Be Ready For Whatever's Next
How it works...
IT Planning Toolkit is a strategic planning and decision making platform that helps you develop and maintain a business-aligned IT plan in five easy stages.
Stage one lays the foundation for business-technology success.
Unfortunately, many IT professionals and managed services companies skip this stage, and move straight into technology-focused conversations and product recommendations.
But, for small and mid-sized companies, this is THE CRITICAL launchpad for your success.
Get this wrong, and IT will remain in a constant state
of catch-up, consumed with firefighting, workarounds, and reactive support activities that waste your time, money, and resources, and get you nowhere.
STAGE 1: LAY THE FOUNDATION
Our structured business-review templates streamline the business discovery process, allowing you to quickly and easily document business goals, initiatives, required capabilities, and strategic priorities.
Quantifying the business-context BEFORE launching into technology-focused assessments ensures that your IT budget will align with what's most important to your business, and prevents you from wasting money on IT projects that don’t deliver maximum business-value.
STAGE 2: ASSESS CURRENT STATE OF IT
We make sure you ask the RIGHT questions by providing a library of customizable technology assessments based on the latest best-practice frameworks and controls.
You won’t have to start from scratch or spend countless hours researching, trying to figure it out on your own.
Stage two provides meaningful insight into the strengths and weaknesses of your IT environment across seven key categories: Security, Infrastructure, Operations, Continuity, Communications, Hardware, and Software.
STAGE 3: CONNECT THE DOTS
Knowing what’s important to your business is helpful, knowing HOW important it is...well, that's priceless.
That's why IT Planning Toolkit gives you an intuitive, easy-to-use interface for mapping and quantifying technology dependencies, relationships, and strategic business initiatives.
Stage 3 plays an integral role in the overall planning process by allowing you to measure, in a functional context, the degree of business-technology alignment within your organization with great accuracy.
STAGE 4: ANALYZE AND PRIORITIZE
Advanced analytics and data visualizations allow you to literally SEE the relationships and dependencies between your business objectives and technology capabilities.
With just a glance, you’ll know which areas of IT pose the greatest threat to your business, which offer the greatest opportunity, and where you need to focus your IT spending to get the maximum business-value.
Whether your decisions are influenced by speed, time-to-value, cost, risk tolerance, head-count, industry, or market conditions, you’ll leave stage 4 with the confidence and clarity necessary to quickly move from insight to decisive action.
STAGE 5: DOCUMENT, EXECUTE, & MEASURE
If you don’t document it, it will never happen. That’s why in stage 5 you’ll outline a game plan that visually tells the story of where you are, where you’re headed, and how you plan to get there. Using the built-in roadmapping tools, you’ll define budgets, timelines, and deliverables.
You're now ready to take direct action on the initiatives documented in your strategic plan. To help accelerate this process, we give you an extensive library of pre-designed policies, planning templates, and solution resources.
And, to ensure that you stay aligned and on-track, we include built-in reporting tools, so you can easily track, measure, and communicate the progress and performance of your IT initiatives.
Conclusion
There isn't one.
Because time and change are the only constants, your journey is just beginning with the completion of these five stages.
Fortunately, IT Planning Toolkit is designed around an agile framework that allows you to fine- tune your strategy in real time.
With just a few mouse clicks, you're able to stay ahead of rapidly shifting business priorities, market conditions, new technologies, and compliance requirements.
That means your IT strategy will never become outdated, misaligned, or obsolete.
“IT Planning Toolkit has finally created a custom tailored platform that can help build an IT security strategy quickly, effectively, that allows you to continue to scale and grow within that custom model. Highly suggest for anyone looking to take their business' cybersecurity seriously.”
C. Lindsley | Cloud Development Representative at pax8