Service Delivery Projects

 

WCA has substantial experience of providing accurate, cost effective Service Delivery consultancy services on challenging, complex projects. These incorporate professional planning, structuring and delivery of projects and programmes.

You may simply require our services on a tactical basis, taking partial ownership of the project, or taking total ownership from initial conception to completion.

 

The supplier negotiation part of service delivery is sometimes under emphasized. We have significant negotiation and supplier management experience within sizeable contracts, and have sensitivity to cultural differences and how these can impinge on successful outcomes. We have successfully managed win-win negotiations on a number of challenging, high profile projects with businesses based in France, USA, Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia and Japan.  

 

 

Working to established methodologies appropriate to the complexity of your requirement, our services could include any or all of the Plan, Build, Deliver or Refine phases of a project.

 - In more detail, we could help in these areas:

 

Initial Consultation: A high level business review stage. What is the strategic direction of the business and the strategy for the service? What are the existing business issues and workloads? What are the current costs and what benefits do we expect from the new process and technology being considered? What is the quantifiable value improvement in £’s we should be able to achieve? Produce a robust business case.

 

Business Analysis:

Any successful change requires an understanding of where you are and how things are done now. We are often required to document existing processes and produce a report on the present business infrastructure and related opportunities and costs. Related analysis tasks would usually be to establish the differing requirements from all stakeholders, analyse these and condense into a single document. This should translate the business vision into clear operational goals and draw cost saving benefits or revenue and margin increase to be expected from revised business processes.  This could be as the basis of a draft business development plan or functional design spec (FDS) / Requirements Specification for the new process or technology required.

 

Alternatively, the requirement may be simply to review whether the existing technology is meeting the commercial need or how the process or the technology can be cost effectively modified to make it work better.

 

Requirements Specification: If a technology change is required the business analysis activity is used as the basis of a requirements specification. This organises different stakeholders thoughts on concepts, functional requirements, technology platforms, security and outputs into a single complete description of what is to be created procured and tested, and the reasons why that definition has been arrived at.

It should also allow for accurate estimates of necessary work and resources.while providing an understanding of how “success” in the new system is to be defined, clarifying timescales and criteria for return on investment. 

Worrying this document to a satisfactory statement which all parties agree on is much more cost effective than implementing a system for which the specification is moving as implementation takes place.    

 

  

Producing RFI / RFP/ RFQ: A formalised request for potential vendor and system information, proposals and quotes can both identify potential risks and benefits, bring structure to the procurement process and ensure selection is logical. 

The RFI can be used to help refine what to do next and clarify key parameters for inclusion in the RFP. As it provides an opportunity for the potential vendor to raise any issues they may see with the project as defined, an RFI can be a useful way of starting to establish a working relationship with potential vendors. The RFQ should provide a consistent framework for potential vendor selection and elimination.

 

Short listing Solutions: Our involvement could simply be at the short listing phase, to quickly and cost effectively make sense of the morass of vendor information and produce a first pass list of possible vendors to save you time. Questions to consider, what system architecture and platform is appropriate and why? How easy will this system be to actually use? What is the key functionality and what is simply nice to have? What document management functionality is existing or required? What are the legacy system integration requirements?

 

 

Solution Selection and Implementation: The vendor has been chosen, now for the detail. We have been asked to provide help at this stage alone, in implementing support processes, supplier management, finalising a new contract by re negotiating previous terms, or trying to fix damaged relationships.

Service level agreement (SLA) negotiations can be problematic. A skilled external perspective  - perceived as being without an axe to grind - can help smooth the way ensure that both the service and management components of the SLA reflect the commercial drivers of the business and form the basis of a mutually beneficial partnership with the vendor which drives real business benefit.

Effective change management should also consider the operational change elements of technology implementation. When the vendor has been selected, questions arise such as how about managing change in the business? If strategic and operational planning is ignored then technology implementations will fail. Other questions to ask would be “are we simply automating a flawed process?” “How will the system be integrated into our overall business strategy?” “How will the vendor be managed?” “What is our roll out strategy?”

 - Most importantly, how will user adoption be managed? In a 2007 survey from the U.K., four-fifths of senior executives reported that their biggest challenge is getting their staff to use the systems they had installed. (TMC 2007)

 

 

Refine: So the system has been implemented and IS being used. Based on your increasing experience and greater understanding of the capabilities of the chosen system, how will we refine its use to gain greater insights into the business and higher value?

In a broader sense, how can we best use this new process and technology to make the business thrive?

Speak to us for more information.