There are many ways to achieve that long envisaged end goal in business and you might adopt different approaches to get there – whether based on resources, budget, strategy, priorities, and challenges.
However you choose to work towards longer-term objectives, you need flexibility built into your approach and your end state, and to be able to pivot in response to those political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental (PESTLE) external factors.
The same stands true as you embark on your software upgrade journey to Oracle Cloud Applications.
Around your evolving Oracle Applications roadmap, you need to be able to signpost a direction of travel that underpins your business strategy, while taking advantage of new opportunities that arise from alignment with the Oracle roadmap and updates.
The real magic happens when your roadmap and the Oracle roadmap can align, typically by meeting a new statutory requirement or leveraging cloud to reduce carbon footprints.
OK but how do I start with the end in mind?
The key is to know where you’re heading but with an agile approach to allow course correction as the picture develops. This takes an understanding of how the world is evolving, alongside the ability to visualize a future for your customers, people and business operations.
The tools and techniques on hand, such as implementation approaches like Inoapps Evolve, can help with your vision, objectives and key results, and outcome mapping.
Before embarking on any initiative, you need to understand the vision for your future. It’s easiest to summarize this in a single succinct statement that articulates the purpose of the initiative and how to tell you’ve achieved it. Once you’ve established your vision, you can then deconstruct it to inform your roadmap.
Next, understanding what you want to achieve and how you’ll measure success is key to planning your journey. You can set objectives and key results that measure and communicate aspirational goals. For example, your next objective could be to improve employee experience and retention. The key result needed would be defining the employee experience model while implementing Oracle HCM, Talent and Performance modules.
Finally, you can use outcome maps to link your strategic intent (where you want to get to) to areas for improvement to show how you’ll achieve operational effectiveness, while also measuring success.
Oracle has a framework for business operations within Oracle Cloud called Oracle Business Flows. These are a set of standard best practice business processes that you can adopt to help towards your strategic outcomes and target Oracle Operating Model.
Achieving agility while keeping the end in sight
Agreeing on a minimal viable product (MVP) with your team and your implementation partner directs you to transition your core business operations to Oracle Cloud and achieve baseline associated benefits.
This provides a stable foundation for continuous improvement as you take on additional modules or features, along with an operational baseline to measure ROI.
This is achievable via a roadmap for continuous improvement, which aligns to your organization’s strategic and operational objectives and is set out at the beginning of the project. By sectioning your roadmap into manageable packages, you can easily review and update it in response to external and internal environmental factors.
Fluctuating tax rates, an economic environment demanding reduction in operational costs, new software features, reducing your carbon footprint or new legislation are all factors that need to be taken into account and could affect your processes.
Measuring ROI
You know how much the project costs but how do you work out the benefits and link them to specific implementation partner increments?
With Inoapps Evolve for instance, start with your outcome maps for a high-level indication of the percentile improvements you’re going to generate. These can then be quantified by benefit classification: cashable and non-cashable. Cashable benefits will generate monetary value with ease, like reducing costs or increased income. Non-cashable benefits are less tangible but, with some extra thought, can be transferred into monetary value, like efficiency gains allowing teams to do higher value work and thus increasing overall productivity.
It’s then possible to group outcomes together into phases. Start with the core MVP, then map out future phases based on your Inoapps Evolve roadmap and business strategy. A projected ROI for each phase from MVP onwards can now be created.
Making benefits realization a reality
While some benefits are obviously more realizable, such as decommissioning servers, others are more subjective or complex to quantify. Seeing the results from reducing employee attrition, driven by factors like a better working environment, better tools or increased opportunities for personal growth, can take weeks, and potentially months, to observe.
The more subjective or complex a benefit is, the more it relies on people to make benefits realization (and subsequently the ROI) a reality.
