Newsletter

30 January 2012

Link to full version

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Are you in operations and spending time and effort building business cases to improve your business processes?

Or

Are you a consultant or BPO provider with clients who can’t get their funding together to engage you for a project?

Pitchmap can help you get your business cases funded.

How Pitchmap got started
I’m fanatical about speed in business. I love shaving a few minutes off a process by removing steps that aren’t adding value or reducing the error rate at a particular step.

Now that I’m spending most of my time building business cases to support process improvement projects I find it ironic that this is often an area ripe for improvement. I regularly see business cases where a vast amount of time and effort has been put into a project before two fundamental questions are answered:

1. Can we create a clear vision of the future?
2. Is the business case built on a solid financial foundation?

Answering the first question requires a comprehensive view of your business and deep subject matter expertise. Your business is unique and your processes must accommodate your uniqueness.

Answering the second question is much easier and can largely be automated. This is where Pitchmap comes in. Pitchmap is like a caterer for your party. It’s up to you to make the party fun (clear vision) but you don’t need to worry about serving the food or drinks (financial foundation). If you can create the vision, Pitchmap can tell you how much to invest in the project.

To find out more about Pitchmap, visit pitchmap.com.

Who can use Pitchmap?
Pitchmap is targeted at three groups of users:

1. Operations staff: If your job is to manage or improve your organisation’s processes, you can use Pitchmap to build the financial benefits component of your business case. We’ll either do it for you or provide you with training, industry standards, and guidance on doing it yourself. You can also use it to validate whether you realised the anticipated benefits from completed projects.
2. Outsourcing firms / consulting firms: If you have a potential client who has unsuccessfully tried to get funding for their project, you can use Pitchmap to build the financial business case for them.
3. Industry/professional associations: Your members face similar process improvement challenges. If your membership is willing to share their Pitchmaps then they can easily compare their processes with their peers. These benchmarks provide compelling financial justification for process improvement projects.

Why is it called “Pitchmap”?
When you’re preparing a business case, you’re not in process improvement, you’re in sales. You are no different than a Silicon Valley startup looking for funding from venture capitalists. That’s why we’ve called our application “Pitchmap”—it’s a process map designed to deliver the pitch rather than deliver the improvement.

What next?
Reply to this email and we’ll talk about how Pitchmap can help you get your projects funded. We’re particularly interested in hearing from you if you’ve already tried and failed to get your process improvement project funded. Recently, we’ve used Pitchmap to get procure-to-pay business cases approved where the big 4 accounting firms had already tried and failed. This is particularly satisfying for us and really delights our clients. If you want to speak to us in person, give Doug Hudgeon a call on +61 425203344.