Solutions

A hallmark of mission critical enterprise initiatives is that they are almost always complex, and with good reason:

• Re-engineering core business processes involves a multitude of viewpoints and perspectives. It is essential to harmonize the needs and agendas of stakeholders from different departments and/or operating companies.
• The technology that supports core enterprise business processes is likely to have been created over time, from disparate components, with a fair amount of manual steps that compensate for deficiencies. The number of moving parts makes it easy to focus on the inconsequential while missing significant details.
• By definition a mission critical enterprise process is central to the organization's mission and therefore has a high risk of disrupting the business. This means that projects must not only succeed; they must do so while accommodating the elimination of risk throughout each step of the project lifecycle.

There is a natural tendency to respond to complexity with more complexity when exactly the opposite is needed. Simplifying complexity means discovering the essence of problems and solutions, discussing them in language that is natural to the audience, and collaborating until both the business and the project team are aligned.

“Simple” is too often confused with "lightweight" when it comes to project approaches.

We apply simplicity to processes and technology as a methodology. We simplify processes by identifying the core issues that must be examined in great detail and the extraneous issues that will only exhaust resources. We simplify technology by focusing on architecture; resulting in design approaches that allow a feature rich application to be built, modified, and maintained with a fraction of the effort of other approaches. The degree to which this works can be seen from the initial stakeholder meetings through full system deployment as represented in the following brief project overviews.