Advanced Business Management

Our consultants are highly trained to provide complex management solutions and strategy planning for your business. You can count on us to improve performance and your business skills, while cutting costs.

We ensure full support in a broad range of business management areas, such as:

Business Strategy

Knowing how and when to make the right strategic move is critical to your success in today?s dynamic environment. Our Strategic Management Consultants provide solutions for a tighter integration of your vision, values, and mission statements with the strategic management process.

The result is a stronger alignment of your operating activities with your goals, and also an improved internal infrastructure to support and manage the strategic management process.

Business Process Improvements

In our years of activity, we have developed a robust process to ensure Business Process Improvements projects are implemented successfully. To achieve a positive outcome a number of factors must exist and we?ll make sure your company manages to get the right mix of: sponsorship management and commitment, process improvement goals, right motivations, cultural issues management, provision of adequate resources and funding, and availability of standards and procedures.

Performance Management

An effective performance management system integrates all aspects of the organisation from a shared vision, through a common language, and establishes a culture of accountability and results. It provides more of a holistic way of managing your organization that is more powerful than its individual parts, and without forsaking the values of the organisation.

Change Management Services

Economic downturns, fast rising new competitors, and even climate change, can force companies to scale down, engage in mergers & acquisitions, or transfer to a new location. We?ll help you through every step of the change process, from: evaluating the required change by conducting diagnostics such as change complexity, causal, structural, and context analysis, managing stakeholders including your sponsors, top executives, managers, and personnel, planning for the change, and managing the change process itself.

Project Management

Whether you need help for a single project or much more, we’ve got you covered. With us you get a coordinated, presence-of-mind approach to project management that will point all of your projects to an overall strategic direction, no matter how complex or simple these might be. Our services incorporate all project-related activities including: programme management, project risk management, project review and audit, project rescue, and project governance.

Interim Management

Our resources have an MBA and/or professional accounting qualifications with an average of 10 ? 30 years of progressive work experience with public companies, in complex private equity environments, and/or privately-held middle market companies. We not only offer the most highly qualified project / interim resources to our clients, but we also allow for an interim-to-hire provision in our contracts.

It has proved mutually beneficial to our consultants and clients to have the option for longer term employment opportunities after having worked together on a project / interim basis.

 

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How to Improve Corporate Efficiency through IT

When revenues are low, what do you do to improve your profit? Obviously, those same revenues should at least remain the same. So, the objective would be to deliver the same products and services for less cost. More for less. Such is the essence of corporate efficiency.

There are many things that can make a company inefficient. There are outdated procedures, poor coordination between departments, managers? lack of business visibility, and prolonged down times, to mention a few. As a company grows, these issues get more severe.

You can overcome all these by deploying the right IT solutions. But don’t IT solutions increase spending instead? Au contraire. The last couple of decades have seen the rise of IT solutions that help companies’realise obvious cost savings in no time.

Streamline processes and keep departments in-sync

Company inefficiencies are largely due to outdated systems and procedures. These systems and procedures were not built for the dynamic and complex business environments of today that are being shaped by increasingly onerous regulations, fierce and growing competition, significant economic upswings and downturns, new battlefronts (like the Web) and logistical strategies (like outsourcing), and IT-savvy crooks.

So when your employees force outdated systems to meet today?s business demands, they’re just not able to deliver. At least not efficiently.

Another major cause of inefficiency is the discordance among departments, business units, and even individual staff members themselves. There are those who still use highly personalised spreadsheets and other disparate applications, which make data consolidation take forever and the financial close a perennial headache.

Costly devices like mobile phones, netbooks, and tablet PCs, which are supposedly designed to provide better communication, are not fully maximised. If these are subsidised by the company, then they also contribute to company inefficiency.

One way to deal with these issues is to deploy server based solutions. By centralising your IT system, you can easily implement various improvements that can pave the way for better communication and collaboration, stronger security, faster processes and transactions, and shorter down times for troubleshooting and maintenance. All these clearly translate to cost savings.

Gain better visibility

Corporate efficiency can be improved if your decision makers can make wise and well-informed decisions, faster. But they can only do this if reports they receive from people down the line are timely, accurate, and reliable. Basically, data should be presented in a way for managers to gain quick insights from.

If your people take too much time scrutinising, interpreting, and reconciling data, you can’t hope to gain a significant competitive advantage. Equally important to managing an ongoing project is the speed at which you make a go/no go decision to start or stop a project. A wise, quick decision will help you avoid wastage.

The same holds true when making purchases and investment decisions. It’s all about quickly eliminating waste and investing only on those that will give you fast, positive returns.

Clear business visibility will allow managers to allocate resources where they are most effective, to pinpoint what products and services being offered are more profitable, and to identify which customers are giving better business from an overall perspective.

These are all possible with business intelligence. We know, we know. You’ll say BI solutions will force you to break the bank. Not anymore. At least, not all. There are already two main types of BI solutions: on-premise and SaaS. The latter will generally cost you less.

Of course, each type has its own advantages, and you’ll really have to look into the size of your organisation, the number of source systems your decision-making platform is connected to, integration requirements, budget, etc. to make sure you get the most out of your investment.

But IT solutions cost an arm and a leg

Again, not anymore. These days, you can find IT products that are faster, more functional, and more powerful than their predecessors at a fraction of the cost. When it comes to getting more affordable IT products and services, you now have many options.

For example, you can turn to open source solutions to save on license costs. These solutions are typically backed by vibrant and helpful communities where you can find an extensive source of technical support – many of which are for free. With popular open source products, you can easily tap from a large pool of developers with affordable rates any time you want to make system enhancements or customisation.

On another front, virtualization solutions allow you to save on CAPEX and OPEX by eliminating certain expenses normally used for setting up infrastructure or buying hardware and maintaining them. Server virtualisation, for instance, will allow you to consolidate servers and put them together into just one machine, while desktop virtualisation will enable you to eliminate unproductive hours associated with desktop down times by allowing you to redeploy a malfunctioning desktop very quickly.

Closely related to those are cloud-based solutions like SaaS (Software as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), and DCoD (Data Center on Demand). SaaS and IaaS will help you realize savings in acquisition and maintenance costs for software and hardware, while DCoD?s scalable services allow you to request for additional capacity, power and storage only as you need them, thus making you spend only according to your current infrastructure requirements.

Like we said, there are many, many options out there just waiting to be tapped.

Maturing Into CMMI

 

In all likelihood, the reason why you landed on this page was because you were seeking CMMI experts to help you meet the demands of a growing number of potential clients who require CMMI compliance.

Whether or not you’re here for that reason, you might want to know why CMMI or Capability Maturity Model Integration is steadily becoming a common denominator among highly successful software and engineering development companies. If you stay for a while, we can show you how CMMI can substantially increase your organisation’s chances of:

  • reducing development costs;
  • acquiring new customers and retaining old ones;
  • beating deadlines;
  • bringing down development time;
  • increasing the overall quality of your products and services; and
  • improving the level of satisfaction of customers, employees, and all other stakeholders.

Surely, no organisation can be too small or too big to aspire for such benefits of attaining high levels of maturity and capability.

If you want to look beyond Maturity Level ratings, then you’ve come to the right place. We focus on introducing CMMI principles and blending them into your organisation’s culture to achieve a truly superior and sustainable business advantage. Compliance will then be an inevitable offshoot of the actions you make.

Likewise, if you simply want to obtain a deeper understanding of CMMI and learn how it can be applied either to your entire organisation or to specific projects, we’d be happy to assist you in that regard as well.

Finally, when you’re ready, we can also conduct CMMI appraisals either for benchmarking purposes or simply for determining how well your process improvement initiatives are going.

CMMI Consulting

Are you worried that implementing CMMI might entail an overhaul of your current processes? Don’t be.

CMMI is all about improving current processes, not replacing them. Ideally, the final result of all process improvement activities should be hinged on your own business objectives and context, so we’ll make sure it remains that way when we work with you.

We rely on our extensive knowledge and experience in CMMI, engineering, software development, and technologies as well as in change and project management in providing model-based process improvement services. Whether you’re gearing up for an appraisal or simply want to employ CMMI-based practices, these are the things we can do for you.

  • Help you interpret how CMMI can be implemented in relation to your business.
  • Assist in convincing sponsors and stakeholders to support your CMMI implementation initiatives.
  • Introduce the necessary training to all individuals who need to undertake them.
  • Conduct a Gap Analysis to find out where your company’s current processes stand relative to their CMMI specifications.
  • Assemble a process group that will champion your process improvement initiatives. We’ll facilitate effective collaboration among its team members, transforming them into a cohesive force designed to carry out plans and motivate everyone else down the line.
  • Introduce tools and practices that will improve the efficiency of our process improvement initiatives.
  • Carry out periodic evaluations and produce reports to provide sponsors and stakeholders a clear picture of our progress.

CMMI Training

Still not convinced CMMI is right for you? There’s only one way to fully grasp the benefits of implementing CMMI – take the Introduction to CMMI course. Although what happens next is entirely up to you, we’re pretty sure you’ll make the right decision after passing it.

Do you need to include people from your organisation in a SCAMPI (Standard CMMI Appraisal Method for Process Improvement) team? They’ll have to undergo this course too. The Introduction to CMMI is for systems and software engineering managers and practitioners, appraisal team members, process group members, and basically anyone who want to grasp CMMI fundamentals.

This is what you’ll be able to do after going through 3 days of lectures and exercises:

  • Gain a deeper understanding of the various components of CMMI-DEV models and their relationships.
  • Discuss the process areas in CMMI-DEV models.
  • Extract and interpret aspects in the model relevant to your own organisation’s processes.

We also offer highly specialised training and workshops such as those for:

  • Achieving High Maturity Levels
  • Top Executives
  • Team Building in Preparation for Appraisals

CMMI Appraisal

An organisation new to CMMI will want to know first how far their current processes are relative to the implementation of model-based improvements in order to determine the resources and time that have to be spent to get there.

Similarly, an organisation already well acquainted with CMMI and has begun taking steps in improving processes, will eventually want to know how close it has come to the Maturity Level it has aimed for.

In both cases, these organisations will have to be assessed by a qualified CMMI appraiser to obtain an accurate picture of their current status. We can perform appraisals on either your entire organisation or on specific projects/practices within a process area. Our appraisers can conduct the following SCAMPI (Standard CMMI Appraisal Method for Process Improvement) appraisals:

  • SCAMPI Class A – This is what you’ll need if you’re aiming for a level rating.
  • SCAMPI Class B – You may want to use this for process reviews or for preparing for a SCAMPI Class A.
  • SCAMPI Class C or Gap Analysis – We typically conduct this for organisations who have yet to implement CMMI-based initiatives so that they can design the most cost-effective road map for the implementation proper.
The Rights of Individuals Under The General Data Protection Regulation

The General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR is a European Union law reinforcing the rights of citizens concerning the confidentiality of their information, and confirming that they own it. We thought it would be interesting to examine the GDPR effective 25 May 2018 from an Irish citizen?s perspective. This article is a summary of information on the Data Protection Commissioner?s website, but as viewed through a businessperson?s lens.

How the Office Defines Data Protection

The Office believes that organisations receiving personal details have a duty to keep them private and safe. This applies inter alia to information that individuals supply to government, financial institutions, insurance companies, medical providers, telecoms services, and lenders. It also applies to information provided when they open accounts.

This information may be on paper, on computers, or in video, voice, or photographic records. The true owners of this information, the individuals have a right:

  • To make sure that it is factually correct
  • To the assurance that it is shared responsibly
  • That all with access only use it for stated purposes

Any organisation requesting personal information must state who they are, what the information is for, why they need to have it, and to whom else they may provide it.

Consumer Rights to Access Their Personal Information

Private persons have a right under the GDPR to a copy of all their information held or processed by a business. The regulation refers to such businesses as ?data controllers? as opposed to owners, which is interesting. They have to provide both paper and digital data, and ‘related information?.

Data controller fees for this are discretionary within limits. The request may be denied under certain circumstances. The data controller may release information about children to parents and guardians, only if it considers a minor too young to understand its significance. Other third parties such as attorneys must prove they have consent.

Consumer Rights to Port Their Data to Different Services

Since the personal information belongs to the individual, they have a right not only to access it, but also to copy or move it from one digital environment to another. The GDPR requires this be ?in a safe way, without hindrance to usability?. An application could be a banking client that wants to upload their transaction history to a third party price comparison website.

However, the right to data portability only applies to data originally provided by the consumer. Moreover, an automated method must be available for porting. Data controllers must release the information in an open format, and may not charge for the porting service.

Consumer Rights to Complain About Personal Data Abuse

Individuals have a right under the General Data Protection Regulation to have their information rectified if they discover errors. This right extends to an assurance that third parties know about the changes – and who these third party entities are. Data controllers must respond within one month. If they decline the request, they must inform the complainant of their right to further remedial action.

If a data controller refuses to release personal information to the owner, or to correct errors, then the Data Protection Office has legal power to enforce the consumer?s rights. The complainant must make full disclosure of the history of their complaint, and the steps they have taken themselves to attempt to set things right.

Further Advice on Getting Things Ready for 25 May 2018

The General Data Protection Regulation has the full force of law from 25 May 2018 onward, and supersedes all applicable Irish laws, regulations, and policies from that date. We recommend incorporating rights of data owners who are also your customers into your immediate plans. We doubt that forgetting to do so will cut much sway with the Data Commissioner. Remember, you have one month to respond to consumer requests, and only one more month to close things out subject to the matter being complex.

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