Strategic Assessment for Multi-Entity Enterprise Platforms

We sent a team of consultants to assess the current IT landscape within a major corporate group operating across multiple commercial sectors.

The Challenge

Our client depends on a proprietary enterprise management system supported by a dedicated internal team responsible for maintenance and improvements.

Our client operates a growth strategy through business expansion. As new entities are integrated into the core platform, challenges arise regarding functional alignment across diverse business units, placing increased demand on internal teams to adapt to evolving requirements.

The organisation aims to modernize its core enterprise platform to match current industry standards and performance benchmarks.

Solution and Implementation

Strategic Approach

We sent 3 consultants with different specialisms in key areas to work with our customer.  The project consisted of a discovery phase, followed by an in depth assessment, and finally synthesis and reporting of findings.  This assessment was divided into three areas: Technical Landscape, Quality Engineering and Business Analysis and Delivery Processes.

• Technical Landscape:
  Top-down pain point identification and maturity assessment: Conduct a review of the current IT organisation to identify key operational pain points and deliver a comprehensive technical and process maturity assessment.
• Quality Engineering:
  Identify opportunities and provide a roadmap for developing and implementing a robust, organisation-wide test automation framework.
• Business Analysis and Delivery Processes:
  Review current business analysis and delivery processes, and provide expert advisory on industry best practices to enhance the analysis and delivery functions.

We also were able to meet with a number of key stakeholders from a variety of the companies within the group in order to obtain feedback on their experiences with the system. This user research provided valuable insights, so much so we added an additional section into our recommendations to allow for future optimisation of the system

Key Deliverables

• Prioritised Pain Points Document
• Technical Maturity Assessment (Using the CMMI 2.0 framework)
• Create a Summary of Findings and Recommendations
• A detailed Roadmap to implement suggestions

Results and Outcomes

The production of the other key deliverables allowed for the creation of a detailed roadmap on how to improve the system from a technical quality perspective, in line with the business objectives, as well as to re-organise the team and introduce more efficient processes.  The roadmap was able to provide a structured plan to;

• • Stabilise the system by focusing on removing the biggest barriers to change in order of priority rather than initiating a full system rewrite. These actions address critical architectural debt and process bottlenecks identified during the assessment and are essential for improving maintainability, testability, and accelerating the development workflow.
  • Restructuring the team would allow this work to remain in progress whilst still allowing onboarding of new business units, bug fixes and feature requests to be actioned as a priority. We provided insight on not only what the new team should look like but also on how this should evolve over time.
  • Introduce automated unit testing for a number of key user journeys. Working with the organisation it was agreed that this should focus on a smaller number of essential journeys in order to reduce defects while mitigating excessive expense and increases in lead time of changes.
  • Adopt an agile framework and to utilise/optimise processes and ceremonies to ensure fast effective delivery. Not only were we able to recommend which aspects of these frameworks should be utilised, we were also able to use our experiences within the industry so that we could consider the business objectives, constraints and group policies to tailor our recommendations accordingly, also identifying which industry best practices may have been ill fitted to this specific organisation.
  • Implement a product led strategy. Conduct further user research to see where changes which may not produce a significant return on investment when completed for an individual business, may actually be beneficial when looking across the group as a whole.  We were able to identify potential areas where this may be beneficial, however as this was outside the initial scope, time constraints prevented us from conducting a deep dive with specific requirements in this area.
  • Restructuring the team would protect the ability to make improvements to the enterprise platform. Currently priorities around fixing bugs, onboarding new business units and new feature requests are the biggest barrier to progressing the desired improvements internally. Separating the teams will allow the business to make the necessary changes to the service while still tackling high priority items.