To be able to drive value out of your TBM program, there are some questions to ask and respond appropriately to. Each of these is imperative. Any one of which, if not done, can lead to less than optimal results. The following outlines these success criteria:

1.      Understanding the “What”. What we call the outcome or use case. This should ideally come from senior management and align to the organizations’ goals, short term &/or long term. They should be simple to explain and easy to understand. A good example would be:

·       We want to become more efficient in using our on prem servers to drive Capex down by 20% ($10m) to be able to invest more in our IT Transformation Strategy next year

2.      Identifying the “Who”. Who is the sponsor of this initiative? The use case(s) should be included in the sponsor’s goals for the coming year(s) as they should ultimately be accountable for delivering success. By identifying this person it is far more likely that the appropriate skilled resources will be assigned to the use case, increasing the likelihood of success exponentially.

3.      Understanding the “Why”. If your organisation or team understand why they are being asked to do what they are, it can not only help direct energy and skills to the right areas, but also accelerate the speed of achieving the goal(s).

4.      Knowing the “How”. How do you plan to achieve success? What are the steps to achieve it? What resources and skills are required? How do we obtain them? How do we project manage the effort? Knowing the answer to these questions can be critical to delivering on the outcome expected.

5.      Understanding the beneficiaries or end users. It’s important to identify these people early on so that they can be brought into delivering success and ensuring that they adopt it. Without them using a specific TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) report for Server utilization, going back to the example in 1 above, then they won’t know whether they are progressing in the right direction.

6.      Identifying the process in which the use case will be used to ensure value is achieved. How do you intend the outcome to be communicated? How will you review progress? Is this a Quarterly Business Review, Monthly Business Review, Ad Hoc analysis, etc? If the end users don’t know how and when to use the new data, for example, there will be less adoption. And without adoption, there will be less value.

7.      Identifying what success looks like. What metrics can we use to signal success? What are the specific outputs? How can we measure adoption? How do we signal that the organisation is achieving a return on the investment?

The following is an example of a template that can be used to capture the answers to the above questions:

All these 7 factors can make and break success. Plan for all 7 as early as possible with any new initiative. Make sure it is captured, communicated, and tracked against. Do not leave it to chance. Every $ counts. I know we are all very busy, but by planning up front, you could save your company…Literally. We owe it to each other to ask the tough questions and get the answers, before investing in new initiatives.

Good luck.