IT Organization Structure Analysis & Guidance

In a business environment increasingly dependent on software applications and devices with embedded software, the need to quickly and accurately deliver new capabilities in a cost effective, low-touch manner is critical to delivering the exceptional customer, partner and employee experience which makes a company succeed.

BestIT’s application solutions ensure that your software applications efficiently and effectively support your business. We leverage best practices, tools, methodologies and industry benchmarks to develop, support or convert your applications.

Our quality support for your new and existing software systems, ensuring they are updated and optimized to support your business needs. We provide your business with the implementation, configuration and ongoing support required to maximize your software investments.

Organizations have tremendous potential within the people they employ and the processes they are aligned to. Our organizational design and transformation practice works to unlock that potential and shape your organization for the future.

Let us guide your company through strategic software decisions

We designed a full suite of services which can be provided stand-alone or in a standard or customized bundle: your pick your options; we integrate the services and deliver high performance.

IT Project Management

Tools and techniques to ensure requirements align to the needs, intent and expectations of the project financials return on investment.

• Budget Management
• Scope Management
• Resource Management
• Communication Management
• Workload Breakdown Structure
• Estimating

Risk Management & Reporting

BestIT’s Risk and Issue Management are based on a Composite Risk Index (CRI) which turns probability of occurrence and severity or risk exposure into a practical and manageable tool.

Tools & Techniques Utilized:

Composite Risk Index Process
Earned Value Analysis
Project Portal

Software Development Process

Models we utilize to logically organize the development effort in linear or iterative phases.

• Waterfall model
• Spiral model / Knowledge Based
• Iterative / Incremental
• Agile: XP, SCRUM, Feature Driven Development (FDD), Lean and Kanban.

Software Quality Assurance

Testing validation consists of the verification of suitability and acceptance of the artifacts against pre-determined criteria and industry-recognized standards of quality.

Microsoft suite of products utilizing:

Web Testing
Load Testing
UI Regression
Automation Testing

Software Vendor & Resources Analysis

You do not need to be held captive by vendors and resources. Let us guide you into the functional relationships. This includes determining if you should “pay for play” or “fixed” priced engagements.

Benefits Realization & Accrual

In most cases the benefits are never fully realized or at least recognized, casting doubts on the fiduciary discipline of the sponsors and leadership, and allowing critical decisions (go / no-go, kill or keep, slow down or accelerate) to be made in absence of a fact based substantiation. This severely short changes the organization and undermine the capacity of the executive teams and boards to make decisions.

Leveraging a collection of advance economics and analytics tools, BestIT can help you put in place:

Rigorous Business Cases where benefits and costa re equally substantiated.
Processes and disciplines to recognize the benefits as they are accrued, up to their transfer into a dedicated chart of account.
Discipline to stop the spillage of benefits linked to the annual or fixed term of the budgeting / forecasting process.
Ongoing measurement and reporting on the instant value of the benefits realized, and their Net Present Value adjustment.

Tools & Techniques

Financial Analysis
NPV
Applied Information Economics
Real Options

Execute Your Programs

We help identify goals and vision for the program/project, allowing you to rally everybody behind the program banner. It also helps
define precisely the outcome, quantify the costs and the benefits and launch the overall effort.

Tools & Techniques Utilized:

Strategic Mapping
Kaplan Norton Mapping
Hoshin Planning

Impact Analysis & Organizational Change Management

Change is movement, and movement creates friction, or resistance. Transformation initiatives are generating the same friction within the organization: the more change (movement), the more resistance. We help identify the organizations (department, region, function) to be impacted by the deployment of a solution or product, through assessing the level of impact / disruption including from other initiatives and decisions, and establishing change management strategies and plans to optimize the deployment and buy-in from the teams, while helping get faster returns on the program investments.

BestIT leverages its Organizational Change Management process and best practices to make sure a transformation is not just successful, but is delivering the business value that was stated in the original business case.

Tools & Techniques

OCM Framework
Emotional Intelligence

Sponsorship & Governance

The primary reason for programs to fail is the inadequate or inconsistent sponsorship and governance. The sponsorship is the definition and continuous guidance provided to the program team and leadership, including the clarification on the business goals, benefits case and course adjustments unavoidable with an effort that often spans over months or years. The governance is the leadership and management structure that both holds all the parts together and provide a single body management decision and repository of knowledge.

We help ensure there is a clear executive champion of the program, establish a governance plan to manage project execution, create a process and cadence for raising issues, and ensure a review process is in place with full participation from the stakeholders. The clear line of sight with the sponsor and the visible, unambiguous involvement of the stakeholders is the best guarantee of success.

Establishing Vision For Success & Stakeholder Alignment

BestIT will help you ensure that the program is aligned with the company’s strategic or enterprise level objectives, will facilitate agreement on scope, ensure common understanding of outcomes and will help identify and engage stakeholders. Finally, our experts will help or design the program’s structure, decomposition into projects and sub-programs and write the overall program charter.

Performance Reporting & Analysis

Although all projects and programs produce huge amounts of reports and diagrams showing versions of status and progress, it can be hard for an executive to understand and believe in the true status of a single or a portfolio of initiatives.

BestIT has developed a trued-up reporting solution that takes the raw data produced every day and translates it into simple, effective performance reporting for the leadership.
Most reports routinely state the amount of effort, resources and exceptions that describe the latest and the cumulated consumption (burn) of an effort.

The real value to the leadership is to determine the variance against the plan, the projected variance at completion and to know if there is a situation that requires attention or intervention. Only when a variance exceeds the acceptable value should it be escalated and investigated.

BestIT has established a reporting system that emphasizes the operational accountability of line and project or program managers, and
ensure that escalations linked to inadequate performances are only those worth the senior management time and attention.

Tools & Techniques
Statistical Analysis
Trued-up Performance Reporting
Kaplan Norton Mapping

PROJECT/ PROGRAM PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT (PPM)

Conduct a comprehensive assessment of your organization’s ability to manage and deliver your portfolio of initiative.

Ultimate goal is to establish centralized management of processes, methods, and technologies used by project managers and the project management office (PMO) to analyze and collectively manage a group of current or proposed projects based on numerous key characteristics. The objectives of PPM is to determine the optimal resource mix for delivery and to schedule activities to best achieve your organization’s operational and financial goals ― while honoring constraints imposed by customers, strategic objectives or external real-world factors.

The PMO ensures that the proper governance structure is in place for your projects and programs or portfolios.

Operational: Execution is taking place with acceptable performance, and exceptions, issues and risks are addressed at the level closest to their origination.
Leadership: Usually through a steering team or committee, the periodic review of the performance trends, escalations and exceptions handling. The leadership level also provides tactical direction to match the overall / strategic guidance.
Strategic / Executive: The periodic (but less frequent than leadership) meeting of the sponsors and key stakeholders to define or review the goals and objectives, provide fresh guidance or course changing directions and acknowledge the variances and accomplishments to date against the charter.

Each level provides upward reporting and downward decisions and guidance, according to their individual charter.

HIGH PERFORMANCE PMO BEST PRACTICES

BestIT can provide you with a repository of best practices honed over thousands of hours of projects and program execution. But you are probably not starting from scratch, so we will build a simple and effective process to integrate best practices and elect the ones that your PMO should promote. In a self-serving twist, BestIT can bring on its knowledge and best practices on how to create and manage a high performance PMO, in order to help you:
Set up a PMO: All activities to establish a PMO, staff it with the right competencies, put in place the tools and processes necessary to a smooth execution and along the way explain train and coach people on how it works and how to take advantage of this new capability.
Optimize: If you already got started and built PMO foundations, we will assess and review what is in place and update or complement it with our best practices and the result of our assessment (a roadmap). The optimization includes enhancing the performances and streamlining processes as needed, verifying the alignment with the PMO charter and in general the fine-tuning of the PMO engine to provide higher performances.
Run: We actually run the PMO on your behalf, with some or no participation of your teams. We create or integrate best practices, processes and procedures to establish the baseline body of knowledge that will make the PMO sustainable. Then we execute following the model, which in effect is a turnkey PMO.
Transition: Eventually, you want to own and operate the PMO. This can be a tough job if you do not have resources and a history of running a full size PMO before. Now comes the easy part: once we have optimized and stabilized the PMO, we transition it to your team. The transition includes coaching and basic training, as well as a “driving school” approach: we show your teams how we operate the PMO; then we operate together, until we are both comfortable that the new team can operate with just us watching or being in support. As a matter of fact, a risk-free transition.

The BestIT Software Architect

Our team of experts in Application Development, Support and Maintenance (ADSM) carries years of experience and masters a wide variety of languages and techniques, including: Oracle Forms/Reports, Oracle EBS, Oracle CRM, JD Edwards, Salesforce.com, Java, C#.Net, ASP.Net, SSIS, SSRS and SharePoint. The software development and support team is supported by a Project Management Office that monitors performance and keeps projects on track. A team of business analysts are experts in identifying the true business problem to be solved and documenting the requirements in a language which bridges business and technology specialists. BestIT’s Quality Assurance testing team ensures that anything developed is working in accordance with the requirements and the successful delivery of artifacts is predictable and repeatable.

“I cannot thank you enough for your responsiveness, sensitivity, and expertise in this request. This all came together in literally minutes and is a testament to what you bring to the table as our remote IT provider.”

Rob McDonald

“I would recommend BestIT to anybody…the team members that I work with are professional, competent, and it has really been a great experience. They have made me look good and I am thrilled with their service.”

A. PerkinsCFO

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ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN AND TRANSFORMATION

Architect your Organization • Align Skillsets to Business Needs • Organizational Transformation

How to establish a Transformation Center of Excellence

Architect

Our subject matter experts assess the structure of your organization in terms of value creation, operational enablement and strategic contribution and craft a roadmap to make the change. We help you getting there too.

Transform

To assist clients in the process of transforming their business, BestIT utilizes its Organizational Change Management (OCM) framework. Based on industry best practices, our framework includes the strategy, process and activities that drive organizational and individual transitions to achieve program success. Our approach focuses on generating awareness, understanding, and acceptance for large-scale transformations, but can be tapered for smaller engagements to integrate and empower your people.

Align

Few organizations have the internal capacity and capability to perform a deep analysis of business need, skills, roles and job alignment. Many events can drive a chasm to form between the skills and capabilities the organization has today and its current or future needs. This is especially true when the the need is greatest – at times of great growth, rapid decline, technological shift or pronounced business change. We help you see the gaps and put a clear, practical plan in place.

Excellence

In today’s business climate, organizations that excel build transformation into their DNA. Establishing a Transformation Center of Excellence is the foundation for strategic agility – whether its used to address a changing marketplace, leaps in technology, new vision, or M&A, the TCoE gives you the control.

We look forward to assisting you with your IT Organization Structure Analysis & Guidance needs. Please contact us to setup an initial free consultation.