Product Description – RK0004A

Responsiv Consulting is provided specifically to augment your own projects, or to deliver a specific set of outcomes to your project or business. We provide skills and experience at all stages of project conception, build, and operation. All Responsiv Consulting engagements are subject to the Responsiv Terms and Conditions that can be found on our website (www.responsiv.co.uk).

Responsiv Consulting is delivered using a variety of different contracting models, including time and materials, fixed price and outcome-based contracts, agile delivery contracts, and custom or risk sharing agreements. This flexibility is only possible because of our confidence that we can deliver quality solutions to a specified schedule.

Your fee gives access to the whole team.

All Responsiv Consulting products are delivered by skilled staff who are backed by Responsiv. Our consultants have access to formal education as well as consulting assets from the Responsiv Method, knowledge base, and our software development organisation. They can use “Responsiv Assist” to raise questions and formally network with the rest of our business.

Responsiv Consultants are security vetted and many have government security clearance with experience working in highly sensitive or pressured environments.

Product description for purchases of entitlements after August 2020

Description

Responsiv Consulting can provide three distinct skill sets to address different stages of a change programme. We have defined these as Conceive, Build, and Operate to highlight the skills and styles of consulting appropriate to the respective stages.

Conceive

During the project/solution conception activities, Responsiv Consulting can work with you to conceive how your business problem can be effectively solved using technology. This includes helping the project to understand how the business plan translates into a technology requirement. We can support initiation activities during mobilisation of the project and the project team, including supporting your recruitment of permanent staff, project planning, and development of a stakeholder and communications plan.

Business Analysis; Requirement gathering and refinement
Architecture and design. Design for change, Design for test
Project initiation and ongoing management
Engineering models (POC, POT, RFI)

Build

Once the requirements are clear, and the plan is established we will take away and deliver individual workstreams or modules, augment your team, provide a centre of excellence, manage to the chosen planning/monitoring method (agile, iterative, waterfall), and provide consultants with the skills and experience necessary to support and accelerate your development or implementation project.

Mentoring for technical and project as well as senior leadership (knowledge transfer and critical friend)
Fixed price, Time and Materials, and custom contracting mechanisms
Highly motivated problem solvers backed by a company that understands how to deliver projects
System Integration, Process analysis and development, API design and build

Operate

Project responsibilities during our operate phase include development of appropriate documentation to support handover and ongoing operation of the solution, and provision of hyper-care for a short period after release to help assure the lack of problems in the solution. For iterative delivery projects we can provide hyper-care for the duration of the project and for a period during which the project is closing.

Design and produce technical how-to, operational, DevOps, and user guides
Handover to Responsiv Assist or your own support arrangements
Hyper-care and warranty periods
Bug fix, extension of value, and capacity management

During the last four years Responsiv Consulting has delivered over £6m of consulting, including two large scale fixed price projects to time and budget. In the period, we have delivered on smaller engagements to augment projects and to deliver fixed solution outcomes.

Technologies primarily used by Responsiv Consulting

Responsiv Consulting can provide problem solving and technical skills to almost any project, however, as a team we focus on technologies from Responsiv, IBM, OpenSource, and RedHat. We have experience with migration to cloud, Containerised infrastructure, Cloud and Kubernetes, cloud native applications, micro services, multi-cloud challenges, SaaS system integration, and much more.

Please contact us for more detail.

Software Examples

IBM

IBM Cloud packs, BlueWorks live, Process management, CASE management, Security software, Integration and API, WebSphere application server, and more.

RedHat

OpenShift, RedHat Linux, Centos

OpenSource

Kubernetes, JavaScript languages, and many of the Opensource packages,

Purchasing

To purchase this product, you require a “Consulting Agreement” suitable for the type of consulting required, and that includes a description of the scope, completion criteria, and responsibilities of each party. The agreement will state the price and conditions of delivery.

How to order

Engaging Responsiv Consulting cannot be simpler. We will want to understand the context and broad requirements in sufficient detail to write a proposal or offer for more complex engagements, or to write a Responsiv Consulting Agreement for your acceptance. In many cases a simple consulting engagement for one or two consultants can be turned around in a couple of days. More complex agreements can take longer.

We will agree a schedule and work with you to deliver your project.

Styles of agreement

This table is an illustrative guide to the different styles of Responsiv Consulting agreement available.

Description

Time and Materials

Fixed Price Outcome

Time and Materials (T&M) agreements are used when we are augmenting your project team and when the scope, completion and dependencies are unknown or cannot be defined or controlled. They are also used when it is difficult to assess delivery risk, which would otherwise result in an expensive fixed price contract.

Fixed Duration

Solution Agreements

T&M contracts are limited only by time. Our consultants can take responsibility for deliverables, contribute to deliverables, or provide other services under the contract; however, the contract itself comes to an end when the time expires and subject to no other incumbency. Materials, including subsistence expenses, are charged as separate items.

Agile Project Agreements

This means that regardless of responsibility, the contract terminates when the time runs out.

Fixed price (FP) and Outcome agreements are used to place delivery risk on Responsiv. They are our preferred way of working because it allows us to demonstrate our confidence in the Responsiv team, and gives you the peace of mind that the project will be delivered for a known cost.

To agree a fixed price, we must be comfortable that any dependencies are controlled by Responsiv, that the scope of the project is well defined and understood, and that the completion criteria and objective are reasonable.

We can provide fixed price contracts limited by time-period, for example a hypercare period. These contracts are billed in advance and state that Responsiv will make available a number of consultants to be used by your project between two dates.

Solution agreements are used to allow us to combine software, consulting, and support products into a single agreement. They work in a very similar way to outcome agreements.

Agile Project (AP) agreements are designed to be used when you require an iterative, agile delivery approach to be taken, while at the same time needing assurance that a core set of functions will definitely be delivered. An AP agreement is constructed to have a set of core deliverables and a set of stretch deliverables for a fixed or time and materials price.

Typical uses of this product

Responsiv Consulting is like a swiss army knife for consulting. It has access it a wide range of skills out of the box
and can quickly be used to address a wide variety of situations.

Responsiv Consulting for problems worth solving

Our focus on a set of products allows us to develop a real depth of skills and subject matter knowledge in those areas. The result is that our delivery is more predictable, we take more advantage of product features, and we know from experience what is possible or desirable, and what kind of effort is likely.

This does not mean that we are not open to conversations in other technical areas. For example, we have developed software to apply statistical sampling on real-time event streams to detect trends and to apply compression of telemetry and IoT data. We have solved problems of detection of failing sensors, and designed solutions that are multi-vendor enterprise architectures. If you have a problem worth solving come to Responsiv.

The following table is a summary of what we can provide at each stage of your project.

Activities

Mentoring and Education

Business Consulting

Subject Matter Expertise

Architecture and Design

OpenShift Design

Technical Reviews and Reports

Centres of Excellence

Hybrid Cloud Strategy

Solution Delivery

Conceive

Presentations and workshops, examples and reference visits.

Gap analysis between business plan and current IT capabilities.

Art of the possible product briefings and experiences.

Develop conceptual, logical, and physical architectures.

Design and use of OpenShift in public and private clouds.

Review of architecture and design documents. Provision of concepts and help in organising an architecture.

Creation and specification of the CoE.

Understanding the benefits and planning the move (or not).

Requirements and designs, concepts and planning.

Build

Over the shoulder and formal education tailored to project

Cost effective iterative development planning

Accelerated development leveraging skills & experience

Build components, deploy products, and support testing

Deployment and configuration services

Code reviews, Fagin inspections, and workshops.

Operational documentation and recruitment of staff

Performance of migration, including runbooks etc.

All installations and developments and testing

Operate

Practice and guidance on design for effective support

Support arrangements and organisations

Avoiding weaknesses in products and deployments

DevOps designs and implementation experience

Operating instructions

Operating models

Periodic support and creation of knowledge papers

Operational Instructions

Handover documents, user guides etc.

Conceive

During the conception phase of a project, Responsiv Consulting can review your business plans and determine how changes to your existing IT landscape can support its efficient delivery. If you have already determined the gaps in provision and are working to shape the projects or perform business analysis to determine requirements – then we can support your process discovery, solution envisioning, and product selection activity.

Our partner network combines seamlessly with our inhouse capability to allow us to take responsibility for delivering strategic plans, and for providing industry and technology recommendations that are based on hard practical experience.

Perhaps you have already determined the project and its requirements. In this case we can review your findings and plans against our cross-industry experience.

Bridging from Business to Technology

Our consultants can work to interpret and facilitate communication between your business owners and technical staff, including helping with identification of business processes and business functionality. Examples of this type of work include:

Business Process analysis and mentoring
System integration and data mapping
Stakeholder management and communication planning

Presentations to management and board members

Our consultants are experienced in producing easy to consume and focused presentations suitable for senior management and decision makers. We are happy to provide support for your own presentations, or to develop and deliver on your behalf. Responsiv has a number of templates and examples that accelerate this activity.

Creation of business case

Our consultants can provide input to your business case, or develop and deliver one on your behalf. Responsiv has a number of examples that accelerate this activity.

Business and Process Analysis

Our business consultants are skilled with design tooling and other techniques to support and deliver analysis of your business and its processes. Responsiv has a method and number of templates and examples that accelerate this activity.

Establishing a Project

Project managing your first software development or integration project can be daunting. Designing an integration solution that is sustainable and cost effective to operate is not simple. We can work with specific individuals in your company to support them through their first project’s full development lifecycle by providing advice and answering their questions. Thinking about scalability and resilience of the eventual solution will make a significant difference to the operational cost and efficiency.

Accelerate and justify important design decisions
Build to the strengths of each products and avoid surprises
Provision of code snippets, document templates, and white papers (assets)
Accelerate capable developers in their use and experience of the IBM products.
Education

Reviews

Documents, project plans, Blueworks Live (BWL) processes, change plans, and many more documents can be reviewed by our subject matter experts. To perform a review, we will need some context to the document and a statement of what the review is to achieve. Here are some examples of what to expect from a document review:

Component Design (single documents)

This type of review includes architectural documents, software components, models, BWL processes, requirement specifications, and plans.

To perform a component design review, we will need the component design itself, and to know what the component is expected to do, and how it is expected to be used. If you have any design standards or other requirements that are separate from the business requirements, then we will need them too.

When you request the review, you will need to tell us what we are reviewing against – any specifics.

Component design
Design guides or standards
Component specification / requirements
Review instructions

We will read through the background information and then perform a gap analysis between the document being reviewed and what we understand to be expected of it. We will then add to that any experience we may have about the general subject or problem being addressed, for example any patterns we may know about.

Our report will look something like:

Introduction: This is a review of <doc> in the context of <doc>, and <doc> specifically reviewing for <things> and constrained to <days> effort. Other considerations are <things>
Findings: <three key findings with descriptions and observations>
Body: Optional body of more detail around findings. This may require additional time.
Appendix: <all findings listed>

Depending on your request, we will produce a short presentation or written report on our findings.

Architecture Reviews (multiple documents)

This type of review is for sets of documents and reviewing overall architectures. To perform such a review, we will need to understand the context and what the architecture is expected to do, and how it is expected to be used. We will also require a workshop to discuss the architecture.

If you have any design standards or other requirements that are separate from the business requirements, then we will need them too.

When you request the review, you will need to tell us what we are reviewing against – any specifics.

Architecture logical, physical, conceptual models
Design guides or standards
Business requirements
Your Review instructions to us

Our report will look something like:

Introduction: This is a review of <doc> in the context of <doc>, and <doc> specifically reviewing for <things> and constrained to <days> effort. Other considerations are <things>
Findings: <three key findings with descriptions and observations>
Body: Optional body of more detail around findings. This may require additional time.
Appendix: <all findings listed>

Depending on your request, we will produce a short presentation or written report on our findings.

Developing an Architecture

The development and planning of a solution benefits from practice and breadth of experience. With the best developers in the world it is hard to deliver excellence when the wrong problem is the focus. Responsiv Consulting can provide experienced architects to establish the solution structure and set the direction for component designs and development.

Specifically, this includes:

Method and technique selection and education

To be agile, iterative, waterfall, Kanban, or roll the dice is sometimes not obvious. Perhaps a combination is more effective. We can support your DevOps and method adoption from experience.

Engineering models

Often solutions contain points that should be tested and proven before making significant investments in the real thing. We can help specify and develop engineering models that properly demonstrate the performance of important parts of the solution.

Lots of other things

Our architects are experienced with most aspects of large architecture delivery. They also have subject matter expertise in technologies that include OpenShift, Redhat Enterprise Linux, IBM Cloud packs, and Opensource technologies.

We have designed and delivered IoT solutions and large cloud deployments, as well as small single function solutions.

Build

When the talking is done the work to deliver must begin. We believe that it is important to maintain project momentum and to deliver to our stated schedule. Our consultants will work with your IT professionals and product owners to assure efficient delivery of the solution.

Mentoring and knowledge share

We can provide trusted and objective advice to your developers, architects, and administrative staff. Our consultants have access to Responsiv Assist to get answers to questions they do not know. Our remote support can save delays to your project and prevent teams of developers sitting around waiting for an answer.

Mentoring can include briefing sessions on product features and experiences we have with the product or type of project. Our mentoring can be used to extend your own team’s knowledge about specific features or illustrate pitfalls and good practice. It gives access to the rest of the Responsiv consulting team and their experience as well as to our knowledge base and extended network.

When using a product for the first time, or infrequently, it is comforting to know that you have an expert on hand without unnecessary delay.

We expect any informal mentoring to impact our delivery expectation by around 20%. In situations where your staff are not experienced or there are many staff, this can increase the challenge to delivery. We will discuss this problem before we start.

Developing a solution

We will assemble a team to contain the skills and capacity needed to deliver the solution to your plan. Teams run by us can include your own staff as a great way to simplify handover and up-skill developers.

Product experts and technical developers

Our IT specialists will work independently or with your team to deliver components that are unit tested and coded to a recognised standard. We can deploy software to your chosen container system or cloud, code solution components, or build entire solutions from our base in Bracknell.

You just need to imagine the possibilities and get in touch.

Developing a delivery capability

Centres of Excellence

A CoE is often used to create a known pool of experts and knowledge articles or code fragments. This can be a challenge because demanding projects can hog the resources, and experienced projects can ignore the centre.

The Responsiv approach to CoE is to:

Understand the purpose and how the centre will be measured and funded.
Establish a set of operating principles and policies, for example scope, engagement, and power
Create a communication plan with assets to socialise and inform departments of the CoE
Create an engagement model and working practices, for example creation of assets, and right to reuse
Recruit experts and deliver the service

The aim of the service is to reduce project delays due to lack of expertise in the supported products.

Developer support and mentoring

The Responsiv approach to formal mentoring is create a foundation, show, help, watch.

To create a more complete foundation we ask that your staff take the requisite courses. We can provide these courses for Responsiv, IBM, and RedHat products.

In a formal mentoring situation, we then deliver the first of a kind with your staff watching, or in some situations we deliver and then provide detailed briefings on how it was built and why.

We then expect you to help build the next of a kind. We will work together, providing help when needed and encouraging self-help, problem solving, and research.

Finally, we watch while you work. In this final part we are providing support or insights for future work or important
variants but not supporting the build itself.

Training and Education

Responsiv can develop and deliver education specific to a product in your context, or a project. We also provide off the shelf courses for products from IBM, RedHat, and Responsiv.

Project Management and technical planning

Our project managers can support planning the plan and delivery of all styles of agreement listed above.

Testing

Test planning, Test harnesses, and execution

We can develop test plans and coverage management as well as support your development or obviation of test data. We can develop test harnesses based on our existing assets, and specifically for your needs.

Operate

Operations is not generally a Responsiv Consulting product, however when we deliver a solution, we like to assure you that we are available to answer ongoing questions and generally support your use and value extraction.

Responsiv Assist is our operational support organisation and we have products specifically tailored to provide ongoing support for solutions developed by Responsiv.

Product Installation and upgrade

We can perform product installations and upgrades, including testing, review of release notes and planning. Our contribution is technical knowledge of the product and experience of other upgrades.

Installations include first time installation of supported products on your site, and support in setting up connectivity to cloud services.
Installation of new software versions, including the base product installation, appropriate fix packs and initial configurations / setup.
Upgrades include subsequent installations of software over existing supported products that are significant version changes and noted by the vendor as being new versions, or rolled up patch releases.
“just in case” assistance to developer and operational staff during upgrades to production applications, or making changes to configurations.

We will require time to become familiar with the intended installation and the requirements as well as the physical design.

Installation plan (whole plan)
Installation runbook (on the day detailed plan and rollback actions)
Installation physical model
Installation rollback plan and data handling procedures
Your installation instructions to us

We can provide a consultant to be available onsite or remotely during a specified period of time. Many customers use this to assure that their projects get to production on time.

We provide assistance with your deployment of new functionality to production environments, including deployment of changes as part of an issue resolution and/or a project/small change implementation.
Deployment of changes as part of an issue resolution and/or a project/small change implementation. Includes creation or modification of configurations and scripts.
We will assist you during deployment of objects that form part of the configuration of a supported product, for example; MQ queues, channels, BPM Applications, or API policies. Our specialists will provide feedback on your deployment and rollback planning, and be available during the deployment

Trusted Advisor and ongoing strategy support

Our consultants can work with your executives and senior technology professionals to help shape and inform IT strategy. These engagements run for several months with meetings every few weeks to review progress and answer questions or provide perspective on appropriate industry and IT trends.

Hypercare and bug fix

Our consulting engagements often include a portion that extends beyond the delivery date to allow for additional development (nice to have) and provide specific support for the solution as it is tested by real users on real data. We call this hyper-care and it can extend for several months beyond the release date to allow you to be confident that bugs and usability have been addressed. This feeds nicely into Responsiv Assist for longer term support.

During this time, we can be refining developer and user documentation, operational instructions, and troubleshooting guides.

Zoe Whyte