Reduce operational complexity
You can miss a 20% or more reduction in ongoing business complexity costs because you avoid or minimize the time spent on defining and simplifying your business requirements.
Simplified business requirements can deliver a 20% cost reduction not only in solution and project costs as well as in ongoing operational costs.
Your project is defining your future. It is implementing your strategy and determining how your organization will do business, compete and make money in the future. Yet, too often, the critical definition of the business requirements is skipped or skimped. Instead software is implemented “vanilla” thereby adopting someone else’s processes and designs instead of your own.
Now, there are several great fears in this area, such as …
- you don’t know what you want
- you’ll redefine the current state with only minimal improvements
- you’ll define an ideal solution that cannot be delivered.
- And so on.
These are all valid but manageable concerns but they are not valid excuses for avoiding defining and simplifying your own requirements.
We’ve consistently proven that appropriately facilitated and trained incumbent staff can effectively define exactly how they want do business, compete and make money in the future. They clearly define the required processes and information needs and the resultant desired end states (outcomes) plus the changes required to achieve them. This process commonly eliminates 40%-50% of the existing process steps (ie reduces future operating complexity) that, in turn, leads to a 20% plus reduction in both operational and project delivery costs. This results in a quantum, sustainable reduction in operational costs.
This long term saving is missed if you just put in the system ’vanilla' and hope for some resultant benefits. That is a very expensive choice to make.
