In a fast moving business environment, how can hypothetical projects improve project delivery?
With the increasing pressure for business to be dynamic most organisations are struggling with how to get projects completed cheaper, faster and without comprising quality. This article presents one approach that can be considered to address this dilemma.
A dynamic, evolving environment
The dramatic advancements in technology, even over the past 10 years, have created a business environment now where two things are clear:
- Change – the pace of change and the need for a business to be dynamic is at levels never experienced before
- Connectivity – the maturity of technology has enabled almost any application, device and location to connected and interconnected
This evolution has real implications for project implementation:
- No longer can projects take years to complete. Business is changing too fast and long-term projects will not often make the ROIs they set out to as technology and business requirements have changed (often multiple times) before the project delivers
- Many components of end to end business processes are now outsourced (BPO), or acquired as a service (SaaS) and not developed or managed in-house
The technology leaders have stood up to this challenge by seeking to build out enterprise reference architectures that allow for projects to deliver quickly, autonomously and yet by adhering to the enterprise architecture work seamlessly together.
So how do we then leverage this change to do projects better, faster and cheaper? The answer we call “Hypothesis” based implementation.
How does a hypothesis implementation work?
A hypothesis implementation goes like this:
“Based upon some key criteria we believe this is the best solution and then going about proving we are right” – in other words ruling the solution out rather than ruling one in.
Some criteria considered in devising the hypothesis could include industry research (like the Gartner Magic Quadrant), knowledge of specifics for the business, and the current and future business strategies and of course the enterprise architecture standards of the organisation.
A Project might go something like this:
- Capture high-level requirements from a small, senior, stakeholder group
- Triage and prioritize requirements – draw a line under the requirements that deliver 80% of the value sought using a correlation of priority, capability gap and business benefit
- Investigate and create a high level solution using by applying the key criteria (end to end People, Process and Technology components)
- Select the Product/s that best fits
- Get going – Prove the Concept and iterate
The hypothetical project approach is more about ruling out a solution than ruling it in. It makes allowance for high-level requirements but does not get laboured in detailed requirements. In most cases solutions will leverage the cloud (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) over in house infrastructure and application development.
The only constant in business is change
This approach recognises the principle that the only constant in business is change and that time is definitely of the essence. By leveraging the work of experts, applying enterprise standards and procuring components of the solution as a service, businesses can rapidly deploy solutions of high quality and low cost and low risk.
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