RedtoBlack Software Consulting handles business technology projects differently than many other providers.
Rather than jump straight to a product-centric view of tackling business problems, we take a process-oriented approach. This approach, called Project Initiation, provides you and us with several strategic advantages in the quest for improving business performance:
- It helps us identify together whether or not existing systems can be leveraged as part of the ultimate solution(s) you choose – why replace software that is simply under-implemented or mis-configured?
- It helps us identify whether there is a significant ROI justification to make any changes to your current infrastructure – our target is to find a figure in the neighborhood of three times the solution cost in savings / increased profit within the first year
- It reduces your risk by delaying a product purchase until it has been proven to be necessary to meet your goals and only after a clear definition of what the software will and will not do has been developed
- It reduces our risk by helping your team to gain consensus on what must be achieved and encouraging a team effort during the fact finding and implementation processes – The journey truly is the important part when it comes to implementing technology-based solutions to your business problems.
How Project Initiation Works
We start with a focus on getting a fundamental understanding of business processes that drive your organization. After carefully taking stock of the current situation, we assist your with defining the goal scenario. Both of these are typically mapped using specialized business process modeling software so that you have a standardized tool that can be used in a variety of consulting and planning scenarios.
Next, we research multiple options with you to determine the best fit solution. We start with a bias for cloud-based tools because our philosophy of reducing IT costs and the burden on your staff demands it. Once we’ve written the blueprint, we craft several solution options around the recommended solutions and in so doing you have greater control over your initial costs and commitment of your resources such as staff time and energy.
Once we have reviewed all of the aforementioned deliverables thoroughly, you can either make your selections and purchase the solutions (typically a combination of software licensing and services) that you believe will best match up with your goals, capacity and budget.
As you finalize your decision and purchase, we begin the planning and project administration processes to schedule a kickoff meeting with the key players on all teams and flesh out the Project Activity Plan as much as possible using a work-back approach based on your desired go-live date. At that point, it is full speed ahead and all of the effort of completing the Project Initiation process really begins to pay off.