Evolving and tracking the business case - AWS Prescriptive Guidance

Evolving and tracking the business case

As the migration proceeds, especially for long-running programs, it is inevitable that business pressures will cause migration and modernization priorities to be regularly re-examined.

We recommend that you both evolve the business case as new information becomes available, and that you track actual commercial performance against the expectations documented in the detailed business case. These recommendations include the following:

  • New structural change in the organization affecting business priorities and impacting IT strategy and the application portfolio with it

  • Increased commercial importance of one part of the application portfolio or the changes to it that migration and modernization are targeted to achieve

  • Availability of actual resource utilization data for migrated applications, including refining sizing and quantifying and confirming cases for incremental modernization

  • Availability of data on effort consumed in IT operations and support activities, and analyses of possible operational improvements and automation

  • Availability of data measuring changes in software development and maintenance cycle times, software defect by development stage and service availability information, and root cause analyses for areas open to further improvement

By tracking performance against the business case, you can evolve the case to include further improvements that can be more readily assessed and quantified after migration starts. The program governance organization is much better equipped to respond to changing business pressures and to steer the transformation in a direction that drives the greatest value at a manageable and acceptable level of risk.

This is particularly important for the IT productivity, resilience, and business agility benefits within the case. These are typically both the larger and the more difficult drivers to assess ahead of time. By tracking the performance of these drivers, the team can dive deep and resolve problems that are hindering benefits realization. Or the business case can be adjusted to prioritize initiatives that achieve the most ongoing financial performance optimization.