How to assess business needs using industry best practices?

A transformation project aims to improve your current situation, not reproduce it. To do so, you must first assess the business needs to be met. However, too many businesses define their business needs to be based on their current situation. This is contrary to the desire for improvement linked to transformation. What should be the basis for developing your business needs?

 

How can you assess business needs to be met by the digital transformation?

As stated above, the goal is to improve your current situation. A good tactic for choosing your business needs to be met would be to define them based on the best business practices in your industry. Chances are that these best practices are already documented by experts in your industry. These experts have probably already described the business processes that support them.

 

Reusing this documentation allows you to significantly speed up the definition of your business needs. You will also obtain a superior result compared to the approach of describing the current situation.

 

How do you evaluate industry best practices?

It is important to target consulting firms that are experts in your industry, right from the planning stage of your project. We suggest that you contact them to determine the depth and extent of the intellectual capital that they hold regarding the best practices and processes that interest you.

 

Reviewing leading-edge practices and supporting processes will enable you to assess the impact of their implementation on your organization. You will then be able to proactively manage these changes. In this way, you will get good advice on documenting concretely the business benefits that your project will bring.

 

Risk management

With the new processes to be implemented come, as with any change, certain risks. However, good planning allows us to anticipate these risks. To do so, we suggest targeting the portions of the processes that involve greater risks related to the functional coverage of the software package to be implemented.

 

The review of these risk areas ensures that there are no substantial gaps between the functionalities offered by the software package and the business processes to be implemented. If there are any gaps, you should adapt the processes to the software’s capacities rather than modifying it. Some of the areas of risk will be related to a lack of understanding of your business needs rather than the capabilities of the software package. You will need to further analyze these business needs to achieve a better match with the software package.

 

Evaluate processes using test scenarios

For some of the risk areas, you will make prototypes. You will install the software package in a demonstration environment and validate the functionalities corresponding to your risk areas. High-level test scenarios or targeted explorations are most often used. It is not necessary at this stage of the project to conduct exhaustive testing of the software package.

 

Once you have identified the areas of risk and the measures to be taken to mitigate them, you will proceed to break down your business processes into test scenarios. These scenarios will allow you to conduct extensive testing of the software package and your target processes. Your project team will be able to confirm the validity of your new processes when the tests are completed.

 

Next, your project team will document the business procedures supporting your processes and produce end-user training material. The firm from which you purchased the process library may be able to provide you with generic business procedures. In this case, all you will need to do is adjust them to suit your organization’s specific features.

 

What are your business needs? Are you familiar with the best practices in your industry?

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Jean-François Desroches is Program Manager at PlanAxion Solutions.
He can be reached at jean-francois.desroches@planaxion.com