Comprehensive options analysis, appraisal, and recommendations for an IT ecosystem that delivers what you need, now and in the future.

Using a tried-and-tested agile process, our options analysis service will provide you with a cost-effective, future-proofed systems architecture comprising the most usable and suitable software solutions available.

Our consultants will work to build an in-depth understanding of your software development needs, based on what’s required by the business in the short-, medium- and long-term.

This insight will inform expert software options analysis and recommendations for the systems, infrastructure and processes that will best deliver against your requirements – including supporting the implementation of your digital transformation strategy – to give you a clear plan for the future and helping you to make a business case for change.

Options Analysis at Box UK

Agile discovery phase

A highly collaborative process, the discovery phase of any options analysis and appraisal project helps drive quality and efficiency by facilitating a shared understanding of both the current software development situation and future requirements, as well as possible risks for mitigation.

Ensuring success from the outset, we’ll assign you a multi-disciplinary team who act as ‘champions’ for the different perspectives involved in defining an effective IT ecosystem. This includes an experienced business analyst responsible for capturing and communicating organisational needs, and a solutions architect to evaluate the current technical landscape and any potential software development solutions, as well as a user researcher who will gather end-user insight and ensure that the selected options are a great fit to user needs.

We’ll use a range of techniques to conduct holistic, agile analysis and deliver a validated picture of your existing ecosystem’s strengths and pain points, alongside the roles, processes, dependencies and integrations this ecosystem touches upon. Tailored to suit your specific stakeholders and ways of working, information gathering techniques used during your options appraisal may include:

• Project vision definition
• Face-to-face workshops
• Remote interviews
• Documentation reviews
• Analytics review
• End-user surveys and testing

Analysis of software development options

Once the full scope of your options analysis project is understood, we’ll continue to work closely with your team on defining the organisational requirements that will form the basic evaluation criteria for identified solutions, taking an agile approach to ensure these are collaboratively and iteratively prioritised to deliver greatest value.

We’ll assess a wide range of off-the-shelf, configurable, customisable and bespoke software options depending on your needs, rapidly narrowing these down before conducting extensive assessments of the most suitable solutions. Not only this, but we’ll also compare different architecture approaches, software vendors, team structures and hosting options, to ensure all elements of your system work together efficiently and effectively.

Using principles taken from leading industry models such as the Lean Prioritisation Matrix and Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP), our options appraisal process explicitly separates the examination of assessment criteria from the performance of solutions. As a result, you can be confident that those solutions that perform against the most important criteria will rise to the top.

Criteria will be tailored to your specific needs and environment, but may include:

• Fitness for purpose
• Integration capability
• Ease of reporting
• User friendliness
• Access across devices
• Support/SLA offering
• Purchasing and lifetime costs
• Ease of IT management
• Data storage

By separately evaluating relevant tools and technologies against these individual criteria, we can cut through complex issues to deliver a transparent, understandable and confident evaluation of the options available to you. From this, we’ll also produce a traceable matrix of scores that will help inform both our final recommendations and future decision-making.

Playback of options appraisal results and recommendations

We’ll deliver you the results of our options analysis in a clear and comprehensive deck, detailing:

• Our understanding of the landscape, based on the discovery and evaluation activities undertaken
• A high-level overview of the options appraisal process and its outcomes
• Our recommendations for software development solutions, alongside architecture, approach and hosting considerations
• Any additional recommendations for your future IT strategy, based on our assessment

Armed with this information you’ll be able to make informed decisions to enhance your IT ecosystem, driving sustainable returns and enabling you to consistently deliver against business goals and user expectations.

Deliverables include

• Strategic recommendations
• Ecosystem audit
• Stakeholder analysis
• Project vision
• Prioritised organisational requirements
• Results from software options analysis (with scoring matrix)
• Solution proposal