Lay the Strategic Foundations of Your Applications Team

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As an application leader, you are expected to quickly familiarize yourself with the current state of your applications environment.
You need to continuously demonstrate effective leadership to your applications team while defining and delivering a strategy for your applications department that will be accepted by stakeholders.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

The applications department can be viewed as the face of IT. The business often portrays the value of IT through the applications and services they provide and support. IT success can be dominantly driven by the application team’s performance.
Conflicting perceptions lead to missed opportunities. Being transparent on how well applications are supporting stakeholders from both business and technical perspectives is critical. This attribute helps validate that technical initiatives are addressing the right business problems or exploiting new value opportunities.

Impact and Result

Get to know what needs to be changed quickly. Use Info-Tech’s advice and tools to perform an assessment of your department’s accountabilities and harvest stakeholder input to ensure that your applications operating model and portfolio meets or exceeds expectations and establishes the right solutions to the right problems.
Solidify the applications long-term strategy. Adopt best practices to ensure that you are striving towards the right goals and objectives. Not only do you need to clarify both team and stakeholder expectations, but you will ultimately need buy-in from them as you improve the operating model, applications portfolio, governance, and tactical plans. These items will be needed to develop your strategic model and long-term success.
Develop an action plan to show movement for improvements. Hit the ground running with an action plan to achieve realistic goals and milestones within an acceptable timeframe. An expectations-driven roadmap will help establish the critical structures that will continue to feed and grow your applications department.

Lay the Strategic Foundations of Your Applications Team Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should develop an applications strategy, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

Lay the Strategic Foundations of Your Applications Team – Executive Brief

1. Get to know your team

Understand your applications team.

2. Get to know your stakeholders

Understand your stakeholders.

3. Develop your applications strategy

Design and plan your applications strategy.

Member Testimonials

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this blueprint and what our clients have to say.

8.0/10

Overall Impact

Client

Experience

Impact

$ Saved

Days Saved

Testimonial

British Columbia Institute of Technology

Workshop

8/10

N/A

Bellevue College

Guided Implementation

7/10

N/A

Workshop: Lay the Strategic Foundations of Your Applications Team

Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

Module 1: Get to Know Your Team

The Purpose

Understand the expectations, structure, and dynamics of your applications team.
Review your team’s current capacity.
Gauge the team’s effectiveness to execute their operating model.

Key Benefits Achieved

Clear understanding of the current responsibilities and accountabilities of your teams.
Identification of improvement opportunities based on your team’s performance.

Activities

Outputs

1.1

Define your team’s role and responsibilities.

Current team structure, RACI chart, and operating model

1.2

Understand your team’s application and project portfolios.

Application portfolios currently managed by applications team and projects currently committed to

1.3

Understand your team’s values and expectations.

List of current guiding principles and team expectations

1.4

Gauge your team’s ability to execute your operating model.

Team effectiveness of current operating model

Module 2: Get to Know Your Stakeholders

The Purpose

Understand the expectations of stakeholders.
Review the services stakeholders consume to support their applications.
Gauge stakeholder satisfaction of the services and applications your team provides and supports.

Key Benefits Achieved

Grounded understanding of the drivers and motivators of stakeholders that teams should accommodate.
Identification of improvement opportunities that will increase the value your team delivers to stakeholders.

Activities

Outputs

2.1

Understand your stakeholders and applications services.

Expectations stakeholders have on the applications team and the applications services they use

2.2

Define stakeholder expectations.

List of applications expectations

2.3

Gauge stakeholder satisfaction of applications services and portfolio.

Stakeholder satisfaction of current operating model

Module 3: Develop Your Applications Strategy

The Purpose

Align and consolidate a single set of applications expectations.
Develop key initiatives to alleviate current pain points and exploit existing opportunities to deliver new value.
Create an achievable roadmap that is aligned to organizational priorities and accommodate existing constraints.

Key Benefits Achieved

Applications team and stakeholders are aligned on the core focus of the applications department.
Initiatives to address the high priority issues and opportunities.

Activities

Outputs

3.1

Define your applications expectations.

List of applications expectations that accommodates the team and stakeholder needs

3.2

Investigate your diagnostic results.

Root causes to issues and opportunities revealed in team and stakeholder assessments

3.3

Envision your future state.

Future-state applications portfolio, operating model, supporting people, process, and technologies, and applications strategic model

3.4

Create a tactical plan to achieve your future state.

Roadmap that lays out initiatives to achieve the future state

3.5

Finalize your applications strategy.

Completed applications strategy

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

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Guided Implementation 1: Get to know your team

Call 1: Review your and your team’s role and responsibilities to satisfy team expectations and execute your operating model.
Call 2: Discuss the findings behind the assessment of your team’s ability to execute your operating model.

Guided Implementation 2: Get to know your stakeholders

Call 1: Review your understanding of your stakeholders, their needs, and the channels they use to interact with your team.
Call 2: Discuss findings behind the satisfaction assessment of your applications services and portfolio.

Guided Implementation 3: Develop your applications strategy

Call 1: Review your applications expectations and root-cause analysis of key issues and opportunities.
Call 2: Review your future state and the tactical plan to achieve this state.
Call 3: Review your applications strategy and your approach to present it to your team and stakeholders.

Authors

Andrew Kum-Seun

Jeff Forbes

Contributors

Ken Piddington, CIO and Executive Advisor, MRE Consulting
Sterling Bjorndahl, Director of IT Operations, eHealth Saskatchewan
Dan Dibben, Senior Director of Systems Development, Father Flanagan’s Boys Home
Naresh Mongroo, Chief Technology Officer, Guardian Shared Services Limited
Geoff Temple, Manager of Application Development, Children’s Aid Society of Toronto
Anonymous Contributor, CIO, IT Asset Management Company
Anonymous Contributor, Applications Manager, Gaming and Hospitality Company