Willard Enterprises was founded by Buddy Willard to enable him to provide Interim and Consultancy services for large scale IT transformations to best meet your business needs.
Services Include:
- IT Transformation
- Business divestment
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Efficiency plans
- IT restructuring
- Business Smart Sourcing
- Vendor arbitration / dispute resolution
- Outsourcing / Captive design (onshore, offshore, near-shore)
- Creating migration plans
- IT Transparency
- Bespoke or off the shelf request process design and implementation
- Programme governance creation
- Project prioritisation guidelines
- Stakeholder and project team training and guidance
IT Transparency
It is quite common for employees and business leaders alike to complain about their IT department, whether its regarding changes to existing or new technical solutions, or the day to day operations of the current systems. There are often echoes of complaints from the IT department too, showing an ever expanding disconnect. Many in the IT department suggest that customer complaints are unfounded or that they fail to get the necessary time from the other functions within the business when detailing the request requirements.
There can be several reasons for this disconnect, from simple communication gaps to larger transparency issues, especially regarding budget, IT complexity and conflicting business requirements including within the IT department itself.
With close to 20 years’ experience leading complex IT departments, leveraging skills in Six Sigma, Prince 2, ITIL and numerous others, I can help you vastly improve your IT transparency in a number of ways.
Services Available
IT department “health check” assessment
Leaders run the risk of losing sight of the current priorities and rarely stop to reflect how their strategies may affect the day operations. It is advisable to seek input from others on occasion to ensure priorities continue to stay in line.
An IT health check will assist by putting things in perspective and making sure the grand long term strategy does not ignore customers’ current needs without understanding the consequences and making the necessary adjustments. It points out department risks and you can use this to plan and budget projects focused on closing these risks before they got out of hand.
The assessment covers the capabilities, strengths and weaknesses of a department by gathering feedback and assessing information provided by their customers. This includes the voice of both internal and external customers. It will help shape the business’ long term strategy and identify any major pitfalls facing the department as things progressed.
The time and money it takes to complete an assessment is minimal in comparison to the potential damages that can occur if one of these items slips past the department’s radar. A health check should be completed yearly at a minimum to assist in creating your department’s review and budget forecast. It is also advisable that it is completed as a supplement to the due diligence report when either acquiring or divesting a business unit.
Health Check Assessment
Company Profile: Holding company supplying regulated and non-regulated water utility businesses with shared service functions, having 400+ employees, operating from a central location with a 180+ strong IT department.
Task: Complete IT health check assessment and provide SWOT analysis report for executive board.
Results: Identified six key projects that needed immediate attention to ensure stable IT department. Highlighted numerous key strengths the IT department had that could be used to assist in business growth. The resulting projects identified in this report contributed to over £6m/year in additional revenue and greatly improved the IT departments standing within the business.
Create a PMO structure and governance model
As long as businesses and IT departments continue to refer to themselves as two different entities, there will be a significant disconnect in their interpretation of priorities.
In order to assist your business in moving closer to a single entity it is suggested that a single PMO structure is adopted. At a minimum, for complex organisations, businesses need to agree a common governance model, prioritisation guidelines and a request process so that ideas can be captured and moved along the organisation.
Willard Enterprises can assist your organisation by helping design and rolling out these critical requirements. Using a proven model that helps you to create and deliver a simple, end-to-end solution that best meets your business’ needs. It covers a broad range of processes from which you can choose, including:
- Creating a request process
- Instilling a programme governance model
- Designing enterprise level project prioritisation guidelines
These processes give you true programme transparency, appropriate ownership and cost control through a simple but structured approval process to ensure your business is spending its capital wisely to achieve the returns it is looking for.
Programme delivery process
Company Profile: B2B insurance provider providing high risk origination protection, with 180+ employees, £105 million revenues with continued growth, operating in eight countries with an outsourced centralised 200+ IT department.
Task: Provide IT programme delivery transparency, improve end user experience for new projects and reduce project waste by 30%.
Results: Moved the programme prioritisation for IT requests from the IT department to the requesting department heads within the business that receives the service. Board level project sponsors were appointed within the business ensuring adequate functional resources were assigned and remained appointed to project.
All services were owned by the functional department heads and their teams. IT’s responsibility changed to ensuring service availability, maintenance and upgrades as requested.
Business users and leaders alike were regularly updated on their programme progress allowing for early intervention and significantly reducing waste and improving delivery time.
Programmes with insufficient resources allocated by the business were either closed or risk mitigations were implemented.
High profile project prioritisations were moved to the board so that all directors were involved in the decision process
Programme governance
Company Profile: Holding company supplying regulated and non-regulated water utility businesses with shared service functions, having 400+ employees, operating from a central location with a 180+ strong IT department.
Task: Standardise, simplify and clarify the rules associated with project/programme approval.
Results: Creation and publication of company-wide governance model covering minimum project requirements, minimum return on investments and extenuating circumstances used for project prioritisation. Followed for every project, this guideline ensured financial resources assigned to project deliveries were sanctioned and approved by the executive committee. This simplified the prioritisation process, significantly reducing decision times, enabling the delivery of high priority programmes at a reliable pace and vastly reducing wasted resource effort on lower priority requests.
Business case standardisation
Company Profile: Financial Services, subprime mortgage lender, with 300+ employees, originating c.£100million new loans monthly, introduced through the Loan Packager Networks, operating in 3 countries with a distributed 80+ strong outsourced multi-supplier IT department.
Task: Standardise business case documentation to ensure the leadership team can prioritise seemingly unrelated projects timely, accurately and efficiently. Enable leadership team to prioritise programmes in a very quick and decisive manner suitable for all departments regardless of interests.
Results: Created a one page summary document with all critical information necessary for decision for each individual programme. This document covered financials, risks, programme and solution descriptions as well as dependencies so that all parties regardless of their awareness could easily identify and compare one request to another for approval for spend and resource allocation.
Provided details for prioritisation including resource allocation impacts, legal restrictions, regulatory obligations and return on investment predictions.
Reduced the programme pipeline prioritisation time from 1 day to under 1 hour.
Please contact us if you have any questions or would like to discuss your needs further via the link at the top of the page.