New Synergy Group offers coaching and consulting services to software-intensive enterprises in a number of areas, listed as CS-1 through CS-6 below. Topics can be combined from these areas and further customized to client-specific needs. Coaching and consulting services often are preceded by or accompanied with customized training services from New Synergy Group to support and complement the consulting service engagement.
New Synergy Group conducts structured interviews of key members of your executive, product management, project management, software development, quality assurance, and customer support teams in order to understand areas of strengths, key issues and challenges, and areas of improvement. It may observe sample sessions of project management meetings to understand actual project team dynamics in work.
CS-1. Improve effectiveness of
individual team members and team performance
Identify
specific issues related to effectiveness of individual team members and team
performance, analyze the root cause, and help resolve those issues in order to
improve individual effectiveness and team performance. As required,
apply systems thinking to address systemic, persistent issues in these
areas. Examples of specific issues with people and team performance are:
- How to build self-organized teams consisting of self-disciplined team members?
- How to be a servant leader in an agile development organization?
CS-2. Identify specific issues with your
enterprise, and develop associated benefits and business values as the issues
are resolved
These issues cover specific software
projects, programs and processes, and organizational systems responsible
for innovation, product management, project management, and product delivery,
deployment and customer support. Some examples of issues and
challenges are:
- How to transition from traditional scope-driven development to a fixed time-box iterative development?
- How to scale up agile teams where all members are co-located to a distributed model of development where teams are multiple locations that may be in different time zones, countries, cultures, etc.?
- How to scale up agile development projects from small teams (under 20 people) to much larger teams of 100 to 500 people?
- How to combine the advantages of high productivity agile development with cost-effectiveness of off-shore development and global delivery models?
- How to customize specific agile practices to your enterprise, and determine the frequency of agile iterations and their time-boxed duration?
- How to develop a learning organization that continually improves itself based on visibility, transparency and frequent feedback of critical measures
- How to properly overlap product management, project management, development and quality assurance efforts in each agile iteration (such as each Scrum sprint) so people with these different skill sets are fully loaded and highly productive in each agile iteration?
- How to embed quality in the development effort itself so it is not the responsibility of solely the quality assurance team?
For
each identified issue, help your organization articulate the associated
business benefits and value when the issue gets resolved.
Identification of proper issues and associated benefits and value (upon their
resolution) is critically important to draw management attention and help
prioritize the issues.
CS-3. Develop and implement solutions to the issues identified
This service includes development and implementation of a change management
plan to transition from the current project, program, process or organizational
systems to the new target project, program, process, or organizational
systems.
- Define the new target project plan, processes, and organizational systems for product management and project management covering the entire software lifecycle; define its values and principles; define its process framework, practices and templates – all customized to your enterprise culture.
- Identify likely areas of resistance, obstacles or hick-ups and how to overcome. These obstacles may be due to lack of knowhow or cultural or organizational or systemic. Help define and implement a pilot project (if warranted) to test and refine the transition plan.
- Develop and implement a change management plan to transition from the current project, program, process or organizational systems to the new target project, program, process, or organizational systems.
CS-4. Select software suppliers and solution vendors
Help you qualify, evaluate and select software suppliers and solutions vendors, including agile development and management tool vendors, as well as vendors qualified for global software development and delivery.
- Define and validate requirements
- Survey tool vendors and prepare a short-list for more detailed evaluation
- Conduct evaluation projects or pilots for selecting tool vendors
- Help negotiate licensing and professional services terms and conditions
CS-5.
Implement interaction and collaboration systems
Determine
how to create and implement interaction and collaboration systems in support of
your agile project management and agile process framework. Such
Interaction and collaboration systems are likely to use integrated project management
and defect tracking tools, customer support tools, time-boxed driven agile
iteration management, blogging and micro-blogging, and wikis.
- Implement agile product management systems: Determine how to create and implement an agile product management system in support of your agile project management system and agile process framework.
- Implement software delivery, support and maintenance systems: Determine how to implement disciplined, repeatable production systems for software product or solution delivery, deployment, customer support and maintenance.
CS-6. Apply lean thinking and methods, and systems thinking approach to resolve persistent, systemic issues
We apply lean thinking and methods to eliminate and reduce waste and queues, improve productivity and throughput with better flow and pull systems, etc.
We also apply systems thinking approach to resolve specific persistent systemic issues (system archetypes) associated with your project management systems, software process framework and practices, and people and team dynamics issues. A number of well-known system archetypes in software-intensive industries along with their likely high-leverage, systemic solutions are described in the section on System Archetypes.
We carefully evaluate specific solutions for your
enterprise from many options by applying systems thinking. We may use Causal
Loop Diagrams (CLDs) as illustrated with Figure 4. CLDs are typically used to reach a shared and
common understanding of the problem among all stake holders. This first
step is essential and has great benefits in framing and scoping the problem
correctly. CLDs are good for qualitative understanding and insights
into problems, but cannot provide quantitative answers as they cannot be
simulated or quantified.
Systems thinking approach can be used to address and resolve root causes in the
areas of people effectiveness and team performance, as well as process and
project improvements. Some examples are listed below:
- People effectiveness and team performance: Learning, Motivation, Exhaustion and burnout, Communication and Collaboration, Hiring and retention.
- Process and project improvements: Peer reviews, Software reuse, Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS)-based development, Global delivery process, Design re-factoring.
Benefits of coaching and consulting services: Your enterprise will
receive the following benefits from consulting services offered by New Synergy
Group:
- Improved collaboration among all stake holders: Customers, Product management, Project Management, Software Development, Quality Assurance, Customer Support, and Business Executives
- Improved decision making
- Increased effectiveness, self-discipline and productivity of people
- High performance, self-organized teams
- Improved agile product management
- Improved agile project management
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