Service Offering Details
Below we offer some details within areas of
your technology organization we can evaluate. Use this to help identify
places where Inventivity should focus our attention.
1. Project Management and Implementation
Our project management review includes four
major areas to evaluate the team's ability to succeed on projects:
- Execution — Can the team complete projects
on time / on budget / with required features?
- Tracking — Can the team measure and
understand the status of projects internally to help balance efforts
and stay on schedule?
- Communicating/Reporting — Can the team
accurately describe the project status to the rest of the business?
- Learning — Does the team learn from
completed projects and have a documented project methodology that is
constantly improved?
2. Systems and Platforms
Learning about your systems and platforms falls
into four categories:
- Openness / Flexibility - Will this platform
serve foreseeable business needs into future? Are you tied to
specific vendors?
- Status of Internal Technology - Is the hardware
and software you have developed robust and well-understood?
- Interfaces - Is the system well-partitioned,
are the interfaces well-built and well-documented?
- Scalability - Does the team understand the
current limits of the platform and have a plan for increasing its capabilities?
[top of page]
3. Processes
There are four topics for critical processes
in the technology group:
- Vendor relationships - How do you select
/ work with / evaluate / replace your technology partners?
- Operational processes - How do you measure
and improve operationally?
- Support processes - How do you address need
for changes / fixes / real-time requests from the business?
- Hiring - How successful is your approach
to hiring? Do you evaluate quality and speed of the process?
4. Development Environment
Once development has begun, it's important
to examine its performance. We categorize our review of the health
of the environment as follows:
- Methodology - How would the team describe
the approach to development?
- Internal Technology Status - What's the
quality of the existing technology base?
- Documentation and Reviews - How usable is
the current documentation, what's the process for creating it going
forward?
- Bug tracking - How is this managed and fit
into the overall development environment?
- Productivity and other metrics - Do you
know how productive you are relative to similar teams and efforts?
[top of page]
5. Operational
- Risk minimization - What tools do you have
in place to evaluate risk? How do you track risk? Where do you accept
the most risk? The least??
- Disaster planning - What would you do if
your data center was destroyed?
- Security - How do you monitor for and prevent
breaches from outside your system? What policies and procedures do you
have in place to ensure internal security?
- Reliability and monitoring — How reliable
is your technology? How do you measure its reliability and compare it
to goals and your competitors?
6. Culture
Evaluating culture is by necessity filled with
intangibles. We're not simply counting ping-pong tables here; any
useful evaluation is far more nuanced - however we have homed in on some
specific axes along which we can usefully evaluate "culture":
- Job satisfaction / retention - Is the team
happy and committed?
- Performance tracking - Do you know how well
the team is performing and more importantly, do they?
- Team communication - What are the typical
types and frequency of team communications? Is this effective?
- Work environment - Are the team members
appreciated and provided with a productivity-enhancing workplaces?
[top of page]
7. Relationship to the business
We focus on four major yardsticks to judge
the relationship between technology and the business:
- Project creation - What are the requirements?
How are they mapped to business cases?
- Processes - What tools and interactions
exist to view and manage projects in terms of business goals?
- Organization — What is the state of
the hierarchical and interpersonal fit to the business? How are both
formal reporting structure and informal work relationships?
- Financial - What budgeting and other financial
information is flowing in and out of the technology group?
8. Comparative Technology Assessment
- Current research — What is the state
of the art for your key technologies in industry and in academia?
- Current competition — How sophisticated
are your competitors? Do their platform decisions differ significantly
from yours?
- Idealized competition — What is possible
in your industry currently?
- Related industries — What is possible
in related industries that may be quickly adapted to your firm?
[top of page]
|
