Did your consultancy send your change order overseas for execution? Did they do it to save “you” money? Do you wonder where that expert who has been working on your problems for the last few years went?
She was the victim of a mass layoff, a “realignment of resources”, a resource action, RA, which is based in the fiction that all technical people are plug compatible. The acting company had very experienced folks, that have been working to deliver successful results to clients for many years. With experience comes cost. In order to increase quarterly profits, the contract that was staffed with experienced talent has been off-shored, and the talent you've come to rely on has been discarded.
XiBMR Services (say Kai-Bee-Emm-R, stands for eXcellence in Business Management Resources), a affiliation of graduate IBMers making themselves available to you. We have centuries of combined experience. What we don't have is a team of lawyers making agreeing to proposals painful, and leaving you wondering if you are actually going to receive the benefits you seek. What we don't have is a bloated overhead structure that trebles the cost of services to pay for layers of non-productive management and bonuses to executives scheming to maximize stock price instead of service quality. We strive to deliver best value services with minimized non-value-add components.
Business strategy, marketing strategy, marketing analytics, UI, design, web site optimization, business process flow/optimization/automation, server and storage capacity planning, performance management, resiliency, disaster preparedness, disaster recovery, infrastructure architecture, implementation, project management, virtualization, cloud computing, smart phone/mobile infrastructure, VOIP, roll outs, upgrades, Windows, Linux, i series, AIX, z series, x series, blades, cubes; we have these skills.
In truth though, the technical skills are only part of the equation. The real productivity is realized not when the bit is flipped, but when the project impact is realized, and that is much more a result of understanding how to work together to achieve a goal than it is to translate a well documented requirement into a functional line of code. That comes from experience, from having been there and done that. According to PMI, most IT projects fail, something north of 70%, on one or more of time line, budget, and functionality. They fail largely on communication, both in misunderstanding what is said, and in not clarifying that which is unsaid. In both cases, the key to overcoming that gap is experience. That experience comes in two forms. The first is functional experience, in which the practitioner has done that kind of project before and knows what the success components are. He can say, “this requirement is unclear or needs additional detail”, or “we need to add this other item to the list, we can't get from here to there without it”. The second is business acumen, questioning the requirement with respect to the business objective. This capacity comes from having been around many kinds of businesses. The most important and least asked question in most projects is “How does this project (or requirement), if successfully implemented, lead to the desired business result?” Without a clear understanding of the answer, the impact of the inevitable changes in scope and compromise of requirements cannot be quantified, and as such managed. These mismanaged projects fail. Failure is delay and cost without ROI. Nobody can afford that very often.
It is this experience that we offer, in addition to our technical skills, that makes the difference. And we do it in a way that delivers greater value, the same skills that have delivered for you before, at less cost, without the negotiating pain, and bloated overhead, and off-shoring risk you now have with the companies that have shifted workload to places where the technicians that do the work don't buy your products or services.
Call me at 405-204-0783 or email me at bobrahm@gmail.com to discuss re-engaging with the experienced practitioners that have moved on from working for IBM to working for you, to help you achieve your business objectives, at significantly less cost and hassle than you've come to expect from your hardware or software provider.
