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5-Step Printing Assessment, Step 4: Build the Final Deliverables

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So, we’ve talked about the importance of building support for, and refining the content of, your Imaging & Printing Analysis by including both stakeholders and non-stakeholders in the review process. With their feedback in hand, it’s time to complete your future-state recommendations.

Think back to your spend buckets. It is easy to attack the future-state recommendations by breaking them into the same buckets. Ask yourself separately how to handle printers, copiers, multifunction devices, and fax machines. What is your corporate policy for personal desktop printers? What about color printing? Think back to your current-state assessment data. What is the useful life of the devices you already own and/or lease? How many devices can be reused in your future state?

Your goal at this point is to create a deliverable that incorporates these factors, as well as a detailed floor plan map that visually illustrates the desired future state.

Create a Template for your Deliverables

Organize, organize, organize!  Has someone ever handed you data or a report that was difficult to read, was not intuitive, or gave you a negative gut feeling? Don’t fall into that trap. You have a lot of data to present and it’s vital you present it in an organized, reader-friendly format that incorporates all of your critical success factors.

Below are some tips for creating a well structured imaging and printing assessment deliverable.

1. Start with an executive summary that briefly highlights the savings opportunity.
2. List critical success factors.
3. Identify stakeholders and their role in the assessment process.
4. Briefly describe the assessment process.
5. Explain your findings, using charts and tables when communicating numbers.
6. Describe your future-state recommendations.
7. Explain the savings opportunity in detail.
8. Provide color-coded floor plan maps for visual reference.
9. Describe the process to continuously monitor and manage the fleet in the future.
10. Create appendices with your raw data, and refer to them throughout the document.

Tips to Organize and Present the Financials

You will likely be presenting your findings and future-state recommendations to financially focused decision makers. Make sure you present numbers in a meaningful and organized fashion.

Use charts and tables when communicating numbers. Don’t address numbers — especially the key figures — in sentences. If you choose to present your findings in PowerPoint, make sure your charts and tables are intuitive and don’t distract attention from the rest of the content.

Details matter; make sure numbers are aligned properly. When presenting a table of numbers do not center them in individual cells or within a column. Dollar figures require a $ and the number must be right-justified.

Balancing Quantity and Quality

Quality is critical; you don’t want to sacrifice important points for the sake of brevity. You worked hard on this assessment, and there is a lot of information you need to communicate to the decision makers. If you consider the template tips above and each tip encompasses one page, you now have a ten-page document.

Be specific, make the document flow, and make sure the information is intuitive. A high quality deliverable that balances quality and quantity will typically be 15-25 pages, along with 11x17 floor plan maps. If you are 20 pages in with no end in sight, consider revising your document. You don’t want to present a 50-100-page spiral bound assessment deliverable.

Consider sharing drafts with people outside the project who can provide unbiased feedback on the length and clarity of the presentation before you present it.

Tell the Story

Finally, remember that you’re telling a story, not defending your dissertation. You’re telling the story of an organization that spends too much money on printing and imaging and of the operational processes that led to this current state of inefficiency. And, most importantly, you’re telling the story about your plan to make these problems go away and continuously optimize the print environment.

If you tell a clear, compelling story that directly connects problems to actionable solutions, you stand a good chance of getting the green light to implement your recommendations. But, before you plunge forward, you’ll need to put in place the project plan to execute them efficiently — the subject of the last post in this series.

5-Step Printing Assessment Series:

1. Gather the Data

2. Crunch the Numbers

3. Validate Your Findings

4. Build Final Deliverables

5. Implementation

Jeffrey Goldstein is Senior Consultant at MCPc and is responsible for the delivery of hardcopy and value-added services within the Lifecycle Management Group. Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn.