Tag Archive: development

  1. Align – Pivot – Accelerate: Developing a Technology-Enabled Business Modernization Strategy

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    Align – Pivot – Accelerate

    As technological advancements continue to accelerate, businesses face significant challenges in keeping pace with these rapid changes. The swift evolution of technology disrupts traditional methods of delivering goods and services, demanding new and innovative approaches. However, many organizations lack an effective strategy to navigate this evolving landscape, leading to potential unpreparedness and operational inefficiencies.

    As one CEO described it: “I have a clear vision for the next 12 to 18 months and where the business is going. But given the rate of change, particularly with AI, it’s hard to see five or more years into the future.” In this case, they were trying to identify a strategy to embrace the change and create a competitive advantage over slower moving competitors.

    Without a forward-looking modernization strategy, businesses risk losing their competitive edge. The absence of a cohesive plan to integrate new technologies and adapt to the future can result in missed opportunities, inefficient resource allocation, and ultimately jeopardize the very existence of the business. It is crucial for organizations to proactively address these challenges to ensure resilience, agility, and sustained success in a technology-driven environment.

    Like the rate of adoption of the Internet that reshaped the winners and losers at the turn of the century, organizations once again face a decision on embracing artificial technology to enable their businesses for the future. Those early decisions, the ability to manage the corresponding risks, along with wise financial investment will inevitably shape a new set of winners and losers over the next decade. This document outlines a disciplined approach to developing a technology-enabled business modernization strategy built on three phases: Align, Pivot, and Accelerate. This strategic approach more effectively identifies places to compete, shapes budget priorities, and balances risk versus innovation and experimentation.

    Align

    The first phase, “Align,” involves a thorough evaluation of the existing technological landscape to determine its relevance and importance for future operations. This phase focuses on identifying and halting unnecessary programs, reallocating resources, and training or adjusting staff to meet new technological requirements. By aligning current capabilities with future needs, businesses can create a solid foundation for sustained growth.

    Evaluate Existing Technology

    Conduct a detailed assessment of all current technologies and their relevance to future business goals. Identify technologies that are critical for future operations and those that no longer meet organizational needs. This evaluation will help in making informed decisions about technology investments and retirements.

    Halt Unnecessary Programs

    Terminate programs and projects that do not align with the strategic vision or contribute to future operational requirements. Redirect resources and funding from these halted programs to more critical areas, ensuring efficient allocation of organizational assets and funds.

    Train and Adjust Staff

    Invest in training programs to upskill and reskill staff members, preparing them for new roles and responsibilities. Align staffing to support new technology implementations and operational requirements. This ensures that the workforce is capable and ready to embrace the changes brought about by modernization efforts when you start to pivot.

    Manage Risk

    Some challenges and risks associated with alignment towards a future state:

    • The business demands don’t stop as the business aligns to the future. The competition for resources, as well as attention, increases as resources are prioritized toward modernization, and risks turbulence in the current delivery of goods and services. Given the changing environment, businesses have no choice but to do both – remain competitive and responsive to current demands while balancing time and energy towards the future. The goal during the alignment phase is to identify critical versus less important functions to effectively assume risk prior to pivoting.
    • Capability risk increases as the business transitions from legacy systems to introduce new, more advanced ones in a relatively short period of time. This alignment will likely stress existing processes and strain the enterprise, which will have to support both new requirements and existing ones at the same time. Much like Operation Agility, the goal is the identification of the critical capabilities needed today, and assume risk by not supporting functions no longer needed or not important to the future.
    • Infrastructure risk increases if the business does not modernize facilities and equipment along with the pace of emerging technologies. AI will provide advanced capabilities, but still relies on networks, databases, and servers to function. This can result in unplanned infrastructure requirements, buying more capable equipment than what is required today to enhance the future and change the requirements and procurement process.
    • Budget risk increases if funding decisions are delayed, re-aligned, or re-prioritized quarter to quarter without commitment to the future. Trade-offs between near-term demands, and long-term investments risk, remain until technologies are available to achieve a return on investment.

    Pivot

    The second phase, “Pivot,” addresses the critical shortfalls by refining and improving ongoing efforts. This phase aims to enhance current initiatives that are essential for meeting key business demands. By fixing these existing efforts, businesses can ensure that they are strategically positioned to overcome immediate challenges and capitalize on emerging opportunities.

    This is the phase where the traditional approaches are re-invented, whether that is staff, budget, and/or bureaucratic processes. All are challenged with an eye towards the future rather than how it was accomplished in the past. The organization must remember why controls and boundaries were put in place, and if they are additive or restrictive to the future.

    The pivot doesn’t come without risks. Several were discussed previously during the alignment phase. As one leader heavily immersed in an organizational pivot described it: “This sort of feels a bit like we are running with scissors every day! We no longer want to go back to the old way of business, but we are still trying to see our future selves.”

    Fix Critical Operational Shortfalls

    Identify and rectify deficiencies in current operations that hinder the achievement of business objectives. Prioritize efforts that address the most pressing operational shortfalls, ensuring that core functions are healthy and efficient.

    Adopt an Agile Acquisition Strategy

    Shift towards a more agile acquisition strategy that allows for rapid experimentation and adaptation. This includes adopting innovative technologies, and experimenting on their effectiveness when quickly integrated into business operations. Establish a new process for experimenting with various technologies, enabling the organization to learn, adapt, and innovate continuously.

    Accelerate

    The final phase, “Accelerate,” takes advantage of new business processes, acquisition, and requirements methodology that incorporates experimentation, staff development, and budgeting to go faster. This phase is the reward of the hard work invested during the two earlier phases and designed to foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation. Both serve as the fuel for rapid adaptation of technology. By accelerating the adoption of innovative solutions, businesses can not only maintain a competitive edge but win and drive long-term success as an industry leader.

    Experimentation and Learning

    Create a culture of experimentation where new ideas and technologies are tested and evaluated regularly. Establish innovation labs or centers of excellence dedicated to exploring emerging technologies and their potential applications. Encourage a mindset of continuous improvement and learning throughout the organization.

    Staff Development

    Further invest in staff development through ongoing training and professional development programs. Encourage cross-functional collaboration and knowledge sharing to foster a culture of innovation and adaptability. Provide opportunities for employees to engage in innovation projects and contribute to the modernization efforts.

    Budgeting for Innovation

    Allocate a dedicated budget for innovation and modernization initiatives. Ensure that financial resources are available to support experimentation, technology acquisitions, and staff development. Regularly review and adjust the budget to align with evolving business needs and priorities.

    Conclusion

    In conclusion, this technology-enabled business modernization strategy provides a structured approach for navigating the complexities of the emerging business environment. By systematically aligning, pivoting, and accelerating their operations by embracing emerging technologies, companies can enhance their agility, foster innovation, and ensure they are fully equipped to meet the demands of a rapidly changing future.

    -Brad Hilton (Consultant)

  2. Unlocking the Power of Agile Requirements

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    How Non-Agile Organizations Can Benefit from Agile Methodology

    Why Agile Requirements Matter

    Agile as an iterative approach to software development and project management focused on collaboration, flexibility, and customer satisfaction. While Agile is often associated with rapid development cycles and adaptive planning, it’s also a powerful framework for requirements gathering.

    Agile requirements are intentionally flexible and user-focused, making them highly relevant in today’s rapidly changing business environment. Organizations can adopt Agile-inspired requirements practices even if they continue using traditional methodologies, gaining clarity, flexibility, and improved stakeholder alignment.

    Let’s explore how Agile practices in requirements gathering can drive better results in any project, whether it’s run on Agile principles or not.

    The Agile Advantage: How Agile Requirements Differ from Traditional Requirements

    • User-Centric Focus: Traditional requirements often focus on technical specifications, whereas Agile requirements center around the end-user’s experience. Agile requirements are framed as “user stories” to highlight the user’s needs, the functionality required, and the value or benefit it provides. This user-centered approach fosters a deeper understanding of requirements’ purpose and impact.
    • Flexibility and Adaptability: Traditional requirements gathering often aims for completeness upfront, creating documents that can be difficult to adjust later. In Agile, requirements are designed to evolve through iterative feedback, enabling teams to refine and pivot as needed. This adaptability is crucial for responding to new information or changing conditions during project development.
    • Collaborative Process: Agile encourages collaboration between cross-functional teams and stakeholders throughout the project. Requirements are developed through ongoing discussions, enabling stakeholders to provide insights and feedback early on. This collaboration improves alignment and reduces misunderstandings, ensuring that requirements remain focused on actual needs rather than assumptions.

    Writing Agile-Inspired Requirements Without Adopting Full Agile

    • Use User Stories: Capture the “who” (user), “what” (feature), and “why” (goal). This format keeps requirements concise, actionable, and meaningful. Explain how organizations can adapt user stories for their needs by making user-focused requirements the foundation, even in a non-Agile environment.
    • Prioritize with EPICs and Themes: EPICs represent larger bodies of work, while Themes group related requirements, helping teams manage priorities and align work with strategic goals. Even in non-Agile settings, using EPICs and Themes allows organizations to focus on the highest-value areas first and structure requirements to avoid information overload.
    • Acceptance Criteria: Provides testable, clear conditions for each user story or requirement, ensuring everyone has a shared understanding of what success looks like. Acceptance criteria offer detailed requirements without adding excess documentation, improving transparency and enabling requirements to be assessed against measurable outcomes.

    Benefits of Agile Requirements for Non-Agile Organizations

    • Enhanced Clarity and Alignment: User stories and acceptance criteria help stakeholders, developers, and project managers gain a unified understanding of requirements. This shared clarity reduces ambiguity, makes expectations explicit, and minimizes the risk of misinterpretation.
    • Improved Responsiveness to Change: With Agile-inspired requirements, teams can gather feedback continuously and adjust requirements incrementally. Even in traditional project cycles, applying Agile principles enables teams to be responsive to changes, incorporate new insights, and maintain relevance with evolving business needs.
    • Reduced Miscommunication and Scope Creep: Clear, concise requirements prevent misunderstandings and misalignment. Since Agile requirements focus on user value and are broken into smaller, manageable parts, it’s easier to control scope and ensure only necessary features are developed, reducing the chances of scope creep.

    Practical Steps for Getting Started with Agile Requirements

    • Start Small: Encourage teams to experiment by converting a few key requirements into user stories and defining acceptance criteria. Starting small allows teams to learn and adjust their approach with minimal disruption while seeing the benefits of Agile requirements.
    • Engage Stakeholders in Workshops: Collaborative workshops foster cross-departmental input, ensuring that requirements are well-rounded and reflective of all stakeholders’ needs. Regular workshops help uncover key requirements, clarify user stories, and refine acceptance criteria, creating a collaborative environment where Agile practices can thrive even in non-Agile settings.
    • Iterate and Refine: With an Agile-inspired approach, teams can collect feedback from stakeholders, test assumptions, and make incremental improvements to requirements, ensuring continuous alignment with business goals without needing a full Agile transformation.

    Tools and Tips to Manage Agile Requirements in Non-Agile Environments

    • Utilize Simple Agile Tools: Use lightweight tools like Trello, Asana, or Jira that allow teams to document, prioritize, and track Agile-style requirements without extensive setup. These tools can visually manage requirements as user stories, helping non-Agile teams implement Agile practices without complex software.
    • Document for Both Agile and Traditional Needs: A few tips on ensuring that Agile-inspired requirements are compatible with traditional project documentation. For instance, user stories and acceptance criteria can be included in requirements documentation or other project artifacts, making it easy to incorporate Agile insights within traditional project management frameworks.
    • Establish Review and Feedback Cycles: Setting regular check-ins to validate requirements against project goals, ensuring the team remains aligned. These check-ins mimic Agile sprints and allow traditional teams to introduce an iterative feedback cycle to monitor requirements’ relevance and adaptability.

    Embracing the Agile Mindset for Requirements Success

    Key Benefits: Agile-inspired requirements bring clarity, alignment, and adaptability to projects of any methodology. By using user-centered requirements like user stories and acceptance criteria, teams ensure clear, actionable goals that minimize miscommunication. The iterative approach of Agile allows for continuous feedback and adjustment, helping organizations stay responsive to change and reduce scope creep. Through collaborative practices and flexible prioritization, Agile requirements enable better stakeholder alignment and ultimately lead to more efficient and effective project outcomes.

    Agile is a flexible, complementary approach. Agile requirements practices don’t require a full Agile transformation to add value; they can be seamlessly integrated with traditional methodologies. By adopting Agile techniques like user stories, prioritization, and iterative feedback, teams can bring a user-centered, adaptive approach to their projects without overhauling existing workflows. This flexibility allows organizations to enhance their requirements process, improve collaboration, and respond more effectively to changing needs, making Agile a versatile, complementary tool for any project management style.

    Agile could be the game-changer your organization needs, so why not give it a try?

    -Tom Chastain, Consultant

  3. Our Approach to Application Development Consulting 

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    How Our High-Value, Purpose-Built Application Development Services Deliver Results Across the Board.

     

    When your organization requests IT consulting services from Core Catalysts, you can expect a highly intentional process that not only delivers results, but establishes a sustainable legacy and long-term success. 

    Core Catalysts knows that challenges such as application development require more than a consulting firm that “knows tech.” Taking many strategic steps alongside development gets you across the finish line, including:

    • Dynamic program and project management.
    • Effective business analysis and process mapping.
    • Key development resources.
    • Comprehensive application functionality.

    Core Catalysts provides significant expertise in IT implementation, but our robust services offerings turn application development into something larger: comprehensive process development. When we approach IT implementation, we also ensure that we make the best decisions on behalf of all stakeholders, while reducing costs and securing team member buy-in.

    A Core Catalysts Case Study In Application Development

    Our client is a globally recognized business that required our assistance with their goal to build a high-value, purpose-built application. This application modernization project would allow them to automatically allocate insurance premiums across their multiple properties. 

    Our initial assistance was focused on helping them to project manage the effort, which also included vendor management. In addition, this client needed a skilled resource that could aid them in gathering all the requirements necessary for the creation of this application. 

    Our Initial Recommendations: Project Management

    Core Catalysts assigned a seasoned project manager with significant experience in managing custom development projects. This individual quickly established a project timeline for the initial phases of the project, leading up to actual development. 

    Additionally, the project manager established the appropriate project governance that would help ensure the proper management of risk, issues, and changes. As part of this governance, and critical to the gathering of requirements, our project manager determined that a stakeholder analysis was necessary. This analysis identified all appropriate internal and external individuals and established their project needs (e.g., the creation of a RACI model to determine which team members were responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed).

    Implemented Business Analysis and Cost Reduction Solutions

    In addition, Core Catalysts assigned a highly skilled business analyst, who guided our client through the development of their application requirements. This individual leveraged the stakeholder analysis and initiated interviews and workshops that allowed the stakeholders to discuss their needs and expectations. 

    This business analyst carefully documented the requirements using a proprietary “traceability matrix” that helps to link business, functional, technical, and testing requirements together. After the business analyst reframed this data in a logical and consumable format, they validated the information with the appropriate stakeholders. 

    Application Development Consulting Begins

    Upon completion of these efforts, the requirements were provided to the application development vendor that the client selected. This vendor provided our client with a timeline and cost estimate to complete the application. Unfortunately, the timeline and cost associated with the development of this application was significantly longer and significantly higher in cost than our client had anticipated. 

    Intimately familiar with the application’s requirements, Core Catalysts took the opportunity to provide our own cost and timeline estimate to the client. Our estimates were significantly less than those of the other vendor. Because Core Catalysts had already established trusted working relationships with the stakeholders and had intimate familiarity with the requirements, the ramp up time to development was significantly reduced, thereby lowering costs as well.  

    A Highly Efficient Timeline 

    Our client selected our proposal to build this high-value purpose-built application, including development work on the initial phase and an MVP (minimum viable product). Our work commenced immediately.

    Because our client valued our ability to respond quickly to their needs, they requested that Core Catalysts not only host the application, but also provide ongoing maintenance and support.

    Within three months our client was able to interact with the initial build of the application. Within six months, our client was able to start using some of the initial functionality within the new application. At the nine-month mark, our client had a complete and operational MVP that provided them with the foundational elements necessary to properly allocate insurance premiums across all their properties.  

    Successful Application and Process Development 

    As the MVP phase came to a close, the trusted relationship that Core Catalysts established with our client was still flourishing. Our ability to execute and deliver on their requested product gave them the confidence to move forward with phases two and three of the project. 

    Core Catalysts is currently working on phase three, continuing to provide additional application modernization and functionality for our client. We provided immediate results and value for both individual users of the application and our client’s entire organization.

    4 Reasons to Partner With Core Catalysts For Application Development Consulting

    This case study illustrates our application and process development success. This success can be broken down into four essential qualities that separate us from other business consulting firms. 

    • Seasoned program and project management talent: Our team’s experience ensures we honor project timelines, reduce costs where possible, and expediently and efficiently deliver application functionality.
    • Effective business analysis and process mapping: We provide highly-skilled resources to gather business and functional requirements, and fully map the application development process. We offer a deep understanding of technology, allowing us to initiate technical requirements, as well as associated testing requirements, such as quality assurance. 
    • Robust development resources: Core Catalysts provides clients with a blend of onshore and offshore resources for the development of the application. This ensures that communication, critical in the development of a custom application, is effective and consistent. We also provide clients with balanced cost models, allowing applications to be built in a cost-effective manner.  
    • Exceptional application functionality: We ensure that your application meets all your functionality requirements, including application modernization. Ultimately, with Core Catalysts’ help, your application will meet or exceed your requirements, so you can use this new resource efficiently and sustainably. 

    Core Catalysts exists to resolve your challenges and deliver results that are yours for the taking. If your team requires application development to modernize your processes, improve organizational efficiency, or deliver any other key metrics, contact our team.