What do you do when you have a systems integration, modernisation or migration project to deliver in your business?
Do you pull together an in-house engineering team, hoping that their day-to-day tasks still get done while you get your project over the line?
What if they’re too busy? Or what if they don’t have the domain knowledge to deliver the project?
It means you’re stuck.
And this is the challenge that a lot of our clients come to us with: a lack of engineering availability, either due to lack of time or lack of specific skills.
It’s totally understandable. Your business imperative is likely to require you to maintain a lean team, and many companies have outsourced their engineering capability.
But when the time comes for any significant integration or migration project to be delivered, you need help from somewhere – and that’s where we come in.
So, what does this look like in practice? Here’s an example of what we might do when working with you on a project:
Needs assessment
We start with a needs assessment to work out an optimal course of action. Sometimes, your systems and processes are already set up well on modern tech architecture and are in need of only a few tweaks.
Other times, you might be using a legacy on–premises setup that would work much better if there were a wholesale migration to Azure Integration Services on the cloud, or perhaps a cloud-agnostic integration technology stack so you can run multi-cloud.
We’re interested in getting to the root of what’s important to you. For example, perhaps you need to:
- modernise your data platform to stay competitive.
- update your existing software stack as it approaches end of life for support.
- comply with new security rules or other legislation.
- increase agility so you can deliver business change faster.
Whatever scenario we find, our aim is always to suggest a sensible solution that delivers the biggest business benefit to our clients.
We don’t believe in change for change’s sake, so we’ll suggest only what we think will give you a business advantage.
In other words, we won’t try to sell you a new bathroom if all that’s wrong is a leaking tap. Our interest is in diving deep into thorny technical problems, that you don’t have the time or expertise to sort out in house.
Interviewing key stakeholders
Our independent view of your setup is useful because we’re often able to see things that you can’t. But that’s not enough on its own. We also take into account what we learn from your own experts, and that means conducting interviews.
For larger projects, we assign people from our team to interview different subject matter specialists in your business. We might run separate interviewers for areas such as:
- testing
- engineering & development
- architecture, infrastructure & operations
- project and programme management
The interviews allow our team members to find out independently what you did well and what could be improved. Our interviewing team then come together to decide what decisions we would have made were we to run the project for you.
Presenting suggestions
We take what we learn from all of our discovery work and put forward a plan of action based on how we would deliver the project in the most optimal and cost-efficient way.
Often, the skillsets we bring to the table mean that we can plot a route that you might not have been able to navigate alone.
For example, imagine a financial services migration that would benefit from industry-specific expertise in areas such as payment domains, payment gateways and the Faster Payment Scheme. As these are topics we happen to know a lot about, we could run such a project in a way that a client couldn’t if they had previously outsourced the required engineering capabilities.
Our aim is always to focus on what will deliver the biggest positive impact in the quickest, easiest way.
Delivery and support
Our findings and recommendations – and how they’re adopted by our clients – determine what happens to the implementation of the project.
We look at the logistics of whether you need to construct your own teams or whether you can pass some or all of the implementation work to us.
It’s great when we can educate and upskill our clients, so we aim to give the engineering teams we work with the skills to become self-sufficient.
This means we can work towards a gradual ramp–down in our involvement on larger projects over a period of months or even years, rather than keeping our skills secret and letting things fall off a cliff when we finish work on each project.
We don’t think it’s right for clients to have to rely on us forever (unless they truly want to!) and we enjoy the projects where we can teach and support rather than simply implement and leave.
Need help with your next project?
Whether you’re short on time, or simply lacking the in-house skills to deliver your next integration or migration project, we can help. We’ll guide you through the process, from assessing your needs through to delivering and supporting your project through to completion.
