From Concept to Benefit: Achieving Corporate Strategy

The Business Need
Sound strategic planning is fundamental to achieving business objectives. Execution of the strategy is difficult and the complexities created by out of sync and competing activities, processes, functional groups and systems across the organization create many obstacles on the road to success. Constant change, corporate politics, functional silos and many other factors affect progress toward business objectives.

A sound business plan and clearly defined goals are essential, but the key to successful execution is understanding how to accomplish those goals. This paper looks at process relationships and
information flow across the business from strategic planning to achievement of the strategy, from great ideas to benefits realization. To ensure the business efficiently and effectively achieves its strategy, the organization must optimize the outcomes from their processes across the entire lifecycle.



While organizations put emphasis on improvement of individual processes, improvement across
processes and systems is often neglected. This big picture transformation is more difficult to tackle.

Over time, standalone systems, functional stovepipes and constant change cause issues around
data, communication, processes, systems and performance. While this task of analyzing and
improving the full lifecycle is difficult, the results are very valuable to the organization.

The Business Issues
Virtually every organization has information fragmented in multiple repositories and enterprise
applications. Many obstacles keep organizations from meeting their basic needs for efficient operations, strategic alignment and profitability. Common business issues include:
Process Issues:
o Inefficient
o Duplication of effort and disconnected
processes
o No standardization, documentation or understanding of process
o Poor metrics and poor performance
Data Issues:
o Insufficient or bad data
o Difficulty in obtaining data
o No authoritative source of data, duplicate entry
Technical Issues:
o Insufficient applications and infrastructure to support best practice processes
o Disparate applications and systems

Strategic Planning, Portfolio Management, Project Management
and Operations processes contribute to achievement of strategy, thus are critical to
business success.

Weaknesses in Strategic Planning, Portfolio Management, Project Management or Operations will result in problems in the other areas as there are information feeds and dependencies between these functions. In addition, the processes in each of these major areas must be efficient and must provide quality information to the other areas.

The strategic goals are meaningless to the organization unless they are clear, understood by all and interpreted into the activities required to achieve the goals. This means that executives should not throw high‐level strategic goals out to the organization with the directive to make it happen. Instead, they should have a clear idea of the major activities designed to meet the strategic objectives to ensure the organization is headed in the right direction. Leaders in Strategic Planning and Portfolio Management can work together to clearly connect the strategy with the required tactical activity.

Portfolio Management will determine the optimized Portfolio of investments based on
analysis, valuation and prioritization of the business needs. To prioritize investments, a
scoring model is developed based on the organization’s definition of value. The model will provide
strategic alignment and will represent the benefit provided by the investment.

Portfolio reviews and analysis require up‐to‐date information from Strategic Planning, Finance, Enterprise Architecture, IT Governance and Project Management. Finance provides available budget information to be used in determining how many items in the portfolio can be funded. Enterprise Architecture provides capabilities and Enterprise Architect requirements used in Portfolio Management selection process while Portfolio Management provides portfolio performance to capabilities and requirements to Enterprise Architecture. In some organizations, IT Governance will utilize the investment scores to prioritize and grant funding to investments.

When funding decisions are complete, approved projects move to the Project Management process in the lifecycle. Project Management is complex and key to achievement of the business needs. Therefore, best practice processes are key to achievement of the corporate plans.

Performance Management
Performance Management is an element in each of the processes as metrics and analysis are required to ensure each area is achieving its goals and to ensure benefits realization from the system as a whole. For decision makers, Portfolio Management will provide benefits realization metrics including financial benefits. Portfolio Management measures progress toward corporate goals based on the metrics for each goal and reports this information to Strategic Planning/Executives. For each Project, metrics will be established to ensure the project team is meeting the project goals. Project Performance is measured and analyzed to develop corrective actions and ensure risks are managed. This Performance information is reviewed in Project and Program reviews to ensure Project Management performance is optimized. Performance information is fed from the Project Management system to the Portfolio Management system (and/ or the Program Management system) to allow decision making for the portfolio and programs. In Portfolio reviews, project performance is taken into consideration and failing projects may be stopped.

Where Has This Solution Been Applied and What Were the Results?
A division of a government agency required an analysis of all applications, systems, processes and data across lifecycle management. The analysis showed they had legacy systems that were no longer supported, high maintenance homemade tools (requiring frequent coding), applications that only had a handful of users, standalone applications for each process, data entered manually in more than one application and manual processes. The analysis led to corrective actions to
eliminate or retire systems, automate and streamline processes and data feeds and implement a
more robust infrastructure. An IT/ Process Roadmap was developed to provide the needed solution concept and plan. A large company had merged many other companies into the organization. There were many scattered databases, duplication of effort, re‐packaging of information for different levels of the organization, different databases, processes, and reports across the same functions. Excessive time was spent manually generating reports in preparation for management decision‐making meetings. There were no standard project performance metrics across the enterprise. Portfolio management had been developed using a very complex process involving numerous Excel spreadsheets. A new lifecycle was designed to standardize and automate Project Management, Portfolio Management, IT Governance and Financial Management across the merged businesses. This solution brought all the data for these processes into a centralized database, providing greatly improved efficiency, improved data accuracy, cost and labor savings and elimination of non‐value added work.

Building the Holistic Lifecycle Solution
How do you build the holistic lifecycle process to optimize sharing information across processes,
eliminate duplication of tasks, and improve each process while optimizing across all processes?
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