Background
SSE Energy, one of the leading distributors of energy in the UK established a subsidiary, independent digital company, Connected Home with the goal of providing new & existing SSE SMART Energy Customers with a gateway device in their homes rendering home control, energy insight, home services & home support. Architecture Components include Connected Home Platform, Gateway/Hub devices, Mobile Application, Supply Chain, Energy Data Repository, CRM (Customer record, Payment plan, loyalty, Operational Analytics), Identity & Access Management (IDAM), Home Services (Response, Vault, Knowledge Management, Twillio, IVR, Contact Centre), ETL, Telephony (Genesys, Avaya). Key programme drivers include Customer retention, Business Process reengineering and the innovation of new products and services.
I-MORAN Consultancy Engagement
The Connected Home programme tasked I-MORAN Consultancy with owning the programme enterprise process model. As a new programme, it needed to integrate and align with existing programmes, in-flight programmes and the operating model as a whole. We were mandated to produce a business process master list & enterprise process model and ensure alignment to the overall business objectives, statement of intent, high level requirements and low-level requirements.
We started off by facilitating a series of internal and external workshops with Internal Connected Home Senior Stakeholders & SSE Retail business heads, technology partners to define a collaborative approach for the delivery of the programme. We also facilitated and managed process engineering, requirements engineering, legal and compliance working sessions. Additionally, we had a working session with Executive Committee members to provide confidence, leveraging our design assurance framework to provide transparency and traceability of work.
History
On completion of our fact-finding sessions, we commenced a capability assessment phase, mapping the state of the current business and technical capability that existed and their level of maturity. We also worked with programme directors for all inflight programmes, collaborating on the approach for SSE Target Operating Model and how the elements of the operating model will align. The dependency of the Connected Home programme on SMART, Digital and Back office programmes added an additional layer of complexity to the ability to integrate with other programmes. We had a holistic approach for the delivery of the TOM.
Business Design Expertise
I-MORAN Consultancy facilitated a series of cross programme and cross function workshops with both internal and external stakeholders. We led on key working sessions with Connected Home logistics partners re-engineering existing supply chain processes to align with the strategic objectives. Sessions facilitated include high level and detailed level requirements workshops – elicitation, analysing and validating requirements and putting in place the best approach to manage programme requirements and processes across multiple strategic units.
We pulled together all key design decisions across all workshops and worked closely with all heads of function to review, validate and close decisions related to technical and business design for the gateway device, back office, logistics and operational processes. Conducted gap analysis at process design, solution design and requirements level to ensure both agile and waterfall requirements inputs are well defined, writing solution specification (business requirements & functional specifications) for the solution development team.
Additionally, we supported the SCRUM delivery teams by grouping product backlog items, prioritising sprint backlogs and periodically communicating backlog items to the development team and back to the business stakeholders where release candidates and items were contentious.
Testimonial
“I worked with I-MORAN Consultancy on a complex programme where their consultant was responsible in designing a process architecture that sat across 5 internal businesses and had to integrate with 2 external suppliers. His approach and direction in defining the process architecture really supported me with my role as the requirements lead as it meant I was able to pinpoint which requirements were owned by which business as well as ensure those requirements fitted into the business processes that were being developed and tested. He’s also very down to earth and a great team player and I’d highly recommend him for any future process architecture role.”
Harminder Motay, Senior Business Analyst