services
Project Management
We provide professional project and software management services for organizations that are interested in:
- Adopting project management best practices within the framework of their culture
- Ensuring that one or more critical projects achieve their stated organizational objectives
- Integrating collaboration into their approach to project management, recognizing that a team dedicated to a successful project outcome is far more powerful than a project manager flying solo
And yes, FifthDiscipline deliberately and consciously makes a distinction between project management and software management. Although traditional project management skills like risk analysis, planning and scheduling and estimating are all part of software management, they are not sufficient - as we suspect many organizations have learned the hard way. We are confident that the following additional capabilities are what make the difference between success and a quagmire:
- Managing and motivating a team of software and quality assurance engineers
- Effectively planning for iterations and the inevitable changes that will come
- Managing stakeholder expectations and vendor relationships
- Translating business requirements into well-architected technical plans
- Understanding technical issues and distilling them into language that non-technical team members can process
- Measuring real progress toward tangible objectives
FifthDiscipline can help your projects succeed.
SharePoint consulting
SharePoint is a powerful and widely adopted technology, perhaps one of Microsoft's most innovative and successful products, bringing collaboration, document management, and personal, departmental and enterprise intranet capabilities within the reach of all organizations. But its power and flexibility can become problematic if improperly planned, architected or managed. For example, we've seen organizations:
- Use the power of its API to programmatically develop powerful applications with little thought to deployment or long-term maintenance
- Release SharePoint to the enterprise without a corporate information architecture, governance and alignment to business objectives
- Establish SharePoint as a corporate repository for critical document management, with little thought given to retention policies, version control and planning for scalability, backup, retrieval and search
- Allow the development of intranets and MY SITES with inadequate training or support structures in place
FifthDiscipline can help ensure that you get the most out of your SharePoint investment.
Integration between IT and Marketing and Social Media Strategy
The recent convergence of Marketing and Social Media Technologies (e.g., Facebook, blogs, on-line services, Twitter, etc.) has created both a remarkable opportunity and a genuine problem for many large organizations. They find themselves trying to quickly adjust their marketing strategies, budgets and technology to effectively:
- Rebuild or modify their existing web sites to stay “in the conversation” and engage with customers and business partners in new ways
- Develop a strategy to blend their brand and customer demographics with a dizzying array of technical platforms, services and vendors
- Develop a next generation employee portal that “re-enfranchises” existing, often jaded employees
- Manage the program, often comprised of several related but discrete projects, to implement this strategy
- Measure the results and adjust accordingly
FifthDiscipline has the real-world experience to help organizations make sense of this rapidly changing field and steer a course to success.