An outcome-driven method based on practice and delivery excellence
Business value is our relentless focus
We believe a focus on business value is essential to the success of our customers and their businesses. In our experience, too often projects/programs become inward-looking, focusing on the work itself and losing sight of how what is being done is meant to help the business. That is why business value is at the center of everything we do. Why we start every demonstration with a reminder of the overall goals and how what is being shown contributes to either increased revenue, revenue protection, reduced costs, or avoided costs.
We begin every engagement by creating a Value Stream Map (VSM) of the process(es) that will be impacted by the work. VSMs allow us to identify waste in the process and steps that don’t contribute to the creation of value. Improving these often improves business value and positively impacts our metrics.
Measured by metrics
In order to prove that we are making an impact on the business, we focus on tracking that impact using those measures described and documented in the seminal work Accelerate. Now often referred to as the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics. The four key metrics identified are:
Deployment Frequency (DF)
Lead Time for Changes (LT)
Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR)
Change Failure Rate (CFR)
The first two relate to speed to market, while the last two tell us the reliability of what we deliver. The VSM allows us to identify the sources for the data and baseline these values in order to demonstrate impact as progress is made.
Guided by proven principles
Once we have established a target, and we understand the metrics that we are going to impact, we need to turn our attention to what needs to be done and how we are going to accomplish the goals. We will focus on how for a moment. There has been a fair bit of dogma created and ink spilled about how to make changes in organizations and processes. While there are many approaches and alternatives, we align ourselves with ideas that have roots across a variety of agile methods. We tend to like the way that the Lean Software Development Community outlines the approach with its mix of a people-based, cross-functional approach with emphasis on delivery and reliability.
At Idea Harbor, we focus on:
Amplify Learning - Bring everyone along on the journey. Use every opportunity to teach and to share.
Deliver Fast - Make impact quickly to demonstrate the value of the approach and the ideas, as well as accelerating feedback.
Empower the Teams - Respect people, acknowledge their work, seek their opinions, remove roadblocks and barriers.
Defer Decisions - Delay decisions as much as possible until they can be made based on facts and not on uncertain assumptions and predictions.
Eliminate Waste - If you don’t need it, don’t do it. If some activity can be bypassed or automated, do it.
Build Quality In - Ford used to say that “Quality is Job One”. Make sure that the team is validating all of its progress.
Optimize the Whole - Optimize the whole value stream, not just individual functions or teams
Creates solutions tailored to your customers
Together our focus, metrics, and principles allow Idea Harbor to meet our Customers along their journey to becoming a world-class delivery organization. Proven through practice, we use our experience and insights to help our customers implement tailored solutions for their Cloud, Data/AI/ML, and Platform Engineering needs. Whether in the cloud or on-prem.
We are not resellers and thus do not have a particular hammer looking at all your nails. Instead, we use our opinionated and proven experience to allow you to leverage your existing investments to create the best solution for your organization and your customers.
All of the techniques and solutions described in and of themselves do not guarantee that the product/program is going to be successful. What they will guarantee is the ability to bring the features to the market rapidly while making sure that solutions are reliable and secure.
