Integrated Business and Systems Strategic Planning
The Problem You May be Facing
While most medium to large enterprises have both business and systems plans, these plans often have little true impact on the daily choices made by systems and departmental management. If you have difficulty seeing the impact of your high level plans on daily operations, then these plans are "shelfware". They are only useful to show to auditors and to your board.
What your systems and business organizations do every day is to follow a different (informal) plan. In other cases either the business plan or the systems plan do not exist and need to be constructed.
In either case what you want and need is an integrated set of plans that get marketing, systems and business operations reading from the same page. When that happens great morale, efficiency and effectiveness benefits are derived. As Goethe said above, "...[there is] magic in it."
What We Do
Basically we provide the consensus and structure you need for truly effective planning. Starting with your CEO we seek first to understand what the enterprise must accomplish and the parameters around any planning process. We then construct a planning scenario that begins with the executive management team, proceeds to the operational departments, and ends with the systems organization.
Once this planning process is understood and supported by the involved parties, we provide brief training events designed to enable the planners to participate effectively. This is necessary because the planning meetings have a very unique structure, and produce plan documents immediately. The training ensures that the participants are prepared, participate constructively, and produce a usable result.
Once underway, the process looks like a carefully structured series of workably small meetings, producing working documents that enable executive management to see the IBSP take shape over time. When the component meetings are complete, we facilitate the integration of components in such a way that the Integrated Business Plan is produced. For the IT organization this is usually a real breakthrough, because with our approach they get a specific, prioritized and time-sequenced understanding of what they should be doing to support the enterprise for the next 3 to 5 years.
The next stage of the planning process is the development of the detailed systems plan. While this is sometimes challenging, it is very "doable" since IS now knows what needs to be accomplished. Again, we provide a "template" and a structure for this IS plan and facilitate its development. In parallel, the business departments may want to follow a similar template, with our assistance.
The "next to final" stage is the publication of these operational plans and the final drafting of the overall business plan. Since the components mesh, this "rolling up" to a high level plan proceeds quickly.
The final step is, of course, the presentation of the high level plan to the board of directors of the enterprise, or other governing body. With their approval, you not only have your plan, but also the assurance that the plan is being followed operationally. Day by day the investments in time, money, and people are now truly focused on the goals of the enterprise. It is truly "magic and power" at work!
Representative Past Assignments
As you might imagine, disclosing the details of past assignments on a medium as public as a web page is a sensitive matter. SMR Representative Assignments summarizes some of our completed projects. Out of respect for our clients' privacy we have chosen not to disclose their names on this web site. We encourage reference checking, after direct discussions have established a mutual interest.
