Don’t we all want to implement straight and rapid solutions to Business problems ? Not only because of the products time to market, but also, because it improves our own visibility on value we bring internally to our companies. We spent a lot reading, taping tweets, looking social medias, talking with suppliers, attending conferences as we expect to find good ideas for us. If we feel to have caught one, we try to set it next to an old one to see how they fit just like a lego game. Often it does not fit. Then we store the idea for a later stage when we will find a new one which will realise the fitting.
As soon as it fits, we make a business case and start to enlist a sponsor to what it promise to be a breakthrough project for our company. Starting from now, no doubt that we are enough experienced to lead the project to a successful achievement, otherwise it would be another story.
Reaching the point where a set of ideas makes up a breakthrough business solution, is indeed very hard for plenty of reasons studied by management researchers. According to the project promise, some may accept an imperfect fit in comparison with benefits, all things which will require people to make the bridge.
This would be a nominal process for change which tries to do things for the best. Actually people are more in a hurry and often use copy paste method to find and implement responses to business problems. Why what it is good for competitors would not be good for us ? We are not worse aren’t we ?
One of the last project failure study done by CA outlines that most of time wrong scoping or wrong estimates, despite good project management methods, leads to over budget and sometimes to stopping. Other papers from CIO magazine stress also wrong scope, especially when organisations try to copy paste external solution and cut some parts of scope for better budgeting without a really understanding of impacts.
As Business become more and more complex, Business people are loosing Business expertise on the behalf of software editors, software developpers and consultants. Their responsiility is more to understand how their customers behave and how it will evolve, than to define the better way to set the response which should belong to a multidisciplinary team including business experts (consultants), software editor, IT developper, IT integrator, Business Analyst, organizer, end users.
Times have changed. In complex changes, nobody can have full vision. All stakeholders have to work together to make it happen. It is a critical success factor for getting benefits from innovations.
An established Enterprise Architecture pratice allows to set and to sustain an effective collaboration between all stakeholders by the way of points of view. The requirements framework allows to link new ones to existing ones, and make impacts more obvious. Requirements accrual year after year improve enterprise capability to select consistent business solutions especially for rating idea coming from copy-paste process.