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Tools, templates and assessments for the Define strategy phase of CAF (Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework)

Microsoft is offering an excellent framework to support cloud migration and adoption process – Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) 

The framework defined an iterative process with the following phases:

  1. Define Strategy
  2. Plan
  3. Ready
  4. Adopt
  5. Govern
  6. Manage

For each of them, Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) provides us a list of templates, tools, and assessment mechanisms that can help us improve the adoption and migration process. Let's take a look at the ones for Define Strategy.


Define Strategy Tools, Assessments, and Templates

Cloud journey tracker

Location: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/assessments  

The primary purpose of this assessment is to help us identify how we should do Azure's adoption. The assessment identifies areas of the CAF framework that are relevant for our adoption of the migration journey.

There are in total 8 questions that can be covered in around 15 minutes, covering areas like adoption strategy, plan, ready, govern, and manage. The assessment helps us identify where we are now from the cloud maturity level and the adoption areas (e.g., strategy, plan, ready, govern, manage).

The output of the assessment provides us scoring that takes into account what kind of cloud adoption we want to make. Additionally, it provides a list of recommended actions that we can take to improve our understanding of the cloud journey and the business objectives that we want to achieve for each area. 

The information is valuable if you are at the beginning of the journey and you have a basic experience with the cloud and how to adopt it. 

 

Business outcome template

Location: https://archcenter.blob.core.windows.net/cdn/business-outcome-template.xlsx

The Excel template provides us the ability to collect the adoption outcomes that we want to achieve. Each business outcome has 5 different items:

  1. Stakeholders (e.g., Financial Product Owner)
  2. Primary business outcome (e.g., Decrease the total time of the monthly invoice processing)
  3. Business Drivers (e.g., Improve the waiting time)
  4. KPI (e.g., 30% opportunity time per month reduce)
  5. Capability (e.g., Invoice sorting automation)

The KPI item provides help us later on during the cloud adoption to measure the adoption's success. KPI needs to be set from the beginning. Otherwise, the business value is hard to track.

At the end of the exercise, we will have the list of all business outcomes, together with the list of names of the main stakeholders, KPIs, and the main business drivers. 

A full list of business outcomes that can be used, specific for each industry can be checked on the CAF website - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-framework/strategy/business-outcomes/

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