Business Value Planning Services

What is BVPS?

Business Value Planning Services, a new SA service from Microsoft, are designed to help you quantify the value of deploying Office technologies. A Business Value Planning Service (BVPS) engagement creates a business case that quantifies the ROI of deploying Office technologies, by highlighting a key business process that can be improved by the deployment, how to improve it and quantify the financial return of the deployment, and how to overcome any adoption roadblocks, to ensure you achieve your desired results.

KnowledgeTech is proud to announce they are partnering with Microsoft to deliver Business Value Planning Services (BVPS) engagements, and want to make you aware of this great new offering. Microsoft has launched this exciting FREE* initiative to help customers identify, unlock, and capture the business value of Office System solution. Using the SA Benefit days included in your Enterprise Agreement for a 5-, 10- or 15- day engagement, the goal of each engagement is to help you find the value of deploying Office technologies.

Why should I be interested in BVPS?

• Save money in a difficult economic environment
  E.g. Streamline the customer service process by providing self-service options to customers
• Realize a greater return on your technology investments
  Identifying multiple business processes that could benefit from a common technology investment lowers TCO
• Solve business problems with a familiar technology platform
  E.g. A consistent experience for mobile workers means higher productivity and increased sales
• Build a convincing business case for Office System deployment
  A measurable and achievable business case is easily built for the Office System when tied to key business processes
• Identify and manage roadblocks to change
  User adoption roadblocks can be minimized or eliminated by planning for the business process changes needed and creating an adoption roadmap

What can I expect?

Upon completing a Business Value Planning Services engagement, customers receive a current state process analysis, future state process design, an adoption/implementation plan and, a business case for the proposed solution.

Workshop Scenarios

Below are a number of sample scenarios that are applicable to each different workshop type. You may have different business opportunities or challenges, and we are happy to address those which are specific to your organization.

Content Management

Control your Content Chaos:

• Delays in document delivery
• Lack of coordination between document authors and organizational units
• Difficulty meeting internal stakeholder deadlines
• Significant amounts of document rework
• Frequent recreation of existing information or document research components

Records Management

• Inability to consistently apply metadata, retention schedules, record declarations, and legal holds to records
• Significant compliance concerns regarding new content types (multimedia, blogs, wikis, etc.) and communications (emails, IM, etc.)
• Accidental destruction of important documents and potential spoliation of evidence
• Long record review cycle time, laborious manual review effort
• Accidental dissemination of sensitive subject matter and intellectual property
• As employees are unsure of record handling procedures, legal department receives increased volume of potential records for review

The Easier Way to Search and Share

• Time spent searching for content increases project cycle times, as teams search across large number of files, different file types, and disparate file locations for required information
• Inability to incorporate “unstructured” content into search results, particularly new social content like team wikis, blogs, and discussion threads
• Inability to find pertinent content leads to repetition of costly work
• Finding outdated content versions leads to project errors
• Marketing staff required to contact IT for access to protected content
• Inability to consistently apply metadata, retention schedules, record declarations, and legal holds to records
• Significant compliance concerns regarding new content types (multimedia, blogs, wikis, etc.) and communications (emails, IM, etc.)
• Accidental destruction of important documents and potential spoliation of evidence
• Long record review cycle time, laborious manual review effort
• Accidental dissemination of sensitive subject matter and intellectual property
• As employees are unsure of record handling procedures, legal department receives increased volume of potential records for review

Web Content Management

• Challenging and costly to keep Websites fresh and to post new content
• Cannot easily surface important info important to visitors, increasing volume of costly support calls
• Cannot maintain brand identity across sites
• IT is a bottleneck for posting content and business users do not know HTML
• Lack of brand consistency and content policy applications across Website sites
• Cannot deliver “YouTube”-like functionality on sites
• Cannot use sites to build/maintain customer communities

Operations and Process Management

Optimize Your Project Portfolio Management

• Lack of governance controls in project management leads to misallocation of resources
• Lack of resource utilization knowledge across projects leads to resource surpluses or deficits for ongoing projects
• Lack of visibility into status of projects in the portfolio, which impacts future project pipeline planning
• Laborious process to update project status, resource utilization, and resource requirements
• Long project status reporting process taking 10 days of cycle time per month, leading to out-of-date reports when finalized
• Inability to accurately measure risk and return of projects

Electronic Forms

• Change Request (CR) workflow driven through email, with users attaching files to emails to transmit, decreasing process effectiveness
• Information captured through existing Word CR form does not enable good filtering, search, or sorting
• Manual CR processing steps require 50% of resource time / 20+ hours per week
• Often CRs will have missing or insufficient content, requiring manual follow-ups
• Series of manual process steps required post meeting
• CR “translation” required to show impact to stakeholders
• CRs improvements are not easily repeatable for other groups – take too much time and includes many errors
• CRs do not often lead to efficiency and cost reductions

Communications and Collaboration

Maximize Your Meetings

• Employees distributed across three continents (North America, Europe, Australia)
• Difficult to coordinate scheduling of meetings to maximize attendance
• Difficult to identify local presenters or appropriate external subject matter experts (SMEs) to lead meetings and meeting segments
• Significant costs incurred for both travel costs and lost employee productivity

Simplify Communications

• The acquired call center uses out-dated processes and technology to manage support calls
• Tier 1 call center staff cannot locate information or subject matter experts (SMEs), which results in high frequency of escalation
• The call center staff cannot coordinate ad-hoc meetings to resolve support issues in real time
• Excessive case resolution time
• Heavy reliance on email to resolve issues
• Lack of visibility into call center performance: no way to track support issues through resolution to improve performance
• Security and compliance vulnerabilities: no way to audit support cases to ensure security of sensitive customer data

Partner and Customer Communication

• No supplier visibility into Contoso inventory levels, leading to reactive inventory management approach
• Limited communication and collaboration between Manufacturing Department and Regional Distributor
• Increased lag time to supply parts to manufacturing, slowing overall process
• Lost sales due to long anticipated manufacturing time and decreased customer satisfaction
• Time consuming process for Regional Distributor to identify appropriate parts supplier
• Suppliers have difficulty maintaining their own parts inventories without visibility into Contoso’s demand; further increasing lag time and cost as Contoso waits for needed parts to be manufactured by suppliers

Social Networking

• Lack of employee awareness of new program offerings reduces program participation and overall performance
• Lack of early employee involvement in program design leads to low employee satisfaction with the program
• Long cycle times to collect employee input during program design
• Long cycle times to assess program performance, collect employee feedback, and modify the program to increase participation
• Inability to accurately gauge employee response to new programs

Ad-Hoc Collaboration

• Employees distributed across three continents (North America, Europe, Australia)
• Difficult to coordinate scheduling of meetings to maximize attendance
• Difficult to identify local presenters or appropriate external subject matter experts (SMEs) to lead meetings and meeting segments
• Significant costs incurred for both travel costs and lost employee productivity

Performance Management

Manage Your Performance

• Difficult to assess the impact of a given strategic decision on the business
• Increased cycle times and plan iterations required to set goals and objectives
• Limited integration between financial and operational systems creates integration problems for users, limiting ability to model and measure key business drivers
• More professional staff time is spent collecting and validating data than on analysis
• Performance reports often of limited value, with either too much or too little performance data for a given audience
• Significantly increased ad-hoc report generation time

Self-Service BI

• Departmental analysts must work through IT department to collect performance data from LOB systems
• Access to info is available to the few, not the many
• Professional staff time is spent collecting and validating data, leaving little time for analysis and taking time from their regular jobs
• IT perceived as a bottleneck for the few execs who do see LOB data
• Long reporting process taking 10 days cycle time per month, leading to out-of-date reports when finalized
• Limited integration between financial, operational, and unstructured information sources creates integration problems for users to coordinate reports