The Extreme Networks One Page IT Plan is has been developed by Team Extreme to help small business owners get a quick snapshot of their IT in their business and to highlight the risks and opportunities that they have within their business.
The One Page IT Plan is Australia’s first comprehensive planning tool for SMEs looking to use technology to build a sustainable competitive advantage. We’ve taken all of the experience that we’ve built up by providing technical solutions to Schools, Accountants, Lawyers, Manufacturing, Restaurants, Professional Services and general Small and Medium-sized businesses and created a framework
The One Page IT Plan helps you align your IT resources with your business plan, to create a sustainable competitive advantage.
What is in a One Page IT Plan?
The OPIP has been developed from our 12 point audit process, which covers 13 critical areas for a business. (There are 13 components to our 12 point audit because we like to under-promise and over-deliver. 🙂 )
- Backups – A critical component for all businesses, this looks at what is backed up, when it is tested and how quickly it will take.
- Business Continuity – how resilient is the business to disruption and how can it be improved? Is the business running unwarranted risk?
- Security – Each year security becomes more important for SMEs, with more threat actors and more sophisticated attacks. We’ve partnered with the Australian Cyber Security Centre’s Essential 8 methodology, which we’ve tailoured for SMEs.
- Documentation – The one area to rule them all, documentation is the first part in planning and executing your IT Plan and cutting support costs.
- Network – The fabric on which all your data runs – how can it best be utilised?
- Online Marketing – Creating an integrated sales funnel is often the quickest way to supercharge your business’ growth.
- Internet – Wireless, Fibre, NBN, 5G and redundancy – which is right for your business?
- UPS + Power – More than just UPSs – do you need power during a prolonged outage and can solar play a part in your businesses power strategy?-
- Printing – Is your printer costing too much money, or should you been looking to move to a paperless office?
- Fleet Management – Providing a budget across software, hardware and services for the next 3 years to support financial planning in the business.
- Patch Management – A sub component for security – but it’s more than just Windows, it’s around applications and even IoT device management.
- Business Strategy – Offshoring, KPIs, business automation – this area covers some of the highest ROI processes we have helped our customers with.
- IT Strategy – Cloud, on-premise, Commercial Off the Shelf Software or bespoke? Developing a strategy around knowledge management to ensure that your people have the information that they need to do their job.
What are the big wins that can come from a One Page IT Plan?
The strength of the one page IT plan is that it is aligns business goals with the goals within the business.
- An OPIP for a manufacturing customer highlighted the need to redevelop their online marketing to assist in driving new customer acquisition.
- An OPIP for a nursery customer identified a series of opportunities to collect and display productive data that assisted management in increasing the teams output by more than 16%.
- Customers with the OPIP plan were well placed to transition to remote working as a part of measures implemented in their business continuity plans.
- One customers, looking to exit their business, identified areas to improve with the OPIP process to ensure the business was saleable. They were subsequently able to successfully sell their business.
- By looking at labour costs, a business was able to use our offshoring playbook to dramatically decrease their costs of labour and access a range of skills that they would not have had access to had they been paying on-shore costs.
- Many customers have been able to cut their IT costs with the OPIP identifying issues and suggesting better ways the business can be more self sufficient and resilient.
How to create an OPIP for your business.
The easiest way is to work with the team from Extreme Networks. The biggest mistake we see with OPIPs is that you don’t know what you don’t know. Team Extreme regularly review OPIPs as a part of our continual business improvement process for ourselves and this means that each OPIP benefits from the team approach. When a customers
The process for the OPIP development is based on the OODA Loop – Observe, Orientate, Decide and Act.
Based on the OODA Loop developed by COL John Boyd, our process commences with an Environmental Scan, which looks at technology, competitors and customers. The assessment is a straight forward process documenting the current state of the business and highlight risks and opportunities. Plan and Prioritise looks at how the limited resources of time and money are to be allocated and then risks are managed and opportunities are exploited.