Insights & Perspectives

Outcomes Before Requirements: Writing the RFP for a Digital Transformation

Most RFPs are inventories. Hundreds of “the system shall” rows, harvested from the current system and whatever the incumbent vendor already does. They are easy to write and nearly impossible to evaluate, because every proponent can tick every box and nobody has said what the organization is actually trying to become.

When a provincial Crown insurer launched a multi-year transformation to become a high-performing, customer-centric digital insurer, the RFP workstream started somewhere else: with outcomes.

Four Apps, One Roadmap: Product Ownership in an Enterprise Mobility Group

Enterprise mobile applications have a reputation problem. They get built because a business unit asked, they get rolled out because a project closed, and then they sit on a device next to the apps people actually use. At a provincial power utility’s enterprise mobility group, I was product owner for four application initiatives, and the goal was simply to avoid that fate.

A roadmap is a set of promises with dates

All four initiatives shipped within budget and on time, which sounds like a project management sentence. It was a product management one. The roadmap tracked features, user stories, test cases, and the feedback and suggestions that came out of every product demo, in one place, so that a request from a demo in March was visibly either scheduled or declined by April. Nothing kills adoption faster than feedback that disappears.