Identifying the Business Needs
You might already know your business needs, but if you don’t, this short exercise will help. If you personally know the business need(s), consider doing this exercise with your team, the other stakeholders, and your executive sponsor. Doing this will promote buy-in to the entire process from selection to implementation to go-live.
Consider and answer these fundamental questions:
- Why did you start looking for software?
- What are the business processes that need improvement?
- Who participates in these processes? Think beyond your team to others impacted as you follow the process from start to finish.
- Who owns these processes? Which teams have revenue or cost responsibilities?
- What are these problems costing the business right now in these areas? You’ll look more closely at ROI later, but this calculator will help you assess costs of mistakes for product and quality management work based on your inputs.
This exercise will allow you to clearly state the business objectives. You want to take this information and get to a business needs statement in the form of:
We must improve W and have better X to accomplish Y and meet Z.
Circulate this “Business Needs” statement until you have input and agreement from all stakeholders.