Ajilus - consulting services

What We Do - We deliver.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Public Speaking

When it comes time to persuade people to consider new ideas, sometimes the right method of introducing the ideas, making a well-balanced argument for change and challenging people to embrace change opportunity is to leverage an outside expert experienced in research, development, argument and presentation.

We are experts in speaking, presenting and challenging listeners to consider new ideas. If you would like us to speak at your next event, whether public or private, large, very large or small groups on business and technology and how it evolves teams, projects, corporations, institutions and governments, contact us. We'll work with you to understand the setting, the intended audience, the desired end-state effect and how we will achieve your goals together through speaking and presentation opportunities.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Enterprise Product Portfolio Management Review

When you need to have your enterprise assessed from top-to-bottom in terms of what products and services you are working on, delivering and servicing, we know what to do by experience. Having led multi-million dollar corporations, projects and teams in the past, we know what it looks like when an institution is delivering quality-driven, useful products and services and when it is failing to do so. We will help you determine what is planned to be in your products and services portfolio, what is actually there, and how to reconcile your planned activities and revenues against the actuals. We've done this before and know the difference between a focused and unfocused organizations is measured in revenue, growth and profitability. When we work with you, we'll practice what is documented below or something close to it tailored to your unique needs. Anyone is capable of saying they do what is documented below. However, unless the other companies you consider to help you have verifiable, personal experience in small to very large international organizations, you're wasting your money. Call us to bring experienced talent to the table and help you increase your profitability.

We review the enterprise processes, procedures, stakeholders and tools currently in use to determine areas of strength and potential improvement.

Step 1 – Review and assess what exists compared to domestic and international industry standards
Step 2 – Submit an analysis results and recommendation report
Step 3 – Review prioritized recommendations together and determine "Next Steps"
Step 4 – Engage Consultant to lead the implementation of agreed change

Customized to your unique needs, areas of interest we'll review, assess and recommend for review and next steps include, but are not limited to, the below identified areas:

Requirements Gathering and Management
Deliverable Estimation Methods
Solution Design and Development
Mapping product portfolio priorities to Corporate priorities
Quality Assurance Methods (Preventing Defects/Errors)
Quality Control Methods (Detecting Defects/Errors)
Document Management (Storage, Security, Permissions, Versions, Publication)
Change Management (Managing, Estimating, Prioritizing and Delivering)
Physical and Information Security Management
Budget to Actual to Forecast Fiscal Management
Interface, dependency and utilization of ICT
Wildcard (Discover what reveals itself)

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Executive Coaching

Sometimes Board of Directors, Executive Leaders and Investors would like someone to talk with, review and discuss what they are doing, what they are seeing and to consider with an outside set of eyes how to lead, manage and evolve their organization or institution to a desired state of performance, output and profitability.

Our team is composed of people who have worked on multiple Boards and held multiple Executive positions. We know what is expected of leadership and know how to help leadership structures attain maximum performance. Contact us. We will help you determine where you are in relation to where you want to be and work alongside you or your senior leadersihp team to ensure that your leadership style, plans and actions get you there.

As is expected in any senior leadership role, extreme sensitivity, diplomacy and confidentiality is practised on all of our consulting activities, particularly in this activity. [an error occurred while processing this directive] Enterprise Technology Review

Whether your business delivers technology to the marketplace or your non-technology business relies upon technology to deliver the business portfolio, owning and managing hardware, software, networking and technical staff costs money. Is it working well? Do you have what you need? Have you over-purchased? Knowing whether your investment in technology is paying off is sometimes difficult to assess. However, discovering whether your technology plan and investment doesn't work after it fails you and your organization or institution is unacceptable. We wil help you determine what you have, what you need and how your technology strategy will match up against your business plan in the near and long-term futures. Spending money on technology must be planned, not reactionary or accidental. Your operation's ability to successfully function is directly tied to your technology strategy and solutioning. Since our entire careers have been in and around the technology space in large and small domestic and cross-continental implementations, we know what it looks like done right. We'll validate you are already there or help you get from where you are to where you need to go.

We will review the operational processes and procedures of the technology division of the institution to determine areas of strength and areas of potential improvement to then submit an analysis and recommendation report that includes recommended, prioritized next steps for the organization.

Step 1 – Review and assess what exists compared to domestic and international industry standards
Step 2 – Submit an analysis results and recommendation report
Step 3 – Review prioritized recommendations together and determine "Next Steps"
Step 4 – Engage Consultant to lead the implementation of agreed change

Customized to your needs, areas of interest to for review, assessment and recommendation for next steps include, but are not limited to, the below identified areas:

Requirements gathering and management
Deliverable Estimation Methods
Technical system design and development
Mapping technical priorities to product management priorities
Quality Assurance (Defect and Error Prevention)
Quality Control (Defect and Error Detection)
Configuration Management (Managing versioned software/hardware changes)
Change Management (Managing and delivering change requests)
Physical and Information Security Management
Budget to Actual to Forecast Fiscal Management
Production implementation methodology
Business Continuity
Internal/External Customer/Technical Support methodology
Web presence and utilization of social mediums
Wildcard (Discover what reveals itself)

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Enterprise Project Portfolio Management Review

There is a reason that organizations and institutions consistently do not deliver projects according to budget, time and scope definitions. Do you know what it is? Focus. Organizations consistently under-deliver, over-engineer what they do deliver, over-spend, miss deadlines, fail to communicate, fail to document change requests and mis-manage relationships with customers due to an inability to manage and maintain focus. When projects are long, they change scope. When projects are under-managed, they change focus. When teams do not accept or respect project leadership, deliverable focus is compromised. Focus defines whether a project will be successful or a failure.

It really doesn't matter whether your project is composed of ten or ten thousand people, valued at $10,000 or multiple-million, the problems will be the same, though at different scales of complexity. A project's inability to focus itself impacts everything around it including budget, timeline, scope, teams, organizations and customers. We know how to help you solve this challenge, but first, we'll evaluate what you have against what you desired and help you work from there with an immediately executable plan of action customized for your needs.

We will review the processes, procedures, quality assurance and control, and current status of existing and planned projects according to the below sequence of activities:

Step 1 – Review and assess what exists compared to industry standards
Step 2 – Submit an analysis results and recommendation document
Step 3 – Review prioritized recommendations together and determine "Next Steps"
Step 4 – Engage Consultant to lead the implementation of agreed change

Customized to your unique needs, areas of interest for review, assessment and recommendation for next steps include, but are not limited to, the below identified areas:

Project Requirements Gathering and Management
Project Deliverable Estimation Methods
Project Design, Development and Management
Slack elimination method
Incremental deliverable method
Mapping project portfolio priorities to Product Portfolio priorities
Quality Assurance Methods (Preventing errors)
Quality Control Methods (Detecting errors)
Document Management (Storage, Security, Permissions, Versions)
Change Management (Managing, estimating, prioritizing and delivering)
Physical and Information Security Management
Budget to Actual to Forecast Fiscal Management
Interface, dependency and utilization of ICT
Wildcard (Discover what reveals itself)

Top-Down Assessment of an Enterprise's Ability to Operationally Deliver

This is a more generally targeted experience whereby the Consultant role is to review everything the institution operationally planned to accomplish in 2010 and compare it to what the institution actually accomplished in 2010 and compare it to the 2011 effort forecast. This effort would span all departments, divisions and/or sectors within the institution and would look at the overall supply chain continuity and efficacy of the institution's ability to move product to market and/or service the target industry. Date ranges of planned versus actual versus forecasted analysis are determined during initial contract structuring activities.

This effort takes three to four weeks and requires unlimited access to all departments, staff, information and systems. If there are access limits, they need to be during contract structuring activities as constraints.

This effort is only performed at the explicit request of an authorized Senior Official or Executive of the institution being reviewed for optimization. All work will be performed discretely, diplomatically and with complete confidentiality. Information and observations gleaned, as well as, associative recommendations will exclusively be submitted to the authorized Senior Official or Executive. Distribution of this material is the responsibility of the Senior Official or Executive and not that of the Consultant. Encryption is a preferred method of communication and data submission when available.

Strategic Direction Setting

Defining where a company, organization or institution is going is more difficult than it appears. Making it more complicated is the fact that circumstances, market demands, staffing, budget and economy change and require us to revisit the corporate strategic direction on a regular basis. Setting annual strategic and tactical direction with accompanying objectives is simply not enough anymore. Market demands shift daily, not annually straining the ability for any organization, project, team, individual and leader to adapt quickly and competitively.

In this effort we'll work together to analyse your organization's historical strategies compared to results, determine market, industry, investor and/or over-seeing institutional demands and construct not only a strategy for your organization's future, but a method of constantly revisiting and evolving it as circumstances require.

It is not the absence of a good strategy that hampers most organizations, it is the ability to change it proactively that separates good companies from great companies.

Project Management

Efforts to construct, execute and deliver projects include challenges in any country, institution and team. Sometimes, despite best efforts projects do not get started, seem to have stalled in the middle or simply do not deliver what was committed, if anything at all. To discover that a USD1.5M project is going to in fact usurp USD10M can be catastrophic. To discover that deliverables will not be present on the marketed delivery date or are delivered incorrectly or incompletely ruins reputations. Your organization's credibility is on the line everytime someone ask for a project, and moreso for whomever approves the project's existence. Project Management sounds easy, however industry agnostic statistics tell us that it isn't as easy as it first appeared.

We are knowledgeable in Project Management Institute (PMI), Prince2, Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) and Agile Cloud deliverable behaviors. We know what a project should look like at inception, while in-flight and whether a project is healthy, unhealthy, heading towards success or failure. At the end of the day it matters less what project management method you have chosen and most whether you are actually going to deliver as scheduled, as budgeted, as defined. At the end of a project, no one is going to ask you which method you used; they are going to ask if you did what you set out to do correctly and competely.

Bring us in to help you design a new project. Bring us in to help you determine if a project is healthy and will deliver as projected. Bring us in to overhaul an existing project that does not seem to be delivering or has no chance of succeeding if left alone. We'll help you succeed by coming alongside you in a coaching and mentoring capacity, or we'll simply take over the project, bring it back online and finish what you envisioned from the beginning.

If you have to choose how to spend your project management money, choose to spend it succeeding. Call us.

Software Testing

If you build software for your own organization or for customers, it requires testing. Customers expect software to work, when they want it to work, how they want it to work, all of the time. Few things in the history of invention have been as misunderstood and pervasively used by customers of all skill-levels and experiences as software. Perhaps cars. Software is used to run medical equipment, military equipment, engines in modern vehicles, power generation plants, water management plants, accounting and payroll systems, Human Resource systems, web servers, mail servers, smart phones and the list goes on. Software is everywhere. And where there is software there are usually customers. And when software does not meet the needs of a customer in the manner they believed it should occur, they'll look for other options. To you, this may mean these customers go to other competitors. If you deliver to internal customers within your corporation or institution, this may mean that you get replaced or they begin to outsource the work because the software quality you and your team deliver perceived to be poor.

When you need help with a software testing strategy, a quality plan, building a new software product, building up the skills of your existing software testing team or building a team from the ground-up, we have the experience and knowledge to help you.

If you are running concurrent software development projects and your test teams have no capacity left, we'll augment your team and help you get the job done. On-site or off-site, we are equipped to take on your software testing project initiative and get the job done for you helping the project achieve quality goals and customers experience well tested, well delivered working software.

If you need to reduce your operational costs and need to retrench, we'll take over your software quality needs off-site and help you not only reduce your on-site operational costs, but get the job done at the same time.

If you have no quality team in your company and need to build one from the ground-up, we have done it multiple times in multiple industries. We will help you structure the organization to include the new software testing team, hire the people, train them and get them up and running as quickly as achievable.

Call us today to see if outsourcing your software testing efforts is right thing for your organization's operational, budgetary and project requirements. We'll help you increase the quality of your software product, decrease your operational costs and help you implement systems that work.

Merger & Acquisition Competitor Research and Analysis

When you are considering merging with or taking over another company, institution or organization there are obvious and inobvious risks involved in the process.

When a company is attempting to sell itself, whether through merger or acquisition, they are sure to make all of their ledgers, assets, processes, procedures, sales history and financial forecasts look their best. Because understanding someone else's operation is a complicated matter and we often only see what is presented to us, it is reasonable the buyer or leader in the transaction will overlook critical details impacting future success. It will be advantageous for you to have an external set of eyes with executive and operational level experience research and analyze the asset on your behalf with fresh eyes and no predispositions to either party.

We are experienced in researching market reputation and history, organizational structure (goals, training, measurements, results), operational maturity, sales effectivity, staff contribution, product and services portfolio value, as well as, financial planned versus actual versus forecasted results. We know what a healthy, flourishing organization should look like and where the details of a foundering organization are often hidden.

If you are considering merging with another institution or organization, or even acquiring one, you need may need to know details about the asset prior to signing the contract. Your future success and professional reputation is at stake. Call us for a consultation. We may be the right solution for your challenge. Know what you are buying or merging with prior to doing it. It may not change your decision, but you'll be going into the relationship with in-depth knowledge and your eyes wide-open.

Negotiation/Facilitation

Negotating or facilitating two or more parties to a useful conclusion is often difficult. When two parties are discussing the finer details of a contract agreement, the ability for either side to see the perspective of the other is often lost in the pursuit of self-interest goals. Understandably so. And when facilitating a resolution or solution between multiple like or unlike parties into a multi-party conclusion drawing on the strengths of all for the benefit of all is even more complex.

How do you get multiple NGOs to willingly come together as a unified team to solve a particular problem that no NGO alone could or would ordinarily solve? Are you in a situation where multiple departments, sectors or Ministries of Government need to find common strategic, tactical and measurable operational ground to solve something that would individually be inaccessible? Are you managing multiple international product or service providers against varying quality, timeline or budget standards and you're finding it not only difficult to deliver against your contracts because of the variability, but are wishing you had used one contract structure for all vendors?

Sometimes it makes sense to use someone who is not involved with either party to help you get from where you are to where you need to go in the verbal agreement, contract, policy or legislation. Contact us to discuss whether an third-party negotiator or facilitator will help you get to where you need to go with expedience.

Ajilus provides multiple consulting services for your organization. We're different than most of the other consulting firms in that we're not only experienced, educated and capable of helping you find where your organization or institution may need attention, but we're capable of coming alongside you and solving the problems with you or for you when it makes sense. Our historical consulting scenarios have included anything from performing assessments against industry standards or planned results to providing training, mentoring or general consulting on how to improve daily operational results. We are industry agnostic and are therefore capable of working with you no matter the institution type, industry or size.

We specialize in organizational change and operational efficiencies in medium to large and particularly very large institutions, especially when an organization discovers (or admits) that the way they are operating today is not delivering results consistently, well or at all. Ajilus builds teams, brings projects and organizations into alignment with goals and will help you reduce operational costs, compresses return on investment windows and help your organization or institution begin delivering useful, working products and services to your customers and partners.

Through our careers we have lived this work, not just read about it or attended school discussing it. Contact us to find out how we will help build and evolve your institution or organization. Whether you're an NGO, Governmental Institution, Public or Private Company or Mission Organization, we're on the ground, experienced and willing to help you be successful starting right now.