Forrester: - Making Leaders Successful Every Day

Event Overview

The economic downturn has IT executives scrambling to defend budgets, avoid cutbacks, and help the business survive. Here's a Workshop that will bring significant credibility to your IT organization and help you get all critical projects justified and approved quickly.

More than 70% of organizations build business cases for their most important technology investments, but most organizations do not have a consistent, repeatable process behind the numbers. Many organizations do a fair job of understanding IT investment costs but don't understand and quantify the business value impact of technology investments. In addition, organizations are not quantifying risk factors or calculating the value of an IT investment's future strategic flexibility options.

In this interactive one-day Workshop, learn the fundamentals for building effective business cases for technology investments by applying Forrester's proven Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) framework and methodology. Forrester analysts help you learn how to build sound business cases; easily understand basic financial concepts; quantify business benefits, risks, and flexibility options; and prioritize and communicate with business stakeholders and management. Then, apply your learning in exercises and a case study, finally building an action plan to incorporate an improved technology business case process within your organization. The Forrester analyst running this Workshop is also available for 30 days of post-Workshop phone support for each attendee.

During this full day of presentations, hands-on exercises, and interactive discussions, Forrester analysts will teach you how to:

• Identify and quantify elusive business benefits. IT investments can rarely be linked directly to a single strategic business objective and the benefits are often intangible making them difficult to justify using standard financial tools and business case templates. Learn to consider all impacts of the business decision by applying Forrester's Total Economic Impact methodology and conducting a hands-on exercise building costs and benefits into a business case.
   
• Build your action plan. The investment funding problem IT executives face isn't that IT investments don't have value; it's that organizations struggle with how to measure and communicate that value in a way that makes sense to executives and business leadership. This Workshop gives you the ability to go back and review your existing processes, and to develop a step-by-step process to better identify business goals, assess project risk, determine value-based success metrics, and communicate IT's value to management.
   
• Quantify risk factors. Risk can increase the cost of an investment and decrease projected benefits. Conversely, being able to measure the impact of risk will reduce the uncertainty of cost and benefit estimates and greatly improve the success rate of investments. Complete a project risk assessment and learn to factor risk and uncertainty into benefits and costs to produce a more accurate business case estimate.
   
• Communicate business value impact. The difficulty in trying to value IT investments lies in their existence as assets such as computer hardware, software, or networking. However, when these assets are redefined by the service they provide — such as email services, data access services, disaster recovery services, security services, or hosting services — it becomes a different story. Workshop discussion and exercises will help you to understand these benefits and their alignment with business strategies as well as ways to estimate the value of future strategic flexibility options.
  

Who Should Attend?

• CIOs and staff; directors of IT; PMO staff; finance support of IT; project/program managers; and anyone else involved with creating, approving, prioritizing, and communicating the financial value of technology investments
• CIOs may want to send staff members who are responsible for improving their business case justification processes.

Why Attend?

Hundreds of organizations have already benefited from attending this interactive one-day Workshop. Gain an understanding of the fundamentals of building effective business cases for technology investments, applying Forrester's well-known Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) framework and methodology. Forrester analysts teach you how to:

• Build sound, consistent business cases within your organization using a 10-step process, with 30 days of follow-on phone support from the Forrester Workshop instructor.
• Understand important financial concepts used to value technology investments.
• Identify and quantify those elusive business benefits.
• Quantify a project's risk factors and future strategic flexibility options.
• Communicate the value of technology to business stakeholders and management.
• Apply your learning in exercises and a case study.
• Build an action plan to incorporate an improved, consistent technology business case process within your organization.