Consulting and Project Management
We have developed a ‘Delivery Oriented’ approach to consulting, project management and agile software development. This approach creates empowered and efficient delivery teams that are self-motivated to meet aggressive targets, and that work well with your business stakeholders and clients.
Organisations that transition to Agile increase visibility and control while empowering teams to work at a sustainable pace. This pace can be at the expense of meeting stakeholder expectations. Left unchecked, the thrill of meeting commitments can be lost to technology for technologies sake. The evidence and commentary point to the benefits of Agile, but there are challenges.
We have worked with ‘Agile consultants’ that rigidly stick to the theory with little creativity or flexibility. Our approach to Agile tempers the theory with economic reality. It strikes a healthy balance between speed and quality which in turn supports teams to work at high velocities sustainably. The win-win is that our clients benefit from reduced costs while still reaping the benefit of Agile’s increased visibility and control. We specialise in fitting Agile to fixed price and/or fixed duration projects, and we can work with you to implement similar practices in your own workplaces.
The key to unlocking Agile’s benefits is the creation of high-performing teams that thrive on winning, overlaying the delivery of results. Agile methods were crafted by software developers for software developers and they missed an important intrinsic motivation. While Agile delivers tangible benefits to visibility and control, teams lose the thrill of delivery to endless sprints/iterations. Software development is a team sport and the players will perform best when winning.
Contracting for Agile work is difficult in traditional environments but we have a proven approach that marries Agile with Waterfall and will assist you to secure and successfully deliver in environments that are not progressive. These techniques can also be applied to internal projects in less progressive environments.
BENEFITS
- Create a team that is self-motivated to deliver value for money.
- Manage architecture and non-functional requirements.
- Manage scope when Agile promotes late discovery.
- Maintain quality at high development velocities.
- Manage expectations and alignment with external and/or internal clients.
- Integrate business analysis, user experience and quality assurance.
Project Management
Our projects are managed in accordance with PRINCE2. PRINCE2 is the world’s widest used project management methodology. We have chosen to be a PRINCE2 compliant organisation as we believe this is the most effective way for organisations to work together on complex projects. PRINCE2 is used by thousands of organisations in hundreds of countries around the world and PRINCE2 provides a foundation for common understanding which removes ambiguity and reduces risk.
The benefits that PRINCE2 brings to ZOAK Solutions’ projects and clients are:
- The product (deliverable) focus provides clarity of what will be delivered, by whom, by when and to what quality standards.
- It focuses on benefits realisation and has checkpoints to verify that a project continues to deliver ongoing benefits.
- It is based on a ‘management by exception’ concept which promotes the efficient application of management time.
- It promotes clearly defined roles and responsibilities between customers and suppliers.
- It promotes learning and continuous improvement.
- It easily dovetails into other project delivery methods, for example Agile.