As your business grows so should your company’s software. While there are many accounting systems out there, when you’re making the switch, you’ll want to be sure you are making the right choice. This is where a Business Impact Assessment (BIA) can not only save your business a ton of money, but also a lot of headaches. Because there is nothing worse than spending money on a new software solution just to outgrow it in a short amount of time.
What is the BIA?
The BIA is an engagement that our team at 360 Visibility conducts upfront before our clients make a critical business investment in a new system.
A lot of business will do this engagement as part of their overall planning methodology. However, what is different is that we do this first to ensure that our team understands your business and what you’re trying to achieve, and that the project is mapped to achieve that.
It is important to do this up front and make sure everything is clearly defined before moving on.
What are the key benefits?
The benefits to conducting this upfront prior to making an investment in a project is it helps reduce the risk of a failed project or even a challenged project.
There are a lot of key reasons why a project may be challenged or fail. Including engagement from the entire organization, unclear objectives, scope creep, or changing requirements, and what a BIA does is clearly identify these risks to eliminate them before they arise.
By meeting with the entire organization, it ensures that everyone is engaged from the beginning prior to a final decision or project starting. The BIA will help your team understand what everyone wants to achieve. This helps set the tone for the entire project.
The BIA process will also clearly define common objectives so everyone has a benchmark for what the project is heading towards. We will also help teams determine how they will measure success so there is something that you are continually working towards.
Scope creep is a common thing we see in any project and we want to try to cut that off right away by defining the scope clearly. Everyone should understand what is in scope, what’s not, who’s taking which responsibility and a set timeline that we work towards. This is all delivered and defined from the beginning so objectives are clear. And finally at the end of the engagement there is a complete roadmap as to how the project is to proceed.
What can you expect
Our team at 360 Visibility works with your team to schedule several days of workshops where we conduct interviews with all levels of the organization. We start with a session with the management team so we can understand their strategic visions for the business, we then move on to implementing each critical business area and review all their processes, their challenges, and what you want to achieve. We don’t necessarily want to come discuss a system, but we want to understand what does this system need to do to support your business. From there we then want to clearly define that out of this process.
After meeting with your team, we begin to design the solution. We want to define the technology that is needed to support, define the roles, detailed scope, the budget and the timeline. When we are finished we then come back and present that to the team and review it as a group and make sure that it meets everybody’s expectations. Then we proceed on with the rest of the project
About 360 Visibility
At 360 Visibility we accelerate end-to-end cloud adoption with Microsoft’s secure Azure Cloud and the Dynamics suite of software, giving your business the best service, software, and experience. Our Business Impact Assessment and Cloud Consultation make achieving your business results easier and faster, no matter where you are in your digital transformation.