“Help us reconnect with our stakeholders and establish the next set of priorities for our Finance Transformation Programme”.
Large Retailer
3 Consultants and Design Studio
Reingage the business stakeholder community for the next phase in transformation.
July 19 – Oct 19
£1-2 million in new developments
£3-5 million
The UK Finance Function had only recently moved onto Oracle Fusion, but the Finance architecture team knew they had to to keep the momentum going to further embed the transformation programme’s success. There was a lot left to be accomplished, but with differing opinions across the stakeholder group on the priorities and remaining work to be completed, the architecture team needed to step back and engage a trusted third party to help navigate the way forward.
The yearly investment plan deadline was looming, so the team at KV and the client decided a short, sharp engagement would deliver the most value. We set out to compile the objective facts required to capture the attention of the senior stakeholders and help them view the issues and opportunities in the Finance domain through a new set of lenses. Once we had the data to produce a recommendation, we would seek their support for a realistic three-year plan that covered the priority areas. Just as important, any recommendations would account for the size of the investment budget and the respective capabilities of both the Finance and Technology business units to deliver the recommended initiatives.
Let’s be honest: 2.5 years into a group-wide tech transformation is going to feel painful for most folk, so why should the business be excited about another 12 months that they are being asked to fund? A few extra features probably won’t cut it. There would have to be significant benefits to the business – and communication about what the benefits would be. The perspectives we prepared allowed the client to identify the business problems and risks that remained unmitigated and incorporated a whole new input of technology risk that hadn’t previously been identified. The view of the current inflight projects made a real impact to stakeholders who hadn’t previously understood the scale of the current planned projects within Finance or the numerous risks that were lurking in the dark corners of the estate. Using the Konvergent approach, the Finance architecture team were able to compile a 3-year roadmap that addressed the highest priorities – and for the first time, identified the correct order that would allow investment in new platforms for future development at the same time as retiring the riskiest technologies.
Changing the dialogue with transformation-fatigued stakeholders is a really tough ask, especially when the relationship needs produce a prioritised and agreed investment plan in a matter of weeks. Sticking to our approach to strategic roadmapping, Konvergent met these challenges head on by:
We spent time talking with the business to understand their plans and challenges, capture their pain points and rapidly replay their world through a business motivation lens.
Konvergent are passionate about equipping our clients with new approaches to enterprise architecture and business engagement – business capability planning was a new approach for the finance architecture team so alongside re-engaging the stakeholders we had a coaching job to do with the incumbent architecture team to show them how business capabilities map into their target service model.
The biggest value we delivered on this engagement was to help the client’s Finance Architecture team share the technical risk assessment they had recently completed. The framing of this piece of work made a major impact on the hearts and minds of stakeholders and presented the ‘killer feature’ for the impact of the work – the overall picture became a very effective call to arms and decision-making tool.
De-scoping low priority initiatives:
Cost savings of £1-2 million in new developments
Focusing on building central data and analytics platform instead of points solutions across service lines:
Cost efficiencies of £3-5 million
Konvergent,
The Hoxton, 70 Colombo St,
London,
SE1 8DP
T: +44 (0)20 3744 1256
E: info@konvergent.co.uk
