Due Diligence on Enterprise Customers: Five Maps

Due Diligence on Enterprise Customers—Five Maps Before writing the first line of business code on site, understand the customer’s situation systematically. A complete diligence checklist includes five maps. • Data map: sources, owners, quality, permissions, and overlooked dark data—veteran employees’ spreadsheets, reports circulated only by email, or paper archives. Ask not only what exists, but what people actually trust. In most organizations, official sources differ from those staff use; the latter deserve highest integration priority. • Process map: actual workflows observed through shadowing, not the documented version. Include unwritten steps, exceptions, and workarounds. Mark three points: the most time-consuming, the costliest errors, and the greatest concentration of conflict. These usually reveal valuable opportunities. • Organization map: who initiates, pays, uses, vetoes, and influences without a title. Failure often comes from misreading relationships, not technology: a champion is too junior, too senior to follow through, or key people are excluded. Identify knowledge hubs—staff everyone consults about difficult problems regardless of rank. They are important sources of requirements and early users for the later rollout. • Systems map: systems and interfaces, security and compliance boundaries, and change-management procedures. These determine architecture and timing. Some schedules fail from day one because nobody checked that client-system update approval takes six weeks. • Political map: the most sensitive and crucial. Ask three questions: whose established interests will change, whether a process to be automated is a department’s power base, and whose role loses value. Imagine a launch demonstration where one department applauds while another manager remains silent because that department maintains the process being automated. Employees’ reluctance to adopt tools is the leading roadblock. Usually the root is fear rather than laziness: replacement, invalidated abilities, or loss of meaning. Identify concerned stakeholders early and design new development paths rather than simply stripping away their value. Turn those who would be victims into the strongest supporters at renewal. Only after all five maps are complete are you ready to begin. Diligence generally takes one or two weeks with daily updates. It looks like pure cost, but two weeks can prevent six months of blind investment in the wrong direction. #Forward-deployed engineering (FDE) ---- Robin: ‘Most enterprise projects fail because the customer’s internal organization, responsibilities, and interests were not understood beforehand. Excellent technology does not automatically win everyone’s support.’