How broken is your IT? Whether it feels as if the world is on fire as soon as you enter the office, or you just need a few helpful pointers in the right direction, I can help you. My process is strongly talk-based: Talking about possible solutions allows fast iterations.
Bottleneck Analysis
What is slowing your IT down? Do supposedly simple tasks take forever? Are your tech-enabled processes slow, stuck or limit your revenue in any way? Is your tech team constantly blocked?
Teams only deliver value as fast as their weakest link, no matter whether it’s a process, person, server, printer or piece of software. Optimizations in other areas are not only fruitless, but often even counter-productive. The goal is to move the bottleneck to a known, controllable point, to unblock your IT.
The analysis will provide solutions for
- Monitoring and alerting for current process throughput
- Optimization of individual tech tools or processes
- Ways for limiting scope in a sensible way
- Team coordination or (re)structuring
- Improvements to communication & collaboration
- …
Business Capability Mapping
Is your IT strategy focusing on the right task? Is your IT team building the right product?
Business Capability Mapping identifies whether your business capabilities match your IT systems and initiatives. If your business is still in a start-up phase, we can work on a tech-driven Business Model Canvas together that will provide a clear vision for your entire company. Building upon the canvas, the analysis will focus on your existing and planned IT structure and point out strategic changes that will focus and streamline your IT.
After having defined the big picture, the insights from the top-level analysis can be applied within individual projects and teams, and provide guidance in a wide variety of areas:
- Feature scope
- UX strategy
- In-House vs. External development
- Hosting decisions
- User stories
- …
Architecture & In-Depth Code Review
What problems will you face tomorrow? Is your IT infrastructure sound? How scalable, secure and extensible are your systems?
„It works!“ is never enough. A seemingly innocent working MVP with bad code that is brought to production will sometimes manifest issues years later or lead to an unmaintainable mess that slows down your IT team or even entire company.
This analysis will identify potential limitations of system architecture, infrastructure or code, so you can make an informed decision on whether these are relevant today or can be tackled later. Additionally practical suggestions will accompany every identified area of concern. You can decide on the level of detail you need while I also analyze
- Architecture of automated tests / CI pipelines
- Deployment system
- Performance and Scalability
- Issues when entering new markets (i18n, extensibility)
- Code quality & readability *
- …
* PHP, Java, TypeScript, other languages upon request; advice for projects not based on a language I feel comfortable with, could be brought in from third-parties from my network of experts