It’s the start of a new fiscal year and the IT Department are very positive and optimistic of what lies ahead. Budgets secured and approved? Check. Projects lined up? Check. All planned properly? Check. These are good enough reasons to make anyone happy.
Fast forward a few months and you’re approaching the end of Q2, you’re halfway through the year and you have a few initiatives that are running behind schedule. And by the looks of it you’re going to miss out on getting a few of those planned projects completed before the end of the year.
These things tend to happen, more often than we’d like to admit it. Some initiatives are prioritized over others, an agreement doesn’t go through with a service provider so you need to initiate the selection process all over again to find another company to work with, business owners change the scope and their requirements have multiplied. The pressure is building up on the IT Department and time is running out.
And this was the case with one of our strategic customers that we recently met with. We have several country-wide initiatives running with them and the topic of delayed projects came up in our discussion. They were feeling the pressure from a business unit who had expressed their dissatisfaction with the delay in having an e-services portal up and running before the end of the year. The reason for the delay was that the chosen IT Service Provider had pulled out of the contract and will not be delivering the portal. This leaves the customer with a huge project that requires automating 15 services in just under 1 month.
The previous IT Service Provider had estimated 1 week of development for each of the 15 services, meaning they would have required a good 15 weeks (just under 4 months) to develop these services for them- 15 weeks that the customer clearly does not have anymore. So, with just 25% of the original time allocated for such a project, the IT Department were in a bit of a pickle.
We tried to help them in setting the priorities for delivering the e-services portal in the time remaining before going live with the system by asking some questions:
To the business all the e-services were equally important and critical, but the good news was that the process for approvals is pretty straight forward due to them being linear processes that had no dependencies on other systems. We were off to a good start after analyzing the scope and the business’s requirements, which then left us with the technology to be used for developing the system.
IT had a preference for a specific technology but the time to develop and cost incurred to mobilize even more resources to complete the job was somewhat impossible to achieve. This is where the Enterprise Submission Platform was the right solution for them.
ESP’s ability to automate processes for application approval dynamically without needing to rely on a team of techies to do any of the development work was exactly what this customer needed, and it achieves that through a simple and easy way of:
The best part is that the task of managing and updating any feature in ESP can be done by the business users themselves, so this eliminated the need to involve the IT Department or even the IT Service Provider in maintaining and updating the system.
The IT Department put ESP to the test and went ahead with it, and within 2 weeks, they had a complete system ready for the business users to review and test. To start off they were given a 2-hour session to familiarize themselves with ESP’s features and capabilities, and then they went ahead and created all 15 e-services by themselves.
It was now time for the business users to see the system. After reviewing the details and process flow for each of the 15 e-services, they had some comments and wanted some minor changes to be done which took just a few minutes of tweaking and updating and then they were all set. The business quickly understood the capabilities of ESP and started planning what other e-services they can add to the system in the following year.
The customer successfully launched the e-services portal on time and with the features required, and within the 1stday had over 2000 users registering and applying for services.