Our Industry Insights

It’s true we have a bumpy economic outlook to face again - but the strong and rigorous businesses will survive. The challenge that all IT leaders will face is offering options for cost-cutting to their organizations. Accelerated time-to-value from current and ongoing projects, and new projects to support revenue growth while navigating justifiable “future foundation” investments such as SOA and EAI initiatives. Agile,  project management and development methods can help across the entire organization. IT leaders can also leverage the lessons from Lean manufacturing techniques - adapting the key lessons to IT. While your competitors focus on cutting overall costs, agile and lean organizations will continue to deploy strategic technology, positioning their businesses for future and steady growth while cutting project cycle times, and reducing waste. Agile project characteristics of accelerated value creation; a focus on business needs including revenue growth; and built-in ability to react to fast-changing conditions, like the economy, without taking projects back to square one, are tailor-made for these times of uncertainty.

What do you think?  I welcome your thoughts and comments.  Look for upcoming posts on the agile and lean advantages.

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This week I have invited a guest author, Tim Kocher, Revere’s Vice President of Marketing and Business Development to post our “Industry Insights” blog post.

Are You Using the Right Lens?

In these challenging and competitive economic times, it’s easy to lean over the microscope focused on operations and cost containment. But if you try the telescope for a moment, you can see some interesting things – like your competitors preparing to one-up you as the economy recovers.

Many of our clients are taking advantage of the downturn by investing prudently now to gain a quantum leap improvement in certain areas of their business such as next generation web/social media, supply chain, or human capital. These moves can attack the cost side of the equation now, while simultaneously better preparing them for top-line growth during the recovery with built in agility, scale, and organizational efficiency.

While the hiring faucet may be turned off right now, one way to get these business results quickly is to hire experts for a discrete set of deliverables in the desired area of improvement.

Why pay for a consultant to do that?

Here are a few reasons:

1. Speed: When compared to recruiting, on-boarding, training, and retaining a full time employee, you can be finished with your project before you even get started ramping up the internal model. There is also the natural “task compression” that occurs when a seasoned expert executes a task vs. an associate who may be trying it for the first time.
2. Cost: Yes, cost. When you compare staffing up your payrolls with a full project team for a project that lasts 90-120 days (our average project duration) it can be much less expensive for your company to leverage a consultant to do the project (and train your existing team in the process) thus netting up your organization’s skills without increasing permanent labor costs.
3. Intellectual Capital: The view from your microscope can get rather myopic. A consultant who has deep industry experience, or broad experience from your industry and others, also brings the power of those ideas to the table for your executive team. Why not get the incremental benefit of some unique outside experience and fresh ideas during the delivery of your next project?

While it may seem counterintuitive to do so now, it actually may make real sense for you to pick the right projects and get them done now, to position yourself for performance in the months and quarters to come.

What are your thoughts on the subject? Are you reigning in capital projects and squeezing operations? Are you also peeking through the telescope?

We’d like to hear from you.