Your organization runs on processes - not features or functions. Your business requirements therefore need to be defined in terms of organizational processes — how you want to do business, compete and make money in the future. The trend to ‘adopt systems vanilla’ or ‘out of the box’ has caused business requirements definition to be skipped, skimped or treated as unnecessary resulting in the User Testing step becoming the de facto point when the true business requirements are discovered! This is madness, too late and unnecessary. Our approach - Business Simplification - routinely takes 40% or more of complexity out of operational processes (measured in terms of the number of individual processes and process steps). This leads to a 20% or more reduction in both project costs (less complexity to design, test and implement) and operating costs (simpler, streamlined processes). Business Simplification enables you to

• set the vision - where are we going?
• define the current state - how things really work today
• determine the strategic intent of each process - what are trying to achieve with this process? Why do we do it at all?
• assess the value contribution of each and every step - why do we do this step at all?
• identify the information needs of each step - what information does the person doing each step need to do an excellent job?
• verify the logic and workability of the processes
• define the resultant desired business outcomes/business end states - what will it look like when we’re operating in this new way?
• identify the major change activities required to get us from the current state to the future end states?

All in a matter of a few weeks leveraging the ‘deep smarts’ of your own staff. Business Simplification is a highly effective time-boxed business (not just process) re-engineering. The result is

• clearly defined, streamlined operational processes directly aligned to your strategy and plans
• a systems specification (without ever mentioning ‘systems’)
• a set of clearly defined, specific and measurable ‘desired business outcomes’ - the consequential end states
• a set of Master Change Plans, one for each outcome, that show the size, scale and complexity of the change program required to get there from here

plus

• a team of staff who understand and own the outcomes and want to implement them as soon as possible
• a progressive change approach whereby early and continuous benefits can be delivered.

Measured as four times more effective than Six Sigma, Business Simplification enables you to define and then deliver a quantum improvement in your business results.