What is OptimizeIT?

A best practices development
program to optimize your major IT functions.

OptimizeIT will help you:

Squeeze the most from your budget
Allocate your team's time wisely
Get maximum results from your available resources

Get right to it:

Select an IT Function to Optimize

Establish Process for Collecting Valid Project Requests
Establishing a process for collecting valid project requests is achieved through the completion of two main steps:

1. Establish Rules of Engagement
2. Collect Project Proposals
Decide High Priority Projects
Once project proposals have been submitted and collected, establish a process to identify the highest priority project proposals. This will include maintaining an inventory of proposed projects, applying ranking criteria, and establishing the highest priority proposals.
Determining high priority projects consists of two key steps:

1. Apply criteria to compare and rank projects
2. Obtain senior management approval
Adjust Project Prioritization List to Reflect IT Capacity
After the preliminary ranking of projects, actual resource availability needs to be taken into account. In this stage, IT capacity for completing projects will be measured against the projects that have already been identified as high priority.
Re-Adjustments
When organizational or market factors fluctuate, project priorities may shift due to changing realities. Organizations that have multiple projects competing for limited resources face the following key challenges:
Making the project inventory and project priority list vital elements of the IT management and/or organizational process, rather than static documents or reports left to become stagnant and useless.
Keeping the project priority list dynamic and reflective of current IT and/or organizational initiatives and activities rather than a single point-in-time assessment and evaluation.
Business - IT Strategic Alignment
The purpose of Business – IT Alignment is to optimize the value that IT contributes to the enterprise. As such, in order to successfully outline a strategic IT roadmap, it is important to start here.
Application Direction
How well will your current portfolio of applications help you achieve the company's top priorities? What additions, improvements and changes are necessary in the near-term, medium-term, and long-term?
Technical Infrastructure Direction
How well will your current computing and networking technologies help you achieve the company's top priorities? What additions, improvements and changes are necessary in the near-term, medium-term, and long-term?
IT Organization Direction
Many companies ignore the fact that it is often the human factors that have a more direct impact on overall strategy success. Any time you develop an IT Strategy, consider how well the IT organization is positioned to deliver it.
IT Strategic Investment and Value Roadmap
At this stage, you know all of the things that IT could do to help support company objectives and priorities. Now you need to sort through what IT should do, when and how.
HR Management Practices
The purpose of HR Management Practices is to provide the tools to manage the IT human resource lifecycle. This lifecycle begins with the decision to hire new employees and ends with how to manage departing employees.
Leadership
The purpose of the Leadership section is to give IT leaders guidelines for improving their teams and their leadership skills. Leadership practices are centered around the idea that to be an effective leader is to take a holistic view of leadership.
Professional Performance Management
The purpose of the Performance Measurement and Professional Development section is to gather performance feedback, at regular intervals, and to apply that feedback as a component in the professional development program.
Select and Evaluate Vendors
Enterprises are dependent on vendors to obtain IT hardware, software and services. The Vendor Management process includes the identification, selection, contracting with, and ongoing management of vendors or suppliers, and is an essential part of the IT management process.
Negotiate Contract
A well-written contract ensures that the selected vendor meets the company's specific expectations and objectives for the purchase. During the evaluation process, the team will determine whether the selected vendor will have any difficulty meeting original purchase objectives. The negotiating team, therefore, must reach agreement on which objectives will require negotiation and what an acceptable outcome will be.
Manage Vendor Performance
In order to deliver excellent service to the organization, IT must ensure that the services delivered by key vendors are of adequate quality and meet time commitments. Achieving a high level of service or product delivery from vendors generally requires three components: establishing a set of performance targets with the vendor, measuring performance against these targets, and promptly addressing issues and gaps between the actual and the target performance.
Application Maintenance Management
Whether it's planned, routine, or emergency-related, the constant change involved in application maintenance must be managed in order to minimize possible downtime and maximize maintenance efforts without overrunning the maintenance budget.
Request Analysis
The framework for applications maintenance and change practices has been established. In this step of the program, you will be setting up a process for gathering, assessing, and accepting/denying change requests from users within the organization.
Change Execution Management
Changes to an application must be executed and rolled out to the user base in a controlled way that maximizes the change's success and minimizes disruption to the business. This process is known as change execution management.
Process Management
Every enterprise has processes, whether they are formally documented or not. In fact, the fundamental building blocks of any organization are its processes and the people who put them into practice.
IT Policies and Procedures Definition
Policies and procedures are critical governance tools in every enterprise. Where policies dictate the rules, procedures explain how these same rules are practically applied in real life. Taken as a collective, policies and procedures set expectations for behaviors and activities, as well as provide mechanisms to enforce these expectations.
IT Policies and Procedures Enforcement
Once policies and procedures have been identified and documented, it is imperative to communicate their presence and purpose to the organization. The fact is that policies and procedures are useless if they are not enforced.
Business Impact and Risk Assessment
The purpose of a Business Impact and Risk Assessment is to determine the approximate business value of IT assets, to assess the impact the loss of those assets would have on business units, and to assign recovery priorities to the assets.
IT Continuity Plan Creation
The purpose of this section is to assist you in creating the basis of the actual DRP document itself.
Continuity Plan Testing and Maintenance
The purpose of this section is to assist you in the care and feeding of the DRP after its creation and communication to the rest of the company.
Incident Response
Compliance efforts vary across industries and apply differently to enterprises, depending on organizational size, structure, and complexity of the IT environment. These compliance needs may be driven by government legislation, corporate initiatives, or related businesses that require their partners adhere to industry standards.
Proactive Compliance
In enterprises where compliance is a known cost of doing business and auditing is a predictable task, a pre-emptive approach to compliance can reduce the cost of compliance projects down the line, and leave the enterprise well-prepared for future auditor visits.

Get a Head Start:

Develop your Strategy with an Analyst

Advisory Service members can have one of our experts review their program and outline the best ways to use OptimizeIT for maximum improvement. If you're an Advisory Service member, you can book your call online.