CASE STUDIES
I have selected a couple of case studies below that demonstrate the diverse problem statements that I have addressed in my extensive IT consulting career. I have picked one each from the NFP sector and Corporate sector.
IT Transformation
2015 - 2016 ( 1 Year)
Background: Sacred Heart Mission located in St Kilda, Melbourne, is a medium sized not-for-profit that started off in the 1980s with meal programs for the homeless. Over the decades, the mission added more services such as a health clinic, crisis accomodation for women, rooming house for the homeless etc. As new services were added organically, IT systems were purchased and business processes created to enable these services. Over time, this resulted in a fragmented IT landscape and incoherent business process.
Problem Statement: "Transform SHM's current fragmented IT landscape into an integrated business systems environment that:
-supports outcomes based measures;
-provides timely, accurate and relevant data, information and knowledge to trained users;
-and supports effective and efficient program delivery."
Project Delivery phases:
Discovery:
The problem statement was too broad and generic. It needed to be actionable within the constraints of time and budget. This led me into a discovery phase with the client for a period of four weeks. During the discovery phase I ran workshops with staff from the services in scope, conducted individual interviews with service managers and from the data I collected I was able to map business process overlayed with the IT systems that were supporting the services. This gave me a clear picture of where the bottlenecks were.
From the discovery exercise, I was able to refine the problem statement to:
"There is no single view of the client that uses the various SHM services due to the fact that the IT systems that enable those services are not integrated with each other. This means that SHM does not know that they have provided rooming house service, meals and health clinic services to the same person. Consequently, service performance reporting did not accurately reflect the impact of the services."
Business analysis:
In this phase, my work was to undertake an analysis of all the IT systems used by the services listed in the scope of the program and understand what data was recorded for every client that interfaced with the service. The work was very detailed down to the database field level. The idea was to arrive at a requirement set to inform a future enterprise wide CRM system or a single source data warehouse to house all client data (note: The RFP to go to market for this strategic system was not in scope for my engagement with SHM)
Results and Conclusion:
I provided SHM with a detailed requirement set for a future state integrated system, current state and future state business process workflows and a current state tech architecture diagram as assets to inform the next phase of their multi-year transformation program.
There were also some user training gaps, where the users of the systems did not fully understand the functionality of the legacy systems. I also provided appropriate training to the users.
Delivering tech initiatives to launch a new MVP retail media business
2025 - 2026 (1 year)
Background:
Wesfarmers was going to market with a new MVP Retail Media Network that aimed at leveraging advertising inventory across group divisions; Bunnings, Officeworks and Priceline. Each of the three divisions were already running well established retail media businesses individually. Wesfarmers as the holding umbrella group wanted to sell advertising inventory to the wider market across all three divisions. A sales and marketing team had been formed. The team had started to sell some inventory. The sales head wanted to ramp up the team but did not have the supporting tech to achieve the target scale. The sales team members were booking inventory over the phone with their counterparts in the three divisions. The lack of a central repository that provided a single view of inventory meant that forward bookings could not be made. Excel sheets were being used to manage the sales funnel from recording client information to generating proposals and contract documentation.
Problem Statement:
An enterprise wide multi tenant CRM was required that would hold a single inventory view across all divisions and that the sales team could use to move opportunities and leads across the sales funnel all the way to proposal generation and contract stage.
Project Delivery phases:
Discovery:
I ran extensive workshops with senior stakeholders across all three Wesfarmers divisions in scope (Bunnings, Priceline and Officeworks). All three divisions used different IT systems for CRM and for inventory management. Detailed workflows were mapped to depict the current state of people, process and technology across all three divisions for CRM and Inventory management. All divisions had agreed in principle to move to a multi-tenant enterprise wide CRM.
Business analysis:
Post discovery, I documented an exhaustive set of requirements to form part of a RFP process to send to enterprise grade CRM vendors.
Plot Twist
Whilst in the middle of the RFP process, the divisional leaders made a decision to not migrate from their individual CRM and inventory management IT systems. A quick pivot was made to revise the RFP process to solicit tier 2 and tier 3 vendors as the original complex functionality to support multiple divisional data was no longer required. But the original problem still remained. No CRM system and no single view of inventory for the Wesfarmers sales team.
Results and Conclusion:
I recommended that in the interim a tactical CRM solution be implemented. I had come across Monday.com and had discovered in detail its capabilities and functionality in the discovery phase as a couple of divisions were using it. It is a very basic software that would enable the Wesfarmers retail media sales team to move away from excel and manual management of their sales process. This was endorsed by senior management. I helped implement and train the team on the new CRM.
As to the single inventory view problem, I had also explored the capabilities of Zitcha, a Inventory and Order management system for Retail Media whilst in the discovery phase with the divisions as all three divisions were using Zitcha in some form. Either for order management or inventory management or both.
I recommended that the Wesfarmers retail media sales team also move to Zitcha for their inventory and order management which would then enable them to be on a common platform as the divisions, enabling a single view of inventory.
I contributed to a roadmap for the adoption of Zitcha in cadence with the divisional Zitcha roadmap.
I then held workshops with stakeholders in the divisions to understand their order and inventory management processes and documented them for future adoption of Zitcha.