If you are graced with the task of drafting a proposal for the following system analysis that you will be discussing over the next leadership meeting, here are some guidelines for you to help you with some of the points and questions.
- First, you need to make sure you set clear goals which will then help you direct your actions. Since it’s unlikely that you will make decisions on the goals completely by yourself, it’s important you outline a couple of possibilities on which you and the rest of the leadership will decide. Don’t forget, the goals aren’t just what we need to aim to obtain in the future, it’s also what we want to preserve as an organization. Every organization has an aspect that’s going well and needs to be saved from the general forces of entropy.
- Now that you have outlined a stack of possible goals, preferably in order of importance, it’s time to figure out actions and tasks that will take you to the goal. Remember, choosing the activities and tasks wisely will directly impact the chance of achieving the goals.
- On a different note, all the activities have multiple ways of conducted them, therefore it’s another step that you need to think through. “Just do it” is the quote you need to save after the planning phase is done.?
- Next, we have the criteria for optimal performance, or in more popular words, KPIs! Actually, KPIs are derived from the criteria for optimal performance, due to the need to better quantify what the optimal performance is. This part is a whole different beast, and I would suggest you have a separate meeting just for KPIs, after each member of the leadership team has gone through their own department and had a discussion with their team on optimal performance within the department, taking into consideration different spheres of business.?
- You have your goals, various primary and alternate activities, and KPIs, now you need to create a model which will help you “dumb down” the problem and put it in a nice presentation. You can use some of the fancy programs for modelling, but you don’t need to. Charts, facts, and numbers, merged into a good story are a great choice for this purpose. Remember, you aren’t doing a deep dive version of a systems analysis, you are creating a draft. But it is important to outline in the draft which actions you and your team will take to bring this analysis from draft to finish.?
- Now, the final part is the expenses. How much will different activities, their alternatives, as well as different ways of doing them cost in order to achieve a particular goal? This is the key element of the systems analysis - to provide insights into how much the change and implementation will cost the decision-makers, and which activities are worth pursuing.?
“Let’s do this because I think will work” is not a way of implementing change. Collect data, do a detailed analysis, think it through and over, and only then move forward with such a decision.?
I hope these guidelines will help you draft a good proposal for the systems analysis. As a procurement leader, you will be a part of one, or do one yourself, if not already in the progress of conducting one.?
