Rationale for a Business Blueprint

Rationale for a Business Blueprint

The year 2020 has shown us that there is high value in being adaptable in business. This known as Business Agility and much has been made of being Agile. It has always been simpler for smaller businesses and often very difficult for larger organisations.

The secret to agility is knowing where everything is and what is does. This facilitates understanding the impact of changing anything.

An effective Blueprint brings agility to all sizes of businesses. This allows rapid and significant change across an organization with confidence.

Much of the value in creating a Blueprint is the very process of creating it can be an amazing exercise in creativity and innovation. Especially with a group of the key players in a facilitated workshop.

The Blueprint provides a number of benefits to all the business stakeholders.

• It enables better decision making by making the underlying logic visible.
• It provides a baseline for change management and impact analysis.
• It provides a long term business architecture.
• It explains how things work in the business to new hires.
• It generates a common frame of reference across all disciplines and functions.
• It provides a common vocabulary enhancing clear, unambiguous communication.
• It provides a logical design for creating or acquiring automated systems.

The blueprint exerts a disciplined structure and self-checking process to minimize errors and build trust.

The Blueprint should be an accessible living document that contributes to all your strategic planning and decision making activities. It should be kept up to date. Many ways the Blueprint is used are listed below.

 Agility

The ability to make rapid changes to the business by being able to quickly determine exactly what the scope of the impact would be for every change, large and small.

 Strategic Planning

The building of the Blueprint is in itself a strategic activity and may be used once as a function of a strategic planning session.

 Business Growth and Change

Any decision process involving making changes or handling growth can benefit enormously from having a Blueprint as an excellent reference for reviewing current state and measuring impact of change across the organization.

Business Policy and Procedure Documents

The BUC narratives in the Blueprint are themselves policies and procedures and require very little effort to transcribe into your corporate format for these documents.

 Test & Teach Your Business Processes

Role playing the business processes with the team members is an excellent way of teaching new members as well as testing your process design by trying it out I a safe environment.

 Job & Role Descriptions

With very little effort, job and role descriptions can be transcribed from the BUC narratives.

 Proprietary Software Evaluation

The Blueprint provides an excellent tool for measuring a prospective software application against the business model. It will readily show how the software system will provide the required functionality.

 In comparing more than one software application, the Blueprint can be used to thoroughly identify the pros and cons of each prospective application against the business requirements.

 Software Development Specification

The complete Blueprint doubles as a software requirements specification and can be provided to software developers with confidence. In fact the Blueprint represent the results of what is considered to be the analysis phase of a software development project.

 Process Improvement

Any activity aimed at process improvement (workshops or continuous process) will benefit immensely from having a detailed and stable Blueprint to work from.

 Software system User Documentation

Most software systems are woefully short of clear documentation. The properly completed User Experience Model has proven to be excellent user documentation with little or no modification.

 Modifying Existing Software Systems

If you are planning a modification of a software system, the Blueprint provides as complete “As is” model from which it is very simple to identify the areas of change.

 Software Acceptance Test Scripts

If you provided the Blueprint to a software developer, The same Blueprint can be used to test a delivered system by working through the User Experience Models.

Would You Like to know More?

 If you would like more information or more help. Here are some options for you.

Free Consultation

You can book a one hour free consultation with the author on Zoom.

Guide to facilitating your own Blueprint session

There are two options:

1. Request a copy of the manual.
2. Take the Blueprint workshop online (or in-house if permitted)

 Arrange a Blueprint session

Request a quote for a facilitated Blueprint workshop for your organisation online (or in-house if permitted). The sessions are facilitated by the author

Train Your IT Department

Request a quote for a training workshop for business/system analysts, business architects and software designers.

Send all requests to Peter Messervy