Business & IT Assessments
Assessments and Planning include a wide range of activities to assist business or technical teams from idea to final deployment.
Strategic and tactical planning for business programs can include mission statement development, visioning and goals, objectives, strategy development or recommended plans and roadmaps; while strategic and tactical planning for IT programs can include IT effectiveness, maturity, governance, project management and architecture.
The purpose of an assessment is to help you do what you do better. This can be through business process improvements, technology enhancements, solving complex problems with root cause analysis or conducting a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis to help make strategic recommendations to achieve current and future goals.
Before a problem can be solved, it must be accurately identified and analyzed. Sometimes, symptoms are easier to identify than the root cause. Clients know a problem exists but often can’t step away from operational responsibilities to assess. Loblolly can act as an objective third party to perform impartial business and technical assessments. The result of our assessments is often a surprising clarity about a situation. Loblolly’s assessment process identifies challenges and provides recommended actions that can be taken immediately or planned over time to address specific risks.
Example
During a recent project, Loblolly reviewed a mobile workforce solution with a low user acceptance rate. The assessment included both the business approach and technology tools. Multiple issues surfaced across different departments that lead to the limited success of the mobile application. Some of the issues included training and a mismatch between mobile worker process steps and the steps in the mobile application. These issues were the symptoms of root cause problems in the requirements and project management processes used by the agency. Loblolly assisted the agency with new standards for the full Project Management Life-Cycle. The new standards were used to improve the mobile workforce solution now considered to be one of the most successful applications at the agency.