THE PROBLEM
The development of an information management system (IMS) carries with it a lot of uncertainty. How do we manage this uncertainty?
A SOLUTION
Here’s the method I use to reduce and manage some the uncertainty that comes with IMS type projects:
- Create a Wardley Mapping of the technology solutions based on the needs of the users who’ll be using the system. I’ll group these components into 4 categories: rental services, product purchases, custom design & development and research & development. I’ll then map out how their links / dependencies.
- From the map I’ll have a list of components that can be used to create the information system. To reduce the uncertainty I’ll pick as many components for the system as far to the right of that landscape as possible. Which means I’m looking at the marketplace and prioritising components that I can rent as subscription services (e.g. AWS, Gmail), if not then I’ll look to components I can buy as products (e.g. VMWare, Exchange) and only as a last option would I build something from scratch
- From that I can build a business model of the components required and use innovation options to guide and manage the implementation of the system.
Example Usage
Last week a few of us got together to figure out what we would need to design and build electronic systems for Fisheries Port Management.
As a group session at a 1 day hackathon last week we built a wardley map of the components we’d need. Here’s a screenshot of the final map we ended up with:
We then used the our map of these components to build a prototype to confirm that these were the right pieces needed to build the system. We confirmed that they were during the one day hack.
See the example here https://ano.github.io/port/:
From that hackathon we built a business modeller which we can combine with an innovation options calculator to help us manage risk and uncertainty moving forward. You can find our business modeller and the innovation options calculator here:
See screenshot below:
