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Strategic Assessment & Planning
It is highly unlikely that your business can afford to implement the wrong technology or simply waste your IT budget or your employees' time.
Assessments are often done in response to perceived problems with IT services, project delivery issues, strategy changes, or in preparation for a merger or spin-off. Symptoms of these problems are often easy enough to see, reflected in user sentiment, costs, and missed deadlines or goals. But the cause of the problems - and their solutions - can often be more difficult to pinpoint. I can provide an assessment of the situation, and provide actionable recommendations on:
- Budget - What opportunities are there to economize, or improve performance for the same dollar? Can the same services be provided better for less (realizing that there are more factors involved in this decision than simply potential financial savings)? Can work be done differently so that it enhancs other areas of your organization?
- Service Level Agreement - What is the right definition of 'good service' for your business?
- Service Level Measurement - How is your IT service being measured, and is it accurate? How useful is your reporting, and isit being used effectively to both measure and improve your organization?
- Service Level Performance - What is the actual servcie level being delivered, in terms of responsiveness, problem resolution, and problem tracking and reporting? How does it compare to your expected level of service?
- People - How well suited are the people to the current task, and the proposed projects? How effectively are they being measured, supported, trained, managed, and compensated? Is the organization designed to be as efficient and effective as possible?
- Processes and Procedures - How complete and mature are the processes and procedures being used? Are the same procedures being used each time the same task is performed? Are best practices being captured and distributed?
- Systems - To what extent are the available systems actually being used, and are they effective? Are there existing tools that are not being used (and should they be or not)? Are your deployed tools assisting or impeding your operation? What opportunities exist to integrate existing or new tools to improve service levels, reduce operating costs, or enhance operational visibility?
Assessments can be a brief engagement which can identify basic success areas, basic problem areas, and areas for immediate action, or it can be a complete operational and budgetary review in preparation for a larger change. The assessment may be used as the basis for developing an RFP.
Transition Planning - When strategic changes are to be made, it's important to precisely define your desired result, and then determine the time, resource(s), and budget it will take to get there. You also need to know what the ongoing costs will be in order to fully understand your ROI. I can work with your management to define:
- Target service levels, operating model, budget, and controls
- Changes to existing resources, tools, processes and procedures to be made, or specificatiosn for new components
- Internal staff expectation management
- Transition planning & strategy
- Costing (typically including Rolland as Advisor or Project Manager, your staff, and other resourses)
I can deliver a complete roadmap to turn recommendations and plans into reality. You may then engage me to lead the transition (see below), or use these plans for an RFP.
Strategy Implementation Management - Once the transition plan and end goals are defined (from the initial needs-gathering phase), I can lead the project if you desire, serving in:
- Process and procedure development and implementation
- Internal staff expectation management
- Reports development
- Communication
- Conflict resolution
- Advisor to management
- Providing project oriented resources, to manage the more technical aspects of your plans. This includes project management and oversight of systems modifications and integration, parallel processes, network implementation, project review, as well as vendor and application selection.
Contact us for more info
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