Enterprise Transformation: Essential Elements for COTS- based business transformation programs Presented by David M. Fisher Director Business Transformation Agency June 2010

Essential Elements for COTS-based business transformation programs  Ensuring strategic alignment exists across all stakeholder organizations (top to bottom and side to side) regarding the scope, approach, and objectives of the program.  Ensuring governance is defined, established, and engaged in the enforcement of these strategic elements of the program, actively addressing program issues in a timely and decisive manner.  Ensuring that program leadership is embodied in a “fanatical leader” who brings an excessive enthusiasm to the effort, and is appropriately empowered, respected, loved, and feared. This leader’s authority must encompass the entire scope of effort, overcoming the often conflicting perspectives of the sub-elements of the program.

Essential Elements for COTS-based business transformation programs  Ensuring that the program office not only enforces the strategic objectives and approach of the program, escalating to the governance bodies as necessary, but also maintains an open and collaborative approach with the user communities to enable a productive environment in delivering the required business capabilities.  Ensuring the program office is appropriately staffed with skilled practitioners who have extensive hands-on practical experience in implementing large scale COTS solutions and driving process-focused change in the acquiring organizations.  Ensuring that the functional communities that will inherit the solution are actively engaged throughout the lifecycle of the program, from the early stage concept development, through design, solution development, testing, and deployment.

 Ensuring an end-to-end process approach to solution design and development (vice individual stovepiped business functions), and aligning cross-stakeholder project teams to these processes for effective end-to-end solutions.  Ensuring requirements and the solution design optimize the use of the COTS product, reengineering legacy processes and limiting interfaces to legacy systems to the maximum extent possible.  Ensuring requirements are based on defined standards to the maximum extent possible, as well as ensuring that they have been streamlined and simplified even if it requires policy, regulatory, or even statutory changes. Essential Elements for COTS-based business transformation programs

 Ensuring that the program is “right-sized” to be no bigger than what is practical to implement.  Ensuring the approach includes a phased implementation plan that starts small, delivers quickly, and then builds on the initial solution with additional functionality and population over time.  Ensuring data quality issues are addressed at the earliest stage of the program, with a relentless effort to provide clean, reconciled data to the program in time for multiple rounds of conversion testing.

Essential Elements for COTS-based business transformation programs  Ensuring meaningful incentives based on quantifiable measures are in place for all stakeholders (including contractors) to align to the strategic objectives of the program.  Ensuring that periodic independent reviews are conducted across all areas of programmatic risk, and ensuring governance is engaged in the results of these reviews and willing to make tough decisions on course corrections if necessary to keep programs on track.

 Strategic Alignment  Governance  Fanatical Program Leadership  Effective Program Office  Skilled Practitioners  Engaged Functional Communities  End-to-End Process Approach  Optimize COTS / Business Process Reengineering  Requirements: Standardized, Streamlined, Simplified  Right-Sized  Phased Implementations  Data Quality  Meaningful Incentives / Quantifiable Measures  Independent Reviews YES, we can transform our business operations via COTS implementations IF we have… How many of these exist in your program?