The Aim in Ready, Aim, Fire

The "Aim" in "Ready, Aim, Fire"

Most project management disciplines divide IT projects into five major stages:

- Conceive, where an initial proposal and cursory description of the project are put forward

- Design, where a detailed plan is developed that lays out what needs to be done, when, and by whom

- Build, where new assets such as processes and systems are assembled

- Test, where the new assets undergo rigorous testing to ensure that they perform as planned

- Deploy, where the new assets and behavioral changes are implemented in the live business environment

Chapter Three, indicated that predictive modeling would help companies go from a "ready, fire" approach to using IT in the business to a "ready, aim, fire" method that "aims" to make sure team members make decisions that keep business, process, and technology aligned. By mapping this crude analogy back to the five stages of IT projects, as in Fig. 4.2, we see some obvious similarities.

Figure 4.2. By helping to improve the design stage of IT projects, BTM provides the "aim" in "ready, aim, fire"

Most importantly, note the connection between aim and design. For BTM to really help companies aim to make better decisions, two assumptions should be true: first, the business/technology disconnect should result primarily from mistakes and oversights during the design stage of IT projects, and second, BTM needs to provide a mechanism to improve this crucial design.

Studies show that the first of these assumptions does indeed hold. In projects of all kinds a huge percentage of the cost is fixed in the design phase, no matter how scrupulously the project team adheres to best practices and careful management during the build, test, and deploy stages (which is where most project management efforts aim to wring value from the initiative). For example, research indicates that although "80% of the money and time invested in supply-chain management information systems is devoted to addressing execution processes 70% of a product's real cost is determined and decided in the early phases of product innovation and design." ^[1]

The second of these assumptions, that by improving the design of IT projects BTM successfully aligns business and technology, is the focus of this chapter. Each of Ch. 1's real-world disconnects ”from Patrick Flynn's customs -clearance system to Carl Wilson's HR initiative to Scott Hayward's call-reporting system ” demonstrates that disconnects between three crucial areas ”business, process, and technology ”are the catalysts for financial, behavioral, and functional disasters. By using modeling to improve the design of these areas before moving on to the costly build, test, and deploy stages, companies can address disconnects before they crop up. And, in fact, the activities of BTM ”business model definition, process optimization, and technology automation ”help companies to design enterprise architecture, a concrete blueprint that includes these three crucial areas, improves decision-making in their IT projects, and helps bring alignment to IT projects and the enterprise as a whole.