Strategic Project Execution
Align Project and Program Efforts with the Business Strategy
“Software rework from poor requirements is consuming over 40% of project budgets.” - voke BA Market Snapshot, 2008
40 percent is a big number of any budget, and if you figure that’s an average of all of your project spending, that’s probably a really big number. Millions? Tens of millions? More? How confident are you that requirements are being captured correctly? To go even further, how confident are you that you’ve picked the projects most critical for the success of the organization? In a business climate this competitive and unforgiving, you have to minimize your risk from project selection through execution and delivery.
The problem is that most organizations find it difficult to identify and prioritize the projects, and then scope the work so that it optimizes return to the business. Poor prioritization results in non-value creating work. Poor requirements lead to significant rework. By doing these better, your organization can increase value-creating effort significantly. This means identifying projects aligned with the most important needs of the business; focusing on the smallest subset of requirements that will deliver the business value; reducing rework by having a clear, focused, purpose-driven set of requirements; and, incrementally delivering business value to shorten time to benefit.
“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” - Peter Drucker
There is now a way to re-think your project selection, prioritization and definition. In just six to eight weeks we can help you significantly improve your focus on business value and reduce your active business and technical risk. We are able to identify, prioritize and scope requirements by mapping business value, performance and technical risk to the “what” of your business.
Reduce Waste and Improve Focus
Our consultants have performed engagements for a number of organizations, resulting in a rapid improvement in time to value and a resulting improvement in cash flow. In one case, we reduced the backlog of requests considered in scope for an IT department by almost 80 percent, allowing it to focus resources on efforts that delivered value to the business. We also identified critical areas that deserved attention but had been not been obvious because they fell between functional groups. In another case, we were able to deliver a business-critical project that was dramatically over cost and behind schedule on the original date within the original budget.
Offering: Strategically Aligned Execution
Translating a project or product into action in the organization is difficult. Not because people aren’t smart, but because people lack a clear and complete view of which specific areas of work have the greatest, and least, impact on overall performance. Use us to create a sustainable model for translating strategy into action.
- Prioritization Workshop – Learn how to use capabilities to identify, scope, and prioritize improvement efforts or product features to align with Business Value, Risk, and the organization’s Ability to Execute.
- Backlog Rationalization – Balance the backlog of IT requests or product improvements against the business strategy to determine the next best effort to invest in.
Contact us to get started with Strategically Aligned Execution. We can engage at multiple levels – from a workshop or project recovery, to prioritizing and communicating the organization’s strategic project portfolio.
