Assessing your Organization – is this
a Cake Walk?
Before
defining and implementing a new business or IT strategy, very often
organizations do not exactly know how their organization or architecture look
like in detail or which capabilities they have established, tailored, or
retired – both for business and IT.
On top of it,
different areas can be assessed within the organization. The business capabilities
ensure the business is able to deliver the services to the customer as
requested. The IT and architecture capabilities support the business with a
specific set of services and a proper management over this area to achieve the
organization’s objectives. Finally, when having planed a change, organizations
should normally know if they are ready to undergo the change as it is needed.
All these
areas can be assessed within an organization and honestly, most of the involved
stakeholders think that this is a cake walk to go through it.
Starting an assessment properly
requires a set of pre-defined and standardized approaches using tailored
templates, artifacts and deliverables and the assessment team should know the
tricks and hurdles going through it successfully.
The Preparation Phase prepares the
organization to run the assessment engagement properly. Discovery workshops
with the stakeholders and the preparation of the deliverables, interviews and
questionnaires are crucial parts of this phase.
The Assessment Phase is the execution phase
of the assessment. The interviews, interview workshops and the analysis of the
documents including the related interviews are executed. Furthermore, the
observations, weaknesses, risks and improvement options are identified.
Finally, the results of the assessment are
documented in the agreed output documents and communicated to the customer.
A series of feedback workshops ensure that the observations and improvement
options are understood by the stakeholders and the involved IT partner
commonly.
So, coming
back to our question: Does this sound like a cake walk? NO – definitely not!
Especially the Preparation Phase contains several hurdles which have a high
potential for failure.
As an
example: Are you really sure that you talk about the same term and definition?
I have been in an assessment engagement a while ago. In the preparation phase
we have talked about a term called “QMS”. We as the assessment team thought
that we would talk about Quality Management System as a quality improvement
process in the IT management. Practically, the assessed organization had
another understanding about the term “QMS” which was more related to a process
documentation tool for the business architecture. Honestly, it took the
assessment team a while to find that out.
Such a situation
causes a lot of confusion within the whole team and can be best managed by
running a small discovery phase or rather workshops. The objective here is very
clear and simple: “You tell us how you work and we tell you how we work.”
Having sorted
out this situation has also a positive impact on defining the questionnaire for
the interviews. Imagine, you are using terms in your questionnaire or questions
which are misunderstood by the assessed organization and stakeholders – what
would be the result of the interview? Exactly, the output would not lead a
profound and useable result.
Be aware of
politics – what does that mean? As usual in the Enterprise Architecture
environment, the assessment of an organization is also influenced by politics
within the organization. You never know the full history why the organization
has started to think about this assessment and how the relevant and impacted
stakeholders think about it. Some stakeholders do support this engagement, but
some others might feel threatened by it – and you should better know why.
Therefore, one stakeholder group might give you clear and useable answers and a
full documentation as evidences for the questionnaire. Other ones just provide
“standardized answers” with low value for the assessment engagement.
Therefore, a
proper and comprehensive stakeholder and communication management is the key
for success. Additionally, a series of interview iterations using standard
questionnaires, follow up questionnaires and workshops help to sort out potential
gaps and contradictions between the different answers of questionnaires of the
interviewees.
So you see,
an assessment might look like a simple thing for a couple of weeks you can go through
easily, but it has a number of hurdles where you can failure. It is definitely
not a cake walk!
