“...strategic priority shifted to ensuring ongoing effectiveness and relevance of the investment...”
Business Opportunity
Following a five-year implementation of an ERP / CRM system at the City of Edmonton, which was transformational across 30 lines of business, strategic priority shifted to ensuring ongoing effectiveness and relevance of the investment over the next 10 to 15 years (the expected product lifecycle).
Actions + Outcomes
As the business owner of the enterprise platform, Nathan led the process to plan, design, negotiate and secure funding for a multi-year technology roadmap. This approach involved three in-depth phases working extensively in collaboration with IT, operational teams, and stakeholders from across the corporation, as well as with a global technology provider.
Phase 1: Framework Planning and Design
The planning and design phase focused on taking a bottom-up approach by first building the foundational framework. Nathan achieved this by working with senior leadership, as well as with stakeholders cross-departmentally, to establish fundamental parameters for the roadmap, such as:
A three-tiered planning horizon; immediate (2020), mid-term (2021 to 2022) and long-term (2023 to 2026)
A governance committee to support ideation, scoring and process implementation
Weighted criteria that would be used to score and prioritize future technology requests
A customer feedback procedure to receive customer scoring on proposed enhancements
A capital budget funding strategy that aligned with planning horizons
Phase 2: Roadmap Development and Scoping
With the framework in place, building out the roadmap came next. Configuration, enhancement and development requests were captured across a multitude of channels, including from:
Internal support tickets where future development was required
Ideation sessions facilitated with key lines-of-business
Customer feedback provided through customer service and research channels
Competitive market scanning
Business strategy and priorities
“This multi-staged vetting process allowed for each proposed enhancement to be prioritized and scoped across immediate, mid-term and long-term planning horizons.”
These proposed enhancements were then scored against the previously established weighted criteria and then assessed once more by customer segments, to better understand alignment to customer expectations. They were then evaluated in terms of delivery feasibility and cost, working closely with technology providers. This multi-staged vetting process allowed for each proposed enhancement to be prioritized and scoped across immediate, mid-term and long-term planning horizons. Not to mention the added insight gained from being able to directly identify how customer segments scored each particular line item.
With over 100 configuration, enhancement and development items scoped within the final iteration of the roadmap, several common themes emerged.
Integrating AI to analyze data more effectively and better execute processes
Advancing data management and reporting to better centralize, visualize and utilize data
Automating services to personalize experiences while adding efficiencies
Expanding payment options (web and mobile), as well as refining UI / UX, to enhance customer conversion and monetization
Integrating with other platforms to manage data more efficiently and ensure a common source of truth
Phase 3: Corporate Approval and Funding
The final phase of the process required receiving the necessary corporate approval and funding to move forward. Given the estimated value of the proposed roadmap, particularly what was being requested for 2021 and 2022, a business case was developed in partnership with IT and then, presented to executive leadership.
In the fall of 2020, funding was approved by City Council for the mid-term planning horizon (2021 to 2022) of the roadmap as part of the supplementary capital budget adjustment process, receiving shortly thereafter subsequent approval for project commencement by the City’s executive oversight committee.
Insights
Aligning transformational change with corporate culture and organizational readiness is critical to success
Leveraging the same project team across planning, implementation and like initiatives, can build momentum, better support knowledge management and enable a more in-depth team development strategy to be realized
Investing time early in the process to center stakeholders around the 'why' or business challenge, will enable them to better speak a common language and unify around a single point of reference - regardless of the technical background or complexity of the solution
