The Task

For a $250M integrated financial management system implementation, Diamond was engaged by a large, federal Department to create a business-driven blueprint that aligns the tactical execution of the program with its high-level strategy. The blueprint provides line-of-sight traceability from program goals and objectives to enabling strategies, supporting business processes, organizational units, and the required systems architecture.

Challenge

Despite a two year effort to define detailed requirements and business processes for the Department’s Unified Financial Management System (UFMS), program leadership was not confident that strategic business capabilities were being addressed by the planned implementation. Moreover, the Department was not confident that the identified requirements and business processes were sufficient to meet Department-wide goals and objectives. Finally, the Department had no objective way to measure the success of the system rollout over its planned 5-7 year implementation period.

Solution

Diamond used its Strategic Enterprise Architecture blueprint approach to model the strategic plan for UFMS. The Business Architecture model outlined the program’s mission, vision, goals, objectives and strategic business capabilities. The goals identified the most significant financial management priorities that supported the Department mission. The objectives provided a basis for measuring the achievement of those goals. Based on its knowledge of federal financial management practices, commercial leading practices, and interviews with senior Department executives, Diamond identified numerous business-driven capabilities that the system must support. Diamond linked these capabilities upwards to the strategic plan and downwards to business processes and system requirements, thereby ensuring that the program would meet management’s objectives. Finally, Diamond translated the business imperatives into a supporting systems architecture that identified cost and time tradeoffs and provi

Results

The UFMS strategic plan allows the Department to more effectively govern program scope, investment and risk. The strategic plan articulates high-level program strategy and links that strategy to low-level requirements that can be implemented. The quantifiable objectives included in the strategic plan allow the Department to measure and quantify the progress of implementation vendors and articulate program benefits to internal and external constituents such as the Office of Management and Budget and the General Accountability Office.