How can IT inform business direction and investment decisions rather than trying to make the best out of decisions already made?
BT
5 Consultants
Introduce Business Capability Planning at BT
Mar 17 – Dec 17
BT’s IT Leaders needed to act fast. With the 2017 Strategy Update requiring rapid convergence between discrete lines of business and the need to transform costs, the demands on the Technology Services Organisation to execute the Group’s strategic goals became crystal clear. Recognising the need to invest in the Technology Organisation at all levels, BT’s IT Leadership called in Konvergent to help them formulate a strategy for managing this need in the Architecture organisation. After an initial Architecture Maturity Assessment, we produced a targeted deployment of Business Architecture to start engaging with the business as partners in investment planning. This was seen as the best way to help the business find the issues that will challenge them in their efforts to align service and product offerings, as well as highlighting the common capabilities and technologies that can offer opportunities for cost reductions.
“The project allowed us to accelerate building out capability models for two critical areas of business that were about to undergo significant transformations. Having artefacts in business language helped enormously with building trust with our stakeholders that we understood their business domain and provided a transparent level of objectivity in the evaluation of alternative options. The project also upskilled our internal team so that they can now go forward ad build out these critical models on their own."
5
5%
*One of the programmes we unblocked estimated immediate savings of 5% of multi-million pound total development costs.
We identified these skills as critical phases to spearhead Business Capability Planning in the organisation.
Business Capability Models make great communications tools. Our approach for using them at BT was simple:
Because the understanding of architecture at BT was mainly technical, and because we had to move quickly to catch opportunities, we needed to limit the amount of analysis we performed to a few key models/techniques:
We were introduced to our biggest opportunities by asking the stakeholders we met whether they could identify any of the following scenarios:
We partnered with architects at BT to co-create deliverabes and coach them on the techniques and models we introduced. This method has several advantages:
"I feel like I've stepped up a level. I have a lot of experience, but I've always been delivery focused. The mentoring I received from Konvergent has allowed me to start considering the business side of things and how it all connects."
How to overcome: We met a few stakeholders at BT who were reticent to try yet another approach, or simply had no room in their calendars. Our advice is to bring them something of value that you’ve worked up in the background. Something of value could be:
How to overcome:
Some of BT’s Business IT Directors and Programme Directors were feeling threatened with the idea of our teams (our architects and the BT partner architect) engaging with the business directly. When this happened, we placed these individuals in the upper-right quadrant of our stakeholder heatmap to reflect their ability to derail our efforts. We recommend keeping these stakeholders very involved in your activities and, above all, make sure they look good.
How to overcome:
We had to recommend that BT free up 25-30% of the working week for the architects who were actively mentored. To be blunt, if you can’t carve out this time, you won’t be successful on this journey. We found the tendency to slip back into BAU was very strong at BT because of the pressures on the architecture community.
We also needed to continue to remind people of executive sponsorship to ensure the mandate for change was not forgotten. Our work on developing at Target Operating Model for BT ensured that key competencies were identified for each architectural role.
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Employee Services
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5%
BT Centre of Excellence for Business Architecture Enabled
*One of the programmes we unblocked estimated immediate savings of 5% of multi-million pound total development costs.
Konvergent,
The Hoxton, 70 Colombo St,
London,
SE1 8DP
T: +44 (0)20 3744 1256
E: info@konvergent.co.uk
