Information Technology is ever more critical to business success being a core enabler for business processes and entire business models. Due to its inherent complexity however only one in three IT projects is successful. More specifically, a recent Harvard Business Review article revealed that one in six of the IT projects reviewed had cost overruns of 200% and schedule overruns of almost 70%. (2)

Avaelis is well versed in the cost-effective delivery of best-practice IT, project and business management and can help you with the following services:

• Our Enterprise Architecture service allows you to derive better value from your investments by aligning your business processes, technology and infrastructure with your strategy.
• With the Project, Program and Portfolio Management service, Avaelis can deliver, or help your staff deliver, projects, programs and portfolios of work. We can also set up a framework to increase the maturity of your project, program and portfolio management processes in your business.
• Avaelis’ Roadmap Execution service can help you to realise your strategic objectives by navigating your business to the desired state through the definition and execution of the roadmap to get there.
• With the IT Service Management service, Avaelis ensures that you and your customers receive the maximum benefit from the delivery of quality information technology services.
• Our Interim Management service provides quality temporary management skills to your business while you identify and source the ideal permanent resource.
• Reduced IT cost and better value from your investments through the alignment of the building blocks of your business with your strategy
• Reduced risk in the delivery of IT projects, programs and portfolios by leveraging the most experienced practitioners and best-practice methodologies
• Improved project, program and portfolio maturity to make your business more successful at effective and consistent project, program and portfolio delivery ongoing
• Improved user and customer satisfaction through our quality IT Service Management service

When you engage Avaelis in the area of Cost-effective delivery of IT, you can expect:

• Reduced IT cost and better value from your investments through the alignment of the building blocks of your business with your strategy
• Reduced risk in the delivery of IT projects, programs and portfolios by leveraging the most experienced practitioners and best-practice methodologies
• Improved project, program and portfolio maturity to make your business more successful at effective and consistent project, program and portfolio delivery ongoing
• Improved user and customer satisfaction through our quality IT Service Management service
• Safeguarded business continuity through the engagement of our effective interim managers

References 

1. Bloch, Michael, Blumberg, Sven and Laartz, Jürgen. Delivering large-scale IT projects on time, on budget, and on value. s.l. : McKinsey & Co, 2012.

2. Flyvbjerg, Bent and Budzier, Alexander. Why Your IT Project May Be Riskier Than You Think. September 2011.

3. McKinsey Global Institute. The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies. s.l. : McKinsey & Company, 2012.

Deciding to make an investment in your business and implementing that investment is only half the battle. Once you have made the expenditure, it is critical that the environment of people, processes and technology in which the investment operates has been optimised to enable the best returns. Too often, we see benefits failing to be realised to their full potential. Example causes for this problem include:

• Poor handover from the Project team to the Business As Usual team means your team struggles to use the investment effectively
• Resistance to change or lack of buy-in from the Business As Usual team means your team is not inspired to use the investment effectively
• Legacy business processes have not been updated to maximise benefit from the investment (This Is How We’ve Always Done It)
• Integration of the new investment with existing systems proves insufficiently robust and your team resorts to inefficient workarounds or legacy processes
• Provisions for increased infrastructure requirements have not been put in place, causing your investment to be ineffective, unreliable or entirely incapacitated
• Benefits are not actively monitored to enable effective course-correction.

In addition, it is not unusual for there to be some ambiguity on how or when the return on an investment should be measured.

Avaelis can help you with these issues by implementing proven strategies that enable you to maximise the return on your investments. We offer the following services:

• Our Investment Management service carefully monitors the benefits realised by your investment and mitigates or eliminates both anticipated and unanticipated roadblocks to optimise effective use of your investment.
• Avaelis’ Investment Return service helps you to maximise the return on your investment by employing proven change management and benefits realisation management strategies.
• With the Application and Infrastructure Improvement service, Avaelis reviews and optimises your application and infrastructure architecture to identify and eliminate ROI inhibitors.
• The Business Process Re-engineering service uses Lean techniques to optimise your business processes, taking into account your current systems and removing tasks that do not add value to gain maximum value from your investment.

When you engage Avaelis in the area of Leveraging ROI, you can expect:

• Improved ROI through the preparation of the people, process and technology environment in which your investment will operate and monitoring benefits to keep your returns on track
• Clarity on how and when to best measure your ROI to facilitate organisational learning and continuous improvement to help you further improve the quality of your investment decisions

Organisations operate in constantly changing environments. As a result, in order to maintain competitive advantage, they must periodically assess their environments, themselves and their strategy to ensure the fit between the three remains current and effective. Some adjustments are typically required, but if the necessary change is significant, the business must transform to defend its competitive advantage. Drivers for business transformation include:

• Loss of revenue due to loss of market share, a shrinking market or a shift in customer preferences
• Margin pressure due to aggressive competitors and suppliers
• New laws or regulations require compliance
• Technological changes, such as virtualisation, cloud computing, or big data represent opportunities to gain an advantage over your competitors, or your competitors have already invested and you need to catch up with them to stay relevant
• Shifts in your workforce have resulted in skill gaps ad ineffective performance.

Whether it’s developing new markets, products or your workforce, Avaelis can help you succeed at transformational change. We offer the following services in the Business Transformation arena:

• Avaelis’ Enterprise Growth Strategies service defines a tailored approach to achieving strong growth for your organisation. We identify the most promising avenues to build your business and provide a clear roadmap for reaching the growth objective.
• Our Customer Attraction service draws on our industry experience to define fresh and innovative methods to build your customer base with new clients.
• With the New Markets and Technologies service, Avaelis can help you to uncover new markets and market segments to grow your business, as well as develop strategies for tapping into these markets. We also identify and implement the best of breed technologies that will mitigate weaknesses and build core competencies in your business.
• Our Product Development service helps you to expand your presence and drive revenue in your current markets by developing new products to replace outdated products or to provide choice or upsell / cross-sell opportunities for your target customers.
• The Talent and Workforce Development service addresses skill gaps and builds competencies with key staff, through coaching in areas such as leadership, management, planning and strategy development.

When you engage Avaelis in the area of Business Transformation, you can expect:

• Your competitive advantage to be safeguarded against internal and external change
• Higher revenue by increasing your customer base, tapping into new markets or market segments and offering a new product portfolio.
• Improved staff productivity by upskilling your team to make them more effective at their jobs

A recent McKinsey study indicated that the average knowledge worker spends less than forty percent of his or her time actually performing role-specific tasks. More than three full days per week are dedicated to reading and answering e-mail, searching and gathering information and communicating and collaborating internally. (3)

Knowledge workers often spend much of their time:

• Traveling to and participating in a multitude of ineffective meetings
• Navigating tools and technology solutions that are not fit for purpose, simply outdated, or which they do not understand sufficiently to use effectively
• Making best-effort decisions with an incomplete understanding of the tasks that take place before or after theirs
• Relying on time-consuming and error-prone manual labour for administrative tasks and as a result spending even more time error-checking and duplicating work
• Scouring the Internet, intranet and internal reporting systems and questioning other staff for information before combining it all into regular custom reports, such as weekly sales reports.

These are examples of everyday challenges faced by workers in your organisation. And then there is the question of what to do with conflicting information in different reports. What if hardware failure causes the loss of countless hours of hard work? How do you make sure that your staff continues to be productive when they are away from the office? And how should you handle your staff using online social networks?

To unlock business productivity in your organisation, Avaelis offers the following services:Our End User Productivity service focuses on the many opportunities to make your workers more productive. Tailored competeies Avaelis can develop include collaboration, mobility, KPI management, people development and workflow analysis.

• Avaelis’ Automation service identifies potential areas for the reduction or elimination of expensive manual labour tasks by putting in place streamlined, automated processes.
• Our Enterprise Intelligence service provides you the opportunity to significantly cut down time spent by your staff gathering information and can deliver valuable, timely insights that would otherwise be too difficult to attain.
• With the Supply Chain Optimisation service, Avaelis will increase the efficiency, reliability and agility of your supply chain, for example through the implementation of flexible IT systems and channels, standardising business processes and elimination of duplicate effort.

When engaging Avaelis in the area of Business Productivity, you can expect:

• Reduced cost through automation of time-consuming tasks, elimination of task duplication and a more efficient workforce
• Reduced error rates and associated cost and customer dissatisfaction by reducing reliance on error-prone manual tasks and by optimising your supply chain
• Improved staff productivity through enhanced, tailored collaboration and mobility strategies
• Improved staff engagement by enabling your staff to focus on the interesting tasks that really matter and reducing tedious administrative work
• Additional insights to help you make better informed strategic decisions and ensure your organisation’s competitiveness in the market.

References 

1. Bloch, Michael, Blumberg, Sven and Laartz, Jürgen. Delivering large-scale IT projects on time, on budget, and on value. s.l. : McKinsey & Co, 2012.

2. Flyvbjerg, Bent and Budzier, Alexander. Why Your IT Project May Be Riskier Than You Think. September 2011.

3. McKinsey Global Institute. The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies. s.l. : McKinsey & Company, 2012.