As mentioned last week, I’d like to share our approach to framing challenges so we can deliver business value. Best of all, it is not too hard to do, gives a good rounded view of the issues, and gives you a way to checkpoint your value delivered.

What is the 5 x 5 approach? It is a method of looking at a need from 5 apertures, and looking at the returns projected from 5 bases of value. It reflects the fact that our clients are large, complex organizations, and the work we do crosses many parts of the organization. Here are the 5 apertures we use–

1) Strategic / Business Alignment - does this initiative align with the CEO’s and CIO’s top initiatives for the year ahead? If so how? if not how might it? How does it effectively support a system or effort that does align?

2) Organizational / Roles and Responsibilities - How does this affect the organization? What consensus do we need to build? What is our plan for doing so? How will we market the plan and approach to get support? How do we find and leverage the best practices that already exist in our company? How do we determine the IT governance impact? What is federated(required) and what can be decided locally? What are the roles and responsibilities needed across the company? Who will fill them, how much time will it take, and what training or skills might they need to be able to deliver? What processes will we establish to ensure periodic reviews of the effectiveness of this area?

3) Standards / Governance - What are the appropriate outside standards that should guide us? What are best practices that should guide us? What alignment is required with internal standards? our enterprise architecture, our IT governance model, our project management process, quality practices like 6 Sigma, financial accountability like Balanced Scorecard? What parts of outside standards like CMM, CoBIT, ITIL, and Sarbanes-Oxley are important and / or add value in our business? What parts can we ignore? How do we combine multiple standards that might apply into a logical framework? What emerging trends / standards should we consider and watch in our strategy? What process will we establish to ensure periodic reviews of the effectiveness of this area?

4) Policy / Process (PP) - What are our current PP in place regarding this area? Do they vary by the different component areas of IT? Are they in conflict? How are they enforced today? How do we codify the strategic, organizational, and standards goals in the planning for the new policy approach? Are there proven best practices in policy management that exist in the company today in this area? How do we get policy consensus across the silos of IT? What if any process baseline exists in our company today? How do we control process development to prevent over-engineering? How will we ‘test’ process design before making it operational? What mechanisms ( functionality that ensures a high degree of compliance with a minimum of management) can we put in place to ensure an high degree of adoption quickly after we go live with the new system? How will we ‘market’ the new system internally to drive adoption, and uncover those who are resisting or struggling with the change? What are the key reporting / management metrics will we want to determine that policy and process are being followed? What process will we establish to ensure periodic reviews of the effectiveness of this area?

5) Technology - What core technical functionality is required? What technology do we already own that can be leveraged for a good solution? Are there What functionality must be added? Can we additional technology from current vendors to solve the problem, thereby not having to add another vendor, development environment, new skills, etc to our current complexity? How much additional integration needs to be developed and maintained for the solution? Are the gains worth the increased cost and complexity to our environment? Are all of the considered vendors well established in the market or the market leader? Will their technology be relevant in five years, or do they have a track record of effectively staying current? Are they developing for companies of our size and complexity, or are they trying to address the whole market with one size fits all? Do they understand our business problem and can they articulate it though proven solutions in current customers?

This works well for us. What works for you? Do you have other ideas that have helped you establish and maintain strategic value in your projects? I welcome your feedback.

—–