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POINT OF VIEW

Introduction

Digital transformation is a call for companies to adopt digital technology to improve efficiency, value, and ability to innovate. Done properly, digital transformation will change the way people work, how information flows around an organisation, and how customers relate to them.

Digital transformation is not a quick fix, but there should be incremental benefit to demonstrate progress, keeping stakeholders engaged and building support for strategic change.

To support innovation, enterprise technology must be optimised for change.

At Responsiv, we have experience supporting the whole journey, however there may only be an element of the overall plan where support is needed today.

Whether you are wanting to transform customer experience, are working out how best to address business risk and efficiency, or looking to improve the operations of an existing capability, Responsiv has worked with clients to successfully deliver their change priorities.

But what has this got to do with consulting? Lots. And here’s what we mean by that…

[1] Business Consulting

Helping customers translate a business problem into successfully adopted new ways of working is a critical outcome of digital transformation. Responsiv Consultants have experience in commercial and public sector organisations, helping them understand how problems and opportunities can be addressed through a coordinated mix of technology, people, and change.

We support the programme to produce an actionable plan, with the commitment from key stakeholders.

Problem Definition

Customers often identify a range of issues that they wish to address. These may be an overlapping set of goals, opportunities, internal challenges, changes in their marketplace or customers’ expectations.

Helping define and structure these issues and identify any underlying root causes, allows them to be addressed effectively and strategically. Many business problems are inherently ‘messy’ where gaining a clear view of the problems allow stakeholders to coalesce behind shared plans and a direction of travel.

Exploration Workshops

Different parts of an organisation will have different perspectives, priorities, and interest in the elements of an overall solution to organisational issues. Responsiv will facilitate exposing these elements in structured ways and across teams so that people can appreciate the whole issue and their team’s roles in creating and solving their organisation’s challenges. This will also provide an appreciation of the bigger picture.

Strategy Creation

A business strategy helps provide organisations with a structured path and clear directions to follow. This may include the need to address an external change, to enhance internal capability, restructure how capabilities are delivered, or address a changing technology landscape.

Responsiv has extensive experience developing client strategies that support stakeholders and are followed through to delivery.

Business Analysis

A structured approach to business analysis ensures we understand the whole problem and the elements that must be changed. Whilst a technology capability may be a critical enabler, often requirements around culture, skills, structures, and governance need to be understood so necessary change can support the technology and deliver the impact that is desired and necessary.

Candidate Solutioning

Implementing any complex change will have many options for how that will be achieved. Exploring them at a high level allows stakeholders to understand which options are preferred, and whether those changes are worth the investments. Understanding how options will impact people, technology, organisational structures, partners, customers, and other stakeholders enables the organisation to make better decisions about which directions are most likely to deliver the desired outcomes.

We can help identify and define those options, in line with stakeholders’ business priorities, so the technology solutions can be considered alongside wider needs.

Transformation Definition

Change is often complex. Defining what is needed and ensuring there is the desire and budget for all the elements necessary to achieve a transformation is critical to success. With clarity around the transformation requirements, a client can more clearly understand its responsibilities and the gaps it must bridge to ensure a successful outcome. Ensuring the programme is deemed successful by stakeholders is also imperative.

Responsiv will work with your project teams to ensure the technology enabled change programme has all the necessary issues suitably planned. Our expertise covers the complex technology elements as well as the data, governance and people considerations that are part of a successful technology transformation.

[2] Decision Support

Once a problem is defined, and a strategy is in place, further detailed planning is critical to ensure all the elements happen, and the right delivery plan of internal and partner capabilities are chosen.

Responsiv use our experience and proven approaches to ensure high quality decision making using structured methods to reduce risk and maximise stakeholder confidence.

Market / Vendor Analysis

Understanding the market to address a need can be a complex mix of new technologies and partnership models, balanced with an organisation’s existing capability, technology choices and suppliers.

This landscape will have a significant impact on the benefits of different vendors and technology choices when seeking out solutions to a business need.

We bring our experience and knowledge to identify candidates and then assess their strengths and weaknesses in a structured methodology against agreed criteria.

Options Generation

Complex technology centred decision making usually has several credible options, not least the ‘do nothing’ option. We generate the options through engagement with stakeholders, producing a report outlining the different choices, considered through various lenses (technology, people, strategy, etc.) to provide a formalised input into decision making bodies. These may be used within the organisation itself or for external bodies, such as group level boards or cabinet office.

Procurement Support

Complementing an organisation’s procurement team with SME skills ensures a more effective buying process. This may include confirming that qualifying questions and effective scoring identify the key measures of a successful outcome, or supporting functional and procurement staff to assess and challenge the submissions that are made.

Enterprise/ Solution Architecture

Responsiv will provide architectural support at an enterprise level and in support of specific solutions. Our skills will ensure the necessary capabilities are identified and provide resources to augment existing teams, or where necessary define and develop the architecture capability, developing the skills of the client’s internal team to take over responsibility.

We will support existing architecture processes and deliverables or help develop improved standards alongside internal stakeholders and SMEs.

Delivery Planning

Responsiv has a long history of delivering technology-based projects to clients on time and on budget, often guaranteed through fixed price contracts. This has been achieved by robust planning and contract definition, ensuring risks are identified and mitigated, and responsibilities are clearly understood and actioned.

Responsiv helps organisations to define plans to manage the delivery of projects and programmes within their own organisation. We work with internal resources and leaders to ensure plans are well developed and any gaps are addressed so the client can hold suppliers to account for their commitments, maximising the likelihood of a successful delivery project.

[3] Implementation

Responsiv’s success has been built on implementing technology-based solutions for our clients. These are often complex integrations that scale as our partners grow with the ability to support their changing needs in flexible ways.

These may be system-centric solutions, needing to connect IT infrastructure together robustly, however they can be people-centred solutions where user needs and expectations are central to a successful implementation.

PaaS

Responsiv Cloud Automation Platform (RCAP) provides a flexible platform to build and run business automation and integration-based workloads. This provides clients with a powerful set of capabilities that can be configured quickly and at competitive costs to provide customers with the services they need. As the foundation of many of our client solutions, this has proven itself as a highly effective platform to efficiently implement and deploy new capabilities.

However, there are situations where another PaaS is the right answer, and we can use our skills gained through providing integrated solutions across heterogenous landscapes to deliver a successful implementation.

Bespoke Development

Where our standard platform capabilities are inappropriate for a client, or where a chosen platform needs augmenting, Responsiv has rich development skills and mature tried and tested processes to enable the development of bespoke solutions tailored to your specific needs.

Detailed Design

Responsiv can lead the creation of detailed designs to allow development teams to create implementable solutions. We follow a rigorous and well proven process internally; but also have extensive experience complementing and following client architecture and design standards.

Responsiv’s skilled developers will ensure designs meet key success criteria, for example ensuring the design can deliver against data security standards, scalability and security requirements as well as supporting anticipated future growth or the ability to make effective use of cloud services and cost structures.

Migration to Cloud – AWS, Azure, Private

Currently, most clients are actively planning to move workload from data centres to cloud, and moving services between clouds. Responsiv’s experience comes from moving client capabilities to both our own cloud and other major providers.

Our integration and automation workloads usually require interacting with other clouds, platforms, and the services they provide. Through these activities we have developed the skills to understand and manage a complex multi-cloud/datacentre infrastructure to provide a complete solution using data and services wherever it resides.

[4] Deployment

Our experience developing and running our own platform and platforms on behalf of clients has provided significant understanding of the importance and complexity of deployment planning and delivery.

As we run production solutions for many clients, ensuring a successful deployment is critical. Responsiv also use these skills and experiences to help customers plan and execute the deployment on their chosen infrastructure and delivery capability. Whether it is on premise or in the cloud, with internal staff, outsourced or a mixture, we can support the design and planning, and review proposals for effectiveness and risk.

PoC Spin Up

For many solutions, fast access to a PoC environment is critical for demonstrating approaches and giving stakeholders a real opportunity to test their requirements and understanding of needs early on. Responsiv can quickly spin up PoC environments with the chosen technologies to enable demonstration of early examples and ideas using wireframe and no-code capabilities.

The purpose of PoC environments can be expanded to assess testing plans, challenge understanding, and highlight assumptions quickly with user communities.

Dev, UAT, Prod Planning

Planning for production and non-production environments allows effective development and testing before deploying to production, addressing all the facets of a successful solution. As solutions mature, it is critical that all the aspects are well understood and robustly controlled and tested. This is especially true where many of the integration points reside outside the direct control of the projects and changes affect the complex relationship with other stakeholders who have their own business and development priorities.

Platform Optimisation (Cost, Security, Performance)

Alongside planning for delivery, it is critical that all the surrounding non-functional requirements are addressed appropriately. Many clients have a complex infrastructure of various cloud and on-prem components, with links to other partner services. Consideration for how these are optimised to achieve the right balance of priorities, including performance and cost, should be a critical project success factor.

Testing Automation for New Capability and Regression

High quality automated testing ensures requirements are thoroughly tested and any changes are comprehensively tested against a well-defined specification. Automation reduces resource demand but also ensures the widest scope of requirements and constraints are consistently checked to ensure there is no regression or any unforeseen impacts from ongoing environment changes and the development process.

[5] Operate

No solution is successful if it cannot be operated effectively. Responsiv has significant experience running production solutions for clients, complemented with a comprehensive, fully featured support capability.

Service Desk

Responsiv has a mature service desk delivered by an experienced technical team. The ticketing system ensures issues are dealt with in a timely manner relevant to the priority and impact of the issue. Solutions created by the team can be searched as you create tickets, allowing you to resolve common issues at first contact.

Upgrade Management

Keeping software components up to date is a critical part of ensuring systems are secure and supported by providers. Proactive maintenance helps reduce downtime and lowers the risk of cyber-attacks. It is also required to maintain compliance with governance standards and external regulation. We can develop and enact upgrade plans to meet these needs, ensuring all elements of the infrastructure, and business priorities are met.

Our operations process schedules these types of tasks to ensure they are identified in good time, and are acted upon before they are overdue. This is especially important where progressing change takes significant time due to the amount of planning and preparation required.

Incident Management

Responsiv Assist provides incident management services to clients to ensure their production issues are addressed appropriately, in a timely manner, and within an agreed governance framework.

We can act as a 2nd/3rd line function within a client’s existing support structure to provided a seamless escalation function, ensuring end users receive the support they need.

Hypercare

Following periods of significant change, such as a new deployment, a business event or where infrastructure undergoes major changes, Responsiv also provide Hypercare.

Responsiv Assist provides intensive support with dedicated resources who are readily available and have specific knowledge of the infrastructure. This ensures issues are quickly identified and resolved; vital where there is a significant business impact to downtime or other issues. Hypercare can be time-based or credit-based for situations where support demand is particularly high.

Assist Support – Developer, Architecture, Operate

Responsiv can provide call off contracts, so your technical staff have the ability to call upon our experienced resources to provide additional input and support resolving issues and providing high quality advice and guidance. This is especially useful for clients with a limited spread of technical knowledge, reducing the risk for individuals with no colleagues to support them.

Remote Monitoring & Diagnostics

Our operational environment provides a rich set of monitoring and diagnostic capabilities refined through our experience supporting a wide set of clients and their production infrastructures. Responsiv can design and implement a monitoring capability that can integrate with a client’s infrastructure or alternatively to the Responsiv Service Desk automatically raising tickets for critical situations, reducing the time and effort on your staff. This ensures issues are identified, and that support staff are not overwhelmed with unactionable notifications and alerts.

Next Steps

So, what now? Get in touch to find out how Responsiv Consulting will affect your next (or current) project.