Assessing Viability of a Technology Initiative

As a technology leader, you're responsible for assessing projects, making decisions that add value, and creating opportunities for your team to succeed. You often spend time overseeing more than one project or initiative and are required to focus on two or more of the following types of activities:

• Building and refining product roadmap(s) to confirm that future work is valuable to the organization and your team. 
• Reporting project updates to managers or stakeholders.
• Educating yourself and your teams on tools or products that have evolved to ensure projects remain viable.
• Understanding what applications and tools are being used, how they talk to one another, and if they are integrated in a secure way.

This focus might be highlighted if:

• Your organization acquired a new company.
• Your organization was acquired.
• You inherited a new team or project.
• You are new to the organization. 
• You are shifting left in your security journey.

These responsibilities often have a two-fold focus – customer value and the company’s bottom line. On top of managing multiple things with this split focus, you’re working in a rapidly evolving industry. You are constantly assessing high stakes and high opportunities. Decisions don’t seem to slow down. They only keep piling up. 

Decision-making made practical  

Some people feel excited, anxious, or have different emotions altogether when making important decisions. Those feelings are valid – identifying what matters and what doesn’t can be hard if where to start seems unclear. 

You can leverage the Assessment Framework to understand where you’re at, where you’ve come from, and where you’re going. A robust project evaluation ensures all context has been discussed and considered – increasing the odds of product or project health, security, and viability. 

Ideally, this process will provide you one of the following recommendations:

• Project is working well.
• Project is not working well, but it is correctable.
• Project is not working well, and is not recoverable in a way that makes business sense.

‍This framework was originally described by Matthew D Edwards in his article, Distill What You See Into Action.

Download the Assessment Framework to determine the health and business value of your initiative. For even more accurate results, include your team to consider and broaden your perspective. 

Making Your Assessment Actionable

If you desire an outside perspective for assessing the health of your project or initiative, reach out to Trility. Our teams can help by conducting the assessment and leading a discovery process, building out an actionable roadmap, and partnering on areas of work where your team may need to leverage future-state skills.