Fractals for Business Case – presenting “Options”

Once the “Reasons” are clearly stated, forming the first version of the baseline, the Business Case needs some solutions for starting the operations with clear guidance.

The “Options”  should be in the number of three; these are the main properties:

1. Every option shall cover (in different ways) the needs forming the “Reasons”
2. While the core is technical (e.g. architectural, COTS), each solution needs to be framed into the receiving organization. The impact, of the proposed solution, shall be shown using the costs/benefit’s analysis.
3. Presenting each commercial (i.e. outsourcing, in-house etc) proposal requires to establish common guidelines about, for example:
   1. Weighting the importance of testing in each development phase (from Unit Test to Peer-review).
   2. Configurable GUI.
4. One of the three solutions proposed, has to minimize the implementation costs. It will include the effects of “doing nothing” on the organization. The motivation for this option consists in supplying a reference for the other two.

This is the first test for our design.

The success will be ideally measured through the overlapping of the two shapes.  This will offer another opportunity to evaluate the respondence of the proposal against the requests.

In order to produce the three candidates, the “Options” are focused on our mock-up CRM project. The cost/benefit’s analysis will be described in the next post.

First Option

Framing the proposal into the company’s environment

All the operations (e.g. calls and various ads campaigns) are managed via a “single center” developed using “cloud computing” tools.

Cost/Benefit’s analysis

It requires a lot of features for “translating” every different transaction into a financial and operational standard.
Local legislations have to be probed for dealing about the data security.
Both the financial operatives and production floor have only one fob, updated in “real-time”.
Increasing the operational speed, the quality of offered services shall increase dramatically. An average of 40% of developers’ time will be allocated to the testing.
The GUIs shall be highly configurable both for line-products and languages – special features.

Second Option

Framing the proposal into the company’s environment

At a regional level will be created dedicated centers. Everyone is based on a COTS.

Cost/Benefit’s analysis

Lesser costs due to the availability of most of required features. The system’s core will be common, the needed localizations will be done outsourcing GUIs.
The financial and production centers will be supplied with standard reports approved by regional manager.
The reduced costs for adopting this strategy are balanced by the beefing up of regional coordination centers.
Quality becomes less important, due to the controls carried out by human operators.

Third Option

Framing the proposal into the company’s environment

Each team of sale-people will prepare standardized spread-sheets, which will be sent to the financial and production sites.

Cost/Benefit’s analysis.

Initial costs tends to naught. Bottleneck both in financial and production sites shall be solved either slowing the operations or increasing the personnel attending the sifting and alignment operations.
No issues about quality.

Overlapping the shapes

All three “Options” must be confronted with the “Reasons”. Obviously, this operation should be carried through at the end of the process of issuing the Business Case; however, it could offer a glimpse of the ongoing situation.
Assuming that the proposed COTS (second option) is focused on Operational CRM.
This means that some features do not cover all our requirements. In particular, there is a need for more powerful tools dedicated to customers’ behavior analyses. The SME are foisting to add a Business Intelligent application. This solution imposes the scheduled migration of data from the main DB to that dedicated to DWH.

Working out results through the pictures

The graphical results can offer a quick and clear view of the impact produced by each “Option” on the project. Transforming, orderly, figures into shapes could be easily done using PowerPoint (dimension’s tab).

First Option

Second (biased) option

Third Option

Conclusion

There is no magic in the application of a bit of math and physics for rendering concepts in an objective reality. The adherence to a clearly well-defined set of shared data is fundamental to the credibility of the whole project.

“You may prove anything by figures” T. Carlyle

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