To get the approval from key stakeholders for a CMDB project, you need a strong orientation of problem, resolution, and benefits. If your project does not map with what the business is trying to achieve overall, other better planned projects will be selected over the CMDB project.

A strong business case for a CMDB must include the following elements:

Executive summary

Problem statement

Executive Summary

The executive summary offers all of the statistics required to know the fundamentals of the CMDB project in a strong, transparent, high-level package. It should include, in one or two pages:

Strategic planning — Begin with the details you are planning for a CMDB. Pin point the association with enterprise planning or review the changes that initiated the consideration of the CMDB project. Showing significance to the business is the first step in showing value.

Project overview — Review the problem that the CMDB will resolve. Review the CMDB solution being offered. Pinpoint the services and processes that will benefit from CMDB statistics. Limit your details mostly to business terms, rather than technical terms.

Impact — Recognize the project sponsors in the project. Review the important metrics and objectives that will be used to calculate success. Summarize who the CMDB will affect and how. Classify crucial risks and outline expectations. Finally, summarize the timeline of the deployment and estimated benefits.

Cost benefit analysis — Review your projected expenses and benefits. Pin Point important assumptions about project expenses.

Metrics and Measurements — Define how you will calculate whether the CMDB project is effective, including what standard you will use. Be certain to describe in detail about your strategy to measure the success of the project and decide whether the business case was effective.

Problem Statement

The executive summary is a top-level report. The problem statement is the overview of the logic behind your CMDB business case. Quite often, technology solutions such as the CMDB are determined as answers in search of a problem. This segment gives you the chance to provide context and significance. Plan what will be made more effective by a CMDB and what growth would be incomplete by doing nothing. The problem statement should include:

Current situation — Define how the business currently works without a CMDB. This segment will be as descriptive as necessary and can comprise process diagrams as well as testimonials from key project sponsors in the project or technology group about the problems they currently have to undergo because of various IT functions without a CMDB. If relevant, include expense and resource needs to support the existing situation. Remember to refer important requirements that are tough to support without integrated data access.

Best practices — Summarize ITIL best practices or analyze about how other enterprises perform the same tasks. This data pin points the scale of the possible enhancement.

Gap Analysis — Distinguish current practices from best practices to support build harmony. Don’t take a broad view, such as “The CMDB will assist to integrate information.” Be precise. For example, “The CMDB will support the service desk get real-time statistics about current changes to CIs that will help increase first-fix rate and so will improve service availability.”

Author : Arunavo Banerjee

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