IT Delivery Acceleration Services

Your business has a complex IT environment. Getting new capabilities in this environment quickly is essential to your competitive advantage. However, IT needs more time than you can afford, projects are taking longer than ever, and business customers aren’t happy. How long does it take for your business to go from concept to delivered product in customers hands? Speed is a key competitive advantage. What would be the value to your business if you could deliver work 30% faster? How about 5 times faster?

Delivery Acceleration Services have provided:

• 30% to 5x improvements in delivery speed
• 15% to 70% cost savings per project
• improved team morale and retention (before/after surveys)

How do IT Delivery Acceleration Services work?

We work with our clients on a case by case basis to tailor our services to your needs, based on a Statement Of Work. Based on previous engagements our preferred approach is:

1. Strategy – we work with you to understand the current state of key factors including IT delivery process, organizational change culture, business climate, and potential benefits. From this assessment, customers can evaluate if and how they would like to proceed, and what rate of change can be expected in their environment. 2-4 weeks
2. Pilot - As part of our assessment we will work with the client to find pilot candidates. These project teams will work closely with Senior practitioners to learn IT Delivery Acceleration, and to work in this new environment. This will provide a low risk test for the company to understand how the process will work. 4-8 months
3. Exploration - Based on Pilot data, a growing number of project efforts can be converted through IT Delivery Acceleration Services. This stage is called exploration because of the high risk and criticality of this phase in the adoption cycle. Projects are now routinely seeing dramatic improvements, however change management, training, and senior executive support are critical to successfully complete exploration. 4-24 months
4. Tipping Point and Expansion - With successful adoption by numerous projects, trained associates, established executive support, and strong business advocacy, expansion of the IT Delivery Acceleration can occur with the remaining majority of teams in the business. Resistance to the change lessened in the whole organization, but will stronger in certain areas that do not understand how to engage. 12-60 months
5. Continuous Improvement - Teams have moved beyond learning and practicing to continuous improvement, and are regularly adopting changes to accelerate business value delivery and reduce cost. In this stage there is a very high level of engagement from associates and management around IT Delivery Acceleration, and now see it as the way they get work done. Post 24 months.

Please contact us for a free consultation.

Retention and Productivity Improvement Services

Maintaining a commitment to innovation and speed requires embedding key values, principles, and practices into company culture.

Value Stream Measurement - Ever heard the phrase “tell me how you’ll measure me and I’ll tell you how I behave”? Having the right metrics in place will allow you to prove, through data, the benefits that you have gotten from adopting new ways of delivering customer value. It is critical to establish clear value streams that can be evaluated for opportunities to improve speed, cost, or both. We can help your organization identify and map out value streams and establish the metrics that will drive the right action in your organization.

Performance Incentives - Powerful, innovative cultures are driven through great teamwork. Often the ways in which organizations create performance objectives and in-cent behaviors is not team oriented. We can help you evaluate how your performance incentives are structured and help better align them to team based behaviors

Targeted Improvement Programs - In order to get faster and be more innovative, organizations will have to undertake large, long standing change efforts. These change efforts are geared toward reinventing key processes that are necessary to move your ideas quickly into innovative products and services for your customers. We can help you establish a change road map and programs geared at continuously improving your organization’s effectiveness

Skills Development - Your associates will also experience change in the way their work is done and the expectations that you set for them. Often this will change how you establish career paths. These new paths will require some unique skills development. We can help you design and deliver tailored training and mentoring programs focused on establish a clear progression for your most important asset, your people.

Please contact us for a free consultation.

Project and Program Turn Arounds

From Dysfunction to Reliable Execution

The project stated with ambitious goals and tight timelines. The teams were confident, and gave optimistic assessments and estimates. The business set aggressive targets based on the new business capabilities, product managers forecasted P&L based on projected sales. Customers loved the powerpoint presentations, and were ready to begin testing the new system last week, driving even more excitement. Then, slowly, things began to change. Capturing the customer’s requirements took longer than anticipated; the developers were surprised by amount of new features needed; delivery dates came and went; the pressure on the program team was intense, Project Managers were asked for daily status updates, developers and testers started working longer and longer hours, tempers flared, weeks turned to months, and still the promised system was not delivered…

Sound familiar? All large companies have projects that fail to deliver or meet customer expectations. Almost every company has a “burning platform” that is difficult to manage and consistently fails to meet user or customer expectations, that takes too long to get features implemented, or suffers from chronically high staff turn over.

We have delivered major turn arounds on complex enterprise software projects, and delivered results in as little as 6 weeks. Working with our clients, we can take a burning platform and create reliable delivery in as little as 3 months. While we approach each client’s projects on a case by case basis, we have a methodical, proven, empirical approach to move your problem projects from dysfunction to reliability. This is most often accomplished without significant changes to the team members.

Please contact us for a free consultation.