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Strategic Advisory Services

Our strategic advisory services help your organization leverage our vision and technology to achieve true and lasting change towards modern software engineering practice. Specifically, we do this through:
 

  • helping you to recognize opportunities in an increasingly complex software engineering landscape,

  • shaping your change management strategy by leveraging our credible vision,

  • assisting with consensus building among key enterprise stakeholders,

  • architecting a successful transformational roadmap,

  • assisting with the execution of your plan in a cost-effective manner,

  • providing you with the visibility necessary to answer the question "How are we doing?".

Metrics Bridge and KPI Consulting

We can't count the number of times we have heard senior IT executives complain about how they are flying blind.  They can't seem to get the key performance indicators necessary to effectively govern their rather expensive IT investment portfolios.  Worse, by the time status has been fabricated in the form of pretty PowerPoint stoplight charts or meaningless critical-path-method Gantt charts, the opportunity to proactively prevent disaster has come and gone.

We realize that incumbent PPM technologies lace the enterprise landscape and it is difficult to dislodge the status quo, even if a best-of-brand solution is not getting fiduciaries what they need.  Similarly, larger vendors seem to be chosen for various reasons, typically due to perceived simplicity and a one-size-fits all mentality.  In either of these situations, getting from A to B is still a daunting challenge, with the portfolio remaining riddled with blind spots throughout the retrofit.

 

Our "Metrics Bridge" consulting offering is an industry unique offering that ensures complete visibility in a matter of days to weeks rather than months to years with either a roll-your-own strategy with the likes of Power BI or a full-scale PPM platform acquisition.  Empowered by our metrics appliance, Advisor™,  we can aggregates your entire IT portfolio metrics for side-by-side relative comparisons of performance in near real-time.  Our portfolio and program aggregation technology is agnostic of VSM stack and enables cross-program views of Release Plans with drill-through capability into hybrid repositories when you need to "pull-the-thread".  Our technology is unlike any other, with competing offerings only able to provide the typical "go-and-find-it" basic charts and reports, typically void of any substance for their relevance or credibility.  Even with the typical usage and data gaps with existing toolsets, our engagement will spot practice deficiencies and help plot out course corrections.


What makes our real time metrics and KPI advisory unique in the industry :

  • Off-the-shelf Metrics Appliance technology

  • Hybrid and agnostic regarding technologies in use

  • Real-time streaming of over 50 KPIs and visualizations

  • Advanced GQM based visualizations not available in core infrastructure toolsets

  • Aggregation up to the scale of the enterprise and across the entire value stream

  • AI enabled portfolio alerts and interpretation co-pilots

2nd Pair of Eyes Consulting

Is the fox watching the henhouse?  SDE believes that the risks of undue influence over your large-scale IT portfolio investments should be mitigated through the use of a neutral, third party, one with the experience, knowledge and technology to cut through the haze of gamed status reports, top-heavy resourcing strategies, ineffective processes and biased use of technology.  Through this service offering, our consultants engage with your large-scale programs and embed themselves in the day-to-day activity alongside your system integrator.  SDE provides honest and unbiased assessments on issues such as architecture, business modelling, practice maturity, governance, compliance, analytics and various methodology choices related to large-scale acquisitions.

What makes our offering unique in the industry?

 

  • seasoned consultants, each with over 30 years experience in the industry, and not shy when it comes to speaking up

  • unbiased selection of methodology, a capability that is transitioned to your internal organization

  • measured improvement platform capabilities

  • a cost effective "eye in the sky" technology that provides large scale, real-time status visibility of your portfolio in a matter of days, not months or years like Power BI

Tactical Execution Services

SDE tactical services help enterprises as they explore and adopt modern approaches to todays software delivery challenges, including the necessary supporting infrastructure technologies. Through such things as targeted SDLC assessments, project-level method adoption training and coaching, and hybrid PPM & DevOps platform consulting, we provide unbiased and vendor-agnostic advice and guidance to our clients. Our consulting and knowledge transfer capabilities ensure successful and targeted application through utilization of some of the industries most senior resources, and coupled with an extensive set of leveragable assets.

Hybrid Software Delivery Infrastructure (VSM)

Advice, Guidance & Implementation

Our consultants understand the issues surrounding the need for Hybrid VSM, and have the breadth and depth of experience to understand the entire stack supporting the IT Value Stream. Coupled with this is a robust knowledge of software delivery methodology and approaches that VSM technologies support. Most other consultants have silo'd and limited knowledge that results in points of friction around their knowledge-area weaknesses. SDE can deliver from our broad base of assets to accelerate results and lower the risk adoption of infrastructure. Such leverage is viewed by our clients as providing game-changing value through disruptive innovation.

 

Change Management Execution

Leveraged and more cost-effective use of Change Agents

Capability improvement is inherently a human-intensive effort. While much of the coaching and training that is applied in industry today is necessary to traverse the knowledge transfer curve, much of it isn't necessary. With much of the "low-lying fruit" automated within our expert system technology, bona-fide coaches can focus on helping teams in the trenches as they solve tough project challenges. Through the support of "pull-based" coaching requests and delivery intelligence dashboards providing leading indicators on teams struggling, our coaching and mentoring resources can be focused on targeted assistance to those that need it. With the visibility afforded by our Lean and Agile Transformation platform, the right help is given on the needed project, just-in-time. The net result is more effective influence over project success, and lowered Total-Cost-of-Transformation (TCT).

Lean & Agile Transformation Consulting

Change is hard. Yet the reasons for transformation to modern practice have never been more important. Faced with Digital Disruption, enterprises must improve their capability to deliver software within an environment of increasing complexity, both in the approaches to software delivery and the technologies that realize today's solutions. Whether that complexity is confronted by self-organizing teams who must sort through marketing rhetoric to identify their best approach for execution, or from technology churn that materially affects outcomes, we know that teams continue to struggle today no differently than in the past. Even with the new management science manifested in today's Lean and Agile approaches, we know that the historical project failure rates continue to be flat. Moreover, the trend in strategic change management continues to exhibit a 70% historical failure rate, of which software capability improvement is not immune. It is not uncommon to hear about "their third Agile transformation" among companies that were once the poster children that fueled the Agile movement.

Our strategic transformation services successfully realize change towards modern practice at enterprise scale. Through Decision-centric Capability Improvement (DCCI), our strategy realizes risk mitigation for decisions related to people, process and technology at the scale of the enterprise. This credible transformation strategy is based on nudging incremental change, one that is sensitive to your corporate culture and contextual realities. With our breakthroughs, the likelyhood that true change will ensue is greatly enhanced. Supported by Advisor, our industry first Lean and Agile Transformation and Governance platform, this strategy enables intelligent practice at scale affording effective governance levers necessary to positively influence outcomes.


What makes our transformation strategy unique in the industry :

  • Strength through enterprise diversity and cultural inclusiveness,

  • Governed Self-organization @ Scale,

  • Hybrid-approaches with industry method reuse,

  • Lean Supply-chain resourcing through practice-based staffing,

  • Decision-centric Architecture based on Reference Architectures,

  • Enterprise Risk Management based on people, process and technology decisions,

  • Real-time maturity and compliance assessments,

  • Cultural evolution tracking,

  • Emergent standards policies and advice,

  • Reuse of portfolio success patterns,

  • Vendor-agnostic ALM integration.

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