Plans and Strategies and the weakest link

Plans and Strategies are only really useful if they executed to produce the intended outcomes

To support strategic transformation and optimization three things are required:

1. Strategies and Plans: that can be demonstrated to be: based on facts (or explicitly stated testable beliefs) and produce the business outcomes desired if effectively and coherently executed.

2. Coherent orchestrated execution: so that the set of changes taking place within the various silos of activity are orchestrated as a set so that gaps, overlaps and conflicts are identified and resolved.

3. Agile and adaptive: that is the ability to adapt as changes occur to the facts, the beliefs or other circumstances. Often as a result of discovery during the execution activities themselves.

An issue with how things are usually done at present in business and IT transformation is that there is an ugly document layer that exists between what are typically two precisely modelled (i.e. sets of explicitly related concepts) layers. 

In this layer documents like: Project Definitions (Charters, SoWs etc.), Requirements Documents, Solution Design Documents (SAD, etc.), DR/BCP Plans are produced manually. This is time consuming, often obscures root cause analysis, and the artefacts themselves are seldom suited to most the audiences that are presented to (because most are only interested in a small subset of the information contained within them) and can't easily be maintained (or verified).

They are not explicitly connected to the layer above and provide no hooks for explicitly linking to the layer below. They provide scope for fictional narratives that executives, business stakeholder, et al may be persuaded to believe by the silver tongued.

We offer solutions that allow the middle layer to also be modelled (i.e. treated as data). The documents become reports. As they are reports it is easy to produce subsets specifically tailored to different audiences.  The contents of the documents (goals, requirements, solutions, milestones) are explicity related to each other and to the concepts above. Then they can be analysed (e.g. impact, overlap, cost, complexity, risk etc.) and the data managed (i.e. as change occurs over time). This allows agile approaches to be adopted while maintaining the integrity, coherence of the information and allowing the impact of changes (from bottom or top) to be understood in context.