Cloud Service Strategy & Roadmap

The Crown Consulting Group Listed on G-Cloud 12

We are please to announce that we are once again listed on the G-Cloud framework. We have revised our services to further compliment the project delivery phases outlined in the Government Digital Services Manual. These services can be consumed individually or collectively depending on your specific requirements.

In this post we are going to look at our new Cloud Strategy & Roadmap Service. All our services and listings can be found directly on the Digital Marketplace.

Our Approach

We have designed our service offerings to align with the Government Agile Delivery project phases. Furthermore, we have adopted and work against the Service Standards and Technology Code of Practice to further complement our clients. At a high-level, our services include;

• Cloud Strategy & Roadmap: Designed to help our clients identify their goal and aspirations by taking a holistic look at their organisation. The objective of which is to create a working, measurable and sustainable strategy that will support any organisation moving to and adopting cloud services.

• Cloud Service Discovery: Discovery is about understanding the problem and/or aspirations in question. We then set to refine the problem by building a contextual understanding of the users, their frustrations and objectives. We look to understand the current working practices, constraints and business rules.

• Cloud Service Design: Having identified a series of options based on the Discovery output, this is where we start to refine those options into potentially viable services. By refining these with users we uncover further considerations enabling these to be addressed early. Further, at this stage we take a holistic view of the service and catalogue all entry and end points.

• Cloud Service Delivery: Taking the most refined option from Design we work at developing this service in the real instance. Depending on the service we may operate a small pilot here, this helps to ensure the accuracy and alignment to the users’ needs.

• Cloud Service Support: Having transitioned the service into a live environment we can continue supporting the development of enhanced features and further aligning the service to expectations.

Cloud Strategy & Roadmap

Our Cloud Strategy service has been designed to help our clients identify their goals and aspirations and how to convert these into a workable and manageable strategy. We believe that no two business are the same and as such we invest heavily in ensuring our approach and recommendations are based solely on your business and your objectives. We have no pre-conformed ideas and hold no elegancies to any technologies, so we are best placed to offer you practical and impartial advice. Understanding our clients’ business is a key step in allowing us to help build a strategy that will complement in the long-term, some of the key questions and considerations we explore with our clients at this stage include;

• Where are you today?

• What is your current position and why do you want to change?

• What do you want to achieve?

• Why do you want to achieve these things?

• How do you imagine working in the interim, and ultimately the future, having achieved your vision?

• What tools, mechanisms and methodologies do you think you need in place to support you in delivering your vision?

Another key element we consider when engaging any client about a change initiative, strategy or upgrade is the wider reaching impacts. We adopt a holistic view point here to assess how a change in one area may impact operations in another. This approach allows us to support you in identifying key points early thus avoiding unnecessary risk and delay in a delivery phase.

We always work in an open, transparent and collaborative way to help you understand our processes and help you adopt the skills and expertise we use to help you in the future.

Developing your strategy is key. However, working towards delivering it is critical. The Crown Consulting Group can help you plan this aspect by helping convert the strategy into a roadmap detailing your initiative deliveries, your key milestones and your benefit realisation activities.

Having helped develop your strategy and roadmap we can then help you plan out how you go about delivering it. Typically, this will involve us helping you design a new IT operating model, devise business cases and outline specifications for your technologies and associated architecture.

Service Benefits

• Clear picture of how people, process and technology aspects interrelate;

• Clear strategy illustration highlighting strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats;

• Completely individual approach designed to complement your business;

• Working practices are consistent with wider Government initiatives (GDS & Agile);

• We always work in an open, collaborative and transparent way;

• Thorough knowledge transfer designed to equip you with the skills;

• Clear illustration of benefits realisation against your strategy initiatives;

• Improved cost control through consistent agility to delivery practices, AND;

• Greater cost efficiency through increased transparency.

Service Features

• Comprehensive strategy individually tailored to compliment your business objectives;

• Impact assessment benchmarking your current position against your goals;

• Illustration and analysis of target operating models moving forwards;

• Long standing domain knowledge and technical expertise;

• Completely independent and impartial advice;

• Designed to align to your business and corporate strategy initiatives;

• Holistically designed to address people, process and technology aspects;

• Stakeholder buy-in from consistent inclusive approach;

• Translation into a workable and manageable roadmap highlighting key milestones, AND;

• Design of business cases to complement your digital journey.

Deliverables

Our Cloud Strategy service has been designed specifically to help you identify your goals and objectives. Additionally, the service aims to illustrate and articulate a delivery schedule which will enable you to work towards achieving your objectives. Depending on your scope our Cloud Strategy service will aim to deliver;

• Detailed Cloud vision for your specific organisation;

• Business case developed to support your goals and aspirations for Cloud migration/ adoption;

• Complete 3 – 5-year Digital and IT Strategies that fully complement your organisations corporate objectives;

• Full 3 – 5-year Cloud Strategy aimed to empowering and/or enabling your move to cloud services;

• Health-Checks of existing systems, architecture and infrastructure. Aimed at assessing your organisations ability to deliver your vision, gap analysis and recommendations;

• Complete holistic view of your organisation – People, Process & Technology to identify your key drivers, end-to-end processes, customer journeys and core business functions;

• Transformation Roadmap, this will illustrate your journey and key milestones in taking your organisation from its current “As-Is” state to your desired future “To-Be” state, AND;

• Identification of dependencies, your core risks and possible mitigation plans and a detailed benefits realisation plan to measure and illustrate your transformation success.

In addition to our key service deliverables outlined above there are a number of additional elements we consider as part of any transformation work. We feel by exploring these elements we can help our clients arrive at a solution which will really complement you, these include;

• Green IT;

• Sustainability & Carbon Impact;

• New Ways of Working;

• Partner & Supplier Model;

• Procurement Model;

• Shared Services & Collaborative Working, AND;

• Outsourcing Model.

Throughout all our work one of our main objectives is consistent. That objective is to provide a service/ solution that is individual to your business and will be designed and delivered in a way that will complement your operations and support your further growth. We believe that every business is different and should be addressed to that degree.

About Us

When we formed in 2015 our objective was, and still is, simple. We aim to deliver a comprehensive service that is designed to help our client deliver transformation value to their organisations. We act with complete integrity, practice collaborative working wherever possible and operate a completely transparent open policy. Our clients are at the heart of what we do and what we aim to achieve. We believe that every business is different and subsequently there are no two problems the same. As such, an individual approach is required. We believe that nobody knows and understands your business better than you. We want to work collaboratively to embed this knowledge into the recommendations and work we deliver. We put our clients needs and objectives at the heart of what we do. We are completely independent so are best placed to offer impartial unbaits advice. Throughout our work we aim to upskill your people by effective knowledge transfer and inclusion, so you are well placed to continue delivering sustainable results into the future.

Our Values

• Integrity – We respect the values and views of our clients. We consistently honest, open and genuine and always work in a transparent way;

• Collaboration – We believe that nobody knows your business and situation better than you. To deliver a complementary sustainable solution we work openly with our clients. Additionally, this supports our approach to knowledge transfer and your sustainability through upskilling;

• Trust – We trust, and put great weight, on each other’s ability to follow through on their commitments and do the right thing. We aim to create lasting relationships with our clients which are mutually beneficial; 

• Individuality – Your business is unique as are your aspirations, culture and targets. We embrace this in everything we do and always strive to deliver a solution that will complement that individuality;

• Simplicity – We adopt an ethos of simplicity in everything we do. Where possible we try and remove any unnecessary barriers, simplify complexities and present our approach, recommendations and work in a clear precise way that everyone can understand

Conclusion

We are proud to have our services once again listed on the G-Cloud framework and are excited to continue our journey in supporting our clients.

We are going to explore our service offerings in greater detail in the coming weeks. This, in addition to all our publications, will be available on our Company Blog.

Additionally, please feel free to Contact Us.