Business & Technology Strategy Refresh
Define a compelling technology strategy and actionable plan to advance your organization to your desired state.
Driver
Is technology causing more headaches than breakthroughs? Do you keep running up against limitations in your current technology stack, hearing “we can’t do that” or “that will take months to complete?” These are signs that the technology foundation you’re working with just isn’t up to the task of enabling success for years to come.
Sometimes we need to modernize technology to enable growth, transitioning the existing tech stack to modern, cloud-based “as-a-service” options. Other times, we need to transform the technology landscape, reimagining how technology can support business needs and adopting new tools and techniques. We’ll help you navigate which approach is best for you.
In short, we’ll partner with you to cut through the noise and prioritize your technology investment to deliver real value.
Outcome
If you’re on your way to business transformation, you’ll walk away with a vision for the future that resonates with key stakeholders, a multi-year roadmap to achieve the vision, and a detailed plan for the first year. You’ll also have supporting materials that contributed to the roadmap, to incorporate into initiatives and to refine and adapt as you progress.
If we determine together that you’re best served by a technology modernization, we’ll create a directional roadmap that targets the best next opportunity to enable customers and team members through technology, along with subsequent efforts that make sense with your goals, guardrails, and timeframe.
In either case, you’ll have a proven prioritization framework to match technology efforts with enabling specific business needs going forward, so you can make helpful plans and budgets closer to when they’ll be used.
You’ll see serious benefits with this approach:
You can target finite resources toward technology enhancements that will best serve customers and team members
You and your team will practice the prioritization and planning process with a seasoned guide, so you’ll be confident doing it yourself next time
You’ll be a pro with reusable materials that we co-create to support ongoing decision-making
We’re just a phone call away for a sanity check as you navigate big and small technology decisions over the coming years
Approach
We’ll tailor our approach based on your goals and whether you’re embarking up on a business transformation or technology modernization effort.
In the case of business transformation, we follow a phased approach, from baselining current state and envisioning a bright future, through gap analysis and roadmapping.
While we can point to foundational elements in common across business transformation strategies (like product or program management, organizational change management, and iterative checkpoints to benefit from lessons learned), the vast majority of strategy refresh content is customized to each client.
We bring expertise in business transformation; your team holds crucial expertise in your business. That’s why we’ll start by listening to stakeholders across your business. We’ll ask lots of questions and listen intently to what’s being said and what topics are avoided.
With a sense for your unique opportunities and ways of working, we’ll collaborate to create a technology-enabled vision for the future that’s worth the effort to achieve. This will likely take several iterations: we’ll work with an executive sponsor, a management-level sponsor, and key stakeholders throughout your organization to craft a future state vision that resonates.
Why baseline current state?
While current opportunities and challenges can seem crystal clear from the outset, we find a current state baseline crucial for two main reasons.
First, we always uncover something surprising in the discovery phase, even if it’s simply a difference in perspectives across teams. An external party looking across teams has a very different vantage point than is typically needed to excel in day-to-day activities.
Second, it’s an important opportunity to build buy-in across the organization. We ask about ideas that have been percolating (and any persistent complaints) — and make sure that stakeholders know that we took their feedback to the executive sponsor. In this, we’re laying the foundation for effective organizational change management from the start.
Vision in hand, we’ll conduct a gap analysis and create a value matrix of options for moving from where we are to where we want to be. All of this will inform a multi-year roadmap — a visual representation of the initiatives to accomplish our goals — and a detailed plan for the first year.
For technology modernization efforts, we’ll work with you to:
Understand true business needs and how your technology foundation is (and isn’t) holding back progress.
Map out your tech stack, highlighting standards and practices that are likely to serve you going forward.
Identify options to transition legacy technologies to modern offerings and work with your business and technology teams to define long-term goals and guardrails.
With a sense for what is possible in the long-run, work with you to identify the first area to address.
Create a high-level plan for the first digital modernization effort, including success factors, pointed questions to ask vendors, and more.
Customize a lightweight framework to use in further modernization decision-making, weighing potential impact against feasibility.
Combine all of these inputs into an IT modernization roadmap that includes the first effort, as well as the building blocks that make sense with your goals, guardrails, and timeframe. We’ll expect this modernization roadmap to change as you go along, so we’ll make sure you’re comfortable owning and adapting it going forward.
Click on the graphic to read this client success story
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