Projects

Many Consultants know the Rules, we also know the Exceptions!

Projects provide opportunities to apply existing knowledge, skills, and abilities to aid clients. Likewise, each is also an opportunity to acquire new information and experience that can help better serve future clients.

Hopefully, with enough time and experience, one should also develop some wisdom. As a result, our basic objective is to ensure success for our Global 2000 client’s most complex initiatives and largest IT investments.

In fact, with no up-sell, cross-sell, extension, or other ulterior motives, we are free to provide clear, concise guidance. To be sure, this often includes hard truths others may be unwilling or unable to say for fear of compromising relationships or future revenue streams.

In general, the larger the challenge, the more value we can provide. Indeed, our sole concern is to see our clients achieve their best possible results.

Sample Past Clients

The summaries below describe past engagements and the types of roles fulfilled for clients across a variety of industries.

International Airline

Engaged as a Solution Architect to provide guidance and help improve the performance of a struggling enterprise Workforce Planning, Scheduling and Administration program. Briefly, the program involved multiple systems, multiple projects, and multi-phase builds and deployments for 30K+ EEs across several collective bargaining agreements.

Engagement Highlights

Situational coaching of management and teams (PMO, BPA, Dev, QA) regarding solution architecture and design.
Developed and socialized strategy to facilitate architecture and design decisions.
Reviewed technical designs and other solutions from both client and vendor resources.
Adapted and applied newly-introduced Agile concepts to an ERP-scale project.
Designed and facilitated a more effective testing strategy and approach.
Drove alignment between business process, applications, technologies, operating procedures, testing, and training.
Designed and led data center failover testing for enterprise applications.

HW/SW & Apps

Infor WFM
Quintiq
JIRA
Confluence
Oracle RDBMS
Oracle Middle-ware
IBM WAS
Cognos BI
Apache WS

Gaming Technologies Company

Solicited as an Enterprise Architect (EA) to drive an enterprise perspective to the recovery of a multi-national, multi-project program. Concurrently, tasked to advocate and implement architectural standards.

After substantial growth, both organic and via acquisition, various projects were initiated to consolidate legacy processes, data, and systems from several multi-national organizations into global platforms spanning ERP, PLM, CRM, and CPQ. Eventually, inter-dependencies brought the projects under an single umbrella program. However, a host of factors contributed to missed objectives and stakeholder dissatisfaction.

Accordingly, this EA role sought to improve productivity, lower TCO, and increase stakeholder satisfaction. In this case, tasks sought to remove siloes as well as foster better, more consistent, solution delivery capabilities. Moreover, worked with both client and vendor resources, ranging from ‘C-Level’ to developers, to provide a more holistic solution design, coupled with advanced methods and delivery capabilities, several of which are now being adopted beyond the original target projects.

Engagement Highlights

Adapted and applied iterative delivery (i.e., Agile) concepts and tools to align and enable multiple, enterprise-scale projects.
Rationalized the cross-platform solutions to better align process, data, and scope, defining more holistic, global solutions.
Introduced business process definitions, as well as tools and capabilities designed to facilitate subsequent system delivery.
Defined iterative delivery processes for planning, implementation (Analysis & Design; Build, Test & Deploy), and reporting.
Designed and produced materials to standardize strategies, diagrams, and approaches, across solutions.
Introduced strategies and approaches to address application architecture, integrations, data migrations, reporting, security, testing and QA, environments, and code set management.
Produced 4th gen iterative delivery materials to support large-scale work, aligning SAFe, TOGAF and APQC.
Situational coaching of management and teams across project portfolio management, PMO, delivery, and QA.

Apps

Teamcenter (PLM)
Salesforce (CRM)
e-Con (CPQ)
Microsoft D365 (ERP)
JIRA
Confluence

Wireless Telecom

To begin with, provided technology leadership for the recovery of an enterprise financials implementation previously botched by a global professional services firm. Afterwards, acted as technical lead for the program, run by a different global consulting firm, to correct the earlier implementation's errors and to extend the ERP's capabilities.

Engagement Highlights

Stabilized the production environment by defining, then addressing, all the technical work that needed to be done.
Planned the work of resources for several IT clients aa well as app development groups.
Developed & implemented operations and management processes, policies & procedures.
Tech lead of an upgrade to clean up the apps and implement proper tier-2 and tier-3 support organizations.
Provided HW/SW planning, performance tuning, training, app management policies & procedures, and end-user support.

Apps

PeopleSoft FIN AM, AP, AR, BI, GL, PC, and PO

Government Services Provider

For the most part, worked with a small, core team to design a new entity from the ground-up. In reality, this entity would operate Client- and Administrative-Services supporting a $15B portfolio of complex financial products serving 1.2M clients. Moreover, the solution involved establishing multiple call centers, multiple data centers, and new processes to support enhanced customer self-service, and new customer communication channels.

Thereafter, post-design responsibility shifted to program planning. Generally, this involved producing Implementation-Plans to instantiate all of the solution’s components. Furthermore, they included a Transition-Plan to migrate from the existing legacy organizations and platforms to the new solution. Eventually, the plans comprised a Program consisting of seven (7) Projects, addressing four (4) separate phases of deployment involving 160 resources from 5 separate companies. All in all, they combined for 645K hours of work effort over 24 months.

Subsequently, re-engaged as a Solution Designer for the new financial services entity.

Engagement Highlights

Defined business process flows, including alignment to underlying technologies.
Defined configuration and transactional data requirements; mapped requirements to application components.
Developed business-logic and rules for self-service portal, ETLs, and financial management tools.
Developed presentation content to communicate two of the most critical and complex sections of the overall solution.

Apps

FICO Debt Manager 9 (DM9)
FICO Decision Management Platform (DMP)
Cisco PCCE
Oracle & SQL Server RDMBS
Oracle Middleware

Multinational Manufacturer

Led technical teams supporting a $1B international, private manufacturer during their deployment of 27 enterprise-wide applications. In general, these systems supported accounting, finance, reporting, procurement, quote to cash, and manufacturing functions across multiple countries.

Engagement Highlights

Created Application Architecture and Technical Architecture materials, including logical and physical infrastructure design.
Designed and implemented approaches for application migration, integration, reporting, data migration, security, and testing.
Designed the client's application support organization (Tier-2 & Tier3), defining roles, responsibilities and training.
Produced a three (3) year, multi-national, multi-phase release strategy for all participants.

Apps

Oracle EBS

Regional Transport

In brief, engaged as Interim President to drive the turn-around of a failing transportation and distribution firm. Specifically, applied financial planning and management, business and IT transformation, organizational design, as well as negotiation skills to complete the company's transition back to health. Thereafter, facilitated a transition to long-term management.

Engagement Highlights

Immediately cut non-essential operational and administrative expenditures.
Implemented new processes, systems, policies and procedures to better manage finance and logistics.
Improved operational and individual efficiencies through better designed processes, roles and responsibilities.
Developed a management reporting system; increased use of technology across multiple Distribution Centers.
Reduced significant cost drivers in areas such as: leased vs. owned equipment; improved compliance; financial management; equipment management and maintenance.
Transitioned operational and financial control to new majority owners.

Future Clients

To summarize, whether engaged on behalf of IT, the Business, or even your systems integrator, our goal remains the same. That is, to help you and your organization to achieve desired objectives.

After many years serving some of the top companies across several industries, we have built a rather unique set of knowledge, skills and experience. As a result, we have capabilities to fill specific roles, as well as to fix things which fall through the cracks. That is, to address issues and impediments rooted in the work no one is yet doing well.

If you’re facing a large, complex or challenging scenario, or simply want to get things on track and on schedule, then it’s worth a conversation to explore how we may be able to help. It is not hyperbole to say that in many cases, we can save initiatives $10s millions of dollars and months to years of effort.

To be sure, an independent, experienced and knowledgeable perspective can pay huge dividends in relatively little time. Accordingly, allow us to help make things easier on you, your people, and your customers.