The Enterprise Technology Blueprint
Delivering a successful product the first time requires understanding your operating environment, your people, and your technology. To effectively integrate all layers of program delivery requires iterative planning - from business concept through system retirement.
BLUEPRINTING AND DELIVERING SUCCESS
A multi-year, multi-million dollar integrated systems implementation across four continents, including hardware, software, data, and communications in remote locations. The blueprint was useful for communicating vision, indicating progress, and understanding impacts across locations.
The program was successfully delivered on schedule and on budget; an independent third-party auditor verified over 97% of requirements were met and called the effort "a textbook system implementation.“
Experience shows that major change initiatives - enterprise-wide, global, change initiatives that impact core business processes and technologies – benefit from a living blueprint. Many change initiatives fail because the program plan was incomplete, not sufficiently robust, or simply got stale; the circumstances surpassed the baseline plan, and there's no easy recovery.
Further complicating the scenario is that once a major program fails, it makes it much harder to enroll the organization - from stakeholders to users - in the next major change initiative. Credibility in vision is compromised, followers dwindle, adoption fails, and follow-on funding is jeopardized. Most importantly, the organizational benefits of the change, the main reason for embarking on the arduous journey in the first place, are not realized.
The living blueprint is critical to program delivery; it details the long-view architectural roadmap and provides an on-ramp to introduce change. It represents the best vision forward based on the current knowns; identifying and managing the risks helps to mitigate threats and exploit opportunities - the unknowns. Flexibility and agility in planning are required to manage those emergent positive and negative risks; trade-offs occur frequently, and understanding the long-term impacts across multiple program critical paths drives effective decisions.
DEFINING SUCCESS
"Future state" means different things to different people. It's important to clearly define success criteria early in the planning process, and for the stakeholders to know what "done" means. Equally important is the definition of future state(s) as related to the "ideal state": the ideal state may take several phases to realize, but each completed phase represents an iterative future state toward that ideal goal. Each future state, once realized, should be celebrated as a major win; and the program plans should be refreshed with a view toward reviewing and identifying both threats and opportunities.
Ask the delivery team, the stakeholders, and the users one question: "What does success look like?" You may be greeted with blank stares, because no one has asked them that question before. It's worth asking, and the ensuing exploratory conversation is worth having. Once thoughtfully considered, you'll be surprised at the variety and passion of the responses; and understanding what success means to your customers is the only way to deliver long-lasting solutions that achieve enterprise adoption.
