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.

The Client’s Profile

Our client’s development group was charged with the development, deployment, and support of their multi-platform, high-performance stock trading application. Part of their responsibility was to support a minimum of seven independent operating copies of the application (including hardware and software) for three of their clients. Each of the copies of the application needed to be configured with significant differences in size, structure, and functionality.

The Client’s Challenge

As part of remaining competitive and to meet their client’s contracted requirements and expectations, our client had to deliver new functions and defect corrections monthly. We were engaged to improve their deployment process with the aim of reducing resource requirements and the time to market.

Our Mandate

As part of achieving our client’s objectives, we were given the mandate to move the perception of the company, starting from within our client’s development group, from being viewed a custom development shop to a general software products company. To accomplish this, we were charged with:

1. Analyzing their current processes and procedures
2. Identifying and documenting the major causes of deployment delays and errors
3. Making recommendations on improvements to processes and procedures
4. Identifying, defining, and documenting requirements to allow application deployment into new and existing environment to be carried out rapidly, consistently, and correctly
5. Integrating development tasks, library management policies and testing procedures into a single, consistent set of cooperating procedures.

The Key Benefits Our Client Received

In order to help our customer, Nexbridge:

1. Identified and remedied the root causes of delays and most common errors.
2. Worked with our client to reduce the deployment time from the typical 2 to 3 weeks down to an average of 1 day for the creating and deployment of new application environment. After the client became proficient, through our training, mentoring and guidance, they achieved a sustainable deployment time of one half day.
3. Directed and were the primary participants in the redevelopment of infrastructure to manage the configuration of our client’s software product and hardware environments. This redevelopment involved the creation of configuration architecture and documentation procedures that position the company to more rapidly incorporate changes into any environment. This also included a complete reorganization of the client’s software code library system.
4. Built and deployed infrastructure to enable the automation of the creation of new application environments.

Additional Benefits

In addition to the key benefits:

1. Training material was developed and training delivered to all areas within the development group
2. Training was also delivered to our client’s operations and operation support groups as well as their customers’ operations support groups.
3. Documentation for support of infrastructure elements was created and delivered. Part of the reduction of the time to market involved our creation of automated documentation technology to reduce resource requirements.

End Conditions

Once our services were completed, the client was entirely self-sufficient in being able to maintain and sustain the improved productivity and reduced time to market.

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

The Client’s Profile

Our client was attempting to launch a new mentoring and coaching company targeted at radically improve their clients’ sales process. The founders had created a very effective selling methodology and were determined to bring their methodology to market in some form.

The Client’s Challenge

The key problem the client had was a lack of clarity on how to turn their methodology into set of saleable product and service offerings. They had looked at many different options but were unable to distill any option into a sustainable offering. We were engaged to help define the strategy for their product and service offerings.

Our Mandate

As part of achieving our client’s objectives, we were given the mandate to determine the most effective set of capabilities and offerings.

What We Did

In order to help our customer, Nexbridge:

1. Identified the existing capabilities the founders wished to bring to market.
2. Established the value of the capabilities to the founders and to their client base over the projected life-span of their company.
3. Guided and mentored the founders into building an effective business strategy based on sensitivity to their clients own expectations.

End Conditions

When the company ultimately went to market, the form of the offering differed significantly from what was originally conceived. The offering has taken on a life of its own and nurtures its creators with new ideas and perspectives. We continue to act in partnership with Creative Discovery as reciprocal sounding boards for ideas and service offerings. Our relationship with this client continues to be one of mutual respect and collaboration.

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