Kristen Bresch
ITBM Product Line Sales Manager
ServiceNow
Digital transformation is at the tip of everyone’s lips. Organisations are aiming to reinvent the workplace while also driving innovation. This means transforming back office, operations and commercial processes, with IT at the heart of this transition. Shifting the way IT and the business work together is critical to deliver great experiences at work and drive innovation.
Yet many organisations and the tools they use are siloed, making it difficult to properly drive transformation or manage ideas from concept to delivery.
An approach based around isolated islands can hamper fast decisions. In addition, a lack of visibility can foster an inconsistent decision-making process and make a real-time view of data impossible to achieve. Inconsistent portfolio processes can generate uncertainty and inefficiency.
If you fail to understand what benefits have been realized this can stop project management offices ‘closing the loop’, justifying budgets and resource allocations.
So how can project management offices and IT departments effectively deliver transformation? The answer is to gain a clearer understanding of all activities, not just strategic initiatives, to effectively target the right investments and funnel more resources into innovation. Achieving this understanding can expedite the acceptance, development and delivery of projects and encourage the submission of ideas.
Enabling ‘ideation’ – the process of creating and delivering new ideas from a broad range of stakeholders – is a key step. However, ideation requires an efficient and transparent process for managing incoming ideas.
Companies that support an ideation culture encourage all of their employees to participate in the submission of ideas. Who knows better about ways to transform than the employees who work there? Fostering this culture encourages all levels of the organisation to support growth and transformation.
The submission process does not have to be laborious. Simply stating the idea and the desired outcome of the work can be enough information for the first level of organisational review. A well-managed ideation process will crowdsource management of the idea by allowing voting and other ways of vetting ideas. Once the idea is vetted a more detailed review should be facilitated to make sure value, risk, and resource availability are all considered.
Not all of these ideas will become strategic projects but may be enhancements or smaller pieces of work that can be put into a backlog or become part of a program of work that supports a strategic goal. The ideation process must make this sorting and directing of work seamless.
Another important step of the ideation process is providing feedback. When you encourage ideas from employees, it is important to provide feedback. For example, ‘was the idea accepted?’ ‘Will it become a project or an enhancement?’ This information should be automated so the person who made the submission can easily check the progress of their idea.
Organisations can complement this process by transitioning demand management from ‘doing something because an executive said it should be done’ to a systemic approach that accounts for the skills and capacity available. Note that those skills may reside in many different groups in the organisation and may also be involved in unplanned work.
Organisations also need to understand whether the approach to a particular initiative creates technical debt that must be ‘paid’ through reworks down the track. Organisations must properly establish and measure the parameters of any piece of work – time, cost, quantity and quality – which are key factors in determining success.
Implementing a ‘decision engine’ can help organisations achieve these capabilities. This engine can help organisations consider new business requests, enhancements and existing systems support requirements against resources, time, business cases, risk and strategy. Covering all of this on one platform allows for everyone to agree on criteria that can be applied and help prioritise items that will grow the business and increase efficiencies over lower-impact items.
The engine should provide visibility over all the IT processes and methodologies used to execute work – including Agile, waterfall, break-fix and business productivity applications. The decision engine should also enable organisations to ‘close the loop’ on benefits realisation. They gain the ability to answer critical questions such as ‘why did we do this?’ ‘did we deliver what we said we would deliver?’ and ‘what is the impact on operations (bearing in mind closure of a project may be just the beginning of delivering value)?’.
Ultimately organisations can gain the ability to manage end-to-end idea to value.
By adopting this approach, organisations can establish a platform to transform their back office, operations and commercial processes and realise innovation through new business models, channels and products. If you would like to learn more, please contact me at Kristen.Bresch@servicenow.com
