Services - New Synergy Group

Services from New Synergy Group

New Synergy Group offers Assessment, Training, Workshops, and Coaching and Consulting services as shown in Table 2: Business strategy development to drive product vision and lifecycle; Effectiveness of people and teams; Processes and Projects; Systems thinking; and Intellectual Property Development for software-intensive products and solutions. Systems thinking solutions are holistic in nature, and complement analytical thinking represented by software project management and process management disciplines.

Table 2: New Synergy Group Service Offerings

	Assessment	Training	Workshops	Coaching, Consulting
Business strategy development to drive product vision	√	√	√	√
Effectiveness of people and agile teams	√	√		√
Agile-Lean Methods and Systems Thinking for Software Development, and Project and Product Management	√	√	√	√
Intellectual Property Development	√			√

The end results and benefits of professional services from New Synergy Group for your enterprise are:

A: Improved effectiveness of people and agile teams: Assessment, training and consulting services customized to your enterprise that enables you to cultivate and nurture highly motivated and effective people as team members of high-performance, agile teams. Such people and teams define and work on the right goals and objectives with the right approach. They take appropriate proactive measures and make prompt decisions.

How to work as cross-functional, cross-component, self-organizing teams of self-disciplined members.
How to work smart and achieve results; professional/technical knowledge is necessary but not sufficient.
How to learn and apply certain competencies that are essential to complement professional knowledge, such as problem solving skills, decision making, conflict resolution, team work, effective communication, self-discipline, 100% defect-free closures, etc.

B. Improved project management: Assessment, training, consulting and management services customized to your enterprise that enables you to better manage software projects with substantial improvements in productivity, cycle time and quality. The word “software project” is used to cover:

Software-intensive products for external market (packaged software or hosted software as service)
Software-intensive client-specific solutions
Software-intensive solutions developed for in-house use

C. Improved process management: Assessment, training, consulting and management services customized for your enterprise that enables you to better manage existing software development processes, or develop new processes, or transition from the current to new processes covering the entire software development life cycle:

Product management
Requirements engineering
Architecture and design
Code development and unit testing
Documentation development (Installation, Administration and End User Guides, On-line Help, etc.)
Testing and quality assurance
Product or solution delivery to customers
Post-delivery customer support
Business value realization by customers

D. Improved flow and pull of work, and reduced waste with application of lean methods : Lean methods have a tremendous wealth of techniques to offer to software development processes and project management.

Systematic elimination of waste: Delete steps that don’t deliver customer value, such as:

Little-value compliance activities, little or no-value work are not done
Requirements that don’t get implemented are not analyzed.

Flow thinking: Keep activities flowing from one to the next step, without delays for approvals. This requires techniques such as:

Elimination or reduction of queues between different activities (such as analysis, design, code developing, testing, etc.) by fostering cross-functional self-organizing teams.
Reducing the variability of batches of work by making small batches limited to time-boxes. For example, large requirements need to be broken down to smaller use case scenarios or user stories and fully completed in a small 2 to 8 weeks of time-boxed iteration (called Scrum sprint).

Pull thinking: Waiting for “customers” downstream to ask for products, instead of building large inventories and then pushing them to customers.

Avoid creating a large backlog of analyzed requirements, many of which will never get designed and completed as the market changes. Analyze requirements “just-in-time” within a Scrum sprint time-box.

E. Improved organizational dynamics with systems thinking: Training and consulting services customized to your enterprise to better manage existing organizational systems or to develop new systems or to transition from current to new systems, and to address system archetypes (recurring or endemic systemic issues) at the most fundamental level to develop enduring solutions. Without the root cause diagnosis performed for resolving system archetypes, solutions tend to be short-lived, old system reasserts itself and old problems resurface. Some well-known system archetypes in software-intensive enterprises are listed below. More details are provided in the section on System Archetypes.

Attempting to remove errors from a legacy software system causes the number of latent errors to increase.
Heroics to resolve a crisis in software project undermines the ability to develop long-term and enduring solutions to the crisis.
After the initial enthusiasm and commitment to software process quality generated by winning a software quality certificate or certain process maturity level grade, software process compliance erodes resulting into a downgrading in the software process maturity level.
Many software projects spend 95% resources on completing the first 95% of the project, but always need additional 95% resources to complete the remaining “5%” of the project! … and that last 5% of the work never seems to end.

There are many factors whose complex interactions and combined effects make it imperative for software project managers and process owners to pay careful attention to system dynamics underlying software development in order to make appropriate decisions. Here is a partial list of important factors:

Rapidly changing business environment
Requirements volatility and frequent change requests from customers and other stakeholders
Communication challenges and overhead, especially in a geographically distributed and culturally diverse development team
Underestimation of work effort (architecture, design, development, testing, defect fixing, etc.)
Technology platform immaturity and changes
Excessive schedule pressure
Personnel turn-over

New Synergy Group offers assessment, training, and coaching and consulting services to help you apply systems thinking solutions to resolve deep-rooted problems and issues in complex software development projects and processes in order to improve productivity and quality in an enduring and sustainable way.

F. Workshops: New Synergy Group offers workshops to facilitate the development of product vision; product, release, sprint plans and backlogs; information radiator design; capacity planning; team formation; and get your Scrum team ready-ready for sprints for client-specific product or solution development. Training services from New Synergy Group usually precede its workshop services.

G. Improved Intellectual Property Development: New Synergy Group offers assistance to your creative and innovative technical staff members to rapidly produce ideas that become the basis for intellectual property (patents, copyrights, etc.); and also offers assistance in developing such intellectual property cost-effectively.

Services: Training | Workshops | Consulting | Management | IP Development