The fact is clear: the modern business needs digitalization to grow fast on the market. So, your Company realized its need for a mature IT Partner and set the procurement process to select an IT Company that can help your Enterprise with continuous improvement.
There were a lot of procurement stages and negotiations so once the best IT Company defined. Finally, you have got IT-Partner.
Usually, business people shape success criteria as a set of high-level requirements for upcoming Software and IT-infrastructure improvements expecting smooth Company transformation. IT Partner listened to you carefully helping you with Digital Transformation Roadmap that takes all your success criteria into account.
Also, they promised to be agile sharing your business goals. That is why your expectation to have ROI soon makes sense. Nevertheless, it is your assumption until they deliver the first outcomes to the market.
So, how to get the right IT-partner if all of them sound equal, promising and committed as declared by their website, portfolio, and references? What is the possible impact of such a wrong decision made, as to the choice of a weak IT-Partner? And the main question: how to avoid it?
Do not rely on your standard procurement procedure choosing your IT Partner. IT-services is something different so it needs a special approach to achieve ROI.
Agile/SCRUM, as a proven approach for incremental value delivery for Software Development projects, enables ROI of Software Services. It is just a matter of time as Software Solution is online serving consumers and brings the money. You can remove technical debt, find and fix defects and even refactor whole application user experience or software architecture of newly developed Software services. Or do nothing. That means you have the tools to manage the ROI of Software Development Projects mitigating business risks.
In the case of Process & Infrastructure transformations, you should run with DevOps methodology as operations, it is crystal that slacks and downtimes are unacceptable and changes have to be implemented in real-time. It is another kind of engineers with their own DevOps Professional Ethics who committed to get things done by all means possible securing the value chain continuity. That means you unlock the ROI and make it possible.