Assessments & Road Maps

The ISM Way

Assessments & Road Maps: Overview

Assessments and Roadmaps are an ISM service that focuses on client maturity levels and a resulting set of recommendations from both a platform and a process/people/product perspective.

There are typically four scope categories that can be distinguished based on the client’s maturity level and objectives:

Platform Assessment
An operational assessment of the current-state functionality of your platform, providing recommendations for platform optimization in alignment with your business objectives.
Process Assessment
An operational assessment of the process and people elements of your business. We tailor the assessment to provide recommendations to help you achieve your desired state of maturity and capability, given an assessment of your current state. Our process consultants are skilled in industry best-practice process frameworks, drawing on real-world experience.

Process Assessment
Strategic Platform Assessment
This approach provides a deep-dive into your platform focusing on the strategic results you’re looking for. We assess not only the current state functionality of your platform but also do an in-depth review of the solution architecture. The result is a strategic roadmap that walks you through the steps needed to implement a solution architecture to meet your strategic objectives.
Strategic Roadmap Assessment
This assessment provides an in-depth analysis of the people, process, platform elements of your business from a strategic level. We combine our platform and process consulting expertise to deliver a strategic roadmap focused on obtaining maximum value and return on investment (ROI) from all areas of your business.

Strategic Roadmap Assessment

Plan of Action

Our experienced ISM consultants start with a series of standardized questions and probes to establish an “as is” current state profile for the assessment level chosen. We analyze and summarize the results to develop a roadmap that contains the prioritized steps to reach the “to be” vision. These recommendations are based on:

The client’s vision
Best practices and existing pain points
Identification of “low-hanging fruit”

Examples:

If you are looking for an operational assessment of your platform, we would recommend the Platform Assessment, where we focus on functionality and optimization.

If you are looking for strategic and platform only, ISM will provide an Architecture & Roadmap assessment, providing you with the platform assessment, along with a roadmap of how to get to the architecture you want.

Assessment Process

Vision and Road Map

Define
Define the Basics
Manage
Manage the basics
Excel
Show excellence

Maturity Continuum ( Building Agility, Choice, and Value)

The levels of the Maturity Improvement Continuum:

Chaotic:
No control.
Reactive:
Limited control.
Proactive:
Gained control, Defined goals, Reduced risk.
Strategic:
Managed, Reduced Costs, Accountable.
Utility:
At this stage of maturity, ROI, and customer satisfaction is at an all-time high, operating costs and risks are at an all-time low, and predictive analysis is the driver set. An organization that was once only reactive in nature is now able to efficiently and effectively forecast and has matured into a predictive nature. (This is where you can be and ISM can help you get there)

Why Maturity Improvement?

What are the benefits that can be obtained from maturity improvement? Can we quantify our goals? How do we know we have reached the desired state? What are our critical success factors and KPI’s?

Desired State and Goals

(The Questions that drive Success)

Desired State

What are your goals?
What are you trying to achieve?
Which areas cause concern?
Do we have metrics pointing to ‘pain’?

Choose the ‘yardstick’

How are we going to measure?
What are the benchmarks?
How do we prioritize?

Current State Assessment

Where are we now?
What are the gaps?
Where are the “low-hanging” fruits?

Recommendations

How do we get where you want to be?

Roadmap Process

The RoadMap Cornerstones: A maturity model-based approach is used to define the roadmap for you:

Define ( Define the basics)

Adopt new processes and tools
Iterate, learn and improve consistency
Baseline key metrics

Manage (Manage the basics)

Manage centralized processes
Evolve maturity of capabilities
Measure key metrics

Excel ( Show excellence)

Leverage more advanced functionality
Enable enterprise-level decisions and priorities
Control key metrics

Assessments & Road Maps

Assessments & Road Maps: Overview

Platform Assessment

Process Assessment