Friday, August 22, 2008

Setting the high level services.

Okay so now the team is getting established, as a hint for the future though remember that August is a really bad time to get a project going in Europe, and we are looking at structure. We have three high level business services
  • Engagement
  • Management
  • Production
These are the real names but they describe the basic areas of the project I'm on.

Engagement is all about getting information, its about how we get the information from the users and from other systems that we need, it covers how that information gets filtered and the process around registering systems and users.

Management is about what we do with the information, how we prioritise certain elements and eliminate others and use it to decide what actions should be taken. It covers approving actions and business case creation.

Production is about what happens once we've decided to take an action. How do we track their implementation and their operation against the original costs and business case estimates.

This really means that when we do the process and technology work we are being very clear about these handover points between areas because they represent different operational ambitions. Engagement is all about quantity and then filtering. Management is about the quality and Production is about realising the benefits.

We've also mapped the stakeholders onto these areas to determine which bits are most important to them and so which bits will have them actively engaged.

This is now the structure that we will use to organise the project.

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6 comments:

Jack van Hoof said...

I created an implementation pattern which exactly matches what you state.

See here

-Jack

Jack van Hoof said...

And this one might be of interest to you. This posting holds pictures that match your idea. Feel free to use all of my pictures. Everybody may use them. No copyright limitations...

-Jack

Steve Jones said...

Good stuff Jack.

Unknown said...

good to see people talking about what you're referring to here as the 'production' phase - so many organizations totally fail to measure and see what the project actually delivered vs what was originally required/forecast - and thus rob themselves of valuable lessons...

Colin Jack said...

So my question would be how you take these high level services and assign them capabilities and then match those with messaging endpoints?

A valid answer would be "read my book" which I do intend to do! :)

Steve Jones said...

Colin,

Clearly read my book, but the bit about messaging endpoints is a much further down the line. Some capabilities that you identify won't have an IT messaging end-point they will have a manual/human end-point. They key is to understand the services and capabilities first then worry about the specific end-point.

Steve