Introduction

Inventivity is a consulting group of senior technology and project managers who can work hand-in-hand with your technical organization to identify areas for rapid improvements in strategic alignment and operational effectiveness. Typically, we perform short duration engagements for technology-based companies faced with particular strategic or operational concerns.

Our goals of strategic alignment and operational effectiveness lead us to focus on some common situations for IT organizations. We can help nearly all organizations improve, but we have also developed standardized offerings for the following:

• Merger and Acquisitions evaluation and implementation support [example]
• Platform and vendor selection and oversight [example ]
• Preparation and implementation of outsourcing plans [example]
• Budget constraints and changes in direction [example]
• Rapid Growth within your company and team [example]

BECOMING THE BEST

Many firms depend on their technology organizations to deliver a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Perhaps more significantly, nearly all firms today find that they must integrate their technology organization more completely into their strategic and operational planning and demand quantitative results. Surprisingly, few organizations objectively assess their technology teams or take the initiative necessary to build a technology organization that can be described as "among the best".

A recent report on IT operations found the following⁽¹⁾ :

• 84% of companies either do not do business cases for their IT projects at all or just do them on a select few key projects
• 83% of companies are unable to adjust and align their budgets with business needs more than once or twice a year
• 67% of IT organizations are not "market ready" — benchmarking is done less frequently than once a year
• 89% of companies are flying blind, with virtually no metrics in place except for finance

Improving your technology organization performance helps your bottom line immediately. With just a 20-person team, a 5% increase in productivity and effectiveness is like hiring an extra person! Research shows that productivity gains of 20% are common and 150% are possible by implementing known best practices and measuring the results. Inventivity firmly believes that "you can't fix what you can't measure". We urge you to start to measure your technology organization today.

BEST PRACTICES

Our standardized service offerings focus on inculcating best practices within your organization. In addition, our Best Practices Evaluation can provide you with recommendations and tools to optimize your technology operations. We look at the relationship with the rest of the organization, including communications channels and organizational touch-points. We review the internal structure of your teams for both hierarchical and project-focused teams. And we review your development, test, and deployment methodologies. Is your organization effectively focused on the end-users? Is it productive and efficient? Does it minimize risks? Is it self-measuring and improving?

BEST STRATEGY

All of our standardized service offerings recognize that strategic alignment is key to creating operational excellence within the technology organization. Our Best Strategy Evaluation will generate a product and strategy viewpoint. We examine your technology platforms for best fit with your business goals, while helping you gather data to build and manage your "IT portfolio". Company executives and investors also want a technology valuation, lead assessment, and project & team status check. We work quickly and effectively with your teams to gather both objective data and team perceptions about the work. As a result, our report offers an independent view of your teams. We can quickly assess the balance between speed-to-market technology trade-offs versus the needs to build considered and flexible systems for longer-term value in product and corporate strategy. When seeking to determine where adjustments are needed, we provide ROI and TCO measures against real and idealized competitors.

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