Software and Services Provider
A
for Nonprofit Organizations
Learns the Value of Program
Prioritization
a meeting where the cross-functional team discussed
the cloud project’s needs and identified the tasks that
were getting in the way. The CTO listened and offered
support, but did not make any moves to realign prior-
ities. Not surprisingly, the cloud program slowed and
lost momentum.
Goals Lessons Learned
Seeking to move its flagship software application to
AWS and thereby create a SaaS product, a supplier of
software and services for nonprofit organizations ini-
tiated a cloud project. The goals were to provide more
stability in their product, increasing performance
and uptime, while keeping a lid on the use of internal
IT resources. The biggest lesson we all took away was that a Cloud
Business Office can only be effective if leadership
supports the project. Leaders need to make the tough
decisions to re-prioritize work, backfilling with addi-
tional resources so the team can focus on cloud activ-
ities, and make sure the priorities are communicated
throughout the organization to ensure continued
alignment.
After bringing in CTP to do a Cloud Transformation
Maturity Assessment which looked at capabilities
across 10 domains, the organization realized that its
readiness was low in each of the cloud maturity
categories.
Working with the client, CTP established a Cloud
Business Office (CBO) to guide the customer’s devel-
opment and execution of its initiatives across each
domain. In parallel, CTP created a cross-functional
team and configured a Jira instance to build the
required epics and stories for an agile execution.
Challenges
Very quickly, issues began to crop up. The team mem-
bers the customer assigned to the job were viewing
the project as a secondary task — something to do “off
to the side of their desks.” They had a lot of competing
priorities in their day-to-day responsibilities, so they
were not really taking the cloud project seriously.
Their leadership was still pushing for deliverables and
was not allowing the cloud team enough time to
devote to the program.
We paused and put together a workshop to identify
the competing priorities. Each worker not only had
daily tasks to complete — many also had to partici-
pate in a governance risk audit that was assigned
right before the cloud project launched.
At the end of the workshop, the client’s CTO attended
86 | THE DOPPLER | FALL 2018
n Energy Company Fails to Focus
A
on a Specific Deliverable
Overview
A large integrated energy company undertook a cloud
transformation project to accomplish two organiza-
tional goals: reduce costs and roll out new features
and functionality when lines of business come call-
ing. Leaders supported the initiative and looked for-
ward to getting it done.
The company brought in CTP to do a complete Cloud
Transformation Maturity Assessment. As with many
companies brand new to cloud, this customer needed
to do a lot of work to get up to speed. It also had what
their leaders readily acknowledged was an “old-
school” culture that required many approval levels
and a methodical approach to planning.
Challenges
The energy company’s tentative approach created
challenges for the cloud project. It got off to a slow
start when the customer put it on hold for four
months after we finished the maturity assessment. As
part of that assessment, we developed a roadmap and
encouraged the client to get started, so they could
meet their strategic goals for the year. However, it
took several months to get the funding approved to