Let's Optimize Your People, Process and Technology!

 

Featured Services

We can put a solution together to fit almost any need you may have. Here are a few of our featured services:


Agile Process Improvement

Get quick wins with focused change, fast adoption and permanent ownership, in a low risk way that causes a minimal interruption to your staff.

What You Can Achieve

Eliminate bottlenecks and pain points by updating obsolete processes. Raise productivity by engaging employees in process ownership and improvement. Increase capabilities across your organization using proven Best Practices from industry leaders. Take the guesswork out of planning with predictable, practical processes. Eliminate the drag of needless work and unnecessary delays. Eliminate red tape, streamline handoffs, and refocus action on productive tasks, all of which increases speed and capacity.

How It Works

After a no-obligation initial consultation, where we listen to your concerns and objectives, then meet with up to ten members of your staff, we collaborate to establish goals and expected outcomes. Then we execute a series of four step, four week sprints. At the beginning of each sprint, we provide three recommendations for improvements. You choose which one to implement, and we get to work.

Each sprint has four steps during its four week timebox: Analysis, Design, Implementation, and Handoff. The final result is a meaningful improvement in your operations, with an employee you designate trained in the new process and serving as ongoing process owner. Then we come up with three recommendations for the next sprint, and iterate as often as you like.



Sanity Check

Ever need a second opinion? Get an unbiased take on a current situation, upcoming decisions or a course of action. Receive frank, honest recommendations for immediate action. Make decisions with confidence.

Get Unbiased Advice When You Need It Most

As a leader your decisions impact your team and those you serve. It's good to seek out advice. But who to turn to? Anyone with skin in the game will be influenced by their agendas, objectives...even their own past decisions. As an independent body, we have no agendas or bias. When we level with you, you can rest assured you're getting the unvarnished truth.

What We Provide

A Sanity Check provides quick, relevant, actionable advice on important decisions. Our experts can bring to bear decades of expertise and Best Practices as well as proven insightfullness and a synthesis of modern and time-tested tools and techniques. All of this – delivered to you fast, concise and affordable: only $9995.

When To Have A Check

Good times to have a Sanity Check are before a project kickoff, after a major milestone, when you're considering a course change in a project, or when a project has fallen behind schedule. Other good times are strategic planning for next year, you're planning a reorg, or when customers are unhappy with product or service.


Project Rescue

When a project doesn't go so well, our experts can identify root causes and take corrective action to eliminate and prevent further problems, and improve productivity to recoup lost time.

You're Not Alone

It's no secret projects get in trouble. Nearly one third are canceled before completion, and only 16% finish on time and on budget. Often projects are scaled back to make target dates, leaving customers less than satisfied.

Causes

Causes of project troubles range from poor requirements, poor communications, vendors not working together, people operating in silos instead of collaborating, unrealistic schedules, resource contention, lack of empowerment, too many approvers, a focus on written requirements instead of fitness for purpose, unnecessary documentation and red tape, lack of clear objectives, squabbling, people making assumptions, project leadership and methods unsuitable for a large-scale project, and a host of other issues.

Our Approach

Our approach is to listen, diagnose, develop a strategy of corrective actions, and then execute the strategy.

Drawing on our experience with projects of all sizes, we apply proven Causal Analysis techniques to work with your team both individually and collaboratively. We meet with project stakeholders, end users, project leadership and the project staff. This provides multiple perspectives to identify gaps and unmet needs. We rapidly formulate a strategy (think one good whiteboarding session) and immediately start executing that strategy. Then we iterate through monitoring progress and making adjustments to ensure the project gets back on track and stays on track.


Improve IT Performance

Growth, fierce competition and pressure to deliver profit all combine to demand that today's CIO raise the bar on IT performance. Partnering with your leadership team, we identify strategic and tactical ways to boost productivity of critical projects, teams and IT as a whole.

What We Do

We set up or improve key functions such as PMO, QA, BA, Change Management, Release Management, Requirements Management, Environment Management, Build and Deploy strategies, Rollout Strategies and an Agile Center of Excellence. We also optimize cross-functional workstreams and their handoffs of deliverables across IT and Business functions.

Generally, we achieve 6-7 figure savings in the first year after our improvements, with break-even periods ranging from 3-14 weeks.

Our Approach

We first meet with project sponsors to understand issues and motivations for undertaking an improvement effort. That done, we generally start by identifying the basic teams and the internal value streams. Then we meet with each team collaboratively to learn what their localized process is (their silo) and who their internal and external customers and suppliers are. Concurrently, we iterate, meeting with the teams upstream and downstream of the first team, until we've met with met with every team in every value stream.

With this big picture approach, we can recognize trends and patterns. Workflows, handoffs, delays and dependencies are mapped out, then analyized for ways to reduce wait states, simplify workflows, and eliminate unneccessary work, as well as opportunities to work in parallel rather than sequentially, streamlining the critical path activities.


Recruiting & Placement

What We Do

In searching for the best Business and IT candidates, we strive for an ideal fit for both parties. We gain a thorough understanding of your immediate needs and strategic goals. We consider what skills they need day one, what they are expected to learn after hiring, and what they're expected to teach others.

Your corporate culture is important too and whether you want someone to fit in, or shake things up. We look at how decisions are made, how authority and responsibility is apportioned and what a typical work day looks like, then select great candidates who would fit your firm.

For the candidates, we consider their commuting distance, how long they want to stay in a new position, are they interested in your industry, and do they show a desire to grow in your firm. After all, longevity in a position is important.


How We Do It

We start by providing you with a single point of contact for the whole process, who then partners with your hiring manager or team. To understand all the "between the lines" details and implicit needs of the position and gain a sense of what's most important versus nice to have, we meet with you, preferably in person.

Since a successful placement requires the candidate to be satisfied and enthused, we study the details of your compensation package and benefits, opportunities for growth, and work environment, which will aid in presenting your firm and the position in an accurate, positive light.

We prefer to offer candidates we know or are referred to us so we look there first for a great fit. Then we search our networks for people known by trusted friends. Finally we employ conventional search methods.

We offer a two-tiered pricing structure to fit your needs. In addition to a traditional arrangement, we feature a sign-and-done plan which many of our clients prefer. With sign-and-done you get an additional discount of 20% or more in lieu of warranty, making the services of a professional search firm more affordable than ever.


Staff Augmentation

What We Do

As IT experts with broad experience, we gain an intimate, thorough understanding of your needs and select incredible candidates in your interest. To ensure a great cultural fit, we become very familiar with your expectations, objectives, challenges and the tone of your firm.

We don't waste everyone's time by matching keywords and sending stacks of resumes for you to sort through. We see this as a blend of the personal and the professional. We evaluate each outcome and continue to serve our clients' best interest until there is a fabulous fit…and we try very hard to make it the first candidate.

We specialize in matching highly experienced people with growing, high integrity organizations. Technical leadership roles we typically staff for include architecture, DBA, development, project management, SME, BA, testing and QA.


How We Do It

We stay connected with the best, the brightest, the most capable and trusted professionals available. We review each job description in the context of your immediate needs and long term objectives while also considering each contract as an opportunity to serve. We apply our expertise to ensure candidates are a good fit for your culture and your technology.

If it's difficult to define and describe your perfect need, we happily provide advice and insight to help you craft or enhance job descriptions. We listen carefully to your direction and feedback and we strive for continuous improvement to serve our clients' best interests.