Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing

Finance Systems – Discovery and Requirements Gathering to Procure New Technology

The challenge

MTVH identified a need to review their current finance systems used across the business to identify the existing finance workflows, systems and business requirements.

They recognised that rationalising the 20+ systems that they had in place and procuring new technology would allow them to optimise the organisation’s finance business process and drive transformational change in the delivery of service.

The organisation needed support in both capacity and approach to develop a set of collateral and a qualified list of solution providers in order to progress with a procurement exercise.

Getting all levels of the organisation to sign up to replacement technologies

The response

The 4OC approach to this task recognised the importance of undertaking a structured requirements gathering process, with the full involvement of the operational services who were users of the various finance team systems and processes, alongside a thorough engagement with the finance team members.

Through a series of workshops, interviews, and meetings we identified the main issues, drivers for change, and core business processes. We worked closely with management and staff from the finance and operational teams through a series of Value Chain workshops to establish the underlying business requirements, revised business processes and underlying challenges.

Based on the agreed assumptions around revised business process, an understanding of the work and dataflows and a documented set of business requirements and selection criteria, we generated a qualified list of suppliers to progress to the next phase of developing an IT solution for the finance team.

The outcome

The primary output was a recommendations report, which had been extensively reviewed and most importantly, agreed by staff at all levels across the organisation. An additional significant by-product of our approach was the identification of a requirement to address key points within the business processes in place within TVH operations and master data management in advance of embarking on any transition to a new solution.

In addition, Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing, the recently merged, significantly larger organisation managing 57,000 homes, has recently commissioned 4OC to use this same approach to requirements gathering, to begin the process of replacing their two existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions with a new, cloud-based, simple CRM-lite solution to be used by approximately 350 users.