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The Solutions Delivery (SD) capability aims to develop IT solutions that are effective in meeting business needs.

• Manage business requirements, contain development costs, and reduce the time to market for IT solutions.
• Adopt flexible solutions development and delivery methodologies based on the project context — for example, waterfall, agile, or a hybrid of the two.
• Ensure that IT solutions follow agreed development methodologies regardless of where they are developed within the organization — within the IT function or within other business units.
• Employ built-in assurance mechanisms that enhance the quality of IT solutions to better meet business requirements and service standards.
• Design and develop stable and flexible IT solutions that can easily be maintained and updated to meet future demands of the organization.

The Solutions Delivery (SD) capability ensures a balance between quality, costs, and schedule during the development of IT solutions to meet organizational objectives.

Up to two-thirds of technology-related projects end in failure. Reasons regularly cited include project team inexperience, large project size, unclear and complex requirements, inadequate testing, poor change management, and lack of stakeholder communication. Typically, successful projects can spend up to 40 per cent of the total project effort in a design phase (requirements analysis and planning). This is the case regardless of whether they adopt waterfall, incremental, or agile project delivery methodologies — the latter two typically cycling through multiple design-develop-deploy phases. They can spend up to another 40 per cent in a deploy phase (releasing and validating), with the remaining 20 per cent in a develop phase (building and testing).

Organizations that rush into a develop phase without thoughtful consideration of design can suffer unforeseen consequences. For example, finding and fixing a problem in a later phase is more expensive than finding and fixing it during a design phase. Additionally, there will be implications relating to the maintainability of inefficiently designed solutions when they are deployed. Such challenges underscore the need for the development of IT solutions to be better managed so that they achieve more predictable and successful outcomes¹.

By establishing an effective Solutions Delivery (SD) capability, an organization can more effectively manage IT solutions during the design, development, and deployment phases, and control costs and schedules while minimizing the risk of failure. Consequently, the organization can more readily leverage the resultant IT solutions to deliver business value.

The Solutions Delivery (SD) capability is the ability to design, develop, validate, and deploy IT solutions that effectively address the organization's business requirements and opportunities. The Solutions Delivery (SD) capability covers:

• Managing requirements (functional and non-functional) and their traceability throughout the IT solution's delivery life cycle.
• Developing IT solutions based on the output from requirements analysis and the solution's architecture.
• Selecting appropriate methods and IT solutions delivery life cycle models (for example, waterfall, incremental, agile).
• Reviewing and testing IT solutions throughout the development process.
• Managing changes and releases that occur during the IT solution's delivery life cycle.

Representative POMs are described for SD at each level of maturity.

2Basic

• Practice

  Elicit functional and non-functional requirements in a suitable format through, for example, qualitative data collection techniques such as interviews and workshops.

  Outcome

  Requirements are documented and stored in a format that ensures they are clear, correct, unambiguous, and testable.

  Metric

  Number of requirements specified in desired formats.

• Practice

  Prioritize and define implementation standards — for example, coding standards and integration standards.

  Outcome

  Agreement on appropriate guidelines is reached in advance to ensure that the solutions design adequately satisfies all system requirements.

  Metric

  Percentage of applicable design guidelines correctly implemented by project.

• Practice

  Define and agree testing procedures.

  Outcome

  Ability to perform testing in accordance with agreed testing procedures will help to improve the appropriateness and effectiveness of the testing performed.

  Metric

  Number of solutions where agreed testing procedures are used during the testing process.

• Practice

  Identify and agree a formal release management approach with procedures and templates for releases.

  Outcome

  A release schedule that specifies the date of each release is in place.

  Metric

  Percentage of releases performed in accordance with the defined release management approach.

• Practice

  Define and agree core elements of solutions delivery processes — for example, requirements management, design, building, testing, and configuration management processes.

  Outcomes

  • Stable processes are provided to support delivery of appropriate IT solutions.
  • These processes help to ensure consistency in the approach used to deliver solutions and prevent the need to create processes from scratch for each solution delivered.

  Metric

  Number of processes that are defined and agreed.

3Intermediate

• Practices

  • Promote involvement of relevant stakeholders in analysing business requirements and converting them into an agreed set of system requirements.
  • Include relevant business and user representatives as well as representatives from those areas responsible for design, development, testing, deployment, and maintenance of the proposed solution.

  Outcome

  This helps to ensure that a complete set of functional and non-functional requirements is accurately specified, and the quality of the proposed IT solution is improved.

  Metric

  Percentage of relevant stakeholders participating in requirements specification.

• Practices

  • Agree a test strategy that identifies the test levels to be performed.
  • For each test level (for example, those that relate to unit, integration, system, and user acceptance), clearly specify the defined objectives, scope, and assigned responsibilities.

  Outcomes

  • The test strategy is the starting point for testing.
  • Test levels are unambiguously defined, and this reduces the likelihood of overlap between the test levels and leads to a more efficient test process.

  Metric

  Percentage of IT solutions delivered in accordance with a test strategy.

• Practice

  Agree criteria for selecting an appropriate solutions delivery life cycle model — for example, those that might apply to waterfall, incremental, or agile models.

  Outcome

  Appropriate life cycle models are considered, allowing pros and cons to be objectively considered, so that the best outcome can be delivered.

  Metric

  Percentage of projects that use suitable life cycle models.

• Practice

  Ensure key stakeholders are allocated appropriate levels of authority for evaluating, and approving or rejecting proposed changes to IT solutions.

  Outcome

  Releases are appropriately governed and controlled.

  Metric

  Percentage of changes evaluated that had involvement from necessary stakeholders.

• Practice

  Establish and maintain the test environments within which the necessary testing can be carried out prior to implementation.

  Outcome

  Stable test environments are provided for each level of testing, ensuring the separation of development, system, and user testing environments.

  Metric

  Percentage of releases tested in correct test environments prior to release.

4Advanced

• Practice

  Implement methods to facilitate the tracing of requirements from their source to design, implementation, and testing (in both directions).

  Outcome

  Methods are available to enable requirements to be traced in both directions throughout the solutions delivery life cycle, thereby enabling the validation of specified requirements by relevant users.

  Metric

  Percentage of requirements traceability methods that support bi-directional traceability throughout the full solutions delivery life cycle.

• Practice

  Expand the portfolio of design methods — for example, these could include prototypes, structural models, design thinking, design reuse, design patterns, and entity relationship models.

  Outcome

  The quality of designs is enhanced, productivity is improved, and the likelihood of errors and rework downstream is reduced.

  Metric

  Number of effective design methods used.

• Practice

  racticeFully integrate release management and version control processes.

  Outcome

  The delivery of IT solutions into the operational environment is improved.

  Metric

  Percentage of version control and release activities that are integrated.

• Practice

  Promote integrated tools that can assist in the execution of solutions delivery processes — for example, these could include requirements modelling, test automation, defect management, and measurement capture, storage, and analysis.

  Outcome

  Greater levels of productivity can be supported, and errors can be reduced.

  Metric

  Percentage of processes supported by integrated tools.

• Practice

  Measure the performance of the solutions delivery processes against specific targets and KPIs.

  Outcome

  Transparency is increased and process predictability is improved.

  Metric

  Percentage of solutions delivery processes that have specific targets and KPIs.

5Optimized

• Practice

  Investigate innovative methods and techniques for requirements gathering, analysis, design, development, and deployment of solutions on a continual basis.

  Outcome

  The quality of IT solutions benefits from the latest proven practices.

  Metric

  Number of innovative methods and techniques introduced into the solutions delivery processes.

• Practices

  • Continually monitor and optimize testing in accordance with test plans.
  • Mandate that all testing activities conform to an organization-wide test strategy.

  Outcomes

  • All test processes, scripts, tools, and environments support optimization of testing.
  • Actions are taken without delay if any deviations are found during testing.

  Metrics

  • Number of IT solutions where testing is continually monitored in accordance with test plans.
  • Percentage of testing activities that adhere to a test strategy.

• Practice

  Mandate a continual improvement programme by which deficiencies in approaches are identified and improvements are implemented through incremental and innovative change.

  Outcome

  Approaches are reviewed and adapted consistently in an effective and efficient manner.

  Metric

  Percentage of improvement requests that are reviewed and implemented.

• Practices

  • Continually analyse and review performance measures relating to the solutions delivery processes.
  • Feed information back into a continual improvement and benchmarking initiative.

  Outcomes

  • The performance of solutions delivery processes is objectively evaluated.
  • Corrective and preventative actions can be taken to optimize these processes.

  Metric

  Frequency of review of performance measures relating to the solutions delivery processes.

This capability was introduced in Revision 16 as a new critical capability.

It was deprecated in Revision 18.04, being updated by Solution Delivery (18.04).

The following CCs cover topics that are related to SD in some way:

BARBenefits Assessment and Realization

A validated business case to justify proposed IT solutions

BPMBusiness Process Management

Understanding of the underlying business process context that a proposed IT solution may have to comprehend

EAMEnterprise Architecture Management

Architectural principles and designs for informing the software architecture design

EIMEnterprise Information Management

Details on the quality of information that the development of a proposed IT solution may have to comprehend

ISMInformation Security Management

Security policies that IT solutions development methodologies may have to incorporate

ITGIT Leadership and Governance

Guidance on governance to inform stakeholder and requirements management

PDPPersonal Data Protection

Acquiring data, providing fair notice, and establishing storage and deletion criteria for personal data

PDPPersonal Data Protection

Guidance for the protection of personal data, fair notice and consent, and the processing of data and its destruction

PMPortfolio Management

Tracking delivery across multiple programmes

PPMProgramme and Project Management

Appropriate project delivery methodologies to support the IT solutions development process

PPMProgramme and Project Management

Managing project delivery methodologies

PPPPortfolio Planning and Prioritization

Prioritizing and deprioritizing programmes for investment funding

RDEResearch, Development and Engineering

Details on the investigation and validation of new technologies

SRPService Provisioning

Managing IT solutions when in operation

TIMTechnical Infrastructure Management

Managing the technical Infrastructure

TIMTechnical Infrastructure Management

The underlying computing infrastructure to develop IT solutions

UEDUser Experience Design

Conducting in-depth investigations of end-user preferences, usability, and prototyping

UEDUser Experience Design

In-depth analysis of usability and user preferences