AGILE CONSULTING SERVICES
Agile frameworks help organizations manage changing priorities, increase team productivity, provide better visibility, and go to market faster. These benefits provide companies the competitive advantage in a fast paced digital world.
PCG has been providing waterfall, iterative and agile services for over 20 years and bring a wealth of knowledge, insights and experience to the table. We provide strategic and tactical consulting, as outlined below, for companies across the world.
WHAT IS AGILE ?
ASSESSMENTS • SERVICES • SOLUTIONS
Implementing agile in an organization not only impacts delivery teams, it will influence how organizations handle annual planning, portfolio management, financial management, capacity planning, team structures, operations, and employee training. Most agile initiatives fall short when only taking into account delivery team components.
Agile is an approach encompassing multiple iterative delivery practices (e.g. Continuous Delivery, Extreme Programming, Kanban, Lean, Scrum, Scrumban) as well as a handful of scaling frameworks (e.g. SAFe, LeSS, DAD). These practices share many of the same principles; primarily differentiated by their practical application and approach.
Agile promotes a collaborative environment between teams, leaders, and users to provide a continuous delivery of products and services. Agile frameworks embrace changing needs and measure success through the production of well-designed products. Agile teams strive to maintain a sustainable pace while continually reflecting on how to become more effective and efficient.
Experienced Agile organizations will have notable success in delivering value to the customer, although it is important for new adopters to walk before they run. Companies interested in agile should be open to continuous team interaction, increased business involvement, simplifying process, reducing documentation, and accepting change.
HOW CAN PROJECT CONSULTING GROUP HELP?
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PCG has been at the forefront of product, software, and service delivery frameworks and disciplines for more than 20 years. In our experience, organizational change management is the most critical component for adopting Agile. We are frequently asked to speak and provide insight into industry best practices and standards.
About 15 years ago we expanded our capabilities to include the rational unified process (RUP), providing our clients the concept of iterative development and delivering business value incrementally in a time-boxed cross disciplined approach. Over the past 10 years, we developed our agile practice, including our proprietary component playbook and ARTS program. Organizational characteristics will shape a company's optimal playbook.
We packaged some of the more common service offerings below, although PCG will provide a tailored service to meet your specific business needs. PCG provides advisory, strategic, and tactical execution services. Our senior consultants work with leadership teams to address opportunities and challenges, determine options, set direction, and design a pragmatic approach. Our delivery consultants execute upon that vision.
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Inform & Advise
Coach the organization and the employees who carry out personal information processing of their GDPR obligations.
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Monitor Compliance
Track compliance gaps and manage associated risks. Prioritize remediation activities including awareness campaigns, training, and implementations.
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Oversee DPIAs
Provide advice where requested regarding data protection impact assessments and monitor performance.
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Regulator Engagement
Act as the point of contact for the supervisory authority as needed.
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800-731-7153
Agile frameworks help organizations manage changing priorities, increase team productivity, provide better visibility, and go to market faster. These benefits provide companies the competitive advantage in a fast paced digital age.
PCG has been providing waterfall, iterative and agile services for over 20 years and bring a wealth of knowledge, insights and experience to the table. We provide strategic and tactical consulting, as outlined below, for companies across the world.
PCG has been at the forefront of product, software, and service delivery frameworks and disciplines for more than 20 years. In our experience, organizational change management is the most critical component for organizations adopting Agile. We are frequently asked to speak and provide input into industry best practices and standards.
About 15 years ago we expanded our capabilities to include the rational unified process (RUP), providing our clients the concept of iterative development and delivering business value incrementally in a time-boxed cross disciplined approach. Over the past 10 years, we developed our agile practice, including our propriety component playbook and ARTS program. Organizational characteristics shape the optimal playbook
We packaged some of the more common service offerings below, although PCG will provide a tailored service to meet your specific business needs. PCG provides advisory, strategic, and tactical execution services. Our senior consultants work with leadership teams to address opportunities and challenges, determine options, set direction, and design a pragmatic approach. Our delivery consultants execute upon that vision.
AGILE CONSULTING SERVICES
The global threat environment has intensified resulting in business continuity, disaster recovery, crisis management, and emergency response becoming an area of focus for board of directors, executive leaders, clients, customers, and regulators. This increased focus has resulted in greater maturity and heightened expectations around response, recovery, and communication capabilities.
Business continuity management identifies these potential threats and impacts to your business, creates the organizational resilience and recovery capabilities for an appropriate level of response, and safeguards the interests of your customers, employees, reputation, and value. Potential threats include items such as natural disasters, technological failures, data breaches, human error, fire, terrorism, lawsuits, misconduct, acts of violence, labor action, or drop in share price.
There are multiple components encompassing a robust business continuity program, in addition to several ancillary items such as event/incident management, disaster recovery, crisis management, and emergency response. The terminology used within industries, by regulations, and across vendors is inconsistent at best, so we recommend focusing on the components rather than debating the nomenclature. Below are the components.
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OUR AGILE COMPONENT SUMMARY
YOUR COMPLIMENTARY DISCOVERY SESSION INCLUDES:
Dedicated time with a PCG Agile Expert
Identify Goals and Strategies
OR
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A Review of your Current-state
Define Future-State Needs
EXPERTISE • CONSULTING SERVICES • SOLUTIONS
Project Consulting Group
Organizational Culture
The right organizational culture and mindset is essential for supporting an agile environment. It needs to encourage the principles to promote innovation and value based work alongside continuous learning, improvement and delivery. The right culture encourages and supports these concepts, while bridging the gap of any perceived or actual challenges.
Organizational Structure
How a company structures their people and resources can influence the value received from agile. Many traditional models were optimized for greater control and compliance rather than speed and agility. Aligning people and resources to products and value streams helps deliver the most benefit in an agile environment.
Portfolio Management
Conventional project portfolio management practices (annual planning, business case prioritization, resource balancing, project execution, benefit realization) need adjustment to support and operate in an agile environment. Aligning work to products, value streams, and key performance indicators allow for increased responsiveness, predictability, and results.
Team Alignment
How an organization aligns resources is a key aspect of agile environments. It is difficult to support the concepts of predictability and continuous improvement in an environment where teams are short lived. Rather than creating temporary teams for work, the work should flow through long lived and self directing teams especially where the demand is persistent.
Product and Project Management
Many organizations continue to balance product and project concepts. Companies do not need to choose one or the other, but rather utilize concepts as appropriate. Enterprise project activities, product concepts, and agile development need to work in conjunction. Project activities encompass business operations, enterprise architecture, governance, compliance, and other units.
Similar to project stage gates, agile release planning should perform a financial appraisal of projected costs and revenues. Although, unlike traditional methods, the concept of incremental release allows for near real-time benefit tracking and financial steering from early business and key performance indicators. Some companies employ a "budget defines work" versus "estimate defines budget" approach.
Financial Management
Lifecycle Frameworks
Some organizations transition fully to agile while others retain their waterfall approach to support heavy requirement or timeline sensitive work (e.g. regulations). Companies may adopt multiple practices under the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) model such as Scrum and Kanban. Scaling frameworks (LeSS, SAFe, SoS, DA) is another layer similar to traditional program management. .
Operational Alignment
Business and IT operations need to work in union with the agile development and agile delivery teams. DevOps is the practice of aligning IT operations with planning, coding, build, testing, releases, deployments, operations, support, and monitoring. BusDevOps streamlines the entire value stream, including customer service and product support.
Project Office Alignment
The project management office should be enhanced to support an agile organization. This may include items such as full value stream management, non-invasive governance, standards and tools, support services, professional development, portfolio management, capacity management, financial management., vendor alignment, and executive reporting.
Vendor Alignment
Integrating a non-agile vendor or partner with an agile organization or team requires a defined strategy and approach. Adjusting existing partnership lists or vendor agreements is one option. Another option is to incorporate a blended approach to address dissimilar delivery frameworks and mindsets such as culture, language, interaction, cadence, and artifacts.
Metrics and Reporting
Portfolio, program, and delivery team metrics should be used to report progress, measure performance, and promote continuous improvement. Example metrics include business value and customer satisfaction indicators, quality (escaped defects), productivity (cycle times, velocity, burndown), project (cumulative flow, code coverage), and team health (morale).
Agile Team Ceremonies
A standard set of activities and cadence is performed by agile teams. Activities vary based on the framework utilized, but include items like release/sprint planning, daily stand ups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives. This item, alongside the agile practices component, are key elements for creating an agile organization, although often mistaken as the only items.
Agile Practices
Agile practices include items a team utilizes for delivery. These practices vary by framework, but include items like backlogs, grooming, epics, user stories, story points, velocity, definition of done, acceptance criteria, and refactoring. Practices are preformed in a team environment and facilitated by roles like scrum master or product owner. Jira is a common tool used to help manage these items.
Provide Top Talent
PCG employs subject matter experts and leaders across the industry leading agile frameworks.
Deliver Tailored Approaches
Every organization has unique challenges and demands that require flexible service offerings.
PCG solutions balance people, processes and tools to help drive change and stakeholder alignment.
Drive Organizational Change
"PCG did a tremendous job with our project. They built a strong rapport with the business owners, which helped create trust and confidence."
- Manager at a Multinational Bank and Financial Services Company
IIBA Premier Sponsor
Fast 50 Company
PMI Corporate Partner
Project Consulting Group
Certified Consultants
READINESS ASSESSMENT
This service assesses the organization’s overall readiness to adopt agile , identifies areas at risk, and provides recommendations to significantly increase the likelihood of project success.
VALUE ASSESSMENT
This assessment is focused on common challenges and obstacles an organization experiences when not seeing value from their efforts. This assessment targets high value areas for improvement.
GAP ANALYSIS
This service analyzes the current-state to identify gaps and actionable recommendations. We offer two versions; an accelerated approach for scoping and a deep-dive approach for planning purposes.
MATURITY ASSESSMENT
This service assesses the degree of maturity across the components. The results are mapped to a capability maturity model including the findings, level designation, and maturity improvement roadmap.
ASSESSMENT SERVICES
CAPABILITY SERVICES
ORGANIZATIONAL CAPABILITIES
This service addresses organizational culture, structure, and value streams essential for supporting an agile environment. This includes how an organization structures people and resources to create value.
DEMAND/SUPPLY CAPABILITIES
This service addresses alignment of portfolio management, project offices, and product management. This includes how an organization handles capacity planning, financials, metrics, and reporting.
TEAM CAPABILITIES
This service addresses the agile lifecycle frameworks (individual team and scaling), team alignment, ceremonies, and practices. This includes standard frameworks for approach, activities, and cadence.
OPERATIONAL CAPABILITIES
This service aligns business operations (acceptance, customer service, product support) and IT operations (testing, releases, deployment, services) to support an agile delivery environment.
TOOL CAPABILITIES
This service validates organizational readiness to adopt tool capabilities. Tools include AgileCraft, VersionOne, CA Broadcom, Microsoft, Jira, Planview, GitLab, Targetprocess, and Service Now.
CI / CD CAPABILITIES
This services addresses continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery and continuous deployment practices. This includes automated tools like Jenkins, Git, and Maven.
COMPONENT CAPABILITIES
This service includes a tailored approach for one or more of our agile components described above. Component scoping and dependency alignment required to define scope under this service.
MANAGED SERVICES
ARTS PROGRAM
This service provides end-to-end transformation services including assessment, road-map, transformation, and scaling (ARTS). The team includes strategic advisers, practitioners, and project oversight.
DELIVERY TEAM ONBOARDING
This service provides an accelerated approach for taking teams from concept to practical execution of agile ceremonies and practices. This service includes real-time support to the agile delivery teams.
STAFFING SERVICES
TRANSFORMATION LEAD
The transformation lead partners with stakeholders to align the organization on strategy while promoting awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement (ADKAR) of benefits.
PRODUCT OWNER
The product owner is responsible for delivering product value. This includes working with stakeholders in developing a vision, managing the product backlog, and helping set priorities.
DEVOPS SUBJECT EXPERT
The DevOps subject matter expert helps companies leverage DevOps behavior, processes and technology in support of a fast-paced agile delivery environment.
AGILE COACH
The agile coach helps teams or individuals adopt or improve upon their agile methods and practices. The coach role is part embedded trainer and part consultant; an adviser to team members.
SCRUM MASTER
The Scrum Master orchestrates delivery team work. This includes facilitating ceremonies, removing impediments, and minimizing distractions for team members.
CI/CD SUBJECT EXPERT
The CI/CD subject matter expert is familiar with the tools and concepts of automated continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment.
Select the service category that best aligns with your needs:
Implementing agile in an organization not only impacts delivery teams, it will influence how organizations handle annual planning, portfolio management, financial management, capacity planning, team structures, operations, and employee training. Most agile initiatives fall short when only taking into account delivery team components.
Agile is an approach encompassing multiple iterative delivery practices (e.g. Continuous Delivery, Extreme Programming, Kanban, Lean, Scrum, Scrumban) as well as a handful of scaling frameworks (e.g. SAFe, LeSS, DAD). These practices share many of the same principles; primarily differentiated by their practical application and approach.
Agile promotes a collaborative environment between teams, leaders, and users to provide a continuous delivery of products and services. Agile frameworks embrace changing needs and measure success through the production of well-designed products. Agile teams strive to maintain a sustainable pace while continually reflecting on being more effective and efficient.
Experienced Agile organizations will have notable success in delivering value to the customer, although it is important for new adopters to walk before they run. Companies interested in agile should be open to continuous team interaction, increased business involvement, simplifying process, reducing documentation, and accepting change.
Capacity Planning
Resource capacity planning (demand/allocation) practices need to support an agile workforce. Instead of planning around individuals; demand, capacity, and allocation planning align to teams. Concepts are expressed in the form of story points, velocity, cycle time, burn-down and throughput variation which can be translated to effort and financial data as needed.
CI/CD² Practices
Continuous integration (CI) is the practice of integrating code in a shared repository and performing automated testing. Continuous delivery manages the release of change in a quick and sustainable way. . Continuous deployment automatically moves code, passing a defined test suite, to production. Example tools to help manage these processes include Jenkins, Git, and Maven.
CEO of a Global Manufacturing Company
PCG has done an excellent job at leading our multi-year project.
Manager at a Government Agency
PCG is very professional and has a broad range of abilities. They took great care to identify the help needed.
PCG did a tremendous job with our project. They built a strong rapport with the business owners, which helped create trust and confidence.
Manager at a Multinational Bank and Financial Services Company
- VP of an International Agricultural and Food Company
I wanted to reach out to PCG and say thank you for a job well done!
VP of Fortune 500 Bank
I can’t express how much I appreciate the leadership and guidance PCG provided to our program.
PCG was excellent in defining and implementing the framework that has helped provide significantly improved governance and transparency.
Director of Mid-Market National Retailer
Manager at a Fortune 500 Financial Services Company
I want to make sure to recognize the great work PCG did on the project, you have certainly surpassed my expectations.
Director at a National Insurance Corporation
You have no idea how nice it is to hand off something like this to someone you know will stay on top of it and communicate progress. Great job.
PCG has been a great partner to us and if we need consulting help, we reach out. Thanks!
National Health Insurance Company