Recommended Key Initiative Plan

These 9 initiatives have been found to elicit the most significant measurable impact for professionals in this role.

Assess Your Applications Portfolio

72% of organizations do not have a full understanding of their application portfolios.

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Activities

  • Survey your departments to capture all systems and tools in use
  • Compare the relative usage and satisfaction with your applications
  • Prioritize applications for investment and retirement decisions

Benefits

  • Get a 360-degree view of the health of your application portfolio
  • Capture business level input for supporting a rationalization exercise

Build an Applications Roadmap

57% of organizations believe that modernizing their applications landscape is critical to achieving business objectives.

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Activities

  • Align your app portfolio to a known framework and your key business processes
  • Determine the appropriate disposition for each application
  • Build and socialize your app roadmap with business approval

Benefits

  • Create a business-aligned roadmap where investment is made in the highest value areas
  • Reduce application sprawl and free up IT investment

Improve Your Requirements Gathering Process

70% of project failure is due to bad requirements. Don't be on the wrong end of this statistic.

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Activities

  • Learn multiple techniques to elicit requirements from your stakeholders
  • Establish methodologies to analyze, validate, and prioritize requirements
  • Set a program for managing project changes

Benefits

  • Implement an SOP for repeatable requirements gathering
  • Establish minimum criteria for documentation and sign-off standards

Govern and Manage an Enterprise Software Implementation

On average, 66% of large software projects are over budget, 33% are over time, and they deliver 17% less value than originally projected.

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Activities

  • Assess the implementation complexity of a project
  • Create appropriate stage gates for each phase of the implementation
  • Establish communication framework for managing your systems integrator

Benefits

  • Establish entry and exit criteria for each phase of the project lifecycle
  • Create a governance model for large-scale software implementations

Optimize Application Development

Only 14% of organizations identify their development throughput as highly effective.

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Activities

  • Identify gaps and risks in your current SDLC process
  • Design high-level solution components
  • Restructure your development team to optimize for throughput

Benefits

  • Drive greater throughput and business satisfaction with development projects
  • Build consensus on the development process, accountabilities, and artifacts

Enhance Your Software Quality Assurance Practice

Testing alone does not guarantee success. Quality needs to be embedded in every step of the PMLC.

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Activities

  • Understand the barriers to quality in your current processes
  • Create a holistic QA framework, customized to your specific SDLC
  • Identify where automation can help save costs, reduce time, and improve results

Benefits

  • Make quality part of your entire development process
  • Reduce costs by catching issues earlier in the dev cycle

Develop an Annual Application Maintenance Program

50% of all maintenance is reactive. Establish a business-aligned plan for maintaining the most important applications in your environment.

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Activities

  • Align maintenance tasks to business value and SLA requirements
  • Create a forward-looking maintenance roadmap
  • Identify areas to optimize and reduce your maintenance spend

Benefits

  • Build a proactive maintenance roadmap aligned to business priorities
  • Justify maintenance spend and effort to business and IT executives

Establish an Applications Center of Excellence

53% of organizations receive less than half the benefits from their ERP implementations. Make sure you have a program to drive benefits realization post go-live.

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Activities

  • Define your cost-efficient but viable application COE operating model
  • Establish appropriate roles, resources, and accountabilities
  • Establish metrics and benchmarks to track ongoing application delivery

Benefits

  • Build a connection between the business and IT for ongoing application and process health
  • Build a governance model appropriate for your critical applications

Adopt Business Process Improvement

Poor process equals poor business results. A good BPI initiative can result in a 50% reduction in labor costs.

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Activities

  • Analyze a business process to define goals and key drivers
  • Document the to-be state of the process
  • Create a playbook for improving BPI across the organization

Benefits

  • Optimize your current business processes
  • Develop a program for your team to conduct ongoing business process improvement
1 / 9
  • 1. Assess Your Applications Portfolio
  • 2. Build an Applications Roadmap
  • 3. Improve Your Requirements Gathering Process
  • 4. Govern and Manage an Enterprise Software Implementation
  • 5. Optimize Application Development
  • 6. Enhance Your Software Quality Assurance Practice
  • 7. Develop an Annual Application Maintenance Program
  • 8. Establish an Applications Center of Excellence
  • 9. Adopt Business Process Improvement

Application Development

Featured Blueprints

Application Portfolio Management Foundations

January 07, 2022

This blueprint will help you streamline and rationalize Application Portfolio Management by following our four-phase methodology: Lay Your Foundati...

Enhance Your Solution Architecture Practices

December 03, 2021

Because of the increasing realization that principles like Agile and DevOps are important for overall business health, organizations have started t...

Deliver Digital Products at Scale

November 05, 2021

The need for business agility is growing, but many organizations still focus on product delivery at a tactical level. How well are individual produ...

Implement DevOps Practices That Work

September 14, 2021

DevOps is a philosophy that emphasizes a strong relationship between development and operations by incorporating each other’s priorities in their o...

Mentoring for Agile Teams

June 15, 2021

Most command and control–style organizations struggle with adopting Agile because it requires a different way of working. To be successful, you’ll ...

Build an Application Department Strategy

May 11, 2021

Your application department strategy isn’t just about what you should do next. It is a balance of identity, priority, and goals.

Automate Testing to Get More Done

April 22, 2021

Limited capacity for manual testing exposes your applications to unnecessary business and technical risks. Delaying automation is not worth the pri...

Implement and Mature Your User Experience Design Practice

April 09, 2021

Many organizations want to get to market quickly and on budget but don’t know the right steps to get the right product or service. Learn how to cre...

Browse Topics

Architecture & Strategy
Development
Maintenance
Mobile Development
Requirements & Design
Testing, Deployment & QA

Resources

Job Descriptions

View all 6 Job Descriptions

Tools

View all 60 Tools

Templates & Policies

View all 87 Templates & Policies

Business Processes

Featured Blueprints

Select Software With the Right Satisfaction Drivers in Mind

November 06, 2020

Select your applications with the right satisfaction drivers in mind. Find deep satisfaction from software that provides long-term, meaningful bene...

Optimize Your Software Selection Process: Why 5 and 30 Are the Magic Numbers

October 21, 2020

Select your applications better, faster, and cheaper with the “Magic Numbers.” This research uses 43,000 data points to help you make the business ...

Craft a Customer-Driven Market Strategy With Unbiased Data

September 30, 2020

The product marketing team is responsible for taking a product from concept to market using a well-informed strategy. Traditional go-to-market stra...

Get the Best Discount Possible With a Data-Driven Negotiation Approach

September 16, 2020

Vendors will eat you for breakfast if you aren’t well prepared for negotiations, but many customers aren’t negotiation experts and are overwhelmed ...

Build Your First RPA Bot

September 16, 2020

Your stakeholders decided to invest in robotic process automation (RPA) to increase business productivity, improve customer experience, and scale a...

Switching Software Vendors Overwhelmingly Drives Increased Satisfaction

September 15, 2020

Switching software substantially drives satisfaction, no matter the organization’s industry or size or the type of software. This research outlines...

Advisory Call Outline: Software Selection Engagement

June 22, 2020

Application selection is a critical activity for IT departments. Implement a repeatable, data-driven approach that accelerates application selectio...

The Rapid Application Selection Framework

May 26, 2020

Application selection is a critical activity for IT departments. Implement a repeatable, data-driven approach that accelerates application selectio...

Browse Topics

Business Analysis
Optimization
Selection & Implementation

Resources

Job Descriptions

Tools

View all 21 Tools

Templates & Policies

View all 42 Templates & Policies

Enterprise Applications

Featured Blueprints

Select an ERP Implementation Partner

December 22, 2021

Enterprise applications implementations are complex, and their success is critical to business operations. Selecting the right software implementat...

Optimize Lead Generation With Lead Scoring

July 23, 2021

With marketer rush to generate revenues, just 32% of companies pass well-qualified leads over to their outbound sellers. The culprit is often a lac...

Get the Most Out of Your HRMS

July 05, 2021

In today’s connected world continuous optimization of HRMS, HRIS, and HCM is key to enabling your digital strategy. Human resource management syste...

Get the Most Out of Your CRM

June 02, 2021

A CRM system is a critical component to deliver services to customers. It is essential to the organization; therefore, the usage of the CRM needs t...

Get the Most Out of Your ERP

April 09, 2021

An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is one of the most expensive software purchases a company will make. It is essential to the organizati...

Build a Chatbot Proof of Concept

February 02, 2021

Lay the groundwork for a successful chatbot proof of concept while keeping business goals up front by implementing the proper metrics, gathering re...

Strategically Phase in Technology to Bolster Supply Chain Management

October 07, 2020

This research is for IT leaders looking for creating a comprehensive SCM strategy in order to make solution recommendations and augment the functio...

Adapt Your Customer Experience Strategy to Successfully Weather COVID-19

March 20, 2020

COVID-19 is a daunting threat for virtually every organization – but an updated approach to Customer Experience Management can help ward off the wo...

Browse Topics

Customer Relationship Management
Enterprise Resource Planning
Human Resource Systems
Marketing Solutions

Resources

Job Descriptions

View all 8 Job Descriptions

Tools

View all 84 Tools

Templates & Policies

View all 103 Templates & Policies

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