Bringing a different perspective to problem-solving.
Our engagement for this client began as a call for help with a particular technology which was critical to the client’s business. As is often the case, the contact was via someone we’d worked with before (some years earlier) who had moved on to a new role.
Our client was an analytics business and had implemented cutting edge database technology using hardware acceleraton. They had changed to a new supplier of this type of technology, but despite a successful proof of concept, it production this was not delivering anywhere near the expected or needed performance. Customers were beginning to complain and if it couldn’t be fixed, our client risked losing customer renewals.
Our review highlighted that the approach to the project had not been sufficiently rigorous given the level of risk. We made recommendations for a contingency plan to de-risk the transition and helped manage the new supplier to ensure that they were giving a higher level of attention to our client. This resulted in our client being loaned much higher specification hardware for a longer pilot duration to be run in parallel with their existing hardware. We recommended revisiting the selection project and in particular taking up customer references in a much more fine-grained way to understand whether the technology was proven for our client’s specific use case.
We were then asked to broaden our work to provide an overview of the performance of the technology function as a whole. These types of reviews can be sensitive, but we had managed to establish a rapport with the team based on mutual respect on the technology work and this enabled us to conduct the broader review successfully and with good cooperation.
Our output was a map illustrating the maturity level of various aspects of the function and what needed to happen to improve maturity in key areas. This included recommendations on organisation structure and changes of approach to product development and managing the quality of output from specific processes.