Laying the Groundwork for Cloud

Chapter 5. Take Small and Measured Iterative Steps

You have now done the outline planning and it’s time to start delivering the first transformation horizon. Your strategy should take a long-term view but the detailed planning and execution should focus one transformation horizon at a time. In this chapter, I’ll explain how you align projects and work packages within a horizon, to achieve the expected benefits and avoid investing in changes that yield no results. You will identify the key relationships with daily business and suppliers. Finally, look at how you can measure the journey and if needed adjust the direction.

Deliver Work Packages

To accelerate your timeline you need to consider packaging work, and where possible, hand it directly to BAU or to your suppliers, rather than overscope the project team. Each transformation horizon should group a number of tasks into a package of work; this technique helps manage scheduling and dependencies.

Figure 5-1 provides a visual reference of the approaches to change types and an example set of stages.

Figure 5-1. Transition, transformation, and migration approaches

Where possible, you should identify work packages that can execute immediately, without waiting for broader transformational dependencies. A pre-transformation work package can be completed by the existing organization and “as-is” operating model. These work packages ...