The Nolan
approach actively involves your key business and technical staff in a
participative process. Nolan subject-matter experts facilitate your staff,
focusing on your business strategy and on achieving critical operating
results. This model promotes effective integration and optimization of
three primary enablers of business strategy: People, Process &
Technology. The following key elements comprise the Nolan approach.
Strategy
Creating, confirming &
understanding your business strategy is the first critical step towards
assuring a successful technology implementation. This step establishes a
shared vision relative to corporate direction and strategic results. It
assures a proper understanding of the competitive environment, validates
customer expectations and identifies key deliverables that depend on
technology.
Requirements
Defining business and technical
requirements for customers, internal users, distribution channels and
vendors helps assure that technology meets mission-critical expectations.
During this step, functional business requirements are defined and
weighted, costs and benefits are analyzed and confirmed, the number and
type of required resources are identified, essential skills sets are
defined, technology specifications are detailed, and system
integration/development, testing and business processes are defined.
Current Environment
This step evaluates the current
environment to identify gaps between the proposed environment and the
existing people, process and technology. Skills matrices, process mapping
and technical evaluation tools are used for this analysis. The results are
evaluated, confirmed, quantified and documented.
Goal State
During this step our business
and technical consultants work with your staff to develop and evaluate
recommendations. The team designs solutions to address gaps, achieve the
desired goal state, meet defined requirements and ensure effective support
for your business strategy.
Transition Strategy
This phase assures appropriate
involvement of key people, broadens participation and promotes ownership
of results. An implementation support structure is defined first. Then
technical, business process, human resource and training teams are formed
to address key planning components. Critical action steps are documented,
responsibilities are assigned, dependencies are identified and target
dates are established. To enhance the quality and speed of the technical
design process, we use UML (Unified Modeling Language) to model and
describe defined business requirements. Release plans, tracking tools and
reporting systems are tailored and used to monitor the progress of the
implementation plan. These help assure that deliverables occur on schedule
and that expected results are achieved.
As an integral piece of the
overall process, we assist your staff in developing effective, easy to use
measures that focus on key functional and corporate results. Nolan
software and templates, along with industry best practices and benchmarks,
are used to develop key output measures and staffing models. These
management tools are used to forecast staffing requirements and to monitor
delivery of expected service, quality, productivity and cost improvements.
Implementation
This step includes final design,
programming/integration, testing, training, release management and
system roll out. We provide ongoing advice and support for your project
managers, periodic audits of the implementation effort and on-site project
management assistance. The result is an on-time, in-budget delivery of
technology that effectively enables your business strategy.
