively, mentoring, leadership, and organizational skills.

    Rupert Kainzbauer

    VP Product, Digital Wallets
    Paysafe Group

    Rupert Kainzbauer is an experienced senior leader with a passion for defining and delivering products that deliver real customer and commercial benefit. With a team of highly experienced and motivated product managers, he has successfully led highly complex, multi-stakeholder payments initiatives, from proposition development and solution design through to market delivery. Their domain experience is in building online payment products in high-risk and emerging markets, remittance, prepaid cards, and mobile applications.

    Research Contributors and Experts

    Saeed Khan

    Founder,
    Transformation Labs

    Saeed Khan has been working in high tech for 30 years in Canada and the US and has held several leadership roles in Product Management in that time. He speaks regularly at conferences and has been writing publicly about technology product management since 2005.

    Through Transformation Labs, Saeed helps companies accelerate product success by working with product teams to improve their skills, practices, and processes. He is a cofounder of ProductCamp Toronto and currently runs a Meetup group and global Slack community called Product Leaders; the only global community of senior level product executives.

    Hoi Kun Lo

    Product Owner
    Nielsen

    Hoi Kun Lo is an experienced change agent who can be found actively participating within the IIBA and WITI groups in Tampa, FL and a champion for Agile, architecture, diversity, and inclusion programs at Nielsen. She is currently a Product Owner in the Digital Strategy team within Nielsen Global Watch Technology.

    Research Contributors and Experts

    Abhishek Mathur

    Sr Director, Product Management
    Kasisto, Inc.

    Abhishek Mathur is a product management leader, an artificial intelligence practitioner, and an educator. He has led product management and engineering teams at Clarifai, IBM, and Kasisto to build a variety of artificial intelligence applications within the space of computer vision, natural language processing, and recommendation systems. Abhishek enjoys having deep conversations about the future of technology and helping aspiring product managers enter and accelerate their careers.

    Jeff Meister

    Technology Advisor and Product Leader

    Jeff Meister is a technology advisor and product leader. He has more than 20 years of experience building and operating software products and the teams that build them. He has built products across a wide range of industries and has built and led large engineering, design, and product organizations.

    Jeff most recently served as Senior Director of Product Management at Avanade, where he built and led the product management practice. This involved hiring and leading product managers, defining product management processes, solution shaping and engagement execution, and evangelizing the discipline through pitches, presentations, and speaking engagements.

    Jeff holds a Bachelor of Applied Science (Electrical Engineering) and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Waterloo, an MBA from INSEAD (Strategy), and certifications in product management, project management, and design thinking.

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    Vincent Mirabelli

    Principal,
    Global Project Synergy Group

    With over 10 years of experience in both the private and public sectors, Vincent Mirabelli possesses an impressive track record of improving, informing, and transforming business strategy and operations through process improvement, design and re-engineering, and the application of quality to business analysis, project management, and process improvement standards.

    Oz Nazili

    VP, Product & Growth
    TWG

    Oz Nazili is a product leader with a decade of experience in both building products and product teams. Having spent time at funded startups and large enterprises, he thinks often about the most effective way to deliver value to users. His core areas of interest include Lean MVP development and data-driven product growth.

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    Director of Engineering
    W.W. Grainger

    Mike Starkey is a Director of Engineering at W.W. Grainger, currently focusing on operating model development, digital architecture, and building enterprise software. Prior to joining W.W. Grainger, Mike held a variety of technology consulting roles throughout the system delivery lifecycle spanning multiple industries such as healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and utilities with Fortune 500 companies.

    Anant Tailor

    Cofounder and Head of Product
    Dream Payments Corp.

    Anant Tailor is a cofounder at Dream Payments where he currently serves as the COO and Head of Product, having responsibility for Product Strategy & Development, Client Delivery, Compliance, and Operations. He has 20+ years of experience building and operating organizations that deliver software products and solutions for consumers and businesses of varying sizes.

    Prior to founding Dream Payments, Anant was the COO and Director of Client Services at DonRiver Inc, a technology strategy and software consultancy that he helped to build and scale into a global company with 100+ employees operating in seven countries.

    Anant is a Professional Engineer with a Bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering from McMaster University and a certificate in Product Strategy & Management from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

    Research Contributors and Experts

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    Angela Weller is an experienced Agile business analyst who collaborates with key stakeholders to attain their goals and contributes to the achievement of the company’s strategic objectives to ensure a competitive advantage. She excels when mediating or facilitating teams.

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    Deliver more projects by giving yourself the voice to say “no” or “not yet” to new projects.

    Enhance PPM Dashboards and Reports

    Facilitate ongoing alignment between Agile teams and the business with a set of targeted service offerings.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Organizational Design and Performance

    Redesign Your IT Organizational Structure

    Focus product delivery on business value-driven outcomes.

    Build a Strategic IT Workforce Plan

    Have the right people, in the right place, at the right time.

    Implement a New Organizational Structure

    Reorganizations are inherently disruptive. Implement your new structure with minimal pain for staff while maintaining IT performance throughout the change.

    Build an IT Employee Engagement Program

    Don’t just measure engagement, act on it

    Set Meaningful Employee Performance Measures

    Set holistic measures to inspire employee performance.

    Bibliography (Product Management)

    “12th Annual State of Agile Report.” VersionOne, 9 April 2018. Web.

    A, Karen. “20 Mental Models for Product Managers.” Product Management Insider, Medium, 2 Aug. 2018. Web.

    Adams, Paul. “Product Teams: How to Build & Structure Product Teams for Growth.” Inside Intercom, 30 Oct. 2019. Web.

    Aghina, Handscomb, Ludolph, West, and Abby Yip, “How to select and develop individuals for successful agile teams: A practical guide” McKinsey & Company 20 Dec. 2018. Web.

    Agile Alliance. “Product Owner.” Agile Alliance. n.d. Web.

    Ambler, Scott W. "Communication on Agile Software Teams“, Agile Modeling. 2001-2022. Web.

    Ambysoft. “2018 IT Project Success Rates Survey Results.” Ambysoft. 2018. Web.

    Banfield, Richard, et al. “On-Demand Webinar: Strategies for Scaling Your (Growing) Enterprise Product Team.” Pluralsight, 31 Jan. 2018. Web.

    Beck, Beedle, van Bennekum, Cockburn, Cunningham, Fowler, Grenning, Highsmith, Hunt, Jeffries, Kern, Marick, Martin, Mellor, Schwaber, Sutherland, Thomas, "Manifesto for Agile Software Development." agilemanifesto.org. 2001

    Berez, Steve, et al. “How to Plan and budget for Agile at Scale.” Bain & Company, 08 Oct 2019. Web

    Blueprint. “10 Ways Requirements Can Sabotage Your Projects Right From the Start.” Blueprint. 2012. Web.

    Breddels, Dajo, and Paul Kuijten. “Product Owner Value Game.” Agile2015 Conference, Agile Alliance 2015. Web.

    Cagan, Martin. “Behind Every Great Product.” Silicon Valley Product Group. 2005. Web.

    Cohn, Mike. “What Is a Product?” Mountain Goat Software. 6 Sept. 2016. Web.

    Connellan, Thomas K. Inside the Magic Kingdom, Bard Press, 1997.

    Curphey, Mark. “Product Definition.” SlideShare, 25 Feb. 2007. Web.

    “Delegation Poker Product Image.” Management 3.0, n.d. Web.

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    Eringa, Ron. “Evolution of the Product Owner.” RonEringa.com, 12 June 2016. Web.

    Fernandes, Thaisa. “Spotify Squad Framework - Part I.” PM101, Medium, 6 Mar. 2017. Web.

    Galen, Robert. “Measuring Product Ownership – What Does ‘Good’ Look Like?” RGalen Consulting, 5 Aug. 2015. Web.

    Grenny, Joseph. “The Best Teams Hold Themselves Accountable.” Harvard Business Review, 30 May 2014. Web.

    Halisky, Merland, and Luke Lackrone. “The Product Owner’s Universe.” Agile2016 Conference, Agile Alliance, 2016. Web.

    Bibliography (Product Management)

    IIBA "A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge® (BABOK® Guide) v3" IIBA. 15 APR 2015

    Kamer, Jurriaan. “How to Build Your Own ‘Spotify Model’.” The Ready, Medium, 9 Feb. 2018. Web.

    Kendis Team. “Exploring Key Elements of Spotify’s Agile Scaling Model.” Scaled Agile Framework, Medium, 23 Jul. 2018. Web.

    Lindstrom, Lowell. “7 Skills You Need to Be a Great Product Owner.” Scrum Alliance, n.d. Web.

    Lukassen, Chris. “The Five Belts Of The Product Owner.” Xebia.com, 20 Sept. 2016. Web.

    Mankins, Michael. “The Defining Elements of a Winning Culture.” Bain, 19 Dec. 2013. Web.

    McCloskey, Heather. “Scaling Product Management: Secrets to Defeating Common Challenges.” ProductPlan, 12 July 2019. Web.

    McCloskey, Heather. “When and How to Scale Your Product Team.” UserVoice, 21 Feb. 2017. Web. Mironov, Rich. “Scaling Up Product Manager/Owner Teams.” Rich Mironov's Product Bytes, Mironov Consulting, 12 Apr. 2014. Web.

    Moore, Geoffrey A. “Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition.” Collins Business Essentials, 28 Jan 2014

    Oh, Paul. “How Mastering Resilience Can Help Drive Agile Transformations.” Why Innovation!, 10 Oct. 2019.

    Overeem, Barry. “A Product Owner Self-Assessment.” Barry Overeem, 6 Mar. 2017. Web.

    Overeem, Barry. “Retrospective: Using the Team Radar.” Barry Overeem, 27 Feb. 2017. Web.

    Pichler, Roman. “How to Scale the Scrum Product Owner.” Roman Pichler, 28 June 2016 . Web.

    Pichler, Roman. “Product Management Framework.” Pichler Consulting Limited, 2014. Web.

    Pichler, Roman. “Sprint Planning Tips for Product Owners.” LinkedIn, 4 Sept. 2018. Web.

    Pichler, Roman. “What Is Product Management?” Pichler Consulting Limited, 26 Nov. 2014. Web.

    PMI "The high cost of low performance: the essential role of communications“. PMI Pulse of Profession, May 2013.

    Radigan,Dan. “Putting the ‘Flow' Back in Workflow With WIP Limits.” Atlassian, n.d. Web.

    Bibliography (Product Management)

    Rouse, Margaret. “Definition: product.” TechTarget, Sept. 2005. Web.

    Schuurman, Robbin. “10 Tips for Product Owners on (Business) Value.” Scrum.org, 30 Nov. 2017. Web.

    Schuurman, Robbin. “10 Tips for Product Owners on Agile Product Management.” Scrum.org, 28 Nov. 2017. Web.

    Schuurman, Robbin. “10 Tips for Product Owners on Product Backlog Management.” Scrum.org, 5 Dec. 2017. Web.

    Schuurman, Robbin. “10 Tips for Product Owners on the Product Vision.” Scrum.org, 29 Nov. 2017. Web.

    Schuurman, Robbin. “Tips for Starting Product Owners.” Scrum.org, 27 Nov. 2017. Web.

    Sharma, Rohit. “Scaling Product Teams the Structured Way.” Monetary Musings, 28 Nov. 2016. Web.

    Shirazi, Reza. “Betsy Stockdale of Seilevel: Product Managers Are Not Afraid To Be Wrong.” Austin Voice of Product, 2 Oct. 2018. Web.

    Spitz, Enid R. “The Three Kinds of Empathy: Emotional, Cognitive, Compassionate.” The Three Kinds of Empathy: Emotional, Cognitive, Compassionate. Heartmanity. Web.

    Steiner, Anne. “Start to Scale Your Product Management: Multiple Teams Working on Single Product.” Cprime, 6 Aug. 2019. Web.

    “The Qualities of Leadership: Leading Change.” Cornelius & Associates, 2016. Web.

    “The Standish Group 2015 Chaos Report.” The Standish Group. 2015. Web.

    Theus, Andre. “When Should You Scale the Product Management Team?” ProductPlan, 7 May 2019. Web.

    Tolonen, Arto. “Scaling Product Management in a Single Product Company.” Smartly.io, 26 Apr. 2018. Web.

    Ulrich, Catherine. “The 6 Types of Product Managers. Which One Do You Need?” Medium, 19 Dec. 2017. Web.

    Verwijs, Christiaan. “Retrospective: Do The Team Radar.” The Liberators, Medium, 10 Feb. 2017. Web.

    Vlaanderen, Kevin. “Towards Agile Product and Portfolio Management”. Academia.edu. 2010. Web.

    Backlog

    2009 Business Analysis Benchmark Study.” IAG Consulting, 2009. Web.

    Armel, Kate. “Data-driven Estimation, Management Lead to High Quality.” Quantitative Software Management Inc, 2015. Web.

    Bradley, Marty. “Agile Estimation Guidance.” Leading Agile, 30 Aug. 2016. Web. Feb. 2019.

    CollabNet and VersionOne. “12th Annual State of Agile Report.” VersionOne, 9 April 2018. Web.

    Craveiro, João. “Marty meets Martin: connecting the two triads of Product Management.” Product Coalition, 18 Nov. 2017. Accessed Feb. 2019.

    “Enablers.” Scaled Agile, n.d. Web.

    “Epic.” Scaled Agile, n.d. Web.

    Fischer, Christian. “Scrum Compact.” Itemis, n.d. Web. Feb. 2019.

    Hackshall, Robin. “Product Backlog Refinement.” Scrum Alliance, 9 Oct. 2014. Accessed Feb. 2019.

    Hartman, Bob. “New to agile? INVEST in good user stories.” Agile For All, 14 May 2009. Web.

    Huether, Derek. “Cheat Sheet for Product Backlog Refinement (Grooming).” Leading Agile, 2 Nov. 2013. Accessed Feb. 2019.

    Karlsson, Johan. “Backlog Grooming: Must-Know Tips for High-Value Products.” Perforce, 18 May 2018. Accessed Feb. 2019.

    Khan, Saeed. “Good Bye ‘Product Owner’, Hello ‘Backlog Manager.’” On Product Management, 27 June 2011. Accessed Feb. 2019.

    Khan, Saeed. “Let’s End the Confusion: A Product Owner is NOT a Product Manager.” On Product Management, 14 July 2017. Accessed Feb. 2019.

    Lawrence, Richard. “New Story Splitting Resource.” Agile For All. 27 Jan. 2012. Web. Feb. 2019.

    Leffingwell, Dean. “SAFe 4.0.” Scaled Agile Inc, 2017. Accessed Feb. 2019.

    Lucero, Mario. “Product Backlog – Deep Model.” Agilelucero, 8 Oct. 2014. Web.

    “PI Planning.” Scaled Agile, n.d. Web.

    Pichler, Roman. “The Product Roadmap and the Product Backlog.” Roman Pichler, 9 Sept. 2014. Accessed Feb. 2019.

    Rubin, Kenneth S. Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process. Pearson Education, 2012.

    Schuurman, Robbin. “10 Tips for Product Owners on Product Backlog Management.” Burozeven, 20 Nov. 2017. Accessed Feb. 2019.

    Srinivasan, Vibhu. “Product Backlog Management: Tips from a Seasoned Product Owner.” Agile Alliance, n.d. Accessed Feb. 2019.

    Todaro, Dave. “Splitting Epics and User Stories.” Ascendle, n.d. Accessed Feb. 2019.

    “What Characteristics Make Good Agile Acceptance Criteria?” Segue Technologies, 3 Sept. 2015. Web. Feb. 2019.

    Bibliography (Roadmap)

    Bastow, Janna. “Creating Agile Product roadmaps Everyone Understands.” ProdPad, 22 Mar. 2017. Accessed Sept. 2018.

    Bastow, Janna. “The Product Tree Game: Our Favorite Way To Prioritize Features.” ProdPad, 21 Feb. 2016. Accessed Sept. 2018.

    Chernak, Yuri. “Requirements Reuse: The State of the Practice.” 2012 IEEE International Conference, 12 June 2012, Herzliya, Israel. Web.

    Fowler, Martin. “Application Boundary.” MartinFowler.com, 11 Sept. 2003. Accessed 20 Nov. 2017.

    Harrin, Elizabeth. “Learn What a Project Milestone Is.” The Balance Careers, 10 May 2018. Accessed Sept. 2018.

    “How to create a product roadmap.” Roadmunk, n.d. Accessed Sept. 2018.

    Johnson, Steve. “How to Master the 3 Horizons of Product Strategy.” Aha!, 24 Sept. 2015. Accessed Sept. 2018.

    Johnson, Steve. “The Product Roadmap vs. the Technology Roadmap.” Aha!, 23 June 2016. Accessed Sept. 2018

    Juncal, Shaun. “How Should You Set Your Product Roadmap Timeframes?” ProductPlan, Web. Sept. 2018.

    Leffingwell, Dean. “SAFe 4.0.” Scaled Agile, 2017. Web.

    Maurya, Ash. “What is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).” Leanstack, 12 June 2017. Accessed Sept. 2018.

    Pichler, Roman. “10 Tips for Creating an Agile Product Roadmap.” Roman Pichler, 20 July 2016. Accessed Sept. 2018.

    Pichler, Roman. Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age. Pichler Consulting, 2016.

    “Product Roadmap Contents: What Should You Include?” ProductPlan, n.d. Accessed 20 Nov. 2017.

    Saez, Andrea. “Why Your Roadmap Is Not a Release Plan.” ProdPad, 23 October 2015. Accessed Sept. 2018.

    Schuurman, Robbin. “Tips for Agile product roadmaps & product roadmap examples.” Scrum.org, 7 Dec. 2017. Accessed Sept. 2018.

    Bibliography (Vision and Canvas)

    Adams, Paul. “The Future Product Canvas.” Inside Intercom, 10 Jan. 2014. Web.

    “Aligning IT Funding Models to the Pace of Technology Change.” EDUCAUSE, 14 Dec. 2015. Web.

    Altman, Igor. “Metrics: Gone Bad.” OpenView, 10 Nov. 2009. Web.

    Barry, Richard. “The Product Vision Canvas – a Strategic Tool in Developing a Successful Business.” Polymorph, 2019. Web.

    “Business Canvas – Business Models & Value Propositions.” Strategyzer, 2019. Web.

    “Business Model Canvas.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, 4 Aug. 2019. Web.

    Charak, Dinker. “Idea to Product: The Working Model.” ThoughtWorks, 13 July 2017. Web.

    Charak, Dinker. “Product Management Canvas - Product in a Snapshot.” Dinker Charak, 29 May 2017. Web.

    Chudley, James. “Practical Steps in Determining Your Product Vision (Product Tank Bristol, Oct. 2018).” LinkedIn SlideShare. Uploaded by cxpartners, 2 Nov. 2018. Web.

    Cowan, Alex. “The 20 Minute Business Plan: Business Model Canvas Made Easy.” COWAN+, 2019. Web.

    Craig, Desiree. “So You've Decided To Become A Product Manager.” Start it up, Medium, 2 June 2019. Web.

    “Create an Aha! Business Model Canvas Strategic Model.” Aha! Support, 2019. Web.

    Eick, Stephen. “Does Code Decay? Assessing the Evidence from Change Management Data.” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 27, no. 1, Jan. 2001, pp. 1-12. Web.

    Eriksson, Martin. “The next Product Canvas.” Mind the Product, 22 Nov. 2013. Web.

    “Experience Canvas: a Lean Approach: Atlassian Team Playbook.” Atlassian, 2019. Web.

    Freeman, James. “How to Make a Product Canvas – Visualize Your Product Plan.” Edraw, 23 Dec. 2019. Web.

    Fuchs, Danny. “Measure What Matters: 5 Best Practices from Performance Management Leaders.” OpenGov, 8 Aug. 2018. Web.

    Gorisse, Willem. “A Practical Guide to the Product Canvas.” Mendix, 28 Mar. 2017. Web.

    Gothelf, Jeff. “The Lean UX Canvas.” Jeff Gothelf, 15 Dec. 2016. Web.

    Gottesdiener, Ellen. “Using the Product Canvas to Define Your Product: Getting Started.” EBG Consulting, 15 Jan. 2019. Web.

    Gottesdiener, Ellen. “Using the Product Canvas to Define Your Product's Core Requirements.” EBG Consulting, 4 Feb. 2019. Web.

    Gray, Mark Krishan. “Should I Use the Business Model Canvas or the Lean Canvas?” Blog, Medium.com, 2019. Web.

    Bibliography (Vision and Canvas)

    Hanby, Jeff. "Software Maintenance: Understanding and Estimating Costs." LookFar, 21 Oct. 2016. Web.

    “How do you define a product?” Scrum.org, 4 Apr 2017, Web

    Juncal, Shaun. “How to Build a Product Roadmap Based on a Business Model Canvas.” ProductPlan, 19 June 2019. Web.

    “Lean Canvas Intro - Uber Example.” YouTube, uploaded by Railsware Product Academy, 12 Oct. 2018. Web.

    “Lesson 6: Product Canvas.” ProdPad Help Center, 2019. Web.

    Lucero, Mario. “The Product Canvas.” Agilelucero.com, 22 June 2015. Web.

    Maurya, Ash. “Create a New Lean Canvas.” Canvanizer, 2019. Web.

    Maurya, Ash. “Don't Write a Business Plan. Create a Lean Canvas Instead.” LEANSTACK, 2019. Web.

    Maurya, Ash. “Why Lean Canvas vs Business Model Canvas?” Medium, 27 Feb. 2012. Web.

    Mirabelli, Vincent. “The Project Value Canvas.” Vincent Mirabelli, 2019. Web.

    Mishra, LN. “Business Analysis Canvas – The Ultimate Enterprise Architecture.” BA Times, 19 June 2019. Web.

    Muller. Jerry Z. “Why performance metrics isn’t always the best way to judge performance.” Fast Company, 3 April 2019. Web.

    Perri, Melissa. “What Is Good Product Strategy?” Melissa Perri, 14 July 2016. Web.

    Pichler, Roman. “A Product Canvas for Agile Product Management, Lean UX, Lean Startup.” Roman Pichler, 16 July 2012. Web.

    Pichler, Roman. “Introducing the Product Canvas.” JAXenter, 15 Jan. 2013. Web.

    Pichler, Roman. “Roman's Product Canvas: Introduction.” YouTube, uploaded by Roman Pichler, 3 Mar. 2017. Web.

    Pichler, Roman. “The Agile Vision Board: Vision and Product Strategy.” Roman Pichler, 10 May 2011. Web.

    Pichler, Roman. “The Product Canvas – Template.” Roman Pichler, 11 Oct. 2016. Web.

    Pichler, Roman. “The Product Canvas Tutorial V1.0.” LinkedIn SlideShare. Uploaded by Roman Pichler, 14 Feb. 2013. Web.

    Pichler, Roman. “The Product Vision Board: Introduction.” YouTube uploaded by Roman Pichler, 3 Mar. 2017. Web.

    “Product Canvas PowerPoint Template.” SlideModel, 2019. Web.

    Bibliography (Vision and Canvas)

    “Product Canvas.” SketchBubble, 2019, Web.

    “Product Canvas.” YouTube, uploaded by Wojciech Szramowski, 18 May 2016. Web.

    “Product Roadmap Software to Help You Plan, Visualize, and Share Your Product Roadmap.” Productboard, 2019. Web.

    Roggero, Giulio. “Product Canvas Step-by-Step.” LinkedIn SlideShare, uploaded by Giulio Roggero, 18 May 2013. Web.

    Royce, Dr. Winston W. “Managing the Development of Large Software Systems.” Scf.usc.edu, 1970. Web.

    Ryan, Dustin. “The Product Canvas.” Qdivision, Medium, 20 June 2017. Web.

    Snow, Darryl. “Product Vision Board.” Medium, 6 May 2017. Web.

    Stanislav, Shymansky. “Lean Canvas – a Tool Your Startup Needs Instead of a Business Plan.” Railsware, 12 Oct. 2018. Web.

    Stanislav, Shymansky. “Lean Canvas Examples of Multi-Billion Startups.” Railsware, 20 Feb. 2019. Web.

    “The Product Vision Canvas.” YouTube, Uploaded by Tom Miskin, 20 May 2019. Web.

    Tranter, Leon. “Agile Metrics: the Ultimate Guide.” Extreme Uncertainty, n.d. Web.

    “Using Business Model Canvas to Launch a Technology Startup or Improve Established Operating Model.” AltexSoft, 27 July 2018. Web.

    Veyrat, Pierre. “Lean Business Model Canvas: Examples + 3 Pillars + MVP + Agile.” HEFLO BPM, 10 Mar. 2017. Web.

    “What Are Software Metrics and How Can You Track Them?” Stackify, 16 Sept. 2017. Web

    “What Is a Product Vision?” Aha!, 2019. Web.

    Supporting Research

    Transformation topics and supporting Info-Tech research to make the journey easier, with less rework.

    Supporting research and services

    Improving IT alignment

    Build a Business-Aligned IT Strategy

    Success depends on IT initiatives clearly aligned to business goals, IT excellence, and driving technology innovation.

    Includes a "Strategy on a page" template

    Make Your IT Governance Adaptable

    Governance isn't optional, so keep it simple and make it flexible.

    Create an IT View of the Service Catalog

    Unlock the full value of your service catalog with technical components.

    Application Portfolio Management Foundations

    Ensure your application portfolio delivers the best possible return on investment.

    Supporting research and services

    Shifting toward Agile DevOps

    Agile/DevOps Resource Center

    Tools and advice you need to be successful with Agile.

    Develop Your Agile Approach for a Successful Transformation

    Understand Agile fundamentals, principles, and practices so you can apply them effectively in your organization.

    Implement DevOps Practices That Work

    Streamline business value delivery through the strategic adoption of DevOps practices.

    Perform an Agile Skills Assessment

    Being Agile isn't about processes, it's about people.

    Define the Role of Project Management in Agile and Product-Centric Delivery

    Projects and products are not mutually exclusive.

    Supporting research and services

    Shifting toward product management

    Make the Case for Product Delivery

    Align your organization on the practices to deliver what matters most.

    Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision

    Build a product vision your organization can take from strategy through execution.

    Deliver Digital Products at Scale

    Deliver value at the scale of your organization through defining enterprise product families.

    Build a Better Product Owner

    Strengthen the product owner's role in your organization by focusing on core capabilities and proper alignment.

    Supporting research and services

    Improving value and delivery metrics

    Build a Value Measurement Framework

    Focus product delivery on business value-driven outcomes.

    Create a Holistic IT Dashboard

    Mature your IT department by measuring what matters.

    Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectively

    Be careful what you ask for because you will probably get it.

    Reduce Time to Consensus With an Accelerated Business Case

    Expand on the financial model to give your initiative momentum.

    Supporting research and services

    Improving governance, prioritization, and value

    Make Your IT Governance Adaptable

    Governance isn't optional, so keep it simple and make it flexible.

    Maximize Business Value from IT Through Benefits Realization

    Embed benefits realization into your governance process to prioritize IT spending and confirm the value of IT.

    Drive Digital Transformation With Platform Strategies

    Innovate and transform your business models with digital platforms.

    Succeed With Digital Strategy Execution

    Building a digital strategy is only half the battle: create a systematic roadmap of technology initiatives to execute the strategy and drive digital transformation.

    Build a Value Measurement Framework

    Focus product delivery on business value-driven outcomes.

    Create a Holistic IT Dashboard

    Mature your IT department by measuring what matters.

    Supporting research and services

    Improving requirements management and quality assurance

    Requirements Gathering for Small Enterprises

    Right-size the guidelines of your requirements gathering process.

    Improve Requirements Gathering

    Back to basics: great products are built on great requirements.

    Build a Software Quality Assurance Program

    Build quality into every step of your SDLC.

    Automate Testing to Get More Done

    Drive software delivery throughput and quality confidence by extending your automation test coverage.

    Manage Your Technical Debt

    Make the case to manage technical debt in terms of business impact.

    Create a Business Process Management Strategy

    Avoid project failure by keeping the "B" in BPM.

    Build a Winning Business Process Automation Playbook

    Optimize and automate your business processes with a user-centric approach.

    Create a Winning BPI Playbook

    Don't waste your time focusing on the "as is." Focus on the improvements and the "to be."

    Supporting research and services

    Improving release management

    Optimize Applications Release Management

    Build trust by right-sizing your process using appropriate governance.

    Streamline Application Maintenance

    Effective maintenance ensures the long-term value of your applications.

    Streamline Application Management

    Move beyond maintenance to ensure exceptional value from your apps.

    Optimize Change Management

    Right-size your change management process.

    Manage Your Technical Debt

    Make the case to manage technical debt in terms of business impact.

    Improve Application Development Throughput

    Drive down your delivery time by eliminating development inefficiencies and bottlenecks while maintaining high quality.

    Supporting research and services

    Business relationship management

    Embed Business Relationship Management

    Leverage knowledge of the business to become a strategic IT partner.

    Improving security

    Build an Information Security Strategy

    Create value by aligning your strategy to business goals and business risks.

    Develop and Deploy Security Policies

    Enhance your overall security posture with a defensible and prescriptive policy suite.

    Simplify Identity and Access Management

    Leverage risk- and role-based access control to quantify and simplify the IAM process.

    Supporting research and services

    Improving and supporting business-managed applications

    Embrace Business-Managed Applications

    Empower the business to implement their own applications with a trusted business-IT relationship.

    Enhance Your Solution Architecture Practices

    Ensure your software systems solution is architected to reflect stakeholders’ short-and long-term needs.

    Satisfy Digital End Users With Low- and No-Code

    Extend IT, automation, and digital capabilities to the business with the right tools, good governance, and trusted organizational relationships.

    Build Your First RPA Bot

    Support RPA delivery with strong collaboration and management foundations.

    Automate Work Faster and More Easily With Robotic Process Automation

    Embrace the symbiotic relationship between the human and digital workforce.

    Supporting research and services

    Improving business intelligence, analytics, and reporting

    Modernize Data Architecture for Measurable Business Results

    Enable the business to achieve operational excellence, client intimacy, and product leadership with an innovative, Agile, and fit-for-purpose data architecture practice.

    Build a Reporting and Analytics Strategy

    Deliver actionable business insights by creating a business-aligned reporting and analytics strategy.

    Build Your Data Quality Program

    Quality data drives quality business decisions.

    Design Data-as-a-Service

    Journey to the data marketplace ecosystems.

    Build a Robust and Comprehensive Data Strategy

    Key to building and fostering a data-driven culture.

    Build an Application Integration Strategy

    Level the table before assembling the application integration puzzle or risk losing pieces.

    Appendix

    Pulse survey results

    Pulse survey (N=18): What are the key components of product/service ownership?

    Pulse survey results: What are the key components of product/service ownership? Table shows answer options and responses in percentage.

    Pulse Survey (N=18): What are the key individual skills for a product/service owner?

    What are the key individual skills for a product/service owner? Table shows answer options and responses in percentage

    Other choices entered by respondents:

    • Anticipating client needs, being able to support delivery in all phases of the product lifecycle, adaptability, and ensuring a healthy backlog (at least two sprints’ worth of work).
    • Requirements elicitation and prioritization.
    • The key skill is being product-focused to ensure it provides value for competitive advantage.

    Pulse Survey (N=18): What are three things an outstanding product/service owner does that an average one doesn’t?

    What are three things an outstanding product/service owner does that an average one doesn't? Table shows results.

    Develop a Security Operations Strategy

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}264|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): 10.0/10 Overall Impact
    • member rating average dollars saved: $79,249 Average $ Saved
    • member rating average days saved: 28 Average Days Saved
    • Parent Category Name: Security Processes & Operations
    • Parent Category Link: /security-processes-and-operations
    • There is an onslaught of security data – generating information in different formats, storing it in different places, and forwarding it to different locations.
    • The organization lacks a dedicated enterprise security team. There is limited resourcing available to begin or mature a security operations center.
    • Many organizations are developing ad hoc security capabilities that result in operational inefficiencies, the misalignment of resources, and the misuse of security technology investments.
    • It is difficult to communicate the value of a security operations program when trying to secure organizational buy-in to gain the appropriate resourcing.
    • There is limited communication between security functions due to a centralized security operations organizational structure.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    1. Security operations is no longer a center, but a process. The need for a physical security hub has evolved into the virtual fusion of prevention, detection, analysis, and response efforts. When all four functions operate as a unified process, your organization will be able to proactively combat changes in the threat landscape.
    2. Functional threat intelligence is a prerequisite for effective security operations – without it, security operations will be inefficient and redundant. Eliminate false positives by contextualizing threat data, aligning intelligence with business objectives, and building processes to satisfy those objectives.
    3. If you are not communicating, you are not secure. Collaboration eliminates siloed decisions by connecting people, processes, and technologies. You leave less room for error, consume fewer resources, and improve operational efficiency with a transparent security operations process.

    Impact and Result

    • A unified security operations process actively transforms security events and threat information into actionable intelligence, driving security prevention, detection, analysis, and response processes, addressing the increasing sophistication of cyberthreats, and guiding continuous improvement.
    • This blueprint will walk through the steps of developing a flexible and systematic security operations program relevant to your organization.

    Develop a Security Operations Strategy Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should enhance your security operations program, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Assess your current state

    Assess current prevention, detection, analysis, and response capabilities.

    • Develop a Security Operations Strategy – Phase 1: Assess Operational Requirements
    • Security Operations Preliminary Maturity Assessment Tool

    2. Develop maturity initiatives

    Design your optimized state of operations.

    • Develop a Security Operations Strategy – Phase 2: Develop Maturity Initiatives
    • Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool
    • Concept of Operations Maturity Assessment Tool

    3. Define operational interdependencies

    Identify opportunities for collaboration within your security program.

    • Develop a Security Operations Strategy – Phase 3: Define Operational Interdependencies
    • Security Operations RACI Chart & Program Plan
    • Security Operations Program Cadence Schedule Template
    • Security Operations Collaboration Plan
    • Security Operations Metrics Summary Document
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Develop a Security Operations Strategy

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Assess Operational Requirements

    The Purpose

    Determine current prevention, detection, analysis, and response capabilities, operational inefficiencies, and opportunities for improvement.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Determine why you need a sound security operations program.

    Understand Info-Tech’s threat collaboration environment.

    Evaluate your current security operation’s functions and capabilities.

    Activities

    1.1 Understand the benefits of refining your security operations program.

    1.2 Gauge your current prevention, detection, analysis, and response capabilities.

    Outputs

    Security Operations Preliminary Maturity Assessment Tool

    2 Develop Maturity Initiatives

    The Purpose

    Begin developing and prioritizing gap initiatives in order to achieve the optimal state of operations.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Establish your goals, obligations, scope, and boundaries.

    Assess your current state and define a target state.

    Develop and prioritize gap initiatives.

    Define the cost, effort, alignment, and security benefits of each initiative.

    Develop a security strategy operational roadmap.

    Activities

    2.1 Assess your current security goals, obligations, and scope.

    2.2 Design your ideal target state.

    2.3 Prioritize gap initiatives.

    Outputs

    Information Security Strategy Requirements Gathering Tool

    Security Operations Maturity Assessment Tool

    3 Define Operational Interdependencies

    The Purpose

    Identify opportunities for collaboration.

    Formalize your operational process flows.

    Develop a comprehensive and actionable measurement program.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understand the current security operations process flow.

    Define the security operations stakeholders and their respective deliverables.

    Formalize an internal information-sharing and collaboration plan.

    Activities

    3.1 Identify opportunities for collaboration.

    3.2 Formalize a security operations collaboration plan.

    3.3 Define operational roles and responsibilities.

    3.4 Develop a comprehensive measurement program.

    Outputs

    Security Operations RACI & Program Plan Tool

    Security Operations Collaboration Plan

    Security Operations Cadence Schedule Template

    Security Operations Metrics Summary

    Further reading

    INFO-TECH RESEARCH GROUP

    Develop a Security Operations Strategy

    Transition from a security operations center to a threat collaboration environment.

    Info-Tech Research Group, Inc. is a global leader in providing IT research and advice. Info-Tech’s products and services combine actionable insight and relevant advice with ready-to-use tools and templates that cover the full spectrum of IT concerns.
    © 1997-2017 Info-Tech Research Group Inc.

    ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

    “A reactive security operations program is no longer an option. The increasing sophistication of threats demands a streamlined yet adaptable mitigation and remediation process. Protect your assets by preparing for the inevitable; unify your prevention, detection, analysis, and response efforts and provide assurance to your stakeholders that you are making information security a top priority.”

    Phot of Edward Gray, Consulting Analyst, Security, Risk & Compliance, Info-Tech Research Group.

    Edward Gray,
    Consulting Analyst, Security, Risk & Compliance
    Info-Tech Research Group



    Our understanding of the problem

    This Research Is Designed For:
    • Chief Information Officer (CIO)
    • Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)
    • Chief Operating Officer (COO)
    • Security / IT Management
    • Security Operations Director / Security Operations Center (SOC)
    • Network Operations Director / Network Operations Center (NOC)
    • Systems Administrator
    • Threat Intelligence Staff
    • Security Operations Staff
    • Security Incident Responders
    • Vulnerability Management Staff
    • Patch Management
    This Research Will Help You:
    • Enhance your security program by implementing and streamlining next-generation security operations processes.
    • Increase organizational situational awareness through active collaboration between core threat teams, enriching internal security events with external threat intelligence and enhancing security controls.
    • Develop a comprehensive threat analysis and dissemination process: align people, process, and technology to scale security to threats.
    • Identify the appropriate technological and infrastructure-based sourcing decisions.
    • Design a step-by-step security operations implementation process.
    • Pursue continuous improvement: build a measurement program that actively evaluates program effectiveness.
    This Research Will Also Assist:
    • Board / Chief Executive Officer
    • Information Owners (Business Directors/VP)
    • Security Governance and Risk Management
    • Fraud Operations
    • Human Resources
    • Legal and Public Relations
    This Research Will Help Them
    • Aid decision making by staying abreast of cyberthreats that could impact the business.
    • Increase visibility into the organization’s threat landscape to identify likely targets or identify exposed vulnerabilities.
    • Ensure the business is compliant with regularity, legal, and/or compliance requirements.
    • Understand the value and return on investment of security operations offerings.

    Executive summary

    Situation

    • Current security practices are disjointed, operating independently with a wide variety of processes and tools to conduct incident response, network defense, and threat analysis. These disparate mitigations leave organizations vulnerable to the increasing number of malicious events.
    • Threat management has become resource intensive, requiring continuous monitoring, collection, and analysis of massive volumes of security event data, while juggling business, compliance, and consumer obligations.

    Complication

    • There is an onslaught of security data – generating information in different formats, storing it in different places, and forwarding it to different locations.
    • The organization lacks a dedicated enterprise security team. There is limited resourcing available to begin or mature a security operations center.
    • Many organizations are developing ad hoc security capabilities that result in operational inefficiencies, the misalignment of resources, and the misuse of their security technology investments.
    • It is difficult to communicate the value of a security operations program when trying to secure organizational buy-in to gain the appropriate resourcing.
    • There is limited communication between security functions due to a centralized security operations organizational structure.

    Resolution

    • A unified security operations process actively transforms security events and threat information into actionable intelligence, driving security prevention, detection, analysis, and response processes, addressing the increasing sophistication of cyberthreats, and guiding continuous improvement.
    • This blueprint will walk through the steps of developing a flexible and systematic security operations program relevant to your organization.

    Info-Tech Insight

    1. Security operations is no longer a center, but a process. The need for a physical security hub has evolved into the virtual fusion of prevention, detection, analysis, and response efforts. When all four functions operate as a unified process, your organization will be able to proactively combat changes in the threat landscape.
    2. Functional threat intelligence is a prerequisite for effective security operations – without it, security operations will be inefficient and redundant. Eliminate false positives by contextualizing threat data, aligning intelligence with business objectives, and building processes to satisfy those objectives.
    3. If you are not communicating, you are not secure. Collaboration eliminates siloed decisions by connecting people, processes, and technologies. You leave less room for error, consume fewer resources, and improve operational efficiency with a transparent security operations process.

    Data breaches are resulting in major costs across industries

    Horizontal bar chart of 'Per capita cost by industry classification of benchmarked companies', with the highest cost attributed to 'Health', 'Pharmaceutical', 'Financial', 'Energy', and 'Transportation'.

    Average data breach costs per compromised record hit an all-time high of $217 (in 2015); $74 is direct cost (e.g. legal fees, technology investment) and $143 is indirect cost (e.g. abnormal customer churn). (Source: Ponemon Institute, “2015 Cost of Data Breach Study: United States”)

    '% of systems impacted by a data breach', '1% No Impact', '19% 1-10% impacted', '41% 11-30% impacted', '24% 31-50% impacted', '15% more than 50% impacted
    Divider line.
    '% of customers lost from a data breach', '61% Lost <20%', '21% Lost 20-40%', '8% Lost 40-60%', '6% Lost 60-80%', '4% Lost 80-100%'.
    Divider line.
    '% of business opportunity lost from a data breach', '58% Lost <20%', '25% Lost 20-40%', '9% Lost, 40-60%', '5% Lost 60-80%', '4% Lost 80-100%'.
    (Source: The Network, “ Cisco 2017 Security Capabilities Benchmark Study”)

    Persistent issues

    • Organizational barriers separating prevention, detection, analysis, and response efforts.
      Siloed operations limit collaboration and internal knowledge sharing.
    • Lack of knowledgeable security staff.
      Human capital is transferrable between roles and functions and must be cross-trained to wear multiple hats.
    • Failure to evaluate and improve security operations.
      The effectiveness of operations must be frequently measured and (re)assessed through an iterative system of continuous improvement.
    • Lack of standardization.
      Pre-established use cases and policies outlining tier-1 operational efforts will eliminate ad hoc remediation efforts and streamline operations.
    • Failure to acknowledge the auditor as a customer.
      Many compliance and regulatory obligations require organizations to have comprehensive documentation of their security operations practices.

    60% Of organizations say security operation teams have little understanding of each other’s requirements.

    40% Of executives report that poor coordination leads to excessive labor and IT operational costs.

    38-100% Increase in efficiency after closing operational gaps with collaboration.
    (Source: Forbes, “The Game Plan for Closing the SecOps Gap”)

    The solution

    Bar chart of the 'Benefits of Internal Collaboration' with 'Increased Operational Efficiency' and 'Increased Problem Solving' having the highest percentage.

    “Empower a few administrators with the best information to enable fast, automated responses.”
    – Ismael Valenzuela, IR/Forensics Technical Practice Manager, Foundstone® Services, Intel Security)

    Insufficient security personnel resourcing has been identified as the most prevalent challenge in security operations…

    When an emergency security incident strikes, weak collaboration and poor coordination among critical business functions will magnify inefficiencies in the incident response (IR) process, impacting the organization’s ability to minimize damage and downtime.

    The solution: optimize your SOC. Info-Tech has seen SOCs with five analysts outperform SOCs with 25 analysts through tools and process optimization.

    Sources:
    Ponemon. "2016 State of Cybersecurity in Small & Medium-Sized Businesses (SMB).”
    Syngress. Designing and Building a Security Operations Center.

    Maintain a holistic security operations program

    Legacy security operations centers (SOCs) fail to address gaps between data sources, network controls, and human capital. There is limited visibility and collaboration between departments, resulting in siloed decisions that do not support the best interests of the organization.
    Venn diagram of 'Next-Gen Security Operations' with four intersecting circles: 'Prevent', 'Detect', 'Analyze', and 'Respond'.

    Security operations is part of what Info-Tech calls a threat collaboration environment, where members must actively collaborate to address cyberthreats affecting the organization’s brand, business operations, and technology infrastructure on a daily basis.

    Prevent: Defense in depth is the best approach to protect against unknown and unpredictable attacks. Diligent patching and vulnerability management, endpoint protection, and strong human-centric security (amongst other tactics) are essential. Detect: There are two types of companies – those who have been breached and know it and those who have been breached and don’t know it. Ensure that monitoring, logging, and event detection tools are in place and appropriate to your organizational needs
    Analyze: Raw data without interpretation cannot improve security and is a waste of time, money, and effort. Establish a tiered operational process that not only enriches data but also provides visibility into your threat landscape. Respond: Organizations can’t rely on an ad hoc response anymore – don’t wait until a state of panic. Formalize your response processes in a detailed incident runbook in order to reduce incident remediation time and effort.

    Info-Tech’s security operations blueprint ties together various initiatives

    Stock image 1.

    Design and Implement a Vulnerability Management Program

    Vulnerability Management
    Vulnerability management revolves around the identification, prioritization, and remediation of vulnerabilities. Vulnerability management teams hunt to identify which vulnerabilities need patching and remediating.
    Deliverables
    • Vulnerability Tracking Tool
    • Vulnerability Scanning Tool RFP Template
    • Penetration Test RFP Template
    • Vulnerability Mitigation Process Template
    Stock image 2.

    Integrate Threat Intelligence Into Your Security Operations

    Threat Intelligence
    Threat intelligence addresses the collection, analysis, and dissemination of external threat data. Analysts act as liaisons to their peers, publishing actionable threat alerts, reports, and briefings. Threat intelligence proactively monitors and identifies whether threat indicators are impacting your organization.
    • Maturity Assessment Tool
    • Threat Intelligence RACI Tool
    • Management Plan Template
    • Threat Intelligence Policy Template
    • Alert Template
    • Alert and Briefing Cadence Schedule
    Stock image 3.

    Develop Foundational Security Operations Processes

    Operations
    Security operations include the real-time monitoring and analysis of events based on the correlation of internal and external data sources. This also includes incident escalation based on impact. Analysts are constantly tuning and tweaking rules and reporting thresholds to further help identify which indicators are most impactful during the analysis phase of operations.
    • Maturity Assessment Tool
    • Event Prioritization Tool
    • Efficiency Calculator
    • SecOps Policy Template
    • In-House vs. Outsourcing Decision-Making Tool
    • SecOps RACI Tool
    • TCO & ROI Comparison Calculator
    Stock image 4.

    Develop and Implement a Security Incident Management Program

    Incident Response
    Effective and efficient management of incidents involves a formal process of analysis, containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident activities. IR teams coordinate root-cause analysis and incident gathering while facilitating post-incident lessons learned. Incident response can provide valuable threat data that ties specific indicators to threat actors or campaigns.
    • Incident Management Policy
    • Maturity Assessment Tool
    • Incident Management RACI Tool
    • Incident Management Plan
    • Incident Runbook Prioritization Tool
    • Various Incident Management Runbooks

    This blueprint will…

    …better protect your organization with an interdependent and collaborative security operations program.

    Phase 01

    Assess your operational requirements.

    Phase 02

    Optimize and further mature your security operations processes

    Phase 3a

    Develop the process flow and specific interaction points between functions

    Phase 3b

    Test your current capabilities with a table top exercise
    Briefly assess your current prevention, detection, analysis, and response capabilities.
    Highlight operational weak spots that should be addressed before progressing.
    Develop a prioritized list of security-focused operational initiatives.
    Conduct a holistic analysis of your operational capabilities.
    Define the operational interaction points between security-focused operational departments.
    Document the results in comprehensive operational interaction agreement.
    Test your operational processes with Info-Tech’s security operations table-top exercise.

    Info-Tech integrates several best practices to create a best-of-breed security framework

    Legend for the 'Information Security Framework' identifying blue best practices as 'In Scope' and white best practices as 'Out of Scope'. Info-Tech's 'Information Security Framework' of best practices with two main categories 'Governance' and 'Management', each with subcategories such as 'Context & Leadership' and 'Prevention', each with a group of best practices color-coded to the associated legend identifying them as 'In Scope' or 'Out of Scope'.

    Benefits of a collaborative and integrated operations program

    Effective security operations management will help you do the following:

    • Improve efficacy
      Develop structured processes to automate activities and increase process consistency across the security program. Expose operational weak points and transition teams from firefighting to an innovator role.
    • Improve threat protection
      Enhance network controls through the hardening of perimeter defenses, an intelligence-driven analysis process, and a streamlined incident remediation process.
    • Improve visibility and information sharing
      Promote both internal and external information sharing to enable good decision making.
    • Create and clarify accountability and responsibility
      Security operations management practices will set a clear level of accountability throughout the security program and ensure role responsibility for all tasks and processes involved in service delivery.
    • Control security costs
      Security operations management is concerned with delivering promised services in the most efficient way possible. Good security operations management practices will provide insight into current costs across the organization and present opportunities for cost savings.
    • Identify opportunities for continuous improvement
      Increased visibility into current performance levels and the ability to accurately identify opportunities for continuous improvement.

    Impact

    Short term:

    • Streamlined security operations program development process.
    • Completed comprehensive list of operational gaps and initiatives.
    • Formalized and structured implementation process.
    • Standardized operational use cases that predefine necessary operational protocol.

    Long term:

    • Enhanced visibility into immediate threat environment.
    • Improved effectiveness of internal defensive controls.
    • Increased operational collaboration between prevention, detection, analysis, and response efforts.
    • Enhanced security pressure posture.
    • Improved communication with executives about relevant security risks to the business.

    Understand the cost of not having a suitable security operations program

    A practical approach, justifying the value of security operations, is to identify the assets at risk and calculate the cost to the company should the information assets be compromised (i.e. assess the damage an attacker could do to the business).

    Cost Structure Cost Estimation ($) for SMB
    (Small and medium-sized business)
    Cost Estimation ($) for LE
    (Large enterprise)
    Security controls Technology investment: software, hardware, facility, maintenance, etc.
    Cost of process implementation: incident response, CMBD, problem management, etc.
    Cost of resource: salary, training, recruiting, etc.
    $0-300K/year $200K-2M/year
    Security incidents
    (if no security control is in place)
    Explicit cost:
    1. Incident response cost:
      • Remediation costs
      • Productivity: (number of employees impacted) × (hours out) × (burdened hourly rate)
      • Extra professional services
      • Equipment rental, travel expenses, etc.
      • Compliance fine
      • Cost of notifying clients
    2. Revenue loss: direct loss, the impact of permanent loss of data, lost future revenues
    3. Financial performance: credit rating, stock price
      Hidden cost:
      • Reputation, customer loyalty, etc.
    $15K-650K/year $270K-11M/year

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Workshop Day 1 Workshop Day 2 Workshop Day 3 Workshop Day 4 Workshop Day 5
    Activities
    • Kick-off and introductions.
    • High-level overview of weekly activities and outcomes.
    • Activity: Define workshop objectives and current state of knowledge.
    • Understand the threat collaboration environment.
    • Understand the benefits of an optimized security operations.
    • Activity: Review preliminary maturity level.
    • Activity: Assess current people, processes, and technology capabilities.
    • Activity: Assess workflow capabilities.
    • Activity: Begin deep-dive into maturity assessment tool.
    • Discuss strategies to enhance the analysis process (ticketing, automation, visualization, use cases, etc.).
    • Activity: Design ideal target state.
    • Activity: Identify security gaps.
    • Build initiatives to bridge the gaps.
    • Activity: Estimate the resources needed.
    • Activity: Prioritize gap initiatives.
    • Activity: Develop dashboarding and visualization metrics.
    • Activity: Plan for a transition with the security roadmap and action plan.
    • Activity: Define and assign tier 1, 2 & 3 SOC roles and responsibilities.
    • Activity: Assign roles and responsibilities for each security operations initiative.
    • Activity: Develop a comprehensive measurement program.
    • Activity: Develop specific runbooks for your top-priority incidents (e.g. ransomware).
      • Detect the incident.
      • Analyze the incident.
      • Contain the incident.
      • Eradicate the root cause.
      • Recover from the incident.
      • Conduct post-incident analysis and communication.
    • Activity:Conduct attack campaign simulation.
    • Finalize main deliverables.
    • Schedule feedback call.
    Deliverables
    1. Security Operations Maturity Assessment Tool
    1. Target State and Gap Analysis (Security Operations Maturity Assessment Tool)
    1. Security Operations Role & Process Design
    2. Security Operations RACI Chart
    3. Security Operations Metrics Summary
    4. Security Operations Phishing Process Runbook
    5. Attack Campaign Simulation PowerPoint

    All Final Deliverables

    Develop a Security Operations Strategy

    PHASE 1

    Assess Operational Requirements

    1

    Assess Operational Requirements

    2

    Develop Maturity Initiatives

    3

    Define Interdependencies

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Determine why you need a sound security operations program.
    • Understand Info-Tech’s threat collaboration environment.
    • Evaluate your current security operation’s functions and capabilities.

    Outcomes of this step

    • A defined scope and motive for completing this project.
    • Insight into your current security operations capabilities.
    • A prioritized list of security operations initiatives based on maturity level.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Security operations is no longer a center, but a process. The need for a physical security hub has evolved into the virtual fusion of prevention, detection, analysis, and response efforts. When all four functions operate as a unified process, your organization will be able to proactively combat changes in the threat landscape.

    Warm-up exercise: Why build a security operations program?

    Estimated time to completion: 30 minutes

    Discussion: Why are we pursuing this project?

    What are the objectives for optimizing and developing sound security operations?

    Stakeholders Required:

    • Key business executives
    • IT leaders
    • Security operations team members

    Resources Required

    • Sticky notes
    • Whiteboard
    • Dry-erase markers
    1. Briefly define the scope of security operations
      What people, processes, and technology fall within the security operations umbrella?
    2. Brainstorm the implications of not acting
      What does the status quo have in store? What are the potential risks?
    3. Define the goals of the project
      Clarify from the outset: what exactly do you want to accomplish from this project?
    4. Prioritize all brainstormed goals
      Classify the goals based on relevant prioritization criteria, e.g. urgency, impact, cost.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Don’t develop a security operations program with the objective of zero incidents. This reliance on prevention results in over-engineered security solutions that cost more than the assets being protected.

    Decentralizing the SOC: Security as a function

    Before you begin, remember that no two security operation programs are the same. While the end goal may be similar, the threat landscape, risk tolerance, and organizational requirements will differ from any other SOC. Determine what your DNA looks like before you begin to protect it.

    Security operations must provide several fundamental functions:
    • Real-time monitoring, detecting, and triaging of data from both internal and external sources.
    • In-depth analysis of indicators and incidents, leveraging malware analysis, correlation and rule tweaking, and forensics and eDiscovery techniques.
    • Network/host scanning and vulnerability patch management.
    • Incident response, remediation, and reporting. Security operations must disseminate appropriate information/intelligence to relevant stakeholders.
    • Comprehensive logging and ticketing capabilities that document and communicate events throughout the threat collaboration environment.
    • Tuning and tweaking of technologies to ingest collected data and enhance the analysis process.
    • Enhance overall organizational situational awareness by reporting on security trends, escalating incidents, and sharing adversary tools, tactics, and procedures.
    Venn diagram of 'Security Operations' with four intersecting circles: 'Prevent', 'Detect', 'Analyze', and 'Respond'.
    At its core, a security operations program is responsible for the prevention, detection, analysis, and response of security events.

    Optimized security operations can seamlessly integrate threat and incident management processes with monitoring and compliance workflows and resources. This integration unlocks efficiency.

    Understand the levels of security operations

    Take the time to map out what you need and where you should go. Security operations has to be more than just monitoring events – there must be a structured program.

    Foundational Arrow with a plus sign pointing right. Operational Arrow with a plus sign pointing right. Strategic
    • Intrusion Detection Management
    • Active Device and Event Monitoring
    • Log Collection and Retention
    • Reporting and Escalation Management
    • Incident Management
    • Audit Compliance
    • Vendor Management
    • Ticketing Processes
    • Packet Capture and Analysis
    • SIEM
    • Firewall
    • Antivirus
    • Patch Management
    • Event Analysis and Incident Triage
    • Security Log Management
    • Vulnerability Management
    • Host Hardening
    • Static Malware Analysis
    • Identity and Access Management
    • Change Management
    • Endpoint Management
    • Business Continuity Management
    • Encryption Management
    • Cloud Security (if applicable)
    • SIEM with Defined Use Cases
    • Big Data Security Analytics
    • Threat Intelligence
    • Network Flow Analysis
    • VPN Anomaly Detection
    • Dynamic Malware Analysis
    • Use-Case Management
    • Feedback and Continuous Improvement Management
    • Visualization and Dashboarding
    • Knowledge Portal Ticket Documentation
    • Advanced Threat Hunting
    • Control and Process Automation
    • eDiscovery and Forensics
    • Risk Management
    ——Security Operations Capabilities—–›

    Understand security operations: Establish a unified threat collaboration environment

    Stock image 1.

    Design and Implement a Vulnerability Management Program

    Security operations is part of what Info-Tech calls a threat collaboration environment, where members must actively collaborate to address threats impacting the organization’s brand, operations, and technology infrastructure.
    • Managing incident escalation and response.
    • Coordinating root-cause analysis and incident gathering.
    • Facilitating post-incident lessons learned.
    • Managing system patching and risk acceptance.
    • Conducting vulnerability assessment and penetration testing.
    • Monitoring in real-time and triaging of events.
    • Escalating events to incident management team.
    • Tuning and tweaking rules and reporting thresholds.
    • Gathering and analyzing external threat data.
    • Liaising with peers, industry, and government.
    • Publishing threat alerts, reports, and briefings.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Ensure that information flows freely throughout the threat collaboration environment – each function should serve to feed and enhance the next.

    Stock image 2.

    Integrate Threat Intelligence Into Your Security Operations

    Stock image 3.

    Develop Foundational Security Operations Processes

    Stock image 4.

    Develop and Implement a Security Incident Management Program

    The threat collaboration environment is comprised of three core elements

    Info-Tech Insight

    The value of a SOC can be achieved with fewer prerequisites than you think. While it is difficult to cut back on process and technology requirements, human capital is transferrable between roles and functions and can be cross-trained to satisfy operational gaps.

    Three hexes fitting together with the words 'People', 'Process', and 'Technology'. People. Effective human capital is fundamental to establishing an efficient security operations program, and if enabled correctly, can be the driving factor behind successful process optimization. Ensure you address several critical human capital components:
    • Who is responsible for each respective threat collaboration environment function?
    • What are the required operational roles, responsibilities, and competencies for each employee?
    • Are there formalized training procedures to onboard new employees?
    • Is there an established knowledge transfer and management program?
    Processes. Formal and informal mechanisms that bridge security throughout the collaboration environment and organization at large. Ask yourself:
    • Are there defined runbooks that clearly outline critical operational procedures and guidelines?
    • Is there a defined escalation protocol to transfer knowledge and share threats internally?
    • Is there a defined reporting procedure to share intelligence externally?
    • Are there formal and accessible policies for each respective security operations function?
    • Is there a defined measurement program to report on the performance of security operations?
    • Is there a continuous improvement program in place for all security operations functions?
    • Is there a defined operational vendor management program?
    Technology. The composition of all infrastructure, systems, controls, and tools that enable processes and people to operate and collaborate more efficiently. Determine:
    • Are the appropriate controls implemented to effectively prevent, detect, analyze, and remediate threats? Is each control documented with an assigned asset owner?
    • Can a solution integrate with existing controls? If so, to what extent?
    • Is there a centralized log aggregation tool such as a SIEM?
    • What is the operational cost to effectively manage each control?
    • Is the control the most up-to-date version? Have the most recent patches and configuration changes been applied? Can it be consolidated with or replaced by another control?

    Conduct a preliminary maturity assessment before tackling this project

    Stock image 1.

    Design and Implement a Vulnerability Management Program

    Sample of Info-Tech's Security Operations Preliminary Maturity Assessment

    At a high level, assess your organization’s operational maturity in each of the threat collaboration environment functions. Determine whether the foundational processes exist in order to mature and streamline your security operations.

    Stock image 2.

    Integrate Threat Intelligence Into Your Security Operations

    Stock image 3.

    Develop Foundational Security Operations Processes

    Stock image 4.

    Develop and Implement a Security Incident Management Program

    Assess the current maturity of your security operations program

    Prioritize the component most important to the development of your security operations program.

    Screenshot of a table from the Security Operations Preliminary Maturity Assessment presenting the 'Impact Sub-Weightings' of 'People', 'Process', 'Technology', and 'Policy'.
    Screenshot of a table from the Security Operations Preliminary Maturity Assessment assessing the 'Current State' and 'Target State' of different 'Security Capabilities'.
    Each “security capability” covers a component of the overarching “security function.” Assign a current and target maturity score to each respective security capability. (Note: The CMMI maturity scores are further explained on the following slide.) Document any/all comments for future Info-Tech analyst discussions.

    Assign each security capability a reflective and desired maturity score.

    Your current and target state maturity will be determined using the capability maturity model integration (CMMI) scale. Ensure that all participants understand the 1-5 scale.
    Two-way vertical arrow colored blue at the top and green at the bottom. Ad Hoc
    1 Arrow pointing right. Initial/Ad Hoc: Activity is not well defined and is ad hoc, e.g. no formal roles or responsibilities exist, de facto standards are followed on an individual-by-individual basis.
    2 Arrow pointing right. Developing: Activity is established and there is moderate adherence to its execution, e.g. while no formal policies have been documented, content management is occurring implicitly or on an individual-by-individual basis.
    3 Arrow pointing right. Defined: Activity is formally established, documented, repeatable, and integrated with other phases of the process, e.g. roles and responsibilities have been defined and documented in an accessible policy, however, metrics are not actively monitored and managed.
    4 Arrow pointing right. Managed and Measurable: Activity execution is tracked by gathering qualitative and quantitative feedback, e.g. metrics have been established to monitor the effectiveness of tier-1 SOC analysts.
    5 Arrow pointing right. Optimized: Qualitative and quantitative feedback is used to continually improve the execution of the activity, e.g. the organization is an industry leader in the respective field; research and development efforts are allocated in order to continuously explore more efficient methods of accomplishing the task at hand.
    Optimized

    Notes: Info-Tech seldom sees a client achieve a CMMI score of 4 or 5. To achieve a state of optimization there must be a subsequent trade-off elsewhere. As such, we recommend that organizations strive for a CMMI score of 3 or 4.

    Ensure that your threat collaboration environment is of a sufficient maturity before progressing

    Example report card from the maturity assessment. Functions are color-coded green, yellow, and red. Review the report cards for each of the respective threat collaboration environment functions.
    • A green function indicates that you have exceeded the operational requirements to proceed with the security operations initiative.
    • A yellow function indicates that your maturity score is below the recommended threshold; Info-Tech advises revisiting the attached blueprint. In the instance of a one-off case, the client can proceed with this security operations initiative.
    • A red function indicates that your maturity score is well below the recommended threshold; Info-Tech strongly advises to not proceed with the security operations initiative. Revisit the recommended blueprint and further mature the specific function.

    Are you ready to move on to the next phase?

    Self-Assessment Questions

    • Have you clearly defined the rationale for refining your security operations program?
    • Have you clearly defined and prioritized the goals and outcomes of optimizing your security operations program?
    • Have you assessed your respective people, process, and technological capabilities?
    • Have you completed the Security Operations Preliminary Maturity Assessment Tool?
    • Were all threat collaboration environment functions of a sufficient maturity level?

    If you answered “yes” to the questions, then you are ready to move on to Phase 2: Develop Maturity Initiatives

    Develop a Security Operations Strategy

    PHASE 2

    Develop Maturity Initiatives

    1

    Assess Operational Requirements

    2

    Develop Maturity Initiatives

    3

    Define Interdependencies

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Establish your goals, obligations, scope, and boundaries.
    • Assess your current state and define a target state.
    • Develop and prioritize gap initiatives.
    • Define cost, effort, alignment, and security benefit of each initiative.
    • Develop a security strategy operational roadmap.

    Outcomes of this step

    • A formalized understanding of your business, customer, and regulatory obligations.
    • A comprehensive current and target state assessment.
    • A succinct and consolidated list of gap initiatives that will collectively achieve your target state.
    • A formally documented set of estimated priority variables (cost, effort, business alignment).
    • A fully prioritized security roadmap that is in alignment with business goals and informed by the organization’s needs and limitations.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Functional threat intelligence is a prerequisite for effective security operations – without it, security operations will be inefficient and redundant. Eliminate false positives by contextualizing threat data, aligning intelligence with business objectives, and building processes to satisfy those objectives

    Align your security operations program with corporate goals and obligations

    A common challenge for security leaders is learning to express their initiatives in terms that are meaningful to business executives.

    Frame the importance of your security operations program to
    align with that of the decision makers’ over-arching strategy.

    Oftentimes resourcing and funding is dependent on the
    alignment of security initiatives to business objectives.

    Corporate goals and objectives can be categorized into three major buckets:
    1. BUSINESS OBLIGATIONS
      The primary goals and functions of the organization at large. Examples include customer retention, growth, innovation, customer experience, etc.
    2. CONSUMER OBLIGATIONS
      The needs and demands of internal and external stakeholders. Examples include ease of use (external), data protection (external), offsite access (internal), etc.
    3. COMPLIANCE OBLIGATIONS
      The requirements of the organization to comply with mandatory and/or voluntary standards. Examples include HIPAA, PIPEDA, ISO 27001, etc.
    *Do not approach the above list with a security mindset – take a business perspective and align your security efforts accordingly.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Developing a security operations strategy is a proactive activity that enables you to get in front of any upcoming business projects or industry trends rather than having to respond reactively later on. Consider as many foreseeable variables as possible!

    Determine your security operations program scope and boundaries

    It is important to define all security-related areas of responsibility. Upon completion you should clearly understand what you are trying to secure.

    Ask yourself:
    Where does the onus of responsibility stop?

    The organizational scope and boundaries and can be categorized into four major buckets:
    1. PHYSICAL SCOPE
      The physical locations that the security operations program is responsible for. Examples include office locations, remote access, clients/vendors, etc.
    2. IT SYSTEMS
      The network systems that must be protected by the security operations program. Examples include fully owned systems, IaaS, PaaS, remotely hosted SaaS, etc.
    3. ORGANIZATIONAL SCOPE
      The business units, departments, or divisions that will be affected by the security operations program. Examples include user groups, departments, subsidiaries, etc.
    4. DATA SCOPE
      The data types that the business handles and the privacy/criticality level of each. Examples include top secret, confidential, private, public, etc.

    This also includes what is not within scope. For some outsourced services or locations you may not be responsible for security. For some business departments you may not have control of security processes. Ensure that it is made explicit at the outset, what will be included and what will be excluded from security considerations.

    Reference Info-Tech’s security strategy: goals, obligations, and scope activities

    Explicitly understanding how security aligns with the core business mission is critical for having a strategic plan and fulfilling the role of business enabler.

    Download and complete the information security goals, obligations and scope activities (Section 1.3) within the Info-Tech security strategy research publication. If previously completed, take the time to review your results.

    GOALS and OBLIGATIONS
    Proceed through each slide and brainstorm the ways that security operations supports business, customer, and compliance needs.

    Goals & Obligations
    Screenshots of slides from the information security goals, obligations and scope activities (Section 1.3) within the Info-Tech security strategy research publication.

    PROGRAM SCOPE & BOUNDARIES
    Assess your current organizational environment. Document current IT systems, critical data, physical environments, and departmental divisions.

    If a well-defined corporate strategy does not exist, these questions can help pinpoint objectives:

    • What is the message being delivered by the CEO?
    • What are the main themes of investments and projects?
    • What are the senior leaders measured on?
    Program Scope & Boundaries
    Screenshots of slides from the information security goals, obligations and scope activities (Section 1.3) within the Info-Tech security strategy research publication.

    INFO-TECH OPPORTUNITY

    For more information on how to complete the goals & obligations activity please reference Section 1.3 of Info-Tech’s Build an Information Security Strategy blueprint.

    Complete the Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool

    On tab 1. Goals and Obligations:
    • Document all business, customer, and compliance obligations. Ensure that each item is reflective of the over-arching business strategy and is not security focused.
    • In the second column, identify the corresponding security initiative that supports the obligation.
    Screenshot from tab 1 of Info-Tech's Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool. Columns are 'Business obligations', 'Security obligations to support the business (optional)', and 'Notes'.
    On tab 2. Scope and Boundaries:
    • Record all details for what is in and out of scope from physical, IT, organizational, and data perspectives.
    • Complete the affiliated columns for a comprehensive scope assessment.
    • As a discussion guide, refer to the considerations slides prior to this in phase 1.3.
    Screenshot from tab 2 of Info-Tech's Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool. Title is 'Physical Scope', Columns are 'Environment Name', 'Highest data criticality here', 'Is this in scope of the security strategy?', 'Are we accountable for security here?', and 'Notes'.
    For the purpose of this security operations initiative please IGNORE the risk tolerance activities on tab 3.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    A common challenge for security leaders is expressing their initiatives in terms that are meaningful to business executives. This exercise helps make explicit the link between what the business cares about and what security is trying to do.

    Conduct a comprehensive security operations maturity assessment

    The following slides will walk you through the process below.

    Define your current and target state

    Self-assess your current security operations capabilities and determine your intended state.

    Create your gap initiatives

    Determine the operational processes that must be completed in order to achieve the target state.

    Prioritize your initiatives

    Define your prioritization criteria (cost, effort, alignment, security benefit) based on your organization

    Build a Gantt chart for your upcoming initiatives
    The final output will be a Gantt to action your prioritized initiatives

    Info-Tech Insight

    Progressive improvements provide the most value to IT and your organization. Leaping from pre-foundation to complete optimization is an ineffective goal. Systematic improvements to your security performance delivers value to your organization, each step along the way.

    Optimize your security operations workflow

    Info-Tech consulted various industry experts and consolidated their optimization advice.

    Dashboards: Centralized visibility, threat analytics, and orchestration enable faster threat detection with fewer resources.

    Adding more controls to a network never increases resiliency. Identify technological overlaps and eliminate unnecessary costs.

    Automation: There is shortfall in human capital in contrast to the required tools and processes. Automate the more trivial processes.

    SOCs with 900 employees are just as efficient as those with 35-40. There is an evident tipping point in marginal value.

    There are no plug-and-play technological solutions – each is accompanied by a growing pain and an affiliated human capital cost.

    Planning: Narrow the scope of operations to focus on protecting assets of value.

    Cross-train employees throughout different silos. Enable them to wear multiple hats.

    Practice: None of the processes happen in a vacuum. Make the most of tabletop exercises and other training exercises.

    Define appropriate use cases and explicitly state threat escalation protocol. Focus on automating the tier-1 analyst role.

    Self-assess your current-state capabilities and determine the appropriate target state

    1. Review:
    The heading in blue is the security domain, light blue is the subdomain and white is the specific control.
    2. Determine and Record:
    Ask participants to identify your organization’s current maturity level for each control. Next, determine a target maturity level that meets the requirements of the area (requirements should reflect the goals and obligations defined earlier).
    3.
    In small groups, have participants answer “what is required to achieve the target state?” Not all current/target state gaps will require additional description, explanation, or an associated imitative. You can generate one initiative that may apply to multiple line items.

    Screenshot of a table for assessing the current and target states of capabilities.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    When customizing your gap initiatives consider your organizational requirements and scope while remaining realistic. Below is an example of lofty vs. realistic initiatives:
    Lofty: Perform thorough, manual security analysis. Realistic: Leverage our SIEM platform to perform more automated security analysis through the use of log information.

    Consolidate related gap initiatives to simplify and streamline your roadmap

    Identify areas of commonality between gap initiative in order to effectively and efficiently implement your new initiatives.

    Steps:
    1. After reviewing and documenting initiatives for each security control, begin sorting controls by commonality, where resources can be shared, or similar end goals and actions. Begin by copying all initiatives from tab 2. Current State Assessment into tab 5. Initiative List of the Security Operations Maturity Assessment Tool and then consolidating them.
    2. Initiatives Consolidated Initiatives
      Document data classification and handling in AUP —› Document data classification and handling in AUP Keep urgent or exceptional initiatives separate so they can be addressed appropriately.
      Document removable media in AUP —› Define and document an Acceptable Use Policy Other similar or related initiatives can be consolidated into one item.
      Document BYOD and mobile devices in AUP —›
      Document company assets in Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) —›

    3. Review grouped initiatives and identify specific initiatives should be broken out and defined separately.
    4. Record your consolidated gap initiatives in the Security Operations Maturity Assessment Tool, tab 6. Initiative Prioritization.

    Understand your organizational maturity gap

    After inputting your current and target scores and defining your gap initiatives in tab 2, review tab 3. Current Maturity and tab 4. Maturity Gap in Info-Tech’s Security Operations Maturity Assessment Tool.

    Automatically built charts and tables provide a clear visualization of your current maturity.

    Presenting these figures to stakeholders and management can help visually draw attention to high-priority areas and contextualize the gap initiatives for which you will be seeking support.

    Screenshot of tabs 3 and 4 from Info-Tech's Security Operations Maturity Assessment Tool. Bar charts titled 'Planning and Direction', 'Vulnerability Management', 'Threat Intelligence', and 'Security Maturity Level Gap Analysis'.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Communicate the value of future security projects to stakeholders by copying relevant charts and tables into an executive stakeholder communication presentation (ask an Info-Tech representative for further information).

    Define cost, effort, alignment, and security benefit

    Define low, medium, and high resource allocation, and other variables for your gap initiatives in the Concept of Operations Maturity Assessment Tool. These variables include:
    1. Define initial cost. One-time, upfront capital investments. The low cut-off would be a project that can be approved with little to no oversight. Whereas the high cut-off would be a project that requires a major approval or a formal capital investment request. Initial cost covers items such as appliance cost, installation, project based consulting fees, etc.
    2. Define ongoing cost. This includes any annually recurring operating expenses that are new budgetary costs, e.g. licensing or rental costs. Do not account for FTE employee costs. Generally speaking you can take 20-25% of initial cost as ongoing cost for maintenance and service.
    3. Define initial staffing in hours. This is total time in hours required to complete a project. Note: It is not total elapsed time, but dedicated time. Consider time required to research, document, implement, review, set up, fine tune, etc. Consider all staff hours required (2 staff at 8 hours means 16 hours total).
    4. Define ongoing staffing in hours. This is the ongoing average hours per week required to support that initiative. This covers all operations, maintenance, review, and support for the initiative. Some initiatives will have a week time commitment (e.g. perform a vulnerability scan using our tool once a week) versus others that may have monthly, quarterly, or annual time commitments that need to averaged out per week (e.g. perform annual security review requiring 0.4 hours/week (20 hours total based on 50 working weeks per year).
    Table relating the four definitions on the left, 'Initial Cost', 'Ongoing Cost (annual)', 'Initial Staffing in Hours', and 'Ongoing Staffing in Hours/Week'. Each row header is a definition and has four sub-rows 'High', 'Medium', 'Low', and 'Zero'.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    When considering these parameters, aim to use already existing resource allocations.

    For example, if there is a dollar value that would require you to seek approval for an expense, this might be the difference between a medium and a high cost category.

    Define cost, effort, alignment, and security benefit

    1. Define Alignment with Business. This variable is meant to capture how well the gap initiative aligns with organizational goals and objectives. For example, something with high alignment usually can be tied to a specific organization initiative and will receive senior management support. You can either:
      • Set low, medium, and high based on levels of support the organization will provide (e.g. High – senior management support, Medium – VP/business unit head support, IT support only)
      • Attribute specific corporate goals or initiatives to the gap initiative (e.g. High – directly supports a customer requirement/key contract requirement; Medium – indirectly support customer requirement/key contract OR enables remote workforce; Low – security best practice).
    2. Define Security Benefit. This variable is meant to capture the relative security benefit or risk reduction being provided by the gap initiative. This can be represented through a variety of factors, such as:
      • Reduces compliance or regulatory risk by meeting a control requirement
      • Reduces availability and operational risk
      • Implements a non-existent control
      • Secures high-criticality data
      • Secures at-risk end users
    Table relating the two definitions on the left, 'Alignment with Business', and 'Security Benefit'. Each row header is a definition and has three sub-rows 'High', 'Medium', and 'Low'.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Make sure you consider the value of AND/OR. For either alignment with business or security benefit, the use of AND/OR can become useful thresholds to rank similar importance but different value initiatives.

    Example: with alignment with business, an initiative can indirectly support a key compliance requirement OR meet a key corporate goal.

    Info-Tech Insight

    You cannot do everything – and you probably wouldn’t want to. Make educated decisions about which projects are most important and why.

    Apply your variable criteria to your initiatives

    Identify easy-win tasks and high-value projects worth fighting for.
    Categorize the Initiative
    Select the gap initiative type from the down list. Each category (Must, Should, Could, and Won’t) is considered to be an “execution wave.” There is also a specific order of operations within each wave. Based on dependencies and order of importance, you will execute on some “must-do” items before others.
    Assign Criteria
    For each gap initiative, evaluate it based on your previously defined parameters for each variable.
    • Cost – initial and ongoing
    • Staffing – initial and ongoing
    • Alignment with business
    • Security benefit
    Overall Cost/Effort Rating
    An automatically generated score between 0 and 12. The higher the score attached to the initiative, the more effort required. The must-do, low-scoring items are quick wins and must be prioritized first.
    Screenshot of a table from Info-Tech's Concept of Operations Maturity Assessment Tool with all of the previous table row headers as column headers.

    A financial services organization defined its target security state and created an execution plan

    CASE STUDY
    Industry: Financial Services | Source: Info-Tech Research Group
    Framework Components
    Security Domains & Accompanied Initiatives
    (A portion of completed domains and initiatives)
    CSC began by creating over 100 gap initiatives across Info-Tech’s seven security domains.
    Current-State Assessment Context & Leadership Compliance, Audit & Review Security Prevention
    Gap Initiatives Created 12
    Initiatives
    14
    Initiatives
    45
    Initiatives
    Gap Initiative Prioritization
    Planned Initiative(s)* Initial Cost Ongoing Cost Initial Staffing Ongoing Staffing
    Document Charter Low - ‹$5K Low - ‹$1K Low - ‹1d Low - ‹2 Hour
    Document RACI Low - ‹$5K Low - ‹$1K Low - ‹1d Low - ‹2 Hour
    Expand IR processes Medium - $5K-$50K Low - ‹$1K High - ›2w Low - ‹2 Hour
    Investigate Threat Intel Low - ‹$5K Low - ‹$1K Medium - 1-10d Low - ‹2 Hour
    CSC’s defined low, medium, and high for cost and staffing are specific to the organization.

    CSC then consolidated its initiatives to create less than 60 concise tasks.

    *Initiatives and variables have been changed or modified to maintain anonymity

    Review your prioritized security roadmap

    Review the final Gantt chart to review the expected start and end dates for your security initiatives as part of your roadmap.

    In the Gantt chart, go through each wave in sequence and determine the planned start date and planned duration for each gap initiative. As you populate the planned start dates, take into consideration the resource constraints or dependencies for each project. Go back and revise the granular execution wave to resolve any conflicts you find.

    Screenshot of a 'Gantt Chart for Initiatives', a table with planned and actual start times and durations for each initiative, and beside it a roadmap with the dates from the Gantt chart plugged in.
    Review considerations
    • Does this roadmap make sense for our organization?
    • Do we focus too much on one quarter over others?
    • Will the business be going through any significant changes during the upcoming years that will directly impact this project?
    This is a living management document
    • You can use the same process on a per-case basis to decide where this new project falls in the priority list, and then add it to your Gantt chart.
    • As you make progress, check items off of the list, and periodically use this chart to retroactively update your progress towards achieving your overall target state.

    Consult an Info-Tech Analyst

    To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
    Onsite workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If a Guided Implementation isn’t enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to successfully complete your project.
    Photo of TJ Minichillo, Senior Director – Security, Risk & Compliance, Info-Tech Research Group. TJ Minichillo
    Senior Director – Security, Risk & Compliance
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Edward Gray, Consulting Analyst – Security, Risk & Compliance, Info-Tech Research Group. Edward Gray
    Consulting Analyst – Security, Risk & Compliance
    Info-Tech Research Group
    Photo of Celine Gravelines, Research Manager – Security, Risk & Compliance, Info-Tech Research Group. Celine Gravelines
    Research Manager – Security, Risk & Compliance
    Info-Tech Research Group
    If you are not communicating, then you are not secure.

    Call 1-888-670-8889 or email workshops@infotech.com for more information.

    Are you ready to move on to the next phase?

    Self-Assessment Questions

    • Have you identified your organization’s corporate goals along with your obligations?
    • Have you defined the scope and boundaries of your security program?
    • Have you determined your organization’s risk tolerance level?
    • Have you considered threat types your organization may face?
    • Are the above answers documented in the Security Requirements Gathering Tool?
    • Have you defined your maturity for both your current and target state?
    • Do you have clearly defined initiatives that would bridge the gap between your current and target state?
    • Are each of the initiatives independent, specific, and relevant to the associated control?
    • Have you indicated any dependencies between your initiatives?
    • Have you consolidated your gap initiatives?
    • Have you defined the parameters for each of the prioritization variables (cost, effort, alignment, and security benefit)?
    • Have you applied prioritization parameters to each consolidated initiative?
    • Have you recorded your final prioritized roadmap in the Gantt chart tab?
    • Have you reviewed your final Gantt chart to ensure it aligns to your security requirements?

    If you answered “yes” to the questions, then you are ready to move on to Phase 3: Define Operational Interdependencies

    Develop a Security Operations Strategy

    PHASE 3

    Define Operational Interdependencies

    1

    Assess Operational Requirements

    2

    Develop Maturity Initiatives

    3

    Define Interdependencies

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Understand the current security operations process flow.
    • Define the security operations stakeholders and their respective deliverables.
    • Formalize an internal information sharing and collaboration plan.

    Outcomes of this step

    • A formalized security operations interaction agreement.
    • A security operations service and product catalog.
    • A structured operations collection plan.

    Info-Tech Insight

    If you are not communicating, you are not secure. Collaboration eliminates siloed decisions by connecting people, processes, and technologies. You leave less room for error, consume fewer resources, and improve operational efficiency with a transparent security operations process.

    Tie everything together with collaboration

    If you are not communicating, you are not secure. Collaboration eliminates siloed decisions by connecting people, processes, and technologies. You leave less room for error, consume fewer resources, and improve operational efficiency with a transparent security operations process.

    Define Strategic Needs and Requirements Participate in Information Sharing Communicate Clearly
    • Establish a channel to communicate management needs and requirements and define important workflow activities. Focus on operationalizing those components.
    • Establish a feedback loop to ensure your actions satisfied management’s criteria.
    • Consolidate critical security data within a centralized portal that is accessible throughout the threat collaboration environment, reducing the human capital resources required to manage that data.
    • Participate in external information sharing groups such as ISACs. Intelligence collaboration allows organizations to band together to decrease risk and protect one another from threat actors.
    • Disseminate relevant information in clear and succinct alerts, reports, or briefings.
    • Security operations analysts must be able to translate important technical security issues and provide in-depth strategic insights.
    • Define your audience before presenting information; various stakeholders will interpret information differently. You must present it in a format that appeals to their interests.
    • Be transparent in your communications. Holding back information will only serve to alienate groups and hinder critical business decisions.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Simple collaborative activities, such as a biweekly meeting, can unite prevention, detection, analysis, and response teams to help prevent siloed decision making.

    Understand the security operations process flow

    Process standardization and automation is critical to the effectiveness of security operations.

    Process flow for security operations with column headers 'Monitoring', 'Preliminary Analysis (Tier 1)', 'Triage', 'Investigation & Analysis (Tier 2)', 'Response', and 'Advanced Threat Detection (Tier 3)'. All processes begin with elements in the 'Monitoring' column and end up at 'Visualization & Dashboarding'.

    Document your security operations’ capabilities and tasks

    Table of capabilities and tasks for security operations.
    Document your security operations’ functional capabilities and operational tasks to satisfy each capability. What resources will you leverage to complete the specific task/capability? Identify your internal and external collection sources to satisfy the individual requirement. Identify the affiliated product, service, or output generated from the task/capability. Determine your escalation protocol. Who are the stakeholders you will be sharing this information with?
    Capabilities

    The major responsibilities of a specific function. These are the high-level processes that are expected to be completed by the affiliated employees and/or stakeholders.

    Tasks

    The specific and granular tasks that need to be completed in order to satisfy a portion of or the entire capability.

    Download Info-Tech’s Security Operations RACI Chart & Program Plan.

    Convert your results into actionable process flowcharts

    Map each functional task or capability into a visual process-flow diagram.

    • The title should reflect the respective capability and product output.
    • List all involved stakeholders (inputs and threat escalation protocol) along the left side.
    • Ensure all relevant security control inputs are documented within the body of the process-flow diagram.
    • Map out the respective processes in order to achieve the desired outcome.
    • Segment each process within its own icon and tie that back to the respective input.
    Example of a process flow made with sticky notes.

    Title: Output #1 Example of a process flow diagram with columns 'Stakeholders', 'Input Processes', 'Output Processes', and 'Threat Escalation Protocol'. Processes are mapped by which stakeholder and column they fall to.

    Download Info-Tech’s Security Operations RACI Chart & Program Plan.

    Formalize the opportunities for collaboration within your security operations program

    Security Operations Collaboration Plan

    Security operations provides a single pane of glass through which the threat collaboration environment can manage its operations.

    How to customize

    The security operations interaction agreement identifies opportunities for optimization through collaboration and cross-training. The document is composed of several components:

    • Security operations program scope and objectives
    • Operational capabilities and outputs on a per function basis
    • A needs and requirements collection plan
    • Escalation protocol and respective information-sharing guidance (i.e. a detailed cadence schedule)
    • A security operations RACI chart
    Sample of Info-Tech's Security Operations Collaboration Plan.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Understand the operational cut-off points. While collaboration is encouraged, understand when the onus shifts to the rest of the threat collaboration environment.

    Assign responsibilities for the threat management process

    Security Operations RACI Chart & Program Plan

    Formally documenting roles and responsibilities helps to hold those accountable and creates awareness as to everyone’s involvement in various tasks.

    How to customize
    • Customize the header fields with applicable stakeholders.
    • Identify stakeholders that are:
      • Responsible: The person(s) who does the work to accomplish the activity; they have been tasked with completing the activity and/or getting a decision made.
      • Accountable: The person(s) who is accountable for the completion of the activity. Ideally, this is a single person and is often an executive or program sponsor.
      • Consulted: The person(s) who provides information. This is usually several people, typically called subject matter experts (SMEs).
      • Informed: The person(s) who is updated on progress. These are resources that are affected by the outcome of the activities and need to be kept up to date.
    Sample of Info-Tech's Security Operations Collaboration Plan.

    Download Info-Tech’s Security Operations RACI Chart & Program Plan.

    Identify security operations consumers and their respective needs and requirements

    Ensure your security operations program is constantly working toward satisfying a consumer need or requirement.

    Internal Consumers External Consumers
    • Business Executives & Management (CIO, CISO, COO):
      • Inform business decisions regarding threats and their association with future financial risk, reputational risk, and continuity of operations.
    • Human Resources:
      • Security operations must directly work with HR to enforce tight device controls, develop processes, and set expectations.
    • Legal:
      • Security operations is responsible to notify the legal department of data breaches and the appropriate course of action.
    • Audit and Compliance:
      • Work with the auditing department to define additional audits or controls that must be measured.
    • Public Relations/Marketing Employees:
      • Employees must be educated on prevalent threats and how to avoid or mitigate them.

    Note: Your organization might not be the final target, but it could be a primary path for attackers. If you exist as a third-party partner to another organization, your responsibility in your technology ecosystem extends beyond your own product or service offerings.

    • Third-Party Contractors:
      • Identify relevant threats across industries – security operations is responsible for protecting more than just itself.
    • Commercial Vendors:
      • Identify commercial vendors of control failures and opportunities for operational improvement.
    • Suppliers:
      • Provide or maintain a certain level of security delivery.
      • Meet the same level of security that is expected of business units.
    • All End Users:
      • Be notified of any data breaches and potential violations of privacy.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    “In order to support a healthy constituency, network operations and security operations should be viewed as equal partners, rather than one subordinate to the other.” (Mitre world-class CISO)

    Define the stakeholders, their respective outputs, and the underlying need

    Security Operations Program Service & Product Catalog

    Create an informal security operations program service and product catalog. Work your way backwards – map each deliverable to the respective stakeholders and functions.

    Action/Output Arrow pointing right. Frequency Arrow pointing right. Stakeholders/Function
    Document the key services and outputs produced by the security operations program. For example:
    • Real-time monitoring
    • Event analysis and incident coordination
    • Malware analysis
    • External information sharing
    • Published alerts, reports, and briefings
    • Metrics
    Define the frequency for which each deliverable or service is produced or conducted. Leverage this activity to establish a state of accountability within your threat collaboration environment. Identify the stakeholders or groups affiliated with each output. Remember to include potential MSSPs.
    • Vulnerability Management
    • Threat Intelligence
    • Tier 1, 2, and 3 Analysts
    • Incident Response
    • MSSP
    • Network Operations
    Remember to include any target-state outputs or services identified in the maturity assessment. Use this exercise as an opportunity to organize your security operations outputs and services.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Develop a central web/knowledge portal that is easily accessible throughout the threat collaboration environment.

    Internal information sharing helps to focus operational efforts

    Organizations must share information internally and through secure external information sharing and analysis centers (ISACs).

    Ensure information is shared in a format that relates to the particular end user. Internal consumers fall into two categories:

    • Strategic Users — Intelligence enables strategic stakeholders to better understand security trends, minimize risk, and make more educated and informed decisions. The strategic intelligence user often lacks technical security knowledge; bridge the communication gap between security and non-technical decision makers by clearly communicating the underlying value and benefits.
    • Operational Users — Operational users integrate information and indicators directly into their daily operations and as a result have more in-depth knowledge of the technical terms. Reports help to identify escalated alerts that are part of a bigger campaign, provide attribution and context to attacks, identify systems that have been compromised, block malicious URLs or malware signatures in firewalls, IDPS systems, and other gateway products, identify patches, reduce the number of incidents, etc.
    Collaboration includes the exchange of:
    • Contextualized threat indicators, threat actors, TTPs, and campaigns.
    • Attribution of the attack, motives of the attacker, victim profiles, and frequent exploits.
    • Defensive and mitigation strategies.
    • Best-practice incident response procedures.
    • Technical tools to help normalize threat intelligence formats or decode malicious network traffic.
    Collaboration can be achieved through:
    • Manual unstructured exchanges such as alerts, reports, briefings, knowledge portals, or emails.
    • Automated centralized platforms that allow users to privately upload, aggregate, and vet threat intelligence. Current players include commercial, government, and open-source information-sharing and analysis centers.
    Isolation prevents businesses from learning from each others’ mistakes and/or successes.

    Define the routine of your security operations program in a detailed cadence schedule

    Security Operations Program Cadence Schedule Template

    Design your meetings around your security operations program’s outputs and capabilities

    How to customize

    Don’t operate in a silo. Formalize a cadence schedule to develop a state of accountability, share information across the organization, and discuss relevant trends. A detailed cadence schedule should include the following:

    • Activity, output, or topic being discussed.
    • Participants and stakeholders involved.
    • Value and purpose of meeting.
    • Duration and frequency of each meeting.
    • Investment per participant per meeting.
    Sample of Info-Tech's Security Operations Program Cadence Schedule Template.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Schedule regular meetings composed of key members from different working groups to discuss concerns, share goals, and communicate operational processes pertaining to their specific roles.

    Apply a strategic lens to your security operations program

    Frame the importance of optimizing the security operations program to align with that of the decision makers’ overarching strategy.

    Strategies
    1. Bridge the communication gap between security and non-technical decision makers. Communicate concisely in business-friendly terms.
    2. Quantify the ROI for the given project.
    3. Educate stakeholders – if stakeholders do not understand what a security operations program encompasses, it will be hard for them to champion the initiative.
    4. Communicate the implications, value, and benefits of a security operations program.
    5. Frame the opportunity as a competitive advantage, e.g. proactive security measures as a client acquisition strategy.
    6. Address the increasing prevalence of threat actors. Use objective data to demonstrate the impact, e.g. through case studies, recent media headlines, or statistics.

    Defensive Strategy diagram with columns 'Adversaries', 'Defenses', 'Assets', and priority level.
    (Source: iSIGHT, “ Definitive Guide to Threat Intelligence”)

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Refrain from using scare tactics such as fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). While this may be a short-term solution, it limits the longevity of your operations as senior management is not truly invested in the initiative.

    Example: Align your strategic needs with that of management.

    Identify assets of value, current weak security measures, and potential adversaries. Demonstrate how an optimized security operations program can mitigate those threats.

    Develop a comprehensive measurement program to evaluate the effectiveness of your security operations

    There are three types of metrics pertaining to security operations:

    1) Operations-focused

    Operations-focused metrics are typically communicated through a centralized visualization such as a dashboard. These metrics guide operational efforts, identifying operational and control weak points while ensuring the appropriate actions are taken to fix them.

    Examples include, but are not limited to:

    • Ticketing metrics (e.g. average ticket resolution rate, ticketing status, number of tickets per queue/analyst).
    • False positive percentage per control.
    • Incident response metrics (e.g. mean time to recovery).
    • CVSS scores per vulnerability.

    2) Business-focused

    The evaluation of operational success from a business perspective.

    Example metrics include:

    • Return on investment.
    • Total cost of ownership (can be segregated by function: prevent, detect, analyze, and respond).
    • Saved costs from mitigated breaches.
    • Security operations budget as a percentage of the IT budget.

    3) Initiative-focused

    The measurement of security operations project progress. These are frequently represented as time, resource, or cost-based metrics.

    Note: Remember to measure end-user feedback. Asking stakeholders about their current expectations via a formal survey is the most effective way to kick-start the continuous improvement process.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Operational metrics have limited value beyond security operations – when communicating to management, focus on metrics that are actionable from a business perspective.

    Download Info-Tech’s Security Operations Metrics Summary Document.Sample of Info-Tech's Security Operations Metrics Summary Document.

    Identify the triggers for continual improvement

    Continual Improvement

    • Audits: Check for performance requirements in order to pass major audits.
    • Assessments: Variances in efficiency or effectiveness of metrics when compared to the industry standard.
    • Process maturity: Opportunity to increase efficiency of services and processes.
    • Management reviews: Routine reviews that reveal gaps.
    • Technology advances: For example, new security architecture/controls have been released.
    • Regulations: Compliance to new or changed regulations.
    • New staff or technology: Disruptive technology or new skills that allow for improvement.

    Conduct tabletop exercises with Info-Tech’s onsite workshop

    Assess your security operations capabilities

    Leverage Info-Tech’s Security Operations Tabletop Exercise to guide simulations to validate your operational procedures.

    How to customize
    • Use the templates to document actions and actors.
    • For each new injection, spend three minutes discussing the response as a group. Then spend two minutes documenting each role’s contribution to the response. After the time limit, proceed to the following injection scenario.
    • Review the responses only after completing the entire exercise.
    Sample of Info-Tech's Security Operations Tabletop Exercise.

    This tabletop exercise is available through an onsite workshop as we can help establish and design a tabletop capability for your organization.

    Are you ready to implement your security operations program?

    Self-Assessment Questions

    • Is there a formalized security operations collaboration plan?
    • Are all key stakeholders documented and acknowledged?
    • Have you defined your strategic needs and requirements in a formalized collection plan?
    • Is there an established channel for management to communicate needs and requirements to the security operation leaders?
    • Are all program outputs documented and communicated?
    • Is there an accessible, centralized portal or dashboard that actively aggregates and communicates key information?
    • Is there a formalized threat escalation protocol in order to facilitate both internal and external information sharing?
    • Does your organization actively participate in external information sharing through the use of ISACs?
    • Does your organization actively produce reports, alerts, products, etc. that feed into and influence the output of other functions’ operations?
    • Have you assigned program responsibilities in a detailed RACI chart?
    • Is there a structured cadence schedule for key stakeholders to actively communicate and share information?
    • Have you developed a structured measurement program on a per function basis?
    • Now that you have constructed your ideal security operations program strategy, revisit the question “Are you answering all of your objectives?”

    If you answered “yes” to the questions, then you are ready to implement your security operations program.

    Summary

    Insights

    1. Security operations is no longer a center, but a process. The need for a physical security hub has evolved into the virtual fusion of prevention, detection, analysis, and response efforts. When all four functions operate as a unified process, your organization will be able to proactively combat changes in the threat landscape.
    2. Functional threat intelligence is a prerequisite for effective security operations – without it, security operations will be inefficient and redundant. Eliminate false positives by contextualizing threat data, aligning intelligence with business objectives, and building processes to satisfy those objectives
    3. If you are not communicating, then you are not secure. Collaboration eliminates siloed decisions by connecting people, processes, and technologies. You leave less room for error, consume fewer resources, and improve operational efficiency with a transparent security operations process.

    Best Practices

    • Have a structured plan of attack. Define your unique threat landscape, as well as business, regulatory, and consumer obligations.
    • Foster both internal and external collaboration.
    • Understand the operational cut-off points. While collaboration is encouraged, understand when the onus shifts to the rest of the threat collaboration environment.
    • Do not bite off more than you can chew. Identify current people, processes, and technologies that satisfy immediate problems and enable future expansion.
    • Leverage threat intelligence to create a predictive and proactive security operations analysis process.
    • Formalize escalation procedures with logic and incident management flow.
    • Don’t develop a security operations program with the objective of zero incidents. This reliance on prevention results in over-engineered security solutions that cost more than the assets being protected.
    • Ensure that information flows freely throughout the threat collaboration environment – each function should serve to feed and enhance the next.
    • Develop a central web/knowledge portal that is easily accessible throughout the threat collaboration environment
    Protect your organization with an interdependent and collaborative security operations program.

    Bibliography

    “2016 State of Cybersecurity in Small & Medium-Sized Businesses (SMB).” Ponemon Institute, June 2016. Web. 10 Nov. 2016.

    Ahmad, Shakeel et al. “10 Tips to Improve Your Security Incident Readiness and Response.” RSA, n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2016.

    Anderson, Brandie. “ Building, Maturing & Rocking a Security Operations Center.” Hewlett Packard, n.d. Web. 4 Nov. 2016.

    Barnum, Sean. “Standardizing cyber threat intelligence information with the structured threat information expression.” STIX, n.d. Web. 03 Oct. 2016.

    Bidou, Renaud. “Security Operation Center Concepts & Implementation.” IV2-Technologies, n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2016.

    Bradley, Susan. “Cyber threat intelligence summit.” SANS Institute InfoSec Reading Room, n.d. Web. 03 Oct. 2016.

    “Building a Security Operations Center.” DEF CON Communications, Inc., 2015. Web. 14 Nov. 2016.

    “Building a Successful Security Operations Center.” ArcSight, 2015. Web. 21 Nov. 2016.

    “Building an Intelligence-Driven Security Operations Center.” RSA, June 2014. Web. 25 Nov. 2016.

    Caltagirone, Sergio, Andrew Pendergast, and Christopher Betz. “Diamond Model of Intrusion Analysis,” Center for Cyber Threat Intelligence and Threat Research, 5 July 2013. Web. 25 Aug. 2016.

    “Cisco 2017 Annual Cybersecurity Report: Chief Security Officers Reveal True Cost of Breaches and the Actions Organizations Are Taking.” The Network. Cisco, 31 Jan. 2017. Web. 11 Nov. 2017.

    “CITP Training and Education.” Carnegie Mellon University, 2015. Web. 03 Oct. 2016.

    “Creating and Maintaining a SOC.” Intel Security, n.d. Web. 14 Nov. 2016.

    “Cyber Defense.” Mandiant, 2015. Web. 10 Nov. 2016.

    “Cyber Security Operations Center (CSOC).” Northrop Grumman, 2014. Web. 14 Nov. 2016.

    Danyliw, Roman. “Observations of Successful Cyber Security Operations.” Carnegie Mellon, 12 Dec. 2016. Web. 14 Dec. 2016.

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    EY. “Managed SOC.” EY, 2015. Web. 14 Nov. 2016.

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    “Framework for improving critical infrastructure cybersecurity.” National Institute of Standards and Technology, 12 Feb. 2014. Web.

    Friedman, John, and Mark Bouchard. “Definitive Guide to Cyber Threat Intelligence.” iSIGHT, 2015. Web. 1 June 2015.

    Goldfarb, Joshua. “The Security Operations Hierarchy of Needs.” Securityweek.com, 10 Sept. 2015. Web. 14 Dec. 2016.

    “How Collaboration Can Optimize Security Operations.” Intel, n.d. Web. 2 Nov. 2016.

    Hslatman. “Awesome threat intelligence.” GitHub, 16 Aug. 2016. Web. 03 Oct. 2016.

    “Implementation Framework – Collection Management.” Carnegie Mellon University, 2015. Web.

    “Implementation Framework – Cyber Threat Prioritization.” Carnegie Mellon University, 03 Oct. 2016. Web. 03 Oct. 2016.

    “Intelligent Security Operations Center.” IBM, 25 Feb. 2015. Web. 15 Nov. 2016.

    Joshi Follow , Abhishek. “Best Practices for Security Operations Center.” LinkedIn, 01 Nov. 2015. Web. 14 Nov. 2016.

    Joshi. “Best Practices for a Security Operations Center.” Cybrary, 18 Sept. 2015. Web. 14 Dec. 2016.

    Kelley, Diana and Ron Moritz. “Best Practices for Building a Security Operations Center.” Information Security Today, 2006. Web. 10 Nov. 2016.

    Killcrece, Georgia, Klaus-Peter Kossakowski, Robin Ruefle, and Mark Zajicek. ”Organizational Models for Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs).” Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute, Dec. 2003. Carnegie Mellon. Web. 10 Nov. 2016.

    Kindervag , John. “SOC 2.0: Three Key Steps toward the Next-generation Security Operations Center.” SearchSecurity. TechTarget, Dec. 2010. Web. 14 Dec. 2016.

    Kvochko, Elena. “Designing the Next Generation Cyber Security Operations Center.” Forbes Magazine, 14 Mar. 2016. Web. 14 Dec. 2016.

    Lambert, P. “ Security Operations Center: Not Just for Huge Enterprises.” TechRepublic, 31 Jan. 2013. Web. 10 Nov. 2016.

    Lecky, M. and D. Millier. “Re-Thinking Security Operations.” SecTor Security Education Conference. Toronto, 2014.

    Lee, Michael. “Three Elements That Every Advanced Security Operations Center Needs.” CSO | The Resource for Data Security Executives, n.d. Web. 16 Nov. 2016.

    Linch, David and Jason Bergstrom. “Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement in an Age of Disruption.” Deloitte LLP, 2014.

    Lynch, Steve. “Security Operations Center.” InfoSec Institute, 14 May 2015. Web. 14 Dec. 2016.

    Macgregor, Rob. “Diamonds or chains – cyber security updates.” PwC, n.d. Web. 03 Oct. 2016.

    “Make Your Security Operations Center (SOC) More Efficient.” Making Your Data Center Energy Efficient (2011): 213-48. Intel Security. Web. 20 Nov. 2016.

    Makryllos, Gordon. “The Six Pillars of Security Operations.” CSO | The Resource for Data Security Executives, n.d. Web. 14 Nov. 2016.

    Marchany, R. “ Building a Security Operations Center.” Virginia Tech, 2015. Web. 8 Nov. 2016.

    Marty, Raffael. “Dashboards in the Security Operations Center (SOC).” Security Bloggers Network, 15 Jan. 2016. Web. 14 Nov. 2016.

    Minu, Adolphus. “Discovering the Value of Knowledge Portal.” IBM, n.d. Web. 1 Nov. 2016.

    Muniz, J., G. McIntyre, and N. AlFardan. “Introduction to Security Operations and the SOC.” Security Operations Center: Building, Operating, and Maintaining your SOC. Cisco Press, 29 Oct. 2015. Web. 14 Nov. 2016.

    Muniz, Joseph and Gary McIntyre. “ Security Operations Center.” Cisco, Nov. 2015. Web. 14 Nov. 2016.

    Muniz, Joseph. “5 Steps to Building and Operating an Effective Security Operations Center (SOC).” Cisco, 15 Dec. 2015. Web. 14 Dec. 2016.

    Nathans, David. Designing and Building a Security Operations Center. Syngress, 2015. Print.

    National Institute of Standards and Technology. “SP 800-61 Revision 2: Computer Security Incident Handling Guide.” 2012. Web.

    National Institute of Standards and Technology. “SP 800-83 Revision 1.” 2013. Web.

    National Institute of Standards and Technology. “SP 800-86: Guide to Integrating Forensic Techniques into Incident Response.” 2006. Web.

    F5 Networks. “F5 Security Operations Center.” F5 Networks, 2014. Web. 10 Nov. 2016.

    “Next Generation Security Operations Center.” DTS Solution, n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2016.

    “Optimizing Security Operations.” Intel, 2015. Web. 4 Nov. 2016.

    Paganini, Pierluigi. “What Is a SOC ( Security Operations Center)?” Security Affairs, 24 May 2016. Web. 14 Dec. 2016.

    Ponemon Institute LLC. “Cyber Security Incident Response: Are we as prepared as we think?” Ponemon, 2014. Web.

    Ponemon Institute LLC. “The Importance of Cyber Threat Intelligence to a Strong Security Posture.” Ponemon, Mar. 2015. Web. 17 Aug. 2016.

    Poputa-Clean, Paul. “Automated defense – using threat intelligence to augment.” SANS Institute InfoSec Reading Room, 15 Jan. 2015. Web.

    Quintagroup. “Knowledge Management Portal Solution.” Quintagroup, n.d. Web.

    Rasche, G. “Guidelines for Planning an Integrated Security Operations Center.” EPRI, Dec. 2013. Web. 25 Nov. 2016.

    Rehman, R. “What It Really Takes to Stand up a SOC.” Rafeeq Rehman – Personal Blog, 27 Aug. 2015. Web. 14 Dec. 2016.

    Rothke, Ben. “Designing and Building Security Operations Center.” RSA Conference, 2015. Web. 14 Nov. 2016.

    Ruks, Martyn and David Chismon. “Threat Intelligence: Collecting, Analysing, Evaluating.” MWR Infosecurity, 2015. Web. 24 Aug. 2016.

    Sadamatsu, Takayoshi. “Practice within Fujitsu of Security Operations Center.” Fujitsu, July 2016. Web. 15 Nov. 2016.

    Sanders, Chris. “Three Useful SOC Dashboards.” Chris Sanders, 24 Oct. 2016. Web. 14 Nov. 2016.

    SANS Institute. “Incident Handler's Handbook.” 2011. Web.

    Schilling, Jeff. “5 Pitfalls to Avoid When Running Your SOC.” Dark Reading, 18 Dec. 2014. Web. 14 Nov. 2016.

    Schinagl, Stef, Keith Schoon, and Ronald Paans. “A Framework for Designing a Security Operations Centre (SOC).” 2015 48th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Computer.org, 2015. Web. 20 Nov. 2016.

    “Security – Next Gen SOC or SOF.” InfoSecAlways.com, 31 Dec. 2013. Web. 14 Nov. 2016.

    “Security Operations Center Dashboard.” Enterprise Dashboard Digest, n.d. Web. 14 Dec. 2016.

    “Security Operations Center Optimization Services.” AT&T, 2015. Web. 5 Nov. 2016.

    “Security Operations Centers — Helping You Get Ahead of Cybercrime Contents.” EY, 2014. Web. 6 Nov. 2016.

    Sheikh, Shah. “DTS Solution - Building a SOC (Security Operations Center).” LinkedIn, 4 May 2013. Web. 20 Nov. 2016.

    Soto, Carlos. “ Security Operations Center (SOC) 101.” Tom's IT Pro, 28 Oct. 2015. Web. 14 Dec. 2016.

    “Standardizing and Automating Security Operations.” National Institute of Standards and Technology, 3 Sept. 2006. Web.

    “Strategy Considerations for Building a Security Operations Center.” IBM, Dec. 2013. Web. 5 Nov. 2016.

    “Summary of Key Findings.” Carnegie Mellon University, 03 Oct. 2016. Web. 03 Oct. 2016.

    “Sustainable Security Operations.” Intel, 2016. Web. 20 Nov. 2016.

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    Wilson, Tim. “SOC 2.0: A Crystal-Ball Glimpse of the Next-Generation Security Operations Center.” Dark Reading, 22 Nov. 2010. Web. 10 Nov. 2016.

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    Security Strategy

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    • Parent Category Name: Security and Risk
    • Parent Category Link: /security-and-risk

    The challenge

    You may be experiencing one or more of the following:

    • You may not have sufficient security resources to handle all the challenges.
    • Security threats are prevalent. Yet many businesses struggle to embed systemic security thinking into their culture.
    • The need to move towards strategic planning of your security landscape is evident. How to get there is another matter.

    Our advice

    Insight

    To have a successful information security strategy, take these three factors into account:

    • Holistic: your view must include people, processes, and technology.
    • Risk awareness: Base your strategy on the actual risk profile of your company. And then add the appropriate best practices.
    • Business-aligned: When your strategic security plan demonstrates alignment with the business goals and supports it, embedding will go much more straightforward.

    Impact and results 

    • We have developed a highly effective approach to creating your security strategy. We tested and refined this for more than seven years with hundreds of different organizations.
    • We ensure alignment with business objectives.
    • We assess organizational risk and stakeholder expectations.
    • We enable a comprehensive current state assessment.
    • And we prioritize initiatives and build out a right-sized security roadmap.

     

    The roadmap

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    Get up to speed

    Read up on why you should build your customized information security strategy. Review our methodology and understand the four ways we can support you.

    Assess the security requirements

    It all starts with risk appetite, yes, but security is something you want to get right. Determine your organizations' security pressures and business goals, and then determine your security program's goals.

    • Build an Information Security Strategy – Phase 1: Assess Requirements
    • Information Security Requirements Gathering Tool (xls)
    • Information Security Pressure Analysis Tool (xls)

    Build your gap initiative

    Our best-of-breed security framework makes you perform a gap analysis between where you are and where you want to be (your target state). Once you know that, you can define your goals and duties.

    • Build an Information Security Strategy – Phase 2: Assess Gaps
    • Information Security Program Gap Analysis Tool (xls)

    Plan the implementation of your security strategy 

    With your design at this level, it is time to plan your roadmap.

    • Build an Information Security Strategy – Phase 3: Build the Roadmap

    Let it run and continuously improve. 

    Learn to use our methodology to manage security initiatives as you go. Identify the resources you need to execute the evolving strategy successfully.

    • Build an Information Security Strategy – Phase 4: Execute and Maintain
    • Information Security Strategy Communication Deck (ppt)
    • Information Security Charter (doc)

     

    Optimize the Current Testing Process for Enterprise Mobile Applications

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    • Parent Category Name: Testing, Deployment & QA
    • Parent Category Link: /testing-deployment-and-qa
    • Your team has little or no experience in mobile testing.
    • You need to optimize current testing processes to include mobile.
    • You need to conduct an RFP for mobile testing tools.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • One-size-fits-all testing won’t work for mobile. The testing tools are fragmented.
    • Mobile offers many new test cases, so organizations can expect to spend more time testing.

    Impact and Result

    • Identify and address gaps between your current testing process and a target state that includes mobile testing.
    • Establish project value metrics to ensure business and technical requirements are met.

    Optimize the Current Testing Process for Enterprise Mobile Applications Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Assess the current testing state

    Determine a starting point for architecture and discuss pain points that will drive reusability.

    • Storyboard: Optimize the Current Testing Process for Enterprise Mobile Applications
    • Mobile Testing Project Charter Template
    • Visual SOP Template for Application Testing

    2. Determine the target state testing framework

    Document a preliminary list of test requirements and create vendor RFP and scoring.

    • Test Requirements Tool
    • Request for Proposal (RFP) Template

    3. Implement testing tools to support the testing SOP

    Create an implementation rollout plan.

    • Project Planning and Monitoring Tool

    Infographic

    Workshop: Optimize the Current Testing Process for Enterprise Mobile Applications

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Assess the Fit for Test Process Optimization

    The Purpose

    Understand mobile testing pain points.

    Evaluate current statistics and challenges around mobile testing and compare with your organization.

    Realize the benefits of mobile testing.

    Understand the differences of mobile testing.

    Assess your readiness for optimizing testing to include mobile.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Preliminary understanding of how mobile testing is different from conventional approaches to testing apps.

    Understanding of how mobile testing can optimize your current testing process.

    Activities

    1.1 Understand the pain points experienced with mobile testing

    1.2 Evaluate current statistics and challenges of mobile testing and compare your organization

    1.3 Realize the benefits that come from mobile testing

    1.4 Understand the differences between mobile app testing and conventional app testing

    1.5 Assess your readiness for optimizing the testing process to include mobile

    Outputs

    Organizational state assessment for mobile testing

    2 Structure & Launch the Project

    The Purpose

    Identify stakeholders for testing requirements gathering.

    Create a project charter to obtain project approval.

    Present and obtain project charter sign-off.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Well documented project charter.

    Approval to launch the project.

    Activities

    2.1 Identify stakeholders for testing requirements gathering

    2.2 Create a project charter to obtain project approval

    2.3 Present & obtain project charter sign-off

    Outputs

    Project objectives and scope

    Project roles and responsibilities

    3 Assess Current Testing State

    The Purpose

    Document your current non-mobile testing processes.

    Create a current testing visual SOP.

    Determine current testing pain points.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Thorough understanding of current testing processes and pain points.

    Activities

    3.1 Document your current non-mobile testing processes

    3.2 Create a current state visual SOP

    3.3 Determine current testing pain points

    Outputs

    Documented current testing processes in the form of a visual SOP

    List of current testing pain points

    4 Determine Target State Testing Framework

    The Purpose

    Determine your target state for mobile testing.

    Choose vendors for the RFP process.

    Evaluate selected vendor(s) against testing requirements.

    Design mobile testing visual SOP(s).

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Prioritized list of testing requirements for mobile.

    Vendor selection for mobile testing solutions through an RFP process.

    New SOP designed to include both current testing and mobile testing processes.

    Activities

    4.1 Determine your target state for mobile testing by following Info-Tech’s framework as a starting point

    4.2 Design new SOP to include testing for mobile apps

    4.3 Translate all considered visual SOP mobile injections into requirements

    4.4 Document the preliminary list of test requirements in the RFP

    4.5 Determine which vendors to include for the RFP process

    4.6 Reach out to vendors for a request for proposal

    4.7 Objectively evaluate vendors against testing requirements

    4.8 Identify and assess the expected costs and impacts from determining your target state

    Outputs

    List of testing requirements for mobile

    Request for Proposal

    5 Implement Testing Tools to Support Your Testing SOP

    The Purpose

    Develop an implementation roadmap to integrate new testing initiatives.

    Anticipate potential roadblocks during implementation rollout.

    Operationalize mobile testing and ensure a smooth hand-off to IT operations.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Creation of implementation project plan.

    List of approaches to mitigate potential implementation roadblocks.

    Achieving clean hand-off to IT ops team.

    Activities

    5.1 Develop a project plan to codify your current understanding of the scope of work

    5.2 Anticipate potential roadblocks during your tool’s implementation

    5.3 Operationalize your testing tools and ensure a smooth hand-off from the project team

    Outputs

    Mobile testing metrics implementation plan

    6 Conduct Your Retrospectives

    The Purpose

    Conduct regular retrospectives to consider areas for improvement.

    Adjust your processes, systems, and testing tools to improve performance and usability.

    Revisit implementation metrics to communicate project benefits.

    Leverage the lessons learned and apply them to other projects.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Project specific metrics.

    Discovery of areas to improve.

    Activities

    6.1 Conduct regular retrospectives to consider areas for improvement

    6.2 Revisit your implementation metrics to communicate project benefits to business stakeholders

    6.3 Adjust your processes, systems, and testing tools to improve performance and usability

    6.4 Leverage the lessons learned and apply them to other IT projects

    Outputs

    Steps to improve your mobile testing

    Data security consultancy

    Data security consultancy

    Based on experience
    Implementable advice
    human-based and people-oriented

    Data security consultancy makes up one of Tymans Group’s areas of expertise as a corporate consultancy firm. We are happy to offer our insights and solutions regarding data security and risk to businesses, both through online and offline channels. Read on and discover how our consultancy company can help you set up practical data security management solutions within your firm.

    How our data security consultancy services can help your company

    Data security management should be an important aspect of your business. As a data security consultancy firm, Tymans Group is happy to assist your small or medium-sized enterprise with setting up clear protocols to keep your data safe. As such, we can advise on various aspects comprising data security management. This ranges from choosing a fit-for-purpose data architecture to introducing IT incident management guidelines. Moreover, we can perform an external IT audit to discover which aspects of your company’s data security are vulnerable and which could be improved upon.

    Security and risk management

    Our security and risk services

    Security strategy

    Security Strategy

    Embed security thinking through aligning your security strategy to business goals and values

    Read more

    Disaster Recovery Planning

    Disaster Recovery Planning

    Create a disaster recovey plan that is right for your company

    Read more

    Risk Management

    Risk Management

    Build your right-sized IT Risk Management Program

    Read more

    Check out all our services

    Discover our practical data security management solutions

    Data security is just one aspect with which our consultancy firm can assist your company. Tymans Group offers its extensive expertise in various corporate management domains, such as quality management and risk management. Our solutions all stem from our vast expertise and have proven their effectiveness. Moreover, when you choose to employ our consultancy firm for your data security management, you benefit from a holistic, people-oriented approach.

    Set up an appointment with our experts

    Do you wish to learn more about our data security management solutions and services for your company? We are happy to analyze any issues you may be facing and offer you a practical solution if you contact us for an appointment. You can book a one-hour online talk or elect for an on-site appointment with our experts. Contact us to set up your appointment now.

    Continue reading

    Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan

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    • Parent Category Name: DR and Business Continuity
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    • Any time a natural disaster or major IT outage occurs, it increases executive awareness and internal pressure to create a disaster recovery plan (DRP).
    • Traditional DRP templates are onerous and result in a lengthy, dense plan that might satisfy auditors but will not be effective in a crisis.
    • The myth that a DRP is only for major disasters leaves organizations vulnerable to more common incidents.
    • The growing use of outsourced infrastructure services has increased reliance on vendors to meet recovery timeline objectives.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • At its core, disaster recovery (DR) is about ensuring service continuity. Create a plan that can be leveraged for both isolated and catastrophic events.
    • Remember Murphy’s Law. Failure happens. Focus on improving overall resiliency and recovery, rather than basing DR on risk probability analysis.
    • Cost-effective DR and service continuity starts with identifying what is truly mission critical so you can focus resources accordingly. Not all services require fast failover.

    Impact and Result

    • Define appropriate objectives for service downtime and data loss based on business impact.
    • Document an incident response plan that captures all of the steps from event detection to data center recovery.
    • Create a DR roadmap to close gaps between current DR capabilities and recovery objectives.

    Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) Research – A step-by-step document that helps streamline your DR planning process and build a plan that's concise, usable, and maintainable.

    Any time a major IT outage occurs, it increases executive awareness and internal pressure to create an IT DRP. This blueprint will help you develop an actionable DRP by following our four-phase methodology to define scope, current status, and dependencies; conduct a business impact analysis; identify and address gaps in the recovery workflow; and complete, extend, and maintain your DRP.

    • Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan – Phases 1-4

    2. DRP Case Studies – Examples to help you understand the governance and incident response components of a DRP and to show that your DRP project does not need to be as onerous as imagined.

    These examples include a client who leveraged the DRP blueprint to create practical, concise, and easy-to-maintain DRP governance and incident response plans and a case study based on a hospital providing a wide range of healthcare services.

    • Case Study: Practical, Right-Sized DRP
    • Case Study: Practical, Right-Sized DRP – Healthcare Example

    3. DRP Maturity Scorecard – An assessment tool to evaluate the current state of your DRP.

    Use this tool to measure your current DRP maturity and identify gaps to address. It includes a comprehensive list of requirements for your DRP program, including core and industry requirements.

    • DRP Maturity Scorecard

    4. DRP Project Charter Template – A template to communicate important details on the project purpose, scope, and parameters.

    The project charter template includes details on the project overview (description, background, drivers, and objectives); governance and management (project stakeholders/roles, budget, and dependencies); and risks, assumptions, and constraints (known and potential risks and mitigation strategy).

    • DRP Project Charter Template

    5. DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool – An evaluation tool to estimate the impact of downtime to determine appropriate, acceptable recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) and to review gaps between objectives and actuals.

    This tool enables you to identify critical applications/systems; identify dependencies; define objective scoring criteria to evaluate the impact of application/system downtime; determine the impact of downtime and establish criticality tiers; set recovery objectives (RTO/RPO) based on the impact of downtime; record recovery actuals (RTA/RPA) and identify any gaps between objectives and actuals; and identify dependencies that regularly fail (and have a significant impact when they fail) to prioritize efforts to improve resiliency.

    • DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool
    • Legacy DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool

    6. DRP BIA Scoring Context Example – A tool to record assumptions you made in the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool to explain the results and drive business engagement and feedback.

    Use this tool to specifically record assumptions made about who and what are impacted by system downtime and record assumptions made about impact severity.

    • DRP BIA Scoring Context Example

    7. DRP Recovery Workflow Template – A flowchart template to provide an at-a-glance view of the recovery workflow.

    This simple format is ideal during crisis situations, easier to maintain, and often quicker to create. Use this template to document the Notify - Assess - Declare disaster workflow, document current and planned future state recovery workflows, including gaps and risks, and review an example recovery workflow.

    • DRP Recovery Workflow Template (PDF)
    • DRP Recovery Workflow Template (Visio)

    8. DRP Roadmap Tool – A visual roadmapping tool that will help you plan, communicate, and track progress for your DRP initiatives.

    Improving DR capabilities is a marathon, not a sprint. You likely can't fund and resource all the measures for risk mitigation at once. Instead, use this tool to create a roadmap for actions, tasks, projects, and initiatives to complete in the short, medium, and long term. Prioritize high-benefit, low-cost mitigations.

    • DRP Roadmap Tool

    9. DRP Recap and Results Template – A template to summarize and present key findings from your DR planning exercises and documents.

    Use this template to present your results from the DRP Maturity Scorecard, BCP-DRP Fitness Assessment, DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool, tabletop planning exercises, DRP Recovery Workflow Template, and DRP Roadmap Tool.

    • DRP Recap and Results Template

    10. DRP Workbook – A comprehensive tool that enables you to organize information to support DR planning.

    Leverage this tool to document information regarding DRP resources (list the documents/information sources that support DR planning and where they are located) and DR teams and contacts (list the DR teams, SMEs critical to DR, and key contacts, including business continuity management team leads that would be involved in declaring a disaster and coordinating response at an organizational level).

    • DRP Workbook

    11. Appendix

    The following tools and templates are also included as part of this blueprint to use as needed to supplement the core steps above:

    • DRP Incident Response Management Tool
    • DRP Vendor Evaluation Questionnaire
    • DRP Vendor Evaluation Tool
    • Severity Definitions and Escalation Rules Template
    • BCP-DRP Fitness Assessment
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Define Parameters for Your DRP

    The Purpose

    Identify key applications and dependencies based on business needs.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Understand the entire IT “footprint” that needs to be recovered for key applications. 

    Activities

    1.1 Assess current DR maturity.

    1.2 Determine critical business operations.

    1.3 Identify key applications and dependencies.

    Outputs

    Current challenges identified through a DRP Maturity Scorecard.

    Key applications and dependencies documented in the Business Impact Analysis (BIA) Tool.

    2 Determine the Desired Recovery Timeline

    The Purpose

    Quantify application criticality based on business impact.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Appropriate recovery time and recovery point objectives defined (RTOs/RPOs).

    Activities

    2.1 Define an objective scoring scale to indicate different levels of impact.

    2.2 Estimate the impact of downtime.

    2.3 Determine desired RTO/RPO targets for applications based on business impact.

    Outputs

    Business impact analysis scoring criteria defined.

    Application criticality validated.

    RTOs/RPOs defined for applications and dependencies.

    3 Determine the Current Recovery Timeline and DR Gaps

    The Purpose

    Determine your baseline DR capabilities (your current state).

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Gaps between current and desired DR capability are quantified.

    Activities

    3.1 Conduct a tabletop exercise to determine current recovery procedures.

    3.2 Identify gaps between current and desired capabilities.

    3.3 Estimate likelihood and impact of failure of individual dependencies.

    Outputs

    Current achievable recovery timeline defined (i.e. the current state).

    RTO/RPO gaps identified.

    Critical single points of failure identified.

    4 Create a Project Roadmap to Close DR Gaps

    The Purpose

    Identify and prioritize projects to close DR gaps.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    DRP project roadmap defined that will reduce downtime and data loss to acceptable levels.

    Activities

    4.1 Determine what projects are required to close the gap between current and desired DR capability.

    4.2 Prioritize projects based on cost, effort, and impact on RTO/RPO reduction.

    4.3 Validate that the suggested projects will achieve the desired DR capability.

    Outputs

    Potential DR projects identified.

    DRP project roadmap defined.

    Desired-state incident response plan defined, and project roadmap validated.

    5 Establish a Framework for Documenting Your DRP, and Summarize Next Steps

    The Purpose

    Outline how to create concise, usable DRP documentation.

    Summarize workshop results. 

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A realistic and practical approach to documenting your DRP.

    Next steps documented. 

    Activities

    5.1 Outline a strategy for using flowcharts and checklists to create concise, usable documentation.

    5.2 Review Info-Tech’s DRP templates for creating system recovery procedures and a DRP summary document.

    5.3 Summarize the workshop results, including current potential downtime and action items to close gaps.

    Outputs

    Current-state and desired-state incident response plan flowcharts.

    Templates to create more detailed documentation where necessary.

    Executive communication deck that outlines current DR gaps, how to close those gaps, and recommended next steps.

    Further reading

    Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan

    Close the gap between your DR capabilities and service continuity requirements.

    ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

    An effective disaster recovery plan (DRP) is not just an insurance policy.

    "An effective DRP addresses common outages such as hardware and software failures, as well as regional events, to provide day-to-day service continuity. It’s not just insurance you might never cash in. Customers are also demanding evidence of an effective DRP, so organizations without a DRP risk business impact not only from extended outages but also from lost sales. If you are fortunate enough to have executive buy-in, whether it’s due to customer pressure or concern over potential downtime, you still have the challenge of limited time to dedicate to disaster recovery (DR) planning. Organizations need a practical but structured approach that enables IT leaders to create a DRP without it becoming their full-time job."

    Frank Trovato,

    Research Director, Infrastructure

    Info-Tech Research Group

    Is this research for you?

    This Research Is Designed For:

    • Senior IT management responsible for executing DR.
    • Organizations seeking to formalize, optimize, or validate an existing DRP.
    • Business continuity management (BCM) professionals leading DRP development.

    This Research Will Help You:

    • Create a DRP that is aligned with business requirements.
    • Prioritize technology enhancements based on DR requirements and risk-impact analysis.
    • Identify and address process and technology gaps that impact DR capabilities and day-to-day service continuity.

    This Research Will Also Assist:

    • Executives who want to understand the time and resource commitment required for DRP.
    • Members of BCM and crisis management teams who need to understand the key elements of an IT DRP.

    This Research Will Help Them:

    • Scope the time and effort required to develop a DRP.
    • Align business continuity, DR, and crisis management plans.

    Executive summary

    Situation

    • Any time a natural disaster or major IT outage occurs, it increases executive awareness and internal pressure to create a DRP.
    • Industry standards and government regulations are driving external pressure to develop business continuity and IT DR plans.
    • Customers are asking suppliers and partners to provide evidence that they have a workable DRP before agreeing to do business.

    Complication

    • Traditional DRP templates are onerous and result in a lengthy, dense plan that might satisfy auditors, but will not be effective in a crisis.
    • The myth that a DRP is only for major disasters leaves organizations vulnerable to more common incidents.
    • The growing use of outsourced infrastructure services has increased reliance on vendors to meet recovery timeline objectives.

    Resolution

    • Create an effective DRP by following a structured process to discover current capabilities and define business requirements for continuity:
      • Define appropriate objectives for service downtime and data loss based on business impact.
      • Document an incident response plan that captures all of the steps from event detection to data center recovery.
      • Create a DR roadmap to close gaps between current DR capabilities and recovery objectives.

    Info-Tech Insight

    1. At its core, DR is about ensuring service continuity. Create a plan that can be leveraged for both isolated and catastrophic events.
    2. Remember Murphy’s Law. Failure happens. Focus on improving overall resiliency and recovery, rather than basing DR on risk probability analysis.
    3. Cost-effective DR and service continuity starts with identifying what is truly mission critical so you can focus resources accordingly. Not all services require fast failover.

    An effective DRP is critical to reducing the cost of downtime

    If you don’t have an effective DRP when failure occurs, expect to face extended downtime and exponentially rising costs due to confusion and lack of documented processes.

    Image displayed is a graph that shows that delay in recovery causes exponential revenue loss.

    Potential Lost Revenue

    The impact of downtime tends to increase exponentially as systems remain unavailable (graph at left). A current, tested DRP will significantly improve your ability to execute systems recovery, minimizing downtime and business impact. Without a DRP, IT is gambling on its ability to define and implement a recovery strategy during a time of crisis. At the very least, this means extended downtime – potentially weeks or months – and substantial business impact.

    Adapted from: Philip Jan Rothstein, 2007

    Cost of Downtime for the Fortune 1000

    Cost of unplanned apps downtime per year: $1.25B to $2.5B.

    Cost of critical apps failure per hour: $500,000 to $1M.

    Cost of infrastructure failure per hour: $100,000.

    35% reported to have recovered within 12 hours.

    17% of infrastructure failures took more than 24 hours to recover.

    13% of application failures took more than 24 hours to recover.

    Source: Stephen Elliot, 2015

    Info-Tech Insight

    The cost of downtime is rising across the board, and not just for organizations that traditionally depend on IT (e.g. e-commerce). Downtime cost increase since 2010:

    Hospitality: 129% increase

    Transportation: 108% increase

    Media organizations: 104% increase

    An effective DRP also sets clear recovery objectives that align with system criticality to optimize spend

    The image displays a disaster recovery plan example, where different tiers are in place to support recovery in relation to time.

    Take a practical approach that creates a more concise and actionable DRP

    DR planning is not your full-time job, so it can’t be a resource- and time-intensive process.

    The Traditional Approach Info-Tech’s Approach

    Start with extensive risk and probability analysis.

    Challenge: You can’t predict every event that can occur, and this delays work on your actual recovery procedures.

    Focus on how to recover regardless of the incident.

    We know failure will happen. Focus on improving your ability to failover to a DR environment so you are protected regardless of what causes primary site failure.

    Build a plan for major events such as natural disasters.

    Challenge: Major destructive events only account for 12% of incidents while software/hardware issues account for 45%. The vast majority of incidents are isolated local events.

    An effective DRP improves day-to-day service continuity, and is not just for major events.

    Leverage DR planning to address both common (e.g. power/network outage or hardware failure) as well as major events. It must be documentation you can use, not shelfware.

    Create a DRP manual that provides step-by-step instructions that anyone could follow.

    Challenge: The result is lengthy, dense manuals that are difficult to maintain and hard to use in a crisis. The usability of DR documents has a direct impact on DR success.

    Create concise documentation written for technical experts.

    Use flowcharts, checklists, and diagrams. They are more usable in a crisis and easier to maintain. You aren’t going to ask a business user to recover your SQL Server databases, so you can afford to be concise.

    DR must be integrated with day-to-day incident management to ensure service continuity

    When a tornado takes out your data center, it’s an obvious DR scenario and the escalation towards declaring a disaster is straightforward.

    The challenge is to be just as decisive in less-obvious (and more common) DR scenarios such as a critical system hardware/software failure, and knowing when to move from incident management to DR. Don’t get stuck troubleshooting for days when you could have failed over in hours.

    Bridge the gap with clearly-defined escalation rules and criteria for when to treat an incident as a disaster.

    Image displays two graphs. The graph on the left measures the extent that service management processes account for disasters by the success meeting RTO and RPO. The graph on the right is a double bar graph that shows DRP being integrated and not integrated in the following categories: Incident Classifications, Severity Definitions, Incident Models, Escalation Procedures. These are measured based on the success meeting RTO and RPO.

    Source: Info-Tech Research Group; N=92

    Myth busted: The DRP is separate from day-to-day ops and incident management.

    The most common threats to service continuity are hardware and software failures, network outages, and power outages

    The image displayed is a bar graph that shows the common threats to service continuity. There are two areas of interest that have labels. The first is: 45% of service interruptions that went beyond maximum downtime guidelines set by the business were caused by software and hardware issues. The second label is: Only 12% of incidents were caused by major destructive events.

    Source: Info-Tech Research Group; N=87

    Info-Tech Insight

    Does this mean I don’t need to worry about natural disasters? No. It means DR planning needs to focus on overall service continuity, not just major disasters. If you ignore the more common but less dramatic causes of service interruptions, you are diminishing the business value of a DRP.

    Myth busted: DRPs are just for destructive events – fires, floods, and natural disasters.

    DR isn’t about identifying risks; it’s about ensuring service continuity

    The traditional approach to DR starts with an in-depth exercise to identify risks to IT service continuity and the probability that those risks will occur.

    Here’s why starting with a risk register is ineffective:

    • Odds are, you won’t think of every incident that might occur. If you think of twenty risks, it’ll be the twenty-first that gets you. If you try to guard against that twenty-first risk, you can quickly get into cartoonish scenarios and much more costly solutions.
    • The ability to failover to another site mitigates the risk of most (if not all) incidents (fire, flood, hardware failure, tornado, etc.). A risk and probability analysis doesn’t change the need for a plan that includes a failover procedure.

    Where risk is incorporated in this methodology:

    • Use known risks to further refine your strategy (e.g. if you are prone to hurricanes, plan for greater geographic separation between sites; ensure you have backups, in addition to replication, to mitigate the risk of ransomware).
    • Identify risks to your ability to execute DR (e.g. lack of cross-training, backups that are not tested) and take steps to mitigate those risks.

    Myth busted: A risk register is the critical first step to creating an effective DR plan.

    You can’t outsource accountability and you can’t assume your vendor’s DR capabilities meet your needs

    Outsourcing infrastructure services – to a cloud provider, co-location provider, or managed service provider (MSP) – can improve your DR and service continuity capabilities. For example, a large public cloud provider will generally have:

    • Redundant telecoms service providers, network infrastructure, power feeds, and standby power.
    • Round-the-clock infrastructure and security monitoring.
    • Multiple data centers in a given region, and options to replicate data and services across regions.

    Still, failure is inevitable – it’s been demonstrated multiple times1 through high-profile outages. When you surrender direct control of the systems themselves, it’s your responsibility to ensure the vendor can meet your DR requirements, including:

    • A DR site and acceptable recovery times for systems at that site.
    • An acceptable replication/backup schedule.

    Sources: Kyle York, 2016; Shaun Nichols, 2017; Stephen Burke, 2017

    Myth busted: I outsource infrastructure services so I don’t have to worry about DR. That’s my vendor’s responsibility.

    Choose flowcharts over process guides, checklists over procedures, and diagrams over descriptions

    IT DR is not an airplane disaster movie. You aren’t going to ask a business user to execute a system recovery, just like you wouldn’t really want a passenger with no flying experience to land a plane.

    In reality, you write a DR plan for knowledgeable technical staff, which allows you to summarize key details your staff already know. Concise, visual documentation is:

    • Quicker to create.
    • Easier to use.
    • Simpler to maintain.

    "Without question, 300-page DRPs are not effective. I mean, auditors love them because of the detail, but give me a 10-page DRP with contact lists, process flows, diagrams, and recovery checklists that are easy to follow."

    – Bernard Jones, MBCI, CBCP, CORP, Manager Disaster Recovery/BCP, ActiveHealth Management

    A graph is displayed. It shows a line graph where the DR success is higher by using flowcharts, checklists, and diagrams.

    Source: Info-Tech Research Group; N=95

    *DR Success is based on stated ability to meet recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs), and reported confidence in ability to consistently meet targets.

    Myth busted: A DRP must include every detail so anyone can execute recovery.

    A DRP is part of an overall business continuity plan

    A DRP is the set of procedures and supporting documentation that enables an organization to restore its core IT services (i.e. applications and infrastructure) as part of an overall business continuity plan (BCP), as described below. Use the templates, tools, and activities in this blueprint to create your DRP.

    Overall BCP
    IT DRP BCP for Each Business Unit Crisis Management Plan
    A plan to restore IT services (e.g. applications and infrastructure) following a disruption. This includes:
    • Identifying critical applications and dependencies.
    • Defining an appropriate (desired) recovery timeline based on a business impact analysis (BIA).
    • Creating a step-by-step incident response plan.
    A set of plans to resume business processes for each business unit. Info-Tech’s Develop a Business Continuity Plan blueprint provides a methodology for creating business unit BCPs as part of an overall BCP for the organization. A set of processes to manage a wide range of crises, from health and safety incidents to business disruptions to reputational damage. This includes emergency response plans, crisis communication plans, and the steps to invoke BC/DR plans when applicable. Info-Tech’s Implement Crisis Management Best Practices blueprint provides a structured approach to develop a crisis management process.

    Note: For DRP, we focus on business-facing IT services (as opposed to the underlying infrastructure), and then identify required infrastructure as dependencies (e.g. servers, databases, network).

    Take a practical but structured approach to creating a concise and effective DRP

    Image displayed shows the structure of this blueprint. It shows the structure of phases 1-4 and the related tools and templates for each phase.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

    Guided Implementation

    “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

    Workshop

    “We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

    Consulting

    “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Info-Tech advisory services deliver measurable value

    Info-Tech members save an average of $22,983 and 22 days by working with an Info-Tech analyst on DRP (based on client response data from Info-Tech Research Group’s Measured Value Survey, following analyst advisory on this blueprint).

    Why do members report value from analyst engagement?

    1. Expert advice on your specific situation to overcome obstacles and speed bumps.
    2. Structured project and guidance to stay on track.
    3. Project deliverables review to ensure the process is applied properly.

    Guided implementation overview

    Your trusted advisor is just a call away.

    Define DRP scope (Call 1)

    Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges. Identify applications/ systems to focus on first.

    Define current status and system dependencies (Calls 2-3)

    Assess current DRP maturity. Identify system dependencies.

    Conduct a BIA (Calls 4-6)

    Create an impact scoring scale and conduct a BIA. Identify RTO and RPO for each system.

    Recovery workflow (Calls 7-8)

    Create a recovery workflow based on tabletop planning. Identify gaps in recovery capabilities.

    Projects and action items (Calls 9-10)

    Identify and prioritize improvements. Summarize results and plan next steps.

    Your guided implementations will pair you with an advisor from our analyst team for the duration of your DRP project.

    Workshop overview

    Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

    Image displays the workshop overview for this blueprint. It is a workshop that runs for 4 days and covers various activities and produces many deliverables.

    End-user complaints distract from serious IT-based risks to business continuity

    Case Study

    Industry: Manufacturing
    Source: Info-Tech Research Group Client Engagement

    A global manufacturer with annual sales over $1B worked with Info-Tech to improve DR capabilities.

    DRP BIA

    Conversations with the IT team and business units identified the following impact of downtime over 24 hours:

    • Email: Direct Cost: $100k; Goodwill Impact Score: 8.5/16
    • ERP: Direct Cost: $1.35mm; Goodwill Impact Score: 12.5/16

    Tabletop Testing and Recovery Capabilities

    Reviewing the organization’s current systems recovery workflow identified the following capabilities:

    • Email: RTO: minutes, RPO: minutes
    • ERP: RTO: 14 hours, RPO: 24 hours

    Findings

    Because of end-user complaints, IT had invested heavily in email resiliency though email downtime had a relatively minimal impact on the business. After working through the methodology, it was clear that the business needed to provide additional support for critical systems.

    Insights at each step:

    Identify DR Maturity and System Dependencies

    Conduct a BIA

    Outline Incident Response and Recovery Workflow With Tabletop Exercises

    Mitigate Gaps and Risks

    Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan

    Phase 1

    Define DRP Scope, Current Status, and Dependencies

    Step 1.1: Set Scope, Kick-Off the DRP Project, and Create a Charter

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Establish a team for DR planning.
    • Retrieve and review existing, relevant documentation.
    • Create a project charter.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • DRP Coordinator
    • DRP Team (Key IT SMEs)
    • IT Managers

    Results and Insights

    • Set scope for the first iteration of the DRP methodology.
    • Don’t try to complete your DR and BCPs all at once.
    • Don’t bite off too much at once.

    Kick-off your DRP project

    You’re ready to start your DR project.

    This could be an annual review – but more likely, this is the first time you’ve reviewed the DR plan in years.* Maybe a failed audit might have provided a mandate for DR planning, or a real disaster might have highlighted gaps in DR capabilities. First, set appropriate expectations for what the project is and isn’t, in terms of scope, outputs, and resource commitments. Very few organizations can afford to hire a full-time DR planner, so it’s likely this won’t be your full-time job. Set objectives and timelines accordingly.

    Gather a team

    • Often, DR efforts are led by the infrastructure and operations leader. This person can act as the DRP coordinator or may delegate this role.
    • Key infrastructure subject-matter experts (SMEs) are usually part of the team and involved through the project.

    Find and review existing documentation

    • An existing DRP may have information you can re-purpose rather than re-create.
    • High-level architecture diagrams and network diagrams can help set scope (and will become part of your DR kit).
    • Current business-centric continuity of operations plans (COOPs) or BCPs are important to understand.

    Set specific, realistic objectives

    • Create a project charter (see next slide) to record objectives, timelines, and assumptions.
    *Only 20% of respondents to an Info-Tech Research Group survey (N=165) had a complete DRP; only 38% of respondents with a complete or mostly complete DRP felt it would be effective in a crisis.

    List DRP drivers and challenges

    1(a) Drivers and roadblocks

    Estimated Time: 30 minutes

    Identify the drivers and challenges to completing a functional DRP plan with the core DR team.

    DRP Drivers

    • Past outages (be specific):
      • Hardware and software failures
      • External network and power outages
      • Building damage
      • Natural disaster(s)
    • Audit findings
    • Events in the news
    • Other?

    DRP Challenges

    • Lack of time
    • Insufficient DR budget
    • Lack of executive support
    • No internal DRP expertise
    • Challenges making the case for DRP
    • Other?

    Write down insights from the meeting on flip-chart paper or a whiteboard and use the findings to inform your DRP project (e.g. challenges to address).

    Clarify expectations with a project charter

    1(b) DRP Project Charter Template

    DRP Project Charter Template components:

    Define project parameters, roles, and objectives, and clarify expectations with the executive team. Specific subsections are listed below and described in more detail in the remainder of this phase.

    • Project Overview: Includes objectives, deliverables, and scope. Leverage relevant notes from the “Project Drivers” brainstorming exercise (e.g. past outages and near misses which help make the case).
    • Governance and Management: Includes roles, responsibilities, and resource requirements.
    • Project Risks, Assumptions, and Constraints: Includes risks and mitigation strategies, as well as any assumptions and constraints.
    • Project Sign-Off: Includes IT and executive sign-off (if required).

    Note: Identify the initial team roles and responsibilities first so they can assist in defining the project charter.

    The image is a screenshot of the first page of the DRP Project Charter Template.

    Step 1.2: Assess Current State DRP Maturity

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Complete Info-Tech’s DRP Maturity Scorecard.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • DRP Coordinator
    • IT SMEs

    Results and Insights

    • Identify the current state of the organization’s DRP and continuity management. Set a baseline for improvement.
    • Discover where improvement is most needed to create an effective plan.

    Only 38% of IT departments believe their DRPs would be effective in a real crisis

    Even organizations with documented DRPs struggle to make them actionable.

    • Even when a DRP does become a priority (e.g. due to regulatory or customer drivers), the challenge is knowing where to start and having a methodical step-by-step process for doing the work. With no guide to plan and resource the project, it becomes work that you complete piecemeal when you aren’t working on other projects, or at night after the kids go to bed.
    • Far too many organizations create a document to satisfy auditors rather than creating a usable plan. People in this group often just want a fill-in-the-blanks template. What they will typically find is a template for the traditional 300-page manual that goes in a binder that sits on a shelf, is difficult to maintain, and is not effective in a crisis.
    Two bar graphs are displayed. The graph on the left shows that only 20% of survey respondents indicate they have a complete DRP. The graph on the right shows that 38% of those who have a mostly completed or full DRP actually feel it would be effective in a crisis.

    Use the DRP Maturity Scorecard to assess the current state of your DRP and identify areas to improve

    1(c) DRP Maturity Scorecard

    Info-Tech’s DRP Maturity Scorecard evaluates completion status and process maturity for a comprehensive yet practical assessment across three aspects of an effective DRP program – Defining Requirements, Implementation, and Maintenance.

    Image has three boxes. One is labelled Completion status, another below it is labelled Process Maturity. There is an addition sign in between them. With an arrow leading from both boxes is another box that is labelled DRP Maturity Assessment

    Completion Status: Reflects the progress made with each component of your DRP Program.

    Process Maturity: Reflects the consistency and quality of the steps executed to achieve your completion status.

    DRP Maturity Assessment: Each component (e.g. BIA) of your DRP Program is evaluated based on completion status and process maturity to provide an accurate holistic assessment. For example, if your BIA completion status is 4 out of 5, but process maturity is a 2, then requirements were not derived from a consistent defined process. The risk is inconsistent application prioritization and misalignment with actual business requirements.

    Step 1.3: Identify Applications, Systems, and Dependencies

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Identify systems, applications, and services, and the business units that use them.
    • Document applications, systems, and their dependencies in the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • DRP Coordinator
    • DRP Team

    Results and Insights

    • Identify core services and the applications that depend on them.
    • Add applications and dependencies to the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool.

    Select 5-10 services to get started on the DRP methodology

    1(d) High-level prioritization

    Estimated Time: 30 minutes

    Working through the planning process the first time can be challenging. If losing momentum is a concern, limit the BIA to a few critical systems to start.

    Run this exercise if you need a structured exercise to decide where to focus first and identify the business users you should ask for input on the impact of system downtime.

    1. On a whiteboard or flip-chart paper, list business units in a column on the left. List key applications/systems in a row at the top. Draw a grid.
    2. At a high level, review how applications are used by each unit. Take notes to keep track of any assumptions you make.
      • Add a ✓ if members of the unit use the application or system.
      • Add an ✱ if members of the unit are heavy users of the application or system and/or use it for time sensitive tasks.
      • Leave the box blank if the app isn’t used by this unit.
    3. Use the chart to prioritize systems to include in the BIA (e.g. systems marked with an *) but also include a few less-critical systems to illustrate DRP requirements for a range of systems.

    Image is an example of what one could complete from step 1(d). There is a table shown. In the column on the left lists sales, marketing, R&D, and Finance. In the top row, there is listed: dialer, ERP. CRM, Internet, analytics, intranet

    Application Notes
    CRM
    • Supports time-critical sales and billing processes.
    Dialer
    • Used for driving the sales-call queue, integration with CRM.

    Draw a high-level sketch of your environment

    1(e) Sketch your environment

    Estimated Time: 1-2 hours

    A high-level topology or architectural diagram is an effective way to identify dependencies, application ownership, outsourced services, hardware redundancies, and more.

    Note:

    • Network diagrams or high-level architecture diagrams help to identify dependencies and redundancies. Even a rough sketch is a useful reference tool for participants, and will be valuable documentation in the final DR plan.
    • Keep the drawings tidy. Visualize the final diagram before you start to draw on the whiteboard to help with spacing and placement.
    • Collaborate with relevant SMEs to identify dependencies. Keep the drawing high-level.
    • Illustrate connections between applications or components with lines. Use color coding to illustrate where applications are hosted (e.g. in-house, at a co-lo, in a cloud or MSP environment).
    Example of a high-level topology or architectural diagram

    Document systems and dependencies

    Collaborate with system SMEs to identify dependencies for each application or system. Document the dependencies in the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool (see image below)

    • When listing applications, focus on business-facing systems or services that business users will recognize and use terminology they’ll understand.
    • Group infrastructure components that support all other services as a single core infrastructure service to simplify dependency mapping (e.g. core router, virtual hosts, ID management, and DNS).
    • In general, each data center will have its own core infrastructure components. List each data center separately – especially if different services are hosted at each data center.
    • Be specific when documenting dependencies. Use existing asset tracking tables, discovery tools, asset management records, or configuration management tools to identify specific server names.
    • Core infrastructure dependencies, such as the network infrastructure, power supply, and centralized storage, will be a common set of dependencies for most applications, so group these into a separate category called “Core Infrastructure” to minimize repetition in your DR planning.
    • Document production components in the BIA tool. Capture in-production, redundant components performing the same work on a single dependency line. List standby systems in the notes.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    In general, visual documentation is easier to use in a crisis and easier to maintain over time. Use Info-Tech’s research to help build your own visual SOPs.

    Document systems and dependencies

    1(f) DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool – Record systems and dependencies

    A screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool.

    Stories from the field: Info-Tech clients find value in Phase 1 in the following ways

    An organization uncovers a key dependency that needed to be treated as a Tier 1 system

    Reviewing the entire ecosystem for applications identified key dependencies that were previously considered non-critical. For example, a system used to facilitate secure data transfers was identified as a key dependency for payroll and other critical business processes, and elevated to Tier 1.

    A picture’s worth a thousand words (and 1600 servers)

    Drawing a simple architectural diagram was an invaluable tool to identify key dependencies and critical systems, and to understand how systems and dependencies were interconnected. The drawing was an aha moment for IT and business stakeholders trying to make sense of their 1600-server environment.

    Make the case for DRP

    A member of the S&P 500 used Info-Tech’s DRP Maturity Scorecard to provide a reliable objective assessment and make the case for improvements to the board of directors.

    State government agency initiates a DRP project to complement an existing COOP

    Info-Tech's DRP Project Charter enabled the CIO to clarify their DRP project scope and where it fit into their overall COOP. The project charter example provided much of the standard copy – objectives, scope, project roles, methodology, etc. – required to outline the project.

    Phase 1: Insights and accomplishments

    Image has two screenshots from Info-Tech's Phase 1 tools and templates.

    Created a charter and identified current maturity

    Image has two screenshots. One is from Info-Tech's DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool and the other is from the example in step 1(d).

    Identified systems and dependencies for the BIA

    Summary of Accomplishments:

    • Created a DRP project charter.
    • Completed the DRP Maturity Scorecard and identified current DRP maturity.
    • Prioritized applications/systems for a first pass through DR planning.
    • Identified dependencies for each application and system.

    Up Next: Conduct a BIA to establish recovery requirements

    Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan

    Phase 2

    Conduct a BIA to Determine Acceptable RTOs and RPOs

    Step 2.1: Define an Objective Impact Scoring Scale

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Create a scoring scale to measure the business impact of application and system downtime.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • DRP Coordinator
    • DRP Team

    Results and Insights

    • Use a scoring scale tied to multiple categories of real business impact to develop a more objective assessment of application and system criticality.

    Align capabilities to appropriate and acceptable RTOs and RPOs with a BIA

    Too many organizations avoid a BIA because they perceive it as onerous or unneeded. A well-managed BIA is straightforward and the benefits are tangible.

    A BIA enables you to identify appropriate spend levels, maintain executive support, and prioritize DR planning for a more successful outcome. Info-Tech has found that a BIA has a measurable impact on the organization’s ability to set appropriate objectives and investment goals.

    Two bar graphs are depicted. The one on the left shows 93% BIA impact on appropriate RTOs. The graph on the right shows that with BIA, there is 86% on BIA impact on appropriate spending.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Business input is important, but don’t let a lack of it delay a draft BIA. Complete a draft based on your knowledge of the business. Create a draft within IT, and use it to get input from business leaders. It’s easier to edit estimates than to start from scratch; even weak estimates are far better than a blank sheet.

    Pick impact categories that are relevant to your business to develop a holistic view of business impact

    Direct Cost Impact Categories

    • Revenue: permanently lost revenue.
      • Example: one third of daily sales are lost due to a website failure.
    • Productivity: lost productivity.
      • Example: finance staff can’t work without the accounting system.
    • Operating costs: additional operating costs.
      • Example: temporary staff are needed to re-key data.
    • Financial penalties: fines/penalties that could be incurred due to downtime.
      • Example: failure to meet contractual service-level agreements (SLAs) for uptime results in financial penalties.

    Goodwill, Compliance, and Health and Safety Categories

    • Stakeholder goodwill: lost customer, staff, or business partner goodwill due to harm, frustration, etc.
      • Example: customers can’t access needed services because the website is down.
      • Example: a payroll system outage delays paychecks for all staff.
      • Example: suppliers are paid late because the purchasing system is down.
    • Compliance, health, and safety:
      • Example: financial system downtime results in a missed tax filing.
      • Example: network downtime disconnects security cameras.

    Info-Tech Insight

    You don’t have to include every impact category in your BIA. Include categories that could affect your business. Defer or exclude other categories. For example, the bulk of revenue for governmental organizations comes from taxes, which won’t be permanently lost if IT systems fail.

    Modify scoring criteria to help you measure the impact of downtime

    The scoring scales define different types of business impact (e.g. costs, lost goodwill) using a common four-point scale and 24-hour timeframe to simplify BIA exercises and documentation.

    Use the suggestions below as a guide as you modify scoring criteria in the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool:

    • All the direct cost categories (revenue, productivity, operating costs, financial penalties) require the user to define only a maximum value; the tool will populate the rest of the criteria for that category. Use the suggestions below to find the maximum scores for each of the direct cost categories:
      • Revenue: Divide total revenue for the previous year by 365 to estimate daily revenue. Assume this is the most revenue you could lose in a day, and use this number as the top score.
      • Loss of Productivity: Divide fully-loaded labor costs for the organization by 365 to estimate daily productivity costs. Use this as a proxy measure for the work lost if all business stopped for one day.
      • Increased Operating Costs: Isolate this to known additional costs that result from a disruption (e.g. costs for overtime or temporary staff). Estimate the maximum cost for the organization.
      • Financial Penalties: Isolate this to known financial penalties (e.g. due to failure to meet SLAs or compliance requirements). Use the estimated maximum penalty as the highest value on the scale.
    • Impact on Goodwill: Use an estimate of the percentage of all stakeholders impacted to assess goodwill impact.
    • Impact on Compliance; Impact on Health and Safety: The BIA tool contains default scoring criteria that account for the severity of the impact, the likelihood of occurrence, and in the case of compliance, whether a grace period is available. Use this scale as-is, or adapt this scale to suit your needs.

    Modify the default scoring scale in the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool to reflect your organization

    2(a) DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool – Scoring criteria


    A screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool's scoring criteria

    Step 2.2: Estimate the Impact of Downtime

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Identify the business impact of service/system/application downtime.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • DRP Coordinator
    • DRP Team
    • IT Service SMEs
    • Business-Side Technology Owners (optional)

    Results and Insights

    • Apply the scoring scale to develop a more objective assessment of the business impact of downtime.
    • Create criticality tiers based on the business impact of downtime.

    Estimate the impact of downtime for each system and application

    2(b) Estimate the impact of systems downtime

    Estimated Time: 3 hours

    On tab 3 of the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool indicate the costs of downtime, as described below:

    1. Have a copy of the “Scoring Criteria” tab available to use as a reference (e.g. printed or on a second display). In tab 3 use the drop-down menu to assign a score of 0 to 4 based on levels of impact defined in the “Scoring Criteria” tab.
    2. Work horizontally across all categories for a single system or application. This will familiarize you with your scoring scales for all impact categories, and allow you to modify the scoring scales if needed before you proceed much further.
    3. For example, if a core call center phone system was down:

    • Loss of Revenue would be the portion of sales revenue generated through the call center. This might score a 1 or 2 depending on the percent of sales that are processed by the call center.
    • The Impact on Customers might be a 2 or 3 depending on the extent that some customers might be using the call center to receive support or purchase new products or services.
    • The Legal/Regulatory Compliance and Health or Safety Risk might be a 0, as the call center has no impact in either area.
  • Next, work vertically across all applications or systems within a single impact category. This will allow you to compare scores within the category as you create them to ensure internal consistency.
  • Add impact scores to the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool

    2(c) DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool

    Screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool

    Record business reasons and assumptions that drive BIA scores

    2(d) DRP BIA Scoring Context Example

    Info-Tech suggests that IT leadership and staff identify the impact of downtime first to create a version that you can then validate with relevant business owners. As you work through the BIA as a team, have a notetaker record assumptions you make to help you explain the results and drive business engagement and feedback.

    Some common assumptions:

    • You can’t schedule a disaster, so Info-Tech suggests you assume the worst possible timing for downtime. Base the impact of downtime on the worst day for a disaster (e.g. year-end close, payroll run).
    • Record assumptions made about who and what are impacted by system downtime.
    • Record assumptions made about impact severity.
    • If you deviate from the scoring scale, or if a particular impact doesn’t fit well into the defined scoring scale, document the exception.

    Screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP BIA Scoring Context Example

    Use Info-Tech’s DRP BIA Scoring Context Example as a note-taking template.

    Info-Tech Insight

    You can’t build a perfect scoring scale. It’s fine to make reasonable assumptions based on your judgment and knowledge of the business. Just write down your assumptions. If you don’t write them down, you’ll forget how you arrived at that conclusion.

    Assign a criticality rating based on total direct and indirect costs of downtime

    2(e) DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool – Assign criticality tiers

    Once you’ve finished estimating the impact of downtime, use the following rough guideline to create an initial sort of applications into Tiers 1, 2, and 3.

    1. In general, sort applications based on the Total Impact on Goodwill, Compliance, and Safety first.
      • An effective tactic for a quick sort: assign a Tier 1 rating where scores are 50% or more of the highest total score, Tier 2 where scores are between 25% and 50%, and Tier 3 where scores are below 25%. Some organizations will also include a Tier 0 for the highest-scoring systems.
      • Then review and validate these scores and assignments.
    2. Next, consider the Total Cost of Downtime.
      • The Total Cost is calculated by the tool based on the Scoring Criteria in tab 2 and the impact scores on tab 3.
      • Decide if the total cost impact justifies increasing the criticality rating (e.g. from Tier 2 to Tier 1 due to high cost impact).
    3. Review the assigned impact scores and tiers to check that they’re in alignment. If you need to make an exception, document why. Keep exceptions to a minimum.

    Example: Highest total score is 12

    Screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool

    Step 2.3: Determine Acceptable RTO/RPO Targets

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Review the “Debate Space” approach to setting RTO and RPO (recovery targets).
    • Set preliminary RTOs and RPOs by criticality tier.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • DRP Coordinator
    • DRP Team

    Results and Insights

    • Align recovery targets with the business impact of downtime and data loss.

    Use the “Debate Space” approach to align RTOs and RPOs with the impact of downtime

    The business must validate acceptable and appropriate RTOs and RPOs, but IT can use the guidelines below to set an initial estimate.

    Right-size recovery.

    A shorter RTO typically requires higher investment. If a short period of downtime has minimal impact, setting a low RTO may not be justifiable. As downtime continues, impact begins to increase exponentially to a point where downtime is intolerable – an acceptable RTO must be shorter than this. Apply the same thinking to RPOs – how much data loss is unnoticeable? How much is intolerable?

    A diagram to show the debate space in relation to RTOs and RPOs

    The “Debate Space” is between minimal impact and maximum tolerance for downtime.

    Estimate appropriate, acceptable RTOs and RPOs for each tier

    2(f) Set recovery targets

    Estimated Time: 30 minutes

    RTO and RPO tiers simplify management by setting similar recovery goals for systems and applications with similar criticality.

    Use the “Debate Space” approach to set appropriate and acceptable targets.

    1. For RTO, establish a recovery time range that is appropriate based on impact.
      • Overall, the RTO tiers might be 0-4 hours for gold, 4-24 hours for silver, and 24-48 hours for bronze.
    2. RPOs reflect target data protection measures.
      • Identify the lowest RPO within a tier and make that the standard.
      • For example, RPO for gold data might be five minutes, silver might be four hours, and bronze might be one day.
      • Use this as a guideline. RPO doesn’t always align perfectly with RTO tiers.
    3. Review RTOs and RPOs and make sure they accurately reflect criticality.

    Info-Tech Insight

    In general, the more critical the system, the shorter the RPO. But that’s not always the case. For example, a service bus might be Tier 1, but if it doesn’t store any data, RPO might be longer than other Tier 1 systems. Some systems may have a different RPO than most other systems in that tier. As long as the targets are acceptable to the business and appropriate given the impact, that’s okay.

    Add recovery targets to the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool

    2(g) DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool – Document recovery objectives

    A screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool – Document recovery objectives

    Stories from the field: Info-Tech clients find value in Phase 2 in the following ways

    Most organizations discover something new about key applications, or the way stakeholders use them, when they work through the BIA and review the results with stakeholders. For example:

    Why complete a BIA? There could be a million reasons

    • A global manufacturer completed the DRP BIA exercise. When email went down, Service Desk phones lit up until it was resolved. That grief led to a high availability implementation for email. However, the BIA illustrated that ERP downtime was far more impactful.
    • ERP downtime would stop production lines, delay customer orders, and ultimately cost the business a million dollars a day.
    • The BIA results clearly showed that the ERP needed to be prioritized higher, and required business support for investment.

    Move from airing grievances to making informed decisions

    The DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool helped structure stakeholder consultations on DR requirements for a large university IT department. Past consultations had become an airing of grievances. Using objective impact scores helped stakeholders stay focused and make informed decisions around appropriate RTOs and RPOs.

    Phase 2: Insights and accomplishments

    Screenshots of the tools and templates from this phase.

    Estimated the business impact of downtime

    Screenshot of a tools from this phase

    Set recovery targets

    Summary of Accomplishments

    • Created a scoring scale tied to different categories of business impact.
    • Applied the scoring scale to estimate the business impact of system downtime.
    • Identified appropriate, acceptable RTOs and RPOs.

    Up Next:Conduct a tabletop planning exercise to establish current recovery capabilities

    Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan

    Phase 3

    Identify and Address Gaps in the Recovery Workflow

    Step 3.1: Determine Current Recovery Workflow

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Run a tabletop exercise.
    • Outline the steps for the initial response (notification, assessment, disaster declaration) and systems recovery (i.e. document your recovery workflow).
    • Identify any gaps and risks in your initial response and systems recovery.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • DRP Coordinator
    • IT Infrastructure SMEs (for systems in scope)
    • Application SMEs (for systems in scope)

    Results and Insights

    • Use a repeatable practical exercise to outline and document the steps you would use to recover systems in the event of a disaster, as well as identify gaps and risks to address.
    • This is also a knowledge-sharing opportunity for your team, and a practical means to get their insights, suggestions, and recovery knowledge down on paper.

    Tabletop planning: an effective way to test and document your recovery workflow

    In a tabletop planning exercise, the DRP team walks through a disaster scenario to map out what should happen at each stage, and effectively defines a high-level incident response plan (i.e. recovery workflow).

    Tabletop planning had the greatest impact on meeting recovery objectives (RTOs/RPOs) among survey respondents.

    A bar graph is displayed that shows that tabletop planning has the greatest impact on meeting recovery objectives (RTOs/RPOs) among survey respondents.

    *Note: Relative importance indicates the contribution an individual testing methodology, conducted at least annually, had on predicting success meeting recovery objectives, when controlling for all other types of tests in a regression model. The relative-importance values have been standardized to sum to 100%.

    Success was based on the following items:

    • RTOs are consistently met.
    • IT has confidence in the ongoing ability to meet RTOs.
    • RPOs are consistently met.
    • IT has confidence in the ongoing ability to meet RPOs.

    Why is tabletop planning so effective?

    • It enables you to play out a wider range of scenarios than technology-based testing (e.g. full-scale, parallel) due to cost and complexity factors.
    • It is non-intrusive, so it can be executed more frequently than other testing methodologies.
    • It easily translates into the backbone of your recovery documentation, as it allows you to review all aspects of your recovery plan.

    Focus first on IT DR

    Your DRP is IT contingency planning. It is not crisis management or BCP.

    The goal is to define a plan to restore applications and systems following a disruption. For your first tabletop exercise, Info-Tech recommends you use a non-life-threatening scenario that requires at least a temporary relocation of your data center (i.e. failing over to a DR site/environment). Assume a gas leak or burst water pipe renders the data center inaccessible. Power is shut off and IT must failover systems to another location. Once you create the master procedure, review the plan to ensure it addresses other scenarios.

    Info-Tech Insight

    When systems fail, you are faced with two high-level options: failover or recover in place. If you document the plan to failover systems to another location, you’ll have documented the core of your DR procedures. This differs from traditional scenario planning where you define separate plans for different what-if scenarios. The goal is one plan that can be adapted to different scenarios, which reduces the effort to build and maintain your DRP.

    Conduct a tabletop planning exercise to outline DR procedures in your current environment

    3(a) Tabletop planning

    Estimated Time: 2-3 hours

    For each high-level recovery step, do the following:

    1. On white cue cards:
      • Record the step.
      • Indicate the task owner (if required for clarity).
      • Note time required to complete the step. After the exercise, use this to build a running recovery time where 00:00 is when the incident occurred.
    2. On yellow cue cards, document gaps in people, process, and technology requirements to complete the step.
    3. On red cue cards, indicate risks (e.g. no backup person for a key staff member).
    An example is shown on what can be done during step 3(a). Three cue cards are showing in white, yellow, and red.

    Do:

    • Review the complete workflow from notification all the way to user acceptance testing.
    • Keep focused; stay on task and on time.
    • Revisit each step and record gaps and risks (and known solutions, but don’t dwell on this).
    • Revise and improve the plan with task owners.

    Don't:

    • Get weighed down by tools.
    • Document the details right away – stick to the high-level plan for the first exercise.
    • Try to find solutions to every gap/risk as you go. Save in-depth research/discussion for later.

    Flowchart the current-state incident response plan (i.e. document the recovery workflow)

    3(b) DRP Recovery Workflow Template and Case Study: Practical, Right-Sized DRP

    Why use flowcharts?

    • Flowcharts provide an at-a-glance view, ideal for disaster scenarios where pressure is high and quick upward communication is necessary.
    • For experienced staff, a high-level reminder of key steps is sufficient.

    Use the completed tabletop planning exercise results to build this workflow.

    "We use flowcharts for our declaration procedures. Flowcharts are more effective when you have to explain status and next steps to upper management." – Assistant Director, IT Operations, Healthcare Industry

    Source: Info-Tech Research Group Interview

    Screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP Recovery Workflow Template

    For a formatted template you can use to capture your plan, see Info-Tech’s DRP Recovery Workflow Template.

    For a completed example of tabletop planning results, review Info-Tech’s Case Study: Practical, Right-Sized DRP.

    Identify RPA

    What’s my RPA? Consider the following case:

    • Once a week, a full backup is taken of the complete ERP system and is transferred over the WAN to a secondary site 250 miles away, where it is stored on disk.
    • Overnight, an incremental backup is taken of the day’s changes, and is transferred to the same secondary site, and also stored on disk.
    • During office hours, the SAN takes a snapshot of changes which are kept on local storage (information on the accounting system usually only changes during office hours).
    • So what’s the RPA? One hour (snapshots), one day (incrementals), or one week (full backups)?

    When identifying RPA, remember the following:

    You are planning for a disaster scenario, where on-site systems may be inaccessible and any copies of data taken during the disaster may fail, be corrupt, or never make it out of the data center (e.g. if the network fails before the backup file ships). In the scenario above, it seems likely that off-site incremental backups could be restored, leading to a 24-hour RPA. However, if there were serious concerns about the reliability of the daily incrementals, the RPA could arguably be based on the weekly full backups.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    The RPA is a commitment to the maximum data you would lose in a DR scenario with current capabilities (people, process, and technology). Pick a number you can likely achieve. List any situations where you couldn’t meet this RPA, and identify those for a risk tolerance discussion. In the example above, complete loss of the primary SAN would also mean losing the snapshots, so the last good copy of the data could be up to 24-hours old.

    Add recovery actuals (RTA/RPA) to your copy of the BIA

    3(c) DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool– Recovery actuals

    On the “Impact Analysis” tab in the DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool, enter the estimated maximum downtime and data loss in the RTA and RPA columns.

    1. Estimate the RTA based on the required time for complete recovery. Review your recovery workflow to identify this timeline. For example, if the notification, assessment, and declaration process takes two hours, and systems recovery requires most of a day, the estimated RTA could be 24 hours.
    2. Estimate the RPA based on the longest interval between copies of the data being shipped offsite. For example, if data on a particular system is backed up offsite once per day, and the onsite system was destroyed just before that backup began, the entire day’s data could be lost and estimated RPA could be 24 hours. Note: Enter 9999 to indicate that data is unrecoverable.

    A screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool – Recovery actuals

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    It’s okay to round numbers to the nearest shift, day, or week for simplicity (e.g. 24 hours rather than 22.5 hours, or 8 hours rather than 7.25 hours).

    Test the recovery workflow against additional scenarios

    3(d) Workflow review

    Estimated Time: 1 hour

    Review your recovery workflow with a different scenario in mind.

    • Work from and update the soft copy of your recovery workflow.
    • Would any steps be different if the scenario changes? If yes, capture the different flow with a decision diamond. Identify any new gaps or risks you encounter with red and yellow cards. Use as few decision diamonds as possible.

    Screenshot of testing the workflow against the additional scenarios

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    As you start to consider scenarios where injuries or loss of life are a possibility, remember that health and safety risks are the top priority in a crisis. If there’s a fire in the data center, evacuating the building is the first priority, even if that means foregoing a graceful shut down. For more details on emergency response and crisis management, see Implement Crisis Management Best Practices.

    Consider additional IT disaster scenarios

    3(e) Thought experiment – Review additional scenarios

    Walk through your recovery workflow in the context of additional, different scenarios to ensure there are no gaps. Collaborate with your DR team to identify changes that might be required, and incorporate these changes in the plan.

    Scenario Type Considerations
    Isolated hardware/software failure
    • Failover to the DR site may not be necessary (or only for affected systems).
    Power outage or network outage
    • Do you have standby power? Do you have network redundancy?
    Local hazard (e.g. chemical leak, police incident)
    • Systems might be accessible remotely, but hands-on maintenance will be required eventually.
    • An alternate site is required for service continuity.
    Equipment/building damage (e.g. fire, roof collapse)
    • Staff injuries or loss of life are a possibility.
    • Equipment may need repair or replacement (vendor involvement).
    • An alternate site is required for service continuity.
    Regional natural disasters
    • Staff injuries or loss of life are a possibility.
    • Utilities may be affected (power, running water, etc.).
    • Expect staff to take care of their families first before work.
    • A geographically distant alternate site may be required for service continuity.

    Step 3.2: Identify and Prioritize Projects to Close Gaps

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Analyze the gaps that were identified from the maturity scorecard, tabletop planning exercise, and the RTO/RPO gaps analysis.
    • Brainstorm solutions to close gaps and mitigate risks.
    • Determine a course of action to close these gaps. Prioritize each project. Create a project implementation timeline.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • DRP Coordinator
    • IT Infrastructure SMEs

    Results and Insights

    • Prioritized list of projects and action items that can improve DR capabilities.
    • Often low-cost, low-effort quick wins are identified to mitigate at least some gaps/risks. Higher-cost, higher-effort projects can be part of a longer-term IT strategy. Improving service continuity is an ongoing commitment.

    Brainstorm solutions to address gaps and risk

    3(f) Solutioning

    Estimated Time: 1.5 hours

    1. Review each of the risk and gap cards from the tabletop exercise.
    2. As a group, brainstorm ideas to address gaps, mitigate risks, and improve resiliency. Write the list of ideas on a whiteboard or flip-chart paper. The solutions can range from quick-wins and action items to major capital investments.
    3. Try to avoid debates about feasibility at this point – that should happen later. The goal is to get all ideas on the board.

    An example of how to complete Activity 3(f). Three cue cards showing various steps are attached by arrows to steps on a whiteboard.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    It’s about finding ways to solve the problem, not about solving the problem. When you’re brainstorming solutions to problems, don’t stop with the first idea, even if the solution seems obvious. The first idea isn’t always the best or only solution; other ideas can expand on and improve that first idea.

    Select an optimal DR deployment model from a world of choice

    There are many options for a DR deployment. What makes sense for you?

    • Sifting through the options for a DR site can be overwhelming. Simplify by eliminating deployment models that aren’t a good fit for your requirements or organization using Info-Tech’s research.
    • Someone will ask you about DR in the cloud. Cut to the chase and evaluate cloud for fit with your organization’s current capabilities and requirements. Read about the 10 Secrets for Successful DR in the Cloud.
    • Selecting and deploying a DR site is an exercise in risk mitigation. IT’s role is to advise the business on options to address the risk of not having a DR site, including cost and effort estimates. The business must then decide how to manage risk. Build total cost of ownership (TCO) estimates and evaluate possible challenges and risks for each option.

    Is it practical to invest in greater geo-redundancy that meets RTOs and RPOs during a widespread event?

    Info-Tech suggests you consider events that impact both sites, and your risk tolerance for that impact. Outline the impact of downtime at a high level if both the primary and secondary site were affected. Research how often events severe enough to have impacted both your primary and secondary sites have occurred in the past. What’s the business tolerance for this type of event?

    A common strategy: have a primary and DR site that are close enough to support low RPO/RTO, but far enough away to mitigate the impact of known regional events. Back up data to a remote third location as protection against a catastrophic event.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Approach site selection as a project. Leverage Select an Optimal Disaster Recovery Deployment Model to structure your own site-selection project.

    Set up the DRP Roadmap Tool

    3(g) DRP Roadmap Tool – Set up tool

    Use the DRP Roadmap Tool to create a high-level roadmap to plan and communicate DR action items and initiatives. Determine the data you’ll use to define roadmap items.

    Screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP Roadmap Tool

    Plan next steps by estimating timeline, effort, priority, and more

    3(h) DRP Roadmap Tool – Describe roadmap items

    A screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP Roadmap Tool to show how to describe roadmap items

    Review and communicate the DRP Roadmap Tool

    3(i) DRP Roadmap Tool – View roadmap chart

    A screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP Roadmap Tool's Roadmap tab

    Step 3.3: Review the Future State Recovery Process

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Update the recovery workflow to outline your future recovery procedure.
    • Summarize findings from DR exercises and present the results to the project sponsor and other interested executives.

    This step involves the following participants:

    • DRP Coordinator
    • IT SMEs (Future State Recovery Flow)
    • DR Project Sponsor

    Results and Insights

    • Summarize results from DR planning exercises to make the case for needed DR investment.

    Outline your future state recovery flow

    3(j) Update the recovery workflow to outline response and recovery in the future

    Estimated Time: 30 minutes

    Outline your expected future state recovery flow to demonstrate improvements once projects and action items have been completed.

    1. Create a copy of your DRP recovery workflow in a new tab in Visio.
    2. Delete gap and risk cards that are addressed by proposed projects. Consolidate or eliminate steps that would be simplified or streamlined in the future if projects are implemented.
    3. Create a short-, medium-, and long-term review of changes to illustrate improvements over time to the project roadmap.
    4. Update this workflow as you implement and improve DR capabilities.

    Screenshot of the recovery workflow

    Validate recovery targets and communicate actual recovery capabilities

    3(k) Validate findings, present recommendations, secure budget

    Estimated Time: time required will vary

    1. Interview managers or process owners to validate RTO, RPO, and business impact scores.Use your assessment of “heavy users” of particular applications (picture at right) to remind you which business users you should include in the interview process.
    2. Present an overview of your findings to the management team.Use Info-Tech’s DRP Recap and Results Template to summarize your findings.
    3. Take projects into the budget process.With the management team aware of the rationale for investment in DRP, build the business case and secure budget where needed.

    Present DRP findings and make the case for needed investment

    3(I) DRP Recap and Results Template

    Create a communication deck to recap key findings for stakeholders.

    • Write a clear problem statement. Identify why you did this project (what problem you’re solving).
    • Clearly state key findings, insights, and recommendations.
    • Leverage the completed tools and templates to populate the deck. Callouts throughout the template presentation will direct you to take and populate screenshots throughout the document.
    • Use the presentation to communicate key findings to, and gather feedback from, business unit managers, executives, and IT staff.
    Screenshots of Info-Tech's DRP Recap and Results Template

    Stories from the field: Info-Tech clients find value in Phase 3 in the following ways

    Tabletop planning is an effective way to discover gaps in recovery capabilities. Identify issues in the tabletop exercise so you can manage them before disaster strikes. For example:

    Back up a second…

    A client started to back up application data offsite. To minimize data transfer and storage costs, the systems themselves weren’t backed up. Working through the restore process at the DR site, the DBA realized 30 years of COBOL and SQR code – critical business functionality – wasn’t backed up offsite.

    Net… work?

    A 500-employee professional services firm realized its internet connection could be a significant roadblock to recovery. Without internet, no one at head office could access critical cloud systems. The tabletop exercise identified this recovery bottleneck and helped prioritize the fix on the roadmap.

    Someone call a doctor!

    Hospitals rely on their phone systems for system downtime procedures. A tabletop exercise with a hospital client highlighted that if the data center were damaged, the phone system would likely be damaged as well. Identifying this provided more urgency to the ongoing VOIP migration.

    The test of time

    A small municipality relied on a local MSP to perform systems restore, but realized it had never tested the restore procedure to identify RTA. Contacting the MSP to review capabilities became a roadmap item to address this risk.

    Phase 3: Insights and accomplishments

    Screenshot of Info-Tech's DRP recovery workflow template

    Outlined the DRP response and risks to recovery

    Screenshots of activities completed related to brainstorming risk mitigation measures.

    Brainstormed risk mitigation measures

    Summary of Accomplishments

    • Planned and documented your DR incident response and systems recovery workflow.
    • Identified gaps and risks to recovery and incident management.
    • Brainstormed and identified projects and action items to mitigate risks and close gaps.

    Up Next: Leverage the core deliverables to complete, extend, and maintain your DRP

    Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan

    Phase 4

    Complete, Extend, and Maintain Your DRP

    Phase 4: Complete, Extend, and Maintain Your DRP

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Identify progress made on your DRP by reassessing your DRP maturity.
    • Prioritize the highest value major initiatives to complete, extend, and maintain your DRP.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • DRP Coordinator
    • Executive Sponsor

    Results and Insights

    • Communicate the value of your DRP by demonstrating progress against items in the DRP Maturity Scorecard.
    • Identify and prioritize future major initiatives to support the DRP, and the larger BCP.

    Celebrate accomplishments, plan for the future

    Congratulations! You’ve completed the core DRP deliverables and made the case for investment in DR capabilities. Take a moment to celebrate your accomplishments.

    This milestone is an opportunity to look back and look forward.

    • Look back: measure your progress since you started to build your DRP. Revisit the assessments completed in phase 1, and assess the change in your overall DRP maturity.
    • Look forward: prioritize future initiatives to complete, extend, and maintain your DRP. Prioritize initiatives that are the highest impact for the least requirement of effort and resources.

    We have completed the core DRP methodology for key systems:

    • BIA, recovery objectives, high-level recovery workflow, and recovery actuals.
    • Identify key tasks to meet recovery objectives.

    What could we do next?

    • Repeat the core methodology for additional systems.
    • Identify a DR site to meet recovery requirements, and review vendor DR capabilities.
    • Create a summary DRP document including requirements, capabilities, and change procedures.
    • Create a test plan and detailed recovery documentation.
    • Coordinate the creation of BCPs.
    • Integrate DR in other key operational processes.

    Revisit the DRP Maturity Scorecard to measure progress and identify remaining areas to improve

    4(a) DRP Maturity Scorecard – Reassess your DRP program maturity

    1. Find the copy of the DRP Maturity Scorecard you completed previously. Save a second copy of the completed scorecard in the same folder.
    2. Update scoring where you have improved your DRP documentation or capabilities.
    3. Review the new scores on tab 3. Compare the new scores to the original scores.

    Screenshot of DRP Maturity Assessment Results

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Use the completed, updated DRP Maturity Scorecard to demonstrate the value of your continuity program, and to help you decide where to focus next.

    Prioritize major initiatives to complete, extend, and maintain the DRP

    4(b) Prioritize major initiatives

    Estimated Time: 2 hours

    Prioritize major initiatives that mitigate significant risk with the least cost and effort.

    1. Use the scoring criteria below to evaluate risk, effort, and cost for potential initiatives. Modify the criteria if required for your organization. Write this out on a whiteboard or flip-chart paper.
    2. Assign a score from 1 to 3. Multiply the scores for each initiative together for an aggregate score. In general, prioritize initiatives with higher scores.
    Score A: How significant are the risks this initiative will mitigate? B: How easily can we complete this initiative? C: How cost-effective is this initiative?
    3: High Critical impact on +50% of stakeholders, or major impact to compliance posture, or significant health/safety risk. One sprint, can be completed by a few individuals with minor supervision. Within the IT discretionary budget.
    2: Medium Impacts <50% of stakeholders, or minor impact on compliance, or degradation to health or safety controls. One quarter, and/or some increased effort required, some risk to completion. Requires budget approval from finance.
    1: Low Impacts limited to <25% of stakeholders, no impact on compliance posture or health/safety. One year, and/or major vendor or organizational challenges. Requires budget approval from the board of directors.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    You can use a similar scoring exercise to prioritize and schedule high-benefit, low-effort, low-cost items identified in the roadmap in phase 3.

    Example: Prioritize major initiatives

    4(b) Prioritize major initiatives continued

    Write out the table on a whiteboard (record the results in a spreadsheet for reference). In the case below, IT might decide to work on repeating the core methodology first as they create the active testing plans, and tackle process changes later.

    Initiative A: How significant are the risks this initiative will mitigate? B: How easily can we complete this initiative? C: How cost-effective is this initiative? Aggregate score (A x B x C)
    Repeat the core methodology for all systems 2 – will impact some stakeholders, no compliance or safety impact. 2 – will require about 3 months, no significant complications. 3 – No cost. 12
    Add DR to project mgmt. and change mgmt. 1 – Mitigates some recovery risks over the long term. 1 – Requires extensive consultation and process review. 3 – No cost. 3
    Active failover testing on plan 2 – Mitigates some risks; documentation and cross training is already in place. 2 – Requires 3-4 months of occasional effort to prepare for test. 2 – May need to purchase some equipment before testing. 8

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Find a pace that allows you to keep momentum going, but also leaves enough time to act on the initial findings, projects, and action items identified in the DRP Roadmap Tool. Include these initiatives in the Roadmap tool to visualize how identified initiatives fit with other tasks identified to improve your recovery capabilities.

    Repeat the core DR methodology for additional systems and applications


    You have created a DR plan for your most critical systems. Now, add the rest:

    • Build on the work you’ve already done. Re-use the BIA scoring scale. Update your existing recovery workflows, rather than creating and formatting an entirely new document. A number of steps in the recovery will be shared with, or similar to, the recovery procedures for your Tier 1 systems.

    Risks and Challenges Mitigated

    • DR requirements and capabilities for less-critical systems have not been evaluated.
    • Gaps in the recovery process for less critical systems have not been evaluated or addressed.
    • DR capabilities for less critical systems may not meet business requirements.
    Sample Outputs
    Add Tier 2 & 3 systems to the BIA.
    Complete another tabletop exercise for Tier 2 & 3 systems recovery, and add the results to the recovery workflow.
    Identify projects to close additional gaps in the recovery process. Add projects to the project roadmap.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Use this example of a complete, practical, right-size DR plan to drive and guide your efforts.

    Extend your core DRP deliverables

    You’ve completed the core DRP deliverables. Continue to create DRP documentation to support recovery procedures and governance processes:

    • DR documentation efforts fail when organizations try to boil the ocean with an all-in-one plan aimed at auditors, business leaders, and IT. It’s long, hard to maintain, and ends up as shelfware.
    • Create documentation in layers to keep it manageable. Build supporting documentation over time to support your high-level recovery workflow.

    Risks and Challenges Mitigated

    • Key contact information, escalation, and disaster declaration responsibilities are not identified or formalized.
    • DRP requirements and capabilities aren’t centralized. Key DRP findings are in multiple documents, complicating governance and oversight by auditors, executives, and board members.
    • Detailed recovery procedures and peripheral information (e.g. network diagrams) are not documented.
    Sample Outputs
    Three to five detailed systems recovery flowcharts/checklists.
    Documented team roles, succession plans, and contact information.
    Notification, assessment, and disaster declaration plan.
    DRP summary.
    Layer 1, 2 & 3 network diagrams.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Use this example of a complete, practical, right-size DR plan to drive and guide your efforts.

    Select an optimal DR deployment model and deployment site

    Your DR site has been identified as inadequate:

    • Begin with the end in mind. Commit to mastering the selected model and leverage your vendor relationship for effective DR.
    • Cut to the chase and evaluate the feasibility of cloud first. Gauge your organization’s current capabilities for DR in the cloud before becoming infatuated with the idea.
    • A mixed model gives you the best of both worlds. Diversify your strategy by identifying fit for purpose and balancing the work required to maintain various models.

    Risks and Challenges Mitigated

    • Without an identified DR site, you’ll be scrambling when a disaster hits to find and contract for a location to restore IT services.
    • Without systems and application data backed up offsite, you stand to lose critical business data and logic if all copies of the data at your primary site were lost.
    Sample Outputs
    Application assessment for cloud DR.
    TCO tool for different environments.
    Solution decision and executive presentation.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Use Info-Tech’s blueprint, Select the Optimal Disaster Recovery Deployment Model, to help you make sense of a world of choice for your DR site.

    Extend DRP findings to business process resiliency with a BCP pilot

    Integrate your findings from DRP into the overall BCP:

    • As an IT leader you have the skillset and organizational knowledge to lead a BCP project, but ultimately business leaders need to own the BCP – they know their processes and requirements to resume business operations better than anyone else.
    • The traditional approach to BCP is a massive project that most organizations can’t execute without hiring a consultant. To execute BCP in-house, carve up the task into manageable pieces.

    Risks and Challenges Mitigated

    • No formal plan exists to recover from a disruption to critical business processes.
    • Business requirements for IT systems recovery may change following a comprehensive review of business continuity requirements.
    • Outside of core systems recovery, IT could be involved in relocating staff, imaging and issuing new end-user equipment, etc. Identifying these requirements is part of BCP.
    Sample Outputs
    Business process-focused BIA for one business unit.
    Recovery workflows for one business unit.
    Provisioning list for one business unit.
    BCP project roadmap.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Use Info-Tech’s blueprint, Develop a Business Continuity Plan, to develop and deploy a repeatable BCP methodology.

    Test the plan to validate capabilities and cross-train staff on recovery procedures

    You don’t have a program to regularly test the DR plan:

    • Most DR tests are focused solely on the technology and not the DR management process – which is where most plans fail.
    • Be proactive – establish an annual test cycle and identify and coordinate resources well in advance.
    • Update DRP documentation with findings from the plan, and track the changes you make over time.

    Risks and Challenges Mitigated

    • Gaps likely still exist in the plan that are hard to find without some form of testing.
    • Customers and auditors may ask for some form of DR testing.
    • Staff may not be familiar with DR documentation or how they can use it.
    • No formal cycle to validate and update the DRP.
    Sample Outputs
    DR testing readiness assessment.
    Testing handbooks.
    Test plan summary template.
    DR test issue log and analysis tool.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    Uncover deficiencies in your recovery procedures by using Info-Tech’s blueprint Reduce Costly Downtime Through DR Testing.

    “Operationalize” DRP management

    Inject DR planning in key operational processes to support plan maintenance:

    • Major changes, or multiple routine changes, can materially alter DR capabilities and requirements. It’s not feasible to update the DR plan after every routine change, so leverage criticality tiers in the BIA to focus your change management efforts. Critical systems require more rigorous change procedures.
    • Likewise, you can build criticality tiers into more focused project management and performance measurement processes.
    • Schedule regular tasks in your ticketing system to verify capabilities and cross-train staff on key recovery procedures (e.g. backup and restore).

    Risks and Challenges Mitigated

    • DRP is not updated “as needed” – as requirements and capabilities change due to business and technology changes.
    • The DRP is disconnected from day-to-day operations.
    Sample Outputs
    Reviewed and updated change, project, and performance management processes.
    Reviewed and updated internal SLAs.
    Reviewed and updated data protection and backup procedures.

    Review infrastructure service provider DR capabilities

    Insert DR planning in key operational processes to support plan maintenance:

    • Reviewing vendor DR capabilities is a core IT vendor management competency.
    • As your DR requirements change year-to-year, ensure your vendors’ service commitments still meet your DR requirements.
    • Identify changes in the vendor’s service offerings and DR capabilities, e.g. higher costs for additional DR support, new offerings to reduce potential downtime, or conversely, a degradation in DR capabilities.

    Risks and Challenges Mitigated

    • Vendor capabilities haven’t been measured against business requirements.
    • No internal capability exists currently to assess vendor ability to meet promised SLAs.
    • No internal capability exists to track vendor performance on recoverability.
    Sample Outputs
    A customized vendor DRP questionnaire.
    Reviewed vendor SLAs.
    Choose to keep or change service levels or vendor offerings based on findings.

    Phase 4: Insights and accomplishments

    Screenshot of DRP Maturity Assessment Results

    Identified progress against targets

    Screenshot of prioritized further initiatives.

    Prioritized further initiatives

    Screenshot of DRP Planning Roadmap

    Added initiatives to the roadmap

    Summary of Accomplishments

    • Developed a list of high-priority initiatives that can support the extension and maintenance of the DR plan over the long term.
    • Reviewed and update maturity assessments to establish progress and communicate the value of the DR program.

    Summary of accomplishment

    Knowledge Gained

    • Conduct a BIA to determine appropriate targets for RTOs and RPOs.
    • Identify DR projects required to close RTO/RPO gaps and mitigate risks.
    • Use tabletop planning to create and validate an incident response plan.

    Processes Optimized

    • Your DRP process was optimized, from BIA to documenting an incident response plan.
    • Your vendor evaluation process was optimized to identify and assess a vendor’s ability to meet your DR requirements, and to repeat this evaluation on an annual basis.

    Deliverables Completed

    • DRP Maturity Scorecard
    • DRP Business Impact Analysis Tool
    • DRP Roadmap Tool
    • Incident response plan and systems recovery workflow
    • Executive presentation

    Info-Tech’s insights bust the most obstinate myths of DRP

    Myth #1: DRPs need to focus on major events such as natural disasters and other highly destructive incidents such as fire and flood.

    Reality: The most common threats to service continuity are hardware and software failures, network outages, and power outages.

    Myth #2: Effective DRPs start with identifying and evaluating potential risks.

    Reality: DR isn’t about identifying risks; it’s about ensuring service continuity.

    Myth #3: DRPs are separate from day-to-day operations and incident management.

    Reality: DR must be integrated with service management to ensure service continuity.

    Myth #4: I use a co-lo or cloud services so I don’t have to worry about DR. That’s my vendor’s responsibility.

    Reality: You can’t outsource accountability. You can’t just assume your vendor’s DR capabilities will meet your needs.

    Myth #5: A DRP must include every detail so anyone can execute the recovery.

    Reality: IT DR is not an airplane disaster movie. You aren’t going to ask a business user to execute a system recovery, just like you wouldn’t really want a passenger with no flying experience to land a plane.

    Supplement the core documentation with these tools and templates

    • An Excel workbook workbook to track key roles on DR, business continuity, and emergency response teams. Can also track DR documentation location and any hardware purchases required for DR.
    • A questionnaire template and a response tracking tool to structure your investigation of vendor DR capabilities.
    • Integrate escalation with your DR plan by defining incident severity and escalation rules . Use this example as a template or integrate ideas into your own severity definitions and escalation rules in your incident management procedures.
    • A minute-by-minute time-tracking tool to capture progress in a DR or testing scenario. Monitor progress against objectives in real time as recovery tasks are started and completed.

    Next steps: Related Info-Tech research

    Select the Optimal Disaster Recovery Deployment Model Evaluate cloud, co-lo, and on-premises disaster recovery deployment models.

    Develop a Business Continuity Plan Streamline the traditional approach to make BCP development manageable and repeatable.

    Prepare for a DRP Audit Assess your current DRP maturity, identify required improvements, and complete an audit-ready DRP summary document.

    Document and Maintain Your Disaster Recovery Plan Put your DRP on a diet: keep it fit, trim, and ready for action.

    Reduce Costly Downtime Through DR Testing Improve your DR plan and your team’s ability to execute on it.

    Implement Crisis Management Best Practices An effective crisis response minimizes the impact of a crisis on reputation, profitability, and continuity.

    Research contributors and experts

    • Alan Byrum, Director of Business Continuity, Intellitech
    • Bernard Jones (MBCI, CBCP, CORP, ITILv3), Owner/Principal, B Jones BCP Consulting, LLC
    • Paul Beaudry, Assistant Vice-President, Technical Services, MIS, Richardson International Limited
    • Yogi Schulz, President, Corvelle Consulting

    Glossary

    • Business Continuity Management (BCM) Program: Ongoing management and governance process supported by top management and appropriately resourced to implement and maintain business continuity management. (Source: ISO 22301:2012)
    • Business Continuity Plan (BCP): Documented procedures that guide organizations to respond, recover, resume, and restore to a pre-defined level of operation following disruption. The BCP is not necessarily one document, but a collection of procedures and information.
    • Crisis: A situation with a high level of uncertainty that disrupts the core activities and/or credibility of an organization and requires urgent action. (Source: ISO 22300)
    • Crisis Management Team (CMT): A group of individuals responsible for developing and implementing a comprehensive plan for responding to a disruptive incident. The team consists of a core group of decision makers trained in incident management and prepared to respond to any situation.
    • Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP): The activities associated with the continuing availability and restoration of the IT infrastructure.
    • Incident: An event that has the capacity to lead to loss of, or a disruption to, an organization’s operations, services, or functions – which, if not managed, can escalate into an emergency, crisis, or disaster.
    • BCI Editor’s Note: In most countries “incident” and “crisis” are used interchangeably, but in the UK the term “crisis” has been generally reserved for dealing with wide-area incidents involving Emergency Services. The BCI prefers the use of “incident” for normal BCM purposes. (Source: The Business Continuity Institute)

    • Incident Management Plan: A clearly defined and documented plan of action for use at the time of an incident, typically covering the key personnel, resources, services, and actions needed to implement the incident management process.
    • IT Disaster: A service interruption requiring IT to rebuild a service, restore from backups, or activate redundancy at the backup site.
    • Recovery Point: Time elapsed between the last good copy of the data being taken and failure/corruption on the production environment; think of this as data loss.
    • Recovery Point Actual (RPA): The currently achievable recovery point after a disaster event, given existing people, processes, and technology. This reflects expected maximum data loss that could actually occur in a disaster scenario.
    • Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The target recovery point after a disaster event, usually calculated in hours, on a given system, application, or service. Think of this as acceptable and appropriate data loss. RPO should be based on a business impact analysis (BIA) to identify an acceptable and appropriate recovery target.
    • Recovery Time: Time required to restore a system, application, or service to a functional state; think of this as downtime.
    • Recovery Time Actual (RTA): The currently achievable recovery time after a disaster event, given existing people, processes, and technology. This reflects expected maximum downtime that could actually occur in a disaster scenario.
    • Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The target recovery time after a disaster event for a given system, application, or service. RTO should be based on a business impact analysis (BIA) to identify acceptable and appropriate downtime.

    Bibliography

    BCMpedia. “Recovery Objectives: RTO, RPO, and MTPD.” BCMpedia, n.d. Web.

    Burke, Stephen. “Public Cloud Pitfalls: Microsoft Azure Storage Cluster Loses Power, Puts Spotlight On Private, Hybrid Cloud Advantages.” CRN, 16 Mar. 2017. Web.

    Elliot, Stephen. “DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quantified.” IDC, 2015. Web.

    FEMA. Planning & Templates. FEMA, 2015. Web.

    FINRA. “Business Continuity Plans and Emergency Contact Information.” FINRA, 2015. Web.

    FINRA. “FINRA, the SEC and CFTC Issue Joint Advisory on Business Continuity Planning.” FINRA, 2013. Web.

    Gosling, Mel, and Andrew Hiles. “Business Continuity Statistics: Where Myth Meets Fact.” Continuity Central, 2009. Web.

    Hanwacker, Linda. “COOP Templates for Success Workbook.” The LSH Group, n.d. Web.

    Homeland Security. Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). Homeland Security, 2015. Web.

    Nichols, Shaun. “AWS's S3 Outage Was So Bad Amazon Couldn't Get Into Its Own Dashboard to Warn the World.” The Register, 1 Mar. 2017. Web.

    Potter, Patrick. “BCM Regulatory Alphabet Soup.” RSA Archer Organization, 2012. Web.

    Rothstein, Philip Jan. “Disaster Recovery Testing: Exercising Your Contingency Plan.” Rothstein Associates Inc., 2007. Web.

    The Business Continuity Institute. “The Good Practice Guidelines.” The Business Continuity Institute, 2013. Web.

    The Disaster Recovery Journal. “Disaster Resource Guide.” The Disaster Recovery Journal, 2015. Web.

    The Disaster Recovery Journal. “DR Rules & Regulations.” The Disaster Recovery Journal, 2015. Web.

    The Federal Financial Institution Examination Council (FFIEC). Business Continuity Planning. IT Examination Handbook InfoBase, 2015. Web.

    York, Kyle. “Read Dyn’s Statement on the 10/21/2016 DNS DDoS Attack.” Oracle, 22 Oct. 2016. Web.

    Define Requirements for Outsourcing the Service Desk

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}493|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): N/A
    • member rating average dollars saved: N/A
    • member rating average days saved: N/A
    • Parent Category Name: Service Desk
    • Parent Category Link: /service-desk
    • In organizations where technical support is viewed as non-strategic, many see outsourcing as a cost-effective way to provide this support. However, outsourced projects often fall short of their goals in terms of cost savings and the quality of support. 
    • Significant administrative work and up-front costs are required to outsource the service desk, and poor planning often results in project failure and a decrease of end-user satisfaction.
    • A complete turnover of the service desk can result in lost knowledge and control over processes, and organizations without an exit strategy can struggle to bring their service desk back in house and return the confidence of end users.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Outsourcing is easy. Realizing the expected cost, quality, and focus benefits is hard. Successful outsourcing without being directly involved in service desk management is almost impossible.
    • You don’t need to standardize before you outsource, but you still need to conduct your due diligence. If you outsource without thinking about how you want the future to work, you will likely be unsatisfied with the result.
    • If cost is your only driver for outsourcing, understand that it comes at a cost. Customer service quality will likely be less, and your outsourcer may not add on frills such as Continual Improvement. Be careful that your specialists don’t end up spending more time working on incidents and service requests.

    Impact and Result

    • First decide if outsourcing is the correct step; there may be more preliminary work to do beforehand.
    • Assess requirements and make necessary adjustments before developing an outsource RFP.
    • Clearly define the project and produce an RFP to provide to vendors.
    • Plan for long-term success, not short-term gain.
    • Prepare to retain some of the higher-level service desk work.

    Define Requirements for Outsourcing the Service Desk Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Define Requirements for Outsourcing the Service Desk Deck – A step-by-step document to walk you through building a strategy for efficient service desk outsourcing.

    This storyboard will help you craft a project charter, create an RFP, and outline strategies to build a long-term relationship with the vendor.

    • Define Requirements for Outsourcing the Service Desk – Storyboard
    • Service Desk Outsourcing Requirements Database Library

    2. Service Desk Outsourcing Project Charter Template and Requirements Library – Best-of-breed templates to help you determine processes and build a strategy to outsource them.

    These templates will help you determine your service desk requirements and document your proposed service desk outsourcing strategy.

    • Service Desk Outsourcing Project Charter Template

    3. Service Desk Outsourcing RFP Template – A structured document to help you outline expectations and communicate requirements to managed service providers.

    This template will allow you to create a detailed RFP for your outsourcing agreement, document the statement of work, provide service overview, record exit conditions, and document licensing model and estimated pricing.

    • Service Desk Outsourcing RFP Template

    4. Service Desk Outsourcing Reference Interview Template and Scoring Tool – Materials to help you conduct efficient briefings and select the best vendor to fulfill your service desk requirements.

    Use the Reference Interview Template to outline a list of questions for interviewing current/previous customers of your candidate vendors. These interviews will help you with unbiased vendor scoring. The RFP Vendor Scoring Tool will help you facilitate vendor briefings with your list of questions and score candidate vendors efficiently through quantifying evaluations.

    • Service Desk Outsourcing Reference Interview Template
    • Service Desk Outsourcing RFP Scoring Tool

    Infographic

    Further reading

    Define Requirements for Outsourcing the Service Desk

    Prepare your RFP for long-term success, not short-term gains

    Define Requirements for Outsourcing the Service Desk

    Prepare your RFP for long-term success, not short-term gains

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    Outsource services with your eyes wide open.

    Cost reduction has traditionally been an incentive for outsourcing the service desk. This is especially the case for organizations that don't have minimal processes in place and those that need resources and skills to fill gaps.

    Although cost reduction is usually the main reason to outsource the service desk, in most cases service desk outsourcing increases the cost in a short run. But without a proper model, you will only outsource your problems rather than solving them. A successful outsourcing strategy follows a comprehensive plan that defines objectives, assigns accountabilities, and sets expectations for service delivery prior to vendor outreach.

    For outsourcing the service desk, you should plan ahead, work as a group, define requirements, prepare a strong RFP, and contemplate tension metrics to ensure continual improvement. As you build a project charter to outline your strategy for outsourcing your IT services, ensure you focus on better customer service instead of cost optimization. Ensure that the outsourcer can support your demands, considering your long-term achievement.

    Think about outsourcing like a marriage deed. Take into account building a good relationship before beginning the contract, ensure to include expectations in the agreement, and make it possible to exit the agreement if expectations are not satisfied or service improvement is not achieved.

    This is a picture of Mahmoud Ramin, PhD, Senior Research Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations, Info-Tech Research Group

    Mahmoud Ramin, PhD
    Senior Research Analyst
    Infrastructure and Operations
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    In organizations where technical support is viewed as non-strategic, many see outsourcing as a cost-effective way to provide this support. However, outsourcing projects often fall short of their goals in terms of cost savings and quality of support.

    Common Obstacles

    Significant administrative work and up-front costs are required to outsource the service desk, and poor planning often results in project failure and the decrease of end-user satisfaction.

    A complete turnover of the service desk can result in lost knowledge and control over processes, and organizations without an exit strategy can struggle to bring their service desk back in house and reestablish the confidence of end users.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    • First decide if outsourcing is the correct step; there may be more preliminary work to do beforehand.
    • Assess requirements and make necessary adjustments before developing an outsource RFP.
    • Clearly define the project and produce an RFP to provide to vendors.
    • Plan for long-term success, not short-term gains.
    • Prepare to retain some of the higher-level service desk work.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Outsourcing is easy. Realizing all of the expected cost, quality, and focus benefits is hard. Successful outsourcing without being directly involved in service desk management is almost impossible.

    Your challenge

    This research is designed to help organizations that need to:

    • Outsource the service desk or portions of service management to improve service delivery.
    • Improve and repatriate existing outsourcing outcomes by becoming more engaged in the management of the function. Regular reviews of performance metrics, staffing, escalation, knowledge base content, and customer satisfaction are critical.
    • Understand the impact that outsourcing would have on the service desk.
    • Understand the potential benefits that outsourcing can bring to the organization.

    This image contains a donut chart with the following information: Salaries and Benefits - 68.50%; Technology - 9.30%; Office Space and Facilities Expense - 14.90%; Travel, Training, and Office Supplies - 7.30%

    Source: HDI 2017

    About 68.5% of the service desk fund is allocated to agent salaries, while only 9.3% of the service desk fund is spent on technology. The high ratio of salaries and expenses over other expense drives organizations to outsource their service desk without taking other considerations into account.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The outsourcing contract must preserve your control, possession, and ownership of the intellectual property involved in the service desk operation. From the beginning of the process, repatriation should be viewed as a possibility and preserved as a capability.

    Your challenge

    This research helps organizations who would like to achieve these goals:

    • Determine objectives and requirements to outsource the service desk.
    • Develop a project charter and build an outsourcing strategy to efficiently define processes to reduce risk of failure.
    • Build an outsourcing RFP and conduct interviews to identify the best candidate for service delivery.
    • Build a long-term relationship with an outsourcing vendor, making sure the vendor is able to satisfy all requirements.
    • Include a continual improvement plan in the outsourcing strategy and contain the option upon service delivery dissatisfaction.

    New hires require between 10 and 80 hours of training (Forward Bpo Inc., 2019).

    A benchmark study by Zendesk from 45,000 companies reveals that timely resolution of issues and 24/7 service are the biggest factors in customer service experience.

    This image contains a bar graph with the following data: Timely issue resolution; 24/7 support; Friendly agent; Desired contact method; Not to repeat info; Proactive support; Self-serve; Call back; Rewards & freebies

    These factors push many businesses to consider service desk outsourcing to vendors that have capabilities to fulfill such requirements.

    Common obstacles

    These barriers make this challenge difficult to address for many organizations:

    • In most cases, organizations must perform significant administrative work before they can make a move. Those that fail to properly prepare impede a smooth transition, the success of the vendor, and the ability to repatriate.
    • Successful outsourcing comes from the recognition that an organization is experiencing complete turnover of its service desk staff. These organizations engage the vendor to transition knowledge and process to ensure continuity of quality.
    • IT realizes the most profound hidden costs of outsourcing when the rate of ticket escalation increases, diminishing the capacity of senior technical staff for strategic project work.

    Many organizations may not get the value they expect from outsourcing in their first year.

    Common Reasons:

    • Overall lack of due diligence in the outsourcing process
    • Unsuitable or unclear service transition plan
    • Poor service provider selection and management

    Poor transition planning results in delayed benefits and a poor relationship with your outsourcing service provider. A poor relationship with your service provider results in poor communication and knowledge transfer.

    Key components of a successful plan:

    1. Determine goals and identify requirements before developing an RFP.
    2. Finalize your outsourcing project charter and get ready for vendor evaluation.
    3. Assess and select the most appropriate provider; manage the transition and vendor relationship.

    Outsource the service desk properly, and you could see a wide range of benefits

    Service Desk Outsourcing: Ability to scale up/down; Reduce fixed costs; Refocus IT efforts on core activities; Access to up-to-date technology; Adhere to  ITSM best practices; Increased process optimization; Focus IT efforts on advanced expertise; Reframe to shift-left;

    Info-Tech Insight

    In your service desk outsourcing strategy, rethink downsizing first-level IT service staff. This can be an opportunity to reassign resources to more valuable roles, such as asset management, development or project backlog. Your current service desk staff are most likely familiar with the current technology, processes, and regulations within IT. Consider the ways to better use your existing resources before reducing headcount.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    Determine Goals

    Conduct activities in the blueprint to pinpoint your current challenges with the service desk and find out objectives to outsource customer service.

    Define Requirements

    You need to be clear about the processes that will be outsourced. Considering your objectives, we'll help you discover the processes to outsource, to help you achieve your goals.

    Develop RFP

    Your expectations should be documented in a formal proposal to help vendors provide solid information about how they will satisfy your requirements and what their plan is.

    Build Long-Term Relationship

    Make sure to plan for continual improvement by setting expectations, tracking the services with proper metrics, and using efficient communication with the provider. Think about the rainy day and include exit conditions for ending the relationship if needed.

    Info-Tech's methodology

    1. Define the Goal

    2. Design an Outsourcing Strategy

    3. Develop an RFP and Make a Long-Term Relationship

    Phase Steps

    1.1 Identify goals and objectives

    1.2 Assess outsourcing feasibility

    2.1 Identify project stakeholders

    2.2 Outline potential risks and constraints

    3.1 Prepare service overview and responsibility matrix

    3.2 Define approach to vendor relationship management

    3.3 Manage the outsource relationship

    Phase Outcomes

    Service Desk Outsourcing Vision and Goals

    Service Desk Processes to Outsource

    Outsourcing Roles and Responsibilities

    Outsourcing Risks and Constraints

    Service Desk Outsourcing Project Charter

    Service Desk Outsourcing RFP

    Continual Improvement Plan

    Exit Strategy

    This is an image of the strategy which you will use to build your requirements for outsourcing the service desk.  it includes: 1. Define the Goal; 2. Design an Outsourcing Strategy; 3. Develop RFP and long-term relationship.

    Insight summary

    Focus on value

    Outsourcing is easy. Realizing all of the expected cost, quality, and focus benefits is hard. Successful outsourcing without being directly involved in service desk management is almost impossible.

    Define outsourcing requirements

    You don't need to standardize before you outsource, but you still need to conduct your due diligence. If you outsource without thinking about how you want the future to work, you will likely be unsatisfied with the result.

    Don't focus on cost

    If cost is your only driver for outsourcing, understand that there will be other challenges. Customer service quality will likely be less, and your outsourcer may not add on frills such as Continual Improvement. Be careful that your specialists don't end up spending more time working on incidents and service requests.

    Emphasize on customer service

    A bad outsourcer relationship will result in low business satisfaction with IT overall. The service desk is the face of IT, and if users are dissatisfied with the service desk, then they are much likelier to be dissatisfied with IT overall.

    Vendors are not magicians

    They have standards in place to help them succeed. Determine ITSM best practices, define your requirements, and adjust process workflows accordingly. Your staff and end users will have a much easier transition once outsourcing proceeds.

    Plan ahead to guarantee success

    Identify outsourcing goals, plan for service and system integrations, document standard incidents and requests, and track tension metrics to make sure the vendor does the work efficiently. Aim for building a long-term relationship but contemplate potential exit strategy.

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    This is a screenshot from the Service Desk Outsourcing Requirements Database Library

    Service Desk Outsourcing Requirements Database Library

    Use this library to guide you through processes to outsource

    This is a screenshot from the Service Desk Outsourcing RFP Template

    Service Desk Outsourcing RFP Template

    Use this template to craft a proposal for outsourcing your service desk

    This is a screenshot from the Service Desk Outsourcing Reference Interview Template

    Service Desk Outsourcing Reference Interview Template

    Use this template to verify vendor claims on service delivery with pervious or current customers

    This is a screenshot from the Service Desk Outsourcing Vendor Proposal Scoring Tool

    Service Desk Outsourcing Vendor Proposal Scoring Tool

    Use this tool to evaluate RFP submissions

    Key deliverable:

    This is a screenshot from the key deliverable, Service Desk Outsourcing Project Charter

    Service Desk Outsourcing Project Charter

    Document your project scope and outsourcing strategy in this template to organize the project for efficient resource and requirement allocation

    Blueprint benefits

    IT Benefits

    Business Benefits

    • Determine current challenges with the service desk and identify services to outsource.
    • Make the project charter for an efficient outsourcing strategy that will lead to higher satisfaction from IT.
    • Select the best outsource vendor that will satisfy most of the identified requirements.
    • Reduce the risk of project failure with efficient planning.
    • Understand potential feasibility of service desk outsourcing and its possible impact on business satisfaction.
    • Improve end-user satisfaction through a better service delivery.
    • Conduct more efficient resource allocation with outsourcing customer service.
    • Develop a long-term relationship between the enterprise and vendor through a continual improvement plan.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    "Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

    Guided Implementation

    "Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

    Workshop

    "We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

    Consulting

    "Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    Phase 1Phase 2Phase 3

    Call #1: Scope your specific challenges and objectives

    Call #3: Identify project stakeholders, and potential risks and constraints

    Call #5: Create a detailed RFP

    Call #6: Identify strategy risks.

    Call #2: Assess outsourcing feasibility and processes to outsourceCall #4: Create a list of metrics to ensure efficient reporting

    Call #7: Prepare for vendor briefing and scoring each vendor

    Call #8: Build a communication plan

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    A typical GI is between 8 to 10 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

    Phase 1

    Define the goal

    Define the goal

    Design an outsourcing strategy

    Develop an RFP and make a long-term relationship

    1.1 Identify goals and objectives

    1.2 Assess outsourcing feasibility

    2.1 Identify project stakeholders

    2.2 Outline potential risks and constraints

    3.1 Prepare a service overview and responsibility matrix

    3.2 Define your approach to vendor relationship management

    3.3 Manage the outsource relationship

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Analysis outsourcing objectives
    • Assess outsourcing feasibility
    • Identify services and processes to outsource

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Service Desk Team
    • IT Leadership

    Define requirements for outsourcing service desk support

    Step 1.1

    Identify goals and objectives

    Activities

    1.1.1 Find out why you want to outsource your service desk

    1.1.2 Document the benefits of outsourcing your service desk

    1.1.3 Identify your outsourcing vision and goals

    1.1.4 Prioritize service desk outsourcing goals to help structure your mission statement

    1.1.5 Craft a mission statement that demonstrates your decision to reach your outsourcing objectives

    Define the goal

    This step requires the following inputs:

    • List of strengths and weaknesses of the service desk
    • Challenges with the service desk

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Leadership
    • Service Desk Manager
    • IT Managers

    Outcomes of this step

    • Service desk outsourcing vision and goals
    • Benefits of outsourcing the service desk
    • Mission statement

    What is your rationale to outsource the service desk?

    Potential benefits of outsourcing the service desk:

    • Bring in the expertise and knowledge to manage tickets according to best-practice guidelines
    • Reduce the timeline to response and resolution
    • Improve IT productivity
    • Enhance IT services and improve performance
    • Augment relationship between IT and business through service-level improvement
    • Free up the internal team and focus IT on complex projects and higher priority tasks
    • Speed up service desk optimization
    • Improve end-user satisfaction through efficient IT services
    • Reduce impact of incidents through effective incident management
    • Increase service consistency via turnover reduction
    • Expand coverage hour and access points
    • Expand languages to service different geographical areas

    1.1.1 Find out why you want to outsource your service desk

    1 hour

    Service desk is the face of IT. Service desk improvement increases IT efficiency, lowers operation costs, and enhances business satisfaction.

    Common challenges that result in deciding to outsource the service desk are:

    Participants: IT Director, Service Desk Manager, Service Desk Team

    ChallengeExample
    Lack of tier 1 supportStartup does not have a dedicated service desk to handle incidents and provide services to end users.
    Inefficient ticket handlingMTTR is very high and end users are frustrated with their issues not getting solved quickly. Even if they call service desk, they are put on hold for a long time. Due to these inefficiencies, their daily work is greatly impacted.
    Restricted service hoursCompany headquartered in Texas does not have resources to provide 24/7 IT service. When users in the East Asia branch have a laptop issue, they must wait until the next day to get response from IT. This has diminished their satisfaction.
    Restricted languagesCompany X is headquartered in New York. An end user not fluent in English from Madrid calls in for support. It takes five minutes for the agent to understand the issue and log a ticket.
    Ticket backlogIT is in firefighting mode, very busy with taking care of critical incidents and requests from upper management. Almost no one is committed to the SLA because of their limited availability.

    Brainstorm your challenges with the service desk. Why have you decided to outsource your service desk? Use the above table as a sample.

    1.1.2 Document benefits of outsourcing your service desk

    1 hour

    1. Review the challenges with your current service desk identified in activity 1.1.1.
    2. Discuss possible ways to tackle these challenges. Be specific and determine ways to resolve these issues if you were to do it internally.
    3. Determine potential benefits of outsourcing the service desk to IT, business, and end users.
    4. For each benefit, describe dependencies. For instance, to reduce the number of direct calls (benefit), users should have access to service desk as a single point of contact (dependency).
    5. Document this activity in the Service Desk Outsourcing Project Charter Template.

    Download the Project Charter Template

    Input

    • List of challenges with the current service desk from activity 1.1.1

    Output

    • Benefits of outsourcing the service desk

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Markers
    • Sticky notes
    • Laptops

    Participants

    • IT Director/CIO
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Team
    • IT Managers

    Why should you not consider cost reduction as a primary incentive to outsourcing the service desk?

    Assume that some of the costs will not go away with outsourcing

    When you outsource, the vendor's staff tend to gradually become less effective as:

    • They are managed by metrics to reduce costs by escalating sooner, reducing talk time, and proposing questionable solutions.
    • Turnover results in new employees that get insufficient training.

    You must actively manage the vendor to identify and resolve these issues. Many organizations find that service desk management takes more time after they outsource.

    You need to keep spending on service desk management, and you may not get away from technology infrastructure spending.

    Info-Tech Insight

    In their first year, almost 42% of Info-Tech's clients do not get the real value of outsourcing services as expected. This iss primarily because of misalignment of organizational goals with outcomes of the outsourced services.

    Consider the hidden costs of outsourcing

    Expected Costs

    Unexpected Costs

    Example

    Transition CostsSeverance and staff retention
    • Cost to adapt to vendor standards
    • Training cost of vendor staff
    • Lost productivity
    • Format for requirements
    • Training report developers to work with vendor systems
    FeesPrice of the engagement
    • Extra fees for additional services
    • Extra charges for uploading data to cloud storage
    • Portal access
    Management CostsTime directing account
    • Time directly managing vendor staff
    • Checking deliverables for errors
    • Disputing penalty amounts
    Rework CostsDowntime, defect rate, etc. (quality metrics measured in SLAs)
    • Time spent adapting deliverables for unanticipated requirements
    • Time spent assuring the quality and usefulness of deliverables
    • Completing quality assurance and updating knowledgebase articles
    • Adapting reporting for presentation to stakeholders

    Determine strategies to avoid each hidden cost

    Costs related to transitioning into the engagementAdapting to standards and training costs

    Adapting to standards: Define the process improvements you will need to work with each potential vendor.

    Training costs for vendor staff: Reduce training costs by keeping the same vendor staff on all of your projects.

    Fee-related costs

    Fees for additional services (that you thought were included)

    Carefully review each proposed statement of work to identify and reduce extra fees. Understand why extra fees occur in the SLA, the contract, and the proposed statement of work, and take steps to protect yourself and the vendor.

    Management-related costs

    Direct management of vendor staff and dispute resolution

    Direct management of vendor staff: Avoid excessive management costs by defining a two-tier management structure on both sides of the engagement.

    Time spent resolving disputes: Avoid prolonged resolution costs by defining terms of divorce for the engagement up front.

    Rework costs

    Unanticipated requirements and integration with existing systems

    Unanticipated requirements: Use a two-stage process to define requirements, starting with business people and then with review by technical staff.

    Integration with existing systems: Obtain a commitment from vendors that deliverables will conform to standards at points of integration with your systems.

    Your outsourcing strategy should address the reasons you decided to outsource

    A clear vision of strategic objectives prior to entering an outsourcing agreement will allow you to clearly communicate these objectives to the Managed Service Provider (MSP) and use them as a contracted basis for the relationship.

    • Define the business' overall approach to outsourcing along with the priorities, rules, and principles that will drive the outsourcing strategy and every subsequent outsourcing decision and activity.
    • Define specific business, service, and technical goals for the outsourcing project and relevant measures of success.

    "People often don't have a clear direction around what they're trying to accomplish. The strategic goals should be documented. Is this a cost-savings exercise? Is it because you're deficient in one area? Is it because you don't have the tools or expertise to run the service desk yourself? Figure out what problem you're trying to solve by outsourcing, then build your strategy around that.
    – Jeremy Gagne, Application Support Delivery Manager, Allegis Group

    Most organizations are driven to consider outsourcing their service desk hoping to improve the following:

    • Ability to scale (train people and acquire skills)
    • Focus on core competencies
    • Decrease capital costs
    • Access latest technology without large investment
    • Resolve labor force constraints
    • Gain access to special expertise without paying a full salary
    • Save money overall

    Info-Tech Insight

    Use your goals and objectives as a management tool. Clearly outline your desired project outcomes to both your in-house team and the vendor during implementation and monitoring. It will allow a common ground to unite both parties as the project progresses.

    Mitigate pitfalls that lay in the way of desired outcomes of outsourcing

    Desired outcomePitfalls to overcome
    IT can focus on core competencies and strategic initiatives rather than break-fix tasks.Escalation to second- and third-level support usually increases when the first level has been outsourced. Outsourcers will have less experience with your typical incidents and will give up on trying to solve some issues more quickly than your internal level-one staff.
    Low outsourcing costs compared to the costs needed to employ internal employees in the same role. Due to lack of incentive to decrease ticket volume, costs are likely to increase. As a result, organizations often find themselves paying more overall for an outsourced service desk than if they had a few dedicated IT service desk employees in-house.
    Improved employee morale as a result of being able to focus on more interesting tasks.Management often expects existing employee morale to increase as a result of shifting their focus to core and strategic tasks, but the fear of diminished job security often spreads to the remaining non-level-one employees.

    1.1.3 Identify outsourcing vision and goals

    Identify the goals and objectives of outsourcing to inform your strategy.

    Participants: IT Director, Service Desk Manager, Service Desk Team

    1-2 hours

    1. Meet with key business stakeholders and the service desk staff who were involved in the decision to outsource.
    2. As a group, review the results from activity 1.1.1 (challenges with current service desk operations) and identify the goals and objectives of the outsourcing initiative.
    3. Determine the key performance indicator (KPI) for each goal.
    4. Identify the impacted stakeholder/s for each goal.
    5. Discuss checkpoint schedule for each goal to make sure the list stays updated.

    Use the sample table as a starting point:

    1. Document your table in the Service Desk Outsourcing Project Charter Template.
    IDGoal DescriptionKPIImpacted StakeholdersCheckpoint Schedule
    1Provide capacity to take calls outside of current service desk work hours
    • Decreased in time to response
    • Decreased time to resolve
    • IT Entire organization
    • Every month
    2Take calls in different languages
    • Improved service delivery in different geographical regions
    • Improved end-user satisfaction
    • End users
    • Every month
    3Provide field support at remote sites with no IT presence without having to fly out an employee
    • 40% faster incident resolution and request fulfillment
    • Entire organization
    • Every month
    4Improve ease of management by vendor helping with managing and optimizing service desk tasks
    • Improved service management efficiency
    • Entire organization
    • Every 3 months

    Download the Project Charter Template

    Evaluate organizational demographics to assess outsourcing rationale

    The size, complexity, and maturity of your organization are good indicators of service desk direction with regards to outsourcing.

    Organization Size

    • As more devices, applications, systems, and users are added to the mix, vendor costs will increase but their ability to meet business needs will decrease.
    • Small organizations are often either rejected by vendors for being too small or locked into a contract that is overkill for their actual needs (and budget).

    Complexity

    • Highly customized environments and organizations with specialized applications or stringent regulatory requirements are very difficult to outsource for a reasonable cost and acceptable quality.
    • In these cases, the vendor is required to train skilled support or ends up escalating more tickets back to second- and third-level support.

    Requirements

    • Organizations looking to outsource must have defined outsourcing requirements before looking at vendors.
    • Without a requirement assessment, the vendor won't have guidelines to follow and you won't be able to measure their adherence.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Although less adherence to service desk best practices can be one of the main incentives to outsourcing the service desk, IT should have minimal processes in place to be able to set expectations with targeting vendors.

    1.1.4 Prioritize service desk outsourcing goals to help structure mission statement

    0.5-1 hour

    The evaluation process for outsourcing the service desk should be done very carefully. Project leaders should make sure they won't panic internal resources and impact their performance through the transition period.

    If the outsourcing process is rushed, it will result in poor evaluation, inefficient decision making, and project failure.

    1. Refer to results in activity 1.1.3. Discuss the service desk outsourcing goals once again.
    2. Brainstorm the most important objectives. Use sticky notes to prioritize the items from the most important to the least important.
    3. Edit the order accordingly.

    Input

    • Project goals from activity 1.1.3

    Output

    • Prioritized list of outsourcing goals

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Markers
    • Sticky notes
    • Laptops

    Participants

    • IT Director/CIO
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Team
    • IT Managers

    Download the Project Charter Template

    1.1.5 Craft a mission statement that demonstrates your decision to reach outsourcing objectives

    Participants: IT Director, Service Desk Manager

    0.5-1 hour

    The IT mission statement specifies the function's purpose or reason for being. The mission should guide each day's activities and decisions. The mission statement should use simple and concise terminology and speak loudly and clearly, generating enthusiasm for the organization.

    Strong IT mission statements:

    • Articulate the IT function's purpose and reason for existence
    • Describe what the IT function does to achieve its vision
    • Define the customers of the IT function
    • Can be described as:
      • Compelling
      • Easy to grasp
      • Sharply focused
      • Inspirational
      • Memorable
      • Concise

    Sample mission statements:

    • To help fulfill organizational goals, IT has decided to empower business stakeholders with outsourcing the service desk.
    • To support efficient IT service provision, better collaboration, and effective communication, [Company Name] has decided to outsource the service desk.
    • [Company Name] plans to outsource the service desk so it can identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies with current service desk processes and enable [Company Name] to innovate and support business growth.
    • Considering the goals and benefits determined in the previous activities, outline a mission statement.
    • Document your outsourcing mission statement in the "Project Overview" section of the Project Charter Template.

    Download the Project Charter Template

    Step 1.2

    Assess outsourcing feasibility

    Activities

    1.2.1 Create a baseline of customer experience

    1.2.2 Identify service desk processes to outsource

    1.2.3 Design an outsourcing decision matrix for service desk processes and services

    1.2.4 Discuss if you need to outsource only service desk or if additional services would benefit from outsourcing too

    Define the goal

    This step requires the following inputs:

    • List of service desk tasks and responsibilities

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • IT Leadership
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Infrastructure Manager

    Outcomes of this step

    • End-user satisfaction with the service desk
    • List of processes and services to outsource

    1.2.1 Create a baseline of customer experience

    Solicit targeted department feedback on IT's core service capabilities, communications, and business enablement from end users. Use this feedback to assess end-user satisfaction with each service, broken down by department and seniority level.

    1. Complete an end-user satisfaction survey to define the current state of your IT services, including service desk (timeliness and effectiveness). With Info-Tech's end-user satisfaction program, an analyst will help you set up the diagnostic and will go through the report with you.
    2. Evaluate survey results.
    3. Communicate survey results with team leads and discuss the satisfaction rates and comments of the end users.
    4. Schedule to launch another survey one year after outsourcing the service desk.
    5. Your results will be compared to the following year's results to analyze the overall success/failure of your outsourcing project.

    A decrease of business and end-user satisfaction is a big drive to outsourcing the service desk. Conduct a customer service survey to discover your end-user experience prior to and after outsourcing the service desk.

    Don't get caught believing common misconceptions: outsourcing doesn't mean sending away all the work

    First-time outsourcers often assume they are transferring most of the operations over to the vendor, but this is often not the case.

    1. Management of performance, SLAs, and customer satisfaction remain the responsibility of your organization.
    2. Service desk outsource vendors provide first-line response. This includes answering the phones, troubleshooting simple problems, and redirecting requests that are more complex.
    3. The vendor is often able to provide specialized support for standard applications (and for customized applications if you'll pay for it). However, the desktop support still needs someone onsite, and that service is very expensive to outsource.
    4. Tickets that are focused on custom applications and require specialized or advanced support are escalated back to your organization's second- and third-level support teams.

    Switching to a vendor won't necessarily improve your service desk maturity

    You should have minimal requirements before moving.

    Whether managing in-house or outsourcing, it is your job to ensure core issues have been clarified, processes defined, and standards maintained. If your processes are ad-hoc or non-existent right now, outsourcing won't fix them.

    You must have the following in place before looking to outsource:

    • Defined reporting needs and plans
    • Formalized skill-set requirements
    • Problem management and escalation guidelines
    • Ticket templates and classification rules
    • Workflow details
    • Knowledge base standards

    Info-Tech Insight

    If you expect your problems to disappear with outsourcing, they might just get worse.

    Define long-term requirements

    Anticipate growth throughout the lifecycle of your outsourcing contract and build that into the RFP

    • Most outsourcing agreements typically last three to five years. In that time, you risk outgrowing your service provider by neglecting to define your long-term service desk requirements.
    • Outgrowing your vendor before your contract ends can be expensive due to high switching costs. Managing multiple vendors can also be problematic.
    • It is crucial to define your service desk requirements before developing a request for proposal to make sure the service you select can meet your organization's needs.
    • Make sure that the business is involved in this planning stage, as the goals of IT need to scale with the growth strategy of the business. You may select a vendor with no additional capacity despite the fact that your organization has a major expansion planned to begin two years from now. Assessing future requirements also allows you to culture match with the vendor. If your outlooks and practices are similar, the match will likely click.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Don't select a vendor for what your company is today – select a vendor for what your company will be years from now. Define your future service desk requirements in addition to your current requirements and leave room for growth and development.

    You can't outsource everything

    Manage the things that stay in-house well or suffer the consequences.

    "You can't outsource management; you can only outsource supervision." Barry Cousins, Practice Lead, Info-Tech Research Group

    What can be the vendor in charge of?

    What stays in-house?

    • Call and email answering
    • Ongoing daily ticket creation and tracking
    • Tier 1 support
    • Internal escalation to Level 2 support
    • External escalation to specialized Level 2 and Level 3 support
    • Knowledge base article creation
    • Service desk-related hardware acquisition and maintenance
    • Service desk software acquisition and maintenance
    • Security and access management
    • Disaster recovery
    • Staff acquisition
    • Facilities
    • The role of the Service Desk Manager
    • Skills and training standards
    • Document standardization
    • Knowledge base quality assurance and documentation standardization
    • Self-service maintenance, promotion, and ownership
    • Short and long-term tracking of vendor performance

    Info-Tech Insight

    The need for a Service Desk Manager does not go away when you outsource. In fact, the need becomes even stronger and never diminishes.

    Assess current service desk processes before outsourcing

    Process standards with areas such as documentation, workflow, and ticket escalation should be in place before the decision to outsource has been made.

    Every effective service desk has a clear definition of the services that they are performing for the end user. You can't provide a service without knowing what the services are.

    MSPs typically have their own set of standards and processes in play. If your service desk is not at a similar level of maturity, outsourcing will not be pleasant.

    Make sure that your metrics are reported consistently and that they tell a story.

    "Establish baseline before outsourcing. Those organizations that don't have enough service desk maturity before outsourcing should work with the outsourcer to establish the baseline."
    – Yev Khobrenkov, Enterprise Consultant, Solvera Solutions

    Info-Tech Insight

    Outsourcing vendors are not service desk builders; they're service desk refiners. Switching to a vendor won't improve your maturity; you must have a certain degree of process maturity and standardization before moving.

    Case Study

    INDUSTRY: Cleaning Supplies

    SOURCE: PicNet

    Challenge

    • Reckitt Benckiser of Australia determined that its core service desk needed to be outsourced.
    • It would retain its higher level service desk staff to work on strategic projects.
    • The MSP needed to fulfill key requirements outlined by Reckitt Benckiser.

    Solution

    • Reckitt Benckiser recognized that its rapidly evolving IT needs required a service desk that could fulfill the following tasks:
    • Free up internal IT staff.
    • Provide in-depth understanding of business apps.
    • Offer efficient, cost-effective support onsite.
    • Focus on continual service improvement (CSI).

    Results

    • An RFP was developed to support the outsourcing strategy.
    • With the project structure outlined and the requirements of the vendor for the business identified, Reckitt Benckiser could now focus on selecting a vendor that met its needs.

    1.2.1 Identify service desk processes to outsource

    2-3 hours

    Review your prioritized project goals from activity 1.1.4.

    Brainstorm requirements and use cases for each goal and describe each use case. For example: To improve service desk timeliness, IT should improve incident management, to resolve incidents according to the defined SLA and based on ticket priority levels.

    Discuss if you're outsourcing just incident management or both incident management and request fulfillment. If both, determine what level of service requests will be outsourced? Will you ask the vendor to provide a service catalog? Will you outsource self-serve and automation?

    Document your findings in the service desk outsourcing requirements database library.

    Input

    • Outsourcing project goals from activity 1.1.4

    Output

    • List of processes to outsource

    Materials

    • Sticky notes
    • Markers
    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Laptops

    Participants

    • IT Director/CIO
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Team

    Download the Requirements Database Library

    1.2.2 Design an outsourcing decision matrix for service desk processes and services

    Participants: IT Director, Service Desk Manager, Infrastructure manager

    2-3 hours

    Most successful service desk outsourcing engagements have a primary goal of freeing up their internal resources to work on complex tasks and projects. The key outsourcing success factor is to find out internal services and processes that are standardized or should be standardized, and then determine if they can be outsourced.

    1. Review the list of identified service desk processes from activity 1.2.1.
    2. Discuss the maturity level of each process (low, medium, high) and document under the maturity column of the Outsource the Service Desk Requirements Database Library.
    3. Use the following decision matrix for each process. Discuss which tasks are important to strategic objectives, which ones provide competitive advantage, and which ones require specialized in-house knowledge.
    4. Identify processes that receive high vendor's performance advantage. For instance, access to talent, lower cost at scale, and access to technology.
    5. In your outsourcing assessment, consider a narrow scope of engagement and a broad view of what is important to business outcome.
    6. Based on your findings, determine the priority of each process to be outsourced. Document results in the service desk outsourcing requirements database library, and section 4.1 of the service desk outsourcing project charter.
    • Important to strategic objectives
    • Provides competitive advantage
    • Specialized in-house knowledge required

    This is an image of a quadrant analysis, where the X axis is labeled Vendor's Performance Advantage, and the Y axis is labeled Importance to Business Outcomes.

    • Talent/access to skills
    • Economies of scale/lower cost at scale
    • Access to technology

    Download the Requirements Database Library

    Download the Project Charter Template

    Maintain staff and training: you need to know who is being hired, how, and why

    Define documentation rules to retain knowledge

    • Establish a standard knowledge article template and list of required information.
    • Train staff on the requirements of knowledge base creation and management. Help them understand the value of the time spent recording their work.
    • It is your responsibility to assure the quality of each knowledge article. Outline accountabilities for internal staff and track for performance evaluations.

    For information on better knowledge management, refer to Info-Tech's blueprint Optimize the Service Desk With a Shift-Left Strategy.

    Expect to manage stringent skills and training standards

    • Plan on being more formal about a Service Manager position and spending more time than you allocated previously.
    • Complete a thorough assessment of the skills you need to keep the service desk running smoothly.
    • Don't forget to account for any customized or proprietary systems. How will you train vendor staff to accommodate your needs? What does their turnaround look like: would it be more likely that you acquire a dependable employee in-house?
    • Staffing requirements need to be actively monitored to ensure the outsourcer doesn't have degradation of quality or hiring standards. Don't assume that things run well – complete regular checks and ask for access to audit results.
    • Are the systems and data being accessed by the vendor highly sensitive or subject to regulatory requirements? If so, it is your job to ensure that vendor staff are being screened appropriately.

    Does your service desk need to integrate to other IT services?

    A common challenge when outsourcing multiple services to more than one vendor is a lack of collaboration and communication between vendors.

    • Leverage SIAM capabilities to integrate service desk tasks to other IT services, if needed.
    • "Service Integration and Management (SIAM) is a management methodology that can be applied in an environment that includes services sourced from a number of service providers" (Scopism Limited, 2020).
    • SIAM supports cross-functional integrations. Organizations that look for a single provider will be less likely to get maximum benefits from SIAM.

    There are three layers of entities in SIAM:

    • Customer Organization: The customer who receives services, who defines the relationship with service providers.
    • Service Integrator: End-to-end service governance and integration is done at this layer, making sure all service providers are committed to their services.
    • Service Provider: Responsible party for service delivery according to contract. It can be combination of internal provider, managed by internal agreements, and external provider, managed by SLAs between providers and customer organization.

    Use SIAM to obtain better results from multiple service providers

    In the SIAM model, the customer organization keeps strategic, governance, and business activities, while integrating other services (either internally or externally).

    This is an image of the SIAM model

    SIAM Layers. Source: SIAM Foundation BoK

    Utilize SIAM to obtain better results from multiple service providers

    SIAM reduces service duplication and improves service delivery via managing internal and external service providers.

    To utilize the SIAM model, determine the following components:

    • Service providers
    • Service consumers
    • Service outcomes
    • Service obstacles and boundaries
    • Service dependencies
    • Technical requirements and interactions for each service
    • Service data and information including service levels

    To learn more about adopting SIAM, visit Scopism.

    1.2.3 Discuss if you need to outsource only service desk or if additional services would benefit from outsourcing too

    1-2 hours

    • Discuss principles and goals of SIAM and how integrating other services can apply within your processes.
    • Review the list of service desk processes and tasks to be outsourced from activities 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
    • Brainstorm a list of other services that are outsourced/need to be outsourced.
    • Determine providers of each service (both internal and external). Document the other services to be integrated in the project charter template and requirements database library.

    Input

    • SIAM objectives
    • List of service desk processes to outsource

    Output

    • List of other services to outsource and integrate in the project

    Materials

    • Sticky notes
    • Markers
    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Laptops

    Participants

    • IT Director/CIO
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Team

    Download the Requirements Database Library

    Download the Project Charter Template

    Establish requirements for problem management in the outsourcing plan

    Your MSP should not just fulfill SLAs – they should be a proactive source of value.

    Problem management is a group effort. Make sure your internal team is assisted with sufficient and efficient data by the outsourcer to conduct a better problem management.

    Clearly state your organization's expectations for enabling problem management. MSPs may not necessarily need, and cannot do, problem management; however, they should provide metrics to help you discover trends, define recurring issues, and enable root cause analysis.

    For more information on problem management, refer to Info-Tech's blueprint Improve Incident and Problem Management.

    PROBLEM MANAGEMENT

    INCIDENT MANAGEMENT

    INTAKE: Ticket data from incident management is needed for incident matching to identify problems. Critical Incidents are also a main input to problem management.

    EVENT MANAGEMENT

    INTAKE: SMEs and operations teams monitoring system health events can identify indicators of potential future issues before they become incidents.

    APPLICATION, INFRASTRUCTURE, and SECURITY TEAMS

    ACTION: Problem tickets require investigation from relevant SMEs across different IT teams to identify potential solutions or workarounds.

    CHANGE MANAGEMENT

    OUTPUT: Problem resolution may need to go through Change Management for proper authorization and risk management.

    Outline problem management protocols to gain value from your service provider

    • For example, with a deep dive into ticket trend analysis, your MSP should be able to tell you that you've had a large number of tickets on a particular issue in the past month, allowing you to look into means to resolve the issue and prevent it from reoccurring.
    • A proactive MSP should be able to help your service levels improve over time. This should be built into the KPIs and metrics you ask for from the outsourcer.

    Sample Scenario

    Your MSP tracks ticket volume by platform.

    There are 100 network tickets/month, 200 systems tickets/month, and 5,000 end-user tickets/month.

    Tracking these numbers is a good start, but the real value is in the analysis. Why are there 5,000 end-user tickets? What are the trends?

    Your MSP should be providing a monthly root-cause analysis to help improve service quality.

    Outcomes:

    1. Meeting basic SLAs tells a small part of the story. The MSP is performing well in a functional sense, but this doesn't shed any insight on what kind of knowledge or value is being added.
    2. The MSP should provide routine updates on ticket trends and other insights gained through data analysis.
    3. A commitment to continual improvement will provide your organization with value throughout the duration of the outsourcing agreement.

    Phase 2

    Design an Outsourcing Strategy

    Define the goal

    Design an outsourcing strategy

    Develop an RFP and make a long-term relationship

    1.1 Identify goals and objectives

    1.2 Assess outsourcing feasibility

    2.1 Identify project stakeholders

    2.2 Outline potential risks and constraints

    3.1 Prepare a service overview and responsibility matrix

    3.2 Define your approach to vendor relationship management

    3.3 Manage the outsource relationship

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Identify roles and responsibilities
    • Determine potential risks of outsourcing the service desk
    • Build a list of metrics

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Service Desk Team
    • IT Leadership

    Define requirements for outsourcing service desk support

    Step 2.1

    Identify project stakeholders

    Activity

    2.1.1 Identify internal outsourcing roles and responsibilities

    Design an Outsourcing Strategy

    This step requires the following inputs:

    • List of service desk roles
    • Service desk outsourcing goals

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Managers
    • Project Team
    • Service Desk Manager

    Outcome of this step

    • Outsourcing roles and responsibilities

    Design an outsourcing strategy to capture the vision of your service desk

    An outsourcing strategy is crucial to the proper accomplishment of an outsourcing project. By taking the time to think through your strategy beforehand, you will have a clear idea of your desired outcomes. This will make your RFP of higher quality and will result in a much easier negotiation process.

    Most MSPs are prepared to offer a standard proposal to clients who do not know what they want. These are agreements that are doomed to fail. A clearly defined set of goals (discussed in Phase 1), risks, and KPIs and metrics (covered in this phase) makes the agreement more beneficial for both parties in the long run.

    1. Identify goals and objectives
    2. Determine mission statement
    3. Define roles and responsibilities
    4. Identify risks and constraints
    5. Define KPIs and metrics
    6. Complete outsourcing strategy

    A successful outsourcing initiative depends on rigorous preparation

    Outsourcing is a garbage in, garbage out initiative. You need to give your service provider the information they need to provide an effective product.

    • Data quality is critical to your outsourcing initiative's success.
    • Your vendor will be much better equipped to help you and to better price its services if it has a thorough understanding of your IT environment.
    • This means more than just building a catalog of your hardware and software. You will need to make available documented policies and processes so you and your vendor can understand where they fit in.
    • Failure to completely document your environment can lead to a much longer time to value as your provider will have to spend much more time (and thus much more money) getting their service up and running.

    "You should fill the gap before outsourcing. You should make sure how to measure tickets, how to categorize, and what the cost of outsourcing will be. Then you'll be able to outsource the execution of the service. Start your own processes and then outsource their execution."
    – Kris Krishan, Head of IT and business systems, Waymo

    Case Study

    Digital media company built an outsourcing strategy to improve customer satisfaction

    INDUSTRY: Digital Media

    SOURCE: Auxis

    Challenge

    A Canadian multi-business company with over 13,000 employees would like to maintain a growing volume of digital content with their endpoint management.

    The client operated a tiered model service desk. Tier 1 was outsourced, and tier 2 tasks were done internally, for more complex tasks and projects.

    As a result of poor planning and defining goals, the company had issues with:

    • Low-quality ticket handling
    • High volume of tickets escalated to tier 2, restraining them from working on complex tickets
    • High turn over and a challenge with talent retention
    • Insufficient documentation to train external tier 1 team
    • Long resolution time and low end-user satisfaction

    Solution

    The company structured a strategy for outsourcing service desk and defined their expectations and requirements.

    They engaged with another outsourcer that would fulfill their requirements as planned.

    With the help of the outsourcer's consulting team, the client was able to define the gaps in their existing processes and system to:

    • Implement a better ticketing system that could follow best-practices guidelines
    • Restructure the team so they would be able to handle processes efficiently

    Results

    The proactive planning led to:

    • Significant improvement in first call resolution (82%).
    • MTTR improvement freed tier 2 to focus on business strategic objectives and allowed them to work on higher-value activities.
    • With a better strategy around outsourcing planning, the company saved 20% of cost compared to the previous outsourcer.
    • As a result of this partnership, the company is providing a 24/7 structure in multiple languages, which is aligned with the company's growth.
    • Due to having a clear strategy built for the project, the client now has better visibility into metrics that support long-term continual improvement plans.

    Define roles and responsibilities for the outsourcing transition to form the base of your outsourcing strategy

    There is no "I" in outsource; make sure the whole team is involved

    Outsourcing is a complete top-to-bottom process that involves multiple levels of engagement:

    • Management must make high-level decisions about staffing and negotiate contract details with the vendor.
    • Service desk employees must execute on the documentation and standardization of processes in an effort to increase maturity.
    • Roles and responsibilities need to be clearly defined to ensure that all aspects of the transition are completed on time.
    • Implement a full-scale effort that involves all relevant staff. The most common mistake is to have the project design follow the same top-down pattern as the decision-making process.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The service desk doesn't operate in isolation. The service desk interfaces with many other parts of the organization (such as finance, purchasing, field support, etc.), so it's important to ensure you engage stakeholders from other departments as well. If you only engage the service desk staff in your discussions around outsourcing strategy and RFP development, you may miss requirements that will come up when it's too late.

    2.1.1 Identify internal outsourcing roles and responsibilities

    2 hours

    1. The sample RACI chart in section 5 of the Project Charter Template outlines which positions are responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed for each major task within the outsourcing project.
    2. Responsible, is the group that is responsible for the execution and oversight of activities for the project. Accountable is the owner of the task/process, who is accountable for the results and outcomes. Consulted is the subject matter expert (SME) who is actively involved in the task/process and consulted on decisions. Informed is not actively involved with the task/process and is updated about decisions around the task/process.
    3. Make sure that you assign only one person as accountable per process. There can be multiple people responsible for each task. Consulted and Informed are optional for each task.
    4. Complete the RACI chart with recommended participants, and document in your service desk outsourcing project charter, under section 5.

    Input

    • RACI template
    • Org chart

    Output

    • List of roles and responsibilities for outsource project

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Markers
    • Laptops

    Participants

    • IT Director/CIO
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Team

    Download the Project Charter Template

    Step 2.2

    Outline potential risks and constraints

    Activities

    2.2.1 Identify potential risks and constraints that may impact achievement of objectives

    2.2.2 Arrange groups of tension metrics to balance your reporting

    Design an Outsourcing Strategy

    This step will walk you through the following activities:

    • Outsourcing objectives
    • Potential risks

    This step involves the following participants:

    • IT Managers
    • Project Team
    • Service Desk Manager

    Outcomes of this step

    • Mitigation strategy for each risk
    • Service desk metrics

    Know your constraints to reduce surprises during project implementation

    No service desk is perfect; know your limits and plan accordingly

    Define your constraints to outsourcing the service desk.

    Consider all types of constraints and opportunities, including:

    • Business forces
    • Economic cycles
    • Disruptive tech
    • Regulation and compliance issues
    • Internal organizational issues

    Within the scope of a scouring decision, define your needs and objectives, measure those as much as possible, and compare them with the "as-is" situation.

    Start determining what alternative approaches/scenarios the organization could use to fill the gaps. Start a comparison of scenarios against drivers, goals, and risks.

    Constraints

    Goals and objectives

    • Budget
    • Maturity
    • Compliance
    • Regulations
    • Outsourcing Strategy

    Plan ahead for potential risks that may impede your strategy

    Risk assessment must go hand-in-hand with goal and objective planning

    Risk is inherent with any outsourcing project. Common outsourcing risks include:

    • Lack of commitment to the customer's goals from the vendor.
    • The distraction of managing the relationship with the vendor.
    • A perceived loss of control and a feeling of over-dependence on your vendor.
    • Managers may feel they have less influence on the development of strategy.
    • Retained staff may feel they have become less skilled in their specialist field.
    • Unanticipated expenses that were assumed to be offered by the vendor.
    • Savings only result from high capital investment in new projects on the part of the customer.

    Analyze the risks associated with a specific scenario. This analysis should identify and understand the most common sourcing and vendor risks using a risk-reward analysis for selected scenarios. Use tools and guidelines to assess and manage vendor risk and tailor risk evaluation criteria to the types of vendors and products.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Plan for the worst to prevent it from happening. Evaluating risk should cover a wide variety of scenarios including the worst possible cases. This type of thinking will be crucial when developing your exit strategy in a later exercise.

    2.2.1 Identify potential risks and constraints that may impact achievement of objectives

    1-3 hours

    1. Brainstorm any potential risks that may arise through the outsourcing project. Describe each risk and categorize both its probability of occurring and impact on the organization as high (H), medium (M), or low (L), using the table below:
    Risk Description

    Probability(H/M/L)

    Impact(H/M/L)Planned Mitigation
    Lack of documentationMMUse cloud-based solution to share documents.
    Knowledge transferLMDetailed knowledge-sharing agreement in place in the RFP.
    Processes not followedLHClear outline and definition of current processes.
    1. Identify any constraints for your outsourcing strategy that may restrict, limit, or place certain conditions on the outsourcing project.
      • This may include budget restrictions or staffing limitations.
      • Identifying constraints will help you be prepared for risks and will lessen their impact.
    2. Document risks and constraints in section 6 of the Service Desk Outsourcing Project Charter Template.

    Input

    • RACI template
    • Org chart

    Output

    • List of roles and responsibilities for outsource project

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Markers

    Participants

    • IT Director/CIO
    • Service Desk Manager
    • Service Desk Team

    Download the Project Charter Template

    Define service tiers and roles to develop clear vendor SLAs

    Management of performance, SLAs, and customer satisfaction remain the responsibility of your organization.

    Define the tiers and/or services that will be the responsibility of the MSP, as well as escalations and workflows across tiers. A sample outsourced structure is displayed here:

    External Vendor

    Tickets beyond the scope of the service desk staff need to be escalated back to the vendor responsible for the affected system.

    Tier 3

    Tickets that are focused on custom applications and require specialized or advanced support are escalated back to your organization's second- and third-level support teams.

    Tier 2

    The vendor is often able to provide specialized support for standard applications. However, the desktop support still needs someone onsite as that service is very expensive to outsource.

    Tier 1

    Service desk outsource vendors provide first-line response. This includes answering the phones, troubleshooting simple problems, and redirecting requests that are more complex.

    Info-Tech Insight

    If you outsource everything, you'll be at the mercy of consultancy or professional services shops later on. You won't have anyone in-house to help you deploy anything; you're at the mercy of a consultant to come in and tell you what to do and how much to spend. Keep your highly skilled people in-house to offset what you'd have to pay for consultancy. If you need to repatriate your service desk later on, you will need skills in-house to do so.

    Don't become obsessed with managing by short-term metrics – look at the big picture

    "Good" metric results may simply indicate proficient reactive fixing; long-term thinking involves implementing proactive, balanced solutions.

    KPIs demonstrate that you are running an effective service desk because:

    • You close an average of 300 tickets per week
    • Your first call resolution is above 90%
    • Your talk time is less than five minutes
    • Surveys reveal clients are satisfied

    While these results may appear great on the surface, metrics don't tell the whole story.

    The effort from any support team seeks to balance three elements:

    FCR: Time; Resources; Quality

    First-Contact Resolution (FCR) Rate

    Percentage of tickets resolved during first contact with user (e.g. before they hang up or within an hour of submitting ticket). Could be measured as first-contact, first-tier, or first-day resolution.

    End-User Satisfaction

    Perceived value of the service desk measured by a robust annual satisfaction survey of end users and/or transactional satisfaction surveys sent with a percentage of tickets.

    Ticket Volume and Cost Per Ticket

    Monthly operating expenses divided by average ticket volume per month. Report ticket volume by department or ticket category, and look at trends for context.

    Average Time to Resolve (incidents) or Fulfill (service requests)

    Time elapsed from when a ticket is "open" to "resolved." Distinguish between ticket resolution vs. closure, and measure time for incidents and service requests separately.

    Focus on tension metrics to achieve long-term success

    Tension metrics help create a balance by preventing teams from focusing on a single element.

    For example, an MSP built incentives around ticket volume for their staff, but not the quality of tickets. As a result, the MSP staff rushed through tickets and gamed the system while service quality suffered.

    Use metrics to establish baselines and benchmarking data:

    • If you know when spikes in ticket volumes occur, you can prepare to resource more appropriately for these time periods
    • Create KB articles to tackle recurring issues and assist tier 1 technicians and end users.
      • Employ a root cause analysis to eliminate recurring tickets.

    "We had an average talk time of 15 minutes per call and I wanted to ensure they could handle those calls in 15 minutes. But the behavior was opposite, [the vendor] would wrap up the call, transfer prematurely, or tell the client they'd call them back. Service levels drive behavior so make sure they are aligned with your strategic goals with no unintended consequences."
    – IT Services Manager, Banking

    Info-Tech Insight

    Make sure your metrics work cooperatively. Metrics should be chosen that cause tension on one another. It's not enough to rely on a fast service desk that doesn't have a high end-user satisfaction rate or runs at too high a cost; there needs to be balance.

    2.2.2 Arrange groups of tension metrics to balance your reporting

    1-3 hours

    1. Define KPIs and metrics that will be critical to service desk success.
    2. Distribute sticky notes of different colors to participants around the table.
    3. Select a space to place the sticky notes – a table, whiteboard, flip chart, etc. – and divide it into three zones.
    4. Refer to your defined list of goals and KPIs from activity 1.1.3 and discuss metrics to fulfill each KPI. Note that each goal (critical success factor, CSF) may have more than one KPI. For instance:
      1. Goal 1: Increase end-user satisfaction; KPI 1: Improve average transactional survey score. KPI 2: Improve annual relationship survey score.
      2. Goal 2: Improve service delivery; KPI 1: Reduce time to resolve incidents. KPI 2: Reduce time to fulfill service requests.
    5. Recall that tension metrics must form a balance between:
      1. Time
      2. Resources
      3. Quality
    6. Record the results in section 7 of the Service Desk Outsourcing Project Charter Template.

    Input

    • Service desk outsourcing goals
    • Service desk outsourcing KPIs

    Output

    • List of service desk metrics

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Sticky notes
    • Markers
    • Laptops

    Participants

    • Project Team
    • Service Desk Manager

    Download the Project Charter Template

    Phase 3

    Develop an RFP and make a long-term relationship

    Define the goal

    Design an outsourcing strategy

    Develop an RFP and make a long-term relationship

    1.1 Identify goals and objectives

    1.2 Assess outsourcing feasibility

    2.1 Identify project stakeholders

    2.2 Outline potential risks and constraints

    3.1 Prepare a service overview and responsibility matrix

    3.2 Define your approach to vendor relationship management

    3.3 Manage the outsource relationship

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Build your outsourcing RFP
    • Set expectations with candidate vendors
    • Score and select your vendor
    • Manage your relationship with the vendor

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • Service Desk Manager
    • IT Managers
    • Project Managers

    Define requirements for outsourcing service desk support

    Step 3.1

    Prepare a service overview and responsibility matrix

    Activities

    3.1.1 Evaluate your technology, people, and process requirements

    3.1.2 Outline which party will be responsible for which service desk processes

    This step requires the following inputs:

    • Service desk processes and requirements

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • Service Desk Manager
    • IT Managers
    • Project Managers

    Outcomes of this step

    • Knowledge management and technology requirements
    • Self-service requirements

    Develop an RFP and make a long-term relationship

    Create a detailed RFP to ensure your candidate vendor will fulfill all your requirements

    At its core, your RFP should detail the outcomes of your outsourcing strategy and communicate your needs to the vendor.

    The RFP must cover business needs and the more detailed service desk functions required. Many enterprises only consider the functionality they need, while ignoring operational and selection requirements.

    Negotiate a supply agreement with the preferred outsourcer for delivery of the required services. Ensure your RFP covers:

    1. Service specification
    2. Service levels
    3. Roles and responsibilities
    4. Transition period and acceptance
    5. Prices, payment, and duration
    6. Agreement administration
    7. Outsourcing issues

    In addition to defining your standard requirements, don't forget to take into consideration the following factors when developing your RFP:

    • Employee onboarding and hardware imaging for new users
    • Applications you need current and future support for
    • Reporting requirements
    • Self-service options
    • Remote support needs and locations

    Although it may be tempting, don't throw everything over the wall at your vendor in the RFP. Evaluate your service desk functions in terms of quality, cost effectiveness, and the value provided from the vendor. Organizations should only outsource functions that the vendor can operate better, faster, or cheaper.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Involve the right stakeholders in developing your RFP, not just service desk. If only service desk is involved in RFP discussion, the connection between tier 1 and specialists will be broken, as some processes are not considered from IT's point of view.

    Identify ITSM solution requirements

    Your vendor probably uses a different tool to manage their processes; make sure its capabilities align with the vision of your service desk.

    Your service desk and outsourcing strategy were both designed with your current ITSM solution in mind. Before you hand the reins to an MSP, it is crucial that you outline how your current ITSM solution is being used in terms of functionality.

    Find out if it's better to have the MSP use their own ITSM tools or your ITSM solution.

    Benefits of operating within your own ITSM while outsourcing the service desk:

    Disadvantages of using your own ITSM while outsourcing the service desk:

    • If you provide the service catalog, it's easier to control your ITSM tool yourself.
    • Using your own ITSM and giving access to the outsourcer will allow you to build your dashboard and access your operational metrics rather than relying on the MSP to provide you with metrics.
    • Usage of the current tool may be extended across multiple departments, so it may be in the best interest of your business to have the vendor adopt usage of the current tool.
    • While many ITSM solutions have similar functions, innate differences do exist between them. Outsourcers mostly want to operate in their own ticketing solution. As other departments besides IT may be using the service management tool, you will need to have the same tool across the organization. This makes purchasing the new ITSM license very expensive, unless you operate in the same ITSM as the outsourcer.
    • You need your vendor to be able to use the system you have in order to meet your requirements, which will limit your options in the market.
    • If the outsourcer is using your ITSM, you should provide training to them.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Defining your tool requirements can be a great opportunity to get the tool functionality you always wanted. Many MSPs offer enterprise-level ITSM tools and highly mature processes that may tempt you to operate within their ITSM environment. However, first define your goals for such a move, as well as pros and cons of operating in their service management tool to weigh if its benefits overweigh its downfalls.

    Case Study

    Lone Star College learned that it's important to select a vendor whose tool will work with your service desk

    INDUSTRY: Education

    SOURCE: ServiceNow

    Challenge

    Lone Star College has an end-user base of over 100,000 staff and students.

    The college has six campuses across the state of Texas, and each campus was using its own service desk and ITSM solution.

    Initially, the decision was to implement a single ITSM solution, but organizational complexity prevented that initiative from succeeding.

    A decision was made to outsource and consolidate the service desks of each of the campuses to provide more uniform service to end users.

    Solution

    Lone Star College selected a vendor that implemented FrontRange.

    Unfortunately, the tool was not the right fit for Lone Star's service and reporting needs.

    After some discussion, the outsourcing vendor made the switch to ServiceNow.

    Some time later, a hybrid outsourced model was implemented, with Lone Star and the vendor combining to provide 24/7 support.

    Results

    The consolidated, standardized approach used by Lone Star College and its vendor has created numerous benefits:

    • Standardized reporting
    • High end-user satisfaction
    • All SLAs are being met
    • Improved ticket resolution times
    • Automated change management.

    Lone Star outsourced in order to consolidate its service desks quickly, but the tools didn't quite match.

    It's important to choose a tool that works well with your vendor's, otherwise the same standardization issues can persist.

    Design your RFP to help you understand what the vendor's standard offerings are and what it is capable of delivering

    Your RFP should be worded in a way that helps you understand what your vendor's standard offerings are because that's what they're most capable of delivering. Rather than laying out all your requirements in a high level of detail, carefully craft your questions in a probing way. Then, understand what your current baseline is, what your target requirements are, and assess the gap.

    Design the RFP so that responses can easily be compared against one another.

    It is common to receive responses that are very different – RFPs don't provide a response framework. Comparing vastly different responses can be like comparing apples to oranges. Not only are they immensely time consuming to score, their scores also don't end up accurately reflecting the provider's capabilities or suitability as a vendor.

    If your RFP is causing a ten minute printer backlog, you're doing something wrong.

    Your RFP should not be hundreds of pages long. If it is, there is too much detail.

    Providing too much detail can box your responses in and be overly limiting on your responses. It can deter potentially suitable provider candidates from sending a proposal.

    Request
    For
    Proposal

    "From bitter experience, if you're too descriptive, you box yourself in. If you're not descriptive enough, you'll be inundated with questions or end up with too few bidders. We needed to find the best way to get the message across without putting too much detail around it."
    – Procurement Manager, Utilities

    Info-Tech's Service Desk Outsourcing RFP Template contains nine sections

    1. Statement of work
      • Purpose, coverage, and participation ààInsert the purpose and goals of outsourcing your service desk, using steps 1.1 findings in this blueprint as reference.
    2. General information
      • Information about the document, enterprise, and schedule of events ààInsert the timeline you developed for the RFP issue and award process in this section.
    3. Proposal preparation instructions
      • The vendor's understanding of the RFP, good faith statement, points of contact, proposal submission, method of award, selection and notification.
    4. Service overview
      • Information about organizational perspective, service desk responsibility matrix, vendor requirements, and service level agreements (SLAs).
    5. Scope of work, specifications and requirements
      • Technical and functional requirements à Insert the requirements gathered in Phase 1 in this section of the RFP. Remember to include both current and future requirements.
    6. Exit conditions
      • Overview of exit strategy and transition process.
    7. Vendor qualifications and references
    8. Account management and estimated pricing
    9. Vendor certification
    This is a screenshot of the Service Desk Outsourcing RFP Template.

    The main point of focus in this document is defining your requirements (discussed in Phase 1) and developing proposal preparation instructions.

    The rest of the RFP consists mostly of standard legal language. Review the rest of the RFP template and adapt the language to suit your organization's standards. Check with your legal departments to make sure the RFP adheres to company policies.

    3.1.1 Evaluate your technology, people, and process requirements

    1-2 hours

    1. Review the outsourcing goals you identified in Phase 1 (activity 1.1.3).
    2. For each goal, divide the defined requirements from your requirements database library (activity 1.2.1) into three areas:
      1. People Requirements
      2. Process Requirements
      3. Technical Requirements
    3. Group your requirements based on characteristics (e.g. recovery capabilities, engagement methodology, personnel, etc.).
    4. Validate these requirements with the relevant stakeholders.
    5. Document your results in section 4 of the Service Desk Outsourcing RFP Template.

    Input

    • Identified key requirements

    Output

    • Refined requirements to input into the RFP

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Markers
    • Laptops

    Participants

    • IT Director/CIO
    • Service Desk Manager
    • IT Managers

    Download the Service Desk Outsourcing RFP Template

    Assess knowledge management and technology requirements to enable the outsourcer with higher quality work

    Retain ownership of the knowledgebase to foster long-term growth of organizational intelligence

    With end users becoming more and more tech savvy, organizational intelligence is becoming an increasingly important aspect of IT support. Modern employees are able and willing to troubleshoot on their own before calling into the service desk. The knowledgebase and FAQs largely facilitate self-serve trouble shooting, both of which are not core concerns for the outsource vendor.

    Why would the vendor help you empower end users and decrease ticket volume when it will lead to less revenue in the future? Ticket avoidance is not simply about saving money by removing support. It's about the end-user community developing organizational intelligence so that it doesn't need as much technical support.

    Organizational intelligence occurs when shared knowledge and insight is used to make faster, better decisions.

    When you outsource, the flow of technical insight to your end-user community slows down or stops altogether unless you proactively drive it. Retain ownership of the knowledgebase and ensure that the content is:

    1. Validated to ensure it accurately describes the best solution.
    2. Actionable to ensure it prescribes repeatable, verifiable steps.
    3. Contextual to ensure the reader knows when NOT to apply the knowledge.
    4. Maintained to ensure the solution remains current.
    5. Applied, since knowledge is a cost with no benefit unless you apply it and turn it into organizational intelligence.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Include knowledge management process in your ticket handling workflows to make sure knowledge is transferred to the MSP and end users. For more information on knowledge management, refer to Info-Tech's Standardize the Service Desk and Optimize the Service Desk With a Shift-Left Strategy blueprints.

    Assess self-service requirements in your outsourcing plan

    When outsourcing the service desk, determine who will take ownership of the self-service portal.

    Nowadays, outsourcers provide innovative services such as self-serve options. However, bear in mind that the quality of such services is a differentiating factor. A well-maintained portal makes it easy to:

    • Report incidents efficiently via use-case-based forms
    • Place requests via a business-oriented service catalog
    • Automate request processes
    • Give visibility on ticket status
    • Access knowledgebase articles
    • Provide status on critical systems
    • Look for services by both clicking service lists and searching them
    • Provide 24/7 service via interactive communication with live agent and AI-powered machine
    • Streamline business process in multiple departments rather than only IT

    In the outsourcing process, determine your expectations from your vendor on self-serve options and discuss how they will fulfill these requirements. Similar to other processes, work internally to define a list of services your organization is providing that you can pass over to the outsourcer to convert to a service catalog.

    Use Info-Tech's Sample Enterprise Services document to start determining your business's services.

    Assess admin rights in your outsourcing plan to give access to the outsourcer while you keep ownership

    Provide accessibility to account management to improve self-service, which enables:

    • Group owners to be named who can add or remove people from their operating units
    • Users to update attributes such as photos, address, phone number
    • Synchronization with HRIS (Human Resource Information Systems) to enable two-way communication on attribute updates
    • Password reset self-service

    Ensure the vendor has access rights to execute regular clean up to help:

    • Find stale and inactive user and computer accounts (inactive, expired, stale, never logged in)
    • Bulk move and disable capabilities
    • Find empty groups and remove
    • Find and assess NTFS permissions
    • Automated tasks to search and remediate

    Give admin rights to outsourcer to enable reporting and auditing capabilities, such as:

    • Change tracking and notifications
    • Password reset attempts, account unlocks, permission and account changes
    • Anomaly detection and remediation
    • Privilege abuse, such as password sharing

    Info-Tech Insight

    Provide your MSP with access rights to enable the service desk to have account management without giving too much authentication. This way you'll enable moving tickets to the outsourcer while you keep ownership and supervision.

    3.1.2 Outline which party will be responsible for which service desk processes

    1-2 hours

    This activity is an expansion to the outcomes of activity 1.2.1, where you determined the outsourcing requirements and the party to deliver each requirement.

    1. Add your identified tasks from the requirements database library to the service desk responsibility matrix (section 4.2 of the Service Desk Outsourcing RFP Template).
    2. Break each task down into more details. For instance, incident management may include tier 1, tier 2/3, KB creation and update, reporting, and auditing.
    3. Refer to section 4.1 of your Project Charter to review the responsible party for each use case.
    4. Considering the use cases, assess whether your organization, the MSP, or both parties will be responsible for the task.
    5. Document the results in section 4.2 of the RFP.

    Input

    • Identified key requirements

    Output

    • Responsible party to deliver each task

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Markers
    • Laptops

    Participants

    • IT Director/CIO
    • Service Desk Manager
    • IT Managers

    Download the Service Desk Outsourcing RFP Template

    Step 3.2

    Define your approach to vendor relationship management

    Activities

    3.2.1 Define your SLA requirements

    3.2.2 Score each vendor to mitigate the risk of failure

    3.2.3 Score RFP responses

    3.2.4 Get referrals, conduct reference interviews and evaluate responses for each vendor

    Develop an RFP and make a long-term relationship

    This step requires the following inputs:

    • Service desk outsourcing RFP
    • List of service desk outsourcing requirements

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • Service Desk Manager
    • IT Managers
    • Project Managers

    Outcomes of this step

    • Service desk SLA
    • RFP scores

    Don't rush to judgment; apply due diligence when selecting your vendor

    The most common mistake in vendor evaluation is moving too quickly. The process leading to an RFP evaluation can be exhausting, and many organizations simply want to be done with the whole process and begin outsourcing.

    The most common mistake in vendor evaluation is moving too quickly. The process leading to an RFP evaluation can be exhausting, and many organizations simply want to be done with the whole process and begin outsourcing.

    1. Call around to get referrals for each vendor
    2. Create a shortlist
    3. Review SLAs and contract terms
    4. Select your vendor

    Recognize warning signs in the MSP's proposal to ensure a successful negotiation

    Vendors often include certain conditions in their proposals that masquerade as appealing but may spell disaster. Watch for these red flags:

    1. Discounted Price
      • Vendors know the market value of their competitors' services. Price is not what sets them apart; it's the type of services offered as well as the culture present.
      • A noticeably low price is often indicative of a desperate organization that is not focused on quality managed services.
    2. No Pushback
      • Vendors should work to customize their proposal to suit both their capabilities and your needs. No pushback means they are not invested in your project as deeply as they should be.
      • You should be prepared for and welcome negotiations; they're a sign that both sides are reaching a mutually beneficial agreement.
    3. Continual SLA Improvement
      • Continual improvement is a good quality that your vendor should have, but it needs to have some strategic direction.
      • Throwing continual SLA improvement into the deal may seem great, but make sure that you'll benefit from the value-added service. Otherwise, you'll be paying for services that you don't actually need.

    Clearly define core vendor qualities before looking at any options

    Vendor sales and marketing people know just what to say to sway you: don't talk to them until you know what you're looking for.

    Geography

    Do you prefer global or local data centers? Do you need multiple locations for redundancy in case of disaster? Will language barriers be a concern?

    Contract Length

    Ensure you can terminate a poor arrangement by having shorter terms with optional renewals. It's better to renew and renegotiate if one side is losing in the deal in order to keep things fair. Don't assume that proposed long-term cost savings will provide a satisfactory service.

    Target Market

    Vendors are aiming at different business segments, from startups to large enterprises. Some will accept existing virtual machines, and others enforce compliance to appeal to government and health agencies.

    SLA

    A robust SLA strengthens a vendor's reliability and accountability. Agencies with special needs should have room in negotiations for customization. Providers should also account for regular SLA reviews and updates. Vendors should be tracking call volume and making projections that should translate directly to SLAs.

    Support

    Even if you don't need a vendor with 24/7 availability, vendors who cannot support this timing should be eliminated. You may want to upgrade later and will want to avoid the hassle of switching.

    Maturity

    Vendors must have the willingness and ability to improve processes and efficiencies over time. Maintaining the status-quo isn't acceptable in the constantly evolving IT world.

    Cost

    Consider which model makes the most sense: will you go with per call or per user pricing? Which model will generate vendor motivation to continually improve and meet your long-term goals? Watch out for variable pricing models.

    Define your SLA requirements so your MSP can create a solution that fits

    SLAs ensure accountability from the service provider and determine service price

    SLAs define the performance of the service desk and clarify what the provider and customer can expect in their outsourcing relationship.

    • Service categories
    • The acceptable range of end-user satisfaction
    • The scope of what functions of the service desk are being measured (availability, time to resolve, time to respond, etc.)
    • Credits and penalties for achieving or missing targets
    • Frequency of measurement/reporting
    • Provisions and penalties for ending the contractual relationship early
    • Management and communication structure
    • Escalation protocol for incidents relating to tiers 2 or 3

    Each MSP's RFP response will help you understand their basic SLA terms and enhanced service offerings. You need to understand the MSP's basic SLA terms to make sure they are adequate enough for your requirements. A well-negotiated SLA will balance the requirements of the customer and limit the liability of the provider in a win/win scenario.

    For more information on defining service level requirements, refer to Info-Tech's blueprint Reduce Risk With Rock-Solid Service-Level Agreements.

    3.2.1 Define your SLA requirements

    2-3 hours

    • As a team, review your current service desk SLA for the following items:
      • Response time
      • Resolution time
      • Escalation time
      • End-user satisfaction
      • Service availability
    • Use the sample table as a starting point to determine your current incident management SLA:
    • Determine your SLA expectations from the outsourcer.
    • Document your SLA expectations in section 4.4 of the RFP template.

    Participants: IT Managers, Service Desk Manager, Project Team

    Response
    PriorityResponse SLOResolution SLOEscalation Time
    T1
    Severity 1CriticalWithin 10 minutes4 hours to resolveImmediate
    Severity 2HighWithin 1 business hour8 business hours to resolve20 minutes
    Severity 3MediumWithin 4 business hours24 business hours to resolveAfter 20 minutes without progress
    Severity 4LowSame day (8 hours)72 business hours to resolve After 1 hour without progress
    SLO ResponseTime it takes for service desk to respond to service request or incident. Target response is 80% of SLO
    SLO ResolutionTime it takes to resolve incident and return business services to normal. Target resolution is 80% of SLO

    Download the Service Desk Outsourcing RFP Template

    Get a detailed plan from your selected vendor before signing a contract

    Build a standard process to evaluate candidate vendors

    Use section 5 of Info-Tech's Service Desk Outsourcing RFP Template for commonly used questions and requirements for outsourcing the service desk. Ask the right questions to secure an agreement that meets your needs. If you are already in a contract with an MSP, tale the opportunity of contract renewal to improve the contract and service.

    This is a screenshot of the Service Desk Outsourcing RFP Template.

    Download the Service Desk Outsourcing RFP Template

    Add your finalized assessment questions into Info-Tech's Service Desk Outsourcing RFP Scoring Tool to aggregate responses in one repository for comparison. Since the vendors are asked to respond in a standard format, it is easier to bring together all the responses to create a complete view of your options.

    This is an image of the Service Desk Vendor Proposal Scoring Tool

    Download the Service Desk Vendor Proposal Scoring Tool

    3.2.2 Score each vendor to mitigate the risk of failure

    1-2 hours

    Include the right requirements for your organization and analyze candidate vendors on their capability to satisfy them.

    1. Use section 5 of the RFP template to convert your determined requirements into questions to address in vendor briefings.
    2. Review the questions in the context of near- and long-term service desk outsourcing needs. In the template, we have separated requirements into 7 categories:
      • Vendor Requirements (VR)
      • Vendor Qualifications/Engagement/Administration Capabilities (VQ)
      • Service Operations (SO)
      • Service Support (SS)
      • Service Level Agreement (SLA)
      • Transition Processes (TP)
      • Account Management (AM)
    3. Define the priority for each question:
      • Required
      • Desired
      • Optional
    4. Leave the compliance and comments to when you brief with vendors.

    Input

    • Technical and functional requirements

    Output

    • Priority level for each requirement
    • Completed list of requirement questions

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/flip charts
    • Markers
    • Laptops

    Participants

    • IT Director/CIO
    • Service Desk Manager
    • IT Managers

    Download the Service Desk Outsourcing RFP Template

    3.2.3 Score RFP responses

    2-3 hours

    1. Enter the requirements questions into the RFP Scoring Tool and use it during vendor briefings.
    2. Copy the Required and Desired priority requirements from the previous activity into the RFP Questions column.
    3. Evaluate each RFP response against the RFP criteria based on the scoring scale.
    4. The Results section in the tool shows the vendor ranking based on their overall scores.
    5. Compare potential outsourcing partners considering scores on individual requirements categories and based on overall scores.

    Input

    • Completed list of requirement questions
    • Priority level for each requirement

    Output

    • List of top vendors for outsourcing the service desk

    Materials

    • Service Desk Vendor Proposal Scoring Tool

    Participants

    • Service Desk Manager
    • IT Managers
    • Project Managers
    • IT Director/CIO

    Download the Service Desk Vendor Proposal Scoring Tool

    3.2.3 Get referrals, conduct reference interviews, and evaluate responses for each vendor

    1. Outline a list of questions to conduct reference interviews with past/present clients of your candidate vendors.
    2. Use the reference interview template as a starting point. As a group review the questions and edit them to a list that will fulfill your requirements.
    3. Ask your candidate vendors to provide you with a list of three to five clients that have/had used their services. Make sure that vendors enforce the interview will be kept anonymous and names and results won't be disclosed.
    4. Ask vendors to book a 20-30 minute call with you and their client.
    5. Document your interview comments in your updated reference interview template.
    6. Update the RFP scoring tool accordingly.

    Input

    • List of top vendors for outsourcing the service desk

    Output

    • Updated list of top vendors for outsourcing the service desk

    Materials

    • Service Desk Outsourcing Reference Interview Template
    • Service Desk Vendor Proposal Scoring Tool

    Participants

    • Service Desk Manager
    • IT Managers
    • Project Managers

    Download the Service Desk Vendor Proposal Scoring Tool

    Compare pricing models of outsourcing services

    It's a common sales tactic to use a low price as an easy solution. Carefully evaluate the vendors on your short-list and ensure that SLAs, culture, and price all match to your organization.

    Research different pricing models and accurately assess which model fits your organization. Consider the following pricing models:

    Pay per technician

    In this model, a flat rate is allocated to agents tackling your service desk tickets. This is a good option for building long-term relationship with outsourcer's agents and efficient knowledge transfer to the external team; however, it's not ideal for small organizations that deal with few tickets. This is potentially an expensive model for small teams.

    Pay per ticket

    This model considers the number of tickets handled by the outsourcer. This model is ideal if you only want to pay for your requirement. Although the internal team needs to have a close monitoring strategy to make sure the outsourcer's efficiency in ticket resolution.

    Pay per call

    This is based on outbound and inbound calls. This model is proper for call centers and can be less expensive than the other models; however, tracking is not easy, as you should ensure service desk calls result in efficient resolution rather than unnecessary follow-up.

    Pay per time (minutes or hours)

    The time spent on tickets is considered in this model. With this model, you pay for the work done by agents, so that it may be a good and relatively cheap option. As quicker resolution SLA is usually set by the organization, customer satisfaction may drop, as agents will be driven to faster resolution, not necessarily quality of work.

    Pay per user

    This model is based on number of all users, or number of users for particular applications. In this model, correlation between number of users and number of tickets should be taken into account. This is an ideal model if you want to deal with impact of staffing changes on service price. Although you should first track metrics such as mean time to resolve and average number of tickets so you can prevent unnecessary payment based on number of users when most users are not submitting tickets.

    Step 3.3

    Manage the outsource relationship

    Activities

    3.3.1 Analyze your outsourced service desk for continual improvement

    3.3.2 Make a case to either rehabilitate your outsourcing agreement or exit

    3.3.3 Develop an exit strategy in case you need to end your contract early

    Develop an RFP and make a long-term relationship

    This step requires the following inputs:

    • Service desk SLA
    • List of impacted stakeholder groups
    • List of impacts and benefits of the outsourced service desk

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • Service Desk Manager
    • IT Managers
    • Project Managers

    Outcomes of this step

    • Communication plan
    • Vendor management strategy

    Ensure formality of your vendor management practice

    A service desk outsourcing project is an ongoing initiative. Build a relationship plan to make sure the outsourcer complies with the agreement.

    This is an iamge of the cycle of relationship management and pre-contract management.

    Monitor Vendor Performance

    Key Activity:

    Measure performance levels with an agreed upon standard scorecard.

    Manage Vendor Risk

    Key Activity:

    Periodical assessment of the vendors to ensure they are meeting compliance standards.

    Manage Vendor Contracts and Relationships

    Key Activity:
    Manage the contracts and renewal dates, the level of demand for the services/products provided, and the costs accrued.

    COMPLETE Identify and Evaluate Vendors

    Key Activity:
    Develop a plan with procurement and key internal stakeholders to define clear, consistent, and stable requirements.

    COMPLETE Select a Vendor

    Key Activity:
    Develop a consistent and effective process for selecting the most appropriate vendor.

    Manage Vendor Contracts and Relationships

    Key Activity:
    Contracts are consistently negotiated to ensure the vendor and the client have a documented and consistent understanding of mutual expectations.

    Expect the vendor to manage processes according to your standards

    You need this level of visibility into the service desk process, whether in-house or outsourced

    Each of these steps requires documentation – either through standard operating procedures, SLAs, logs, or workflow diagrams.

    • Define key operating procedures and workflows
    • Record, classify, and prioritize tickets
    • Verify, approve, and fulfill tickets
    • Investigate, diagnose, and allocate tickets
    • Resolve, recover, and close tickets
    • Track and report

    "Make sure what they've presented to you is exactly what's happening."
    – Service Desk Manager, Financial Services

    Manage the vendor relationship through regular communication

    Regular contact with your MSP provides opportunities to address issues that emerge

    Designate a relationship manager to act as a liaison at the business to be a conduit between the business and the MSP.

    • The relationship manager will take feedback from the MSP and relate it back to you to bridge the technical and business gap between the two.

    Who should be involved

    • Routine review meetings should involve the MSP and your relationship manager.
    • Technical knowledge may be needed to address specific issues, but business knowledge and relationship management skills are absolutely required.
    • Other stakeholders and people who are deeply invested in the vendor relationship should be invited or at least asked to contribute questions and concerns.

    What is involved

    • Full review of the service desk statistics, escalations, staffing changes, process changes, and drivers of extra billing or cost.
    • Updates to key documentation for the issues listed above and changes to the knowledgebase.
    • Significant drivers of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction.
    • Changes that have/are being proposed that can impact any of the above.

    Communicate changes to end users to avoid push back and get buy-in

    Top-down processes for outsourcing will leave end users in the dark

    • Your service desk staff has been involved in the outsourcing process the entire time, but end users are affected all the same.
    • The service desk is the face of IT. A radical shift in service processes and points of contact can be detrimental to not only the service desk, but all of IT.
    • Communicating the changes early to end users will both help them cope with the change and help the MSP achieve better results.
      • An internal communication plan should be rolled out in order to inform and educate end users about the changes associated with outsourcing the service desk.
    • Your relationship manager should be tasked with communicating the changes to end users. The focus should be on addressing questions or concerns about the transition while highlighting the value gained through outsourcing to an MSP.
    • Service quality is a two-way street; the end user needs to be informed of proper protocols and points of contact so that the service desk technicians can fulfill their duties to the best of their ability.

    "When my company decided to outsource, I performed the same role but for a different company. There was a huge disruption to the business flow and a lack of communication to manage the change. The transition took weeks before any end users figured out what the new processes were for submitting a ticket and who to ask for help, and from a personal side, it became difficult to maintain relationships with colleagues."
    – IT Specialist for a financial institution

    Info-Tech Insight

    Educate the enterprise on expectations and processes that are handled by the MSP. Identify stakeholder groups affected by the outsourced processes then build a communication plan on what's been changed, what the benefits are, and how they will be impacted. Determine a timeline for communicating these initiatives and how these announcements will be made. Use InfoTech's Sample Communication Plan as a starting point.

    Build a continual improvement plan to make sure your MSP is efficiently delivering services according to expectations

    Ensure that your quality assurance program is repeatable and applicable to the outsourced services

    1. Design a QA scorecard that can help you assess steps the outsourcer agents should follow. Keep the questionnaire high level but specific to your environment. The scorecard should include questions that follow the steps to take considering your intake channels. For instance, if end users can reach the service desk via phone, chat, and email, build your QA around assessing customer service for call, chat, and ticket quality.
    2. Build a training program for agents: Develop an internal monitoring plan to relay detailed feedback to your MSP. Assess performance and utilize KBs as training materials for coaching agents on challenging transactions.
    3. Everything that goes to your service desk has to be documented; there will be no organic transfer of knowledge and experience.
    4. You need to let your MSP know how their efforts are impacting the performance of your organization. Measure your internal performance against the external performance of your service desk.
    5. Constant internal check-ins ensure that your MSP is meeting the SLAs outlined in the RFP.
    6. Routine reporting of metrics and ticket trends allow you to enact problem management. Otherwise, you risk your MSP operating your service desk with no internal feedback from its owner.
    7. Use metrics to determine the service desk functionality.

    Consider the success story of your outsourced service desk

    Build a feedback program for your outsourced services. Utilize transactional surveys to discover and tell outsourcing success to the impacted stakeholders.

    Ensure you apply steps for providing feedback to make sure processes are handled as expected. Service desk is the face of IT. Customer satisfaction on ticket transactions reflects satisfaction with IT and the organization.

    Build customer satisfaction surveys and conduct them for every transaction to get a better sense of outsourced service desk functionality. Collaborate with the vendor to make sure you build a proper strategy.

    • Build a right list of questions. Multiple and lengthy questions may lead to survey taking fatigue. Make sure you ask the right questions and give an option to the customer to comment any additional notes.
    • Give the option to users to rate the transaction. Make the whole process very seamless and doable in a few seconds.
    • Ensure to follow-up on negative feedback. This will help you find gaps in services and provide training to improve customer service.

    3.3.1 Analyze your outsourced service desk for continual improvement

    1 hour

    1. In this project, you determined the KPIs based on your service desk objectives (activity 2.2.2).
    2. Refer to your list of metrics in section 7 of the Service Desk Outsourcing Project Charter.
    3. Think about what story you want to tell and determine what factors will help move the narrative.
    4. Discuss how often you would like to track these metrics. Determine the audience for each metric.
    5. Provide the list to the MSP to create reports with auto-distribution.

    Input

    • Determined CSFs and KPIs

    Output

    • List of metrics to track, including frequency to report and audience to report to

    Materials

    • Service Desk Outsourcing Project Charter

    Participants

    • Service Desk Manager
    • IT Managers
    • Project Managers

    Download the Project Charter Template

    Reward the MSP for performance instead of "punishing" them for service failure

    Turn your vendor into a true partner by including an "earn back" condition in the contract

    MSPs often offer clients credit requests (service credits) for their service failures, which are applied to the previous month's monthly recurring charge. They are applied to the last month's MRC (monthly reoccurring charges) at the end of term and then the vendor pays out the residual.

    However, while common, service credits are not always perceived to be a strong incentive for the provider to continually focus on improvement of mean-time-to-respond/mean-time-to-resolve.

    • Engage the vendor as a true partner within a relationship only based upon Service Credits.
    • Suggest the vendor include a minor change to the non-performance processes within the final agreement: the vendor implements an "earn back" condition in the agreement.
    • Where a bank of service credits exists because of non-performance, if the provider exceeds the SLA performance metrics for a number of consecutive months (two is common), then an amount of any prior credits received by client is returned to the provider as an earn back for improved performance.
    • This can be a useful mechanism to drive improved performance.

    Measure the outsourced service desk ROI constantly to drive efficient decisions for continual improvement or an exit plan

    Efficient outsourced service desk causes positive impacts on business satisfaction. To address the true value of the services outsourced, you should evaluate the return on investment (ROI) in these areas: Emotional ROI, Time ROI, Financial ROI

    Emotional ROI

    Service desk's main purpose should be to provide topnotch services to end users. Build a customer experience program and leverage transactional surveys and relationship surveys to constantly analyze customer feedback on service quality.

    Ask yourself:

    • How have the outsourced services improved customer satisfaction?
    • How has the service desk impacted the business brand?
    • Have these services improved agents' job satisfaction?
    • What is the NPS score of the service desk?
    • What should we do to reduce the detractor rate and improve satisfaction leveraging the outsourced service desk?

    Time ROI

    Besides customer satisfaction, SLA commitment is a big factor to consider when conducting ROI analysis.

    Ask these questions:

    • Have we had improvement in FCR?
    • What are the mean time to resolve incidents and mean time to fulfill requests?
    • Is the cost incurred to outsourced services worth improvement in such metrics?

    Financial ROI

    As already mentioned in Phase 1, the main motivation for outsourcing the service desk should not be around cost reduction, but to improve performance. Regardless, it's still important to understand the financial implications of your decision.

    To evaluate the financial impact of your outsourced service desk, ask these questions:

    • How much have the outsourced services impacted our business financially?
    • How much are we paying compared to when it was done internally?
    • Considering the emotional, time, and effort factors, is it worth bringing the services in house or changing the vendor?

    3.3.2 Make a case to either rehabilitate your outsourcing agreement or exit

    3-4 hours

    1. Refer to the results of activity 2.2.2. for the list of metrics and the metrics dashboard over the past quarter.
    2. Consider emotional and time ROI, assess end-user satisfaction and SLA, and run a report comparison with the baseline that you built prior to outsourcing the service desk.
    3. Estimate the organization's IT operating expenses over the next five years if you stay with the vendor.
    4. Estimate the organization's IT operating expenses over the next five years if you switch the vendor.
    5. Estimate the organization's IT operating expenses over the next five years if you repatriate the service desk.
    6. Estimate the non-recurring costs associated with the move, such as the penalty for early contract termination, data center moving costs, and cost of potential business downtime during the move. Sum them to determine the investment.
    7. Calculate the return on investment. Discuss and decide whether the organization should consider rehabilitating the vendor agreement or ending the partnership.

    Input

    • Outsourced service desk metrics
    • Operating expenses

    Output

    • Return on investment

    Materials

    • List of metrics
    • Laptop
    • Markers
    • Flip chart/whiteboard

    Participants

    • IT Director/CIO
    • Service Desk Manager
    • IT Managers

    For more information on conducting this activity, refer to InfoTech's blueprint Terminate the IT Infrastructure Outsourcing Relationship

    Define exit conditions to complete your contract with your MSP

    The end of outsourcing is difficult. Your organization needs to maintain continuity of service during the transition. Your MSP needs to ensure that its resources can be effectively transitioned to the next deployment with minimal downtime. It is crucial to define your exit conditions so that both sides can prepare accordingly.

    • Your exit conditions must be clearly laid out in the contract. Create a list of service desk functions and metrics that are important to your organization's success. If your MSP is not meeting those needs or performance levels, you should terminate your services.
    • Most organizations accomplish this through a clear definition of hard and measurable KPIs and metrics that must be achieved and what will happen in the case these metrics are not being regularly met. If your vendor doesn't meet these requirements as defined in your contract, you then have a valid reason and the ability to leave the agreement.

    Examples of exit conditions:

    • Your MSP did not meet their SLAs on priority 1 or 2 tickets two times within a month.
    • If they didn't meet the SLA twice in that 30 days, you could terminate the contract penalty-free.

    Info-Tech Insight

    If things start going south with your MSP, negotiate a "get well plan." Outline your problems to the MSP and have them come back to you with a list of how they're going to fix these problems to get well before you move forward with the contract.

    Try to rehabilitate before you repatriate

    Switching service providers or ending the contract can be expensive and may not solve your problems. Try to rehabilitate your vendor relationship before immediately ending it.

    You may consider terminating your outsourcing agreement if you are dissatisfied with the current agreement or there has been a change in circumstances (either the vendor has changed, or your organization has changed).

    Before doing so, consider the challenges:

    1. It can be very expensive to switch providers or end a contract.
    2. Switching vendors can be a large project involving transfer of knowledge, documentation, and data.
    3. It can be difficult to maintain service desk availability, functionality, and reliability during the transition.

    Diagnose the cause of the problem before assuming it's the MSP's fault. The issue may lie with poorly defined requirements and processes, lack of communication, poor vendor management, or inappropriate SLAs. Re-assess your strategy and re-negotiate your contract if necessary.

    Info-Tech Insight

    There are many reasons why outsourcing relationships fail, but it's not always the vendor's fault.

    Clients often think their MSP isn't doing a great job, but a lot of the time the reason comes back to the client. They may not have provided sufficient documentation on processes, were not communicating well, didn't have a regular point of contact, and weren't doing regular service reviews. Before exiting the relationship, evaluate why it's not working and try to fix things first.

    Don't stop with an exit strategy, you also need to develop a transition plan

    Plan out your transition timeline, taking into account current contract terms and key steps required. Be prepared to handle tickets immediately upon giving notice.

    • Review your outsourcing contract with legal counsel to identify areas of concern for lock-in or breech.
    • Complete a cost/benefit analysis.
    • Bring intellectual property (including ticket data, knowledge base articles, and reports) back in-house (if you'd like to repatriate the service desk) or transfer to the next service desk vendor (if you're outsourcing to another MSP).
    • Review and update service desk standard processes (escalation, service levels, ticket templates, etc.).
    • Procure service desk software, licenses, and necessary hardware as needed.
    • Train the staff (internal for repatriating the service desk, or external for the prospective MSP).
    • Communicate the transition plan and be prepared to start responding to tickets immediately.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Develop a transition plan about six months before the contract notice date. Be proactive by constantly tracking the MSP, running ROI analyses and training staff before moving the services to the internal team or the next MSP. This will help you manage the transition smoothly and handle intake channels so that upon potential exit, users won't be disrupted.

    3.3.3 Develop an exit strategy in case you need to end your contract early

    3-4 hours

    Create a plan to be prepared in case you need to end your contract with the MSP early.

    Your exit strategy should encompass both the conditions under which you would need to end your contract with the MSP and the next steps you will take to transition your services.

    1. Define the exit conditions you plan to negotiate into your contract with the MSP:
      • Identify the performance levels you will require your MSP to meet.
      • Identify the actions you expect the MSP to take if they fail to meet these performance levels.
      • Identify the conditions under which you would leave the contract early.
    2. Develop a strategy for transitioning services in the event you need to leave your contract with the MSP:
      • Will you hand the responsibility to a new MSP or repatriate the service desk back in-house?
      • How will you maintain services through the transition?
    3. Document your exit strategy in section 6 of the Service Desk Outsourcing RFP Template.

    Input

    • Outsourced service desk metrics
    • Operating expenses

    Output

    • Return on investment

    Materials

    • List of metrics
    • Laptop
    • Markers
    • Flip chart/whiteboard

    Participants

    • IT Director/CIO
    • Service Desk Manager
    • IT Managers

    Download the Service Desk Outsourcing RFP Template

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Problem Solved

    You have now re-envisioned your service desk by building a solid strategy for outsourcing it to a vendor. You first analyzed your challenges with the current service desk and evaluated the benefits of outsourcing services. Then you went through requirements assessment to find out which processes should be outsourced. Thereafter, you developed an RFP to communicate your proposal and evaluate the best candidates.

    You have also developed a continual improvement plan to ensure the outsourcer provides services according to your expectations. Through this plan, you're making sure to build a good relationship through incentivizing the vendor for accomplishments rather than punishing for service failures. However, you've also contemplated an exit plan in the RFP for potential consistent service failures.

    Ideally, this blueprint has helped you go beyond requirements identification and served as a means to change your mindset and strategy for outsourcing the service desk efficiently to gain long-term benefits.

    if you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech Workshop

    Contact your account representative for more information

    workshops@infotech.com

    1-888-670-8889

    Additional Support

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech Workshop

    To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.

    Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech's historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.

    This is a picture of Info-Tech analyst Mahmoud Ramin

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

    This is a screenshot of activity 1.2.1 found in this blueprint

    Identify Processes to Outsource
    Identify service desk tasks that will provide the most value upon outsourcing.

    This is a screenshot of activity 3.2.2 found in this blueprint

    Score Candidate Vendors
    Evaluate vendors on their capabilities for satisfying your service desk requirements.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Standardize the Service Desk

    • Improve customer service by driving consistency in your support approach and meeting SLAs.

    Outsource IT Infrastructure to Improve System Availability, Reliability, and Recovery

    • There are very few IT infrastructure components you should be housing internally – outsource everything else.

    Terminate the IT Infrastructure Outsourcing Relationship

    • There must be 50 ways to leave your vendor.

    Research Contributors and Experts

    Yev Khovrenkov; Enterprise Consultant, Solvera Solutions

    Kamil Salagan; I&O Manager, Bartek Ingredients

    Satish Mekerira; VP of IT, Coherus BioSciences

    Kris Krishan; Head of IT and Business Systems, Waymo

    Kris Arthur; Infra & Security Director, SEKO Logistics

    Valance Howden; Principal Research Advisor, Info-Tech Research Group

    Sandi Conrad; Principal Research Director, Info-Tech Research Group

    Graham Price; Senior Director of Executive Services, Info-Tech Research Group

    Barry Cousins; Practice Lead, Info-Tech Research Group

    Mark Tauschek; VP of I&O Research, Info-Tech Research Group

    Darin Stahl; Principal Research Advisor, Info-Tech Research Group

    Scott Yong; Principal Research Advisor, Info-Tech Research Group

    A special thank-you to five anonymous contributors

    Bibliography

    Allnutt, Charles. "The Ultimate List of Outsourcing Statistics." MicroSourcing, 2022. Accessed July 2022.
    "Considerations for outsourcing the service desk. A guide to improving your service desk and service delivery performance through outsourcing." Giva. Accessed May 2022.
    Hurley, Allison. "Service Desk Outsourcing | Statistics, Challenges, & Benefits." Forward BPO Inc., 2019. Accessed June 2022.
    Mtsweni, Patricia, et al. "The impact of outsourcing information technology services on business operations." South African Journal of Information Management, 2021, Accessed May 2022.
    "Offshore, Onshore or Hybrid–Choosing the Best IT Outsourcing Model." Calance, 2021. Accessed June 2022. Web.
    "Service Integration and Management (SIAM) Foundation Body of Knowledge." Scopism, 2020. Accessed May 2022.
    Shultz, Aaron. "IT Help Desk Outsourcing Pricing Models Comparison." Global Help Desk Services. Accessed June 2022. Web.
    Shultz, Aaron. "4 Steps to Accurately Measure the ROI of Outsourced Help Desk Services" Global Help Desk Services, Accessed June 2022. Web.
    Sunberg, John. "Great Expectations: What to Look for from Outsourced Service Providers Today." HDI. Accessed June 2022. Web.
    Walters, Grover. "Pivotal Decisions in outsourcing." Muma Case Review, 2019. Accessed May 2022.
    Wetherell, Steve. "Outsourced IT Support Services: 10 Steps to Better QA" Global Held Desk Services. Accessed May 2022. Web.

    Build a Platform-Based Organization

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    • The organization is riddled with bureaucracy. Some even believe that bureaucracy is inevitable and is an outcome of a complex business operating in a complex market and regulatory environment.
    • Time to market for new products and services is excruciatingly long.
    • Digital natives like Facebook, Netflix, and Spotify do not compare well with the organization and cannot be looked to for inspiration.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Large corporations often consist of a few operating units, each with its own idiosyncracies about strategies, culture, and capabilities. These tightly integrated operating units make a company prone to bureaucracy.
    • The antidote to this bureaucracy is a platform structure: small, autonomous teams operating as startups within the organization.

    Impact and Result

    • Platforms consist of related activities and associated technologies that deliver on a specific organizational goal. A platform can therefore be run as a business or as a service. This structure of small autonomous teams that are loosely joined will make your employees directly accountable to the customers. In a way, they become entrepreneurs and do not remain just employees.

    Build a Platform-Based Organization Research & Tools

    Build a platform-based organization

    Download our guide to learn how you can get started with a platform structure.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    • Build a Platform-Based Organization Storyboard
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Build a Platform-Based Organization

    Use a platform structure to overcome bureaucracy.

    Analyst Perspective

    Build a platform-based organization.

    Bureaucracy saps innovation out of large corporations. Some even believe that bureaucracy is inevitable and is an outcome of a complex business operating in a complex market and regulatory environment.

    So, what is the antidote to bureaucracy? Some look to startups like Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, and Spotify, but they are digital native and don’t compare well to a large monolithic corporation.

    However, all is not lost for large corporations. Inspiration can be drawn from a company in China – Haier, which is not a typical poster child of the digital age like Spotify. In fact, three decades ago, it was a state-owned company with a shoddy product quality.

    Haier uses an intriguing organization structure based on microenterprises and platforms that has proven to be an antidote to bureaucracy.

    Vivek Mehta
    Research Director, Digital & Innovation
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    The Challenge

    Large corporations are prone to bureaucracies, which sap their organizations of creativity and make them blind to new opportunities. Though many executives express the desire to get rid of it, bureaucracy is thriving in their organizations.

    Why It Happens

    As organizations grow and become more complex over time, they yearn for efficiency and control. Some believe bureaucracy is the natural outcome of running a complex organization in a complex business and regulatory environment.

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    A new organizational form – the platform structure – is challenging the bureaucratic model. The platform structure makes employees directly accountable to customers and organizes them in an ecosystem of autonomous units.

    As a starting point, sketch out a platform structure that works for your organization. Then, establish a governance model and identify and nurture key capabilities for the platform structure.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The antidote to bureaucracy is a platform structure: small, autonomous teams operating as startups within the organization.

    Executive Brief Case Study

    Small pieces, loosely joined

    Haier

    Industry: Manufacturing
    Source: Harvard Business Review November-December 2018

    Haier, based in China, is currently the world’s largest appliance maker. Zhang Ruimin, Haier’s CEO, has built an intriguing organizing structure where every employee is directly accountable to customers – internal and/or external. A large corporation often consists of a few operating units, each with its own idiosyncrasies, which makes it slow to innovate. To avoid that, Haier has divided itself into 4,000 microenterprises (MEs), most of which have ten to 15 employees. There are three types of microenterprises in Haier:

    1. Approximately 200 “transforming” MEs: market-facing units like Zhisheng, which manufactures refrigerators, a legacy Haier product, for today’s young urbanites.
    2. Approximately 50 “incubating” MEs: entirely new businesses like Xinchu that wrap existing products into entirely new business models.
    3. Approximately 3,800 “node” MEs: units that sell component products and services such as design, manufacturing, and human resources support to Haier’s market-facing MEs.

    Each ME operates as an autonomous unit with its own targets – an organizing structure that enables innovation at Haier.

    (Harvard Business Review, 2018)

    The image is a rectangular graphic with the words Refrigeration Platform in the centre. There are six text boxes around the centre, reading (clockwise from top left): Zhisheng Young urbanites; Langdu Premium; Jinchu Mid-priced; Xinchu Internet-connected; Overseas Export markets; Leader Value-priced. There are a series of white boxes bordering the graphic, with the following labels: at top--Sales nodes; at right--Support nodes (R&D, HR, supply chain, etc.); at bottom left---Design nodes; at bottom right--Production nodes.

    Markets disproportionately reward platform structure

    Tech companies like Facebook, Netflix, and Spotify are organized around a set of modular platforms run by accountable platform teams. This modular org structure enables them to experiment, learn, and scale quickly – a key attribute of innovative organizations.

    Facebook ~2,603 million monthly active users

    India ~1,353 million population

    Netflix ~183 million monthly paid subscribers

    Spotify ~130 million premium subscribers

    Canada ~37 million population

    (“Facebook Users Worldwide 2020,” “Number of Netflix Subscribers 2019,” “Spotify Users - Subscribers in 2020,” Statista.)

    1. Sketch Out the Platform Structure

    What is a platform anyway?

    A modular component of an org structure

    Platforms consist of a logical cluster of activities and associated technology that delivers on a specific business goal and can therefore be run as a business, or ‘as a service’ … Platforms focus on business solutions to serve clients (internal or external) and to supply other platforms.” – McKinsey, 2019

    Platforms operate as independent units with their own business, technology, governance, processes, and people management. As an instance, a bank could have payments platform under a joint business and IT leadership. This payments-as-a-service platform could provide know-how, processes, and technology to the bank’s internal customers such as retail and commercial business units.

    Many leading IT organizations are set up in a platform-based structure that allows them to rapidly innovate. It’s an imperative for organizations in other industries that they must pilot and then scale with a platform play.

    What a platform-based org looks like

    It looks like a multicellular organism, where each cell is akin to a platform

    An organism consists of multiple cells of different types, sizes, and shapes. Each cell is independent in its working. Regardless of the type, a cell would have three features –the nucleus, the cell membrane, and, between the two, the cytoplasm.

    Similarly, an organization could be imagined as one consisting of several platforms of different types and sizes. Each platform must be autonomous, but they all share a few common features – have a platform leader, set up and monitor targets, and enable interoperability amongst platforms. Platforms could be of three types (McKinsey, 2019):

    1. Customer-journey platforms enable customer proposition and experience built on reusable code. They provide “journey as a service”; for example, Account Opening in a bank.
    2. Business-solution platforms are modular and run as a business or as a service. They provide “company as a service”; for example, Payments or Fraud Detection in a bank.
    3. Core IT provisioning platforms provide core IT services for the organization, for example, cloud, data, automation.

    There are two images: in the lower part of the graphic shows a multicellular organism, and has text pointing to a single cell. At the top, there is a zoomed in image of that single cell, with its component parts labelled: Cell Membrane, Nucleus, and Cytoplasm.

    Case study: Payments platform in a bank

    Payments as a service to internal business units

    The payments platform is led by an SVP – the platform leader. Business and IT teams are colocated and have joint leadership. The platform team works with a mindset of a startup, serving internal customers of the bank – retail and commercial lines of business.

    A diagram showing Advisory Council in a large grey box on the left. To the right are smaller dark blue boxes labeled 'Real-time peer-to-peer payments,' Wire transfers,' 'Batch payments,' 'Mobile wallets,' and 'International payments (VISA, WU, etc.),' and one light blue box labeled 'Payments innovation.'


    Advisory Council: An Advisory Council is responsible for strategy, business, and IT architecture and for overseeing the work within the team. The Advisory Council prioritizes the work, earmarks project budgets, sets standards such as for APIs and ISO 20022, and leads vendor evaluation.

    International payments (VISA, WU, etc.): Project execution teams are structured around payment modes. Teams collaborate with each other whenever a common functionality is to be developed, like fraud check on a payment or account posting for debits and credits.

    Payments innovation: A think tank keeping track of trends in payments and conducting proof of concepts (POCs) with prospective fintech partners and with new technologies.

    Use a capability map to sketch out a platform-based structure

    Corral your organization’s activities and associated tech into a set of 20 to 40 platforms that cover customer journeys, business capabilities, and core IT. Business and IT teams must jointly work on this activity and could use a capability map as an aid to facilitate the discussion.

    The image is an example of a capability map, shown in more detail in the following section.

    An example of sketching a platform-based org structure for an insurance provider (partial)

    Design Policy Create Policy Issue Policy Service Customers Process Claims Manage Investments
    Defining Market Research & Analysis Underwriting Criteria Selection Customer Targeting Interaction Management First Notice of Loss (FNOL) Investment Strategy
    Actuarial Analysis Product Reserving Needs Assessment & Quotes Payments Claims Investigation Portfolio Management
    Catastrophe Risk Modeling Reinsurance Strategy Contract Issuance Adjustments Claims Adjudication Deposits & Disbursements
    Product Portfolio Strategy Product Prototyping Application Management Renewals Claims Recovery (Subrogation) Cash & Liquidity Management
    Rate Making Product Testing Sales Execution Offboarding Dispute Resolution Capital Allocation
    Policy Definition Product Marketing Contract Change Management

    Customer Retention

    [Servicing a customer request is a customer-journey platform.]

    Claims Inquiry

    [Filing a claim is a customer-journey platform.]

    Credit Bureau Reporting
    Shared Customer Management

    Account Management

    [Customer and account management is a business-capability platform to enable journeys.]

    Channel Management Risk Management Regulatory & Compliance Knowledge Management
    Partner Management

    Access and Identity Management

    [Access and identity management is a core IT platform.]

    Change Management Enterprise Data Management Fraud Detection [Fraud detection is a business-capability platform to enable journeys.] Product Innovation
    Enabling Corporate Governance Strategic Planning Reporting Accounting Enterprise Architecture Human Resources
    Legal Corporate Finance IT Facilities Management

    2. Establish Governance and Nurture Key Capabilities

    Two ingredients of the platform structure

    Establish a governance

    Advisory Council (AC) operates like a conductor at an orchestra, looking across all the activities to understand and manage the individual components.

    Nurture key capabilities

    Team structure, processes and technologies must be thoughtfully orchestrated and nurtured.

    Establish strong governance

    Empowerment does not mean anarchy

    While platforms are distinct units, they must be in sync with each other, like individual musicians in an orchestra. The Advisory Council (AC) must act like a conductor of the orchestra and lead and manage across platforms in three ways.

    1. Prioritize spend and effort. The AC team makes allocation decisions and prioritizes spend and effort on those platforms that can best support organizational goals and/or are in most urgent technical need. The best AC teams have enterprise architects who can understand business and dive deep enough into IT to manage critical interdependencies.
    2. Set and enforce standards. The AC team establishes both business and technology standards for interoperability. For example, the AC team can set the platform and application interfaces standards and the industry standards like ISO 20022 for payments. The AC team can also provide guidance on common apps and tools to use, for example, a reconciliation system for payments.
    3. Facilitate cross-platform work. The AC team has a unique vantage point where it can view and manage interdependencies among programs. As these complexities emerge, the AC team can step in and facilitate the interaction among the involved platform teams. In cases when a common capability is required by multiple platforms, the AC team can facilitate the dialogue to have it built out.

    Nurture the following capabilities:

    Design thinking

    “Zero distance from the customer” is the focus of platform structure. Each platform must operate with a mindset of a startup serving internal and/or external users.

    Agile delivery model

    Platform teams iteratively develop their offerings. With guidance from Advisory Council, they can avoid bottlenecks of formal alignment and approvals.

    Enterprise architecture

    The raison d'être of enterprise architecture discipline is to enable modularity in the architecture, encourage reusability of assets, and simplify design.

    Microservices

    Microservices allow systems to grow with strong cohesion and weak coupling and enable teams to scale components independently.

    APIs

    With their ability to link systems and data, APIs play a crucial role in making IT systems more responsive and adaptable.

    Machine learning

    With the drop in its cost, predictability is becoming the new electricity for business. Platforms use machine learning capability for better predictions.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Drive Digital Transformation With Platform Strategies
    Innovate and transform your business models with digital platforms.

    Implement Agile Practices That Work
    Guide your organization through its Agile transformation journey.

    Design a Customer-Centric Digital Operating Model
    Putting the customer at the center of digital transformation.

    Bibliography

    Bossert, Oliver, and Jürgen Laartz. “Perpetual Evolution—the Management Approach Required for Digital Transformation.” McKinsey, 5 June 2017. Accessed 21 May 2020.

    Bossert, Oliver, and Driek Desmet. “The Platform Play: How to Operate like a Tech Company.” McKinsey, 28 Feb. 2019. Accessed 21 May 2020.

    “Facebook Users Worldwide 2020.” Statista. Accessed 21 May 2020.

    Hamel, Gary, and Michele Zanini. “The End of Bureaucracy.” Harvard Business Review. Nov.-Dec. 2018. Accessed 21 May 2020.

    “Number of Netflix Subscribers 2019.” Statista. Accessed 21 May 2020.

    “Spotify Users - Subscribers in 2020.” Statista. Accessed 21 May 2020.

    It wasn't me

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    You heard the message before, and yet....  and yet it does not sink in.

    In july 2019 already, according to retruster:

    • The average financial cost of a data breach is $3.86m (IBM)
    • Phishing accounts for 90% of data breaches
    • 15% of people successfully phished will be targeted at least one more time within the year
    • BEC scams accounted for over $12 billion in losses (FBI)
    • Phishing attempts have grown 65% in the last year
    • Around 1.5m new phishing sites are created each month (Webroot)
    • 76% of businesses reported being a victim of a phishing attack in the last year
    • 30% of phishing messages get opened by targeted users (Verizon)

    This is ... this means we, as risk professionals may be delivering our messsage the wrong way. So, I really enjoyed my colleague Nick Felix (who got it from Alison Francis) sending me the URL of this video: Enjoy, but mostly: learn, because we want our children to enjoy the fruits of our work.

    Register to read more …

    External audit company

    External IT audit of your company

    Based on experience
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    Do you seek an external expert to help you prepare for a thorough IT audit of your company? Tymans Group serves as a consulting company with extensive expertise in helping small and medium enterprises. Read on and learn more about how our consulting firm can help your company with an external IT audit.

    Why should you organize an external IT audit of your company?

    Regularly preparing for an IT audit of your company with the help of of an experienced consultancy company like Tymans Group is a great way to discover any weaknesses within your IT and data security management systems, as well as your applications and data architecture, before the real audits by your regulator happen After all, you can only tackle any possible issues when you know their exact nature and origin. Additionally, the sooner you are aware of any security threats in your company thanks to an external audit, the smaller the chances outside forces will be able to take advantage of these threats to harm your business.

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    Position IT to Support and Be a Leader in Open Data Initiatives

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    • Parent Category Name: Innovation
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    • Open data programs are often seen as unimportant or not worth taking up space in the budget in local government.
    • Open data programs are typically owned by a single open data evangelist who works on it as a side-of-desk project.
    • Having a single resource spend a portion of their time on open data doesn’t allow the open data program to mature to the point that local governments are realizing benefits from it.
    • It is difficult to gain buy-in for open data as it is hard to track the benefits of an open data program.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Local government can help push the world towards being more open, unlocking economic benefits for the wider economy.
    • Cities don’t know the solutions to all of their problems often they don’t know all of the problems they have. Release data as a platform to crowdsource solutions and engage your community.
    • Build your open data policies in collaboration with the community. It’s their data, let them shape the way it’s used!

    Impact and Result

    • Level-set expectations for your open data program. Every local government is different in terms of the benefits they can achieve with open data; ensure the business understands what is realistic to achieve.
    • Create a team of open data champions from departments outside of IT. Identify potential champions for the team and use this group to help gain greater business buy-in and gather feedback on the program’s direction.
    • Follow the open data maturity model in order to assess your current state, identify a target state, and assess capability gaps that need to be improved upon.
    • Use industry best practices to develop an open data policy and processes to help improve maturity of the open data program and reach your desired target state.
    • Identify metrics that you can use to track, and communicate the success of, the open data program.

    Position IT to Support and Be a Leader in Open Data Initiatives Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should develop your open data program, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Set the foundation for the success of your open data program

    Identify your open data program's current state maturity, and gain buy-in from the business for the program.

    • Position IT to Support and Be a Leader in Open Data Initiatives – Phase 1: Set the Foundation for the Success of Your Open Data Program
    • Open Data Maturity Assessment
    • Open Data Program – IT Stakeholder Powermap Template
    • Open Data in Our City Stakeholder Presentation Template

    2. Grow the maturity of your open data program

    Identify a target state maturity and reach it through building a policy and processes and the use of metrics.

    • Position IT to Support and Be a Leader in Open Data Initiatives – Phase 2: Grow the Maturity of Your Open Data Program
    • Open Data Policy Template
    • Open Data Process Template
    • Open Data Process Descriptions Template
    • Open Data Process Visio Templates (Visio)
    • Open Data Process Visio Templates (PDF)
    • Open Data Metrics Template
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Position IT to Support and Be a Leader in Open Data Initiatives

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Define Business Drivers for Open Data Program

    The Purpose

    Ensure that the open data program is being driven out from the business in order to gain business support.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Identify drivers for the open data program that are coming directly from the business.

    Activities

    1.1 Understand constraints for the open data program.

    1.2 Conduct interviews with the business to gain input on business drivers and level-set expectations.

    1.3 Develop list of business drivers for open data.

    Outputs

    Defined list of business drivers for the open data program

    2 Assess Current State and Define Target State of the Open Data Program

    The Purpose

    Understand the gaps between where your program currently is and where you want it to be.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Identify top processes for improvement in order to bring the open data program to the desired target state maturity.

    Activities

    2.1 Perform current state maturity assessment.

    2.2 Define desired target state with business input.

    2.3 Highlight gaps between current and target state.

    Outputs

    Defined current state maturity

    Identified target state maturity

    List of top processes to improve in order to reach target state maturity

    3 Develop an Open Data Policy

    The Purpose

    Develop a draft open data policy that will give you a starting point when building your policy with the community.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A draft open data policy will be developed that is based on best-practice standards.

    Activities

    3.1 Define the purpose of the open data policy.

    3.2 Establish principles for the open data program.

    3.3 Develop a rough governance outline.

    3.4 Create a draft open data policy document based on industry best-practice examples.

    Outputs

    Initial draft of open data policy

    4 Develop Open Processes and Identify Metrics

    The Purpose

    Build open data processes and identify metrics for the program in order to track benefits realization.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Formalize processes to set in place to improve the maturity of the open data program.

    Identify metrics that can track the success of the open data program.

    Activities

    4.1 Develop the roles that will make up the open data program.

    4.2 Create processes for new dataset requests, updates of existing datasets, and the retiring of datasets.

    4.3 Identify metrics that will be used for measuring the success of the open data program.

    Outputs

    Initial draft of open data processes

    Established metrics for the open data program

    Break Open Your DAM With Intuitive Metadata

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    • Parent Category Name: Data Management
    • Parent Category Link: /data-management
    • Organizations are facing challenges from explosive information growth in both volume and complexity, as well as the need to use more new sources of information for social media just to remain in business.
    • A lot of content can be created quickly, but managing those digital assets properly through metadata tagging that will be used consistently and effectively requires processes to be in place to create standardized and informational metadata at the source of content creation.
    • Putting these processes in place changes the way the organization handles its information, which may generate pushback, and requires socialization and proper management of the metadata strategy.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Metadata is an imperative part of the organizations broader information management strategy. Some may believe that metadata is not needed anymore; Google search is not a magic act – it relies on information tagging that reflects cultural sentiment.
    • Metadata should be pliable. It needs to grow with the changing cultural and corporate vernacular and knowledge, and adapt to changing needs.
    • Build a map for your metadata before you dig for buried treasure. Implement metadata standards and processes for current digital assets before chasing after your treasure troves of existing artifacts.

    Impact and Result

    • Create a sustainable and effective digital asset management (DAM) program by understanding Info-Tech’s DAM framework and how the framework fits within your organization for better management of key digital assets.
    • Create an enterprise-wide metadata design principles handbook to keep track of metadata schemas and standards, as well as communicate the standards to the entire organization.
    • Gather requirements for your DAM program, as well as the DAM system and roles, by interviewing key stakeholders and identifying prevalent pains and opportunities. Understand where digital assets are created, used, and stored throughout the enterprise to gain a high-level perspective of DAM requirements.
    • Identify the organization’s current state of metadata management along with the target state, identify the gaps, and then define solutions to fill those gaps. Ensure business initiatives are woven into the mix.
    • Create a comprehensive roadmap to prioritize initiatives and delineate responsibilities.

    Break Open Your DAM With Intuitive Metadata Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should develop a digital asset management program focused on metadata, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Build a foundation for your DAM project

    Gain an in-depth understanding of what digital asset management is as well as how it is supported by Info-Tech’s DAM framework.

    • Break Open Your DAM With Intuitive Metadata – Phase 1: Build a Foundation for Your DAM Project
    • DAM Design Principles Handbook
    • Where in the World Is My Digital Asset? Tool
    • Digital Asset Inventory Tool
    • DAM Requirements Gathering Tool

    2. Dive into the DAM strategy

    Create a metadata program execution strategy and assess current and target states for the organization’s DAM.

    • Break Open Your DAM With Intuitive Metadata – Phase 2: Dive Into the DAM Strategy
    • DAM Roadmap Tool
    • DAM Metadata Execution Strategy Document

    3. Create intuitive metadata for your DAM

    Design a governance plan for ongoing DAM and metadata management.

    • Break Open Your DAM With Intuitive Metadata – Phase 3: Create Intuitive Metadata for Your Digital Assets
    • Metadata Manager Tool
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Break Open Your DAM With Intuitive Metadata

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Structure the Metadata Project

    The Purpose

    Develop a foundation of knowledge regarding DAM and metadata, as well as the best practices for organizing the organization’s information and digital assets for ideal findability.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Design standardized processes for metadata creation and digital asset management to help to improve findability of key assets.

    Gain knowledge of how DAM can benefit both IT and the business.

    Activities

    1.1 Build a DAM and metadata knowledge foundation.

    1.2 Kick-start creation of the organization’s DAM design principles handbook.

    1.3 Interview key business units to understand drivers for the program.

    1.4 Develop a DAM framework.

    Outputs

    DAM Design Principles Handbook

    DAM Execution Strategy Document

    2 Assess Requirements for the DAM Program

    The Purpose

    Inventory the organization’s key digital assets and their repositories.

    Gather the organization’s requirements for a full-time digital asset librarian, as well as the DAM system.  

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Determine clear and specific requirements for the organization from the DAM system and the people involved.

    Activities

    2.1 Conduct a digital asset inventory to identify key assets to include in DAM.

    2.2 Prioritize digital assets to determine their risk and value to ensure appropriate support through the information lifecycle.

    2.3 Determine the requirements of the business and IT for the DAM system and its metadata.

    Outputs

    Digital Asset Inventory Tool

    DAM Requirements Gathering Tool

    3 Design Roadmap and Plan Implementation

    The Purpose

    Determine strategic initiatives and create a roadmap outlining key steps required to get the organization to start enabling data-driven insights.

    Determine timing of the initiatives. 

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Establish a clear direction for the DAM program.

    Build a step-by-step outline of how to create effective metadata with true business-IT collaboration.

    Have prioritized initiatives with dependencies mapped out.

    Activities

    3.1 Assess current and target states of DAM in the organization.

    3.2 Brainstorm and document practical initiatives to close the gap.

    3.3 Discuss strategies rooted in business requirements to execute the metadata management program to improve findability of digital assets.

    Outputs

    DAM Roadmap Tool

    4 Establish Metadata Governance

    The Purpose

    Identify the roles required for effective DAM and metadata management.

    Create sample metadata according to established guiding principles and implement a feedback method to create intuitive metadata in the organization. 

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Metadata management is an ongoing project. Implementing it requires user input and feedback, which governance will help to support.

    By integrating metadata governance with larger information or data governance bodies, DAM and metadata management will gain sustainability. 

    Activities

    4.1 Discuss and assign roles and responsibilities for initiatives identified in the roadmap.

    4.2 Review policy requirements for the information assets in the organization and strategies to address enforcement.

    4.3 Integrate the governance of metadata into larger governance committees.

    Outputs

    DAM Execution Strategy

    Find Value With Cloud Asset Management

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    • Parent Category Name: Asset Management
    • Parent Category Link: /asset-management
    • Spending on cloud platforms and software-as-a-service (SaaS) is growing, and with spending comes waste.
    • The barriers are drastically lower for purchasing SaaS and cloud services as compared to traditional IT components.
    • Skills gap: IT asset managers tend not to have the skills to optimize spending on cloud platforms.
    • New space, new tools: The IT asset management market space is still developing cloud asset management and SaaS management capabilities. Practitioners must rely on cloud optimization tools in the meantime.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • IT asset managers are uniquely suited to provide value here. They already optimize costs and manage assets.
    • Scope creep is a killer. Focus first on your highest value, highest risk cloud instances.
    • Don’t completely centralize. Central oversight is powerful, but outsource some responsibility to the business.

    Impact and Result

    • Introduce governance: Work with developers, power business users, and infrastructure groups to define a governance approach to cloud assets and to SaaS.
    • Standardize high-impact, low-effort cloud services: Focus your efforts where they will have the most value and in places where you can provide early value.
    • Update your processes: Ensure that your asset registers and your configuration management database is up to date when cloud assets are provisioned and quiesced.

    Find Value With Cloud Asset Management Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should implement IT asset management for cloud instances and SaaS, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Define cloud asset management

    Define when a cloud instance is an asset, and what it means for the asset to be managed.

    • Find Value With Cloud Asset Management – Phase 1: Define Cloud Asset Management
    • Cloud Asset Management Standard Operating Procedures
    • Cloud Instance Provisioning Standards Checklist

    2. Build cloud asset management practices

    Develop an approach to auditing and optimizing cloud assets.

    • Find Value With Cloud Asset Management – Phase 2: Build Cloud Asset Management Practices
    • Cloud Asset Management Policy
    • Monthly Cloud Asset Optimization Checklist
    • Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Tool
    [infographic]

    Build a Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap

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    • Parent Category Name: Strategy and Organizational Design
    • Parent Category Link: /strategy-and-organizational-design

    Getting a seat at the table is your first objective in building a strategic roadmap. Knowing what the business wants to do and understanding what it will need in the future is a challenge for most IT departments.

    This could be a challenge such as:

    • Understanding the business vision
    • Clear communications on business planning
    • Insight into what the future state should look like
    • Understanding what the IT team is spending its time on day to day

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Having a clear vision of what the future state is and knowing that creating an IT Infrastructure roadmap is never finished will give your IT team an understanding of priorities, goals, business vision, and risks associated with not planning.
    • Understand what you are currently paying for and why.

    Impact and Result

    • Understanding of the business priorities, and vision of the future
    • Know what your budget is spent on: running the business, growth, or innovation
    • Increased communication with the right stakeholders
    • Better planning based on analysis of time study, priorities, and business goals

    Build a Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Build a Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Storyboard – Improve and align goals and strategy.

    In this section you will develop a vision and mission statement and set goals that align with the business vision and goals. The outcome will deliver your guiding principles and a list of goals that will determine your initiatives and their priorities.

    • Build Your Infrastructure Roadmap Storyboard
    • Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Tool

    2. Financial Spend Analysis Template – Envision future and analyze constraints.

    Consider your future state by looking at technology that will help the business in the future. Complete an analysis of your past spending to determine your future spend. Complete a SWOT analysis to determine suitability.

    • Financial Spend Analysis Template

    3. Strategic Roadmap Initiative Template – Align and build the roadmap.

    Develop a risk framework that may slow or hinder your strategic initiatives from progressing and evaluate your technical debt. What is the current state of your infrastructure? Generate and prioritize your initiatives, and set dates for completion.

    • Strategic Roadmap Initiative Template

    4. Infrastructure and Strategy Executive Brief Template – Communicate and improve the process.

    After creating your roadmap, communicate it to your audience. Identify who needs to be informed and create an executive brief with the template download. Finally, create KPIs to measure what success looks like.

    • Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Executive Presentation Template
    • Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template

    Infographic

    Further reading

    Build a Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap

    Align infrastructure investment to business-driven goals.

    Analysts' Perspectives

    Infrastructure roadmaps are an absolute necessity for all organizations. An organization's size often dictates the degree of complexity of the roadmap, but they all strive to paint the future picture of the organization's IT infrastructure.

    Infrastructure roadmaps typically start with the current state of infrastructure and work on how to improve. That thinking must change! Start with the future vision, an unimpeded vision, as if there were no constraints. Now you can see where you want to be.

    Look at your past to determine how you have been spending your infrastructure budget. If your past shows a trend of increased operational expenditures, that trend will likely continue. The same is true for capital spending and staffing numbers.

    Now that you know where you want to go, and how you ended up where you are, look at the constraints you must deal with and make a plan. It's not as difficult as it may seem, and even the longest journey begins with one step.

    Speaking of that first step, it should be to understand the business goals and align your roadmap with those same goals. Now you have a solid plan to develop a strategic infrastructure roadmap; enjoy the journey!

    There are many reasons why you need to build a strategic IT infrastructure roadmap, but your primary objectives are to set the long-term direction, build a framework for decision making, create a foundation for operational planning, and be able to explain to the business what you are planning. It is a basis for accountability and sets out goals and priorities for the future.

    Other than knowing where you are going there are four key benefits to building the roadmap.

    1. It allows you to be strategic and transformative rather than tactical and reactive.
    2. It gives you the ability to prioritize your tasks and projects in order to get them going.
    3. It gives you the ability to align your projects to business outcomes.
    4. Additionally, you can leverage your roadmap to justify your budget for resources and infrastructure.

    When complete, you will be able to communicate to your fellow IT teams what you are doing and get an understanding of possible business- or IT-related roadblocks, but overall executing on your roadmap will demonstrate to the business your competencies and ability to succeed.

    PJ Ryan

    PJ Ryan
    Research Director
    Infrastructure & Operations Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    John Donovan

    John Donovan
    Principal Research Director
    Infrastructure & Operations Practice
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Build a Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap

    Align infrastructure investment to business-driven goals.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    When it comes to building a strategic roadmap, getting a seat at the table is your first objective. Knowing what the business wants to do and understanding its future needs is a challenge for most IT organizations.

    Challenges such as:

    • Understanding the business vision
    • Clear communications on business planning
    • Insight into what the future state should look like

    Common Obstacles

    Fighting fires, keeping the lights on, patching, and overseeing legacy debt maintenance – these activities prevent your IT team from thinking strategically and looking beyond day-to-day operations. Issues include:

    • Managing time well
    • Building the right teams
    • Setting priorities

    Procrastinating when it comes to thinking about your future state will get you nowhere in a hurry.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    Look into your past IT spend and resources that are being utilized.

    • Analyze all aspects of the operation, and resources required.
    • Be realistic with your timelines.
    • Work from the future state backward.

    Build your roadmap by setting priorities, understanding risk and gaps both in finance and resources. Overall, your roadmap is never done, so don't worry if you get it wrong on the first pass.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Have a clear vision of what the future state is, and know that when creating an IT infrastructure roadmap, it is never done. This will give your IT team an understanding of priorities, goals, business vision, and risks associated with not planning. Understand what you are currently paying for and why.

    Insight Summary

    "Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now."
    Source: Alan Lakein, Libquotes

    Your strategic objectives are key to building a roadmap

    Many organizations' day-to-day IT operations are tactical and reactive. This needs to change; the IT team needs to become strategic and proactive in its planning and execution. Forward thinking bridges the gap from your current state, to what the organization is, to what it wants to achieve. Your strategic objectives need to align to the business vision and goals and keep it running.

    Your future state will determine your roadmap priorities

    Identify what the business needs to meet its goals; this should be reflected in your roadmap priorities. Then identify the tasks and projects that can get you there. Business alignment is key, as these projects require prioritization. Strategic initiatives that align to business outcomes will be your foundation for planning on those priorities. If you do not align your initiatives, you will end up spinning your wheels. A good strategic roadmap will have all the elements of forward thinking and planning to execute with the right resources, right priorities, and right funding to make it happen.

    Understand what you have been paying for the last few years

    Measure the cost of "keeping the lights on" as a baseline for your budget that is earmarked and already spent. Determine if your current spend is holding back innovation due to:

    1. The high cost of maintenance
    2. Resources in operations doing low-value work due to the effort required to do tasks related to break/fix on aging hardware and software

    A successful strategic roadmap will be determined when you have a good handle on your current spending patterns and planning for future needs that include resources, budget, and know-how. Without a plan and roadmap, that plan will not get business buy-in or funding.

    Top challenges reported by Info-Tech members

    Lack of strategic direction

    • Infrastructure leadership must discover the business goals.

    Time seepage

    • Project time is constantly being tracked incorrectly.

    Technical debt

    • Aging equipment is not proactively cycled out with newer enabling technologies.

    Case Study

    The strategic IT roadmap allows Dura to stay at the forefront of automotive manufacturing.

    INDUSTRY: Manufacturing
    SOURCE: Performance Improvement Partners

    Challenge

    Following the acquisition of Dura, MiddleGround aimed to position Dura as a leader in the automotive industry, leveraging the company's established success spanning over a century.

    However, prior limited investments in technology necessitated significant improvements for Dura to optimize its processes and take advantage of digital advancements.

    Solution

    MiddleGround joined forces with PIP to assess technology risks, expenses, and prospects, and develop a practical IT plan with solutions that fit MiddleGround's value-creation timeline.

    By selecting the top 15 most important IT projects, the companies put together a feasible technology roadmap aimed at advancing Dura in the manufacturing sector.

    Results

    Armed with due diligence reports and a well-defined IT plan, MiddleGround and Dura have a strategic approach to maximizing value creation.

    By focusing on key areas such as analysis, applications, infrastructure and the IT organization, Dura is effectively transforming its operations and shaping the future of the automotive manufacturing industry.

    How well do you know your business strategy?

    A mere 25% of managers
    can list three of the company's
    top five priorities.

    Based on a study from MIT Sloan, shared understanding of strategic directives barely exists beyond the top tiers of leadership.

    An image of a bar graph showing the percentage of leaders able to correctly list a majority of their strategic priorities.

    Take your time back

    Unplanned incident response is a leading cause of the infrastructure time crunch, but so too are nonstandard service requests and service requests that should be projects.

    29%

    Less than one-third of all IT projects finish on time.

    200%

    85% of IT projects average cost overruns of 200% and time overruns of 70%.

    70%

    70% of IT workers feel as though they have too much work and not enough time to do it.

    Source: MIT Sloan

    Inventory Assessment

    Lifecycle

    Refresh strategies are still based on truisms (every three years for servers, every seven years for LAN, etc.) more than risk-based approaches.

    Opportunity Cost

    Assets that were suitable to enable business goals need to be re-evaluated as those goals change.

    See Info-Tech's Manage Your Technical Debt blueprint

    an image of info-tech's Manage your technical debt.

    Key IT strategy initiatives can be categorized in three ways

    IT key initiative plan

    Initiatives collectively support the business goals and corporate initiatives, and improve the delivery of IT services.

    1. Business support
      • Support major business initiatives
      • Each corporate initiative is supported by a major IT project and each project has unique IT challenges that require IT support.
    2. IT excellence
      • Reduce risk and improve IT operational excellence
      • These projects will increase IT process maturity and will systematically improve IT.
    3. Innovation
      • Drive technology innovation
      • These projects will improve future innovation capabilities and decrease risk by increasing technology maturity.

    Info-Tech Insight

    A CIO has three roles: enable business productivity, run an effective IT shop, and drive technology innovation. Your key initiative plan must reflect these three mandates and how IT strives to fulfill them.

    IT must accomplish many things

    Manage
    the lifecycle of aging equipment against current capacity and capability demands.

    Curate
    a portfolio of enabling technologies to meet future capacity and capability demands.

    Initiate
    a realistic schedule of initiatives that supports a diverse range of business goals.

    Adapt
    to executive feedback and changing business goals.

    an image of Info-Tech's Build your strategic roadmap

    Primary and secondary infrastructure drivers

    • Primary driver – The infrastructure component that is directly responsible for enabling change in the business metric.
    • Secondary driver – The infrastructure component(s) that primary drivers rely on.

    (Source: BMC)

    Sample primary and secondary drivers

    Business metric Source(s) Primary infrastructure drivers Secondary infrastructure drivers

    Sales revenue

    Online store

    Website/Server (for digital businesses)

    • Network
    • Data center facilities

    # of new customers

    Call center

    Physical plant cabling in the call center

    • PBX/VOIP server
    • Network
    • Data center facilities

    Info-Tech Insight

    You may not be able to directly influence the primary drivers of the business, but your infrastructure can have a major impact as a secondary driver.

    Info-Tech's approach

    1. Align strategy and goals
    • Establish the scope of your IT strategy by defining IT's mission and vision statements and guiding principles.
  • Envision future and analyze constraints
    • Envision and define your future infrastructure and analyze what is holding you back.
  • Align and build the roadmap
    • Establish a risk framework, identify initiatives, and build your strategic infrastructure roadmap.
  • Communicate and improve the process
    • Communicate the results of your hard work to the right people and establish the groundwork for continual improvement of the process.
  • Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    Mission and Vision Statement
    Goal Alignment (Slide 28)

    Construct your vision and mission aligned to the business.

    Mission and Vision Statement

    Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap tool

    Build initiatives and prioritize them. Build the roadmap.

    Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap tool

    Infrastructure Domain Study

    What is stealing your time from getting projects done?

    Infrastructure Domain Study

    Initiative Templates Process Maps & Strategy

    Build templates for initiates, build process map, and develop strategies.

    Initiative Templates Process Maps & Strategy

    Key Deliverable

    it infrastructure roadmap template

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    “Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

    Guided Implementation

    “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

    Workshop

    “We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

    Consulting

    “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Info-Tech's methodology for an infrastructure strategy and roadmap

    1. Align Strategy and Goals

    2. Envision Future and Analyze Constraints

    3. Align and Build the Roadmap

    4. Communicate and Improve the Process

    Phase steps

    1.1 Develop the infrastructure strategy

    1.2 Define the goals

    2.1 Define the future state

    2.2 Analyze constraints

    3.1 Align the roadmap

    3.2 Build the roadmap

    4.1 Identify the audience

    4.2 Improve the process

    Phase Outcomes

    • Vision statement
    • Mission statement
    • Guiding principles
    • List of goals
    • Financial spend analysis
    • Domain time study
    • Prioritized list of roadblocks
    • Future-state vision document
    • IT and business risk frameworks
    • Technical debt assessment
    • New technology analysis
    • Initiative templates
    • Initiative candidates
    • Roadmap visualization
    • Process schedule
    • Communications strategy
    • process map
    • Infrastructure roadmap report

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    Phase 0 Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4

    Call #1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges.

    Call #2: Define mission and vision statements and guiding principles to discuss strategy scope.
    Call #3: Brainstorm goals and definition.

    Call #4: Conduct a spend analysis and a time resource study.
    Call #5: Identify roadblocks.

    Call #6: Develop a risk framework and address technical debt.
    Call #7: Identify new initiatives and SWOT analysis.
    Call #8: Visualize and identify initiatives.
    Call #9: Complete shadow IT and initiative finalization.

    Call #10: Identify your audience and communicate.
    Call #11: Improve the process.

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    A typical GI is 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Session 0 (Pre-workshop)

    Session 1

    Session 2

    Session 3

    Session 4

    Session 5 (Post-workshop)

    Elicit business context Align Strategy and Goals Envision Future and Analyze Constraints Align and Build the Roadmap Communicate and Improve the Process Wrap-up (offsite)

    0.1 Complete recommended diagnostic programs.
    0.2 Interview key business stakeholders, as needed, to identify business context: business goals, initiatives, and the organization's mission and vision.
    0.3 (Optional) CIO to compile and prioritize IT success stories.

    1.1 Infrastructure strategy.
    1.1.1 Review/validate the business context.
    1.1.2 Construct your mission and vision statements.
    1.1.3 Elicit your guiding principles and finalize IT strategy scope.

    1.2 Business goal alignment
    1.2.1 Intake identification and analysis.
    1.2.2 Survey results analysis.
    1.2.3 Brainstorm goals.
    1.2.4 Perform goal association and analysis.

    2.1 Define the future state.
    2.1.1 Conduct an emerging technology discussion.
    2.1.2 Document desired future state.
    2.1.3 Develop a new technology identification process.
    2.1.4 Compete SWOT analysis.

    2.2 Analyze your constraints
    2.2.1 Perform a historical spend analysis.
    2.2.2 Conduct a time study.
    2.2.3 Identify roadblocks.
    .

    3.1 Align the roadmap
    3.1.1 Develop a risk framework.
    3.1.2 Evaluate technical debt.

    3.2 Build the roadmap.
    3.2.1 Build effective initiative templates.
    3.2.2 Visualize.
    3.2.3 Generate new initiatives.
    3.2.4 Repatriate shadow IT initiatives.
    3.2.5 Finalize initiative candidates.

    4.2 Identify the audience
    4.1.1 Identify required authors and target audiences.
    4.1.2 Plan the process.
    4.1.2 Identify supporters and blockers.

    4.2 Improve the process
    4.2.1 Evaluate the value of each process output.
    4.2.2 Brainstorm improvements.
    4.2.3 Set realistic measures.

    5.1 Complete in-progress deliverables from previous four days.
    5.2 Set up time to review workshop deliverables and discuss next steps.

    1. SWOT analysis of current state
    2. Goals cascade
    3. Persona analysis
    1. Vision statement, mission statement, and guiding principles
    2. List of goals
    1. Spend analysis document
    2. Domain time study
    3. Prioritized list of roadblocks
    4. Future state vision document
    1. IT and business risk frameworks
    2. Technical debt assessment
    3. New technology analysis
    4. Initiative templates
    5. Initiative candidates
    1. Roadmap visualization
    2. Process schedule
    3. Communications strategy
    4. Process map
    1. Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Report

    Phase 1

    Align Strategy and Goals

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Phase 3

    Phase 4

    1.1 Infrastructure strategy

    1.2 Goal alignment

    2.1 Define your future

    2.2 Conduct constraints analysis

    3.1 Drive business alignment

    3.2. Build the roadmap

    4.1 Identify the audience

    4.2 Process improvement

    and measurements

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • How to build IT mission and vision statements
    • How to elicit IT guiding principles
    • How to finalize and communicate your IT strategy scope

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • Senior IT Team

    Step 1.1

    Develop the Infrastructure Strategy

    Activities

    1.1.1 Review/validate the business context

    1.1.2 Construct your mission and vision statements

    1.1.3 Elicit your guiding principles and finalize IT strategy scope

    This step requires the following inputs:

    • Business Mission Statement
    • Business Vision Statement
    • Business Goals

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Roadmap team

    Outcomes of this step

    • IT mission statement
    • IT vision statement
    • Guiding principles

    To complete this phase, you will need:

    Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template

    Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template

    Use the IT Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template to document the results from the following activities:

    • Mission and Vision Statements
    • Business impact
    • Roadmap

    IT must aim to support the organization's mission and vision

    A mission statement

    • Focuses on today and what an organization does to achieve the mission.
    • Drives the company.
    • Answers: What do we do? Who do we serve? How do we service them?

    "A mission statement focuses on the purpose of the brand; the vision statement looks to the fulfillment of that purpose."

    A vision statement

    • Focuses on tomorrow and what an organization ultimately wants to become.
    • Gives the company direction.
    • Answers: What problems are we solving? Who and what are we changing?

    "A vision statement provides a concrete way for stakeholders, especially employees, to understand the meaning and purpose of your business. However, unlike a mission statement – which describes the who, what, and why of your business – a vision statement describes the desired long-term results of your company's efforts."
    Source: Business News Daily, 2020

    Characteristics of mission and vision statements

    A strong mission statement has the following characteristics:

    • Articulates the IT function's purpose and reason for existence.
    • Describes what the IT function does to achieve its vision.
    • Defines the customers of the IT function.
    • Is:
      • Compelling
      • Easy to grasp
      • Sharply focused
      • Concise

    A strong vision statement has the following characteristics:

    • Describes a desired future achievement.
    • Focuses on ends, not means.
    • Communicates promise.
    • Is:
      • Concise; no unnecessary words
      • Compelling
      • Achievable
      • Measurable

    Derive the IT mission and vision statements from the business

    Begin the process by identifying and locating the business mission and vision statements.

    • Corporate websites
    • Business strategy documents
    • Business executives

    Ensure there is alignment between the business and IT statements.

    Note: Mission statements may remain the same unless the IT department's mandate is changing.

    an image showing Business mission, IT mission, Business Vision, and IT Vison.

    1.1.2 Construct mission and vision statements

    1 hour

    Objective: Help teams define their purpose (why they exist) to build a mission statement (if one doesn't already exist).

    Step 1:

    1. Gather the IT strategy creation team and revisit your business context inputs, specifically the corporate mission statement.
    2. Begin by asking the participants:
        1. What is our job as a team?
        2. What's our goal? How do we align IT to our corporate mission?
        3. What benefit are we bringing to the company and the world?
      1. Ask them to share general thoughts in a check-in.

    Step 2:

    1. Share some examples of IT mission statements.
    2. Example: IT provides innovative product solutions and leadership that drives growth and
      success.
    3. Provide each participant with some time to write their own version of an IT mission statement.

    Download the ITRG IT Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template and document your mission and vision statements in Section 1.

    Input

    • Business vision statement
    • Business mission statement

    Output

    • IT mission statement
    • IT vision statement

    Materials

    • Sticky notes
    • Markers
    • Whiteboard
    • Paper
    • Collaboration/brain-storming tool (whiteboard, flip chart, digital equivalent)

    Participants

    • CIO
    • Senior IT Team

    1.1.2 Construct mission and vision statements (cont'd)

    1 hour

    Objective: Help teams define their purpose (why they exist) to build a mission statement (if one doesn't already exist).

    Step 3:

    This step involves reviewing individual mission statements, combining them, and building one collective mission statement for the team.

    1. Consider the following approach to build a unified mission statement:

    Use the 20x20 rule for group decision-making. Give the group no more than 20 minutes to craft a collective team purpose with no more than 20 words.

    1. As a facilitator, provide guidelines on how to write for the intended audience. Business stakeholders need business language.
    2. Refer to the corporate mission statement periodically and ensure there is alignment.
    3. Document your final mission statement in your ITRG Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template.

    Download the ITRG IT Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template and document your mission and vision statements in Section 1.

    Input

    • Business vision statement
    • Business mission statement

    Output

    • IT mission statement
    • IT vision statement

    Materials

    • Sticky notes
    • Markers
    • Whiteboard
    • Paper
    • Collaboration/brain-storming tool (whiteboard, flip chart, digital equivalent)

    Participants

    • CIO
    • Senior IT Team

    1.1.2 Construct mission and vision statements (cont'd)

    1 hour

    Objective: Help teams define their purpose (why they exist) to build a mission statement (if one doesn't already exist).

    Step 4:

    1. Gather the IT strategy creation team and revisit your business context inputs, specifically the corporate vision statement.
    2. Share one or more examples of vision statements.
    3. Provide participants with sticky notes and writing materials and ask them to work individually for this step.
    4. Ask participants to brainstorm:
      1. What is the desired future state of the IT organization?
      2. How should we work to attain the desired state?
      3. How do we want IT to be perceived in the desired state?
    5. Provide participants with guidelines to build descriptive, compelling, and achievable statements regarding their desired future state.
    6. Regroup as a team and review participant answers.

    Download the ITRG IT Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template and document your mission and vision statements in Section 1.

    Input

    • Business vision statement
    • Business mission statement

    Output

    • IT mission statement
    • IT vision statement

    Materials

    • Sticky notes
    • Markers
    • Whiteboard
    • Paper
    • Collaboration/brain-storming tool (whiteboard, flip chart, digital equivalent)

    Participants

    • CIO
    • Senior IT Team

    1.1.2 Construct mission and vision statements (cont'd)

    1 hour

    Objective: Help teams define their purpose (why they exist) to build a mission statement (if one doesn't already exist).

    Step 5:

    1. Ask the team to post their notes on the wall.
    2. Have the team group the words that have a similar meaning or feeling behind them; this will create themes.
    3. When the group is done categorizing the statements into themes, ask if there's anything missing. Did they ensure alignment to the corporate vision statement? Are there any elements missing when considering alignment back to the corporate vision statement?

    Step 6:

    1. Consider each category as a component of your vision statement.
    2. Review each category with participants; define what the behavior looks like when it is being met and what it looks like when it isn't.
    3. As a facilitator, provide guidelines on word-smithing and finessing the language.
    4. Refer to the corporate vision statement periodically and ensure there is alignment.
    5. Document your final mission statement in your IT Strategy Presentation Template.

    Download the ITRG IT Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template and document your mission and vision statements in Section 1.

    Input

    • Business vision statement
    • Business mission statement

    Output

    • IT mission statement
    • IT vision statement

    Materials

    • Sticky notes
    • Markers
    • Whiteboard
    • Paper
    • Collaboration/brain-storming tool (whiteboard, flip chart, digital equivalent)

    Participants

    • CIO
    • Senior IT Team

    1.1.2 Construct mission and vision statements (cont'd)

    Tips for online facilitation:

    • Pick an online whiteboard tool that allows participants to use a large, zoomable canvas.
    • Set up each topic at a different area of the board; spread them out just like you would do on the walls of a room.
    • Invite participants to zoom in and visit each section and add their ideas as sticky notes once you reach that section of the exercise.
    • If you're not using an online whiteboard, we'd recommend using a collaboration tool such as Google Docs or Teams Whiteboard to collect the information for each step under a separate heading. Invite everyone into the document but be very clear regarding editing rights.
    • Pre-create your screen deck and screen share this with your participants through your videoconferencing software. We'd also recommend sharing this so participants can go through the deck again during the reflection steps.
    • When facilitating group discussion, we'd recommend that participants use non-verbal means to indicate they'd like to speak. You can use tools like Teams' hand-raising tool, a reaction emoji, or have people put their hands up. The facilitator can then invite that person to talk.

    Source: Hyper Island

    Input

    • Business vision statement
    • Business mission statement

    Output

    • IT mission statement
    • IT vision statement

    Materials

    • Sticky notes
    • Markers
    • Whiteboard
    • Paper
    • Collaboration/brainstorming tool (whiteboard, flip chart, digital equivalent)

    Participants

    • CIO
    • Senior IT Team

    IT mission statements demonstrate IT's purpose

    The IT mission statement specifies the function's purpose or reason for being. The mission should guide each day's activities and decisions. The mission statements use simple and concise terminology and speak loudly and clearly, generating enthusiasm for the organization.

    Strong IT mission statements have the following characteristics:

    • Articulate the IT function's purpose and reason for existence
    • Describe what the IT function does to achieve its vision
    • Define the customers of the IT function
    • Are:
      • Compelling
      • Easy to grasp
      • Sharply focused
      • Inspirational
      • Memorable
      • Concise

    Sample IT Mission Statements:

    • To provide infrastructure, support, and innovation in the delivery of secure, enterprise-grade information technology products and services that enable and empower the workforce at [Company Name].
    • To help fulfill organizational goals, the IT department is committed to empowering business stakeholders with technology and services that facilitate effective processes, collaboration, and communication.
    • The mission of the information technology (IT) department is to build a solid, comprehensive technology infrastructure; to maintain an efficient, effective operations environment; and to deliver high-quality, timely services that support the business goals and objectives of ABC Inc.
    • The IT department has operational, strategic, and fiscal responsibility for the innovation, implementation, and advancement of technology at ABC Inc. in three main areas: network administration and end-user support, instructional services, and information systems. The IT department provides leadership in long-range planning, implementation, and maintenance of information technology across the organization.
    • The IT group is customer-centered and driven by its commitment to management and staff. It oversees services in computing, telecommunications, networking, administrative computing, and technology training.

    Sample mission statements (cont'd)

    • To collaborate and empower our stakeholders through an engaged team and operational agility and deliver innovative technology and services.
    • To empower our stakeholders with innovative technology and services, through collaboration and agility.
    • To collaborate and empower our stakeholder, by delivering innovative technology and services, with an engaged team and operational agility.
    • To partner with departments and be technology leaders that will deliver innovative, secure, efficient, and cost-effective services for our citizens.
    • As a client-centric strategic partner, provide excellence in IM and IT services through flexible business solutions for achieving positive user experience and satisfaction.
    • Develop a high-performing global team that will plan and build a scalable, stable operating environment.
    • Through communication and collaboration, empower stakeholders with innovative technology and services.
    • Build a robust portfolio of technology services and solutions, enabling science-lead and business-driven success.
    • Guided by value-driven decision making, high-performing teams and trusted partners deliver and continually improve secure, reliable, scalable, and reusable services that exceed customer expectations.
    • Engage the business to grow capabilities and securely deliver efficient services to our users and clients.
    • Engage the business to securely deliver efficient services and grow capabilities for our users and clients.

    IT vision statements demonstrate what the IT organization aspires to be

    The IT vision statement communicates a desired future state of the IT organization. The statement is expressed in the present tense. It seeks to articulate the desired role of IT and how IT will be perceived.

    Strong IT vision statements have the following characteristics:

    • Describe a desired future
    • Focus on ends, not means
    • Communicate promise
    • Are:
      • Concise; no unnecessary words
      • Compelling
      • Achievable
      • Inspirational
      • Memorable

    Sample IT vision statements:

    • To be a trusted advisor and partner in enabling business innovation and growth through an engaged IT workforce.
    • The IT organization will strive to become a world-class value center that is a catalyst for innovation.
    • IT is a cohesive, proactive, and disciplined team that delivers innovative technology solutions while demonstrating a strong customer-oriented mindset.
    • Develop and maintain IT and an IT support environment that is secure, stable, and reliable within a dynamic environment.

    Sample vision statements (cont'd)

    • Alignment: To ensure that the IT organizational model and all related operational services and duties are properly aligned with all underlying business goals and objectives. Alignment reflects an IT operation "that makes sense," considering the business served, its interests and its operational imperatives.
    • Engagement: To ensure that all IT vision stakeholders are fully engaged in technology-related planning and the operational parameters of the IT service portfolio. IT stakeholders include the IT performing organization (IT Department), company executives and end-users.
    • Best Practices: To ensure that IT operates in a standardized fashion, relying on practical management standards and strategies properly sized to technology needs and organizational capabilities.
    • Commitment to Customer Service: To ensure that IT services are provided in a timely, high-quality manner, designed to fill the operational needs of the front-line end-users, working within the boundaries established by business interests and technology best practices.

    Quoted From ITtoolkit, 2020

    Case Study

    Acme Corp. was able to construct its IT mission and vison statements by aligning to its corporate mission and vision.

    INDUSTRY: Professional Services
    COMPANY: This case study is based on a real company but was anonymized for use in this research.

    Business

    IT

    Mission

    Vision

    Mission

    Vision

    We help IT leaders achieve measurable results by systematically improving core IT processes, governance, and critical technology projects.

    Acme Corp. will grow to become the largest research firm across the industry by providing unprecedented value to our clients.

    IT provides innovative product solutions and leadership that drives growth and success.

    We will relentlessly drive value to our customers through unprecedented innovation.

    IT guiding principles set the boundaries for your strategy

    Strategic guiding principles advise the IT organization on the boundaries of the strategy.

    Guiding principles are a priori decisions that limit the scope of strategic thinking to what is acceptable organizationally, from budgetary, people, and partnership standpoints. Guiding principles can cover other dimensions, as well.

    Organizational stakeholders are more likely to follow IT principles when a rationale is provided.

    After defining the set of IT principles, ensure that they are all expanded upon with a rationale. The rationale ensures principles are more likely to be followed because they communicate why the principles are important and how they are to be used. Develop the rationale for each IT principle your organization has chosen.

    IT guiding principles = IT strategy boundaries

    Consider these four components when brainstorming guiding principles

    Breadth

    of the IT strategy can span across the eight perspectives: people, process, technology, data, process, sourcing, location, and timing.

    Defining which of the eight perspectives is in scope for the IT strategy is crucial to ensuring the IT strategy will be comprehensive, relevant, and actionable.

    Depth

    of coverage refers to the level of detail the IT strategy will go into for each perspective. Info-Tech recommends that depth should go to the initiative level (i.e. individual projects).

    Organizational coverage

    will determine which part of the organization the IT strategy will cover.

    Planning horizon

    of the IT strategy will dictate when the target state should be reached and the length of the roadmap.

    Consider these criteria when brainstorming guiding principle statements

    Approach focused IT principles are focused on the approach, i.e. how the organization is built, transformed, and operated, as opposed to what needs to be built, which is defined by both functional and non-functional requirements.
    Business relevant Create IT principles that are specific to the organization. Tie IT principles to the organization's priorities and strategic aspirations.
    Long lasting Build IT principles that will withstand the test of time.
    Prescriptive Inform and direct decision-making with IT principles that are actionable. Avoid truisms, general statements, and observations.
    Verifiable If compliance can't be verified, the principle is less likely to be followed.
    Easily digestible IT principles must be clearly understood by everyone in IT and by business stakeholders. IT principles aren't a secret manuscript of the IT team. IT principles should be succinct; wordy principles are hard to understand and remember.
    Followed

    Successful IT principles represent a collection of beliefs shared among enterprise stakeholders. IT principles must be continuously reinforced to all stakeholders to achieve and maintain buy-in.

    In organizations where formal policy enforcement works well, IT principles should be enforced through appropriate governance processes.

    Review ten universal IT principles to determine if your organization wishes to adopt them

    IT principle name

    IT principle statement

    1. Enterprise value focus We aim to provide maximum long-term benefits to the enterprise as a whole while optimizing total costs of ownership and risks.
    2. Fit for purpose We maintain capability levels and create solutions that are fit for purpose without over engineering them.
    3. Simplicity We choose the simplest solutions and aim to reduce operational complexity of the enterprise.
    4. Reuse > buy > build We maximize reuse of existing assets. If we can't reuse, we procure externally. As a last resort, we build custom solutions.
    5. Managed data We handle data creation, modification, and use enterprise-wide in compliance with our data governance policy.
    6. Controlled technical diversity We control the variety of technology platforms we use.
    7. Managed security We manage security enterprise-wide in compliance with our security governance policy.
    8. Compliance to laws and regulations We operate in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.
    9. Innovation We seek innovative ways to use technology for business advantage.
    10. Customer centricity We deliver best experiences to our customers with our services and products.

    1.1.3 Elicit guiding principles

    1 hour

    Objective: Generate ideas for guiding principle statements with silent sticky note writing.

    1. Gather the IT strategy creation team and revisit your mission and vision statements.
    2. Ask the group to brainstorm answers individually, silently writing their ideas on separate sticky notes. Provide the brainstorming criteria from the previous slide to all team members. Allow the team to put items on separate notes that can later be shuffled and sorted as distinct thoughts.
    3. After a set amount of time, ask the members of the group to stick their notes to the whiteboard and quickly present them. Categorize all ideas into four major buckets: breadth, depth, organizational coverage, and planning horizon. Ideally, you want one guiding principle to describe each of the four components.
    4. If there are missing guiding principles in any category or anyone's items inspire others to write more, they can stick those up on the wall too, after everyone has presented.
    5. Discuss and finalize your IT guiding principles.
    6. Document your guiding principles in the IT Strategy Presentation Template in Section 1.

    Source: Hyper Island

    Download the ITRG IT Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template and document your mission and vision statements in Section 1.

    Input

    • Four components for eliciting guiding principles
    • Mission and vision statements

    Output

    • IT guiding principles
    • IT strategy scope

    Materials

    • Sticky notes
    • Whiteboard
    • Paper
    • Collaboration/brain-storming tool (whiteboard, flip chart, digital equivalent)

    Participants

    • CIO
    • Senior IT Team

    Guiding principle examples

    • Alignment: Our IT decisions will align with [our organization's] strategic plan.
    • Resources: We will allocate cyber-infrastructure resources based on providing the greatest value and benefit for [the community].
    • User Focus: User needs will be a key component in all IT decisions.
    • Collaboration: We will work within and across organizational structures to meet strategic goals and identify opportunities for innovation and improvement.
    • Transparency: We will be transparent in our decision making and resource use.
    • Innovation: We will value innovative and creative thinking.
    • Data Stewardship: We will provide a secure but accessible data environment.
    • IT Knowledge and Skills: We will value technology skills development for the IT community.
    • Drive reduced costs and improved services
    • Deploy packaged apps – do not develop – retain business process knowledge expertise – reduce apps portfolio
    • Standardize/Consolidate infrastructure with key partners
    • Use what we sell, and help sell
    • Drive high-availability goals: No blunders
    • Ensure hardened security and disaster recovery
    • Broaden skills (hard and soft) across the workforce
    • Improve business alignment and IT governance

    Quoted From: Office of Information Technology, 2014; Future of CIO, 2013

    Case Study

    Acme Corp. elicited guiding principles that set the scope of its IT strategy for FY21.

    INDUSTRY: Professional Services
    COMPANY: Acme Corp.

    The following guiding principles define the values that drive IT's strategy in FY23 and provide the criteria for our 12-month planning horizon.

    • We will focus on big-ticket items during the next 12 months.
    • We will keep the budget within 5%+/- YOY.
    • We will insource over outsource.
    • We will develop a cloud-first technology stack.

    Finalize your IT strategy scope

    Your mission and vision statements and your guiding principles should be the first things you communicate on your IT strategy document.

    Why is this important?

    • Communicating these elements shows how IT supports the corporate direction.
    • The vision and mission statements will clearly articulate IT's aspirations and purpose.
    • The guiding principles will clearly articulate how IT plans to support the business strategically.
    • These elements set expectations with stakeholders for the rest of your strategy.

    Input information into the IT Strategy Presentation Template.

    an image showing the IT Strategy Scope.

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Established the scope of your IT strategy

    • Constructed the IT mission statement to communicate the IT organization's reason for being.
    • Constructed the IT vision statement to communicate the desired future state of the IT organization.
    • Elicited IT's guiding principles to communicate the overall scope and time horizon for the strategy.

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Step 1.2

    Business Goal Alignment

    Activities

    1.2.1 Intake identification and analysis

    1.2.2 Survey results analysis

    1.2.3 Goal brainstorming

    1.2.4 Goal association and analysis

    This step requires the following inputs:

    • Last year's accomplished project list
    • Business unit input source list
    • Goal list
    • In-flight initiatives list

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Business leadership
    • Project Management Office
    • Service Desk
    • Business Relationship Management
    • Solution or Enterprise Architecture
    • Roadmap team

    Outcomes of this step

    • Intake analysis
    • Goal list
    • Initiative-to-goal map

    Identify who is expecting what from the infrastructure

    "Typically, IT thinks in an IT first, business second, way: 'I have a list of problems and if I solve them, the business will benefit.' This is the wrong way of thinking. The business needs to be thought of first, then IT."

    – Fred Chagnon, Infrastructure Director,
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Info-Tech Insight

    If you're not soliciting input from or delivering on the needs of the various departments in your company, then who is? Be explicit and track how you communicate with each individual unit within your company.

    Mature project portfolio management and enterprise architecture practices are no substitute for understanding your business clientele.

    It may not be a democracy, but listening to everyone's voice is an essential step toward generating a useful roadmap.

    Building good infrastructure requires an understanding of how it will be used. Explicit consultation with stakeholders maximizes a roadmap's usefulness and holds the enterprise accountable in future roadmap iterations as goals change.

    Who are the customers for infrastructure?

    Internal customer examples:

    • Network Operations manager
    • IT Systems manager
    • Webmaster
    • Security manager

    External customer examples:

    • Director of Sales
    • Operations manager
    • Applications manager
    • Clients
    • Partners and consultants
    • Regulators/government

    1.2.1 Intake identification and analysis

    1 hour

    The humble checklist is the single most effective tool to ensure we don't forget someone or something:

    1. Have everyone write down their top five completed projects from last year – one project per sticky note.
    2. Organize everyone's sticky notes on a whiteboard according to input source – did these projects come from the PMO? Directly from a BRM? Service request? VP or LoB management?
    3. Make a MECE list of these sources on the left-hand side of a whiteboard.
    4. On the right-hand side list all the departments or functional business units within the company.
    5. Draw lines from right to left indicating which business units use which input source to request work.
    6. Optional: Rate the efficacy of each input channel – what is the success rate of projects per channel in terms of time, budget, and functionality?

    Discussion:

    1. How clearly do projects and initiatives arrive at infrastructure to be acted on? Do they follow the predictable formal process with all the needed information or is it more ad hoc?
    2. Can we validate that business units are using the correct input channel to request the appropriate work? Does infrastructure have to spend more time validating the requests of any one channel?
    3. Can we identify business units that are underserved? How about overserved? Infrastructure initiatives tend to be near universal in effect – are we forgetting anyone?
    4. Are all these methods passive (order taking), or is there a process for infrastructure to suggest an initiative or project?

    Input

    • Last year's accomplished project list

    Output

    • Work requested workflow and map

    Materials

    • Sticky notes
    • Whiteboard & markers

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    Case Study

    Building IT governance and digital infrastructure for tech-enabled student experiences

    INDUSTRY: Education
    COMPANY: Collegis Education

    Challenge

    In 2019, Saint Francis University decided to expand its online program offering to reach students outside of its market.

    It had to first transform its operations to deliver a high-quality, technology-enabled student experience on and off campus. The remote location of the campus posed power outages, Wi-Fi issues, and challenges in attracting and retaining the right staff to help the university achieve its goals.

    It began working with an IT consulting firm to build a long-term strategic roadmap.

    Solution

    The consultant designed a strategic multi-year roadmap for digital transformation that would prioritize developing infrastructure to immediately improve the student experience and ultimately enable the university to scale its online programs. The consultant worked with school leadership to establish a virtual CIO to oversee the IT department's strategy and operations. The virtual CIO quickly became a key advisor to the president and board, identifying gaps between technology initiatives and enrollment and revenue targets. St. Francis staff also transitioned to the consultant's technology team, allowing the university to alleviate its talent acquisition and retention challenges.

    Results

    • $200,000 in funds reallocated to help with upgrades due to streamlined technology infrastructure
    • Updated card access system for campus staff and students
    • Active directory implementation for a secure and strong authentication technology
    • An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) backup is installed to ensure power continues in the event of a power outage
    • Upgrade to a reliable, campus-wide Wi-Fi network
    • Behind-the-scenes upgrades like state-of-the-art data centers to stabilize aging technology for greater reliability

    Track your annual activity by business unit – not by input source

    A simple graph showing the breakdown of projects by business unit is an excellent visualization of who is getting the most from infrastructure services.

    Show everyone in the organization that the best way to get anything done is by availing themselves of the roadmap process.

    An image of two bar graphs, # of initiatives requested
by customer; # of initiatives proposed to customer.

    Enable technology staff to engage in business storytelling by documenting known goals in a framework

    Without a goal framework

    Technology-focused IT staff are notoriously disconnected from the business process and are therefore often unable to explain the outcomes of their projects in terms that are meaningful to the business.

    With a goal framework

    When business, IT, and infrastructure goals are aligned, the business story writes itself as you follow the path of cascading goals upward.

    Info-Tech Best Practice

    So many organizations we speak with don't have goals written down. This rarely means that the goals aren't known, rather that they're not clearly communicated.

    When goals aren't clear, personal agendas can take precedence. This is what often leads to the disconnect between what the business wants and what IT is delivering.

    1.2.2 Survey and results analysis

    1 hour

    Infrastructure succeeds by effectively scaling shared resources for the common good. Sometimes that is a matter of aggregating similarities, sometimes by recognizing where specialization is required.

    1. Have every business unit provide their top three to five current goals or objectives for their department. Emphasize that you are requesting their operational objectives, not just the ones they think IT may be able to help them with.
    2. Put each goal on a sticky note (optional: use a unique sticky note or marker color for each department) and place them on a whiteboard.
    3. Group the sticky notes according to common themes.
    4. Rank each grouping according to number of occurrences.

    Discussion:

    1. This is very democratic. Do certain departments' goals carry more weight more than others?
    2. What is the current business prioritization process? Do the results of our activity match with the current published output of this process?
    3. Consider each business goal in the context of infrastructure activity or technology feature or capability. As infrastructure is a lift function existing only to serve the business, it is important to understand our world in context.

    Examples: The VP of Operations is looking to reduce office rental costs over the next three years. The VP of Sales is focused on increasing the number of face-to-face customer interactions. Both can potentially be served by IT activities and technologies that increase mobility.

    Input

    • Business unit input source list

    Output

    • Prioritized list of business goals

    Materials

    • Sticky notes
    • Whiteboard & markers

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    1.2.3 Goal brainstorming – Affinity diagramming exercise

    1 hour

    Clarify how well you understand what the business wants.

    1. Ask each participant to consider: "What are the top three priorities of the company [this period]?" They should consider not what they think the priorities should be, but their understanding of what business leadership's priorities actually are.
    2. Have each participant write down their three priorities on sticky notes – one per note.
    3. Select a moderator from the group – not the infrastructure leader or the CIO. The moderator will begin by placing (and explaining) their sticky notes on the whiteboard.
    4. Have each participant place and explain their sticky notes on the whiteboard.
    5. The moderator will assist each participant in grouping sticky notes together based on theme.
    6. Groups that become overly large may be broken into smaller, more precise themes.
    7. Once everyone has placed their sticky notes, and the groups have been arranged and rearranged, you should have a visual representation of infrastructure's understanding of the business' priorities.
    8. Let the infrastructure leader and/or CIO place their sticky notes last.

    Discussion:

    Is there a lot of agreement within the group? What does it mean if there are 10 or 15 groups with equal numbers of sticky notes? What does it mean if there are a few top groups and dozens of small outliers?

    How does the group's understanding compare with that of the Director and/or CIO?

    What mechanisms are in place for the business to communicate their goals to infrastructure? Are they effective? Does the team take the time to reimagine those goals and internalize them?

    What does it mean if infrastructure's understanding differs from the business?

    Input

    • Business unit input source list

    Output

    • Prioritized list of business goals

    Materials

    • Sticky notes
    • Whiteboard & markers

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    Additional Activity

    Now that infrastructure has a consensus on what it thinks the business' goals are, suggest a meeting with leadership to validate this understanding. Once the first picture is drawn, a 30-minute meeting can help clear up any misconceptions.

    Build your own framework or start with these three root value drivers

    With a framework of cascading goals in place, a roadmap is a Rosetta Stone. Being able to map activities back to governance objectives allows you to demonstrate value regardless of the audience you are addressing.

    An image of the framework for developing a roadmap using three root value drivers.

    (Info-Tech, Build a Business-Aligned IT Strategy 2022)

    1.2.4 Goal association exercise and analysis

    1 hour

    Wherever possible use the language of your customers to avoid confusion, but at least ensure that everyone in infrastructure is using a common language.

    1. Take your business strategy or IT strategy or survey response (Activity 1.2.3) or Info-Tech's fundamental goals list (strategic agility, improved cash flow, innovate product, safety, standardize end-user experience) and write them across the top of a whiteboard.
    2. Have everyone write, on a sticky note, their current in-flight initiatives – one per sticky note.
    3. Have each participant then place each of their sticky notes on the whiteboard and draw a line from the initiative to the goal it supports.
    4. The rest of the group should challenge any relationships that seem unsupported or questionable.

    Discussion:

    1. How many goals are you supporting? Are there too many? Are you doing enough to support the right goals?
    2. Is there a shared understanding of the business goals among the infrastructure staff? Or, do questions about meaning keep coming up?
    3. Do you have initiatives that are difficult to express in terms of business goals? Do you have a lot of them or just a few?

    Input

    • Goal list
    • In-flight initiatives list

    Output

    • Initiatives-to-goals map

    Materials

    • Whiteboard & markers

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Review performance from last fiscal year.

    • Analyzed and communicated the benefits and value realized from IT's strategic initiatives in the past fiscal year.
    • Analyzed and prioritized diagnostic data insights to communicate IT success stories.
    • Elicited important retrospective information such as KPIs, financials, etc. to build IT's credibility as a strategic business partner.

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Phase 2

    Envision Future and Analyze Constraints

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Phase 3

    Phase 4

    1.1 Infrastructure strategy

    1.2 Goal alignment

    2.1 Define your future

    2.2 Conduct constraints analysis

    3.1 Drive business alignment

    3.2. Build the roadmap

    4.1 Identify the audience

    4.2 Process improvement

    and measurements

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Determine from a greenfield perspective what the future state looks like.
    • Do SWOT analysis on technology you may plan to use in the future.
    • Complete a time study.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Roadmap team

    Step 2.1

    Define the future state

    Activities

    2.1.1 Define your future infrastructure vision

    2.1.2 Document desired future state

    2.1.3 Develop a new technology identification process

    2.1.4 Conduct a SWOT analysis

    This step requires the following inputs:

    • Emerging technology interest

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Roadmap team
    • External SMEs

    Outcomes of this step

    • Technology discovery process
    • Technology assessment process
    • Future state vision document

    Future state discussion

    "Very few of us are lucky enough to be one of the first few employees in a new organization. Those of you who get to plan the infrastructure with a blank slate and can focus all of your efforts on doing things right the first time."

    BMC, 2018

    "A company's future state is ultimately defined as the greater vision for the business. It's where you want to be, your long-term goal in terms of the ever-changing state of technology and how that applies to your present-day business."
    "Without a definitive future state, a company will often find themselves lacking direction, making it harder to make pivotal decisions, causing misalignment amongst executives, and ultimately hindering the progression and growth of a company's mission."
    Source: Third Stage Consulting

    "When working with digital technologies, it is imperative to consider how such technologies can enhance the solution. The future state should communicate the vision of how digital technologies will enhance the solutions, deliver value, and enable further development toward even greater value creation."
    Source: F. Milani

    Info-Tech Insight

    Define your infrastructure roadmap as if you had a blank slate – no constraints, no technical debt, and no financial limitations. Imagine your future infrastructure and let that vision drive your roadmap.

    Expertise is not innate; it requires effort and research

    Evaluating new enterprise technology is a process of defining it, analyzing it, and sourcing it.

    • Understand what a technology is in order to have a common frame of reference for discussion. Just as important, understand what it is not.
    • Conduct an internal and external analysis of the technology including an adoption case study.
    • Provide an overview of the vendor landscape, identifying the leading players in the market and how they differentiate their offerings.

    This is not intended to be a thesis grade research project, nor an onerous duty. Most infrastructure practitioners came to the field because of an innate excitement about technology! Harness that excitement and give them four to eight hours to indulge themselves.

    An output of approximately four slides per technology candidate should be sufficient to decided if moving to PoC or pilot is warranted.

    Including this material in the roadmap helps you control the technology conversation with your audience.

    Info-Tech Best Practices

    Don't start from scratch. Recall the original sources from your technology watchlist. Leverage vendors and analyst firms (such as Info-Tech) to give the broad context, letting you focus instead on the specifics relevant to your business.

    Channel emerging technologies to ensure the rising tide floats all boats rather than capsizing your business

    Adopting the wrong new technology can be even more dangerous than failing to adopt any new technology.

    Implementing every new promising technology would cost prodigious amounts of money and time. Know the costs before choosing what to invest in.

    The risk of a new technology failing is acceptable. The risk of that failure disrupting adjacent core functions is unacceptable. Vet potential technologies to ensure they can be safely integrated.

    Best practices for new technologies are nonexistent, standards are in flux, and use cases are fuzzy. Be aware of the unforeseen that will negatively affect your chances of a successful implementation.

    "Like early pioneers crossing the American plains, first movers have to create their own wagon trails, but later movers can follow in the ruts."
    Harper Business, 2014

    Info-Tech Insight

    The right technology for someone else can easily be the wrong technology for your business.

    Even with a mature Enterprise Architecture practice, wrong technology bets can happen. Minimize the chance of this occurrence by making selection an infrastructure-wide activity. Leverage the practical knowledge of the day-to-day operators.

    First Mover

    47% failure rate

    Fast Follower

    8% failure rate

    2.1.1 Create your future infrastructure vision

    1 hour

    Objective: Help teams define their future infrastructure state (assuming zero constraints or limitations).

    1. Ask each participant to ponder the question: "How would the infrastructure look if there were no limitations?" They should consider all aspects of their infrastructure but keep in mind the infrastructure vision and mission statements from phase one, as well as the business goals.
    2. Have each participant write down their ideas on sticky notes – one per note.
    3. Select a moderator and a scribe from the group – not the infrastructure leader or the CIO. The moderator will begin by placing (and explaining) their sticky notes on the whiteboard. The scribe will summarize the results in short statements at the end.
    4. Have each participant place and explain their sticky notes on the whiteboard.
    5. The moderator will assist each participant in grouping sticky notes together based on theme.
    6. Once everyone has placed their sticky notes and groups have been arranged and rearranged, you should have a visual representation of infrastructure's understanding of the business' priorities.
    7. Let the infrastructure leader and/or CIO place their sticky notes last.

    Discussion:

    1. Assume a blank slate as a starting point. No technical debt or financial constraints; nothing holding you back.
    2. Can SaaS, PaaS, or other cloud-based offerings play a role in this future utopia?
    3. Do vendors play a larger or smaller role in your future infrastructure vision?

    Download the IT Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template and document your mission and vision statements in Section 1.

    Input

    • Thoughts and ideas about how the future infrastructure should look.

    Output

    • Future state vision

    Materials

    • Sticky notes
    • Whiteboard & markers

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    2.1.1 Document your future state vision (cont'd)

    Objective: Help teams define their future infrastructure state (assuming zero constraints or limitations).

    1 hour

    Steps:

    1. The scribe will take the groups of suggestions and summarize them in a statement or two, briefly describing the infrastructure in that group.
    2. The statements should be recorded on Tab 2 of the Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Tool.

    Discussion:

    • Should the points be listed in any specific order?
    • Include all suggestions in the summary. Remember this is a blank slate with no constraints, and no idea is higher or lower in weight at this stage.
    Infrastructure Future State Vision
    Item Focus Area Future Vision
    1 Email Residing on Microsoft 365
    2 Servers Hosted in cloud - nothing on prem.
    3 Endpoints virtual desktops on Microsoft Azure
    4 Endpoint hardware Chromebooks
    5 Network internet only
    6 Backups cloud based but stored in multiple cloud services
    7

    Download Info-Tech's Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Tool and document your future state vision in the Infrastructure Future State tab.

    Input

    • Thoughts and ideas about how the future infrastructure should look.

    Output

    • Future state vision

    Materials

    • Sticky notes
    • Whiteboard & markers

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    2.1.2 Identification and association exercise

    1 hour

    Formalize what is likely an ad hoc process.

    1. Brainstorm with the group a list of external sources they are currently using to stay abreast of the market.
    2. Organize this list on the left-hand side of a whiteboard, in vendor and vendor-neutral groups.
      1. For each item in the list ask a series of questions:
      2. Is this a push or pull source?
      3. Is this source suited to individual or group consumption?
      4. What is the frequency of this source?
    3. What is the cost of this source to the company?
    4. On the right-hand side of the whiteboard brainstorm a list of internal mechanisms for sharing new technology information. Ask about the audience, distribution mode, and frequency for each of those mechanisms.
    5. Map which of the external sources make it over to internal distribution.

    Discussion:

    1. Are we getting the most value out of our high-cost conferences? Does that information make it from the attendees to the rest of the team?
    2. Do we share information only within our domains? Or across the whole infrastructure practice?
    3. Do we have sufficient diversity of sources? Are we in danger of believing one vendor's particular market interpretation?
    4. How do we select new technologies to explore further? Make it fun – upvotes, for example.

    Input

    • Team knowledge
    • Conference notes
    • Expense reports

    Output

    • Internal socialization process
    • Tech briefings & repository

    Materials

    • Whiteboard & markers

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    Info-Tech Best Practices

    It is impractical for everyone to present their tech briefing at the monthly meeting. But you want to avoid a one-to-many exercise. Keep the presenter a secret until called on. Those who do not present live can still contribute their material to the technology watchlist database.

    Analyze new technologies for your future state

    Four to eight hours of research per technology can uncover a wealth of relevant information and prepare the infrastructure team for a robust discussion. Key research elements include:

    • Précis: A single page or slide that describes the technology, outlines some of the vendors, and explores the value proposition.
    • SWOT Analysis:
      • Strengths and weaknesses: What does the technology inherently do well (e.g. lots of features) and what does it do poorly (e.g. steep learning curve)?
      • Opportunities and threats: What capabilities can the technology enable (e.g. build PCs faster, remote sensing)? Why would we not want to exploit this technology (e.g. market volatility, M&As)

    a series of four screenshots from the IT Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template

    Download the IT Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template slides 21, 22, 23 for sample output.

    Position infrastructure as the go-to source for information about new technology

    One way or another, tech always seems to finds its way into infrastructure's lap. Better to stay in front and act as stewards rather than cleanup crew.

    Beware airline magazine syndrome!

    Symptoms

    Pathology
    • Leadership speaking in tech buzzwords
    • Urgent meetings to discuss vaguely defined topics
    • Fervent exclamations of "I don't care how – just get it done!"
    • Management showing up on at your doorstep needing help with their new toy

    Outbreaks tend to occur in close proximity to

    • Industry trade shows
    • Excessive executive travel
    • Vendor BRM luncheons or retreats with leadership
    • Executive golf outings with old college roommates

    Effective treatment options

    1. Targeted regular communication with a technology portfolio analysis customized to the specific goals of the business.
    2. Ongoing PoC and piloting efforts with detailed results reporting.

    While no permanent cure exists, regular treatment makes this chronic syndrome manageable.

    Keep your roadmap horizon in mind

    Technology doesn't have to be bleeding edge. New-to-you can have plenty of value.

    You want to present a curated landscape of technologies, demonstrating that you are actively maintaining expertise in your chosen field.

    Most enterprise IT shops buy rather than develop their technology, which means they want to focus effort on what is market available. The outcome is that infrastructure sponsors and delivers new technologies whose capabilities and features will help the business achieve its goals on this roadmap.

    If you want to think more like a business disruptor or innovator, we suggest working through the blueprint Exploit Disruptive Infrastructure Technology.
    Explore technology five to ten years into the future!

    a quadrant analysis comparing innovation and transformation, as well as two images from Exploit Disruptive Infrastructure Technology.

    Info-Tech Insight

    The ROI of any individual effort is difficult to justify – in aggregate, however, the enterprise always wins!
    Money spent on Google Glass in 2013 seemed like vanity. Certainly, this wasn't enterprise-ready technology. But those early experiences positioned some visionary firms to quickly take advantage of augmented reality in 2018. Creative research tends to pay off in unexpected and unpredictable ways.
    .

    2.1.3 Working session, presentation, and feedback

    1 hour

    Complete a SWOT analysis with future state technology.

    The best research hasn't been done in isolation since the days of da Vinci.

    1. Divide the participants into small groups of at least four people.
    2. Further split those groups into two teams – the red team and the white team.
    3. Assign a technology candidate from the last exercise to each group. Ideally the group should have some initial familiarity with the technology and/or space.
    4. The red team from each group will focus on the weaknesses and threats of the technology. The white team will focus on the strengths and opportunities of the technology.
    5. Set a timer and spend the next 30-40 minutes completing the SWOT analysis.
    6. Have each group present their analysis to the larger team. Encourage conversation and debate. Capture and refine the understanding of the analysis.
    7. Reset with the next technology candidate. Have the participants switch teams within their groups.
    8. Continue until you've exhausted your technology candidates.

    Discussion:

    1. Does working in a group make for better research? Why?
    2. Do you need specific expertise in order to evaluate a technology? Is an outsider (non-expert) view sometimes valuable?
    3. Is it easier to think of the positive or the negative qualities of a technology? What about the internal or external implications?

    Input

    • Technology candidates

    Output

    • Technology analysis including SWOT

    Materials

    • Projector
    • Templates
    • Laptops & internet

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    Step 2.2

    Constraints analysis

    Activities

    2.2.1 Historical spend analysis

    2.2.2 Conduct a time study

    2.2.3 Identify roadblocks

    This step requires the following inputs:

    • Historical spend and staff numbers
    • Organizational design identification and thought experiment
    • Time study
    • Roadblock brainstorming session
    • Prioritization exercise

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Financial leader
    • HR Leader
    • Roadmap team

    Outcomes of this step

    • OpEx, CapEx, and staffing trends
    • Domain time study
    • Prioritized roadblock list

    2.2.1 Historical spend analysis

    "A Budget is telling your money where to go, instead of wondering where it went."
    -David Ramsay

    "Don't tell me where your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money and I'll tell you what they are"
    -James Frick, Due.com

    Annual IT budgeting aligns with business goals
    a circle showing 68%, broken down into 50% and 18%

    50% of businesses surveyed see that improvements are necessary for IT budgets to align to business goals, while 18% feel they require significant improvements to align to business goals
    Source: ITRG Diagnostics 2022

    Challenges in IT spend visibility

    68%

    Visibility of all spend data for on-prem, SaaS and cloud environments
    Source: Flexera

    The challenges that keep IT leaders up at night

    47%

    Lack of visibility in resource usage and cost
    Source: BMC, 2021

    2.2.1 Build a picture of your financial spending and staffing trends

    Follow the steps below to generate a visualization so you can start the conversation:

    1 hour

    1. Open the Info-Tech Infrastructure Roadmap Financial Spend Analysis Tool.
    2. The Instructions tab will provide guidance, or you can follow the instructions below.
    3. Insert values into the appropriate uncolored blocks in the first 4 rows of the Spend Record Entry tab to reflect the amount spent on IT OpEx, IT CapEx, or staff numbers for the present year (budgeted) as well as the previous five years.
    4. Data input populates cells in subsequent rows to quickly reveal spending ratios.

    an image of the timeline table from the Infrastructure Roadmap Financial Analysis Tool

    Download the Infrastructure Roadmap Financial Analysis Tool
    ( additional Deep Dive available if required)

    Input

    • Historical spend and staff numbers

    Output

    • OpEx, CapEx, and staffing trends for your organization

    Materials

    • Info-Tech's Infrastructure Roadmap Financial Spend Analysis Tool

    Participants

    • Infrastructure leader
    • Financial leader
    • HR leader

    2.2.1 Build a picture of your financial spending and staffing trends (cont'd)

    Continue with the steps below to generate a visualization so you can start the conversation.

    1 hour

    1. Select tab 3 (Results) to reveal a graphical analysis of your data.
    2. Trends are shown in graphs for OpEx, CapEx, and staffing levels as well as comparative graphs to show broader trends between multiple spend and staffing areas.
    3. Some observations worth noting may include the following:
      • Is OpEx spending increasing over time or decreasing?
      • Is CapEx increasing or decreasing?
      • Are OpEx and CapEx moving in the same directions?
      • Are IT staff to total staff ratios increasing or decreasing?
      • Trends will continue in the same direction unless changes are made.

    Download the Infrastructure Roadmap Financial Analysis Tool
    ( additional Deep Dive available if required)

    Input

    • Historical spend and staff numbers

    Output

    • OpEx, CapEx, and staffing trends for your organization

    Materials

    • Info-Tech's Infrastructure Roadmap Financial Spend Analysis Tool

    Participants

    • Infrastructure leader
    • Financial leader
    • HR leader

    Consider perceptions held by the enterprise when dividing infrastructure into domains

    2.2.2 Conduct a time study

    Internal divisions that seem important to infrastructure may have little or even negative value when it comes to users accessing their services.

    Domains are the logical divisions of work within an infrastructure practice. Historically, the organization was based around physical assets: servers, storage, networking, and end-user devices. Staff had skills they applied according to specific best practices using physical objects that provided functionality (computing power, persistence, connectivity, and interface).

    Modern enterprises may find it more effective to divide according to activity (analytics, programming, operations, and security) or function (customer relations, learning platform, content management, and core IT). As a rule, look to your organizational chart; managers responsible for buying, building, deploying, or supporting technologies should each be responsible for their own domain.

    Regardless of structure, poor organization leads to silos of marginally interoperable efforts working against each other, without focus on a common goal. Clearly defined domains ensure responsibility and allow for rapid, accurate, and confident decision making.

    • Server
    • Network
    • Storage
    • End User
    • DevOps
    • Analytics
    • Core IT
    • Security

    Info-Tech Insight

    The medium is the message. Do stakeholders talk about switches or storage or services? Organizing infrastructure to match its external perception can increase communication effectiveness and improve alignment.

    Case Study

    IT infrastructure that makes employees happier

    INDUSTRY: Services
    SOURCE: Network Doctor

    Challenge

    Atlas Electric's IT infrastructure was very old and urgently needed to be refreshed. Its existing server hardware was about nine years old and was becoming unstable. The server was running Windows 2008 R2 server operating systems that was no longer supported by Microsoft; security updates and patches were no longer available. They also experienced slowdowns on many older PCs.

    Recommendations for an upgrade were not approved due to budgetary constraints. Recommendations for upgrading to virtual servers were approved following a harmful phishing attack.

    Solution

    The following improvements to their infrastructure were implemented.

    • Installing a new physical host server running VMWare ESXi virtualization software and hosting four virtual servers.
    • Migration of data and applications to new virtual servers.
    • Upgrading networking equipment and deploying new relays, switches, battery backups, and network management.
    • New server racks to host new hardware.

    Results

    Virtualization, consolidating servers, and desktops have made assets more flexible and simpler to manage.

    Improved levels of efficiency, reliability, and productivity.

    Enhanced security level.

    An upgraded backup and disaster recovery system has improved risk management.

    Optimize where you spend your time by doing a time study

    Infrastructure activity is limited generally by only two variables: money and time. Money is in the hands of the CFO, which leaves us a single variable to optimize.

    Not all time is spent equally, nor is it equally valuable. Analysis lets us communicate with others and gives us a shared framework to decide where our priorities lie.

    There are lots of frameworks to help categorize our activities. Stephen Covey (Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) describes a four-quadrant system along the axes of importance and urgency. Gene Kim, through his character Erik in The Phoenix Project,speaks instead of business projects, internal IT projects, changes, and unplanned work.

    We propose a similar four-category system.

    Project Maintenance

    Administrative

    Reactive

    Planned activity spent pursuing a business objective

    Planned activity spent on the upkeep of existing IT systems

    Planned activity required as a condition of employment

    Unplanned activity requiring immediate response

    This is why we are valuable to our company

    We have it in our power to work to reduce these three in order to maximize our time available for projects

    Survey and analysis

    Perform a quick time study.

    Verifiable data sources are always preferred but large groups can hold each other's inherent biases in check to get a reasonable estimate.

    1 hour

    1. Organize the participants into the domain groups established earlier.
    2. On an index card have each participant independently write down the percentage of time they think their entire domain (not themselves personally) spends during the average month, quarter, or year on:
      1. Admin
      2. Reactive work
      3. Maintenance
    3. Draw a matrix on the whiteboard; collect the index cards and transcribe the results from participants into the matrix.
    4. Add up the three reported time estimates and subtract from 100 – the result is the percentage of time available for/spent on project work.

    Discussion

    1. Certain domains should have higher percentages of reactive work (think Service Desk and Network Operations Center) – can we shift work around to optimize resources?
    2. Why is reactive work the least desirable type? Could we reduce our reactive work by increasing our maintenance work?
    3. From a planning perspective, what are the implications of only having x% of time available for project work?
    4. Does it feel like backing into the project work from adding the other three together provides a reasonable assessment?

    Input

    • Domain groups

    Output

    • Time study

    Materials

    • Whiteboard & markers
    • Index cards

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    Quickly and easily evaluate all your infrastructure

    Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Tool, Tab 2, Capacity Analysis

    In order to quickly and easily build some visualizations for the eventual final report, Info-Tech has developed the Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Tool.

    • Up to five infrastructure domains are supported.
      • For practices that cannot be reasonably collapsed into five domains, multiple copies of the tool can be used and manually stitched together.
    • The tool can be used in either an absolute (total number) or relative mode (percentage of available).
    • By design we specifically don't ask for a project work figure but rather calculate it based on other values.
    • For everything but miscellaneous duties, hard data sources can (and where appropriate should) be leveraged.
      • Reactive work – service desk tool
      • Project work – project management tool
      • Maintenance work – logs or ITSM tool
    • Individual domains' values are calculated, as well as the overall breakdown for the infrastructure practice.
    • Even these rough estimates will be useful during the planning steps throughout the rest of the roadmap process.

    an image of the source capacity analysis page from tab 2 of the Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Tool

    Please note that this tool requires Microsoft's Power Pivot add-in to be installed if you are using Excel 2010 or 2013. The scatter plot labels on tabs 5 and 8 may not function correctly in Excel 2010.

    Build your roadmap from both the top and the bottom for best results

    Strong IT strategy favors top-down: activities enabling clearly dictated goals. The bottom-up approach aggregates ongoing activities into goals.

    Systematic approach

    External stakeholders prioritize a list of goals requiring IT initiatives to achieve.

    Roadblocks:

    • Multitudes of goals easily overwhelm scant IT resources.
    • Unglamorous yet vital maintenance activities get overlooked.
    • Goals are set without awareness of IT capacity or capabilities.

    Organic approach

    Practitioners aggregate initiatives into logical groups and seek to align them to one or more business goals.

    Roadblocks:

    • Pet initiatives can be perpetuated based on cult of personality rather than alignment to business goals.
    • Funding requests can fall flat when competing against other business units for executive support.

    A successful roadmap respects both approaches.

    an image of two arrows, intersecting with the words Infrastructure Roadmap with the top arrow labeled Systematic, and the bottom arrow being labeled Organic.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Perfection is anathema to practicality. Draw the first picture and not only expect but welcome conflicting feedback! Socialize it and drive the conversation forward to a consensus.

    2.2.3 Brainstorming – Affinity diagramming

    Identify the systemic roadblocks to executing infrastructure projects

    1 hour

    Affinity diagramming is a form of structured brainstorming that works well with larger groups and provokes discussion.

    1. Have each participant write down their top five impediments to executing their projects from last year – one roadblock per sticky note.
    2. Once everyone has written their top five, select a moderator from the group. The moderator will begin by placing (and explaining) their five sticky notes on the whiteboard.
    3. Have each participant then place and explain their sticky notes on the whiteboard.
    4. The moderator will assist participants in grouping sticky notes together based on theme.
    5. Groups that have become overly large may be broken into smaller, more precise themes.
    6. Once everyone has placed their sticky notes, you should be able to visually identify the greatest or most common roadblocks the group perceives.

    Discussion

    Categorize each roadblock identified as either internal or external to infrastructure's control.

    Attempt to understand the root cause of each roadblock. What would you need to ask for in order to remove the roadblock?

    Additional Research

    Also called the KJ Method (after its inventor, Jiro Kawakita, a 1960s Japanese anthropologist), this activity helps organize large amounts of data into groupings based on natural relationships while reducing many social biases.

    Input

    • Last years initiatives and their roadblocks

    Output

    • List of refined Roadblocks

    Materials

    • Sticky notes
    • Whiteboard & markers

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    2.2.4 Prioritization exercise – Card sorting

    Choose your priorities wisely.

    Which roadblocks do you need to work on? How do you establish a group sense of these priorities? This exercise helps establish priorities while reducing individual bias.

    1 hour

    1. Distribute index cards that have been prepopulated with the roadblocks identified in the previous activity – one full set of cards to each participant.
    2. Have each participant sort their set-in order of perceived priority, highest on top.
    3. Where n=number of cards in the stack, take the n-3 lowest priority cards and put a tick mark in the upper-right-hand corner. Pass these cards to the person on the left, who should incorporate them into their pile (if you start with eight cards you're ticking and passing five cards). Variation: On the first pass, allow everyone to take the most important and least important cards, write "0th" and "NIL" on them, respectively, and set them aside.
    4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for a total of n times. Treat duplicates as a single card in your hand.
    5. After the final pass, ask each participant to write the priority in the upper-left-hand corner of their top three cards.
    6. Collect all the cards, group by roadblock, count the number of ticks, and take note of the final priority.

    Discussion

    Total the number of passes (ticks) for each roadblock. A large number indicates a notionally low priority. No passes indicates a high priority.

    Are the internal or external roadblocks of highest priority? Were there similarities among participants' 0th and NILs compared to each other or to the final results?

    Input

    • Roadblock list

    Output

    • Prioritized roadblocks

    Materials

    • Index cards

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Review performance from last fiscal year

    • Analyzed and communicated the benefits and value realized from IT's strategic initiatives in the past fiscal year.
    • Analyzed and prioritized diagnostic data insights to communicate IT success stories.
    • Elicited important retrospective information such as KPIs, financials, etc. to build IT's credibility as a strategic business partner.

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Phase 3

    Align and Build the Roadmap

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Phase 3

    Phase 4

    1.1 Infrastructure strategy

    1.2 Goal alignment

    2.1 Define your future

    2.2 Conduct constraints analysis

    3.1 Drive business alignment

    3.2. Build the roadmap

    4.1 Identify the audience

    4.2 Process improvement

    and measurements

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Elicit business context from the CIO & IT team
    • Identify key initiatives that support the business
    • Identify key initiatives that enable IT excellence
    • Identify initiatives that drive technology innovation
    • Build initiative profiles
    • Construct your strategy roadmap

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Roadmap Team

    Step 3.1

    Drive business alignment

    Activities

    3.1.1 Develop a risk framework

    3.1.2 Evaluate technical debt

    This step requires the following inputs:

    • Intake identification and analysis
    • Survey results analysis
    • Goal brainstorming
    • Goal association and analysis

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Business leadership
    • Project Management Office
    • Service Desk
    • Business Relationship Management
    • Solution or Enterprise Architecture
    • Roadmap team

    Outcomes of this step

    • Intake analysis
    • Goal list
    • Initiative-to-goal map

    Speak for those with no voice – regularly review your existing portfolio of IT assets and services

    A chain is only as strong as its weakest link; while you'll receive no accolades for keeping the lights on, you'll certainly hear about it if you don't!

    Time has been a traditional method for assessing the fitness of infrastructure assets – servers are replaced every five years, core switches every seven, laptops and desktops every three. While quick, this framework of assessment is overly simplistic for most modern organizations.

    Building one that is instead based on the likelihood of asset failure plotted against the business impact of that failure is not overly burdensome and yields more practical results. Infrastructure focuses on its strength (assessing IT risk) and validates an understanding with the business regarding the criticality of the service(s) enabled by any given asset.

    Rather than fight on every asset individually, agree on a framework with the business that enables data-driven decision making.

    IT Risk Factors
    Age, Reliability, Serviceability, Conformity, Skill Set

    Business Risk Factors
    Suitability, Capacity, Safety, Criticality

    Info-Tech Insight

    Infrastructure in a cloud-enabled world: As infrastructure operations evolve it is important to keep current with the definition of an asset. Software platforms such as hypervisors and server OS are just as much an asset under the care and control of infrastructure as are cloud services, managed services from third-party providers, and traditional racks and switches.

    3.1.1 Develop a risk framework – Classification exercise

    While it's not necessary for each infrastructure domain to view IT risk identically, any differences should be intensely scrutinized.

    1 hour

    1. Divide the whiteboard along the axes of IT Risk and
      Business Risk (criticality) into quadrants:
      1. High IT Risk & High Biz Risk (upper right)
      2. Low IT Risk & Low Biz Risk (bottom left)
      3. Low IT Risk & High Biz Risk (bottom right)
      4. High IT Risk & Low Biz Risk (upper left)
    2. Have each participant write the names of two or three infrastructure assets or services they are responsible or accountable for – one name per sticky note.
    3. Have each participant come one-at-a-time and place their sticky notes in one quadrant.
    4. As each additional sticky note is placed, verify with the group that the relative positioning of the others is still accurate.

    Discussion:

    1. Most assets should end up in the lower-right quadrant, indicating that IT has lowered the risk of failure commensurate to the business consequences of a failure. What does this imply about assets in the other three quadrants?
    2. Infrastructure is foundational; do we properly document and communicate all dependencies for business-critical services?
    3. What actions can infrastructure take to adjust the risk profile of any given asset?

    Input

    • List of infrastructure assets

    Output

    • Notional risk analysis

    Materials

    • Whiteboard & markers
    • Sticky notes

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    3.1.2 Brainstorming and prioritization exercise

    Identify the key elements that make up risk in order to refine your framework.

    A shared notional understanding is good, but in order to bring the business onside a documented defensible framework is better.

    1 hour

    1. Brainstorm (possibly using the affinity diagramming technique) the component elements of IT risk.
    2. Ensure you have a non-overlapping set of risk elements. Ensure that all the participants are comfortable with the definitions of each element. Write them on a whiteboard.
    3. Give each participant an equal number (three to five) of voting dots.
    4. As a group have the participants go the whiteboard and use their dots to cast their votes for what they consider to be the most important risk element(s). Participants are free to place any number of their dots on a single element.
    5. Based on the votes cast select a reasonable number of elements with which to proceed.
    6. For each element selected, brainstorm up to six tiers of the risk scale. You can use numbers or words, whichever is most compelling.
      • E.g. Reliability: no failures, >1 incident per year, >1 incident per quarter, >1 incident per month, frequent issues, unreliable.
    7. Repeat the above except with the components of business risk. Alternately, rely on existing business risk documentation, possibly from a disaster recovery or business continuity plan.

    Discussion
    How difficult was it to agree on the definitions of the IT risk elements? What about selecting the scale? What was the voting distribution like? Were there tiers of popular elements or did most of the dots end up on a limited number of elements? What are the implications of having more elements in the analysis?

    Input

    • Notional risk analysis

    Output

    • Risk elements
    • Scale dimensions

    Materials

    • Whiteboard & markers
    • Voting dots

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    3.1.3 Forced ranking exercise

    Alternate: Identify the key elements that make up risk in order to refine your framework

    A shared notional understanding is good, but in order to bring the business onside a documented defensible framework is better.

    1 hour

    1. Brainstorm (possibly using the affinity diagramming technique) the component elements of IT risk.
    2. Ensure you have a non-overlapping set of risk elements. Ensure that all the participants are comfortable with the definitions of each element. Write them on a whiteboard.
    3. Distribute index cards (one per participant) with the risk elements written down one side.
    4. Ask the participants to rank the elements in order of importance, with 1 being the most important.
    5. Collect the cards and write the ranking results on the whiteboard.
    6. Look for elements with high variability. Also look for the distribution of 1, 2, and 3 ranks.
    7. Based on the results select a reasonable number of elements with which to proceed.
    8. Follow the rest of the procedure from the previous activity.

    Discussion:

    What was the total number of elements required in order to contain the full set of every participant's first-, second-, and third-ranked risks? Does this seem a reasonable number?

    Why did some elements contain both the lowest and highest rankings? Was one (or more) participant thinking consistently different from the rest of the group? Are they seeing something the rest of the group is overlooking?

    This technique automatically puts the focus on a smaller number of elements – is this effective? Or is it overly simplistic and reductionist?

    Input

    • Notional risk analysis

    Output

    • Risk elements

    Materials

    • Whiteboard & markers
    • Index cards

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    3.1.4 Consensus weighting

    Use your previous notional assessment to inform your risk weightings:

    1 hour

    1. Distribute index cards that have been prepopulated with the risk elements from the previous activity.
    2. Have the participants independently assign a weighting to each element. The assigned weights must add up to 100.
    3. Collect the cards and transcribe the results into a matrix on the whiteboard.
    4. Look for elements with high variability in the responses.
    5. Discuss and come to a consensus figure for each element's weighting.
    6. Select a variety of assets and services from the notional assessment exercise. Ensure that you have representation from all four quadrants.
    7. Using your newly defined risk elements and associated scales, evaluate as a group the values you'd suggest for each asset. Aim for a plurality of opinion rather than full consensus.
    8. Use Info-Tech's Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Tool to document the elements, weightings, scales, and asset analysis.
    9. Compare the output generated by the tool (Tab 4) with the initial notional assessment.

    Discussion:

    How much framework is too much? Complexity and granularity do not guarantee accuracy. What is the right balance between effort and result?

    Does your granular assessment match your notional assessment? Why or why not? Do you need to go back and change weightings? Or reduce complexity?

    Is this a more reasonable and valuable way of periodically evaluating your infrastructure?

    Input

    • Notional risk analysis

    Output

    • Weighted risk framework

    Materials

    • Whiteboard & markers
    • Index cards
    • Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Tool

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    3.1.5 Platform assessment set-up

    Hard work up front allows for year-over-year comparisons

    The value of a risk framework is that once the heavy lifting work of building it is done, the analysis and assessment can proceed very quickly. Once built, the framework can be tweaked as necessary, rather than recreated every year.

    • Open Info-Tech's Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Tool, Tab 3.
    • Up to eight elements each of IT and business risk can be captured.
      • IT risk elements of end-of-life and dependencies are mandatory and do not count against the eight customizable elements.
    • Every element can have up to six scale descriptors. Populate them from left to right in increasing magnitude of risk.
      • Scale descriptors must be input as string values and not numeric.
    • Each element's scale can be customized from linear to a risk-adverse or risk-seeking curve. We recommend linear.

    an image of the Platform Assessment Setup Page from Info-Tech's Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Tool,

    IT platform assessment

    Quickly and easily evaluate all your infrastructure.

    Once configured, individual domain teams can spend surprisingly little time answering reasonably simple questions to assess their assets. The common framework lets results be compared between teams and produces a valuable visualization to communication with the business.

    • Open the Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Tool, Tab 4.
    • The tool has been tested successfully with up to 2,000 asset items. Don't necessarily list every asset; rather, think of the logical groups of assets you'd cycle in or out of your environment.
    • Each asset must be associated with one and only one infrastructure domain and have a defined End of Service Life date.
    • With extreme numbers of assets an additional filter can be useful – the Grouping field allows you to set any number of additional tags to make sorting and filtering easier.
    • Drop-down menus for each risk element are prepopulated with the scale descriptors from Tab 3. Unused elements are greyed out.
    • Each asset can be deemed dependent on up to four additional assets or services. Use this to highlight obscure or undervalued relationships between assets. It is generally not useful to be reminded that everything relies on Cat 6 cabling.

    A series of screenshots from the IT Platform Assessment.

    Prioritized upgrades

    Validate and tweak your framework with the business

    Once the grunt work of inputting all the assets and the associated risk data has been completed, you can tweak the risk profile and sort the data to whatever the business may require.

    • Open Info-Tech's Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Tool, Tab 5.
    • IT platforms in the upper-right quadrant have an abundance of IT risk and are critical to the business.
    • The visualization can be sorted by selecting the slicers on the left. Sort by:
      • Infrastructure domain
      • Customized grouping tag
      • Top overall risk platforms
    • With extreme numbers of assets an additional filter can be useful. The Grouping field allows you to set any number of additional tags to make sorting and filtering easier.
    • Risk weightings can be individually adjusted to reflect changing business priorities or shared infrastructure understanding of predictive power.
      • In order to make year-over-year comparisons valuable it is recommended that changing IT risk elements should be avoided unless absolutely necessary.

    An image of a scatter plot graph titled Prioritized Upgrades.

    Step 3.2

    Build the roadmap

    Activities

    3.2.1 Build templates and visualize

    3.2.2 Generate new initiatives

    3.2.3 Repatriate shadow IT initiatives

    3.2.4 Finalize initiative candidates

    This step requires the following inputs:

    • Develop an initiative template
    • Restate the existing initiatives with the template
    • Visualize the existing initiatives
    • Brainstorm new initiatives
    • Initiative ranking
    • Solicit, evaluate, and refine shadow IT initiatives
    • Resource estimation

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Roadmap team

    Outcomes of this step

    • Initiative communication template
    • Roadmap visualization diagram

    Tell them what they really need to know

    Templates transform many disparate sources of data into easy-to-produce, easy-to-consume, business-ready documents.

    Develop a high-level document that travels with the initiative from inception through executive inquiry and project management, and finally to execution. Understand an initiative's key elements that both IT and the business need defined and that are relatively static over its lifecycle.

    Initiatives are the waypoints along a roadmap leading to the eventual destination, each bringing you one step closer. Like steps, initiatives need to be discrete: able to be conceptualized and discussed as a single largely independent item. Each initiative must have two characteristics:

    • Specific outcome: Describe an explicit change in the people, processes, or technology of the enterprise.
    • Target end date: When the described outcome will be in effect.

    "Learn a new skill"– not an effective initiative statement.

    "Be proficient in the new skill by the end of the year" – better.

    "Use the new skill to complete a project and present it at a conference by Dec 15" – best!

    Info-Tech Insight

    Bundle your initiatives for clarity and manageability.
    Ruthlessly evaluate if an initiative should stand alone or can be rolled up with another. Fewer initiatives increases focus and alignment, allowing for better communication.

    3.2.1 Develop impactful templates to sell your initiative upstream

    Step 1: Open Info-Tech's Strategic Roadmap Initiative Template. Determine and describe the goals that the initiative is enabling or supporting.
    Step 2: State the current pain points from the end-user or business perspective. Do not list IT-specific pain points here, such as management complexity.
    Step 3: List both the tangible (quantitative) and ancillary (qualitative) benefits of executing the project. These can be pain relievers derived from the pain points, or any IT-specific benefit not captured in Step 1.
    Step 4: List any enabled capability that will come as an output of the project. Avoid technical capabilities like "Application-aware network monitoring." Instead, shoot for business outcomes like "Ability to filter network traffic based on application type."

    An image of the Move to Office 365, with the numbers 1-4 superimposed over the image.  These correspond to steps 1-4 above.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Sell the project to the mailroom clerk! You need to be able to explain the outcome of the project in terms that non-IT workers can appreciate. This is done by walking as far up the goals cascade as you have defined, which gets to the underlying business outcome that the initiative supports.

    Develop impactful templates to sell your initiative upstream (cont'd)

    Strategic Roadmap Initiative Template, p. 2

    Step 5: State the risks to the business for not executing the project (and avoid restating the pain points).
    Step 6: List any known or anticipated roadblocks that may come before, during, or after executing the project. Consider all aspects of people, process, and technology.
    Step 7: List any measurable objectives that can be used to gauge the success of the projects. Avoid technical metrics like "number of IOPS." Instead think of business metrics such as "increased orders per hour."
    Step 8: The abstract is a short 50-word project description. Best to leave it as the final step after all the other aspects of the project (risks and rewards) have been fully fleshed out. The abstract acts as an executive summary – written last, read first.

    An image of the Move to Office 365, with the numbers 5-8 superimposed over the image.  These correspond to steps 5-8 above.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Every piece of information that is not directly relevant to the interests of the audience is a distraction from the value proposition.

    Working session, presentation, and feedback

    Rewrite your in-flight initiatives to ensure you're capturing all the required information:

    1 hour

    1. Have each participant select an initiative they are responsible or accountable for.
    2. Introduce the template and discuss any immediate questions they might have.
    3. Take 15-20 minutes and have each participant attempt to fill out the template for their initiative.
    4. Have each participant present their initiative to the group.
    5. The group should imagine themselves business leaders and push back with questions or clarification when IT jargon is used.
    6. Look to IT leadership in the room for cues as to what hot button items they've encountered from the business executives.
    7. Debate the merits of each section in the template. Adjust and customize as appropriate.

    Discussion:
    Did everyone use the goal framework adopted earlier? Why not?
    Are there recurring topics or issues that business leaders always seem concerned about?
    Of all the information available, what consistently seems to be the talking points when discussing an initiative?

    Input

    • In-flight initiatives

    Output

    • Completed initiatives templates

    Materials

    • Templates
    • Laptops & internet

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    3.2.2 Visual representations are more compelling than text alone

    Being able to quickly sort and filter data allows you to customize the visualization and focus on what matters to your audience. Any data that is not immediately relevant to them risks becoming a distraction.

    1. Open the Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Tool, Tabs 6 and 7.
    2. Up to ten goals can be supported. Input the goals into column F of the tool. Be explicit but brief.
    3. Initiatives and Obstacles can be independently defined, and the tool supports up to five subdivisions of each. Initiative by origin source makes for an interesting analysis but initially we recommend simplicity.
    4. Every Initiative and Obstacle must be given a unique name in column H. Context-sensitive drop-downs let you define the subtype and responsible infrastructure domain.
    5. Three pieces of data are captured for each initiative: Business Impact is the qualitative value to the business; Risk is the qualitative likelihood of failure – entirely or partially (e.g. significantly over budget or delayed); and Effort is a relative measure of magnitude ($ or time). Only the value for Effort must be specified.
    6. Every initiative can claim to support one or many goals by placing an "x" in the appropriate column(s).
    7. On Tab 7 you must select the initiative end date (go-live date). You can also document start date, owner, and manager if required. Remember, though, that the tool does not replace proper project management tools.

    A series of screenshots of tables, labeled A-F

    Decoding your visualization

    Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Tool, Tab 8, "Roadmap"

    Visuals aren't always as clear as we assume them to be.

    An example of a roadmap visualization found in the Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Tool

    If you could suggest one thing, what would it be?

    The roadmap is likely the best and most direct way to showcase our ideas to business leadership – take advantage of it.

    We've spent an awful lot of time setting the stage, deciding on frameworks so we agree on what is important. We know how to have an effective conversation – now what do we want to say?

    an image of a roadmap, including inputs passing through infrastructure & Operations; to the Move to Office 365 images found earlier in this blueprint.

    Creative thinking, presentation, and feedback

    Since we're so smart – how could we do it better?

    1 hour

    1. Introduce the Roadmap Initiative Template and discuss any immediate questions the participants might have.
    2. Take 15-20 minutes and have each participant attempt to fill out the template for their initiative candidate.
    3. Have each author present their initiative to the group.
    4. The group should imagine themselves business leaders and push back with questions or clarification when IT jargon is used.
    5. Look to IT leadership in the room for cues as to what hot button items they've encountered from the business executives
    6. Debate the merits of each section in the template. Adjust and customize as appropriate.

    Discussion:
    Did everyone use the goal framework adopted earlier? Why not?
    Do we think we can find business buy-in or sponsorship? Why or why not?
    Are our initiatives at odds with or complementary to the ones proposed through the normal channels?

    Input

    • Everything we know

    Output

    • Initiative candidates

    Materials

    • Info-Tech's Infrastructure Roadmap Initiatives Template
    • Laptops & internet

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    Forced Ranking Exercise

    Showcase only your best and brightest ideas:

    1 hour

    1. Write the initiative titles from the previous exercise across the top of a whiteboard.
    2. Distribute index cards (one per participant) with the initiative titles written down one side.
    3. Ask each participant to rank the initiatives in order of importance, with 1 being the most important.
    4. Collect the cards and write the ranking results on the whiteboard.
    5. Look at the results with an eye toward high variability. Also look for the distribution of 1, 2, and 3 ranks.
    6. Based on the results, select (through democratic vote or authoritarian fiat – Director or CIO) a reasonable number of initiatives.
    7. Refine the selected initiative templates for inclusion in the roadmap.

    Discussion:
    Do participants tend to think their idea is the best and rank it accordingly?
    If so, then is it better to look at the second, third, and fourth rankings for consensus instead?
    What is a reasonable number of initiatives to suggest? How do we limit ourselves?

    Input

    • Infrastructure initiative candidates

    Output

    • Infrastructure initiatives

    Materials

    • Index cards

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    Who else might be using technology to solve business problems?

    Shadow IT operates outside of the governance and control structure of Enterprise IT and so is, by definition, a problem. an opportunity!

    Except for that one thing they do wrong, that one small technicality, they may well do everything else right.

    Consider:

    1. Shadow IT evolves to solve a problem or enable an activity for a specific group of users.
    2. This infers that because stakeholders spend their own resources resolving a problem or enabling an action, it is a priority.
    3. The technology choices they've made have been based solely on functionality for value, unrestrained by any legacy of previous decisions.
    4. Staffing demands and procedural issues must be modest or nonexistent.
    5. The users must be engaged, receptive to change, and tolerant of stutter steps toward a goal.

    In short, shadow IT can provide fully vetted infrastructure initiatives that with a little effort can be turned into easy wins on the roadmap.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Shadow IT can include business-ready initiatives, needing only minor tweaking to align with infrastructure's best practices.

    3.2.3 Survey and hack-a-thon

    Negotiate amnesty with shadow IT by evaluating their "hacks" for inclusion on the roadmap.

    1 hour

    1. Put out an open call for submissions across the enterprise. Ask "How do you think technology could help you solve one of your pain points?" Be specific.
    2. Gather the responses into a presentable format and assemble the roadmap team.
    3. Use voting dots (three per person) to filter out a shortlist.
    4. Invite the original author to come in and work with a roadmap team member to complete the template.
    5. Reassemble the roadmap team and use the forced ranking exercise to select initiatives to move forward.

    Discussion:
    Did you learn anything from working directly with in-the-trenches staff? Can those learnings be used elsewhere in infrastructure? Or in larger IT?

    Input

    • End-user ideas

    Output

    • Roadmap initiatives

    Materials

    • Whiteboard & markers
    • Voting dots
    • Index cards
    • Templates

    Participants

    • Enthusiastic end users
    • Roadmap team
    • Infrastructure leader

    3.2.4 Consensus estimation

    Exploit the wisdom of groups to develop reasonable estimates.

    1 hour

    Also called scrum poker (in Agile software circles), this method reduces anchoring bias by requiring all participants to formulate and submit their estimates independently and simultaneously.

    Equipment: A typical scrum deck shows the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, or similar progression, with the added values of ∞ (project too big and needs to be subdivided), and a coffee cup (need a break). Use of the (mostly) Fibonacci sequence helps capture the notional uncertainty in estimating larger values.

    1. The infrastructure leader, who will not play, moderates the activity. A "currency" of estimation is selected. This could be person, days, or weeks, or a dollar value in the thousands or tens of thousands – whatever the group feels they can speak to authoritatively.
    2. The author of each initiative gives a short overview, and the participants are given the chance to ask questions and clarify assumptions and risks.
    3. Participants lay a card representing their estimate face down on the table. Estimates are revealed simultaneously.
    4. Participants with the highest and lowest estimates are given a soapbox to offer justification. The author is expected to provide clarifications. The moderator drives the conversation.
    5. The process is repeated until consensus is reached (decided by the moderator).
    6. To structure discussion, the moderator can impose time limits between rounds.

    Discussion:

    How often was the story unclear? How often did participants have to ask for additional information to make their estimate? How many rounds were required to reach consensus?
    Does number of person, days, or weeks, make more sense than dollars? Should we estimate both independently?
    Source: Scrum Poker

    Input

    • Initiative candidates from previous activity

    Output

    • Resourcing estimates

    Materials

    • Scrum poker deck

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    Hard work up front allows for year-over-year comparisons

    Open the Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Tool, Tab 6, "Initiatives & Goals" and Tab 7, "Timeline"

    Add your ideas to the visualization.

    • An initiative subtype can be useful here to differentiate infrastructure-sponsored initiatives from traditional ones.
    • Goal alignment is as important as always – ideally you want your sponsored initiatives to fill gaps or support the highest-priority business goals.
    • The longer-term roadmap is an excellent parking lot for ideas, especially ones the business didn't even know they wanted. Make sure to pull those ideas forward, though, as you repeat the process periodically.

    An image containing three screenshots of timeline tables from the Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Tool

    Pulling it all together – the published report

    We started with eight simple questions. Logically, the answers suggest sections for a published report. Developing those answers in didactic method is effective and popular among technologists as answers build upon each other. Business leaders and journalists, however, know never to bury the lead.

    Report Section Title Roadmap Activity or Step
    Sunshine diagram Visualization
    Priorities Understand business goals
    Who we help Evaluate intake process
    How we can help Create initiatives
    What we're working on Review initiatives
    How you can help us Assess roadblocks
    What is new Assess new technology
    How we spend our day Conduct a time study
    What we have Assess IT platform
    We can do better! Identify process optimizations

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Review performance from last fiscal year

    • Analyzed and communicated the benefits and value realized from IT's strategic initiatives in the past fiscal year.
    • Analyzed and prioritized diagnostic data insights to communicate IT success stories.
    • Elicited important retrospective information such as KPIs, financials, etc. to build IT's credibility as a strategic business partner.

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Phase 4

    Communicate and Improve the Process

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    Phase 3

    Phase 4

    1.1 Infrastructure strategy

    1.2 Goal alignment

    2.1 Define your future

    2.2 Conduct constraints analysis

    3.1 Drive business alignment

    3.2. Build the roadmap

    4.1 Identify the audience

    4.2 Process improvement

    and measurements

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Identify authors and target audiences
    • Understand the planning process
    • Identify if the process outputs have value
    • Set up realistic KPIs

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • Roadmap team

    Step 4.1

    Identify the audience

    Activities

    4.1.1 Identify required authors and target audiences

    4.1.2 Planning the process

    4.1.3 Identifying supporters and blockers

    This step requires the following inputs:

    • Identify required authors and target audiences
    • Plan the process
    • Identify supporters and blockers

    This step involves the following participants:

    • CIO
    • Roadmap team

    Outcomes of this step

    • Process schedule
    • Communication strategy

    Again! Again!

    And you thought we were done. The roadmap is a process. Set a schedule and pattern to the individual steps.

    Publishing an infrastructure roadmap once a year as a lead into budget discussion is common practice. But this is just the last in a long series of steps and activities. Balance the effort of each activity against its results to decide on a frequency. Ensure that the frequency is sufficient to allow you to act on the results if required. Work backwards from publication to develop the schedule.

    an image of a circle of questions around the Infrastructure roadmap.

    A lot of work has gone into creating this final document. Does a single audience make sense? Who else may be interested in your promises to the business? Look back at the people you've asked for input. They probably want to know what this has all been about. Publish your roadmap broadly to ensure greater participation in subsequent years.

    4.1.1 Identify required authors and target audiences

    1 hour

    Identification and association

    Who needs to hear (and more importantly believe) your message? Who do you need to hear from? Build a communications plan to get the most from your roadmap effort.

    1. Write your eight roadmap section titles in the middle of a whiteboard.
    2. Make a list of everyone who answered your questions during the creation of this roadmap. Write these names on a single color of sticky notes and place them on the left side.
    3. Make a list of everyone who would be (or should be) interested in what you have to say. Write these names on a different single color of sticky notes and place them on the right side.
    4. Draw lines between the stickies and the relevant section of the roadmap. Solid lines indicate a must have communication while dashed lines indicate a nice-to-have communication.
    5. Come to a consensus.

    Discussion:

    How many people appear in both lists? What are the implications of that?

    Input

    • Roadmap sections

    Output

    • Roadmap audience and contributors list

    Materials

    • Whiteboard & markers
    • Sticky notes

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    4.1.2 Planning the process and scheduling

    The right conversation at the right time

    Due Date (t) Freq Mode Participants Infrastructure Owner
    Update & Publish

    Start of Budget Planning

    Once

    Report

    IT Steering Committee

    Infrastructure Leader or CIO

    Evaluate Intakes

    (t) - 2 months

    (t) - 8 months

    Biannually

    Review

    PMO

    Service Desk

    Domain Heads

    Assess Roadblocks

    (t) - 2 months

    (t) - 5 months

    (t) - 8 months

    (t) - 11 months

    Quarterly

    Brainstorming & Consensus

    Domain Heads

    Infrastructure Leader

    Time Study

    (t) - 1 month

    (t) - 4 months

    (t) - 7 months

    (t) - 10 months

    Quarterly

    Assessment

    Domain Staff

    Domain Heads

    Inventory Assessment

    (t) - 2 months

    Annually

    Assessment

    Domain Staff

    Domain Heads

    Business Goals

    (t) - 1 month

    Annually

    Survey

    Line of Business Managers

    Infrastructure Leader or CIO

    New Technology Assessment

    monthly

    (t) - 2 months

    Monthly/Annually

    Process

    Domain Staff

    Infrastructure Leader

    Initiative Review

    (t) - 1 month

    (t) - 4 months

    (t) - 7 months

    (t) - 10 months

    Quarterly

    Review

    PMO

    Domain Heads

    Infrastructure Leader

    Initiative Creation

    (t) - 1 month

    Annually

    Brainstorming & Consensus

    Roadmap Team

    Infrastructure Leader

    The roadmap report is just a point-in-time snapshot, but to be most valuable it needs to come at the end of a full process cycle. Know your due date, work backwards, and assign responsibility.

    Discussion:

    1. Do each of the steps make sense? Is the outcome clear and does it flow naturally to where it will be useful?
    2. Is the effort required for each step commensurate with its value? Are we doing to much for not enough return?
    3. Are we acting on the information we're gathering? Is it informing or changing decisions throughout the year or period?

    Input

    • Roadmap sections

    Output

    • Roadmap process milestones

    Materials

    • Whiteboard & markers
    • Template

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    Tailor your messaging to secure stakeholders' involvement and support

    If your stakeholders aren't on board, you're in serious trouble.

    Certain stakeholders will not only be highly involved and accountable in the process but may also be responsible for approving the roadmap and budget, so it's essential that you get their buy-in upfront.

    an image of a quadrant analysis, comparing levels of influence and support.

    an image of a quadrant analysis, comparing levels of influence and support.

    4.1.3 Identifying supporters and blockers

    Classification and Strategy

    1 hour

    You may want to restrict participation to senior members of the roadmap team only.

    This activity requires a considerable degree of candor in order to be effective. It is effectively a political conversation and as such can be sensitive.

    Steps:

    1. Review your sticky notes from the earlier activity (list of input and output names).
    2. Place each name in the corresponding quadrant of a 2x2 matrix like the one on the right.
    3. Come to a consensus on the placement of each sticky note.

    Input

    • Roadmap audience and contributors list

    Output

    • Communications strategy & plan

    Materials

    • Whiteboard & markers
    • Sticky notes

    Participants

    • Senior roadmap team

    Step 4.2

    Process improvement

    Activities

    4.2.1 Evaluating the value of each process output

    4.2.2 Brainstorming improvements

    4.2.3 Setting realistic measures

    This step requires the following inputs:

    • Evaluating the efficacy of each process output
    • Brainstorming improvements
    • Setting realistic measures

    This step involves the following participants:

    • Roadmap team

    Outcomes of this step

    • Process map
    • Process improvement plan

    Continual improvement

    Not just for the DevOps hipsters!

    You started with a desire – greater satisfaction with infrastructure from the business. All of the inputs, processes, and outputs exist only, and are designed solely, to serve the attainment of that outcome.

    The process outlined is not dogma; no element is sacrosanct. Ruthlessly evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts so you can do better next time.

    You would do no less after a server migration, network upgrade, or EUC rollout.

    Consider these four factors to help make your infrastructure roadmap effort more successful.

    Leadership
    If infrastructure leaders aren't committed, then this will quickly become an exercise of box-checking rather than candid communication.

    Data
    Quantitative or qualitative – always try to go where the data leads. Reduce unconscious bias and be surprised by the insight uncovered.

    Metrics
    Measurement allows management but if you measure the wrong thing you can game the system, cheating yourself out of the ultimate prize.

    Focus
    Less is sometimes more.

    4.2.1 Evaluating the value of each process output

    Understanding why and how individual steps are effective (or not) is how we improve the outcome of any process.

    1 hour

    1. List each of the nine roadmap steps on the left-hand side of a whiteboard.
    2. Ask the participants "Why was this step included? Did it accomplish its objective?" Consider using a reduced scale affinity diagramming exercise for this step.
    3. Consider the priority characteristics of each step; try to be as universal as possible (every characteristic will ideally apply to each step).
    4. Include two columns at the far right: "Improvement" and "Expected Change."
    5. Populate the table. If this is your first time, brainstorm reasonable objectives for your left-hand columns. Otherwise, document the reality of last year and focus on brainstorming the right-hand columns.
    6. Optional: Conduct a thought experiment and brainstorm tension metrics to establish whether the process is driving the outcomes we desire.
    7. Optional: Consider Info-Tech's assertion about the four things a roadmap can do. Brainstorm KPIs that you can measure yearly. What else would you want the roadmap to be able to do?

    Discussion:

    Did the group agree on the intended outcome of each step? Did the group think the step was effective? Was the outcome clear and did it flow naturally to where it was useful?
    Is the effort required for each step commensurate with its value? Are we doing too much for not enough return?
    Are we acting on the information we're gathering? Is it informing or changing decisions throughout the year or period?

    Input

    • Roadmap process steps

    Output

    • Process map
    • Improvement targets & metrics

    Materials

    • Whiteboard & markers
    • Sticky notes
    • Process Map Template (see next slide)

    Participants

    • Roadmap team

    Process map template

    Replace the included example text with your inputs.

    Freq.MethodMeasuresSuccess criteria

    Areas for improvement

    Expected change

    Evaluate intakesBiannuallyPMO Intake & Service RequestsProjects or Initiatives% of departments engaged

    Actively reach out to underrepresented depts.

    +10% engagement

    Assess roadblocksQuarterlyIT All-Staff MeetingRoadblocks% of identified that have been resolved

    Define expected outcomes of removing roadblock

    Measurable improvements

    Time studyQuarterly IT All-Staff MeetingTimeConfidence value of data

    Real data sources (time sheets, tools, etc.)

    85% of sources defensible

    Legacy asset assessmentAnnuallyDomain effortAsset Inventory Completeness of Inventory
    • Compare against Asset Management database
    • Track business activity by enabling asset(s)
    • > 95% accuracy/
      completeness
    • Easier business risk framework conversations
    Understand business goalsAnnuallyRoadmap MeetingGoal listGoal specificity

    Survey or interview leadership directly

    66% directly attributable participation

    New technology assessmentMonthly/AnnuallyTeam/Roadmap MeetingTechnologies Reviewed IT staff participation/# SWOTs

    Increase participation from junior members

    50% presentations from junior members

    Initiative review

    Quarterly

    IT All-Staff Meeting

    • Status Review
    • Template usage
    • Action taken upon review
    • Template uptake
    • Identify predictive factors
    • Improve template
    • 25% of yellow lights to green
    • -50% requests for additional info

    Initiative creation

    Annually Roadmap MeetingInitiatives# of initiatives proposedBusiness uptake+25% sponsorship in 6 months (biz)

    Update and publish

    AnnuallyPDF reportRoadmap Final ReportLeadership engagement Improve audience reach+15% of LoB managers have read the report

    Establish baseline metrics

    Baseline metrics will improve through:

    1. Increased communication. More information being shared to more people who need it.
    2. Better planning. More accurate information being shared.
    3. Reduced lead times. Less due diligence or discovery work required as part of project implementations.
    4. Faster delivery times. Less less-valuable work, freeing up more time to project work.
    Metric description Current metric Future goal
    # of critical incidents resulting from equipment failure per month
    # of service provisioning delays due to resource (non-labor) shortages
    # of projects that involve standing up untested (no prior infrastructure PoC) technologies
    # of PoCs conducted each year
    # of initiatives proposed by infrastructure
    # of initiatives proposed that find business sponsorship in >1yr
    % of long-term projects reviewed as per goal framework
    # of initiatives proposed that are the only ones supporting a business goal
    # of technologies deployed being used by more than the original business sponsor
    # of PMO delays due to resource contention

    Insight Summary

    Insight 1

    Draw the first picture.

    Highly engaged and effective team members are proactive rather than reactive. Instead of waiting for clear inputs from the higher ups, take what you do know, make some educated guesses about the rest, and present that to leadership. Where thinking diverges will be crystal clear and the necessary adjustments will be obvious.

    Insight 2

    Infrastructure must position itself as the broker for new technologies.

    No man is an island; no technology is a silo. Infrastructure's must ensure that everyone in the company benefits from what can be shared, ensure those benefits are delivered securely and reliably, and prevent the uninitiated from making costly technological mistakes. It is easier to lead from the front, so infrastructure must stay on top of available technology.

    Insight 3

    The roadmap is a process that is business driven and not a document.

    In an ever-changing world the process of change itself changes. We know the value of any specific roadmap output diminishes quickly over time, but don't forget to challenge the process itself from time to time. Striving for perfection is a fool's game; embrace constant updates and incremental improvement.

    Insight 4

    Focus on the framework, not the output.

    There usually is no one right answer. Instead make sure both the business and infrastructure are considering common relevant elements and are working from a shared set of priorities. Data then, rather than hierarchical positioning or a d20 Charisma roll, becomes the most compelling factor in making a decision. But since your audience is in hierarchical ascendency over you, make the effort to become familiar with their language.

    4.2.3 Track metrics throughout the project to keep stakeholders informed

    An effective strategic infrastructure roadmap should help to:

    1. Initiate a schedule of infrastructure projects to achieve business goals.
    2. Adapt to feedback from executives on changing business priorities.
    3. Curate a portfolio of enabling technologies that align to the business whether growing or stabilizing.
    4. Manage the lifecycle of aging equipment in order to meet capacity demands.
    Metric description

    Metric goal

    Checkpoint 1

    Checkpoint 2

    Checkpoint 3

    # of critical incidents resulting from equipment failure per month >1
    # of service provisioning delays due to resource (non-labor) shortages >5
    # of projects that involve standing up untested (no prior infrastructure PoC) technologies >10%
    # of PoCs conducted each year 4
    # of initiatives proposed by infrastructure 4
    # of initiatives proposed that find business sponsorship in >1 year 1
    # of initiatives proposed that are the only ones supporting a business goal 1
    % of long-term projects reviewed as per goal framework 100%

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Review performance from last fiscal year

    • Analyzed and communicated the benefits and value realized from IT's strategic initiatives in the past fiscal year.
    • Analyzed and prioritized diagnostic data insights to communicate IT success stories.
    • Elicited important retrospective information such as KPIs, financials, etc. to build IT's credibility as a strategic business partner.

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Build a Business-Aligned IT Strategy
    Success depends on IT initiatives clearly aligned to business goals, IT excellence, and driving technology innovation.

    Document your Cloud Strategy
    A cloud strategy might seem like a big project, but it's just a series of smaller conversations. The methodology presented here is designed to facilitate those conversations using a curated list of topics, prompts, participant lists, and sample outcomes. We have divided the strategy into four key areas.

    Develop an IT Asset Management Strategy
    ITAM is a foundational IT service that provides accurate, accessible, actionable data on IT assets. But there's no value in data for data's sake. Enable collaboration between IT asset managers, business leaders, and IT leaders to develop an ITAM strategy that maximizes the value they can deliver as service provider.

    Infrastructure & Operations Research Center
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    Summary of Accomplishment

    Knowledge gained

    • Deeper understanding of business goals and priorities
    • Key data the business requires for any given initiative
    • Quantification of risk
    • Leading criteria for successful technology adoption

    Processes optimized

    • Infrastructure roadmap
    • Initiative creation, estimation, evaluation, and prioritization
    • Inventory assessment for legacy infrastructure debt
    • Technology adoption

    Deliverables completed

    • Domain time study
    • Initiative intake analysis
    • Prioritized roadblock list
    • Goal listing
    • IT and business risk frameworks
    • Infrastructure inventory assessment
    • New technology analyzes
    • Initiative templates
    • Initiative candidates
    • Roadmap visualization
    • Process schedule
    • Communications strategy
    • Process map
    • Roadmap report

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop

    Contact your account representative for more information.
    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

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    • Governance is essential with integrated applications. If you are planning to integrate your applications, you should already be considering a governance model.
    • Proper governance requires oversight into chains of responsibility, policy, control mechanisms, measurement, and communication.
    • People and process are key. Technology options to aid in governance of integrated apps exist, but will not greatly contribute to the success of AI.

    Impact and Result

    • Assess your capabilities and determine which area of governance requires the most attention to achieve success in AI.
    • Form an Integration Center of Competency to oversee AI governance to ensure compliance and increase success.
    • Conduct ongoing training with your personnel to ensure up-to-date skills and end user understanding.
    • Frequently revisit your AI governance strategy to ensure alignment with business goals.

    Implement and Optimize Application Integration Governance Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Implement and optimize Application Integration Governance

    Know where to start and where to focus your attention in the implementation of an AI governance strategy.

    • Storyboard: Implement and Optimize Application Integration Governance

    2. Assess the organization's capabilities in AI Governance

    Assess your current and target states in AI Governance.

    • Application Integration Governance Gap Analysis Tool

    3. Create an Integration Center of Competency

    Have a governing body to oversee AI Governance.

    • Integration Center of Competency Charter Template

    4. Establish AI Governance principles and guidelines

    Create a basis for the organization’s AI governance model.

    • Application Integration Policy and Principles Template

    5. Create an AI service catalog

    Keep record of services and interfaces to reduce waste.

    • Integration Service Catalog Template
    [infographic]

    Application Portfolio Management

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    • Parent Category Name: Applications
    • Parent Category Link: /applications

    The challenge

    • The chances are that you, too, have too many or far too many applications in your organization. You will not be alone. Almost 60% of companies report the same issue. 
    • That is due to poorly managed portfolios.
    • Your application managers now need to support too many non-critical applications, and they spend insufficient time on the vital applications.
    • You can rarely find the required pieces to rationalize your portfolio in one place. You will need to find the resources and build a team.
    • The lack of standard practices to define the value that each application in a portfolio provides to the company causes misalignments.

    Our advice

    Insight

    • There is no silver bullet solution. Going too rigid in your approach causes delays in value realization through application portfolio management. It may even prevent this altogether. Define flexible inputs to your portfolio and align closely with your business goals.

    Impact and results 

    • Define the outputs of your application rationalization effort, with clear roles and responsibilities.
    • Tailor the application rationalization framework (ARF) to your company's motivations, goals, and limitations.
    • Apply various application assessments to build a clear picture of your portfolio.
    • Build an application portfolio roadmap that shows your target state based on your rationalization decisions.

    The roadmap

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    Get started

    Our concise executive brief shows you why you should rationalize your application portfolio using a tailored framework for your company. We'll show you our methodology and the ways we can help you in handling this.

    Lay the foundations

    Define why you want to rationalize your application portfolio. Define the end state and scope. Build your action plan.

    • Build an Application Rationalization Framework – Phase 1: Lay Your Foundations (ppt)
    • Application Rationalization Tool (xls)

    Plan the application rationalization framework

    Understand what the core assessments are that you perform in these rationalizations. Define your framework and how rigorous you want to apply the reviews based on your business context.

    • Build an Application Rationalization Framework – Phase 2: Plan Your Application Rationalization Framework (ppt)

    Test and adapt your application rationalization framework (ARF)

    Our tool allows you to test the elements of your ARF. Then do a retrospective and adapt based on your experience and desired outcomes. 

    • Build an Application Rationalization Framework – Phase 3: Test and Adapt Your Application Rationalization Framework (ppt)
    • Application TCO Calculator (xls)
    • Value Calculator (xls)

    Initiate your roadmap

    Review your dispositions to ensure they align with your goals. 

    • Build an Application Rationalization Framework – Phase 4: Initiate Your Roadmap (ppt)
    • Disposition Prioritization Tool (xls)

     

    2024 Tech Trends

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    • Parent Category Name: Innovation
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    AI has revolutionized the landscape, placing the spotlight firmly on the generative enterprise.

    The far-reaching impact of generative AI across various sectors presents fresh prospects for organizations to capitalize on and novel challenges to address as they chart their path for the future. AI is more than just a fancy auto-complete. At this point it may look like that, but do not underestimate the evolutive power.

    In this year's Tech Trends report, we explore three key developments to capitalize on these opportunities and three strategies to minimize potential risks.

    Generative AI will take the lead.

    As AI transforms industries and business processes, IT and business leaders must adopt a deliberate and strategic approach across six key domains to ensure their success.

    Seize Opportunities:

    • Business models driven by AI
    • Automation of back-office functions
    • Advancements in spatial computing

    Mitigate Risks:

    • Ethical and responsible AI practices
    • Incorporating security from the outset
    • Ensuring digital sovereignty

    Prepare and Defend Against a Software Audit

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    • Parent Category Name: Licensing
    • Parent Category Link: /licensing
    • Audit defense starts long before you get audited. Negotiating your vendors’ audit rights and maintaining a documented consolidated licensing position ensure that you are not blindsided by a sudden audit request.
    • Notification of an impending audit can cause panic. Don't panic. While the notification will be full of strong language, your best chance of success is to take control of the situation. Prepare a measured response that buys you enough time to get your house in order before you let the vendor in.
    • If a free software asset review sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. If a vendor or one of its partners offers up a free software asset management engagement, they aren’t doing so out of the goodness of their heart — they expect to recoup their costs (and then some) from identified license discrepancies.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • The amount of business disruption depends on the scope of the audit, and the size and complexity of the organization coupled with the contractual audit clause in the contract.
    • These highly visible failures can be prevented through effective software asset management practices.
    • As complexity of licensing increases, so do penalties. If the environment is highly complex, prioritize effort by likelihood of audit and spend.
    • Ensure electronic records exist for license documentation to provide fast access for audit and information requests
    • Verify accuracy of discovered data. Ensure all devices on the network are being audited. Without a complete discovery process, data will always be inaccurate.

    Impact and Result

    • Being able to respond quickly with accurate data is critical. When deadlines are tight, and internal resources don’t exist, hire a third party as their experience will allow a faster response.
    • Negotiate terms of the audit such as deadlines, proof of license entitlement, and who will complete the audit.
    • Create a methodology to quickly and efficiently respond to audit requests.
    • Conduct annual internal audits.
    • Have a designated cross-functional IT audit team.
    • Prepare documentation in advance.
    • Manage audit logistics to minimize business disruption.
    • Dispute unwarranted findings.

    Prepare and Defend Against a Software Audit Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should be prepared and ready to defend against a software audit, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Prevent an audit

    Begin your proactive audit management journey and leverage value from your software asset management program.

    • Prepare and Defend Against a Software Audit – Phase 1: Prevent an Audit
    • Audit Defense Maturity Assessment Tool
    • Effective Licensing Position Tool
    • Audit Defence RACI Template

    2. Prepare for an audit

    Prepare for an audit by effectively scoping and consolidating organizational response.

    • Prepare and Defend Against a Software Audit – Phase 2: Prepare for an Audit
    • Software Audit Scoping Email Template
    • Audit Defense Readiness Assessment

    3. Conduct the audit

    Execute the audit in a way that preserves valuable relationships while accounting for vendor specific criteria.

    • Prepare and Defend Against a Software Audit – Phase 3: Conduct an Audit
    • Software Audit Launch Email Template

    4. Manage post-audit activities

    Conduct negotiations, settle on remuneration, and close out the audit.

    • Prepare and Defend Against a Software Audit - Phase 4: Manage Post-Audit Activities
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Prepare and Defend Against a Software Audit

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Prevent an Audit

    The Purpose

    Kick off the project

    Identify challenges and red flags

    Determine maturity and outline internal audit

    Clarify stakeholder responsibilities

    Build and structure audit team

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Leverage value from your audit management program

    Begin your proactive audit management journey

    A documented consolidated licensing position, which ensures that you are not blindsided by a sudden audit request

    Activities

    1.1 Perform a maturity assessment of the current environment

    1.2 Classify licensing contracts/vendors

    1.3 Conduct a software inventory

    1.4 Meter application usage

    1.5 Manual checks

    1.6 Gather software licensing data

    1.7 Reconcile licenses

    1.8 Create your audit team and assign accountability

    Outputs

    Maturity assessment

    Effective license position/license reconciliation

    Audit team RACI chart

    2 Prepare for an Audit

    The Purpose

    Create a strategy for audit response

    Know the types of requests

    Scope the engagement

    Understand scheduling challenges

    Know roles and responsibilities

    Understand common audit pitfalls

    Define audit goals

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Take control of the situation and prepare a measured response

    A dedicated team responsible for all audit-related activities

    A formalized audit plan containing team responsibilities and audit conduct policies

    Activities

    2.1 Use Info-Tech’s readiness assessment template

    2.2 Define the scope of the audit

    Outputs

    Readiness assessment

    Audit scoping email template

    3 Conduct the Audit

    The Purpose

    Overview of process conducted

    Kick-off and self-assessment

    Identify documentation requirements

    Prepare required documentation

    Data validation process

    Provide resources to enable the auditor

    Tailor audit management to vendor compliance position

    Enforce best-practice audit behaviors

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A successful audit with minimal impact on IT resources

    Reduced severity of audit findings

    Activities

    3.1 Communicate audit commencement to staff

    Outputs

    Audit launch email template

    4 Manage Post-Audit Activities

    The Purpose

    Clarify auditor findings and recommendations

    Access severity of audit findings

    Develop a plan for refuting unwarranted findings

    Disclose findings to management

    Analyze opportunities for remediation

    Provide remediation options and present potential solutions

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Ensure your audit was productive and beneficial

    Improve your ability to manage audits

    Come to a consensus on which findings truly necessitate organizational change

    Activities

    4.1 Don't accept the penalties; negotiate with vendors

    4.2 Close the audit and assess the financial impact

    Outputs

    A consensus on which findings truly necessitate organizational change

    Time Study

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    • Parent Category Name: Governance, Risk & Compliance
    • Parent Category Link: /governance-risk-compliance
    • In ESG’s 2018 report “The Life of Cybersecurity Professionals,” 36% of participants expressed the overwhelming workload was a stressful aspect of their job.
    • Organizations expect a lot from their security specialists. From monitoring the threat environment, protecting business assets, and learning new tools, to keeping up with IT initiatives, cybersecurity teams struggle to balance their responsibilities with the constant emergencies and disruptions that take them away from their primary tasks.
    • Businesses fail to recognize the challenges associated with task prioritization and the time management practices of a security professional.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • The majority of scheduled calendar meetings include employees and peers.
      • Our research indicates cybersecurity professionals spent the majority of their meetings with employees (28%) and peers (24%). Other stakeholders involved in meetings included by myself (15%), boss (13%), customers (10%), vendors (8%), and board of directors (2%).
    • Calendar meetings are focused on project work, management, and operations.
      • When asked to categorize calendar meetings, the focus was on project work (26%), management (23%), and operations (22%). Other scheduled meetings included ones focused on strategy (15%), innovation (9%), and personal time (5%).
    • Time management scores were influenced by the percentage of time spent with employees and peers.
      • When participants were divided into good and poor time managers, we found good time managers spent less time with their peers and more time with their employees. This may be due to the nature of employee meetings being more directly tied to the project outputs of the manager than their peer meetings. Managers who spend more time in meetings with their employees feel a sense of accomplishment, and hence rate themselves higher in time management.

    Impact and Result

    • Understand how cybersecurity professionals allocate their time.
    • Gain insight on whether perceived time management skills are associated with calendar maintenance factors.
    • Identify common time management pain points among cybersecurity professionals.
    • Identify current strategies cybersecurity professionals use to manage their time.

    Time Study Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Read our Time Study

    Read our Time Study to understand how cybersecurity professionals allocate their time, what pain points they endure, and tactics that can be leveraged to better manage time.

    • Time Study Storyboard
    [infographic]

    Build a Software Quality Assurance Program

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    • Parent Category Name: Testing, Deployment & QA
    • Parent Category Link: /testing-deployment-and-qa
    • Today’s rapidly scaling and increasingly complex products create mounting pressure on delivery teams to release new systems and changes quickly and with sufficient quality.
    • Many organizations lack the critical capabilities and resources needed to satisfy their growing testing backlog, risking product success.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Testing is often viewed as a support capability rather than an enabler of business growth. It receives focus and investment only when it becomes a visible problem.
    • The rise in security risks, aggressive performance standards, constantly evolving priorities, and misunderstood quality policies further complicate QA as it drives higher expectations for effective practices.
    • QA starts with good requirements. Tests are only as valuable as the requirements they are validating and verifying. Early QA improves the accuracy of downstream tests and reduces costs of fixing defects late in delivery.
    • Quality is an organization-wide accountability. Upstream work can have extensive ramifications if all roles are not accountable for the decisions they make.
    • Quality must account for both business and technical requirements. Valuable change delivery is cemented in a clear understanding of quality from both business and IT perspectives.

    Impact and Result

    • Standardize your definition of a product. Come to an organizational agreement of what attributes define a high-quality product. Accommodate both business and IT perspectives in your definition.
    • Clarify the role of QA throughout your delivery pipeline. Indicate where and how QA is involved throughout product delivery. Instill quality-first thinking in each stage of your pipeline to catch defects and issues early.
    • Structure your test design, planning, execution, and communication practices to better support your quality definition and business and IT environments and priorities. Adopt QA good practices to ensure your tests satisfy your criteria for a high-quality and successful product.

    Build a Software Quality Assurance Program Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should build a strong foundation for quality, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Define your QA process

    Standardize your product quality definition and your QA roles, processes, and guidelines according to your business and IT priorities.

    • Build a Strong Foundation for Quality – Phase 1: Define Your QA Process
    • Test Strategy Template

    2. Adopt QA good practices

    Build a solid set of good practices to define your defect tolerances, recognize the appropriate test coverage, and communicate your test results.

    • Build a Strong Foundation for Quality – Phase 2: Adopt QA Good Practices
    • Test Plan Template
    • Test Case Template
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Build a Software Quality Assurance Program

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Define Your QA Process

    The Purpose

    Discuss your quality definition and how quality is interpreted from both business and IT perspectives.

    Review your case for strengthening your QA practice.

    Review the standardization of QA roles, processes, and guidelines in your organization.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Grounded understanding of quality that is accepted across IT and between the business and IT.

    Clear QA roles and responsibilities.

    A repeatable QA process that is applicable across the delivery pipeline.

    Activities

    1.1 List your QA objectives and metrics.

    1.2 Adopt your foundational QA process.

    Outputs

    Quality definition and QA objectives and metrics.

    QA guiding principles, process, and roles and responsibilities.

    2 Adopt QA Good Practices

    The Purpose

    Discuss the practices to reveal the sufficient degree of test coverage to meet your acceptance criteria, defect tolerance, and quality definition.

    Review the technologies and tools to support the execution and reporting of your tests.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    QA practices aligned to industry good practices supporting your quality definition.

    Defect tolerance and acceptance criteria defined against stakeholder priorities.

    Identification of test scenarios to meet test coverage expectations.

    Activities

    2.1 Define your defect tolerance.

    2.2 Model and prioritize your tests.

    2.3 Develop and execute your QA activities.

    2.4 Communicate your QA activities.

    Outputs

    Defect tolerance levels and courses of action.

    List of test cases and scenarios that meet test coverage expectations.

    Defined test types, environment and data requirements, and testing toolchain.

    Test dashboard and communication flow.

    Enhance Your Solution Architecture Practices

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    • Parent Category Name: Development
    • Parent Category Link: /development
    • In today’s world, business agility is essential to stay competitive. Quick responses to business needs through efficient development and deployment practices is critical for business value delivery.
    • A mature solution architecture practice is the basic necessity for a business to have technical agility.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Don’t architect for normal situations. That is a shallow approach and leads to decisions that may seem “right” but will not be able to stand up to system elasticity needs.

    Impact and Result

    • Understand the different parts of a continuous security architecture framework and how they may apply to your decisions.
    • Develop a solution architecture for upcoming work (or if there is a desire to reduce tech debt).

    Enhance Your Solution Architecture Practices Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Solution Architecture Practices Deck – A deck to help you develop an approach for or validate existing solution architecture capability.

    Translate stakeholder objectives into architecture requirements, solutions, and changes. Incorporate architecture quality attributes in decisions to increase your architecture’s life. Evaluate your solution architecture from multiple views to obtain a holistic perspective of the range of issues, risks, and opportunities.

    • Enhance Your Solution Architecture Practices – Phases 1-3

    2. Solution Architecture Template – A template to record the results from the exercises to help you define, detail, and make real your digital product vision.

    Identify and detail the value maps that support the business, and discover the architectural quality attribute that is most important for the value maps. Brainstorm solutions for design decisions for data, security, scalability, and performance.

    • Solution Architecture Template
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Enhance Your Solution Architecture Practices

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Vision and Value Maps

    The Purpose

    Document a vision statement for the solution architecture practice (in general) and/or a specific vision statement, if using a single project as an example.

    Document business architecture and capabilities.

    Decompose capabilities into use cases.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Provide a great foundation for an actionable vision and goals that people can align to.

    Develop a collaborative understanding of business capabilities.

    Develop a collaborative understanding of use cases and personas that are relevant for the business.

    Activities

    1.1 Develop vision statement.

    1.2 Document list of value stream maps and their associated use cases.

    1.3 Document architectural quality attributes needed for use cases using SRME.

    Outputs

    Solution Architecture Template with sections filled out for vision statement canvas and value maps

    2 Continue Vision and Value Maps, Begin Phase 2

    The Purpose

    Map value stream to required architectural attributes.

    Prioritize architecture decisions.

    Discuss and document data architecture.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    An understanding of architectural attributes needed for value streams.

    Conceptual understanding of data architecture.

    Activities

    2.1 Map value stream to required architectural attributes.

    2.2 Prioritize architecture decisions.

    2.3 Discuss and document data architecture.

    Outputs

    Solution Architecture Template with sections filled out for value stream and architecture attribute mapping; a prioritized list of architecture design decisions; and data architecture

    3 Continue Phase 2, Begin Phase 3

    The Purpose

    Discuss security and threat assessment.

    Discuss resolutions to threats via security architecture decisions.

    Discuss system’s scalability needs.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Decisions for security architecture.

    Decisions for scalability architecture.

    Activities

    3.1 Discuss security and threat assessment.

    3.2 Discuss resolutions to threats via security architecture decisions.

    3.3 Discuss system’s scalability needs.

    Outputs

    Solution Architecture Template with sections filled out for security architecture and scalability design

    4 Continue Phase 3, Start and Finish Phase 4

    The Purpose

    Discuss performance architecture.

    Compile all the architectural decisions into a solutions architecture list.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A complete solution architecture.

    A set of principles that will form the foundation of solution architecture practices.

    Activities

    4.1 Discuss performance architecture.

    4.2 Compile all the architectural decisions into a solutions architecture list.

    Outputs

    Solution Architecture Template with sections filled out for performance and a complete solution architecture

    Further reading

    Enhance Your Solution Architecture Practice

    Ensure your software systems solution is architected to reflect stakeholders’ short- and long-term needs.

    Analyst Perspective

    Application architecture is a critical foundation for supporting the growth and evolution of application systems. However, the business is willing to exchange the extension of the architecture’s life with quality best practices for the quick delivery of new or enhanced application functionalities. This trade-off may generate immediate benefits to stakeholders, but it will come with high maintenance and upgrade costs in the future, rendering your system legacy early.

    Technical teams know the importance of implementing quality attributes into architecture but are unable to gain approval for the investments. Overcoming this challenge requires a focus of architectural enhancements on specific problem areas with significant business visibility. Then, demonstrate how quality solutions are vital enablers for supporting valuable application functionalities by tracing these solutions to stakeholder objectives and conducting business and technical risk and impact assessments through multiple business and technical perspectives.

    this is a picture of Andrew Kum-Seun

    Andrew Kum-Seun
    Research Manager, Applications
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Enhance Your Solution Architecture

    Ensure your software systems solution is architected to reflect stakeholders’ short- and long-term needs.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    • Most organizations have some form of solution architecture; however, it may not accurately and sufficiently support the current and rapidly changing business and technical environments.
    • To enable quick delivery, applications are built and integrated haphazardly, typically omitting architecture quality practices.

    Common Obstacles

    • Failing to involve development and stakeholder perspectives in design can lead to short-lived architecture and critical development, testing, and deployment constraints and risks being omitted.
    • Architects are experiencing little traction implementing solutions to improve architecture quality due to the challenge of tracing these solutions back to the right stakeholder objectives.

    Info-Tech's Approach

    • Translate stakeholder objectives into architecture requirements, solutions, and changes. Incorporate architecture quality attributes in decisions to increase your architecture’s life.
    • Evaluate your solution architecture from multiple views to obtain a holistic perspective of the range of issues, risks, and opportunities.
    • Regularly review and recalibrate your solution architecture so that it accurately reflects and supports current stakeholder needs and technical environments.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Well-received applications can have poor architectural qualities. Functional needs often take precedence over quality architecture. Quality must be baked into design, execution, and decision-making practices to ensure the right tradeoffs are made.

    A badly designed solution architecture is the root of all technical evils

    A well-thought-through and strategically designed solution architecture is essential for the long-term success of any software system, and by extension, the organization because:

    1. It will help achieve quality attribute requirements (security, scalability, performance, usability, resiliency, etc.) for a software system.
    2. It can define and refine architectural guiding principles. A solution architecture is not only important for today but also a vision for the future of the system’s ability to react positively to changing business needs.
    3. It can help build usable (and reusable) services. In a fast-moving environment, the convenience of having pre-made plug-and-play architectural objects reduces the risk incurred from knee-jerk reactions in response to unexpected demands.
    4. It can be used to create a roadmap to an IT future state. Architectural concerns support transition planning activities that can lead to the successful implementation of a strategic IT plan.

    Demand for quick delivery makes teams omit architectural best practices, increasing downstream risks

    In its need for speed, a business often doesn’t see the value in making sure architecture is maintainable, reusable, and scalable. This demand leads to an organizational desire for development practices and the procurement of vendors that favor time-to-market over long-term maintainability. Unfortunately, technical teams are pushed to omit design quality and validation best practices.

    What are the business impacts of omitting architecture design practices?

    Poor quality application architecture impedes business growth opportunities, exposes enterprise systems to risks, and consumes precious IT budgets in maintenance that could otherwise be used for innovation and new projects.

    Previous estimations indicate that roughly 50% of security problems are the result of software design. […] Flaws in the architecture of a software system can have a greater impact on various security concerns in the system, and as a result, give more space and flexibility for malicious users.(Source: IEEE Software)

    Errors in software requirements and software design documents are more frequent than errors in the source code itself according to Computer Finance Magazine. Defects introduced during the requirements and design phase are not only more probable but also more severe and more difficult to remove. (Source: iSixSigma)

    Design a solution architecture that can be successful within the constraints and complexities set before you

    APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE…

    … describes the dependencies, structures, constraints, standards, and development guidelines to successfully deliver functional and long-living applications. This artifact lays the foundation to discuss the enhancement of the use and operations of your systems considering existing complexities.

    Good architecture design practices can give you a number of benefits:

    Lowers maintenance costs by revealing key issues and risks early. The Systems Sciences Institute at IBM has reported that the cost to fix an error found after product release was 4 to 5 times as much as one uncovered during design.(iSixSigma)

    Supports the design and implementation activities by providing key insights for project scheduling, work allocation, cost analysis, risk management, and skills development.(IBM: developerWorks)

    Eliminates unnecessary creativity and activities on the part of designers and implementers, which is achieved by imposing the necessary constraints on what they can do and making it clear that deviation from constraints can break the architecture.(IBM: developerWorks)

    Use Info-Tech’s Continuous Solution Architecture (CSA) Framework for designing adaptable systems

    Solution architecture is not a one-size-fits-all conversation. There are many design considerations and trade-offs to keep in mind as a product or services solution is conceptualized, evaluated, tested, and confirmed. The following is a list of good practices that should inform most architecture design decisions.

    Principle 1: Design your solution to have at least two of everything.

    Principle 2: Include a “kill switch” in your fault-isolation design. You should be able to turn off everything you release.

    Principle 3: If it can be monitored, it should be. Use server and audit logs where possible.

    Principle 4: Asynchronous is better than synchronous. Asynchronous design is more complex but worth the processing efficiency it introduces.

    Principle 5: Stateless over stateful: State data should only be used if necessary.

    Principle 6: Go horizonal (scale out) over vertical (scale up).

    Principle 7: Good architecture comes in small packages.

    Principle 8: Practice just-in-time architecture. Delay finalizing an approach for as long as you can.

    Principle 9: X-ilities over features. Quality of an architecture is the foundation over which features exist. A weak foundation can never be obfuscated through shiny features.

    Principle 10: Architect for products not projects. A product is an ongoing concern, while a project is short lived and therefore only focused on what is. A product mindset forces architects to think about what can or should be.

    Principle 11: Design for rollback: When all else fails, you should be able to stand up the previous best state of the system.

    Principle 12: Test the solution architecture like you test your solution’s features.

    CSA should be used for every step in designing a solution’s architecture

    Solution architecture is a technical response to a business need, and like all complex evolutionary systems, must adapt its design for changing circumstances.

    The triggers for changes to existing solution architectures can come from, at least, three sources:

    1. Changing business goals
    2. Existing backlog of technical debt
    3. Solution architecture roadmap

    A solution’s architecture is cross-cutting and multi-dimensional and at the minimum includes:

    • Product Portfolio Strategy
    • Application Architecture
    • Data Architecture
    • Information Architecture
    • Operational Architecture

    along with several qualitative attributes (also called non-functional requirements).

    This image contains a chart which demonstrates the relationship between changing hanging business goals, Existing backlog of technical debt, Solution architecture roadmap, and Product Portfolio Strategy, Application Architecture, Data Architecture, Information Architecture and, Operational Architecture

    Related Research: Product Portfolio Strategy

    Integrate Portfolios to Create Exceptional Customer Value

    • Define an organizing principle that will structure your projects and applications in a way that matters to your stakeholders.
    • Bridge application and project portfolio data using the organizing principle that matters to communicate with stakeholders across the organization.
    • Create a dashboard that brings together the benefits of both project and application portfolio management to improve visibility and decision making.

    Deliver on Your Digital Portfolio Vision

    • Recognize that a vision is only as good as the data that backs it up. Lay out a comprehensive backlog with quality built in that can be effectively communicated and understood through roadmaps.
    • Your intent is only a dream if it cannot be implemented ; define what goes into a release plan via the release canvas.
    • Define a communication approach that lets everyone know where you are heading.

    Related Research: Data, Information & Integration Architecture

    Build a Data Architecture Roadmap

    • Have a framework in place to identify the appropriate solution for the challenge at hand. Our three-phase practical approach will help you build a custom and modernized data architecture.
    • Identify and prioritize the business drivers in which data architecture changes would create the largest overall benefit and determine the corresponding data architecture tiers that need to be addressed.
    • Discover the best-practice trends, measure your current state, and define the targets for your data architecture tactics.
    • Build a cohesive and personalized roadmap for restructuring your data architecture. Manage your decisions and resulting changes.

    Build a Data Pipeline for Reporting and Analytics

    • Understand your high-level business capabilities and interactions across them – your data repositories and flows should be just a digital reflection thereof.
    • Divide your data world in logical verticals overlaid with various speed data progression lanes, i.e. build your data pipeline – and conquer it one segment at a time.
    • Use the most appropriate database design pattern for a given phase/component in your data pipeline progression.

    Related Research:Operational Architecture

    Optimize Application Release Management

    • Acquire release management ownership. Ensure there is appropriate accountability for the speed and quality of the releases passing through the entire pipeline.
    • A release manager has oversight over the entire release process and facilitates the necessary communication between business stakeholders and various IT roles.
    • Instill holistic thinking. Release management includes all steps required to push release and change requests to production along with the hand-off to Operations and Support. Increase the transparency and visibility of the entire pipeline to ensure local optimizations do not generate bottlenecks in other areas.
    • Standardize and lay a strong release management foundation. Optimize the key areas where you are experiencing the most pain and continually improve.

    Build Your Infrastructure Roadmap

    • Increased communication. More information being shared to more people who need it.
    • Better planning. More accurate information being shared.
    • Reduced lead times. Less due diligence or discovery work required as part of project implementations.
    • Faster delivery times. Less low-value work, freeing up more time for project work.

    Related Research:Security Architecture

    Identify Opportunities to Mature the Security Architecture

    • A right-sized security architecture can be created by assessing the complexity of the IT department, the operations currently underway for security, and the perceived value of a security architecture within the organization. This will bring about a deeper understanding of the organizational infrastructure.
    • Developing a security architecture should also result in a list of opportunities (i.e. initiatives) that an organization can integrate into a roadmap. These initiatives will seek to improve security operations and strengthen the IT department’s understanding of security’s role within the organization.
    • A better understanding of the infrastructure will help to save time on determining the correct technologies required from vendors, and therefore, cut down on the amount of vendor noise.
    • Creating a defensible roadmap will assist with justifying future security spend.

    Key deliverable:

    Solution Architecture Template
    Record the results from the exercises to help you define, detail, and make real your digital product vision.

    Blueprint Deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    This image contains screenshots of the deliverables which will be discussed later in this blueprint

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.

    Guided Implementation

    Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track

    Workshop

    We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place

    Consulting

    Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. we need assistance through the entirety of this project.

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options

    Workshop Overview

    Contact your account representative for more information. workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4
    Exercises
    1. Articulate an architectural vision
    2. Develop dynamic value stream maps
    1. Create a conceptual map between the value stream, use case, and required architectural attribute
    2. Create a prioritized list of architectural attributes
    3. Develop a data architecture that supports transactional and analytical needs
    1. Document security architecture risks and mitigations
    2. Document scalability architecture
    1. Document performance-enhancing architecture
    2. Bring it all together
    Outcomes
    1. Architecture vision
    2. Dynamic value stream maps (including user stories/personas)
    1. List of required architectural attributes
    2. Architectural attributes prioritized
    3. Data architecture design decisions
    1. Security threat and risk analysis
    2. Security design decisions
    3. Scalability design decisions
    1. Performance design decisions
    2. Finalized decisions

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.
    This GI is between 8 to 10 calls over the course of approximately four to six months.

    Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 2
    Call #1:
    Articulate an architectural vision.
    Call #4:
    Continue discussion on value stream mapping and related use cases.
    Call #6:
    Document security design decisions.
    Call #2:
    Discuss value stream mapping and related use cases.
    Call #5:
    • Map the value streams to required architectural attribute.
    • Create a prioritized list of architectural attributes.
    Call #7:
    • Document scalability design decisions.
    • Document performance design decisions.
    Call #3:
    Continue discussion on value stream mapping and related use cases.
    Call #8:
    Bring it all together.

    Phase 1: Visions and Value Maps

    Phase 1

    1.1 Articulate an Architectural Vision
    1.2 Develop Dynamic Value Stream Maps
    1.3 Map Value Streams, Use Cases, and Required Architectural Attributes
    1.4 Create a Prioritized List of Architectural Attributes

    Phase 2

    2.1 Develop a Data Architecture That Supports Transactional and Analytical Needs
    2.2 Document Security Architecture Risks and Mitigations

    Phase 3

    3.1 Document Scalability Architecture
    3.2 Document Performance Enhancing Architecture
    3.3 Combine the Different Architecture Design Decisions Into a Unified Solution Architecture

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Determine a vision for architecture outcomes
    • Draw dynamic value stream maps
    • Derive architectural design decisions
    • Prioritize design decisions

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Business Architect
    • Product Owner
    • Application Architect
    • Integration Architect
    • Database Architect
    • Enterprise Architect

    Enhance Your Solution Architecture Practice

    Let’s get this straight: You need an architectural vision

    If you start off by saying I want to architect a system, you’ve already lost. Remember what a vision is for!

    An architectural vision...

    … is your North Star

    Your product vision serves as the single fixed point for product development and delivery.

    … aligns stakeholders

    It gets everyone on the same page.

    … helps focus on meaningful work

    There is no pride in being a rudderless ship. It can also be very expensive.

    And eventually...

    … kick-starts your strategy

    We know where to go, we know who to bring along, and we know the steps to get there. Let’s plan this out.

    An architectural vision is multi-dimensional

    Who is the target customer (or customers)?

    What is the key benefit a customer can get from using our service or product?

    Why should they be engaged with you?

    What makes our service or product better than our competitors?

    (Adapted from Crossing the Chasm)

    Info-Tech Insight

    It doesn’t matter if you are delivering value to internal or external stakeholders, you need a product vision to ensure everyone understands the “why.”

    Use a canvas as the dashboard for your architecture

    The solution architecture canvas provides a single dashboard to quickly define and communicate the most important information about the vision. A canvas is an effective tool for aligning teams and providing an executive summary view.

    This image contains a sample canvas for you to use as the dashboard for your architecture. The sections are: Solution Name, Tracking Info, Vision, Business Goals, Metrics, Personas, and Stakeholders.

    Leverage the solution architecture canvas to state and inform your architecture vision

    This image contains the sample canvas from the previous section, with annotations explaining what to do for each of the headings.

    1.1 Craft a vision statement for your solution’s architecture

    1. Use the product canvas template provided for articulating your solution’s architecture.

    *If needed, remove or add additional data points to fit your purposes.

    There are different statement templates available to help form your product vision statements. Some include:

    • For [our target customer], who [customer’s need], the [product] is a [product category or description] that [unique benefits and selling points]. Unlike [competitors or current methods], our product [main differentiators].
    • We believe (in) a [noun: world, time, state, etc.] where [persona] can [verb: do, make, offer, etc.], for/by/with [benefit/goal].
    • To [verb: empower, unlock, enable, create, etc.] [persona] to [benefit, goal, future state].
    • Our vision is to [verb: build, design, provide] the [goal, future state] to [verb: help, enable, make it easier to...] [persona].

    (Adapted from Crossing the Chasm)

    Download the Solution Architecture Template and document your vision statement.

    Input

    • Business Goals
    • Product Portfolio Vision

    Output

    • Solution Architecture Vision

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts

    Participants

    • Business Architect
    • Product Owner
    • IT Leadership
    • Business Leadership

    Solution Architecture Canvas: Refine your vision statement

    This image contains a screenshot of the canvas from earlier in the blueprint, with only the annotation for Solution Name: Vision, unique value proposition, elevator pitch, or positioning statement.

    Understand your value streams before determining your solution’s architecture

    Business Strategy

    Sets and communicates the direction of the entire organization.

    Value Stream

    Segments, groups, and creates a coherent narrative as to how an organization creates value.

    Business Capability Map

    Decomposes an organization into its component parts to establish a common language across the organization.

    Execution

    Implements the business strategy through capability building or improvement projects.

    Identify your organization’s goals and define the value streams that support them

    Goal

    Revenue Growth

    Value Streams

    Stream 1- Product Purchase
    Stream 2- Customer Acquisition
    stream 3- Product Financing

    There are many techniques that help with constructing value streams and their capabilities.

    Domain-driven design is a technique that can be used for hypothesizing the value maps, their capabilities, and associated solution architecture.

    Read more about domain-driven design here.

    Value streams can be external (deliver value to customers) or internal (support operations)

      External Perspective

    1. Core value streams are mostly externally facing: they deliver value to either an external/internal customer and they tie to the customer perspective of the strategy map.
    • E.g. customer acquisition, product purchase, product delivery

    Internal Perspective

  • Support value streams are internally facing: they provide the foundational support for an organization to operate.
    • E.g. employee recruitment to retirement

    Key Questions to Ask While Evaluating Value Streams

    • Who are your customers?
    • What benefits do we deliver to them?
    • How do we deliver those benefits?
    • How does the customer receive the benefits?
    This image contains an example of value streams. The main headings are: Customer Acquisitions, Product Purchase, Product Delivery, Confirm Order, Product Financing, and Product Release.

    Value streams highlight the what, not the how

    Value chains set a high-level context, but architectural decisions still need to be made to deal with the dynamism of user interaction and their subsequent expectations. User stories (and/or use cases) and themes are great tools for developing such decisions.

    Product Delivery

    1. Order Confirmation
    2. Order Dispatching
    3. Warehouse Management
    4. Fill Order
    5. Ship Order
    6. Deliver Order

    Use Case and User Story Theme: Confirm Order

    This image shows the relationship between confirming the customer's order online, and the Online Buyer, the Online Catalog, the Integrated Payment, and the Inventory Lookup.

    The use case Confirming Customer’s Online Order has four actors:

    1. An Online Buyer who should be provided with a catalog of products to purchase from.
    2. An Online Catalog that is invoked to display its contents on demand.
    3. An Integrated Payment system for accepting an online form of payment (credit card, Bitcoins, etc.) in a secure transaction.
    4. An Inventory Lookup module that confirms there is stock available to satisfy the Online Buyer’s order.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Each use case theme links back to a feature(s) in the product backlog.

    Related Research

    Deliver on Your Digital Portfolio Vision

    • Recognize that a vision is only as good as the data that backs it up. Lay out a comprehensive backlog with quality built in that can be effectively communicated and understood through roadmaps.
    • Your intent is only a dream if it cannot be implemented – define what goes into a release plan via the release canvas.
    • Define a communication approach that lets everyone know where you are heading.

    Document Your Business Architecture

    • Recognize the opportunity for architecture work, analyze the current and target states of your business strategy, and identify and engage the right stakeholders.
    • Model the business in the form of architectural blueprints.
    • Apply business architecture techniques such as strategy maps, value streams, and business capability maps to design usable and accurate blueprints of the business.
    • Drive business architecture forward to promote real value to the organization.
    • Assess your current projects to determine if you are investing in the right capabilities. Conduct business capability assessments to identify opportunities and to prioritize projects.

    1.2 Document dynamic value stream maps

    1. Create value stream maps that support your business objectives.
    • The value stream maps could belong to existing or new business objectives.
  • For each value stream map:
    • Determine use case(s), the actors, and their expected activity.

    *Refer to the next slide for an example of a dynamic value stream map.

    Download the Solution Architecture Template for documentation of dynamic value stream map

    Input

    • Business Goals
    • Some or All Existing Business Processes
    • Some or All Proposed New Business Processes

    Output

    • Dynamic Value Stream Maps for Multiple Use Roles and Use Cases

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts

    Participants

    • Business Architect
    • Product Owner
    • Application Architect
    • Integration Architect

    Example: Dynamic value stream map

    Loan Provision*

    *Value Stream Name: Usually has the same name as the capability it illustrates.

    Loan Application**; Disbursement of Fund**; Risk Management**; Service Accounts**

    **Value Stream Components: Specific functions that support the successful delivery of a value stream.

    Disbursement of Funds

    This image shows the relationship between depositing the load into the applicant's bank account, and the Applicant's bank, the Loan Applicant, and the Loan Supplier.

    Style #1:

    The use case Disbursement of Funds has three actors:

    1. A Loan Applicant who applied for a loan and got approved for one.
    2. A Loan Supplier who is the source for the funds.
    3. The Applicant’s Bank that has an account into which the funds are deposited.

    Style # 2:

    Loan Provision: Disbursement of Funds
    Use Case Actors Expectation
    Deposit Loan Into Applicant’s Bank Account
    1. Loan Applicant
    2. Loan Supplier
    3. Applicant’s Bank
    1. Should be able to see deposit in bank account
    2. Deposit funds into account
    3. Accept funds into account

    Mid-Phase 1 Checkpoint

    By now, the following items are ideally completed:

    • Mid-Phase 1 Checkpoint

    Start with an investigation of your architecture’s qualitative needs

    Quality attributes can be viewed as the -ilities (e.g. scalability, usability, reliability) that a software system needs to provide. A system not meeting any of its quality attribute requirements will likely not function as required. Examples of quality attributes are:

    1. Slow system response time
    2. Security breaches that result in loss of personal data
    3. A product feature upgrade that is not compatible with previous versions
    Examples of Qualitative Attributes
    Performance Compatibility Usability Reliability Security Maintainability
    • Response Time
    • Resource Utilization
    • System Capacity
    • Interoperability
    • Accessibility
    • User Interface
    • Intuitiveness
    • Availability
    • Fault Tolerance
    • Recoverability
    • Integrity
    • Non-Repudiation
    • Modularity
    • Reusability
    • Modifiability
    • Testability

    Focus on quality attributes that are architecturally significant.

    • Not every system requires every quality attribute.
    • Pay attention to those attributes without which the solution will not be able to satisfy a user’s abstract* expectation.
    • This set can be considered Architecturally Significant Requirements (ASR). ASR concern scenarios have the most impact on the architecture of the software system.
    • ASR are fundamental needs of the system and changing them in the future can be a costly and difficult exercise.

    *Abstract since attributes like performance and reliability are not directly measurable by a user.

    Stimulus Response Measurement Environmental Context

    For applicable use cases: (*Adapted from S Carnegie Mellon University, 2000)

    1. Determine the Stimulus (temporal, external, or internal) that puts stress on the system. For example, a VPN-accessed hospital management system is used for nurses to login at 8am every weekday.
    2. Describe how the system should Respond to the stimulus. For example, the hospital management system should complete a nurse login under 10ms on initiation of the HTTPS request.
    3. Set a Measurement criteria for determining the success of the response to the stimulus. For example, the system should be able to successfully respond to 98% of the HTTPS requests the first time.
    4. Note the environmental context under which the stimulus occurs, including any unusual conditions in effect.
    • The hospital management system needs to respond in under 10ms under typical load or peak load?
    • What is the time variance of peak loads, for example, an e-commerce system during a Black Friday sale?
    • How big is the peak load?

    Info-Tech Insight

    Three out of four is bad. Don’t architect for normal situations because the solution will be fragile and prone to catastrophic failure under unexpected events.
    Read article: Retail sites crash under weight of online Black Friday shoppers.

    Discover and evaluate the qualitative attributes needed for use cases or user stories

    Deposit Loan Into Applicant’s Bank Account

    Assume analysis is being done for a to-be developed system.

    User Loan Applicant
    Expectations On login to the web system, should be able to see accurate bank balance after loan funds are deposited.
    User signs into the online portal and opens their account balance page.
    Expected Response From System System creates a connection to the data source and renders it on the screen in under 10ms.
    Measurement Under Normal Loads:
    • Response in 10ms or less
    • Data should not be stale
    Under Peak Loads:
    • Response in 15ms or less
    • Data should not be stale
    Quality Attribute Required Required Attribute # 1: Performance
    • Design Decision: Reduce latency by placing authorization components closer to user’s location.
    Required Attribute # 2: Data Reliability
    • Design Decision: Use event-driven ETL pipelines.
    Required Attribute # 3: Scalability
    • Design Decision: Following Principle # 4 of the CSA (JIT Architecture), delay decision until necessary.

    Use cases developed in Phase 1.2 should be used here. (Adapted from the ATAM Utility Tree Method for Quality Attribute Engineering)

    Reduce technical debt while you are at it

    Deposit Loan Into Applicant’s Bank Account

    Assume analysis is being done for a to-be developed system.

    UserLoan Applicant
    ExpectationsOn login to the web system, should be able to see accurate bank balance after loan funds are deposited.
    User signs into the online portal and opens their account balance page.
    Expected Response From SystemSystem creates a connection to the data source and renders it on the screen in under 10ms.
    MeasurementUnder Normal Loads:
    • Response in 10ms or less
    • Data should not be stale
    Under Peak Loads:
    • Response in 15ms or less
    • Data should not be stale
    Quality Attribute RequiredRequired Attribute # 1: Performance
    • Design Decision: Reduce latency by placing authorization components closer to user’s location.

    Required Attribute # 2: Data Reliability

    • Expected is 15ms or less under peak loads, but average latency is 21ms.
    • Design Decision: Use event-driven ETL pipelines.

    Required Attribute # 3: Scalability

    • Data should not be stale and should sync instantaneously, but in some zip codes data synchronization is taking 8 hours.
    • Design Decision: Investigate integrations and flows across application, database, and infrastructure. (Note: A dedicated section for discussing scalability is presented in Phase 2.)

    1.3 Create a conceptual map between the value streams, use cases, and required architectural attributes

    1. For selected use cases completed in Phase 1.2:
    • Map the value stream to its associated use cases.
    • For each use case, list the required architectural quality attributes.

    Download the Solution Architecture Template for mapping value stream components to their required architectural attribute.

    Input

    • Use Cases
    • User Roles
    • Stimulus to System
    • Response From System
    • Response Measurement

    Output

    • List of Architectural Quality Attributes

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts

    Participants

    • Business Architect
    • Application Architect
    • Integration Architect
    • Database Architect
    • Infrastructure Architect

    Example for Phase 1.3

    Loan Provision

    Loan Application → Disbursement of Funds → Risk Management → Service Accounts

    Value Stream Component Use Case Required Architectural Attribute
    Loan Application UC1: Submit Loan Application
    UC2: Review Loan Application
    UC3: Approve Loan Application
    UCn: ……..
    UC1: Resilience, Data Reliability
    UC2: Data Reliability
    UC3: Scalability, Security, Performance
    UCn: …..
    Disbursement of Funds UC1: Deposit Funds Into Applicant’s Bank Account
    UCn: ……..
    UC1: Performance, Scalability, Data Reliability
    Risk Management ….. …..
    Service Accounts ….. …..

    1.2 Document dynamic value stream maps

    1. Create value stream maps that support your business objectives.
    • The value stream maps could belong to existing or new business objectives.
  • For each value stream map:
    • Determine use case(s), the actors, and their expected activity.

    *Refer to the next slide for an example of a dynamic value stream map.

    Download the Solution Architecture Template for documentation of dynamic value stream map

    Input

    • Business Goals
    • Some or All Existing Business Processes
    • Some or All Proposed New Business Processes

    Output

    • Dynamic Value Stream Maps for Multiple Use Roles and Use Cases

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts

    Participants

    • Business Architect
    • Product Owner
    • Application Architect
    • Integration Architect

    Example: Dynamic value stream map

    Loan Provision*

    *Value Stream Name: Usually has the same name as the capability it illustrates.

    Loan Application**; Disbursement of Fund**; Risk Management**; Service Accounts**

    **Value Stream Components: Specific functions that support the successful delivery of a value stream.

    Disbursement of Funds

    This image shows the relationship between depositing the load into the applicant's bank account, and the Applicant's bank, the Loan Applicant, and the Loan Supplier.

    Style #1:

    The use case Disbursement of Funds has three actors:

    1. A Loan Applicant who applied for a loan and got approved for one.
    2. A Loan Supplier who is the source for the funds.
    3. The Applicant’s Bank that has an account into which the funds are deposited.

    Style # 2:

    Loan Provision: Disbursement of Funds
    Use Case Actors Expectation
    Deposit Loan Into Applicant’s Bank Account
    1. Loan Applicant
    2. Loan Supplier
    3. Applicant’s Bank
    1. Should be able to see deposit in bank account
    2. Deposit funds into account
    3. Accept funds into account

    Mid-Phase 1 Checkpoint

    By now, the following items are ideally completed:

    • Mid-Phase 1 Checkpoint

    Start with an investigation of your architecture’s qualitative needs

    Quality attributes can be viewed as the -ilities (e.g. scalability, usability, reliability) that a software system needs to provide. A system not meeting any of its quality attribute requirements will likely not function as required. Examples of quality attributes are:

    1. Slow system response time
    2. Security breaches that result in loss of personal data
    3. A product feature upgrade that is not compatible with previous versions
    Examples of Qualitative Attributes
    Performance Compatibility Usability Reliability Security Maintainability
    • Response Time
    • Resource Utilization
    • System Capacity
    • Interoperability
    • Accessibility
    • User Interface
    • Intuitiveness
    • Availability
    • Fault Tolerance
    • Recoverability
    • Integrity
    • Non-Repudiation
    • Modularity
    • Reusability
    • Modifiability
    • Testability

    Focus on quality attributes that are architecturally significant.

    • Not every system requires every quality attribute.
    • Pay attention to those attributes without which the solution will not be able to satisfy a user’s abstract* expectation.
    • This set can be considered Architecturally Significant Requirements (ASR). ASR concern scenarios have the most impact on the architecture of the software system.
    • ASR are fundamental needs of the system and changing them in the future can be a costly and difficult exercise.

    *Abstract since attributes like performance and reliability are not directly measurable by a user.

    Stimulus Response Measurement Environmental Context

    For applicable use cases: (*Adapted from S Carnegie Mellon University, 2000)

    1. Determine the Stimulus (temporal, external, or internal) that puts stress on the system. For example, a VPN-accessed hospital management system is used for nurses to login at 8am every weekday.
    2. Describe how the system should Respond to the stimulus. For example, the hospital management system should complete a nurse login under 10ms on initiation of the HTTPS request.
    3. Set a Measurement criteria for determining the success of the response to the stimulus. For example, the system should be able to successfully respond to 98% of the HTTPS requests the first time.
    4. Note the environmental context under which the stimulus occurs, including any unusual conditions in effect.
    • The hospital management system needs to respond in under 10ms under typical load or peak load?
    • What is the time variance of peak loads, for example, an e-commerce system during a Black Friday sale?
    • How big is the peak load?

    Info-Tech Insight

    Three out of four is bad. Don’t architect for normal situations because the solution will be fragile and prone to catastrophic failure under unexpected events.
    Read article: Retail sites crash under weight of online Black Friday shoppers.

    Discover and evaluate the qualitative attributes needed for use cases or user stories

    Deposit Loan Into Applicant’s Bank Account

    Assume analysis is being done for a to-be developed system.

    User Loan Applicant
    Expectations On login to the web system, should be able to see accurate bank balance after loan funds are deposited.
    User signs into the online portal and opens their account balance page.
    Expected Response From System System creates a connection to the data source and renders it on the screen in under 10ms.
    Measurement Under Normal Loads:
    • Response in 10ms or less
    • Data should not be stale
    Under Peak Loads:
    • Response in 15ms or less
    • Data should not be stale
    Quality Attribute Required Required Attribute # 1: Performance
    • Design Decision: Reduce latency by placing authorization components closer to user’s location.
    Required Attribute # 2: Data Reliability
    • Design Decision: Use event-driven ETL pipelines.
    Required Attribute # 3: Scalability
    • Design Decision: Following Principle # 4 of the CSA (JIT Architecture), delay decision until necessary.

    Use cases developed in Phase 1.2 should be used here. (Adapted from the ATAM Utility Tree Method for Quality Attribute Engineering)

    Reduce technical debt while you are at it

    Deposit Loan Into Applicant’s Bank Account

    Assume analysis is being done for a to-be developed system.

    UserLoan Applicant
    ExpectationsOn login to the web system, should be able to see accurate bank balance after loan funds are deposited.
    User signs into the online portal and opens their account balance page.
    Expected Response From SystemSystem creates a connection to the data source and renders it on the screen in under 10ms.
    MeasurementUnder Normal Loads:
    • Response in 10ms or less
    • Data should not be stale
    Under Peak Loads:
    • Response in 15ms or less
    • Data should not be stale
    Quality Attribute RequiredRequired Attribute # 1: Performance
    • Design Decision: Reduce latency by placing authorization components closer to user’s location.

    Required Attribute # 2: Data Reliability

    • Expected is 15ms or less under peak loads, but average latency is 21ms.
    • Design Decision: Use event-driven ETL pipelines.

    Required Attribute # 3: Scalability

    • Data should not be stale and should sync instantaneously, but in some zip codes data synchronization is taking 8 hours.
    • Design Decision: Investigate integrations and flows across application, database, and infrastructure. (Note: A dedicated section for discussing scalability is presented in Phase 2.)

    1.3 Create a conceptual map between the value streams, use cases, and required architectural attributes

    1. For selected use cases completed in Phase 1.2:
    • Map the value stream to its associated use cases.
    • For each use case, list the required architectural quality attributes.

    Download the Solution Architecture Template for mapping value stream components to their required architectural attribute.

    Input

    • Use Cases
    • User Roles
    • Stimulus to System
    • Response From System
    • Response Measurement

    Output

    • List of Architectural Quality Attributes

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts

    Participants

    • Business Architect
    • Application Architect
    • Integration Architect
    • Database Architect
    • Infrastructure Architect

    Prioritize architectural quality attributes to ensure a right-engineered solution

    Trade-offs are inherent in solution architecture. Scaling systems may impact performance and weaken security, while fault-tolerance and redundancy may improve availability but at higher than desired costs. In the end, the best solution is not always perfect, but balanced and right-engineered (versus over- or under-engineered).

    Loan Provision

    Loan Application → Disbursement of Funds → Risk Management → Service Accounts

    1. Map architecture attributes against the value stream components.
    • Use individual use cases to determine which attributes are needed for a value stream component.
    This image contains a screenshot of the table showing the importance of scalability, resiliance, performance, security, and data reliability for loan application, disbursement of funds, risk management, and service accounts.

    In our example, the prioritized list of architectural attributes are:

    • Security (4 votes for Very Important)
    • Data Reliability (2 votes for Very Important)
    • Scalability (1 vote for Very Important and 1 vote for Fairly Important) and finally
    • Resilience (1 vote for Very Important, 0 votes for Fairly Important and 1 vote for Mildly Important)
    • Performance (0 votes for Very Important, 2 votes for Fairly Important)

    1.4 Create a prioritized list of architectural attributes (from 1.3)

    1. Using the tabular structure shown on the previous slide:
    • Map each value stream component against architectural quality attributes.
    • For each mapping, indicate its importance using the green, blue, and yellow color scheme.

    Download the Solution Architecture Template and document the list of architectural attributes by priority.

    Input

    • List of Architectural Attributes From 1.3

    Output

    • Prioritized List of Architectural Attributes

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts

    Participants

    • Business Architect
    • Application Architect
    • Integration Architect
    • Database Architect
    • Infrastructure Architect

    End of Phase 1

    At the end of this Phase, you should have completed the following activities:

    • Documented a set of dynamic value stream maps along with selected use cases.
    • Using the SRME framework, identified quality attributes for the system under investigation.
    • Prioritized quality attributes for system use cases.

    Phase 2: Multi-Purpose Data and Security Architecture

    Phase 1

    1.1 Articulate an Architectural Vision
    1.2 Develop Dynamic Value Stream Maps
    1.3 Map Value Streams, Use Cases, and Required Architectural Attributes
    1.4 Create a Prioritized List of Architectural Attributes

    Phase 2

    2.1 Develop a Data Architecture That Supports Transactional and Analytical Needs
    2.2 Document Security Architecture Risks and Mitigations

    Phase 3

    3.1 Document Scalability Architecture
    3.2 Document Performance Enhancing Architecture
    3.3 Combine the Different Architecture Design Decisions Into a Unified Solution Architecture

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Understand the scalability, performance, resilience, and security needs of the business.

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Business Architect
    • Product Owner
    • Application Architect
    • Integration Architect
    • Database Architect
    • Enterprise Architect

    Enhance Your Solution Architecture Practice

    Fragmented data environments need something to sew them together

    • A full 93% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy, with 87% having a hybrid-cloud environment in place.
    • On average, companies have data stored in 2.2 public and 2.2 private clouds as well as in various on-premises data repositories.
    This image contains a breakdown of the cloud infrastructure, including single cloud versus multi-cloud.

    Source: Flexera

    In addition, companies are faced with:

    • Access and integration challenges (Who is sending the data? Who is getting it? Can we trust them?)
    • Data format challenges as data may differ for each consumer and sender of data
    • Infrastructure challenges as data repositories/processors are spread out over public and private clouds, are on premises, or in multi-cloud and hybrid ecosystems
    • Structured vs. unstructured data

    A robust and reliable integrated data architecture is essential for any organization that aspires to be relevant and impactful in its industry.

    Data’s context and influence on a solution’s architecture cannot be overestimated

    Data used to be the new oil. Now it’s the life force of any organization that has serious aspirations of providing profit-generating products and services to customers. Architectural decisions about managing data have a significant impact on the sustainability of a software system as well as on quality attributes such as security, scalability, performance, and availability.

    Storage and Processing go hand in hand and are the mainstay of any data architecture. Due to their central position of importance, an architecture decision for storage and processing must be well thought through or they become the bottleneck in an otherwise sound system.

    Ingestion refers to a system’s ability to accept data as an input from heterogenous sources, in different formats, and at different intervals.

    Dissemination is the set of architectural design decisions that make a system’s data accessible to external consumers. Major concerns involve security for the data in motion, authorization, data format, concurrent requests for data, etc.

    Orchestration takes care of ensuring data is current and reliable, especially for systems that are decentralized and distributed.

    Data architecture requires alignment with a hybrid data management plan

    Most companies have a combination of data. They have data they own using on-premises data sources and on the cloud. Hybrid data management also includes external data, such as social network feeds, financial data, and legal information amongst many others.

    Data integration architectures have typically been put in one of two major integration patterns:

    Application to Application Integration (or “speed matters”) Analytical Data Integrations (or “send it to me when its all done”)
    • This domain is concerned with ensuring communication between processes.
    • Examples include patterns such as Service-Oriented Architecture, REST, Event Hubs and Enterprise Service Buses.
    • This domain is focused on integrating data from transactional processes towards enterprise business intelligence. It supports activities that require well-managed data to generate evidence-based insights.
    • Examples of this pattern are ELT, enterprise data warehouses, and data marts.

    Sidebar

    Difference between real-time, batch, and streaming data movements

    Real-Time

    • Reacts to data in seconds or even quicker.
    • Real-time systems are hard to implement.

    Batch

    • Batch processing deals with a large volume of data all at once and data-related jobs are typically completed simultaneously in non-stop, sequential order.
    • Batch processing is an efficient and low-cost means of data processing.
    • Execution of batch processing jobs can be controlled manually, providing further control over how the system treats its data assets.
    • Batch processing is only useful if there are no requirements for data to be fresh and current. Real-time systems are suited to processing data that requires these attributes.

    Streaming

    • Stream processing allows almost instantaneous analysis of data as it streams from one device to another.
    • Since data is analyzed quickly, storage may not be a concern (since only computed data is stored while raw data can be dispersed).
    • Streaming requires the flow of data into the system to equal the flow of data computing, otherwise issues of data storage and performance can rise.

    Modern data ingestion and dissemination frameworks keep core data assets current and accessible

    Data ingestion and dissemination frameworks are critical for keeping enterprise data current and relevant.

    Data ingestion/dissemination frameworks capture/share data from/to multiple data sources.

    Factors to consider when designing a data ingestion/dissemination architecture

    What is the mode for data movement?

    • The mode for data movement is directly influenced by the size of data being moved and the downstream requirements for data currency.
    • Data can move in real-time, as a batch, or as a stream.

    What is the ingestion/dissemination architecture deployment strategy?

    • Outside of critical security concerns, hosting on the cloud vs. on premises leads to a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and a higher return on investment (ROI).

    How many different and disparate data sources are sending/receiving data?

    • Stability comes if there is a good idea about the data sources/recipient and their requirements.

    What are the different formats flowing through?

    • Is the data in the form of data blocks? Is it structured, semi-unstructured, or unstructured?

    What are expected performance SLAs as data flow rate changes?

    • Data change rate is defined as the size of changes occurring every hour. It helps in selecting the appropriate tool for data movement.
    • Performance is a derivative of latency and throughput, and therefore, data on a cloud is going to have higher latency and lower throughput then if it is kept on premises.
    • What is the transfer data size? Are there any file compression and/or file splits applied on the data? What is the average and maximum size of a block object per ingestion/dissemination operation?

    What are the security requirements for the data being stored?

    • The ingestion/dissemination framework should be able to work through a secure tunnel to collect/share data if needed.

    Sensible storage and processing strategy can improve performance and scalability and be cost-effective

    The range of options for data storage is staggering...

    … but that’s a good thing because the range of data formats that organizations must deal with is also richer than in the past.

    Different strokes for different workloads.

    The data processing tool to use may depend upon the workloads the system has to manage.

    Expanding upon the Risk Management use case (as part of the Loan Provision Capability), one of the outputs for risk assessment is a report that conducts a statistical analysis of customer profiles and separates those that are possibly risky. The data for this report is spread out across different data systems and will need to be collected in a master data management storage location. The business and data architecture team have discussed three critical system needs, noted below:

    Data Management Requirements for Risk Management Reporting Data Design Decision
    Needs to query millions of relational records quickly
    • Strong indexing
    • Strong caching
    • Message queue
    Needs a storage space for later retrieval of relational data
    • Data storage that scales as needed
    Needs turnkey geo-replication mechanism with document retrieval in milliseconds
    • Add NoSQL with geo-replication and quick document access

    Keep every core data source on the same page through orchestration

    Data orchestration, at its simplest, is the combination of data integration, data processing, and data concurrency management.

    Data pipeline orchestration is a cross-cutting process that manages the dependencies between your data integration tasks and scheduled data jobs.

    A task or application may periodically fail, and therefore, as a part of our data architecture strategy, there must be provisions for scheduling, rescheduling, replaying, monitoring, retrying, and debugging the entire data pipeline in a holistic way.

    Some of the functionality provided by orchestration frameworks are:

    • Job scheduling
    • Job parametrization
    • SLAs tracking, alerting, and notification
    • Dependency management
    • Error management and retries
    • History and audit
    • Data storage for metadata
    • Log aggregation
    Data Orchestration Has Three Stages
    Organize Transform Publicize
    Organizations may have legacy data that needs to be combined with new data. It’s important for the orchestration tool to understand the data it deals with. Transform the data from different sources into one standard type. Make transformed data easily accessible to stakeholders.

    2.1 Discuss and document data architecture decisions

    1. Using the value maps and associated use cases from Phase 1, determine the data system quality attributes.
    2. Use the sample tabular layout on the next slide or develop one of your own.

    Download the Solution Architecture Template for documenting data architecture decisions.

    Input

    • Value Maps and Use Cases

    Output

    • Initial Set of Data Design Decisions

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts

    Participants

    • Business Architect
    • Application Architect
    • Integration Architect
    • Database Architect
    • Infrastructure Architect

    Example: Data Architecture

    Data Management Requirements for Risk Management Reporting Data Design Decision
    Needs to query millions of relational records quickly
    • Strong indexing
    • Strong caching
    • Message queue
    Needs a storage space for later retrieval of relational data
    • Data storage that scales as needed
    Needs turnkey geo-replication mechanism with document retrieval in milliseconds
    • Add NoSQL with geo-replication and quick document access

    There is no free lunch when making the most sensible security architecture decision; tradeoffs are a necessity

    Ensuring that any real system is secure is a complex process involving tradeoffs against other important quality attributes (such as performance and usability). When architecting a system, we must understand:

    • Its security needs.
    • Its security threat landscape.
    • Known mitigations for those threats to ensure that we create a system with sound security fundamentals.

    The first thing to do when determining security architecture is to conduct a threat and risk assessment (TRA).

    This image contains a sample threat and risk assessment. The steps are Understand: Until we thoroughly understand what we are building, we cannot secure it. Structure what you are building, including: System boundary, System structure, Databases, Deployment platform; Analyze: Use techniques like STRIDE and attack trees to analyze what can go wrong and what security problems this will cause; Mitigate: The security technologies to use, to mitigate your concerns, are discussed here. Decisions about using single sign-on (SSO) or role-based access control (RBAC), encryption, digital signatures, or JWT tokens are made. An important part of this step is to consider tradeoffs when implementing security mechanisms; validate: Validation can be done by experimenting with proposed mitigations, peer discussion, or expert interviews.

    Related Research

    Optimize Security Mitigation Effectiveness Using STRIDE

    • Have a clear picture of:
      • Critical data and data flows
      • Organizational threat exposure
      • Security countermeasure deployment and coverage
    • Understand which threats are appropriately mitigated and which are not.
    • Generate a list of initiatives to close security gaps.
    • Create a quantified risk and security model to reassess program and track improvement.
    • Develop measurable information to present to stakeholders.

    The 3A’s of strong security: authentication, authorization, and auditing

    Authentication

    Authentication mechanisms help systems verify that a user is who they claim to be.

    Examples of authentication mechanisms are:

    • Two-Factor Authentication
    • Single Sign-On
    • Multi-Factor Authentication
    • JWT Over OAUTH

    Authorization

    Authorization helps systems limit access to allowed features, once a user has been authenticated.

    Examples of authentication mechanisms are:

    • RBAC
    • Certificate Based
    • Token Based

    Auditing

    Securely recording security events through auditing proves that our security mechanisms are working as intended.

    Auditing is a function where security teams must collaborate with software engineers early and often to ensure the right kind of audit logs are being captured and recorded.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Defects in your application software can compromise privacy and integrity even if cryptographic controls are in place. A security architecture made after thorough TRA does not override security risk introduced due to irresponsible software design.

    Examples of threat and risk assessments using STRIDE and attack trees

    STRIDE is a threat modeling framework and is composed of:

    • Spoofing or impersonation of someone other than oneself
    • Tampering with data and destroying its integrity
    • Repudiation by bypassing system identity controls
    • Information disclosure to unauthorized persons
    • Denial of service that prevents system or parts of it from being used
    • Elevation of privilege so that attackers get rights they should not have
    Example of using STRIDE for a TRA on a solution using a payment system This image contains a sample attack tree.
    Spoofing PayPal Bad actor can send fraudulent payment request for obtaining funds.
    Tampering PayPal Bad actor accesses data base and can resend fraudulent payment request for obtaining funds.
    Repudiation PayPal Customer claims, incorrectly, their account made a payment they did not authorize.
    Disclosure PayPal Private service database has details leaked and made public.
    Denial of Service PayPal Service is made to slow down through creating a load on the network, causing massive build up of requests
    Elevation of Privilege PayPal Bad actor attempts to enter someone else’s account by entering incorrect password a number of times.

    2.2 Document security architecture risks and mitigations

    1. Using STRIDE, attack tree, or any other framework of choice:
    • Conduct a TRA for use cases identified in Phase 1.2
  • For each threat identified through the TRA, think through the implications of using authentication, authorization, and auditing as a security mechanism.
  • Download the Solution Architecture Template for documenting data architecture decisions.

    Input

    • Dynamic Value Stream Maps

    Output

    • Security Architecture Risks and Mitigations

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts

    Participants

    • Business Architect
    • Product Owner
    • Security Team
    • Application Architect
    • Integration Architect

    Examples of threat and risk assessments using STRIDE

    Example of using STRIDE for a TRA on a solution using a payment system
    Threat System Component Description Quality Attribute Impacted Resolution
    Spoofing PayPal Bad actor can send fraudulent payment request for obtaining funds. Confidentiality Authorization
    Tampering PayPal Bad actor accesses data base and can resend fraudulent payment request for obtaining funds. Integrity Authorization
    Repudiation PayPal Customer claims, incorrectly, their account made a payment they did not authorize. Integrity Authentication and Logging
    Disclosure PayPal Private service database has details leaked and made public. Confidentiality Authorization
    Denial of Service PayPal Service is made to slow down through creating a load on the network, causing massive build up of requests Availability N/A
    Elevation of Privilege PayPal Bad actor attempts to enter someone else’s account by entering incorrect password a number of times. Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability Authorization

    Phase 3: Upgrade Your System’s Availability

    Phase 1

    1.1 Articulate an Architectural Vision
    1.2 Develop Dynamic Value Stream Maps
    1.3 Map Value Streams, Use Cases, and Required Architectural Attributes
    1.4 Create a Prioritized List of Architectural Attributes

    Phase 2

    2.1 Develop a Data Architecture That Supports Transactional and Analytical Needs
    2.2 Document Security Architecture Risks and Mitigations

    Phase 3

    3.1 Document Scalability Architecture
    3.2 Document Performance Enhancing Architecture
    3.3 Combine the Different Architecture Design Decisions Into a Unified Solution Architecture

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Examine architecture for scalable and performant system designs
    • Integrate all design decisions made so far into a solution design decision log

    This phase involves the following participants:

    • Business Architect
    • Product Owner
    • Application Architect
    • Integration Architect
    • Database Architect
    • Enterprise Architect

    Enhance Your Solution Architecture Practice

    In a cloud-inspired system architecture, scalability takes center stage as an architectural concern

    Scale and scope of workloads are more important now than they were, perhaps, a decade and half back. Architects realize that scalability is not an afterthought. Not dealing with it at the outset can have serious consequences should an application workload suddenly exceed expectations.

    Scalability is …

    … the ability of a system to handle varying workloads by either increasing or decreasing the computing resources of the system.

    An increased workload could include:

    • Higher transaction volumes
    • A greater number of users

    Architecting for scalability is …

    … not easy since organizations may not be able to accurately judge, outside of known circumstances, when and why workloads may unexpectedly increase.

    A scalable architecture should be planned at the:

    • Application Level
    • Infrastructure Level
    • Database Level

    The right amount and kind of scalability is …

    … balancing the demands of the system with the supply of attributes.

    If demand from system > supply from system:

    • Services and products are not useable and deny value to customers.

    If supply from system > demand from system:

    • Excess resources have been paid for that are not being used.

    When discussing the scalability needs of a system, investigate the following, at a minimum:

    • In case workloads increase due to higher transaction volumes, will the system be able to cope with the additional stress?
    • In situations where workloads increase, will the system be able to support the additional stress without any major modifications being made to the system?
    • Is the cost associated with handling the increased workloads reasonable for the benefit it provides to the business?
    • Assuming the system doesn’t scale, is there any mechanism for graceful degradation?

    Use evidence-based decision making to ensure a cost-effective yet appropriate scaling strategy

    The best input for an effective scaling strategy is previously gathered traffic data mapped to specific circumstances.

    In some cases, either due to lack of monitoring or the business not being sure of its needs, scalability requirements are hard to determine. In such cases, use stated tactical business objectives to design for scalability. For example, the business might state its desire to achieve a target revenue goal. To accommodate this, a certain number of transactions would need to be conducted, assuming a particular conversion rate.

    Scaling strategies can be based on Vertical or Horizontal expansion of resources.
    Pros Cons
    Vertical
    Scale up through use of more powerful but limited number of resources
    • May not require frequent upgrades.
    • Since data is managed through a limited number of resources, it is easier to share and keep current.
    • Costly upfront.
    • Application, database, and infrastructure may not be able to make optimal use of extra processing power.
    • As the new, more powerful resource is provisioned, systems may experience downtime.
    • Lacks redundancy due to limited points of failure.
    • Performance is constrained by the upper limits of the infrastructure involved.
    Horizontal
    Scale out through use of similarly powered but larger quantity of resources
    • Cost-effective upfront.
    • System downtime is minimal, when scaling is being performed.
    • More redundance and fault-tolerance is possible since there are many nodes involved, and therefore, can replace failed nodes.
    • Performance can scale out as more nodes are added.
    • Upgrades may occur more often than in vertical scaling.
    • Increases machine footprints and administrative costs over time.
    • Data may be partitioned on multiple nodes, leading to administrative and data currency challenges.

    Info-Tech Insight

    • Scalability is the one attribute that sparks a lot of trade-off discussions. Scalable solutions may have to compromise on performance, cost, and data reliability.
    • Horizontal scalability is mostly always preferable over vertical scalability.

    Sidebar

    The many flavors of horizontal scaling

    Traffic Shard-ing

    Through this mechanism, incoming traffic is partitioned around a characteristic of the workload flowing in. Examples of partitioning characteristics are user groups, geo-location, and transaction type.

    Beware of:

    • Lack of data currency across shards.

    Copy and Paste

    As the name suggests, clone the compute resources along with the underlying databases. The systems will use a load balancer as the first point of contact between itself and the workload flowing in.

    Beware of:

    • Though this is a highly scalable model, it does introduce risks related to data currency across all databases.
    • In case master database writes are frequent, it could become a bottleneck for the entire system.

    Productization Through Containers

    This involves breaking up the system into specific functions and services and bundling their business rules/databases into deployable containers.

    Beware of:

    • Too many containers introduce the need to orchestrate the distributed architecture that results from a service-oriented approach.

    Start a scalability overview with a look at the database(s)

    To know where to go, you must know where you are. Before introducing architectural changes to database designs, use the right metrics to get an insight into the root cause of the problem(s).

    In a nutshell, the purpose of scaling solutions is to have the technology stack do less work for the most requested services/features or be able to effectively distribute the additional workload across multiple resources.

    For databases, to ensure this happens, consider these techniques:

    • Reuse data through caching on the server and/or the client. This eliminates the need for looking up already accessed data. Examples of caching are:
      • In-memory caching of data
      • Caching database queries
    • Implement good data retrieval techniques like indexes.
    • Divide labor at the database level.
      • Through setting up primary-secondary distribution of data. In such a setup, the primary node is involved in writing data to itself and passes on requests to secondary nodes for fulfillment.
      • Through setting up database shards (either horizontally or vertically).
        • In a horizontal shard, a data table is broken into smaller pieces with the same data model but unique data in it. The sum total of the shared databases contains all the data in the primary data table.
        • In a vertical shard, a data table is broken into smaller pieces, but each piece may have a subset of the data columns. The data’s corresponding columns are put into the table where the column resides.

    Info-Tech Insight

    A non-scalable architecture has more than just technology-related ramifications. Hoping that load balancers or cloud services will manage scalability-related issues is bound to have economic impacts as well.

    Sidebar

    Caching Options

    CSA PRINCIPLE 5 applies to any decision that supports system scalability.
    “X-ilities Over Features”

    Database Caching
    Fetches and stores result of database queries in memory. Subsequent requests to the database for the same queries will investigate the cache before making a connection with the database.
    Tools like Memcached or Redis are used for database caching.

    Precompute Database Caching
    Unlike database caching, this style of caching precomputes results of queries that are popular and frequently used. For example, a database trigger could execute several predetermined queries and have them ready for consumption. The precomputed results may be stored in a database cache.

    Application Object Caching
    Stores computed results in a cache for later retrieval. For data sources, which are not changing frequently and are part of a computation output, application caching will remove the need to connect with a database.

    Proxy Caching
    Caches retrieved web pages on a proxy server and makes them available for the next time the page is requested.

    The intra- and inter-process communication of the systems middle tier can become a bottleneck

    To synchronize or not to synchronize?

    A synchronous request (doing one thing at a time) means that code execution will wait for the request to be responded to before continuing.

    • A synchronous request is a blocking event and until it is completed, all following requests will have to wait for getting their responses.
    • An increasing workload on a synchronous system may impact performance.
    • Synchronous interactions are less costly in terms of design, implementation, and maintenance.
    • Scaling options include:
    1. Vertical scale up
    2. Horizontal scale out of application servers behind a load balancer and a caching technique (to minimize data retrieval roundtrips)
    3. Horizonal scale out of database servers with data partitioning and/or data caching technique

    Use synchronous requests when…

    • Each request to a system sets the necessary precondition for a following request.
    • Data reliability is important, especially in real-time systems.
    • System flows are simple.
    • Tasks that are typically time consuming, such as I/O, data access, pre-loading of assets, are completed quickly.

    Asynchronous requests (doing many things at the same time) do not block the system they are targeting.

    • It is a “fire and forget” mechanism.
    • Execution on a server/processor is triggered by the request, however, additional technical components (callbacks) for checking the state of the execution must be designed and implemented.
    • Asynchronous interactions require additional time to be spent on implementation and testing.
    • With asynchronous interactions, there is no guarantee the request initiated any processing until the callbacks check the status of the executed thread.

    Use asynchronous requests when…

    • Tasks are independent in nature and don’t require inter-task communication.
    • Systems flows need to be efficient.
    • The system is using event-driven techniques for processing.
    • Many I/O tasks are involved.
    • The tasks are long running.

    Sidebar

    Other architectural tactics for inter-process communication

    STATELESS SERVICES VERSUS STATEFUL SERVICES
    • Does not require any additional data, apart from the bits sent through with the request.
    • Without implementing a caching solution, it is impossible to access the previous data trail for a transaction session.
    • In addition to the data sent through with the request, require previous data sent to complete processing.
    • Requires server memory to store the additional state data. With increasing workloads, this could start impacting the server’s performance.
    It is generally accepted that stateless services are better for system scalability, especially if vertical scaling is costly and there is expectation that workloads will increase.
    MICROSERVICES VERSUS SERVERLESS FUNCTIONS
    • Services are designed as small units of code with a single responsibility and are available on demand.
    • A microservices architecture is easily scaled horizontally by adding a load balancer and a caching mechanism.
    • Like microservices, these are small pieces of code designed to fulfill a single purpose.
    • Are provided only through cloud vendors, and therefore, there is no need to worry about provisioning of infrastructure as needs increase.
    • Stateless by design but the life cycle of a serverless function is vendor controlled.
    Serverless function is an evolving technology and tightly controlled by the vendor. As and when vendors make changes to their serverless products, your own systems may need to be modified to make the best use of these upgrades.

    A team that does not measure their system’s scalability is a team bound to get a 5xx HTTP response code

    A critical aspect of any system is its ability to monitor and report on its operational outcomes.

    • Using the principle of continuous testing, every time an architectural change is introduced, a thorough load and stress testing cycle should be executed.
    • Effective logging and use of insightful metrics helps system design teams make data-driven decisions.
    • Using principle of site reliability engineering and predictive analytics, teams can be prepared for any unplanned exaggerated stimulus on the system and proactively set up remedial steps.

    Any system, however well architected, will break one day. Strategically place kill-switches to counter any failures and thoroughly test their functioning before releasing to production.

    • Using Principles 2 and 9 of the CSA, (include kill-switches and architect for x-ilities over features), introduce tactics at the code and higher levels that can be used to put a system in its previous best state in case of failure.
    • Examples of such tactics are:
      • Feature flags for turning on/off code modules that impact x-ilities.
      • Implement design patterns like throttling, autoscaling, and circuit breaking.
      • Writing extensive log messages that bubble up as exceptions/error handling from the code base. *Logging can be a performance drag. Use with caution as even logging code is still code that needs CPU and data storage.

    Performance is a system’s ability to satisfy time-bound expectations

    Performance can also be defined as the ability for a system to achieve its timing requirements, using available resources, under expected full-peak load:

    (International Organization for Standardization, 2011)

    • Performance and scalability are two peas in a pod. They are related to each other but are distinct attributes. Where scalability refers to the ability of a system to initiate multiple simultaneous processes, performance is the system’s ability to complete the processes within a mandated average time period.
    • Degrading performance is one of the first red flags about a system’s ability to scale up to workload demands.
    • Mitigation tactics for performance are very similar to the tactics for scalability.

    System performance needs to be monitored and measured consistently.

    Measurement Category 1: System performance in terms of end-user experience during different load scenarios.

    • Response time/latency: Length of time it takes for an interaction with the system to complete.
    • Turnaround time: Time taken to complete a batch of tasks.
    • Throughput: Amount of workload a system is capable of handling in a unit time period.

    Measurement Category 2: System performance in terms of load managed by computational resources.

    • Resource utilization: The average usage of a resource (like CPU) over a period. Peaks and troughs indicate excess vs. normal load times.
    • Number of concurrent connections: Simultaneous user requests that a resource like a server can successfully deal with at once.
    • Queue time: The turnaround time for a specific interaction or category of interactions to complete.

    Architectural tactics for performance management are the same as those used for system scalability

    Application Layer

    • Using a balanced approach that combines CSA Principle 7 (Good architecture comes in small packages) and Principle 10 (Architect for products, not projects), a microservices architecture based on domain-driven design helps process performance. Microservices use lightweight HTTP protocols and have loose coupling, adding a degree of resilience to the system as well. *An overly-engineered microservices architecture can become an orchestration challenge.
    • The code design must follow standards that support performance. Example of standards is SOLID*.
    • Serverless architectures can run application code from anywhere – for example, from edge servers close to an end user – thereby reducing latency.

    Database Layer

    • Using the right database technologies for persistence. Relational databases have implicit performance bottlenecks (which get exaggerated as data size grows along with indexes), and document store database technologies (key-value or wide-column) can improve performance in high-read environments.
    • Data sources, especially those that are frequently accessed, should ideally be located close to the application servers. Hybrid infrastructures (cloud and on premises mixed) can lead to latency when a cloud-application is accessing on-premises data.
    • Using a data partitioning strategy, especially in a domain-driven design architecture, can improve the performance of a system.

    Performance modeling and continuous testing makes the SRE a happy engineer

    Performance modeling and testing helps architecture teams predict performance risks as the solution is being developed.
    (CSA Principle 12: Test the solution architecture like you test your solution’s features)

    Create a model for your system’s hypothetical performance testing by breaking an end-to-end process or use case into its components. *Use the SIPOC framework for decomposition.

    This image contains an example of modeled performance, showing the latency in the data flowing from different data sources to the processing of the data.

    In the hypothetical example of modeled performance above:

    • The longest period of latency is 15ms.
    • The processing of data takes 30ms, while the baseline was established at 25ms.
    • Average latency in sending back user responses is 21ms – 13ms slower than expected.

    The model helps architects:

    • Get evidence for their assumptions
    • Quantitatively isolate bottlenecks at a granular level

    Model the performance flow once but test it periodically

    Performance testing measures the performance of a software system under normal and abnormal loads.

    Performance testing process should be fully integrated with software development activities and as automated as possible. In a fast-moving Agile environment, teams should attempt to:

    • Shift-left performance testing activities.
    • Use performance testing to pinpoint performance bottlenecks.
    • Take corrective action, as quickly as possible.

    Performance testing techniques

    • Normal load testing: Verifies the system’s behavior under the expected normal load to ensure that its performance requirements are met. Load testing can be used to measure response time, responsiveness, turnaround time, and throughput.
    • Expected maximum load testing: Like the normal load testing process, ensures system meets its performance requirements under expected maximum load.
    • Stress testing: Evaluates system behavior when processing loads beyond the expected maximum.

    *In a real production scenario, a combination of these tests are executed on a regular basis to monitor the performance of the system over a given period.

    3.1-3.2 Discuss and document initial decisions made for architecture scalability and performance

    1. Use the outcomes from either or both Phases 1.3 and 1.4.
    • For each value stream component, list the architecture decisions taken to ensure scalability and performance at client-facing and/or business-rule layers.

    Download the Solution Architecture Template for documenting data architecture decisions.

    Input

    • Output From Phase 1.3 and/or From Phase 1.4

    Output

    • Initial Set of Design Decisions Made for System Scalability and Performance

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts

    Participants

    • Business Architect
    • Application Architect
    • Integration Architect
    • Database Architect
    • Infrastructure Architect

    Example: Architecture decisions for scalability and performance

    Value Stream Component Design Decision for User Interface Layer Design Decisions for Middle Processing Layer
    Loan Application Scalability: N/A
    Resilience: Include circuit breaker design in both mobile app and responsive websites.
    Performance: Cache data client.
    Scalability: Scale vertically (up) since loan application processing is very compute intensive.
    Resilience: Set up fail-over replica.
    Performance: Keep servers in the same geo-area.
    Disbursement of Funds *Does not have a user interface Scalability: Scale horizontal when traffic reaches X requests/second.
    Resilience: Create microservices using domain-driven design; include circuit breakers.
    Performance: Set up application cache; synchronous communication since order of data input is important.
    …. …. ….

    3.3 Combine the different architecture design decisions into a unified solution architecture

    Download the Solution Architecture Template for documenting data architecture decisions.

    Input

    • Output From Phase 1.3 and/or From Phase 1.4
    • Output From Phase 2.1
    • Output From Phase 2.2
    • Output From 3.1 and 3.2

    Output

    • List of Design Decisions for the Solution

    Materials

    • Whiteboard/Flip Charts

    Participants

    • Business Architect
    • Application Architect
    • Integration Architect
    • Database Architect
    • Infrastructure Architect

    Putting it all together is the bow that finally ties this gift

    This blueprint covered the domains tagged with the yellow star.

    This image contains a screenshot of the solution architecture framework found earlier in this blueprint, with stars next to Data Architecture, Security, Performance, and Stability.

    TRADEOFF ALERT

    The right design decision is never the same for all perspectives. Along with varying opinions, comes the “at odds with each other set” of needs (scalability vs. performance, or access vs. security).

    An evidence-based decision-making approach using a domain-driven design strategy is a good mix of techniques for creating the best (right?) solution architecture.

    This image contains a screenshot of a table that summarizes the themes discussed in this blueprint.

    Summary of accomplishment

    • Gained understanding and clarification of the stakeholder objectives placed on your application architecture.
    • Completed detailed use cases and persona-driven scenario analysis and their architectural needs through SRME.
    • Created a set of design decisions for data, security, scalability, and performance.
    • Merged the different architecture domains dealt with in this blueprint to create a holistic view.

    Bibliography

    Ambysoft Inc. “UML 2 Sequence Diagrams: An Agile Introduction.” Agile Modeling, n.d. Web.

    Bass, Len, Paul Clements, and Rick Kazman. Software Architecture in Practices: Third Edition. Pearson Education, Inc. 2003.

    Eeles, Peter. “The benefits of software architecting.” IBM: developerWorks, 15 May 2006. Web.

    Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report. Flexera, 2020. Web. 19 October 2021.

    Furdik, Karol, Gabriel Lukac, Tomas Sabol, and Peter Kostelnik. “The Network Architecture Designed for an Adaptable IoT-based Smart Office Solution.” International Journal of Computer Networks and Communications Security, November 2013. Web.

    Ganzinger, Matthias, and Petra Knaup. “Requirements for data integration platforms in biomedical research networks: a reference model.” PeerJ, 5 February 2015. (https://peerj.com/articles/755/).

    Garlan, David, and Mary Shaw. An Introduction to Software Architecture. CMU-CS-94-166, School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University, January 1994.

    Gupta, Arun. “Microservice Design Patterns.” Java Code Geeks, 14 April 2015. Web.

    How, Matt. The Modern Data Warehouse in Azure. O’Reilly, 2020.

    ISO/IEC 17788:2014: Information technology – Cloud computing, International Organization for Standardization, October 2014. Web.

    ISO/IEC 18384-1:2016: Information technology – Reference Architecture for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA RA), International Organization for Standardization, June 2016. Web.

    ISO/IEC 25010:2011(en) Systems and software engineering — Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE) — System and software quality models. International Organization for Standardization, March 2011. Web.

    Kazman, R., M. Klein, and P. Clements. ATAM: Method for Architecture Evaluation. S Carnegie Mellon University, August 2000. Web.

    Microsoft Developer Network. “Chapter 16: Quality Attributes.” Microsoft Application Architecture Guide. 2nd Ed., 13 January 2010. Web.

    Microsoft Developer Network. “Chapter 2: Key Principles of Software Architecture.” Microsoft Application Architecture Guide. 2nd Ed., 13 January 2010. Web.

    Microsoft Developer Network. “Chapter 3: Architectural Patterns and Styles.” Microsoft Application Architecture Guide. 2nd Ed., 14 January 2010. Web.

    Microsoft Developer Network. “Chapter 5: Layered Application Guidelines.” Microsoft Application Architecture Guide. 2nd Ed., 13 January 2010. Web.

    Mirakhorli, Mehdi. “Common Architecture Weakness Enumeration (CAWE).” IEEE Software, 2016. Web.

    Moore, G. A. Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers (Collins Business Essentials) (3rd ed.). Harper Business, 2014.

    OASIS. “Oasis SOA Reference Model (SOA RM) TC.” OASIS Open, n.d. Web.

    Soni, Mukesh. “Defect Prevention: Reducing Costs and Enhancing Quality.” iSixSigma, n.d. Web.

    The Open Group. TOGAF 8.1.1 Online, Part IV: Resource Base, Developing Architecture Views. TOGAF, 2006. Web.

    The Open Group. Welcome to the TOGAF® Standard, Version 9.2, a standard of The Open Group. TOGAF, 2018. Web.

    Watts, S. “The importance of solid design principles.” BMC Blogs, 15 June 2020. 19 October 2021.

    Young, Charles. “Hexagonal Architecture–The Great Reconciler?” Geeks with Blogs, 20 Dec 2014. Web.

    APPENDIX A

    Techniques to enhance application architecture.

    Consider the numerous solutions to address architecture issues or how they will impact your application architecture

    Many solutions exist for improving the layers of the application stack that may address architecture issues or impact your current architecture. Solutions range from capability changes to full stack replacement.

    Method Description Potential Benefits Risks Related Blueprints
    Business Capabilities:
    Enablement and enhancement
    • Introduce new business capabilities by leveraging unused application functionalities or consolidate redundant business capabilities.
    • Increase value delivery to stakeholders.
    • Lower IT costs through elimination of applications.
    • Increased use of an application could overload current infrastructure.
    • IT cannot authorize business capability changes.
    Use Info-Tech’s Document Your Business Architecture blueprint to gain better understanding of business and IT alignment.
    Removal
    • Remove existing business capabilities that don’t contribute value to the business.
    • Lower operational costs through elimination of unused and irrelevant capabilities.
    • Business capabilities may be seen as relevant or critical by different stakeholder groups.
    • IT cannot authorize business capability changes.
    Use Info-Tech’s Build an Application Rationalization Framework to rationalize your application portfolio.
    Business Process:
    Process integration and consolidation
    • Combine multiple business processes into a single process.
    • Improved utilization of applications in each step of the process.
    • Reduce business costs through efficient business processes.
    • Minimize number of applications required to execute a single process.
    • Significant business disruption if an application goes down and is the primary support for business processes.
    • Organizational pushback if process integration involves multiple business groups.
    Business Process (continued):
    Process automation
    • Automate manual business processing tasks.
    • Reduce manual processing errors.
    • Improve speed of delivery.
    • Significant costs to implement automation.
    • Automation payoffs are not immediate.
    Lean business processes
    • Eliminate redundant steps.
    • Streamline existing processes by focusing on value-driven steps.
    • Improve efficiency of business process through removal of wasteful steps.
    • Increase value delivered at the end of the process.
    • Stakeholder pushback from consistently changing processes.
    • Investment from business is required to fit documentation to the process.
    Outsource the process
    • Outsource a portion of or the entire business process to a third party.
    • Leverage unavailable resources and skills to execute the business process.
    • Loss of control over process.
    • Can be costly to bring the process back into the business if desired in the future.
    Business Process (continued):
    Standardization
    • Implement standards for business processes to improve uniformity and reusability.
    • Consistently apply the same process across multiple business units.
    • Transparency of what is expected from the process.
    • Improve predictability of process execution.
    • Process bottlenecks may occur if a single group is required to sign off on deliverables.
    • Lack of enforcement and maintenance of standards can lead to chaos if left unchecked.
    User Interface:
    Improve user experience (UX)
    • Eliminate end-user emotional, mechanical, and functional friction by improving the experience of using the application.
    • UX encompasses both the interface and the user’s behavior.
    • Increase satisfaction and adoption rate from end users.
    • Increase brand awareness and user retention.
    • UX optimizations are only focused on a few user personas.
    • Current development processes do not accommodate UX assessments
    Code:
    Update coding language
    Translate legacy code into modern coding language.
    • Coding errors in modern languages can have lesser impact on the business processes they support.
    • Modern languages tend to have larger pools of coders to hire.
    • Increase availability of tools to support modern languages.
    • Coding language changes can create incompatibilities with existing infrastructure.
    • Existing coding translation tools do not offer 100% guarantee of legacy function retention.
    Code (continued):
    Open source code
    • Download pre-built code freely available in open source communities.
    • Code is rapidly evolving in the community to meet current business needs.
    • Avoid vendor lock-in from proprietary software
    • Community rules may require divulgence of work done with open source code.
    • Support is primarily provided through community, which may not address specific concerns.
    Update the development toolchain
    • Acquire new or optimize development tools with increased testing, build, and deployment capabilities.
    • Increase developer productivity.
    • Increase speed of delivery and test coverage with automation.
    • Drastic IT overhauls required to implement new tools such as code conversion, data migration, and development process revisions.
    Update source code management
    • Optimize source code management to improve coding governance, versioning, and development collaboration.
    • Ability to easily roll back to previous build versions and promote code to other environments.
    • Enable multi-user development capabilities.
    • Improve conflict management.
    • Some source code management tools cannot support legacy code.
    • Source code management tools may be incompatible with existing development toolchain.
    Data:
    Outsource extraction
    • Outsource your data analysis and extraction to a third party.
    • Lower costs to extract and mine data.
    • Leverage unavailable resources and skills to translate mined data to a usable form.
    • Data security risks associated with off-location storage.
    • Data access and control risks associated with a third party.
    Update data structure
    • Update your data elements, types (e.g. transactional, big data), and formats (e.g. table columns).
    • Standardize on a common data definition throughout the entire organization.
    • Ease data cleansing, mining, analysis, extraction, and management activities.
    • New data structures may be incompatible with other applications.
    • Implementing data management improvements may be costly and difficult to acquire stakeholder buy-in.
    Update data mining and data warehousing tools
    • Optimize how data is extracted and stored.
    • Increase the speed and reliability of the data mined.
    • Perform complex analysis with modern data mining and data warehousing tools.
    • Data warehouses are regularly updated with the latest data.
    • Updating data mining and warehousing tools may create incompatibilities with existing infrastructure and data sets.
    Integration:
    Move from point-to-point to enterprise service bus (ESB)
    • Change your application integration approach from point-to-point to an ESB.
    • Increase the scalability of enterprise services by exposing applications to a centralized middleware.
    • Reduce the number of integration tests to complete with an ESB.
    • Single point of failure can cripple the entire system.
    • Security threats arising from centralized communication node.
    Leverage API integration
    • Leverage application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate applications.
    • Quicker and more frequent transfers of lightweight data compared to extract, load, transfer (ETL) practices.
    • Increase integration opportunities with other modern applications and infrastructure (including mobile devices).
    • APIs are not as efficient as ETL when handling large data sets.
    • Changing APIs can break compatibility between applications if not versioned properly.

    Sprint Toward Data-Driven Culture Using DataOps

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    • Parent Category Name: Enterprise Integration
    • Parent Category Link: /enterprise-integration
    • Data teams do not have a mechanism to integrate with operations teams and operate in a silo.
    • Significant delays in the operationalization of analytical/algorithms due to lack of standards and a clear path to production.
    • Raw data is shared with end users and data scientists due to poor management of data, resulting in more time spent on integration and less on insight generation and analytics.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Data and analytics teams need a clear mechanism to separate data exploratory work and repetitive data insights generation. Lack of such separation is the main cause of significant delays, inefficiencies, and frustration for data initiatives.
    • Access to data and exploratory data analytics is critical. However, the organization must learn to share insights and reuse analytics.
    • Once analytics finds wider use in the organization, they need to adopt a disciplined approach to ensure its quality and continuous integration in the production environment.

    Impact and Result

    • Use a metrics-driven approach and common framework across silos to enable the rapid development of data initiatives using Agile principles.
    • Implement an approach that allows business, data, and operation teams to collaboratively work together to provide a better customer experience.
    • Align DataOps to an overall data management and governance program that promotes collaboration, transparency, and empathy across teams, establishes the appropriate roles and responsibilities, and ensures alignment to a common set of goals.
    • Assess the current maturity of the data operations teams and implement a roadmap that considers the necessary competencies and capabilities and their dependencies in moving towards the desired DataOps target state.

    Sprint Toward Data-Driven Culture Using DataOps Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to understand the operational challenges associated with productizing the organization's data-related initiative. Review Info-Tech’s methodology for enabling the improved practice to operationalize data analytics and how we will support you in creating an agile data environment.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Discover benefits of DataOps

    Understand the benefits of DataOps and why organizations are looking to establish agile principles in their data practice, the challenges associated with doing so, and what the new DataOps strategy needs to be successful.

    • Sprint Toward Data-Driven Culture Using DataOps – Phase 1: Discover Benefits of DataOps

    2. Assess your data practice for DataOps

    Analyze DataOps using Info-Tech’s DataOps use case framework, to help you identify the gaps in your data practices that need to be matured to truly realize DataOps benefits including data integration, data security, data quality, data engineering, and data science.

    • Sprint Toward Data-Driven Culture Using DataOps – Phase 2: Assess Your Data Practice for DataOps
    • DataOps Roadmap Tool

    3. Mature your DataOps practice

    Mature your data practice by putting in the right people in the right roles and establishing DataOps metrics, communication plan, DataOps best practices, and data principles.

    • Sprint Toward Data-Driven Culture Using DataOps – Phase 3: Mature Your DataOps Practice
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Sprint Toward Data-Driven Culture Using DataOps

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Identify the Drivers of the Business for DataOps

    The Purpose

    Understand the DataOps approach and value proposition.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A clear understanding of organization data priorities and metrics along with a simplified view of data using Info-Tech’s Onion framework.

    Activities

    1.1 Explain DataOps approach and value proposition.

    1.2 Review the common business drivers and how the organization is driving a need for DataOps.

    1.3 Understand Info-Tech’s DataOps Framework.

    Outputs

    Organization's data priorities and metrics

    Data Onion framework

    2 Assess DataOps Maturity in Your Organization

    The Purpose

    Assess the DataOps maturity of the organization.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Define clear understanding of organization’s DataOps capabilities.

    Activities

    2.1 Assess current state.

    2.2 Develop target state summary.

    2.3 Define DataOps improvement initiatives.

    Outputs

    Current state summary

    Target state summary

    3 Develop Action Items and Roadmap to Establish DataOps

    The Purpose

    Establish clear action items and roadmap.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Define clear and measurable roadmap to mature DataOps within the organization.

    Activities

    3.1 Continue DataOps improvement initiatives.

    3.2 Document the improvement initiatives.

    3.3 Develop a roadmap for DataOps practice.

    Outputs

    DataOps initiatives roadmap

    4 Plan for Continuous Improvement

    The Purpose

    Define a plan for continuous improvements.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Continue to improve DataOps practice.

    Activities

    4.1 Create target cross-functional team structures.

    4.2 Define DataOps metrics for continuous monitoring.

    4.3 Create a communication plan.

    Outputs

    DataOps cross-functional team structure

    DataOps metrics

    Master the Secrets of VMware Licensing to Maximize Your Investment

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    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): N/A
    • member rating average dollars saved: N/A
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    • Parent Category Name: Licensing
    • Parent Category Link: /licensing
    • A lack of understanding around VMware’s licensing models, bundles, and negotiation tactics makes it difficult to negotiate from a position of strength.
    • Unfriendly commercial practices combined with hyperlink-ridden agreements have left organizations vulnerable to audits and large shortfall payments.
    • Enterprise license agreements (ELAs) come in several purchasing models and do not contain the EULA or various VMware product guide documentation that governs license usage rules and can change monthly.
    • Without a detailed understanding of VMware’s various purchasing models, shelfware often occurs.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Contracts are typically overweighted with a discount at the expense of contractual T&Cs that can restrict license usage and expose you to unpleasant financial surprises and compliance risk.
    • VMware customers almost always have incomplete price information from which to effectively negotiate a “best in class” ELA.
    • VMware has a large lead in being first to market and it realizes that running dual virtualization stacks is complex, unwieldy, and expensive. To further complicate the issues, most skill sets in the industry are skewed towards VMware.

    Impact and Result

    • Negotiate desired terms and conditions at the start of the agreement, and prioritize which use rights may be more important than an additional discount percentage.
    • Gather data points and speak with licensing partners to determine if the deal being offered is in fact as great as VMware says it is.
    • Beware of out-year pricing and ELA optimization reviews that may provide undesirable surprises and more spend than was planned.

    Master the Secrets of VMware Licensing to Maximize Your Investment Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Manage Your VMware Agreements – Use the Info-Tech tools capture your existing licenses and prepare for your renewal bids.

    Use Info-Tech’s licensing best practices to avoid shelfware with VMware licensing and remain compliant in case of an audit.

    • Master the Secrets of VMware Licensing to Maximize Your Investment Storyboard

    2. Manage your VMware agreements

    Use Info-Tech’s licensing best practices to avoid shelfware with VMware licensing and remain compliant in case of an audit.

    • VMware Business as Usual – Install Base SnS Renewal Only Tool
    • VMware ELA RFQ Template

    3. Transition to the VMWare Cloud – Use these tools to evaluate your ELA and vShpere requirements and make an informed choice.

    Manage your renewals and transition to the cloud subscription model.

    • VPP Transactional Purchase Tool
    • VMware ELA Analysis Tool
    • vSphere Edition 7 Features List

    Infographic

    Further reading

    Master the Secrets of VMware Licensing to Maximize Your Investment

    Learn the essential steps to avoid overspending and to maximize negotiation leverage with VMware.

    EXECUTIVE BRIEF

    Analyst Perspective

    Master the Secrets of VMware Licensing to Maximize Your Investment.

    The image contains a picture of Scott Bickley.

    The mechanics of negotiating a deal with VMware may seem simple at first as the vendor is willing to provide a heavy discount on an enterprise license agreement (ELA). However, come renewal time, when a reduction in spend or shelfware is needed, or to exit the ELA altogether, the process can be exceedingly frustrating as VMware holds the balance of power in the negotiation.

    Negotiating a complete agreement with VMware from the start can save you from an immense headache and unforeseen expenditures. Many VMware customers do not realize that the terms and conditions in the Volume Purchasing Program (VPP) and Enterprise Purchasing Program (EPP) agreements limit how and where they are able to use their licenses.

    Furthermore, after the renewal is complete, organizations must still worry about the management of various license types, accurate discovery of what has been deployed, visibility into license key assignments, and over and under use of licenses.

    Preventive and proactive measures enclosed within this blueprint will help VMware clients mitigate this minefield of challenges.

    Scott Bickley
    Practice Lead, Vendor Management
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge

    Common Obstacles

    Info-Tech’s Approach

    VMware's dominant position in the virtualization space can create uncertainty to your options in the long term as well as the need to understand:

    • The hybrid cloud model.
    • Hybrid VM security and management.
    • New subscription license model and how it affects renewals.

    Make an informed decision with your VMware investments to allow for continued ROI.

    There are several hurdles that are presented when considering a VMware ELA:

    • Evolving licensing and purchasing models
    • Understanding potential ROI in the cloud landscape
    • Evolving door of corporate ownership

    Overcoming these and other obstacles are key to long-term satisfaction with your VMware infrastructure.

    Info-Tech has a two-phase approach:

    • Manage your VMware agreements.
    • Plan a transition to the cloud.

    A tactical roadmap approach to VMware ELA and the cloud will ensure long-term success and savings.

    Info-Tech Insight

    VMware customers almost always have incomplete price information from which to effectively negotiate a “best in class” ELA.

    Your challenge

    VMware's dominant position in the virtualization space can create uncertainty to your options in the long term driven by:

    • VMware’s dominant market position and ownership of the virtualization market, which is forcing customers to focus on managing capacity demand to ensure a positive ROI on every license.
    • The trend toward a hybrid cloud for many organizations, especially those considering using VMware in public clouds, resulting in confusion regarding licensing and compliance scenarios.

    ELAs and EPPs are generally the only way to get a deep discount from VMware.

    The image contains a pie chart to demonstrate that 85% have answered yes to being audited by VMware for software license compliance.

    Common obstacles

    There are several hurdles that are presented when considering a VMware ELA.

    • A lack of understanding around VMware’s licensing models, bundles, and negotiation tactics makes it difficult to negotiate from a position of strength.
    • Unfriendly commercial practices combined with hyperlink-ridden agreements have left organizations vulnerable to audits and large shortfall payments.
    • ELAs come in several purchasing models and do not contain the EULA or various VMware product guide documentation that govern license usage rules and can change monthly.

    Competition is a key driver of price

    The image contains a screenshot of a bar graph to demonstrate virtualization market share % 2022.

    Source: Datanyze

    Master the Secrets of VMware Licensing to Maximize your Investment

    The image contains a screenshot of the Thought model on Master the secrets of VMware Licensing to Maximize your Investment.

    Info-Tech’s methodology for Master the Secrets of VMware Licensing to Maximize Your Investment

    1. Manage Your VMware Agreements

    2. Transition to the VMware Cloud

    Phase Steps

    1.1 Establish licensing requirements

    1.2 Evaluate licensing options

    1.3 Evaluate agreement options

    1.4 Purchase and manage licenses

    1.5 Understand SnS renewal management

    2.1 Understand the VMware subscription model

    2.2 Migrate workloads and licenses

    2.3 Manage SnS and cloud subscriptions

    Phase Outcomes

    Understanding of your licensing requirements and what agreement option best fits your needs for now and the future.

    Knowledge of VMware’s sales model and how to negotiate the best deal.

    Knowledge of the evolving cloud subscription model and how to plan your cloud migration and transition to the new licensing.

    Insight summary

    Overarching insight

    With the introduction of the subscription licensing model, VMware licensing and renewals are becoming more complex and require a deeper understanding of the license program options to best manage renewals and cloud deployments as well as to maximize legacy ROI.

    Phase 1 insight

    Contracts are typically overweighted with a discount at the expense of contractual T&Cs that can restrict license usage and expose you to unpleasant financial surprises and compliance risk.

    Phase 1 insight

    VMware has a large lead in being first to market and it realizes running dual virtualization stacks is complex, unwieldy, and expensive. To further complicate the issues, most skill sets in the industry are skewed toward VMware.

    Phase 2 insight

    VMware has purposefully reduced a focus on the actual license terms and conditions; most customers focus on the transactional purchase or the ELA document, but the rules governing usage are on a website and can be changed by VMware regularly.

    Tactical insight

    Beware of out-year pricing and ELA optimization reviews that may provide undesirable surprises and more spend than was planned.

    Tactical insight

    Negotiate desired terms and conditions at the start of the agreement, and prioritize which use rights may be more important than an additional discount percentage.

    Blueprint deliverables

    Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

    VMware ELA Analysis Tool

    VMware ELA RFQ Template Tool

    VPP Transaction Purchase Tool

    VMware ELA Analysis Tool

    Use this tool as a template for an RFQ with VMware ELA contracts.

    Use this tool to analyze cost breakdown and discount based on your volume purchasing program (VPP) level.

    The image contains screenshots of the VMware ELA Analysis Tool. The image contains a screenshot of the VMware ELA RFQ template tool. The image contains a screenshot of the VPP Transaction Purchase Tool.

    Key deliverable:

    VMware Business as Usual SnS Renewal Only Tool

    Use this tool to analyze discounts from a multi-year agreement vs. prepay. See how you can get the best discount.

    The image contains screenshots of the VMware Business as Usual SnS Renewal Only Tool.

    Blueprint Objectives

    The aim of this blueprint is to provide a foundational understanding of VMware’s licensing agreement and best practices to manage them.

    Why VMware

    What to Know

    The Future

    VMware is the leader in OS virtualization, however, this is a saturated market, which is being pressured by public and hybrid cloud as a competitive force taking market share.

    There are few viable alternatives to VMware for virtualization due to vendor lock-in of existing IT infrastructure footprint. It is too difficult and cost prohibitive to make a shift away from VMware even when alternative solutions are available.

    ELAs are the preferred method of contracting as it sets the stage for a land-and-expand product strategy; once locked into the ELA model, customers must examine VMware alternatives with preference or risk having Support and Subscription Services (SnS) re-priced at retail.

    VMware does not provide a great deal of publicly available information regarding its enterprise license agreement (ELA) options, leaving a knowledge gap that allows the sales team to steer the customer.

    VMware is taking countermeasures against increasing competition.

    Recent contract terms changed to eliminate perpetual caps on SnS renewals; they are now tied to a single year of discounted SnS, then they go to list price.

    Migration of list pricing to a website versus contract, where pricing can now be changed, reducing discount percentage effectiveness.

    Increased audits of customers, especially those electing to not renew an ELA.


    Examining VMware’s vendor profile

    Turbonomics conducted a vendor profile on major vendors, focusing on licensing and compliance. It illustrated the following results:

    The image contains a pie graph to demonstrate that the majority of companies say yes to using license enterprise software from VMware.

    The image contains a bar graph to demonstrate what license products organizations use of VMware products.

    Source: Turbonomics
    N-sample size

    Case Study

    The image contains a logo for ADP.

    INDUSTRY: Finance

    SOURCE: VMware.com

    “We’ll have network engineers, storage engineers, computer engineers, database engineers, and systems engineers all working together as one intact team developing and delivering goals on specific outcomes.” – Vipul Nagrath, CIO, ADP

    Improving developer capital management

    Constant innovation helped ADP keep ahead of customer needs in the human resources space, but it also brought constant changes to the IT environment. Internally, the company found it was spending too long working on delivering the required infrastructure and system updates. IT staff wanted to improve velocity for refreshes to better match the needs of ADP developers and encourage continued development innovation.

    Business needs

    • Improve turnaround time on infrastructure refreshes to better meet developer roadmaps.
    • Establish an IT culture that works at the global scale of ADP and empowers individual team members.
    • Streamline approach toward infrastructure resource delivery to reduce need for manual management.

    Impact

    • Infrastructure resource delivery reduced from 100+ days to minutes, improving ADP developer efficiency.
    • VMware Cloud™ on AWS establishes seamless private and public cloud workflows, fostering agility and innovation.
    • Automating IT management redirects resources to R&D, boosting time to market for new services.

    Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

    DIY Toolkit

    Guided Implementation

    Workshop

    Consulting

    “Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.” “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.” “We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.” “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

    Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

    Guided Implementation

    What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

    Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3

    Call #1: Discuss scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges.

    Call #2: Assess the current state.

    Determine licensing position.

    Call #3: Complete a deployment count, needs analysis, and internal audit.

    Call #4: Review findings with analyst:

    • Review licensing options.
    • Review licensing rules.
    • Review contract option types.

    Call #5: Select licensing option. Document forecasted costs and benefits.

    Call #6: Review final contract:

    • Discuss negotiation points.
    • Plan a roadmap for SAM.

    Call #7: Negotiate final contract. Evaluate and develop a roadmap for SAM.

    A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

    A typical GI is between 2 to 6 calls over the course of 1 to 2 months.

    Phase # 1

    Manage Your VMware Agreements

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    1.1 Establish licensing requirements

    1.2 Evaluate licensing options

    1.3 Evaluate agreement options

    1.4 Purchase and manage licenses

    2.1 Understand the VMware subscription model

    2.2 Migrate workloads and licenses

    2.3 Discuss the VMware sales approach

    2.4 Manage SnS and cloud subscriptions

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Understanding the VMware licensing model
    • Understanding the license agreement options
    • Understanding the VMware sales approach

    This phase will take you thorough:

    • The new VMware subscription movement to the cloud
    • How to prepare and migrate
    • Manage your subscriptions efficiently

    1.1 Establish licensing requirements

    VMware has greatly improved the features of vSphere over time.

    vSphere Main Editions Overview

    • vSphere Standard – Provides the basic features for server consolidation. A support and subscription contract (SnS) is mandatory when purchasing the vSphere Standard.
    • vSphere Enterprise Plus – Provides the full range of vSphere features. A support and subscription contract (SnS) is mandatory when purchasing the Enterprise Plus editions.
    • vSphere Essentials kit – The Essentials kit is an all-in-one solution for small environments with up to three hosts (2 CPUs on each host). Support is optional when purchasing the Essentials kit and is available on a per-incident basis.
    • vSphere Essentials Plus kit – This is similar to the Essentials kit and provides additional features such as vSphere vMotion, vSphere HA, and vSphere replication. A support and subscription contract (SnS) is sold separately, and a minimum of one year of SnS is required.

    Review vSphere Edition Features

    The image contains a screenshot to review the vSphere Edition Features.

    Download the vSphere Edition 7 Features List

    1.2 Evaluate licensing options

    VMware agreement types

    Review purchase options to align with your requirements.

    Transactional VPP EPP ELA

    Transactional

    Entry-level volume license purchasing program

    Mid-level purchasing program

    Highest-level purchasing program

    • Purchasing in this model is not recommended for business purposes unless very infrequent and low quantities.
    • 250 points minimum
    • Four tiers of discounts
    • Rolling eight-quarter points accumulation period
    • Discounts on license only

    Deal size of initial purchase typically is:

    • US$250K MSRP License + SnS (2,500 tokens)
    • Exceptions do exist with purchase volume

    Minimum deal size of top-up purchase:

    • US$50K MSRP License + SnS (500 tokens)
    • Initial purchase determines token level
    • Three-year term

    Minimum deal size of initial purchase:

    • US$150K-$250K
    • Discounted licenses and SnS through term of contract
    • Single volume license key
    • No final true-up
    • Global deployment rights and consolidation of multiple agreements

    1.2.1 The Volume Purchasing Program (VPP)

    This is the entry-level purchasing program aimed at small/mid-sized organizations.

    How the program works

    • The threshold to be able to purchase from the VPP program is 250 points minimum, equivalent to $25,000.
    • Discounts attained can only be applied to license purchases. They do not apply to service and support/renewals. Discounts range from 4% to 12%.
    • For the large majority of products 1 VPP point = ~$100.
      • Point values will be the same globally.
      • Point ratios may vary over time as SKUs are changed.
      • Points are valid for two years.

    Benefits

    • Budget predictability for two years.
    • Simple license purchase process.
    • Receive points on qualifying purchases that accumulate over a rolling eight-quarter period.
    • Online portal for tracking purchases and eligible discounts.
    • Global program where affiliates can purchase from existing contract.

    VPP Point & Discount Table

    Level

    Point Range

    Discount

    1

    250-599

    4%

    2

    600-999

    6%

    3

    1,000-1,749

    9%

    4

    1,750+

    12%

    Source: VMware Volume Purchasing Program

    1.2.2 Activity VPP Transactional Purchase Tool

    1-3 hours

    Instructions:

    1. Use the tool to analyze the cost breakdown and discount based on your Volume Purchasing Program level.
    2. On tab 1, Enter SnS install base renewal units and or new license details.
    3. Review tab 2 for Purchase summary.

    The image contains a screenshot of the VPP Transactional Purchase Tool.

    Input Output
    • SnS renewal details
    • New license requirements and pricing
    • Transaction purchase summary
    • Estimated VPP purchase level
    Materials Participants
    • Current VMware purchase orders
    • Any SnS renewal requirements
    • Transaction Purchase Tool
    • Procurement
    • Vendor Management
    • Licensing Admin

    Download the VPP Transactional Purchase Tool

    1.3 Evaluate agreement options

    Introduction to EPP and ELA

    What to know when using a token/credit-based agreement.

    Token/credit-based agreements carry high risk as customers are purchasing a set number of tokens/credits to be redeemed during the ELA term for licenses.

    • Tokens/credits that are not used during the ELA term expire and become worthless.
    • By default in most agreements (negotiation dependent), tokens/credits are tied to pricing maintained by VMware on its website that is subject to change (increase usually), resulting in a reduced value for the tokens/credits.
      • Therefore, it is necessary to negotiate to have current list prices for all products/versions included in the ELA to prevent price increases while in the current ELA term.
    • Token-based agreements may come with a lower overall discount level as VMware is granting more flexibility in terms of the wider product selection offered, vendor cost of overhead to manage the redemption program, currency exchange risks, and more complex revenue recognition headaches.

    1.3.1 The Enterprise Purchasing Program (EPP)

    This is aimed at mid-tier customers looking for flexibility with deeper discounting.

    How the program works

    • Token-based program in which tokens are redeemed for licenses and/or SnS.
      • Tokens can be added at any time to active fund.
      • Token usage is automatically tracked and reported.
    • Minimum order of 2,500 tokens, equivalent to $250,000 (1 token=$100).
      • Exceptions have been made, allowing for lower minimum spends.
    • Restricted to specific regions, not a global agreement.
    • Self-service portal for access to license keys and support entitlements.
    • Deeper discounting than the VMware Volume Purchase Program.
    • EPP initial purchase gets VPP L4 for four years.

    Benefits

    • Able to mix and match VMware products, manage licenses, and adjust deployment strategy.
    • Prices are protected for term of the EPP agreement.
    • Number of tokens needed to obtain a product or SnS are negotiated at the start of the contract and fixed for the term.
    • SnS is co-termed to the EPP term.
    • Ability to purchase new products that become available at a future date and are listed on the EPP Eligibility Matrix.

    EPP Level & Point Table

    Level

    Point Range

    7

    2,500-3,499

    8

    3,500-4,499

    9

    4,500-5,999

    10

    6,000+

    Source: VMware Volume Purchasing Program

    1.3.2 The ELA is aimed at large global organizations, offering the deepest discounts with operational benefits and flexibility

    What is an ELA?

    • The ELA agreement provides the best vehicle for global enterprises to obtain maximum discounts and price-hold protection for a set period of time. Discounts and price holds are removed once an ELA has expired.
    • The ELA minimum spend previously was $500,000. Purchase volume now generally starts at $250K total spend with exceptions and, depending on VMware, it may be possible to attain for $150K in net-new license spend.

    Key things to know

    • Customers pay up front for license and SnS rights, but depending on the deployment plans, the value of the licenses is not realized and/or recognized for up to two years after point of purchase.
    • License and SnS is paid up front for a three-year period in most ELAs, although a one- or two-year term can be negotiated.
    • Licenses not deployed in year one should be discounted in value and drive a re-evaluation of the ELA ROI, as even heavily discounted licenses that are not used until year three may not be such a great deal in retrospect.
      • Use a time value of money calculation to arrive at a realistic ROI.
      • Partner with Finance and Accounting to ensure the ROI also clears any Internal Hurdle Rate (IHR).
      • Share and strategically position your IHR with VMware and resellers to ensure they understand the minimum value an ELA deal must bring to the table.
    • Organizational changes, such as merger, acquisition, and divestiture (MAD) activities, may result in the customer paying for license rights that can no longer be used and/or require a renegotiated ELA.

    Info-Tech Insight

    If a legacy ELA exists that has “deploy or lose” language, engage VMware to recapture any lost license rights as VMware has changed this language effective with 2016 agreements and there is an “appeals” process for affected customers.

    1.3.3 Select the best ELA variant to match your specific demand profile and financial needs

    The advantages of an ELA are:

    • Maximum discount level + price protection
    • SnS discounted at % of net license fee
    • Sole option for global use territory rights

    General disadvantages are:

    • Term lock-in with SnS for three years
    • Pay up front and if defer usage, ROI drops
    • Territory rights priced at a premium versus domestic use rights

    Type of ELAs

    ELA Type

    Description

    Pros and Cons

    Capped (max quantities)

    Used to purchase a specific quantity and type of license.

    Pro – Clarity on what will be purchased

    Pro – Lower risk of over licensing

    Con – Requires accurate forecasting

    All you can eat or unlimited

    Used to purchase access to specified products that can be deployed in unlimited quantities during the ELA term.

    Pro – Acquire large quantity of licenses

    Pro – Accurate forecasting not critical

    Con – Deployment can easily exceed forecast, leading to high renewal costs

    Burn-down

    A form of capped ELA purchase that uses prepaid tokens that can be used more flexibly to acquire a variety of licenses or services. This can include the hybrid purchasing program (HPP) credits. However, the percentage redeemable for VMware subscription services may be limited to 10% of the MSRP value of the HPP credit.

    Pro – Accurate demand forecast not critical

    Pro – Can be used for products and services

    Con – Unused tokens or credits are forfeited

    True-up

    Allows for additional purchases during the ELA term on a determined schedule based on the established ELA pricing.

    Pro – Consumption payments matched after initial purchase

    Pro – Accurate demand forecast not critical

    Con – Potentially requires transaction throughout term

    1.4 Purchase and manage licenses

    Negotiating ELA terms and conditions

    Editable copies of VMware’s license and governance documentation are a requirement to initiate the dialogue and negotiation process over T&Cs.

    VMware’s licensing is complex and although documentation is publicly available, it is often hidden on VMware’s website.

    Many VMware customers often overlook reviewing the license T&Cs, leaving them open to compliance risks.

    It is imperative for customers to understand:

    • Product definition for licensing of each acquired product
    • Products included by bundle
    • Use restrictions:
      • The VMware Product Guide, which includes information about:
        • ELA Order Forms, Amendments, Exhibits, EULA, Support T&Cs, and other policies that add dozens of pages to a contractual agreement.
        • All of these documents are web based and can change monthly; URL links in the contract do not take the user to the actual document but a landing page from which customers must find the applicable documents.
      • Obtain copies of ALL current documents at the time of your order and keep as a reference in the CLM and SAM systems.

    Build in time to obtain, review, and negotiate these documents (easily weeks to months).

    1.4.1 Negotiating ELA terms and conditions specifics

    License and Deployment

    • Review perpetual use rights for all licenses purchased under the ELA (exception being subscription services).
    • Carefully scrutinize contract language for clearly defined deployment rights.
      • Some agreements contain language that terminates the use rights for licenses not deployed by the end of the ELA term.
    • While older contracts would frequently contain clearly defined token values and product prices for the ELA term, VMware has moved away from this process and now refers to URL links for current MSRP pricing.

    Use Rights

    • The customer’s legal entities and territories listed in the contract are hard limits on the license usage via the VMware Product Guide definitions. Global use rights are not a standard license grant with VMware license agreement by default. Global rights are usually tied to an ELA.
    • VMware audits most aggressively against violations of territory use rights and will use the non-compliance events to resolve the issue via a commercial transaction.
      • Negotiate for assignment rights with no strings attached in terms of fees or multi-party consent by future affiliates or successors to a surviving entity.
    • Extraordinary Corporate Transaction clause: VMware’s standard language prevents customers from using licenses within the ELA for any third party that becomes part of customer’s business by way of acquisition, merger, consolidation, change of control, reorganization, or other similar transaction.
      • Request VMware to drop this language.
    • Include any required language pertaining to MAD events as default language will not allow for transfer or assignment of license rights.

    Checklist of necessary information to negotiate the best deal

    Product details that go beyond the sales pitch

    • Product family
    • Unique product SKU for license renewal
    • Part description
    • Current regional or global price list
    • One and three-year proposal for SnS renewals including new license and SnS detail
    • SnS term dates
    • Discount or offered prices for all line items (global pricing is generally ~20% higher than US pricing)

    Different support levels (e.g. basic, enterprise, per incident)

    • Standard pricing:
      • Basic Support = 21% of current list price (12x5)
      • Production Support = 25% of current list price (24x7 for severity 1 issues) – defined in VMware Support and Subscription Services T&Cs; non-severity 1 issues are 12x5

    Details to ensure the product being purchased matches the business needs

    • Realizing after the fact the product is insufficient with respect to functional requirements or that extra spend is required can be frustrating and extend expected timelines

    SnS renewals pricing is based on the (1) year SnS list price

    • This can be bundled for a multi-year discounted SnS rate (can result in 12%+ under VPP)

    Governing agreements, VPP program details

    • Have a printed copy of documents that are URL links, which VMware can change, allowing for surprises or unexpected changes in rules

    1.4.2 Activity VMware ELA Analysis Tool

    2-4 hours

    Instructions:

    1. As a group, review the various RFQ responses. Identify top three proposals and start to enter proposal details into the VPP Prepay or ELA tabs of the analysis tool.
    2. Review savings in the ELA Offer Analysis tab.

    The image contains screenshots of the VMware ELA Analysis Tool.

    Input Output
    • RFQ requirements data
    • RFQ response data
    • Analysis of ELA proposals
    • ELA savings analysis
    Materials Participants
    • RFQ response documents
    • ELA Analysis Tool
    • IT Leadership
    • Procurement
    • Vendor Management

    Download the VMware ELA Analysis Tool

    1.4.3 Negotiating ELA terms and conditions specifics: pricing, renewal, and exit

    VMware does not offer price protection on future license consumption by default.

    Securing “out years” pricing for SnS or the cost of SnS is critical or it will default to a set percentage (25%) of MSRP, removing the ELA discount.

    Typically, the out year is one year; maximum is two years.

    Negotiate the “go forward” SnS pricing post-ELA term as part of the ELA negotiations when you have some leverage.

    Default after (1) out year is to rise to 25% of current MSRP versus as low as 20% of net license price within the ELA.

    Carefully incorporate the desired installed-base licenses that were acquired pre-ELA into the agreement, but ensure unwanted licenses are removed.

    Ancillary but binding support policies, online terms and conditions, and other hyperlinked documentation should be negotiated and incorporated as part of the agreement whenever possible.

    1.4.4 Find the best reseller partner

    Seek out a qualified VMware partner that will work with you and with your interest as a priority:

    1. Resellers, at minimum, should have achieved an enterprise-level rating, as these partners can offer the deepest discounts and have more clout with VMware.
    2. Select your reseller prior to engaging in any RFX acquisition steps. Verify they are enterprise level or higher AND secure their written commitment to maximum pass-through of the discounting provided to them by VMware.
    3. Document and prioritize key T&Cs for your ELA and submit to your sales team along with a requirement and timeline for their formal response. Essentially, this escalates outside of the VMware process and disrupts the status quo. Ideally this will occur in advance of being presented a contract by VMware and be pre-emptive in nature.
    4. If applicable and of benefit or a high priority, seek out a reseller that is willing to finance the VMware upfront payment cost at a low or no interest rate.
    5. It will be important to have ELA-level deals escalated to higher levels of authority to obtain “best in class” discount levels, above and beyond those prescribed in the VMware sales playbook.
    6. VMware’s standard process is to “route” customers through a pre-defined channel and “deal desk” process. Preferred pricing of up to an additional 10% discount is reserved for the first reseller that registers the deal with VMware, with larger discounts reserved for the Enterprise and Premium partners. Additional discounts can be earned if the deal closes within specified time periods (First Deal Registration).

    1.4.5 Activity VMware ELA RFQ Template

    1-3 hours

    Use this tool for as a template for an RFQ with VMware ELA contracts.

    1. For SnS renewals that contain no new licenses, state that the requirement for award consideration is the provisioning of all details for each itemized SnS renewal product code corresponding to all the licenses of your installed base. The details for the renewals are to be placed in Section 1 of the template.
    2. SnS Renewal Options: Info-Tech recommends that you ask for one- and three-year SnS renewal proposals, assuming these terms are realistic for your business requirements. Then compare your SnS BAU costs for these two options against ELA offers to determine the best choice for your renewal.

    The image contains a screenshot of the VMware ELA RFQ Template.

    Input Output
    • Renewing SnS data
    • Agreement type options
    • Detailed list of required licenses
    • Summary list of SnS requirements
    Materials Participants
    • RFQ Template
    • SnS renewal summary
    • New license/subscription details
    • IT Leadership
    • Vendor Management
    • Procurement

    Download the VMware ELA RFQ Template

    1.4.6 Consider your path forward

    Consider your route forward as contract commitments, license compliance, and terms and conditions differ in structure to perpetual models previously used.

    • Are you able to accurately discover VMware licensing within your environment?
    • Is licensing managed for compliance? Are internal audits conducted so you have accurate results?
    • Have the product use rights been examined for terms and conditions such as geographic rights? Some T&Cs may change over time due to hyperlinked references within commercial documents.
    • How are Oracle and SQL being used within your VMware environment? This may affect license compliance with Oracle and Microsoft in virtualized environments.
    • Prepare for the Subscription model; it’s here now and will be the lead discussion with all VMware reps going forward.

    Shift to Subscription

    1. With the $64bn takeover by Broadcom, there will be a significant shift and pressure to the subscription model.
    2. Broadcom has significant growth targets for its VMware acquisition that can only be achieved through a strong press to a SaaS model.

    Info-Tech Insight

    VMware has a license cost calculator and additional licensing documents that can be used to help determine what spend should be.

    Phase # 2

    Transition to the VMware Cloud

    Phase 1

    Phase 2

    1.1 Establish licensing requirements

    1.2 Evaluate licensing options

    1.3 Evaluate agreement options

    1.4 Purchase and manage licenses

    2.1 Understand the VMware subscription model

    2.2 Migrate workloads and licenses

    2.3 Discuss the VMware sales approach

    2.4 Manage SnS and cloud subscriptions

    This phase will walk you through the following activities:

    • Understand the VMware licensing model
    • Understand the license agreement options
    • Understand the VMware sales approach

    This phase will take you thorough:

    • The new VMware subscription movement to the cloud
    • How to prepare and migrate
    • Manage your subscriptions efficiently

    2.1 Understand the VMware subscription model

    VMware Cloud Universal

    • VMware Cloud Universal unifies compute, network, and storage capabilities across infrastructures, management, and applications.
    • Take advantage of financial and cloud management flexibility by combining on-premises and SaaS capabilities for automation, operations, log analytics, and network visibility across your infrastructure.
    • Capitalize on VMware knowledge by integrating proven migration methods and plans across your transformation journey such as consumption strategies, business outcome workshops, and more.
    • Determine your eligibility to earn a one-time discount with this exclusive benefit designed to offset the value of your current unamortized VMware on-premises license investments and then reallocate toward your multi-cloud initiatives.

    2.2 Migrate workloads and licenses to the cloud

    There are several cloud migration options and solutions to consider.

    • VMware Cloud offers solutions that can provide a low-cost path to the cloud that will help accelerate modernization.
    • There are also many third-party solution providers who can be engaged to migrate workloads and other infrastructure to VMware Cloud and into other public cloud providers.
    • VMware Cloud can be deployed on many IaaS providers such as AWS, Azure, Google, Dell, and IBM.

    VMware Cloud Assist

    1. Leverage all available transition funding opportunities and any IaaS migration incentives from VMware.
    2. Learn and understand the value and capabilities of VMware vRealize Cloud Universal to help you transition and manage hybrid infrastructure.

    2.2.1 Manage your VMware cloud subscriptions

    Use VMware vRealize to manage private, public, and local environments.

    Combine SaaS and on-premises capabilities for automation, operations, log analytics, network visibility, security, and compliance into one license.

    The image contains a screenshot of a diagram to demonstrate VMware cloud subscriptions.

    2.3 The VMware sales approach

    Understand the pitch before entering the discussion

    1. VMware will present a PowerPoint presentation proposal comparing a Business-as-Usual (BAU) scenario versus the ELA model.
    2. Critical factors to consider if considering the proposed ELA are growth rate projections, deployment schedule, cost of non-ELA products/options, shelf-ware, and non-ELA discounts (e.g. VPP, multi-year, or pre-paid).
    3. Involving VMware’s direct account team along with your reseller in the negotiations can be beneficial. Keep in mind that VMware ultimately decides on the final price in terms of the discount that is passed through. Ensure you have a clear line of sight into how pricing is determined.
    4. Explore reseller incentives and promotional programs that may provide for deeper than normal discount opportunities.

    INFO-TECH TIP: Create your own assumptions as inputs into the BAU model and then evaluate the ELA value proposition instead of depending on VMware’s model.

    2.4 Manage SnS and cloud subscriptions

    The new subscription model is making SnS renewal more complex.

    • Start renewal planning four to six months prior to anniversary.
    • Work closely with your reseller on your SnS renewal options.
    • Request “as is” versus subscription renewal proposal from reseller or VMware with a “savings” component.
    • Consider and review multi-year versus annual renewal; savings will differ.
    • For the Subscription transition renewal model, ensure that credits for legacy licensing is provided.
    • Negotiate cloud transition investments and incentives from VMware.

    What information to collect and how to analyze it

    • Negotiating toward preferred terms on SnS is critical, more so than when new license purchases are made, as approximately 75-80% of server virtualization are at x86 workloads, where maintenance revenue is a larger source of revenue for VMware than new license sales.
    • All relevant license and SnS details must be obtained from VMware to include Product Family, Part Description, Product Code (SKU), Regional/Global List Price, SnS Term Dates, and Discount Price for all new licenses.
    • VMware has all costs tied to the US dollar; you must calculate currency conversion into ROI models as VMware does not adjust token values of products across geographies or currency of purchase. The token to dollar value by product SKU is locked for the three-year term. This translates into a variable cost model depending on how local currency fluctuates against the US dollar; time the initial purchase to take this into consideration, if applicable.
    • Products purchased based on MSRP price with each token contains a value of US$100. Under the Hybrid Purchasing Program (HPP) credit values and associated buying power will fluctuate over the term as VMware reserves the right to adjust current list prices. Consider locking in a set product list and pricing versus HPP.
    • Take a structured approach to discover true discounts via the use of a tailored RFQ template and options model to compare and contrast VMware ELA proposals.

    Use Info-Tech Research Group’s customized RFQ template to discover true discount levels and model various purchase options for VMware ELA proposals.

    The image contains a screenshot of the VMware RFQ Template Tool.

    Summary of accomplishment

    Knowledge Gained

    • The key pieces of licensing information that should be gathered about the current state of your own organization.
    • An in-depth understanding of the required licenses across all of your products.
    • Clear methodology for selecting the most effective contract type.
    • Development of measurable, relevant metrics to help track future project success and identify areas of strength and weakness within your licensing program.

    Processes Optimized

    • Senior leaders in IT now have a clear understanding of the importance of licensing in relation to business objectives.
    • Understanding of the various licensing considerations that need to be made.
    • Contract negotiation.

    Related Info-Tech Research

    Prepare for Negotiations More Effectively

    • IT budgets are increasing, but many CIOs feel their budgets are inadequate to accomplish what is being asked of them.
    • Eighty percent of organizations don’t have a mature, repeatable, scalable negotiation process.
    • Training dollars on negotiations are often wasted or ineffective.

    Price Benchmarking & Negotiation

    You need to achieve an objective assessment of vendor pricing in your IT contracts, but you have limited knowledge about:

    • Current price benchmarking on the vendor.
    • Pricing and negotiation intelligence.
    • How to secure a market-competitive price.
    • Vendor pricing tiers, models, and negotiation tactics.

    VMware vRealize Cloud Management

    VMware vCloud Suite is an integrated offering that brings together VMware’s industry-leading vSphere hypervisor and VMware vRealize Suite multi-vendor hybrid cloud management platform. VMware’s new portable licensing units allow vCloud Suite to build and manage both vSphere-based private clouds and multi-vendor hybrid clouds.

    Bibliography

    Barrett, Alex. “vSphere and vCenter licensing and pricing explained -- a VMware license guide.” TechTarget, July 2010. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Bateman, Kayleigh. “VMware licensing, pricing and features mini guide.” Computer Weekly, May 2011. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Blaisdell, Rick. “What Are The Common Business Challenges The VMware Sector Faces At This Point In Time?” CIO Review, n.d. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    COMPAREX. “VMware Licensing Program.” COMPAREX, n.d. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Couesbot, Erwann. “Using VMware? Oracle customers hate this licensing pitfall.” UpperEdge, 17 October 2016. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Crayon. “VMware Licensing Programs.” Crayon, n.d. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Datanyze." Virtualization Software Market Share.” Datanyze, n.d. Web.
    Demers, Tom. “Top 18 Tips & Quotes on the Challenges & Future of VMware Licensing.” ProfitBricks, 1 September 2015. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Fenech, J. “A quick look at VMware vSphere Editions and Licensing.” VMware Hub by Altaro, 17 May 2017. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Flexera. “Challenges of VMware Licensing.” Flexera, n.d. Accessed 5 February 2018.
    Fraser, Paris. “A Guide for VMware Licensing.” Sovereign, 11 October 2016. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Haag, Michael. “IDC Data Shows vSAN is the Largest Share of Total HCI Spending.” VMware Blogs, 1 December 2017. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Kealy, Victoria. “VMware Licensing Quick Guide 2015.” The ITAM Review, 17 December 2015. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Kirsch, Brian. “A VMware licensing guide to expanding your environment.” TechTarget, August 2017. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Kirupananthan, Arun. “5 reasons to get VMware licensing right.” Softchoice, 16 April 2018. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Knorr, Eric. “VMware on AWS: A one-way ticket to the cloud.” InfoWorld, 17 October 2016. Accessed 7 May 2018
    Leipzig. “Help, an audit! License audits by VMware. Are you ready?” COMPAREX Group, 2 May 2016. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Mackie, Kurt. “VMware Rips Microsoft for Azure “Bare Metal” Migration Solution.” Redmond Magazine, 27 November 2017. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Micromail. “VMware vSphere Software Licensing.” Micromail, n.d. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Microsoft Corportation. “Migrating VMware to Microsoft Azure” Microsoft Azure, November 2017. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Peter. “Server Virtualization and OS Trends.” Spiceworks, 30 August 2016. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Rich. “VMware running on Azure.” The ITAM Review, 28 November 2017. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Robb, Drew. “Everything you need to know about VMware’s licensing shake up.” Softchoice, 4 March 2016. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Rose, Brendan. “How to determine which VMware licensing option is best.” Softchoice, 28 July 2015. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Scholten, Eric. “New VMware licensing explained.” VMGuru, 12 July 2011. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Sharwood, Simon. “Microsoft to run VMware on Azure, on bare metal. Repeat. Microsoft to run VMware on Azure.” The Register, 22 November 2017. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Siebert, Eric. “Top 7 VMware Management Challenges.” Veeam, n.d. Web.
    Smith, Greg. “Will The Real HCI Market Leader Please Stand Up?” Nutanix, 29 September 2017. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    Spithoven, Richard. “Licensing Oracle software in VMware vCenter 6.0.” LinkedIn, 2 May 2016. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    VMTurbo, Inc. “Licensing, Compliance & Audits in the Cloud Era.” Turbonomics, November 2015. Web.
    VMware. “Aug 1st – Dec 31st 2016 Solution Provider Program Requirements & Incentives & Rewards.” VMware, n.d. Web.
    VMware. “Global Support and Subscription Services “SnS” Renewals Policy.” VMware, n.d. Web.
    VMware. “Support Policies.” VMware, n.d. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    VMware. “VMware Cloud Community.” VMware Cloud, n.d. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    VMware. “VMware Cloud on AWS” VMware Cloud, n.d. Accessed 7 May 2018.
    VMware. “VMware Enterprise Purchasing Program.” VMware, 2013. Web.
    VMware. “VMware Product Guide.” VMware, May 2018. Web.
    VMware. “VMware Volume Purchasing Program.” VMware, April 2019. Web.
    VMware. "VMware Case Studies." VMware, n.d. Web.
    Wiens, Rob. “VMware Enterprise Licensing – What You Need To Know. House of Brick, 14 April 2017. Accessed 7 May 2018

    Microsoft Dynamics 365: Understand the Transition to the Cloud

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    • Parent Category Name: Licensing
    • Parent Category Link: /licensing
    • Your on-premises Dynamics CRM or AX needs updating or replacing, and you’re not sure whether to upgrade or transition to the cloud with the new Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform. You’re also uncertain about what the cost might be or if there are savings to be had with a transition to the cloud for your enterprise resource planning system.
    • The new license model, Apps vs. Plans and Dual Use Rights in the cloud, includes confusing terminology and licensing rules that don’t seem to make sense. This makes it difficult to purchase proper licensing that aligns with your current on-premises setup and to maximize your choices in transition licenses.
    • There are different licensing programs for Dynamics 365 in the cloud. You need to decide on the most cost effective program for your company, for now and for the future.
    • Microsoft is constantly pressuring you to move to the cloud, but you don’t understand the why. You're uncertain if there's real value in such a strategic move right now, or if should you wait awhile.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Focus on what’s best for you. Do a thorough current state assessment of your hardware and software needs and consider what will be required in the near future (one to four years).
    • Educate yourself. You should have a good understanding of your options from staying on-premises vs. an interim hybrid model vs. a lift and shift to the cloud.
    • Consider the overall picture. There might not be hard cost savings to be realized in the near term, given the potential increase in licensing costs over a CapEx to OpEx savings.

    Impact and Result

    • Understanding the best time to transition, from a licensing perspective, could save you significant dollars over the next one to four years.
    • Planning and effectively mapping your current licenses to the new cloud user model will maximize your current investment into the cloud and fully leverage all available Microsoft incentives in the process.
    • Gaining the knowledge required to make the most informed transition decision, based on best timing, most appropriate licensing program, and maximized cost savings in the near term.
    • Engaging effectively with Microsoft and a competent Dynamics partner for deployment or licensing needs.

    Microsoft Dynamics 365: Understand the Transition to the Cloud Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should learn about Microsoft Dynamics 365 user-based cloud licensing, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Timing

    Review to confirm if you are eligible for Microsoft cloud transition discounts and what is your best time to move to the cloud.

    • Microsoft Dynamics 365: Understand the Transition to the Cloud – Phase 1: Timing
    • Microsoft License Agreement Summary Tool
    • Existing CRM-AX License Summary Worksheet

    2. Licensing

    Begin with a review to understand user-based cloud licensing, then move to mapping your existing licenses to the cloud users and plans.

    • Microsoft Dynamics 365: Understand the Transition to the Cloud – Phase 2: Licensing
    • Microsoft Dynamics 365 On-Premises License Transition Mapping Tool
    • Microsoft Dynamics 365 User License Assignment Tool
    • Microsoft Licensing Programs Brief Overview

    3. Cost review

    Use your cloud mapping activity as well your eligible discounts to estimate your cloud transition licensing costs.

    • Microsoft Dynamics 365: Understand the Transition to the Cloud – Phase 3: Cost Review
    • Microsoft Dynamics 365 Cost Estimator

    4. Analyze and decide

    Start by summarizing your choice license program, decide on the ideal time, then move on to total cost review.

    • Microsoft Dynamics 365: Understand the Transition to the Cloud – Phase 4: Analyze and Decide
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Microsoft Dynamics 365: Understand the Transition to the Cloud

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Understand What You Own and What You Can Transition to the Cloud

    The Purpose

    Understand what you own and what you can transition to the cloud.

    Learn which new cloud user licenses to transition.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    All your licenses in one summary.

    Eligible transition discounts.

    Mapping of on-premises to cloud users.

    Activities

    1.1 Validate your discount availability.

    1.2 Summarize agreements.

    1.3 Itemize your current license ownership.

    1.4 Review your timing options.

    1.5 Map your on-premises licenses to the cloud-based, user-based model.

    Outputs

    Current agreement summary

    On-premises to cloud user mapping summary

    Understanding of cloud app and plan features

    2 Transition License Cost Estimate and Additional Costs

    The Purpose

    Estimate cloud license costs and other associated expenses.

    Summarize and decide on the best timing, users, and program.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Good cost estimate of equivalent cloud user-based licenses.

    Understanding of when and how to move your on-premises licensing to the new Dynamics 365 cloud model.

    Activities

    2.1 Estimate cloud user license costs.

    2.2 Calculate additional costs related to license transitions.

    2.3 Review all activities.

    2.4 Summarize and analyze your decision.

    Outputs

    Cloud user licensing cost modeling

    Summary of total costs

    Validation of costs and transition choices

    An informed decision on your Dyn365 timing, licensing, and costs

    Recruit and Retain People of Color in IT

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    • Parent Category Name: Engage
    • Parent Category Link: /engage
    • Organizations have been trying to promote equality for many years. Diversity and inclusion strategies and a myriad of programs have been implemented in companies across the world. Despite the attempts, many organizations still struggle to ensure that their workforce is representative of the populations they support or want to support.
    • IT brings another twist. Many IT companies and departments are based on the culture of white males, and underrepresented ethnic communities find it more of a challenge to fit in.
    • This sometimes means that talented minorities are less incentivized to join or stay in technology.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Diversity and inclusion cannot be a one-time campaign or a one-off initiative.
    • For real change to happen, every leader needs to internalize the value of creating and retaining diverse teams.

    Impact and Result

    • To stay competitive, IT leaders need to be more involved and commit to a plan to recruit and retain people of color in their departments and organizations. A diverse team is an answer to innovation that can differentiate your company.
    • Treat recruiting and retaining a diverse team as a business challenge that requires full engagement. Info-Tech offers a targeted solution that will help IT leaders build a plan to attract, recruit, engage, and retain people of color.

    Recruit and Retain People of Color in IT Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should recruit and retain people of color in your IT department or organization, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the ways we can support you in this endeavor.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Recruit people of color in IT

    Diverse teams are necessary to foster creativity and guide business strategies. Overcome limitations by recruiting people of color and creating a diverse workforce.

    • Recruit and Retain People of Color in IT – Phase 1: Recruit People of Color in IT
    • Support Plan
    • IT Behavioral Interview Question Library

    2. Retain people of color in IT

    Underrepresented employees benefit from an expansive culture. Create an inclusive environment and retain people of color and promote value within your organization.

    • Recruit and Retain People of Color in IT – Phase 2: Retain People of Color in IT

    Infographic

    Workshop: Recruit and Retain People of Color in IT

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Setting the Stage

    The Purpose

    Introduce challenges and concerns around recruiting and retaining people of color.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Gain a sense of direction.

    Activities

    1.1 Introduction to diversity conversations.

    1.2 Assess areas to focus on and determine what is right, wrong, missing, and confusing.

    1.3 Obtain feedback from your team about the benefits of working at your organization.

    1.4 Establish your employee value proposition (EVP).

    1.5 Discuss and establish your recruitment goals.

    Outputs

    Current State Analysis

    Right, Wrong, Missing, Confusing Quadrant

    Draft EVP

    Recruitment Goals

    2 Refine Your Recruitment Process

    The Purpose

    Identify areas in your current recruitment process that are preventing you from hiring people of color.

    Establish a plan to make improvements.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Optimized recruitment process

    Activities

    2.1 Brainstorm and research community partners.

    2.2 Review current job descriptions and equity statement.

    2.3 Update job description template and equity statement.

    2.4 Set team structure for interview and assessment.

    2.5 Identify decision-making structure.

    Outputs

    List of community partners

    Updated job description template

    Updated equity statement

    Interview and assessment structure

    Behavioral Question Library

    3 Culture and Management

    The Purpose

    Create a plan for an inclusive culture where your managers are supported.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Awareness of how to better support employees of color.

    Activities

    3.1 Discuss engagement and belonging.

    3.2 Augment your onboarding materials.

    3.3 Create an inclusive culture plan.

    3.4 Determine how to support your management team.

    Outputs

    List of onboarding content

    Inclusive culture plan

    Management support plan

    4 Close the Loop

    The Purpose

    Establish mechanisms to gain feedback from your employees and act on them.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Finalize the plan to create your diverse and inclusive workforce.

    Activities

    4.1 Ask and listen: determine what to ask your employees.

    4.2 Create your roadmap.

    4.3 Wrap-up and next steps.

    Outputs

    List of survey questions

    Roadmap

    Completed support plan

    Implement an IT Chargeback System

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    • member rating average days saved: Read what our members are saying
    • Parent Category Name: Cost & Budget Management
    • Parent Category Link: /cost-and-budget-management
    • Business units voraciously consume IT services and don’t understand the actual costs of IT. This is due to lack of IT cost transparency and business stakeholder accountability for consumption of IT services.
    • Business units perceive IT costs as uncompetitive, resulting in shadow IT and a negative perception of IT.
    • Business executives have decided to implement an IT chargeback program and IT must ensure the program succeeds.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Price IT services so that business consumers find them meaningful, measurable, and manageable:

    • The business must understand what they are being charged for. If they can’t understand the value, you’ve chosen the wrong basis for charge.
    • Business units must be able to control and track their consumption levels, or they will feel powerless to control costs and you’ll never attain real buy-in.

    Impact and Result

    • Explain IT costs in ways that matter to the business. Instead of focusing on what IT pays for, discuss the value that IT brings to the business by defining IT services and how they serve business users.
    • Develop a chargeback model that brings transparency to the flow of IT costs through to business value. Demonstrate how a good chargeback model can bring about fair “pay-for-value” and “pay-for-what-you-use” pricing.
    • Communicate IT chargeback openly and manage change effectively. Business owners will want to know how their profit and loss statements will be affected by the new pricing model.

    Implement an IT Chargeback System Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should implement an IT chargeback program, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Launch

    Make the case for IT chargeback, then assess the financial maturity of the organization and identify a pathway to success. Create a chargeback governance model.

    • Implement IT Chargeback – Phase 1: Launch
    • IT Chargeback Kick-Off Presentation

    2. Define

    Develop a chargeback model, including identifying user-facing IT services, allocating IT costs to services, and setting up the chargeback program.

    • Implement IT Chargeback – Phase 2: Define
    • IT Chargeback Program Development & Management Tool

    3. Implement

    Communicate the rollout of the IT chargeback model and establish a process for recovering IT services costs from business units.

    • Implement IT Chargeback – Phase 3: Implement
    • IT Chargeback Communication Plan
    • IT Chargeback Rollout Presentation
    • IT Chargeback Financial Presentation

    4. Revise

    Gather and analyze feedback from business owners, making necessary modifications to the chargeback model and communicating the implications.

    • Implement IT Chargeback – Phase 4: Revise
    • IT Chargeback Change Communication Template
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Implement an IT Chargeback System

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Kick-Off IT Chargeback

    The Purpose

    Make the case for IT chargeback.

    Identify the current and target state of chargeback maturity.

    Establish a chargeback governance model.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Investigated the benefits and challenges of implementing IT chargeback.

    Understanding of the reasons why traditional chargeback approaches fail.

    Identified the specific pathway to chargeback success.

    Activities

    1.1 Investigate the benefits and challenges of implementing IT chargeback

    1.2 Educate business owners and executives on IT chargeback

    1.3 Identify the current and target state of chargeback maturity

    1.4 Establish chargeback governance

    Outputs

    Defined IT chargeback mandate

    IT chargeback kick-off presentation

    Chargeback maturity assessment

    IT chargeback governance model

    2 Develop the Chargeback Model

    The Purpose

    Develop a chargeback model.

    Identify the customers and user-facing services.

    Allocate IT costs.

    Determine chargeable service units.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Identified IT customers.

    Identified user-facing services and generated descriptions for them.

    Allocated IT costs to IT services.

    Identified meaningful, measurable, and manageable chargeback service units.

    Activities

    2.1 Identify user-facing services and generate descriptions

    2.2 Allocate costs to user-facing services

    2.3 Determine chargeable service units and pricing

    2.4 Track consumption

    2.5 Determine service charges

    Outputs

    High-level service catalog

    Chargeback model

    3 Communicate IT Chargeback

    The Purpose

    Communicate the implementation of IT chargeback.

    Establish a process for recovering the costs of IT services from business units.

    Share the financial results of the charge cycle with business owners.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Managed the transition to charging and recovering the costs of IT services from business units.

    Communicated the implementation of IT chargeback and shared the financial results with business owners.

    Activities

    3.1 Create a communication plan

    3.2 Deliver a chargeback rollout presentation

    3.3 Establish a process for recovering IT costs from business units

    3.4 Share the financial results from the charge cycle with business owners

    Outputs

    IT chargeback communication plan

    IT chargeback rollout presentation

    IT service cost recovery process

    IT chargeback financial presentation

    4 Review the Chargeback Model

    The Purpose

    Gather and analyze feedback from business owners on the chargeback model.

    Make necessary modifications to the chargeback model and communicate implications.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Gathered business stakeholder feedback on the chargeback model.

    Made necessary modifications to the chargeback model to increase satisfaction and accuracy.

    Managed changes by communicating the implications to business owners in a structured manner.

    Activities

    4.1 Address stakeholder pain points and highly disputed costs

    4.2 Update the chargeback model

    4.3 Communicate the chargeback model changes and implications to business units

    Outputs

    Revised chargeback model with business feedback, change log, and modifications

    Chargeback change communication

    Embed Security Into the DevOps Pipeline

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    • Parent Category Name: Secure Cloud & Network Architecture
    • Parent Category Link: /secure-cloud-network-architecture
    • Your organization is starting its DevOps journey and is looking to you for guidance on how to ensure that the outcomes are secure.
    • Or, your organization may have already embraced DevOps but left the security team behind. Now you need to play catch-up.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Shift security left. Identify opportunities to embed security earlier in the development pipeline.
    • Start with minimum viable security. Use agile methodologies to further your goals of secure DevOps.
    • Treat “No” as a finite resource. The role of security must transition from that of naysayer to a partner in finding the way to “Yes.”

    Impact and Result

    • Leverage the CLAIM (Culture, Learning, Automation, Integration, Measurement) Framework to identify opportunities to close the gaps.
    • Collaborate to find new ways to shift security left so that it becomes part of development rather than an afterthought.
    • Start with creating minimum viable security by developing a DevSecOps implementation strategy that focuses initially on quick wins.

    Embed Security Into the DevOps Pipeline Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should secure the DevOps pipeline, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Identify opportunities

    Brainstorm opportunities to secure the DevOps pipeline using the CLAIM Framework.

    • Embed Security Into the DevOps Pipeline – Phase 1: Identify Opportunities

    2. Develop strategy

    Assess opportunities and formulate a strategy based on a cost/benefit analysis.

    • Embed Security Into the DevOps Pipeline – Phase 2: Develop Strategy
    • DevSecOps Implementation Strategy Template
    [infographic]

    Lay the Strategic Foundations of Your Applications Team

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    • Parent Category Name: Architecture & Strategy
    • Parent Category Link: /architecture-and-strategy
    • As an application leader, you are expected to quickly familiarize yourself with the current state of your applications environment.
    • You need to continuously demonstrate effective leadership to your applications team while defining and delivering a strategy for your applications department that will be accepted by stakeholders.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • The applications department can be viewed as the face of IT. The business often portrays the value of IT through the applications and services they provide and support. IT success can be dominantly driven by the application team’s performance.
    • Conflicting perceptions lead to missed opportunities. Being transparent on how well applications are supporting stakeholders from both business and technical perspectives is critical. This attribute helps validate that technical initiatives are addressing the right business problems or exploiting new value opportunities.

    Impact and Result

    • Get to know what needs to be changed quickly. Use Info-Tech’s advice and tools to perform an assessment of your department’s accountabilities and harvest stakeholder input to ensure that your applications operating model and portfolio meets or exceeds expectations and establishes the right solutions to the right problems.
    • Solidify the applications long-term strategy. Adopt best practices to ensure that you are striving towards the right goals and objectives. Not only do you need to clarify both team and stakeholder expectations, but you will ultimately need buy-in from them as you improve the operating model, applications portfolio, governance, and tactical plans. These items will be needed to develop your strategic model and long-term success.
    • Develop an action plan to show movement for improvements. Hit the ground running with an action plan to achieve realistic goals and milestones within an acceptable timeframe. An expectations-driven roadmap will help establish the critical structures that will continue to feed and grow your applications department.

    Lay the Strategic Foundations of Your Applications Team Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should develop an applications strategy, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Get to know your team

    Understand your applications team.

    • Lay the Strategic Foundations of Your Applications Team – Phase 1: Get to Know Your Team
    • Applications Strategy Template
    • Applications Diagnostic Tool

    2. Get to know your stakeholders

    Understand your stakeholders.

    • Lay the Strategic Foundations of Your Applications Team – Phase 2: Get to Know Your Stakeholders

    3. Develop your applications strategy

    Design and plan your applications strategy.

    • Lay the Strategic Foundations of Your Applications Team – Phase 3: Develop Your Applications Strategy
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Lay the Strategic Foundations of Your Applications Team

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Get to Know Your Team

    The Purpose

    Understand the expectations, structure, and dynamics of your applications team.

    Review your team’s current capacity.

    Gauge the team’s effectiveness to execute their operating model.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Clear understanding of the current responsibilities and accountabilities of your teams.

    Identification of improvement opportunities based on your team’s performance.

    Activities

    1.1 Define your team’s role and responsibilities.

    1.2 Understand your team’s application and project portfolios.

    1.3 Understand your team’s values and expectations.

    1.4 Gauge your team’s ability to execute your operating model.

    Outputs

    Current team structure, RACI chart, and operating model

    Application portfolios currently managed by applications team and projects currently committed to

    List of current guiding principles and team expectations

    Team effectiveness of current operating model

    2 Get to Know Your Stakeholders

    The Purpose

    Understand the expectations of stakeholders.

    Review the services stakeholders consume to support their applications.

    Gauge stakeholder satisfaction of the services and applications your team provides and supports.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Grounded understanding of the drivers and motivators of stakeholders that teams should accommodate.

    Identification of improvement opportunities that will increase the value your team delivers to stakeholders.

    Activities

    2.1 Understand your stakeholders and applications services.

    2.2 Define stakeholder expectations.

    2.3 Gauge stakeholder satisfaction of applications services and portfolio.

    Outputs

    Expectations stakeholders have on the applications team and the applications services they use

    List of applications expectations

    Stakeholder satisfaction of current operating model

    3 Develop Your Applications Strategy

    The Purpose

    Align and consolidate a single set of applications expectations.

    Develop key initiatives to alleviate current pain points and exploit existing opportunities to deliver new value.

    Create an achievable roadmap that is aligned to organizational priorities and accommodate existing constraints.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Applications team and stakeholders are aligned on the core focus of the applications department.

    Initiatives to address the high priority issues and opportunities.

    Activities

    3.1 Define your applications expectations.

    3.2 Investigate your diagnostic results.

    3.3 Envision your future state.

    3.4 Create a tactical plan to achieve your future state.

    3.5 Finalize your applications strategy.

    Outputs

    List of applications expectations that accommodates the team and stakeholder needs

    Root causes to issues and opportunities revealed in team and stakeholder assessments

    Future-state applications portfolio, operating model, supporting people, process, and technologies, and applications strategic model

    Roadmap that lays out initiatives to achieve the future state

    Completed applications strategy

    Secrets of SAP S-4HANA Licensing

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    • Parent Category Name: Vendor Management
    • Parent Category Link: /vendor-management
    • With the relatively slow uptake of the S/4HANA platform, the pressure is immense for SAP to maintain revenue growth.
    • SAP’s definitions and licensing rules are complex and vague, making it extremely difficult to purchase with confidence while remaining compliant.
    • Aggressive audit tactics may be used to speed up the move to HANA.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Mapping SAP products to HANA can be highly complex, leading to overspending and an inability to reduce future spend.
    • The deployment model chosen will directly impact commercial pathways forward.
    • Beware of digital (indirect) access licensing and compliance concerns.
    • Without having a holistic negotiation strategy, it is easy to hit a common obstacle and land into SAP’s playbook, requiring further spend.

    Impact and Result

    • Build a business case to evaluate S/4HANA.
    • Understand the S/4HANA roadmap and map current functionality to ensure compatibility.
    • Understand negotiating pricing and commercial terms.
    • Learn the “SAP way” of conducting business, which includes a best-in-class sales structure, unique contracts, and license use policies combined with a hyper-aggressive compliance function.

    Secrets of SAP S/4HANA Licensing Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should explore the secrets of SAP S/4HANA licensing, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Establish requirements

    Determining SAP’s fit within your organization is critical. Start off by building a business case to assess overarching drivers and justification for change, any net new business benefits and long-term sustainability. Oftentimes the ROI is negative, but the investment sets the stage for long-term growth.

    2. Evaluate licensing options

    Your deployment model is more important than you think. Selecting a deployment model will dictate your licensing options followed by your contractual pathways forward.

    • SAP License Summary and Analysis Tool
    • SAP Digital Access Licensing Pricing Tool

    3. Negotiation and license management

    Know what’s in the contract. Each customer agreement is different and there may be existing terms that are beneficial. Depending on how much is spent, anything can be up for negation.

    • SAP S/4HANA Terms and Conditions Evaluator
    [infographic]

    Evaluate Your Vendor Account Team to Optimize Vendor Relations

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}222|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): N/A
    • member rating average dollars saved: N/A
    • member rating average days saved: N/A
    • Parent Category Name: Vendor Management
    • Parent Category Link: /vendor-management
    • Understand how important your account is to the vendor and how it is classified.
    • Understand how informed the account team is about your company and your industry.
    • Understand how long the team has been with the vendor. Have they been around long enough to have developed a “brand” or trust within their organization?
    • Understand and manage the relationships and influence the account team has within your organization to maintain control of the relationship.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    Conducting the appropriate due diligence on your vendor’s account team is as important as the due diligence you put into the vendor. Ongoing management of the account team should follow the lifecycle of the vendor relationship.

    Impact and Result

    Understanding your vendor team’s background, experience, and strategic approach to your account is key to the management of the relationship, the success of the vendor agreement, and, depending on the vendor, the success of your business.

    Evaluate Your Vendor Account Team to Optimize Vendor Relations Research & Tools

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Evaluate Your Vendor Account Team to Optimize Vendor Relations Deck – Understand the value of knowing your account team’s influence in their organization, and yours, to drive results.

    Learn how to best qualify that you have the right team for your business needs, using the accompanying tools to measure and monitor success throughout the relationship.

    • Evaluate Your Vendor Account Team to Optimize Vendor Relations Storyboard

    2. Vendor Rules of Engagement Template – Use this template to create a vendor rules of engagement document for inclusion in your company website, RFPs, and contracts.

    The Vendor Rules of Engagement template will help you develop your written expectations for the vendor for how they will interact with your business and stakeholders.

    • Vendor Rules of Engagement

    3. Evalu-Rate Your Account Team – Use this tool to develop criteria to evaluate your account team and gain feedback from your stakeholders.

    Evaluate your vendor account teams using this template to gather stakeholder feedback on vendor performance.

    • Evalu-Rate Your Account Team
    [infographic]

    Further reading

    Evaluate Your Vendor Account Team to Optimize Vendor Relations

    Understand the value of knowing your account team’s influence in their organization, and yours, to drive results.

    Analyst Perspective

    Having the wrong account team has consequences for your business.

    IT professionals interact with vendor account teams on a regular basis. You may not give it much thought, but do you have a good understanding of your rep’s ability to support/service your account, in the manner you expect, for the best possible outcome? The consequences to your business of an inappropriately assigned and poorly trained account team can have a disastrous impact on your relationship with the vendor, your business, and your budget. Doing the appropriate due diligence with your account team is as important as the due diligence you should put into the vendor. And, of course, ongoing management of the account team relationship is vital. Here we will share how best to qualify that you have the right team for your business needs as well as how to measure and monitor success throughout the relationship.

    Photo of Donna Glidden, Research Director, Vendor Management, Info-Tech Research Group.

    Donna Glidden
    Research Director, Vendor Management
    Info-Tech Research Group

    Executive Summary

    Your Challenge
    • Understand how important your account is to the vendor and how it is classified.
    • Understand how informed the account team is about your company and your industry.
    • Understand how long the team has been with the vendor. Have they been around long enough to have developed a “brand” or trust within their organization?
    • Understand and manage the relationships and influence the account team has within your organization to maintain control of the relationship.
    Common Obstacles
    • The vendor account team “came with the deal.”
    • The vendor account team has limited training and experience.
    • The vendor account team has close relationships within your organization outside of Procurement.
    • Managing your organization’s vendors is ad hoc and there is no formalized process for vendors to follow.
    • Your market position with the vendor is not optimal.
    Info-Tech’s Approach
    • Establish a repeatable, consistent vendor management process that focuses on the account team to maintain control of the relationship and drive the results you need.
    • Create a questionnaire for gaining stakeholder feedback to evaluate the account team on a regular basis.
    • Consider adding a vendor rules of engagement exhibit to your contracts and RFXs.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Understanding your vendor team’s background, their experience, and their strategic approach to your account is key to the management of the relationship, the success of the vendor agreement, and, depending on the vendor, the success of your business.

    Blueprint benefits

    IT Benefits

    • Clear lines of communication
    • Correct focus on the specific needs of IT
    • More accurate project scoping
    • Less time wasted

    Mutual IT and
    Business Benefits

    • Reduced time to implement
    • Improved alignment between IT & business
    • Improved vendor performance
    • Improved vendor relations

    Business Benefits

    • Clear relationship guidelines based on mutual understanding
    • Improved communications between the parties
    • Mutual understanding of roles/goals
    • Measurable relationship criteria

    Insight Summary

    Overarching insight

    Conducting the appropriate due diligence on your vendor’s account team is as important as the due diligence you put into the vendor. Ongoing management of the account team should follow the lifecycle of the vendor relationship.

    Introductory/RFP phase
    • Track vendor contacts with your organization.
    • Qualify the account team as you would the vendor:
      • Background
      • Client experience
    • Consider including vendor rules of engagement as part of your RFP process.
    • How does the vendor team classify your potential account?
    Contract phase
    • Set expectations with the account team for the ongoing relationship.
    • Include a vendor rules of engagement exhibit in the contract.
    • Depending on your classification of the vendor, establish appropriate account team deliverables, meetings, etc.
    Vendor management phase
    • “Evalu-rate” your account team by using a stakeholder questionnaire to gain measurable feedback.
    • Identify the desired improvements in communications and service delivery.
    • Use positive reinforcements that result in positive behavior.
    Tactical insight

    Don’t forget to look at your organization’s role in how well the account team is able to perform to your expectations.

    Tactical insight

    Measure to manage – what are the predetermined criteria that you will measure the account team’s success against?

    Lack of adequate sales training and experience can have a negative impact on the reps’ ability to support your needs adequately

    • According to Forbes (2012), 55% of salespeople lack basic sales skills.
    • 58% of buyers report that sales reps are unable to answer their questions effectively.
    • According to a recent survey, 84% of all sales training is lost after 90 days. This is due to the lack of information retention among sales personnel.
    • 82% of B2B decision-makers think sales reps are unprepared.
    • At least 50% of prospects are not a good fit for the product or service that vendors are selling (Sales Insights Lab).
    • It takes ten months or more for a new sales rep to be fully productive.

    (Source: Spotio)

    Info-Tech Insight

    Remember to examine the inadequacies of vendor training as part of the root cause of why the account team may lack substance.

    Why it matters

    1.8 years

    is the average tenure for top ten tech companies

    2.6 years is the average experience required to hire.

    2.4 years is the average account executive tenure.

    44% of reps plan to leave their job within two years.

    The higher the average contract value, the longer the tenure.

    More-experienced account reps tend to stay longer.

    (Source: Xactly, 2021)
    Image of two lightbulbs labeled 'skill training' with multiple other buzzwords on the glass.

    Info-Tech Insight

    You are always going to be engaged in training your rep, so be prepared.

    Before you get started…

    • Take an inward look at how your company engages with vendors overall:
      • Do you have a standard protocol for how initial vendor inquiries are handled (emails, phone calls, meeting invitations)?
      • Do you have a standard protocol for introductory vendor meetings?
      • Are vendors provided the appropriate level of access to stakeholders/management?
      • Are you prompt in your communications with vendors?
      • What is the quality of the data provided to vendors? Do they need to reach out repeatedly for more/better data?
      • How well are you able to forecast your needs?
      • Is your Accounts Payable team responsive to vendor inquiries?
      • Are Procurement and stakeholders on the same page regarding the handling of vendors?
    • While you may not have a formal vendor management initiative in place, try to understand how important each of your vendors are to your organization, especially before you issue an RFP, so you can set the right expectations with potential vendor teams.
    • Classify vendors as strategic, operational, tactical, or commodity.
      • This will help you focus your time appropriately and establish the right meeting cadence according to the vendor’s place in your business.
      • See Info-Tech’s research on vendor classification.
    When you formalize your expectations regarding vendor contact with your organization and create structure around it, vendors will take notice.

    Consider a standard intake process for fielding vendor inquiries and responding to requests for meetings to save yourself the headaches that come with trying to keep up with them.

    Stakeholder teams, IT, and Procurement need to be on the same page in this regard to avoid missteps in the important introductory phase of dealing with vendors and the resulting confusion on the part of vendor account teams when they get mixed messages and feel “passed around.”

    1. Introductory Phase

    If vendors know you have no process to track their activities, they’ll call who they want when they want, and the likelihood of them having more information about your business than you about theirs is significant.

    Vendor contacts are made in several ways:

    • Cold calls
    • Emails
    • Website
    • Conferences
    • Social introductions

    Things to consider:

    • Consider having a link on your company website to your Sourcing & Procurement team, including:
      • An email address for vendor inquiries.
      • Instructions to vendors on how to engage with you and what information they should provide.
      • A link to your Vendor Rules of Engagement.
    • Track vendor inquiries so you have a list of potential respondents to future RFPs.
    • Work with stakeholders and gain their buy-in on how vendor inquiries are to be routed and handled internally.
    Not every vendor contact will result in an “engagement” such as invitation to an RFP or a contract for business. As such, we recommend that you set up an intake process to track/manage supplier inquiries so that when you are ready to engage, the vendor teams will be set up to work according to your expectations.

    2. RFP/Contract Phase

    What are your ongoing expectations for the account team?
    • Understand how your business will be qualified by the vendor. Where you fit in the market space regarding spend, industry, size of your business, etc., determines what account team(s) you will have access to.
    • Add account team–specific questions to your RFP(s) to gain an understanding of their capabilities and experience up front.
    • How have you classified the vendor/solution? Strategic, tactical, operational, or commodity?
      • Depending on the classification/criticality (See Info-Tech’s Vendor Classification Tool) of the vendor, set the appropriate expectation for vendor review meetings, e.g. weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually.
      • Set the expectation that their support of your account will be regularly measured/monitored by your organization.
      • Consider including a set of vendor rules of engagement in your RFPs and contracts so vendors will know up front what your expectations are for how to engage with Procurement and stakeholders.
    Stock image of smiling coworkers.

    3. Ongoing Vendor Management

    Even if you don’t have a vendor management initiative in place, consider these steps to manage both new and legacy vendor relationships:
    • Don’t wait until there is an issue to engage the account team. Develop an open, honest relationship with vendors and get to know their key players.
    • Seek regular feedback from stakeholders on both parties’ performance against the agreement, based on agreed-upon criteria.
    • Measure vendor performance using the Evalu-Rate Your Account Team tool included with this research.
    • Based on vendor criticality, set a regular cadence of vendor meetings to discuss stakeholder feedback, both positive feedback as well as areas needing improvement and next steps, if applicable.
    Stock image of smiling coworkers.

    Info-Tech Insight

    What your account team doesn’t say is equally important as what they do say. For example, an account rep with high influence says, “I can get that for you” vs. “I'll get back to you.” Pay attention to the level of detail in their responses to you – it references how well they are networked within their own organization.

    How effective is your rep?

    The Poser
    • Talks so much they forget to listen
    • Needs to rely on the “experts”
    • Considers everyone a prospect
    Icons relating to the surrounding rep categories. Ideal Team Player
    • Practices active listening
    • Understands the product they are selling
    • Asks great questions
    • Is truthful
    • Approaches sales as a service to others
    The Bulldozer
    • Unable to ask the right questions
    • If push comes to shove, they keep pushing until you push back
    • Has a sense of entitlement
    • Lacks genuine social empathy
    Skillful Politician
    • Focuses on the product instead of people
    • Goes by gut feel
    • Fears rejection and can’t roll with the punches

    Characteristics of account reps

    Effective
    • Is truthful
    • Asks great questions
    • Practices active listening
    • Is likeable and trustworthy
    • Exhibits emotional intelligence
    • Is relatable and knowledgeable
    • Has excellent interpersonal skills
    • Has a commitment to personal growth
    • Approaches sales as a service to others
    • Understands the product they are selling
    • Builds authentic connections with clients
    • Is optimistic and has energy, drive, and confidence
    • Makes an emotional connection to whatever they are selling
    • Has the ability to put themselves in the position of the client
    • Builds trust by asking the right questions; listens and provides appropriate solutions without overpromising and underdelivering
    Ineffective
    • Goes by gut feel
    • Has a sense of entitlement
    • Lacks genuine social empathy.
    • Considers everyone a prospect
    • Is unable to ask the right questions.
    • Is not really into sales – it’s “just a job”
    • Focuses on the product instead of people
    • Loves to talk so much they forget to listen
    • Fears rejection and can’t roll with the punches
    • If push comes to shove, they keep pushing until you push back
    • Is clueless about their product and needs to rely on the “experts”

    How to support an effective rep

    • Consider being a reference account.
    • Say thank you as a simple way to boost morale and encourage continued positive behavior.
    • If you can, provide opportunities to increase business with the vendor – that is the ultimate thanks.
    • Continue to support open, honest communication between the vendor and your team.
    • Letters or emails of recognition to the vendor team’s management have the potential to boost the rep’s image within their own organization and shine a spotlight on your organization as a good customer.
    • Supplier awards for exemplary service and support may be awarded as part of a more formal vendor management initiative.
    • Refer to the characteristics of an effective rep – which ones best represent your account team?
    A little recognition goes a long way in reinforcing a positive vendor relationship.

    Info-Tech Insight

    Don’t forget to put the relationship in vendor relationship management – give a simple “Thank you for your support” to the account team from executive management.

    How to support an ineffective rep

    An ineffective rep can take your time and attention away from more important activities.
    • Understand what role, if any, you and/or your stakeholders may play in the rep’s lack of performance by determining the root cause:
      • Unrealistic expectations
      • Unclear and incomplete instructions
      • Lack of follow through by your stakeholders to provide necessary information
      • Disconnects between Sourcing/Procurement/IT that lead to poor communication with the vendor team (lack of vendor management)
    • Schedule more frequent meetings with the team to address the issues and measure progress.
    • Be open to listening to your rep(s) and ask them what they need from you in order to be effective in supporting your account.
    • Be sure to document in writing each instance where the rep has underperformed and include the vendor team’s leadership on all communications and meetings.
    • Refer to the characteristics of an ineffective rep – which ones best describe your ineffective vendor rep?
    “Addressing poor performance is an important aspect of supplier management, but prevention is even more so.” (Logistics Bureau)

    Introductory questions to ask vendor reps

    • What is the vendor team’s background, particularly in the industry they are representing? How did they get to where they are?
      • Have they been around long enough to have developed credibility throughout their organization?
      • Do they have client references they are willing to share?
    • How long have they been in this position with the vendor?
      • Remember, the average rep has less than 24 months of experience.
      • If they lack depth of experience, are they trainable?
    • How long have they been in the industry?
      • Longevity and experience matters.
    • What is their best customer experience?
      • What are they most proud of from an account rep perspective?
    • What is their most challenging customer experience?
      • What is their biggest weakness?
    • How are their relationships with their delivery and support teams?
      • Can they get the job done for you by effectively working their internal relationships?
    • What are their goals with this account?
      • Besides selling a lot.
    • What relationships do they have within your organization?
      • Are they better situated within your organization than you are?
    Qualify the account team as you would the vendor – get to know their background and history.

    Vendor rules of engagement

    Articulate your vendor expectations in writing

    Clearly document your expectations via formal rules of engagement for vendor teams in order to outline how they are expected to interact with your business and stakeholders. This can have a positive impact on your vendor and stakeholder relationships and enable you to gain control of:

    • Onsite visits and meetings.
    • Submission of proposals, quotes, contracts.
    • Communication between vendors, stakeholders and Procurement.
    • Expectations for ongoing relationship management.

    Include the rules in your RFXs and contracts to formalize your expectations.

    See the Vendor Rules of Engagement template included with this research.

    Download the Vendor Rules of Engagement template

    Sample of the Vendor Rules of Engagement template.

    Evalu-rate your vendor account team

    Measure stakeholder feedback to ensure your account team is on target to meet your needs. Sample of the Evalu-Rate Your Account Team tool.

    Download the Evalu-Rate Your Account Team tool

    • Use a measurable, repeatable process for evaluations.
    • Include feedback from key stakeholders engaged in the relationship.
    • Keep the feedback fact based and have backup.

    Final thoughts: Do’s and don’ts

    DO

    • Be friendly, approachable.
    • Manage the process by which vendors contact your organization – take control!
    • Understand your market position when sourcing goods/services to establish how much leverage you have with vendors.
    • Set vendor meetings according to their criticality to your business.
    • Evaluate your account teams to understand their strengths/weaknesses.
    • Gain stakeholder buy-in to your vendor processes.

    DON'T

    • Don’t be “friends.”
    • Don’t criticize in public.
    • Don’t needlessly escalate.
    • Don’t let the process of vendors communicating with your stakeholders “just happen.”
    • Don’t accept poor performance or attitude.

    Summary of Accomplishment

    Problem Solved

    Upon completion of this blueprint, Guided Implementation, or workshop, your team should have a comprehensive, well-defined, end-to-end approach to evaluating and managing your account team. Leveraging Info-Tech’s industry-proven tools and templates provides your organization with an effective approach to establishing, maintaining, and evaluating your vendor account team; improving your vendor and stakeholder communications; and maintaining control of the client/vendor relationship.

    Additionally, your team will have a foundation to execute your vendor management principles. These principles will assist your organization in ensuring you receive the perceived value from the vendor as a result of your vendor account team evaluation process.

    If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop.

    Contact your account representative for more information.

    workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

    Bibliography

    “14 Essential Qualities of a Good Salesperson.” Forbes, 5 Oct. 2021. Accessed 11 March 2022.

    “149 Eye-Opening Sales Stats to Consider.” Spotio, 30 Oct. 2018. Accessed 11 March 2022.

    “35 Sales Representative Interview Questions and Answers.” Indeed, 29 Oct. 2021. Accessed 8 March 2022.

    “8 Intelligent Questions for Evaluating Your Sales Reps Performance” Inc., 16 Aug. 2016. Accessed 9 March 2022.

    Altschuler, Max. “Reality Check: You’re Probably A Bad Salesperson If You Possess Any Of These 11 Qualities.” Sales Hacker, 9 Jan. 2018. Accessed 4 May 2022.

    Bertuzzi, Matt. “Account Executive Data Points in the SaaS Marketplace.” Treeline, April 12, 2017. Accessed 9 March 2022. “Appreciation Letter to Vendor – Example, Sample & Writing Tips.” Letters.org, 10 Jan. 2020. Web.

    D’Entremont, Lauren. “Are Your Sales Reps Sabotaging Your Customer Success Without Realizing It?” Proposify, 4 Dec. 2018. Accessed 7 March 2022.

    Freedman, Max. “14 Important Traits of Successful Salespeople.” Business News Daily, 14 April 2022. Accessed 10 April 2022.

    Hansen, Drew. “6 Tips For Hiring Your Next Sales All-Star.” Forbes, 16 Oct. 2012. Web.

    Hulland, Ryan. “Getting Along with Your Vendors.” MonMan, 12 March 2014. Accessed 9 March 2022.

    Lawrence, Jess. “Talking to Vendors: 10 quick tips for getting it right.” Turbine, 30 Oct. 2018. Accessed 11 March 2022.

    Lucero, Karrie. “Sales Turnover Statistics You Need To Know.” Xactly, 24 Aug. 2021. Accessed 9 March 2022.

    Noyes, Jesse. “4 Qualities to Look For in Your Supplier Sales Representative.” QSR, Nov. 2017. Accessed 9 March 2022.

    O’Byrne, Rob. “How To Address Chronic Poor Supplier Performance.” Logistics Bureau, 26 July 2016. Accessed 4 May 2022.

    O'Brien, Jonathan. Supplier Relationship Management: Unlocking the Hidden Value in Your Supply Base. Kogan Page, 2014.

    Short, Alex. “Three Things You Should Consider to Become A Customer of Choice.” Vizibl, 29 Oct. 2021. Web.

    Wayshak, Marc. “18 New Sales Statistics for 2022 from Our Groundbreaking Study!” Sales Insights Lab, 28 March 2022. Web.

    “What Does a Good Customer Experience Look Like In Technology?” Virtual Systems, 23 June 2021. Accessed 10 March 2022.

    Streamline Application Maintenance

    • Buy Link or Shortcode: {j2store}402|cart{/j2store}
    • member rating overall impact (scale of 10): 9.5/10 Overall Impact
    • member rating average dollars saved: 20 Average Days Saved
    • member rating average days saved: After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve.
    • Parent Category Name: Maintenance
    • Parent Category Link: /maintenance
    • Application maintenance teams are accountable for the various requests and incidents coming from a variety business and technical sources. The sheer volume and variety of requests create unmanageable backlogs.
    • The increasing complexity and reliance on technology within the business has set unrealistic expectations on maintenance teams. Stakeholders expect teams to accommodate maintenance without impact on project schedules.

    Our Advice

    Critical Insight

    • Improving maintenance’s focus and attention may mean doing less but more valuable work. Teams need to be realistic about what can be committed and be prepared to justify why certain requests have to be pushed down the backlog (e.g. lack of business value, high risks).
    • Maintenance must be treated like any other development activity. The same intake and prioritization practices and quality standards must be upheld, and best practices followed.

    Impact and Result

    • Justify the necessity of streamlined maintenance. Gain a grounded understanding of stakeholder objectives and concerns, and validate their achievability against the current state of the people, process, and technologies involved in application maintenance.
    • Strengthen triaging and prioritization practices. Obtain a holistic picture of the business and technical impacts, risks, and urgencies of each accepted maintenance requests in order to justify its prioritization and relevance within your backlog. Identify opportunities to bundle requests together or integrate them within project commitments to ensure completion.
    • Establish and govern a repeatable process. Develop a maintenance process with well-defined stage gates, quality controls, and roles and responsibilities, and instill development best practices to improve the success of delivery.

    Streamline Application Maintenance Research & Tools

    Start here – read the Executive Brief

    Read our Executive Brief to understand the common struggles found in application maintenance, their root causes, and the Info-Tech methodology to overcoming these hurdles.

    Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

    1. Understand your maintenance priorities

    Understand the stakeholder priorities driving changes in your application maintenance practice.

    • Streamline Application Maintenance – Phase 1: Assess the Current Maintenance Landscape
    • Application Maintenance Operating Model Template
    • Application Maintenance Resource Capacity Assessment
    • Application Maintenance Maturity Assessment

    2. Instill maintenance governance

    Identify the appropriate level of governance and enforcement to ensure accountability and quality standards are upheld across maintenance practices.

    • Streamline Application Maintenance – Phase 2: Develop a Maintenance Release Schedule

    3. Enhance triaging and prioritization practices

    Build a maintenance triage and prioritization scheme that accommodates business and IT risks and urgencies.

    • Streamline Application Maintenance – Phase 3: Optimize Maintenance Capabilities

    4. Streamline maintenance delivery

    Define and enforce quality standards in maintenance activities and build a high degree of transparency to readily address delivery challenges.

    • Streamline Application Maintenance – Phase 4: Streamline Maintenance Delivery
    • Application Maintenance Business Case Presentation Document
    [infographic]

    Workshop: Streamline Application Maintenance

    Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

    1 Understand Your Maintenance Priorities

    The Purpose

    Understand the business and IT stakeholder priorities driving the success of your application maintenance practice.

    Understand any current issues that are affecting your maintenance practice.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    Awareness of business and IT priorities.

    An understanding of the maturity of your maintenance practices and identification of issues to alleviate.

    Activities

    1.1 Define priorities for enhanced maintenance practices.

    1.2 Conduct a current state assessment of your application maintenance practices.

    Outputs

    List of business and technical priorities

    List of the root-cause issues, constraints, and opportunities of current maintenance practice

    2 Instill Maintenance Governance

    The Purpose

    Define the processes, roles, and points of communication across all maintenance activities.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    An in-depth understanding of all maintenance activities and what they require to function effectively.

    Activities

    2.1 Modify your maintenance process.

    2.2 Define your maintenance roles and responsibilities.

    Outputs

    Application maintenance process flow

    List of metrics to gauge success

    Maintenance roles and responsibilities

    Maintenance communication flow

    3 Enhance Triaging and Prioritization Practices

    The Purpose

    Understand in greater detail the process and people involved in receiving and triaging a request.

    Define your criteria for value, impact, and urgency, and understand how these fit into a prioritization scheme.

    Understand backlog management and release planning tactics to accommodate maintenance.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    An understanding of the stakeholders needed to assess and approve requests.

    The criteria used to build a tailored prioritization scheme.

    Tactics for efficient use of resources and ideal timing of the delivery of changes.

    A process that ensures maintenance teams are always working on tasks that are valuable to the business.

    Activities

    3.1 Review your maintenance intake process.

    3.2 Define a request prioritization scheme.

    3.3 Create a set of practices to manage your backlog and release plans.

    Outputs

    Understanding of the maintenance request intake process

    Approach to assess the impact, urgency, and severity of requests for prioritization

    List of backlog management grooming and release planning practices

    4 Streamline Maintenance Delivery

    The Purpose

    Understand how to apply development best practices and quality standards to application maintenance.

    Learn the methods for monitoring and visualizing maintenance work.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    An understanding of quality standards and the scenarios for where they apply.

    The tactics to monitor and visualize maintenance work.

    Streamlined maintenance delivery process with best practices.

    Activities

    4.1 Define approach to monitor maintenance work.

    4.2 Define application quality attributes.

    4.3 Discuss best practices to enhance maintenance development and deployment.

    Outputs

    Taskboard structure and rules

    Definition of application quality attributes with user scenarios

    List of best practices to streamline maintenance development and deployment

    5 Finalize Your Maintenance Practice

    The Purpose

    Create a target state built from appropriate metrics and attainable goals.

    Consider the required items and steps for the implementation of your optimization initiatives.

    Key Benefits Achieved

    A realistic target state for your optimized application maintenance practice.

    A well-defined and structured roadmap for the implementation of your optimization initiatives.

    Activities

    5.1 Refine your target state maintenance practices.

    5.2 Develop a roadmap to achieve your target state.

    Outputs

    Finalized application maintenance process document

    Roadmap of initiatives to achieve your target state