Quick guide: Go from business strategy analysis to project execution

Turning strategic vision into meaningful results requires a clear line of sight from high-level business goals to the initiatives that bring them to life. This section provides a guideline about how to navigate through Alfabet so that your organization can translate strategy into action by analyzing your business priorities, identifying the most relevant business requirements and changes needed across the enterprise, and guiding those insights into well-defined, executable projects. By connecting strategic intent with operational delivery, your company can pursue a disciplined, transparent path that ensures every investment, decision, and project contributes to the outcomes that matter most.

An up-to-date repository of the IT architecture is at the very center of your strategic management process. Alfabet provides you with the means to continually assess and improve the quality of the data in the repository so that you can be certain that strategic decisions are made on accurate and up-to-date information. You can assess your enterprise architecture at any stage of the strategic planning process to ensure that demands and projects always align with the real as-is state of your IT. Deep-dive with Alfabet's business questions at any point along the way to understand your enterprise's most important business capabilities and business priorities, know the cost drivers and technical debt in your IT architecture, and identify the applications most relevant for investment and rationalization, and their supporting technology and role in the as-is IT landscape.

Begin by conducting a business-focused analysis of your enterprise's IT needs. This could be initiated from the perspective of the organization's vision and goals, its underlying cost drivers, or its company's mission-critical capabilities. An analysis of the underlying application costs and their relationship to the capability model in order to articulate the demands required to transform your organization's IT. The business analysis provides a strategic foundation to derive the business' demands for IT transformation.

Once relevant stakeholders including business and enterprise architects articulate demands to transform the IT, they can be analyzed to understand their potential impact to the IT architecture and bundled to create efficiencies and avoid redundant demands. The demands can then be turned into projects including a work breakdown structure of work packages and tasks. Document project details including the IT architecture that is impacted by the project and the resources required to execute the project. Prioritize projects in the portfolio based on KPIs and other evaluation criteria and monitor the status of the project portfolio.

	Assess business needs. Understand your company's vision as well as its business capabilities, the current as-is application landscape, and the supporting technology landscape to understand where potential transformation projects are needed. Here are some suggestions to gain insight: Know your company's goals.Analyze your company's strategy to understand where project's may be needed to realize the company's vision. Identify where targets are not being met. You will first need to document your company's strategy. Focus on cost drivers.Review the business question What are our cost drivers? . Identify the most expensive business capabilities and review a business capability's data . Review the business support map to identify the most and least used applications. Examine the relevant applications and assess the application's lifecycle and the components that the application uses to understand if the application should be migrated or its technologies updated. Determine if a transformation project is needed. Understand the most critical business capabilities.Review the business question What should we be focusing on? to understand which business capabilities are most relevant. Review the as-is and to-be landscapes that support them and identify where business capabilities may require a project to migrate or change the application landscape. Discuss the future of the applications with relevant stakeholders including business and enterprise architects.
	Articulate and prioritize business demands. Capture demands.Once applications or other assets are identified that require change, capture the needed change in a demand and document the architecture that is affected by the demand . Compare the demand to other demands for similarity in architecture. Prioritize demands. Review the business question Which demands should be realized? to review the demand scores and assess which demands are project candidates.
	Capture transformation projects. Create a project derived from a demand. Create a project for a demand that shall be realized.. Define the project scope. Capture details about the project including responsibilities, the work breakdown in work packages and tasks, the architecture that the project impacts, and project dependencies.
	Document project resources. Carry out high-level planning of skills and resources required to realize a project. Specify the skills and resources needed for the project. and align the overall project schedule with the scheduling of the work packages and tasks. Manage resource constraints. Users with the Resource Manager user profile can manage the skill and resource requests made by organizations and projects to ensure that resource constraints won't impact a project.
	Assess project costs. Estimate the costs of a project by defining a business case. Transfer the costs from the requested skills and resources to ensure a realistic assessment of the costs. Understand whether your projects are in budget and on time. Review the business question What is our CAPEX distribution? to understand the current and planned project budgets on a yearly basis and identify the most important investment and divestment candidates.
	Explore different project scenarios. Design alternative project scenarios Modify work packages and tasks as well as the budget, architecture scope, skill and resource requests, and scheduling. Compare project scenarios to the most favorable in terms of the project's lifecycles, cash flows, business cases, cost types, and architecture scopes.
	Prioritize projects by flexible KPIs and weighting. Add projects to project buckets and assess project spend limit, predefined criteria like architectural impact, business value and project risks, and the allocated budgets for each project to understand which projects can be realized given the budget constraints. Review the status of project approvals to ensure that investment is on track.
	Manage project tasks and timesheets. Users with the Team Member user profile can manage their project tasks, report the time worked on their tasks, keep track of timesheets and understand the time schedule of projects and the skills they have been requested to provide.
	Monitor projects to mitigate project failure. Track and manage the progress of a project by defining project milestones. All projects should have milestones to ensure their trackability. Review all projects to identify risks to projects before they occur. Review the business question What is the status of our project portfolio? to ensure that projects are within their budget and resource allotment and are progressing in a timely manner. Understand changes as they occur and react before a project becomes unmanageable and threatens to fail.