Enabling IT Best Practices
The client: Ernst & Young, a major international accounting and IT professional services firm.
The challenge: Ernst & Young had invested heavily in developing an IT methodology for large-scale package software implementations at enterprise customer sites. An important part of this methodology had to do with understanding customer business requirements and analyzing the gap between these requirements and the functionality of a target software package. The methodology then provided guidelines for using identified gaps to scope implementation projects that would include business process re-engineering, package configuration and custom modifications to the base software package where appropriate.
Despite the success of this methodology in providing a framework for organizing projects, in practice it provided implementation teams with limited practical tools for organizing the information collected about business requirements and functionality gaps and transitioning that knowledge into actionable project planning documents. As project plans were created and updated manually, stakeholders often lost sight of the connection between a group of modifications to the software being implemented and the original business requirements that the modifications were intended to address. This made tracking progress on meeting business requirements, understanding the impact of new version implementations and developing test matrices difficult.
The solution: iData resources built a customized, Web-based knowledge management application based on Ernst & Young’s methodology that allowed client associates to enter business requirement data and information about gaps between requirements and package functionality during the analysis phase of a project. Developer analysts were then able to spec configuration tasks and software modifications to address these requirements and identify the software modules impacted. Based on this date, modifications and configuration changes could be logically grouped around impacted modules and managed as a unit.
The result: Projects that used the system were able to report much more effectively in the status of business requirements that end customers had identified. As project plans were created, conflicting updates to the same module could be identified because specifications included the module impacted. When development of changes was completed, test matrices were be developed by linking the changes back to all business areas impacted by the change, leading to much more effective testing. Learn more about iData's Synapse Publisher content and knowledge management system, or contact us to discuss your knowledge management needs.