Assessment and Planning

Implementation of business and service processes always starts with the initiative planning stage. During this stage, ISM works closely with our clients to understand the business drivers -- Why this initiative is being undertaken? -- and to gain the required commitment from management to support the initiative and “stay the course” throughout the project lifecycle.

Once the business drivers have been identified, and management commitment has been obtained, we can proceed to the second stage in which an assessment of the current state is developed, followed by a gap analysis, defining the deltas between the current state and the desired end state.

These are the first two steps we follow in our core Performance Improvement Methodology and IT Service Management/ITIL Implementation Methodology as we selectively define, implement, and deploy the appropriate aspects of the ISM Framework for IT Success within your business.

Assessment and planning services are 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).

The primary deliverable from this stage is the Service Management Architecture and Implementation Roadmap which includes the following:

• Initiative background
• Overview of the business process
• 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
• Worksheets for gathering detailed process requirements in the following stage

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