The future state is defined as the future state of a business process or the solution.
It is used to visualize the future state of the process or the solution when the needed changes have been implemented.
The future state cannot be implemented without understating the current state of that business process and what needs to change to get to the future state.
The define future state task is used to determine the set of conditions necessary to meet the business needs.
In order to successfully implement the solution, the future state has to be well defined, achievable with the available resources and acceptable to all the stakeholders.
The future state has to be defined at a detailed level so that it fulfills the following criteria :
1. It should achieve the required business needs.
2. provide a clear definition of the outcomes that would satisfy the business needs.
3. Must be within the scope of the solution.
4. Must be able to assess the value created by the future state.
The future state can range from simple changes such as removing a feature in an application to complex changes such as entering a new market.
The future state might include making changes to different parts of the organization such as the business processes, business functions, organizational structures, technological infrastructure and organizational resources.
Describing the future state allows the stakeholder to understand the value that would be realized from the solution.
There are some elements that can help with the defining the future state and they include the following :
1. Business goals and objectives: the business objectives are the needs that the business is trying to meet, while the business goals are a longer term state that the organization is trying to establish and maintain.
Examples of business objectives and goals include increased customer and improved safety.
Some of the business goals might be too large to be measured so they would need to be broken down into smaller, specific goals which can be measured to confirm if the objectives have been achieved.
2. Solution’s scope: The solutions scope is used to set boundaries which should be used to limit the number of available solutions which would be considered for implementation.
If there are multiple options that can fulfill the business needs, they would have to be ranked to decide which ones should be considered.
The decision should be based on the value to be delivered to the stakeholders and that requires an understanding of the required changes.
3. Constraints: Constraints are used to describe the parts of the current and future state that would not be changed by the solution.
They are the limitations that the enterprise has and the limits that they would have to work within to fulfill the business need.
Examples of constraints include budgetary restrictions, time restrictions, technology, policies and infrastructure.
4. Organizational structure and culture: the future state might affect the relationships between people in the enterprise.
These relationships might need to be changed in order to fulfill the future state.
Examples of these type of changes include: changes to reporting lines such as manager and changes to the team dynamics.
Identifying and documenting these potential changes might provide insight into possible source of conflicts, impact and limits.
5. Capabilities and processes: the capabilities and processes is used to identify changes to the way the work would need to be done to fulfill the future state.
This could involve changes to the capabilities and processes which would improve the performance of the enterprise.
6. Technology and infrastructure: it might also be necessary to make changes to the technology and infrastructure in the enterprise in order to achieve the future state.
Examples of technological constraints include data elements, developmental languages, maximum file size, message size and resource utilization.
7. Policies: it might also be necessary to change the current organizational policies in order to achieve the future state.
These business policies may limit which solutions can be implemented.
8. Business architecture: the organizational business architecture must be able to support the future state.
If they cannot support the future state, then they would have to be changed.
So they need to be identified and analyzed so that their compatibility or lack their of can be identified.
9. Internal assets: the organizational internal assets would need to be assessed to identify which ones can be used in the future state.
10. Identify assumptions: any assumptions must be identified and possible verified to confirm validity.
11. Potential value: the potential value of the solution must be identified when defining the future state.
The potential value is the net benefit of the solution after the operating costs have been removed and it must be greater than taking no action at all.