Before delving into the details of setting goals and objectives, let’s quickly examine the ways and times throughout a project when you can leverage the catalog to facilitate smoother implementation.
One way to utilize the catalog is by expediting your demo and presales process. During the discovery phase, precisely define the customer’s needs and outline this process using the catalog’s guidance. This approach aids in assembling demonstrations effectively.
Additionally, the catalog serves as a valuable tool for importing into a business process modeling tool. Moreover, it can assist in conducting a fit-gap analysis after completing the scope and estimation. By refining the business process catalog to your specific scope and project, you can create a project plan importable into project management tools like Azure DevOps.
Importance of Project Scope and Estimation
There are numerous benefits to clearly defining your project scope and estimating it accurately. A well-defined project scope serves as the roadmap for the entire implementation process, outlining specific goals, objectives, and deliverables. Additionally, it helps mitigate the risk of scope creep and ensures that the project stays on track.
Business Process-Centric Approach
Aligning the estimation process with the business processes within the scope of your project ensures the delivery of a tailored solution. Understanding and mapping these business processes are essential steps for accurate estimation. This approach enhances the effectiveness of Dynamics 365 or any technology solution, ensuring it meets your business needs.
It also establishes a common language for communication with your business. Defining the business processes and mapping terminology and concepts used by your business to those used by the software or technology provides a framework for ensuring everyone is on the same page.
Impact On Cost and Resources
The implementation of your scope and estimation process can impact the cost and resources required for your project. Accurate scope and estimation processes lead to better resource allocation, helping avoid unnecessary costs and delays. This efficient resource utilization results in a cost-effective implementation.
Mitigation Risks Through Clear Scope and Estimation
Identifying potential risks at the project outset facilitates the development of a well-defined scope. Accurate estimation enables the creation of clear contingency plans early in the project, reducing the likelihood of disruptions and ensuring on-time project delivery.
Stakeholder Communication and Alignment
Effective stakeholder communication and alignment are crucial from the project onset. Clearly defined scope and estimation processes facilitate effective communication with stakeholders, aligning their expectations and ensuring everyone is on the same page. This communication also fosters confidence and trust among project participants.
Defining Business Goals and Objectives
The process of aligning business goals and objectives can be broken down into five pillars.
First is the pillar of understanding the business goals. Here, it’s crucial to obtain a clear definition of the organization’s overarching goals. Examples of these goals might include improving customer satisfaction or optimizing operational efficiency.
Second, we need to map these goals and objectives with the defined business processes. For instance, the customer satisfaction goal may be mapped to order fulfillment and its supporting processes.
When considering the catalog, we recommend adding a column to show how these business goals are mapped to the actual business processes within the scope of your project.
Third, ensuring process alignment is essential. There should be direct alignment between the business goals and the business processes in scope. For example, mapping the operational efficiency goal to streamlined inventory management, which is part of the end-to-end inventory delivery processes.
Fourth, it’s important to establish measurable objectives for each goal. For instance, for the customer satisfaction goal, an objective could be to reduce order processing time by 20% or increase customer retention by 15%. It’s crucial to have clear metrics to measure these objectives before and after the project starts to assess project success and identify potential areas for improvement.
Fifth, it’s essential to ensure that every business process contributes directly to the achievement of business goals.
Collaborative Goal <> Process Mapping
We cannot emphasize enough that collaborative effort is essential for mapping goals to business processes. It’s crucial to involve key stakeholders to ensure comprehensive and accurate mapping.
When engaging key stakeholders from various parts of your organization such as different lines of business, departments, divisions, regions, etc., you foster a shared vision and commitment to project goals. These stakeholders possess a deep understanding of your business processes, which is instrumental in delivering on those goals and objectives.
Furthermore, they comprehend how these processes impact the organization’s ability to achieve its goals and objectives.
Estimating Project Scope
We recommend starting the process of estimating a project with a very high-level set of steps.
First, define the workshops. It is advisable to begin with a minimum of workshops at the L2 level for your project.
Next, create a work breakdown structure. This entails compiling a detailed list of the business processes and their corresponding steps or configurations that will be included.
Then, identify any necessary integrations by examining various patterns and identifying those that need to integrate with another system. Additionally, identify any data migrations required.
Consider identifying gaps in the process. These gaps may manifest as rows that need to be added or modified in the spreadsheet, indicating potential areas of misalignment.
Once the gaps are sized, begin estimating the time required for each task in the detailed work breakdown structure, with mapping to follow.
Subsequently, after identifying and mapping resources, proceed to estimate the costs associated with each resource, and allocate time for standard tasks such as performance testing, UAT, installation, and deployment.