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"You have a natural ability to pose probing questions and offer powerful insight. When coupled with your great business suggestions, your advice can tip the scale of a project from failure to success.
You have a way to hone in on what's important and highlight the critical details that both bring the big picture into focus and show what's needed to achieve it. In doing so, you've demonstrated a level of honesty that's rare in business consulting.
Your coaching helped me prepare for a successful talk with executive management. You suggested concepts and terms that they would understand and as a result I was able get agreement from senior executives on technology issues, where no agreement had existed before."
– Chris Kemp, Manager of Data Management Services has 20 years in IT at the Washington State Dept. of Transportation
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Why might your project need a Failure Prevention AssessmentSM?
 o one starts a project with the intent of not succeeding. Yet how many IT projects in your organization have under delivered, been over budget, off schedule or canceled?
If your project qualifies for our guaranteed 500% minimum ROI failure prevention services, we can show you how to prevent disastrous overruns, rework and catastrophic cancellations. We find – and show you how to remove – the causes of failure in your software development projects. Early detection can save hundreds of thousands of dollars.
What every IT manager should know about Risk Management
Managing risk does not eliminate the causes of failure. Risks have probability: they may or may not occur, and they may or may not be fatal if they do occur. So risks are routinely watched, mitigated or accepted. Most causes of failure aren't recognized until it's too late.
The causes of failure are cancerous to a project. Whether you believe your project has a cause of failure or not, if it does, it will eventually kill your project - unless you get rid of the cause of failure. We find, expose, and show you how to permanently eradicate previously unrecognized causes of failure within your project. In the process, you'll learn our proprietary methods that you can reuse at will to prevent failure on future projects.
Why do 50 to 75% of IT projects fail to meet objectives, budgets and schedules? Because no one is preventing them from failing. Failure is the extent to which you don't succeed, and success is the absence of failure. Managing risk is not preventing failure.
Is anyone responsible for preventing failure in your organization?
We can't prevent failure for you. We can only show you how to prevent failure yourself, with your team, in your environment. Whether you have new project just starting, a project that's underway and hasn't hit a glitch yet, or a troubled project that needs to be turned around, when you know you've eliminated the causes of failure, you'll know there's smooth sailing ahead.
Why should you hire ANDA Consulting?
Maybe you shouldn't. If you want to outsource work, or you want a large firm to augment and manage your staff, or you know your project won't fail, we're not for you. If you want the ability within your own environment, with your own staff, to recognize and stave off the landmines inherent in your project, we might be able to help. We only work with organizations that value prevention and feel improving is a sign of strength, not an admission of weakness. For these organizations, we guarantee a minimum 500% ROI from our services, based on mutually agreed on objectives, measures and values.
Honest, cost-saving evaluation and advice
Beware of assessments intended to sell you more expensive project management and consulting services. Assessments, speaking and coaching are our core services. We don't hope to augment your team with outside management, developers, methodologies and tools. We hope to help you see for yourself exactly what action steps your team can take in your environment to prevent overruns, rework and failure – now, and in the future.
Beware of assessments sold by senior partners, but performed by junior consultants who won't dare tell you what they think you wouldn't want to hear -- or have the experience to find anything you didn't already know.
We can also mentor or coach your staff, to ensure optimal implementation and transfer skills. Because we're tired of projects failing and want to improve conditions for IT professionals, we created Failure Prevention AssessmentsSM.
What is a Failure Prevention AssessmentSM?
A Failure Prevention AssessmentSM is an intensive, expert review that surfaces the causes of failure in in-house software development projects. By reviewing your strategy, objectives, project plan, data structures, and data delivery practices, we can identify strategic or "quick win" opportunities and best practice ideas that you may not have thought of.
We work on site and remotely, on a fixed fee basis. Because we work in parallel to your team's schedule, there is minimal interruption to your staff's ongoing progress. We're told our insights and questioning improve internal communications, morale, and help staff see for themselves how to progress faster.
Best of all, there's no risk to you.
Because we have spent the last twenty years refining data modeling, data management, and data delivery processes in a wide range of industries, we can bring you powerful ideas and best practices that prevent waste and save you time, money, and effort. If we don't, you don't pay. That's how confident we are that we can make a significant difference to your organization.
Failure Prevention AssessmentSM
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Benefits
- Prevent waste, failure, and severe overruns.
- Avoid rework and overkill.
- Stop working on what cannot succeed.
- Reframe unobtainable objectives.
- Free up resources for more productive pursuits.
- Save time and money.
- Measure what matters.
- Clarify objectives among staff.
- Prevent post-installation rejection.
- Improve IT-business unit relations.
- Reduce uncertainty & improve morale, whether improvement is found or not.
- Reveal tactics that are not aligned with strategy.
- Learn more effective tactics & best practices.
- Decrease IT's overrun and failure rate.
- Improve IT's reputation.
- Raise the bar. Set a new standard of excellence.
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Detriments
- Additional fixed fee.
- Requires staff time to answer questions.
- May reveal design weaknesses.
- May only find small improvements.
- Cannot guarantee project success. Can only reveal potential causes of catastrophic failure.
- Like an insurance policy, it may not be needed.
- Not recommended for IT departments with low overrun & failure rates.
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Data Validation AssessmentSM
(Not just data quality – data existence)
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Benefits
- Verify you have all the required data.
- Know if objectives are not obtainable.
- If not, you can:
- Cancel early, or find new objectives
- Save money and prevent waste
- Re-deploy resources more effectively
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Detriments
- Increases project cost if all required data exists.
- May create resistance from people who feel their judgment is doubted.
- Only suitable for initiatives that promise to make new data available or available in new ways.
- Requires read-only access to data, or IT staff's time to run queries and email query results.
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Get Executive Management Sponsorship
(We coach your staff or garner sponsorship for you)
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Benefits
- Improve relations between IT and the business.
- Choose the right sponsors.
- Know what could prevent or preempt sponsorship.
- Document roles and responsibilities for sponsors.
- Prevent failure from lack of sponsorship.
- Pays for itself if there was insufficient sponsorship.
- Overcome political barriers.
- Develop marketing and sales skills in IT.
- Validate and publicize the project's strategic value.
- Increase confidence and communication skills.
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Detriments
- May uncover a lack of strategic value.
- Discomfort in overcoming communication barriers.
- Only for projects without sufficient sponsorship.
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Results
Either:
- Multiple sponsors who agreed to clear roles or
- Understand why sponsorship is unavailable or not needed.
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Custom Strategic Value MetricsSM
(We coach your staff or create metrics for you)
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Benefits
- Measure the impact & business value of IT projects.
- Publish quantified demonstrations of value.
- Improve IT-business unit relations.
- Prevent post-installation rejection.
- Find objectives with no business value early.
- Uncover design weaknesses.
- Discover unplanned benefits.
- Systematically capture ongoing measurements of value.
- Have a foundation for continuous improvement.
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Detriments
- Additional fixed fee.
- May uncover the need for rework if done too late.
- May surface embarrassing misunderstandings.
- Requires staff time to answer questions.
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Coaching and Mentoring
- Develop failure prevention skills in house.
- Guide staff to implement recommendations from a Failure Prevention AssessmentSM
- As-needed or ongoing assistance.
Speaking
All talks are interactive. Topics include:
- How to Prevent Failure in Your Software Development Projects
- How to Turn Risk Management into Failure Prevention
- How to Get Reliable Estimates, Accurate Status Reports and Pervasive Accountability
- How to Get Executive Management Sponsorship and Improve IT – Business Unit Communications.
Pricing
Our prices are fee-based, not hourly. Most of our services come with a guaranteed 500% minimum ROI, based on your objectives and mutually agreed upon measures and values.
Your project is unique. Until we understand your project's objectives and scope, and what you're looking for, we won't know the price, or even if we can help. Tell us what you're doing, facing, and looking for, and together we'll see if and how working together makes sense.
Free Evaluation
If you control the budget for one or more corporate software development projects and you can articulate the project's business objectives, call 203-499-6469 today. We'll find one cause of failure lurking in your project, free. Whether you choose to recognize it is up to you. Recognition is liberation. |
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