To Succeed, Embrace Failure

We all know that enterprise IT projects are hugely expensive. Through my 20 … read more

The Age of Enterprise IT Innovation has begun?

I woke up this weekend to the interesting Forbes article by Rick Ungar, … read more

The Enjoyment of Enterprise Architecture

I am possibly breaking a taboo by combining the words “Enjoyment” and “Enterprise … read more

Adaptive Roadmap for Transformational Projects

An innovative, transformational project will attempt to deliver significant agility, cost-savings and/or customer benefits by implementing a solution used across the whole enterprise. It can come in form of:

  • An implementation of a platform or a toolkit that will be used to deliver solutions to various parts of the enterprise;
  • An implementation of service that will be re-used by various parts of the enterprise;
  • An implementation of an application with capabilities that are either new or significantly superior to capabilities available prior to the project.

Unfortunately, not all projects of that type succeed – as a matter of fact the rate of delivery of all promised benefits is quite low. The reason being, a project of that types makes a lot of significant and in most cases sincere assumptions in relation to available technical capabilities required for developing and/or implementing the project, internal customer acceptance, customer adoption, features and usability of an external product etc.

A Roadmap will ensure that the key assumptions are validated early on, and that the project will either:

  • Succeed in its entirety delivering or exceeding expected benefits;
  • Succeed by identifying problems early, and by either reducing the scope and costs, or finding alternative superior implementation;
  • Fail early at minimal cost with no impact on related activities, while providing valuable information for future projects;

Business Abstraction applies most advanced methods initially created for market-oriented development of new products, that were adapted to implementation of enterprise solutions. We build a Roadmap by conducting a number of workshops that:

  1. Define the vision of complete adoption of the proposed system, platform or service;
  2. Identifying and mapping all assumptions , as well as “pull” and “push” factors that are likely to affect the project;
  3. Designing ways to validate the assumptions and increase stakeholder support.
  4. Build the Roadmap as a gradual development of the solution with clear defined validation and learning milestones.

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