Working Together and Your ROI

We strive to provide 10x returned value to our customers.  It’s important for our clients to know that they are getting serious value for their investment. Through tracking and KPI’s we can validate that value for them while ensuring that our customer’s interests are put first and that they feel confident that every step we take will continue to drive value for them. 

We work in multiple capacities as related to software consulting.   Some of our use cases include and have included:

Solution architecture in alignment with business need. Creating the right architecture involves lots of moving parts, conflicting agendas from different teams, constraining budgets, and all kinds of constraints from security to regulatory. We talk to all levels of the organization to understand the target we are moving towards and we work closely with stakeholders on all sides to ensure buy-in, architecture approval, and optimal outcomes. During execution, the architecture team maintains responsibility for technical direction and ensures that what is being delivered is in line with the intended and approved target state architecture. Deviations are to be expected due to unknowns and the ever changing nature of agile project scope, so the architecture team is heavily involved in decision making and getting team consensus on shifts which impact the intended target state architecture.

Talk to business stake-holders and understand their business objectives and build quality software products, web applications, and mobile applications that are brought to the market quickly. By working with our customer every step of the way, we identify new innovative ideas to better meet the customer’s business objectives and then ensure we give these ideas to the customer straight-away so they can keep them in their back pocket for future product releases.

Develop a team and lead an offshore team of contractors to deliver the final product for a large Insurance enterprise application.  The team implements new features and fixes existing bugs, while ensuring we are meeting our non-functional requirements.  We do this effectively, but we also put in place data points, controls, and success measurements so that we can monitor and report on team and product improvements over time and make necessary tweaks along the way.  This data is then reviewed by the customer’s management team as a KPI to validate and confirm their return on investment (ROI).

Architect a technical road map for a brand new startup.  We work directly with the customer so they understand exiting technology, and so that we understand their business goals and strategy.  We help in the gathering of requirements for their software product, and bring in additional vendor’s they approve when needed.  We then bring the product to market by meeting launch dates and milestones.  We put in controls and help the customer identify key data points they can use as KPIs to project ROI from a minimal viable product or prototype and then finally track the actual ROI of the application once it’s on the market.

Initialize a new team and install development best practices and agile methodology.  We work with a leading Agile expert in the industry, and we help develop the team to be a highly efficient agile operation.  ROI is realized when management sees the high collaboration between team members, and the continuous improvement, which shows continual improvement in stable product feature releases week after week.

Ensuring the right fit for new SaaS initiatives We love SaaS, but there is a lot to consider when an organization looks to procure a new SaaS solution. Business capability is critical as there are a surprisingly large number of products out there from major vendors that are not mature, and so we take an objective look at each SaaS solutions’ capabilities from both business and technical perspectives. This has lead to our billion dollar client organizations procuring and effectively implementing top end SaaS products that integrate effectively with their other systems (cloud & on-prem).

Unfortunately, we sometimes have to give bad news to our clients In this scenario, we had to objectively state to one of our large enterprise clients that a specific SaaS solution should be avoided completely due to security concerns. A recent example had our client’s legal team working with a SaaS vendor that the business team really wanted to procure, but our team rigorously did a deep dive on the vendor’s IT security infrastructure and found all kinds of security violations which in the case of a security breach could be seen as a PIPEDA violation at worst, or at best, a huge embarrassment to the organization which would negatively impact them. Upon working with the SaaS vendor to try to resolve these issues it was clear the vendor didn’t want to pursue these items as part of their roadmap, and so our client moved to exclude working with them and ceased to move forward with on going legal and vendor agreements.

What our customers typically like is that we track, we measure, and we report on our results, and provide this data to our clients so they can validate it and confirm their ROI.  If clients do not have adequate systems to measure or quantify their ROI, we will work with them to create those systems. It’s incredibly important that we, as a company, can justify our ROI to both ourselves and our customers.

Many consulting companies don’t want to track their effort or have their client’s validate their return on investment.  They don’t want to risk looking like a bad endeavour. We are different in that regard, because we measure our progress internally based on how we are doing in terms of key performance indicators.  We also report and provide the systems for our customer’s management management to track the KPI and view all of our raw captured metrics. The types of metrics and KPIs used vary from project to project and are aligned with and have some dependency on the customers goals and expected business value of the project.