By leveraging the expertise of external help, businesses can enhance their structure and organization, ultimately improving overall performance.
There are a number of reasons a company may turn to additional support to help reach new goals.
For example:
- They may have a short-term need that doesn’t justify building internal capabilities.
- There could be a noticeable gap in their skills or knowledge that requires external expertise.
- Unexpected shifts in resources and staffing may arise.
The most valuable service a technology consultant provides might actually be one that’s in your blind spot.
Striking a Balance
By virtue of having an outside perspective, a consultant can establish structure and organization in a way an internal team member rarely can.
No matter how responsive or prepared a business is, there’s always room for improvement. Optimally, a brand needs to keep services flowing daily to be competitive in today’s ever-changing landscape, which has a trickle-down effect for those striking a balance between long-term priorities and short-term fire drills.
In theory, a business must always be forward-thinking, never painting itself into corners, never trading success today for viability tomorrow. In reality, this is a difficult standard to uphold. The need to keep services flowing day to day puts employees in a position where they must constantly balance long-term priorities against short-term imperatives.
While this kind of ingenuity and flexibility is what keeps business going, it can lead to an accumulation of technical debt. Data and processes get compartmentalized across different systems that don’t talk to each other. Software tools are chosen out of convenience, rather than the best fit. Antiquated technologies remain in use for far too long. Deprecated code and processes don’t get cleaned up and turned off.
These are all signs that speed and ingenuity have been prioritized too highly over technical and structural organization.
Technology consultants are uniquely able to step into the situation described above and transform the enterprise into one with frameworks and strategies laid out, into which creativity and ambition can be funneled. Here are five ways that technology consultants can make your business better through increased structure and organization.
Flexibility
While timely delivery is always a consideration, consultants have no other role within the enterprise to balance their time. They will not be redirected from a forward-thinking project to address a short-term need. However, their hours may need to be limited to avoid additional costs and fees compared to a full-time employee who can work overtime.
This doesn’t mean a consulting project can’t adapt to respond on a daily basis. The flexibility is there to meet whatever the client’s needs may be. The project can be designed with clear, focused foresight and the implementation can stay on track to completion.
Governance
We can provide governance that meets you where you are. One strategy to avoid the chaos that comes with a lack of technical standards is to incorporate broad, enterprise-wide layers of governance that start with identifying participants involved with decision making and completing a RACI matrix analysis. While these policies can prevent major, costly mistakes, they are also, by their very nature, not fine-tuned for any specific solution. They are written from a perspective that can’t consider the differences between various technologies or scenarios.
When a technology consultant comes in, they can provide recommendations and techniques for governance appropriate to the solution being offered. An experienced consultant can prescribe code reviews, gate reviews, best practices, documentation requirements and more, knowing where the specific risks lie and where progress can be safely accelerated.
Organization
The consultant knows what a well-organized final product and production environment look like. When investing in new technologies and systems, an enterprise can do research to establish a clear vision of what the future will look like. But no amount of research can substitute for lived experience.
The consultant has already lived in these systems and implementations. They have seen the challenges and pain points that arise when scaling up, managing change, upgrading systems and more. They can anticipate and plan for these, avoiding the need to rebuild, refactor or retrofit. The right decisions are made from the start.
Best Practices
Consultants build well-established best practices that help you avoid mistakes you wouldn’t recognize until it’s too late. An example is the use of consistent naming conventions.
When building your first application in any new technology, a common instinct is simply to give it a name indicating what it does. When you have only a few applications, these are easy enough to keep track of, but if you keep adding to the collection, problems may arise. Acronyms or shorthand can naturally develop amongst employees or, as a project evolves, the original name may no longer reflect what an application actually does.
A best practice for avoiding this is to give each application a sequential use case number and use it as a prefix for every object in every system that the application will use. In any file system, database schema or repository, every artifact will be automatically sorted exactly the same way, and the application will always be easily identifiable with no ambiguity.
Readiness
Building for change is a fundamental element of the technology consultant’s skill set. When an enterprise developer creates a project, they approach it from the business requirements with which they are familiar. Their instinct is to replicate that process within the prescribed technology. The technology consultant’s perspective is to see the natural development and structure of the technology itself and incorporate the business requirements into that framework.
For example, an enterprise developer creating a robotic process automation (RPA) application that processes purchase orders stored in a SQL table would be inclined to leverage the schema of that table directly, as it’s the format they are familiar with when working with the data.
A consultant who has built many RPA applications leveraging SQL tables would translate that data into a generic format, providing RPA-specific columns and keys aligned to the RPA technology’s requirements. As in the above examples, either option would likely be fine for the first application.
But suppose the next application will require each professional to adapt the first one to process returns instead of purchases. The consultant who built for change already has a generic template and an RPA application built to consume it.
In Summary: The Consultant’s Edge
Admittedly, there are also upsides to building with internal personnel. They have intimate knowledge of the business and all the interconnected systems in place. A consultant needs to be brought up to speed on the specifics of the business they are serving. If they aren’t, and there is insufficient communication between the parties, it can lead to results that don’t accomplish what they need to.
However, as demonstrated, the consultant’s unique perspective can deliver results that far exceed those of internal resources. Main Digital consultants provide solutions designed to help businesses operate more efficiently, securely and dynamically by minimizing chaos and enhancing organization. Contact us at Main Digital to learn more about how we deliver holistic, user-centered solutions that are informed by data to help you transform your business.
Contributed By: Tom Weaver