I will now share an approach that I've used to accelerate decision-making and thus accelerate implementations. It is a method that first considers the decisions that must be made and then gathers the appropriate information required by the decision makers. The first step is to define what decisions must be made.
Before the project team begins information gathering, they must first consider what decisions the project needs to make. The implementation scope for a packaged software implementation is what we need to begin. Consider the following illustration:
Simply stated, the scope for a packaged software implementation consists of the software features that will be deployed (product scope) and the project activities and audience for the deployment (project scope). Once the implementation scope has been defined, the project team can better define the information requirements and key decisions that must be made...