“How are we doing?”, this if often something which is difficult to quantify in a large transformation projects. This is why we believe the initial planning phase is critically important.

We believe planning (and instrumenting) your workflow as early as possible (ideally in the design phase) will give everyone in the project a view of where things are taking time and what areas need to be improved. It should, if done properly, give you information on how valuable various changes and features have been compared to others.

On large programs of work you often hear that getting such metrics is “Too difficult” and that they are “Not Meaningful” however a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve and a focus on making sure that the process is capturing these metrics early and is built into every feature you add will mean that you can see value early and tell what features, changes and people are really driving the business.

This is something the most successful small startup companies do exceptionally well, as every dollar they spend is vital, but in larger projects it is often assumed to be something that a simple analytics plugin can offer easily later on, when actually given a complex environment and product set this is often not the case.

Having worked with smaller companies we believe that this is something that most large transformation projects can learn from and it is something we try to bring to all projects we are involved with, using data to make smarter decisions and prioritise the correct changes to drive real value.