Performance Excellence in IT

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In partnership with a major enterprise's IT & Technology organization, our team assessed current performance, developed performance aspirations, developed a roadmap to achieve over several months, and executed to realize the full vision. The graphic above illustrates the key changes to achieve over 10x performance improvement in cost, velocity, and customer satisfaction. 

While each of these elements were critical to the full success, some of the higher impact items included:

• Solutioning Strategy: Historically, a time-intensive and costly component of evaluating and delivering an opportunity was assessing a range of potential solutions, often starting with a clean slate. The solutioning strategy collapsed the number of options into very few by providing a clear decision tree reducing this activity often to negligible time with decision authority often sitting with the project manager
• Valuation Estimation & Measurement Methodology: Historically, significant effort was expended by both IT and the customer to estimate and then measure value for IT projects with a six figure price tag. By achieving a 90% cost and time reduction, the cost and effort expended to estimate and measure impact became a disproportionate amount of the cost justifying a significant simplification in the methodology while maintaining sufficient rigor to inform prioritization and capital allocation. 
• Agile & DevOps: Adopting Agile project management framework was an early win and welcomed by the customer. Adopting an Agile mindset with the right level of planning rigor across dev teams was equally impactful. Pairing these with DevOps team operating model that is accountable for both development and providing ongoing support created a step change in the user experience, velocity, cost efficiency, and product quality.
• Customer Engagement: Recognition that our customer has a day job with many competing priorities was consistently factored into the design through an aspiration that "all the customer has to do is show up". While it was never quite that convenient, that rigorous customer-centric mindset delivered exceptional customer experience with unprecedented praise from all levels in the organization. 

The outcome was over 10x performance improvement in velocity, cost efficiency, and customer satisfaction. This performance improvement also rebuilt trust between the IT organization and their customer. These two factors together didn't just result in lower IT costs with faster delivery, it directly supported and accelerated Digital Transformation through delivery of a high volume of high quality digital products and opening up new ways of working and business operating model.