Guideline: Application Modernization Strategy Workshop
Workshop is a meeting with all the stake holders and interested people to present preliminary analysis, metrics and recommendations for the application. This event also helps validate findings and understand requirements or goals of the organization with the application under consideration.
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Main Description

Deliver Assessment Presentation and Report

The purpose of the workshop is to gather the executive sponsors and senior IT leaders together to strategize on how to issue the recommendations. These IT leaders include directors, managers, enterprise architects, etc.

During this workshop, a senior assessor delivers a concise presentation of the findings to key stakeholders and other interested parties. The Findings Presentation briefly outlines the approach the assessment team followed and then focuses on the findings and recommendations.

When delivering the findings, it is important to maintain a balance between the areas of strength and areas for improvement. When you address areas for improvement, try to clearly and objectively express the root cause(s) of each one, as well as the degree of the impact on the business. While exact quantification of impact is usually impractical and risky for most assessments, the strongest findings frequently indicate the nature of the impact in terms of cost/effort, schedule, or quality with a potential order or range of magnitude. Remember, the solution value and sense of urgency is often measured by the significance of the identified problems.

Prior to delivering recommendations, it is highly beneficial to elicit stakeholder feedback to gain support of the findings and establish initial priorities. Frequently, stakeholders are well-aware of many or all of the issues expressed in the findings, in which case they will likely be receptive to the recommendations. However, if the stakeholders are resistant to the findings, the senior assessor can need to facilitate a discussion to clarify areas of disagreement before moving on to recommendations. In extreme circumstances, the senior assessor (with agreement from the sponsor) can choose to postpone delivery of recommendations, if the underlying assumptions are called into question.

When delivering the recommendations portion, try to convey that intention is to enable them to achieve their business goals. It is appropriate to review these business goals with the stakeholders to establish a sound foundation for the recommendations. For each recommendation, the most effective presentation clearly and objectively expresses how each one: 1) addresses the root cause(s) of the deficiencies previously identified in the findings, 2) promotes the business goals, and 3) provides a rough indication of the implementation effort/time frame. Again, it is appropriate to elicit stakeholder feedback to gain support to the findings, revisit initial priorities, and gauge the level of stakeholder urgency.

As the presenter, you must be prepared to discuss the identified issues and recommendations, as well as answer questions about what the recommended solution would involve. Try to keep this meeting to no longer than two hours. If the customer wants more discussion than can be accomplished in that time, it indicates that there is follow-on work required.

During this workshop there is no need to deliver the application enhancement road map or strategy even if it is already prepared. However, it is important to be aware of that so that brief question can be answered. It is important to gauge the interest if the sponsors and other interested parties to see if recommendations are acceptable to them. This will go a long way in gauging the interest of the sponsors to accept a particular road map.

It is important for the sponsoring executives to participate, to communicate and clarify to the IT leaders the business goals related to application improvements, the significance of the goals and their expected time frame for achievement.

IT leaders have the opportunity to negotiate the scope and time frames for implementing the new enhancements.

The ideal workshop results are:

  • A set of improvements desired
  • The projects or organizations committed to undertaking the pilots
  • A set of objectives to be achieved by the strategies traced back to one or more of the business goals
  • A leadership team (guiding coalition) responsible for driving organization change

The outcome of the workshop will directly feed the Create and Application enhancement road map activity.

During the workshop you can perform the following activities:

  1. Have the executives review or reiterate the business goals for Application improvements.
  2. Review the assessment recommendations.
  3. List candidate applications for enhancement/improvement.
  4. Access application timeliness and capacity for change, agree upon objectives that can be delivered by each of the candidate application; gain agreement that agreed-to objectives satisfy goals.
  5. Select pilot applications from the candidate list; finalize agreement upon the applications to be enhanced; agree upon potential schedule.
  6. Agree upon measures for the objectives to be accomplished.

Aside from tasks 1 & 2, the tasks are not necessarily sequential.

Input:
• Analysis data from current state analysis
• Analysis data from application code analysis

Output:
• Origination goals and past experiences
• Willingness to accept certain changes to the application environment