Optimizing your Sourcing Strategy
Re-Imagining Business
Success factors
“Our Mapping analysis session with LEF revealed some surprising results & insights. It helped us quickly refine blockers standing in our way, uncover a way forward & focus our ambitions higher. A very valuable piece of work & completely new way to approach our thinking.”
David Richards
Former Director, Cloud Engineering Platforms
BP International
Scaling technology to meet business demands is critical for survival in the digital era. Businesses are more likely to succeed at sourcing activities when they can plot uncertainty and specify invisible unknowns. Constructing maps of digital business assets against market choices is a simple and cost-effective way to source IT, and confidently plan for the future.
LEF’s Sourcing Strategy workshop uses Wardley Mapping to help break down business areas into value chain activities and map them across the stages of their lifecycle. By moving a single component on a visual map, you are able to assess its impact and see the future state. Using this technique helps cut through market confusion and identify business opportunities as well as help save money by removing project duplication.
Source effectively
Mapping provides a means for discovering effective and repeatable strategic gameplays. Once created, the map of your business can be used to support a variety of specific strategic plays as well as sourcing: these include reducing or increasing barriers to entry, exploiting ecosystems, using open technologies, anticipating rivals, plus many other goals and tactics.
‘Best of breed’ is back in fashion for IT procurement. But in the era that LEF defined as The Matrix, having the deep insight required to select the very best services is essential. The Matrix describes the pervasive, aware, embedded, intelligent, and autonomous technology landscape that is emerging today. Mapping these IT assets and their maturity lifecycle against individual sourcing options lets you see how they will evolve, to make objective decisions.
“Mapping is a very good way to determine what your current technology stack is & how you might want to evolve it”.
Adrian Cockcroft
VP, Cloud Architecture Strategy
Amazon Web Services
See future sourcing states
Maps can clarify sourcing direction and choices for any major project that uses external vendors. Large contracts bring big risks, so the project owner will want to reduce the risk of failure or lawsuits. Existing arrangements may be too costly, slow, or have lost confidence of stakeholders. Equally, a desire to exploit emerging technologies may be held back by a lack of skills in-house. Mapping surfaces and simplifies such complexities.
A simple map will help your firm see the relative lifecycle stages of sourcing activities, including in-house agile development, package software and managed services or outsourcing. Typically, this perspective will make it clear that one size won’t fit all, and that different strategies and management practices are needed for different business functions.
Have productive conversations
When you map a solution that is to be sourced, you have to think about what’s needed to accomplish a business output, and how predictable those things are. Complexity is visualized and you can talk about risks, contract types and clusters of components that work together. Knowing uncertainties and risks allows you to plan necessary experimentation before large contracts are signed, reducing the risk of failure.
Mapping creates a learning chain-reaction. To structure sourcing contracts, you have to think about outcomes. Without them, you will not identify necessary components. That forces you to explore what is out there in the market, and you may discover new opportunities, find interesting partners or just spot emerging trends well before your vendors would do.
Gain sourcing insights
LEF’s deep understanding of Wardley Maps and how to plot uncertainty will help you estimate invisible unknowns, and develop a cost-effective approach. But be warned:
- Sourcing decisions about legacy systems are difficult: these are accompanied by people who are personally invested in them & may advocate for the incumbent vendor
- Complexity doesn’t go away when you outsource to your provider: it remains below the surface of the contract, where it can be deadly & derail your project
- Digital assets in transitional states between experimentation & predictability are hard to resource: maintenance & development teams will both reject them
Workshop agenda
At the end of this one-day workshop, you’ll leave with greater clarity of your business landscape and an agreed action plan of where to make changes in your portfolio. You’ll know where future business opportunities for your organization lie and have the confidence to practice mapping in order to realize those opportunities and run your operations more efficiently.
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Workshop session
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Outcome
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Introductions & objectives
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Set expectations
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Agitate: get familiar with mapping
Create Wardley Maps & develop situational awareness
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Level set & build confidence in language & approach
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Activate: build a Wardley Map for your unit
Identify stakeholders, needs & processes, current state, drawing value chains, assessing evolution & uncertainty
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Understand environment & influencing forces, validate project & scope
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Activate: structure approach
Agree natural clusters, determine areas to outsource & insource, learning activities
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Understand how to cluster & sourcing approach to apply
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Accelerate: prepare for sourcing execution
Build project plan to minimize risk, balance risk & speed of execution, identify critical skills needed
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Develop action plan for implementation of sourcing strategy
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Action: confirm what next
Review outputs & next steps to progress journey
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Agreed action plan
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Plot the lifecycle of digital assets
Identify opportunities to source effectively & reduce risk of failure or lawsuits
Become a dexterous business through Mapping
Extend repeatable, strategic gameplays across all areas of your business
