We measure our success by our clients'

Our accomplishments are working behind the scenes to help our clients achieve results – and honors. We do not seek headlines, and love it when the hard work of our clients is publicly acknowledged.

Here is an indicative list of accomplishments our clients have earned:

• For several years in a row two of our clients have been selected as CIOs of the Year by Wall St. and Technology Magazine, and we were the only consulting firm to both of them. One was on the buy side and the other one the sell side.
  
  
• We have been a long-time consultant to a leading computer systems developer and manufacturer. Some of its clients noticed that it had doubled revenue–and net income–in a nine year period while keeping employment level! When the manufacturer's clients asked how to get some of that productivity, our client said that it had had the help of a consulting firm and recommended us to its clients.
  
  
• We worked with the delivery assurance team of a large, global applications outsourcing firm, formerly Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) and now called DXC.technology. Its contracts guarantee savings. In order to calculate the savings that will be promised, we helped our client develop an enterprise measurement system. That measurement system won the highest technology award world-wide, in a firm employing 60,000 people. It combines the technologies of analytical hierarchy process, goal/question/metric, the SEI metrics checklists, Implementation Management Associates' Accelerating Change Method, Balanced Scorecard, and Tufte's visual explanations.
  
  
• Led the Information Technology component at a no-load mutual fund investment company in a $18 million project to outsource the transfer agency functions. The program touched all parts of the business. The project had originally been led by an in-house staff member, but the project foundered and we were engaged. The project was implemented on time with eight million customer accounts successfully converted. It was a "bet the company" project.
  
  
• Managed a program to implement a web-based financial advice tool for a large mutual fund company. Established a cross-business functional Program Office to plan and control the implementation. Recommended the use of a "Model Office" for testing and validating the system prior to implementation and then managed that function. The project had crushing deadlines and was the first web-mostly application in this organization. This, too, was a "bet the company" project.
  
  
• Pioneered methods for deriving precise statements of required applications architectural qualities from more general descriptions of business needs, strategies, and capabilities, for using those requirements as the basis for an assessment of current gaps, for describing an improved "to be" architecture, and for developing a plan for the phased introduction of architectural improvements. This has broken a stalemate in many of our clients between Marketing/Sales and Technology. It has begun a mending of the structure and communication among stakeholders in our client firms, often to striking effect.
  
  
• Specialize in helping organizations that have as their strategic imperative innovation or customer intimacy (total solution). This is an under-served community and the SEI CMM and CMMI are mostly silent on those areas. Convened the first-ever Customer Intimate Systems Providers Summit. Have tailored improvement models, most notably the SEI CMM and CMMI, and even have performed improvement efforts by "stealth," in which the improvement model was not revealed in an effort to keep the initiative internally-focused. Our focus on innovative and customer intimate organizations gives our clients a framework for improvement that is strongly aligned with their business goals.
  
  
• Some of our clients have been fed-up with consulting firms that only give advice – especially in a narrow area – and then leave the implementation to the client. So, we have accepted engagements in which we took line responsibility for our advice: we were a part of the organization we sought to help and had line positions in which our performance was measured based on the bottom-line performance of the improvements on delivered products and services. Our clients achieved high project performance and seamless integration of improvements into their business processes.
  
  
• Have integrated project management, architecture, application development, and process improvement. In most organizations those disciplines are far apart and uncoordinated. Our view is that architecture is central, especially to the communication among product conceivers and product makers, and needs to be simply translated into project plans and execution. And that an architecture also needs to be translated into a step-by-step plan to improve the delivery capability of the technology organization. Our integrated view saves our clients lots of back-tracking and the late discovery of misfits. We help our clients incrementally improve all of the steps they need to be more cost-effective in a way that matches the timing of the investments with the evidence of improvement.