Effective IMS Delivery Partner Model

____ Delivery Expertise

"We understand how important planning and design of any project is. Finding a delivery partner that we can trust is always a challenge, especially in situations where we have to ‘go to market” to choose that most suitable organisation to deliver our projects.

In assessing which delivery partner to engage, what are the key elements we should consider?

How do I know we’re getting a best practice implementation and how will this work if the planning and design phase is covered by another partner?”

____ What to consider?

Organisations are managing rapid and significant change driven by digital disruption – with some also playing catch up for a lack of investment in technology. The primary focus of our advisory work is to describe the opportunities available to an organisation from aligning their business, technology and data initiatives through the adoption of a more strategic approach to Technology and Digital transformation, and the adoption of an enterprise architecture. A key deliverable from most consulting engagements, is a multi-year future state roadmap - but what happens next? Implementation of a transformation roadmap is a difficult challenge for most organisations, as the capabilities available in-house are usually not enough.

To succeed, organisations need access to a myriad of specialists to help deliver critical outcomes and reduce delivery risk, including roles such as transformation program and change managers, business case and procurement specialists, business improvement specialists, CX/UX designers and specialist enterprise, data and solution architects.

A critical success factor for any transformation will be how effective the people doing these specialist roles are, but securing good people for the right amount of time is a key challenge. Organisation’s can engage consultants to deliver some roadmap outcomes, however this usually means they need to pay premium rates or a risk inflated fixed price.

Alternatively, engaging specialists as contractors may be cheaper, but it usually requires a longer commitment of many months, which is at odds with the way specialists are usually needed during a transformation program, in bursts of days or weeks. Also, there’s a significant risk with contractors that they won’t have the level of competency required to deliver the desired outcome.

Finally, neither of these resourcing options facilitate the upskilling of the organisation’s employees to become more self-sufficient in the areas needed to support the future state architecture.

Our Delivery Partner model provides our clients with the core roles required to reduce delivery risk Program Management and Enterprise Architecture - and then provides access to specialist resources as required to deliver the critical outcomes. Through this model, our clients can access some of our best resources on an ad-hoc basis. This a wide range of roles, including:

Prioritisation and coordination of digital transformation and business improvement projects
Change management capability including standards (e.g., ADKAR) supports federated project management where business areas may be undertaking improvement projects with technology implications
The capability should connect Project Management with IT solution delivery and IT operating model
A sophisticated project governance and agile delivery model, tuned for managing risk in private and public sector organisations.
A defined program governance and delivery model to mitigate risk.

___ Client Relationship Management

As part of the delivery partner model, IMS also included dedicated relationship management - providing an escalation point for clients outside the project delivery model. The primary aim of relationship management in this context is to reduce potential service delivery gaps, including differences between perceptions, expectations and the actual quality of deliverables. Client relationship management objectives include:
Developing an understanding of the client’s needs and correctly align our services in light of those needs,
Developing an understanding of the client’s needs and correctly align our services in light of those needs,
Maintaining knowledge of our service offerings, and those of our competitors to ensure we can clearly position and differentiate our service offering,
Maintaining regular communication with our clients, and
Providing post-sales support and liaison.

IMS Delivery Partner Model

IMS Delivery Partner Model

Advisory Partner

Enterprise Architect

Program Manager

Change Management Lead

Project Manager

Solution Architect

Business Analyst

Data Analyst

Developer

Tester

Potential realised.