Options Analysis

Options Analysis at Box UK

Discovery

A highly collaborative process, the discovery phase of any options analysis helps drive quality and efficiency by facilitating a shared understanding of both the current situation and future requirements, as well as possible risks for mitigation.

Ensuring success from the outset, we’ll assign you a multi-disciplinary team who act as ‘champions’ for the different perspectives involved in defining an effective IT ecosystem. This includes an experienced business analyst, responsible for capturing and communicating organisational needs and a solutions architect to evaluate the current technical landscape and any potential technical solutions, as well as a user researcher who will gather end-user insight and ensure that the selected options are a great fit to user needs.

We’ll use a range of techniques to gain a holistic and validated picture of your existing ecosystem’s strengths and pain points, alongside the roles, processes, dependencies and integrations this ecosystem touches upon. Tailored to suit your specific stakeholders and ways of working, our information gathering techniques may include:

• Project vision definition
• Face-to-face workshops
• Remote interviews
• Documentation reviews
• Analytics review
• End-user surveys and testing

Evaluation

Once the full scope of the project is understood, we’ll continue to work closely with your team on defining and prioritising organisational requirements, which will form the basic evaluation criteria for identified solutions.

We’ll assess a wide range of off-the-shelf, configurable, customisable and bespoke application options depending on your needs, rapidly narrowing down these options before conducting extensive assessments of the most suitable solutions. Not only this, but we’ll also compare different architecture approaches, team structures and hosting options, to ensure all elements of your system work together efficiently and effectively.

Using principles taken from leading industry models such as the Lean Prioritisation Matrix and Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP), we explicitly separate the examination of assessment criteria from the performance of solutions. As a result, you can be confident that those solutions that perform against the most important criteria will rise to the top.

Criteria will be tailored to your specific needs and environment, but may include:

• Fitness for purpose
• Integration capability
• Ease of reporting
• User friendliness
• Access across devices
• Support/SLA offering
• Purchasing and lifetime costs
• Ease of IT management
• Data storage

By separately evaluating relevant tools and technologies against these individual criteria, we can cut through complex issues to deliver a transparent, understandable and confident evaluation of the options available to you. From this, we’ll also produce a traceable matrix of scores that will help inform both our final recommendations and future decision-making.

Playback

We’ll deliver you the results of our evaluation in a clear and comprehensive deck, detailing:

• Our understanding of the landscape, based on the discovery and evaluation activities undertaken
• A high-level overview of the evaluation process and its outcomes
• Our recommendations for technology solutions, alongside architecture, approach and hosting considerations
• Any additional recommendations for your future IT strategy, based on our assessment

Armed with this information you’ll be able to make informed decisions to enhance your IT ecosystem, driving sustainable returns and enabling you to consistently deliver against business goals and user expectations.