Initiative Planning & Execution
Initiative Planning & Execution services heighten a client's chance of success with all projects - from "quick wins" to transformative endeavors. A holistic understanding of scope, deadlines, budgets, and intended benefits sets the table for timely and flawless delivery.
SERVICE OFFERINGS
- Scope Definition & Requirements Assessment
Collaborating with key stakeholders to define the body of work. Gaining cross-functional alignment on scope. Review of detailed requirements for clarity and ‘testability’. Ensuring stakeholder buy-in at the outset.
- Program Architecture
Designing the specific program structure to best support the task at hand. Defining work streams and steering committees, authorities and decision rights. Establishing the communication model by which critical project information will be shared.
- Resource Planning
Identifying requisite skills, procuring internal and/or external resources, establishing and communicating clear roles and responsibilities.
- Detailed Project Scheduling
Itemizing tasks, assigning resources, setting target dates and milestones. Good plans begin with a full understanding of stakeholder impact, the critical path, and all available levers.
- Program Leadership
Owning ultimate accountability for the success of initiative. Leading by example and providing day-to-day guidance to teams. Memorializing key decisions made throughout the course of the initiative. Monitoring progress relative to plan, and course correcting as required. Pulling levers when needed. Tackling issues until resolved. Delivering with laser-like focus and precision.
- Deployment and Rollout Management
Validating readiness – both technical and stakeholder. Precise orchestration of teams’ activities to ensure minimal disruption to the enterprise and a seamless transition to the live environment. Post-implementation rollout support.
- Post-Implementation Review
Facilitating group feedback sessions, garnering lessons learned.
- And many other Initiative Planning & Execution services that heighten a client’s chance of a successful implementation.
CASE STUDIES
A global investment bank would soon embark upon a large-scale technology replatforming initiative. Many systems across the world were to be upgraded. The CIO commissioned RFC to work across the enterprise to ensure the body of work was well understood and that the requirements were well defined. He wanted full alignment among those business and technology groups impacted – before getting too far down the road on this $30MM effort.
By analyzing what had been documented to date, RFC quickly tackled the gaps, noting several groups were not represented and many systems were still not accounted for. Strong cross-functional collaboration filled in the blanks. Assumptions, business risks, and constraints were made clear. Project dependencies were brought to light. As a result, a fulsome set of specifications were handed off to the offshore teams designing and coding, and to the test teams writing cases and ultimately assuring delivery quality.
In the post-implementation review, the CIO attributed the initiative’s success to the organization’s work around Scope Definition and Requirements Assessment early on.
A leading pharmaceutical company faced a time-sensitive regulatory issue. To remediate hundreds of systems toward compliance with a new FDA regulation, RFC quickly mobilized a workforce staffed primarily through contracting firms and outsource service providers. Validation experts, systems designers, coders, testers, and tech writers were put to work virtually overnight.
Through strong Program Leadership, including robust control mechanisms to monitor thousands of moving parts, this massive undertaking achieved its objective. The client was fully compliant with the FDA regulation by year-end.