Requirements Planning
Technology is typically deployed to either; 1) automate an existing manual or inefficient process; or, 2) to measure and manage the utilization of assets. Depending on which primary goal the technology is targeted to address dictates– to some extent– the analysis phase methodology.
Process Automation
When the goal is process automation or process improvement, the project team will focus on reviewing the “current state” processes, documentation, and data flows such as; drawings, leases, work orders, invoices, financials and approval processes. The project team will document the processes, create process and document maps and conduct review sessions with the client to identify; where bottlenecks exist, single points of failure, processes that are prone to error or have a high potential for dropped execution. The annotated process map will become the basis of the “future state” process during the design phase.
Measure and Manage
When the goal is to Measure and Manage [the utilization of assets, etc.], the project team will “begin with the end in mind.” This means that the client must define what they want to measure and then gather the inputs and processes required to ensure that the data needed to measure and manage are loaded and maintained in the system. Practically, this means defining the desired reports at the beginning of the process rather than at the end once the data has been loaded.
For example, if we want to measure space utilization, the desired measurement might be a report of area per employee. To obtain a report of area per employee, the system must have information on areas, headcounts, classifications of space, etc. There must be processes defined to load or migrate the data, keeping the data updated, maintaining the data standards, exceptions and approvals to ensure that business rules are followed. As the example illustrates, beginning with the end in mind is critical to ensuring that the system captures the necessary information and processes are in place to generate the management reports to enable business decisions.
The next steps of this phase are the same irrespective of the desired project goal. The project team will work with the client to create the “future state” process flows, define the user roles and responsibility matrix, identify the integration points with other systems, data standards and data migrations required and reports. Based on the findings of the future state requirements, a technical gap analysis is performed against the ARCHIBUS out-of- the-box applications and features, and any configuration or customizations required to fill the gaps are identified.
The list of gaps is then prioritized and rank ordered for the team to triage and determine the must-haves versus the nice-to- have items. This list becomes the foundation of the functional specification document. Each item in the functional specification document is reviewed with the IMS Consulting technical team to develop time estimates for configuration and/or implementation. The Project Manager will assemble the time estimates into a preliminary Project Plan, considering dependencies and tasks that require the client to complete, such as; providing data, installing hardware or software, providing standards, etc.
Deliverables:
• “Current State” diagram/document
• Desired metric reports definition
• “Future State” diagram/document
• Rank-ordered Gap analysis list
• Functional Specification document
• Updated Project Plan