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Strategic Planning: We have years of experience in assisting business and IT in developing
multi-year strategic plans with interim deliverables, providing business
benefits as the IT project proceeds. Once the high-level requirements are
established in the JAD Session or by other means, we
can work with you to turn this plan into a series of projects -- your project
portfolio.
Key Benefits
 | Focus on deliverable & achievable results in an appropriate timeframe |
| Allocation of existing and incrementally necessary staff to achieve
results |
| Understanding of project interrelationships for greatest efficiency |
| Calculation of cost of projects and impact on corporate balance sheet (SOP
98-1) |
| Presentation summarizing the results |
Our Process
In any development environment, it is important to develop a plan to ensure
that system development activities will support future business plans. We
will work with your team to pull together an IT strategic project plan that
includes production support and maintenance, that reflects your current staff,
that reflects the consensus of all involved parties, that reflects your system
development lifecycle methodology, that includes cross-project dependencies, and that is achievable. This process is
frequently more productive when run by an independent third party, and our team
members are skilled in handling these discussions. The key steps in this
process are:
- Resourcing Core Support
- In any IT shop, existing production systems must come first. Our
process ensures that we allocate sufficient staff to support and maintain
core systems while we identify staff that may be available for strategic
efforts.
- Developing the Project List
- Simultaneously, we work with your managers to develop the list of
strategic projects that have arisen from the JAD
Session and/or other planning exercises.
- Allocating Staff to Projects
- We then develop estimates of the size of these projects and work with
your managers to staff them
- Checking for Reasonability
- Once assignments are made, we review them for reasonability, comparing
the project's effort distribution against industry standards and, where
available, against your past experience in such projects.
- Finalizing the Achievable
- After checking for reasonability, we revisit the project plan and the
resource allocation to ensure that we have identified the right
projects, that we have staffed them with the right people of the right
experience with the right expertise, that we understand and have
accounted for project interactions, and that the projects' targeted delivery dates
coincide with the needs of the business.
- Estimating the Additional
- Lastly, there may be other important projects for which there are no
resources. We will work with your managers to determine the best mix
of incremental resources to achieve these additional goals.
- Costing the Result
- Spread throughout this process, we will work with your managers to
develop costs for these projects: staff costs, hardware costs, software
costs. We can present these costs as full project costs, as total cost
within the fiscal year, or as amortized costs including SOP 98-1
capitalization.
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