How Acceptance contributes to the wider business change process
Capita believes that acceptance isn’t just a technology process. The chances are, if you are thinking about change delivery you will be thinking about changing business processes as well.
One of the things that commonly goes wrong in acceptance, both in terms of the technology and the business, is that some problems can be discovered very late in the day, usually just before ‘Go Live’. These are normally directly related to the quality of the original requirements that were gathered at the beginning of the process.
Another issue is that senior management who are expected to sign off the change may not be engaged. They often rely on lower level expert users to guide them in terms of the readiness of the change, understanding that those users will live with the consequences if it doesn’t work. However the changing regulatory requirement and the changing of expectations of the users, customers and ultimately the general public mean that this is no longer acceptable.
Capita works with our clients to make acceptance transparent and meaningful to those that have to make decisions about going live and who have to manage both project and product risks.
We believe it is especially important to get the requirements right. All the evidence from the industry and from our own experience shows that if you capture requirements correctly in the first place, a lot of the other aspects of delivery follow suit. Therefore we put a lot of effort into using structured techniques which capture and manage project and product risk; helping us to better manage the delivery and the outcome.
We make sure that the go live decision is fully informed so the people signing off the delivery understand what has been built and what hasn’t; what’s been tested and what hasn’t and the consequences of the defects found and what this means to them in real terms.