The Client’s Profile

Our client is a multi-national media analysis corporation with several distributed development and production divisions. They release market research software to be used in conjunction with their key products – pre-analyzed market research data packages.

The Client’s Challenge

As part of managing its operations, the client needs to co-ordinate rapidly changing data products, of which there are hundreds, their development teams, and their market research teams. The distributed nature of the company requires effective communication and understanding. The traditional software development life-cycle used by the larger divisions was not perceived as enabling the rapid deployment of changing products. As a side note, there are more products in the company than employees. We were engaged to make recommendations on how the company could continue operations given the seemingly impossible task of managing their workload.

Our Mandate

As part of achieving our client’s objectives, we were given the mandate to define job functions, processes, and methodologies to be used to meet their challenge. To accomplish this, we were charged with:

1. Analyzing their current development and delivery processes and procedures
2. Making recommendations on improvements to processes and procedures
3. Defining job roles and responsibilities for people needed to fill any identified gaps.

The Key Benefits Our Client Received

In order to help our customer, Nexbridge:

1. Using facilitated process design, built a simple and effective product management process to integrate rapid market requirements changes with development capabilities.
2. Mentored their newly appointed Director of Product Management in his new responsibilities and helped him position himself within the company to operate effectively.
3. Using the results of our process design model, we established clear roles and responsibilities for people in the product management group, and how that group interacts with the company’s executives, research, development, marketing, and delivery people.

Additional Benefits

In addition to the key benefits:

1. A structure in which processes, procedures, roles, and responsibilities could be documented.
2. A comfort level that the corporation actually had the capabilities to continue operations.

End Conditions

Once our services were completed, the Director of Product Management was in a position to make effective long-term strategic and tactical decisions based on market need and available resources.

For more information, about this and our other successes, please contact us.