Assessment and Planning

Across numerous ISM business practices -- Enterprise and IT Governance, Service and Asset Management, Portfolio Management, Virtualization, Information Security -- ISM provides assessment and planning services to provide a baseline, strategy, and plan for going-forward IT improvement initiatives.

Senior ISM management consultants aid IT executives in improving their IT operations and business processes by first defining an overall, high-level initiative plan. With all of our business practices, ISM consultants assess the maturity level of several of the key IT “core processes” to establish a baseline for existing controls in IT.

Assessment and planning services are typically available at two levels, depending on the size and needs of the client:

• Summary Level – Designed for single-site organizations, this effort requires two to three days of preparation and data gathering, plus one week on site for analysis, planning, and management presentations.
  
  
• Detailed Level – Designed for more complex and distributed organizations, this effort typically requires three to four days of preparation, two weeks on site (weeks 2 and 5) for data gathering, analysis, planning sessions, and management presentations, and two weeks of off-site staff work, including documention and project plan preparation (weeks 3 and 4).

Depending on the business practice being evaluated, a typical deliverable from an ISM Assessment and Planning engagement includes an Architecture and Implementation Roadmap. An Architecture and Implementation Roadmap, customized to the culture of the organization,generally defines an implementation approach that focuses on developing the appropriate management system, infrastructure, and framework and establishes enterprise alignment in the early phases. The implementation roadmap then defines, builds, and leverages formalized processes on top of that foundation, providing the platform for long-term continuous performance improvement.

Architecture and Implmentation Roadmap deliverables typically include:

• Initiative background
• Overview of the business process(es)
• Business case and mission statement
• Management framework
• Business drivers, critical success factors (CSF’s) and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)
• Desired target business process architecture
• A discussion of the objectives, critical success factors, risks, assumptions, and constraints associated with the initiative
• Initiative strategy, phases and implementation roadmap
• Process definition including process/procedural flow
• Sample and proposed metrics
• A discussion of those external elements required to support this business process
• Functional Responsibility Matrix showing the roles and responsibilities of the key team members

In other words, following our core Performance Improvement Methodology, Implementation Methodology, and Framework for IT Success^SM, we selectively define, implement, and deploy the appropriate components of the framework for your business based on the needs of your business.