Solve Your Organization's Most Challenging Problems
PUT PROVEN EXPERIENCE TO WORK!Leadership & Strategy
Fractional Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
If your business is new, established but in transition, struggling, transforming itself, or preparing for (or experiencing) challenging growth, proven, experienced technology leadership is essential, especially in this increasingly digital age. But not every organization needs or can afford this level of expertise on a full-time basis.
Acting as your trusted advisor, a fractional (or “virtual”) Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is in your corner, understands and can help to develop or evolve your vision and strategy and to enable your teams to deliver efficiently and reliably, while reducing cost and risk.
Let’s talk about your situation and put this valuable expertise to work for you!
Strategic Roadmap and Prioritization
In support of a clear vision and business strategy a strategic roadmap can help you to align and coordinate your stakeholders and create excitement, support, and momentum for your planned initiatives.
We believe strongly that technology exists to serve the organization and those it supports. Therefore, strategic roadmaps are most valuable when they include, support, and mutually reinforce the activities of all teams, including executive, product, sales, marketing, technology, analytics, etc.
Let’s talk about your vision and strategy and how we can help to create your strategic roadmap, align your stakeholders, and inspire excitement and confidence in your organization!
Stakeholder Meeting Design & Facilitation
Too often meetings are simply scheduled and attended rather than designed and facilitated. When we pause and consider the real cost of bringing talented people together as well as the ongoing cost of failing to align these team members and then missing the opportunity to get the most our of this alignment and their combined experience, meeting more intentionally becomes a clear priority.
Meeting design and facilitation by a neutral third party can help get the most out of the investment of costly resources that a meeting requires.
Let’s discuss your stakeholders and meeting facilitation needs and bring them together!
Create or Respond to Request for Information (RFI) and/or Request for Proposal (RFP)
A Request for Information (RFI) is a document that solicits information from potential providers of desired products and services and that often serves as the first step in a formal selection and proposal process …
A Request for Proposal (RFP) is a document that describes desired products and services and solicits a formal proposal for the delivery of desired products and services, including timeframes, pricing, etc …
There is an art to creating successful RFIs and RFPs just as there is an art to responding to them. Experience, writing skill, and attention to detail are vitally important in requesting and responding.
Let’s plan your RFI or RFP request or response and generate new business activity!
People, Product & Process
Product Design / Technical Product Management (TPM)
Starting with a product vision, driving down to features, ensuring fit, outlining initiatives and epics, and defining objectives, goals, metrics, and success criteria, an experienced product designer and product manager … brings skills like analytical thinking, aesthetic sensibility, clear, complete, consistent, considerate communication, creative spirit, entrepreneurial drive, technical mastery, problem solving passion, teamwork, time management/discipline, and above all customer empathy to the table.
Let’s expand your design toolkit, augment your product design and management capabilities, and enable innovation, customer delight, and revenue growth!
Develop Actionable Requirements
Documented requirements are one of the primary technical design artifacts of an organization’s software engineering process …
Well-written requirements contain detailed, specific, and objectively verifiable acceptance criteria and establish the standard that the requirement will need to meet in order to be considered complete …
Let’s create a clear picture of what is required, lay the foundation for successful work, and give your teams and stakeholders the best opportunity for success!
Third-Party Product Evaluation & Integration
When we consider licensing and integrating a third-party software product, hopefully informed by a solid requirements “shopping list” and as the result of a careful build vs buy analysis, there can be a lot at stake (e.g. resources like time and money, reputations, working relationships, etc) and a lot of people, usually with fairly different needs and priorities, to satisfy in terms of long-term cost, perception of and reasons for success/failure, etc.
An engaging, detailed, and well-documented process, especially one that is facilitated by a neutral third party can not only ensure that everyone is heard but that everyone shares a sense of meaningful participation in the process and ownership of the resulting decision, i.e. a consensus.
Let’s build a consensus of excited, engaged stakeholders and select and integrate the right product to power your future success!
Business Process Execution Framework (BPXF)
A business process execution framework (BPXF) is composed of a tightly integrated set of technologies and standards that ensure that every business process is executed and can be accounted for and measured in the same ways. This type of framework must balance standardization against the broad range of needs that must be accommodated across the enterprise.
Let’s wrap your organization’s business processes in a framework that yields valuable insights, and enable innovation, customer delight, and revenue growth!
A/B/n Testing Framework
A/B/n testing is an objective, iterative, small-step, data-driven method of comparing two or more versions of something (e.g. a message, a page, a business process, a business rule, etc) to determine which is more effective at bringing about a desired outcome. This kind of testing is valuable because it can help to remove guesswork and instinct from the decision-making process.
This kind of testing can help gather both qualitative and quantitative user insights and can provide data that can help explain customer behavior, engagement, pain points, and satisfaction.
Organizations that survive and remain competitive make decisions based on data. Enlist the experience needed to fully envision and successfully implement a testing system that supports agile, democratized, data-driven decision-making!
Enterprise Content Management Process
High-quality content consistently attracts attention and audiences, some of whom may become customers. In addition to generating revenue, the “long tail” created by great content can reduce your reliance on expensive, time-consuming outbound sales campaigns. Instead of identifying and pursuing them, customers come to you.
Give all this, it’s important to understand what content really is and why it’s important to invest in managing it efficiently and effectively.
Let’s standardize and centralize your content management capabilities, and create a long-lasting collection of compelling content that will attract customers and generate revenue!
Registration Management Process
Registration and its related processes don’t typically get the focus they deserve. Most people think these processes are so basic that they don’t warrant much consideration. The registration/login page is often either one of the first things to be built in a new project or something of an afterthought — “What, no login page?!” (I’ve actually seen this happen, yikes).
Whether it’s recognized early on or not registration and its related processes are crucial to attracting and retaining customers, understanding who your customers are, where they come from, and why they’re knocking on your virtual front door, and enabling them to quickly and easily manage their own information without the need for time-consuming and costly customer support and without the risk of your valuable customers simply giving up in frustration.
Let’s more fully appreciate and envision your registration process cycle, and enable the virtuous circle of invitation, registration, authentication, and account management!
Campaign Management Process
Campaign management involves planning, executing, tracking, and analyzing a sales, marketing, or other type of initiative (e.g. launching a new product or service, promoting an event, etc). Campaigns like these often use tactics like messaging prospects through different channels like email, web, print, etc on about the same topic, a technique which his known as “multi-channel” or “omni-channel” campaign management.
Let’s equip your teams to plan, coordinate, and automated successful sales and marketing campaigns to drive engagement, adoption, and profit!
#dilo
Enterprise Cohort Management Process
A cohort or “audience” is a group of customers, prospects, etc who share a key characteristic or set of characteristics — demographic (who they are), behavioral (what they’ve done within a given time period), etc.
Defining and maintaining shared, standardized cohorts can be valuable because it can save time and effort (compared with creating and maintaining the same cohorts in multiple systems with different interfaces, capabilities, processes, and rules), prevents data duplication, and enables apples-to-apples comparisons of meaningful statistics …
Let’s expand your design toolkit, augment your product design and management capabilities, and enable innovation, customer delight, and revenue growth!
Asset Management Process
Considering business processes as cycles can lead to important insights in how best to model, implement, leverage, and support them, and asset management is a great example of this principle in action.
Let’s enable your organization to be the best stewards of the valuable resources they procure, create, and manage, enabling an efficient, well-equipped enterprise!
Technology & Tactics
Data Evaluation
Ever wonder why organizations with teams that follow Agile processes are not themselves agile when it comes to capitalizing on new opportunities and avoiding new threats? Why does it take months, financial quarters, even years to get things done? Why does everything take so long?
Maybe what’s being built is at least as important as how it’s being built.
Information systems are built on a foundation of data, and Cygnus Technology Services has over 30 years experience designing clear, complete, consistent data structures that efficiently and reliably power some of the most successful organizations in the world — large and small — and that enable “downstream” data consumers, e.g. reporting, analytics, training artificial intelligence (AI) models, etc, that depend entirely on the integrity, cleanliness, and clarity of this data to produce mission-crucial results quickly and accurately.
Data design isn’t something that gets much love these days, but we want to help make sure that your data foundation is solid, regardless of technical level or available resources, so we can help evaluate your existing or planned data design so that you can get started on the right foot instead of struggling to keep up!
Let’s evaluate your existing or planned data structures so that you can start collecting and benefitting from clear, complete, consistent data sets today!
#business-entity-model #relational #data #normalized #postgres #data-science #sql #microservice #script #entity #data-structures #restful-api
AAF Data Implementation
AAF Data is Deceptively Simple Technologies’ (DST‘s) Adaptív Application Foundation (AAF) Data Layer, delivering foundational business agility with Locally-Sourced, Artisanal Data™.
We want to make AAF Data’s revolutionary capabilities available to everyone, regardless of technical level or available resources, so we can help install, configure, and certify your team’s own AAF Data service instance(s) so that you can start collecting and benefitting from AAF Data’s clear, complete, consistent data sets and features without delay!
Let’s install, configure, and certify your own AAF Data service instance(s) (yes, you own your services and the data they collect — no ongoing fees) so that you can start collecting and benefitting from AAF Data’s clear, complete, consistent data sets and features today!
#business-entity-model #relational #data #normalized #postgres #data-science #sql #microservice #script #entity #data-structures #restful-api
AAF Data Customization
AAF Data is Deceptively Simple Technologies’ (DST‘s) Adaptív Application Foundation (AAF) Data Layer, delivering foundational business agility with Locally-Sourced, Artisanal Data™.
We want to make AAF Data’s revolutionary capabilities available to everyone, regardless of technical level or available resources, so we can help install, configure, and certify your team’s own AAF Data service instance(s) so that you can start collecting and benefitting from AAF Data’s clear, complete, consistent data sets and features without delay!
Let’s install, configure, and certify your own AAF Data service instance(s) (yes, you own your services and the data they collect — no ongoing fees) so that you can start collecting and benefitting from AAF Data’s clear, complete, consistent data sets and features today!
#business-entity-model #relational #data #normalized #postgres #data-science #sql #microservice #script #entity #data-structures #restful-api
AAF Data Training
AAF Data is Deceptively Simple Technologies’ (DST‘s) Adaptív Application Foundation (AAF) Data Layer, delivering foundational business agility with Locally-Sourced, Artisanal Data™.
We want to make AAF Data’s revolutionary capabilities available to everyone, regardless of technical level or available resources, so we can help install, configure, and certify your team’s own AAF Data service instance(s) so that you can start collecting and benefitting from AAF Data’s clear, complete, consistent data sets and features without delay!
Let’s install, configure, and certify your own AAF Data service instance(s) (yes, you own your services and the data they collect — no ongoing fees) so that you can start collecting and benefitting from AAF Data’s clear, complete, consistent data sets and features today!
#business-entity-model #relational #data #normalized #postgres #data-science #sql #microservice #script #entity #data-structures #restful-api
AAF Data Support
AAF Data is Deceptively Simple Technologies’ (DST‘s) Adaptív Application Foundation (AAF) Data Layer, delivering foundational business agility with Locally-Sourced, Artisanal Data™.
We want to make AAF Data’s revolutionary capabilities available to everyone, regardless of technical level or available resources, so we can help install, configure, and certify your team’s own AAF Data service instance(s) so that you can start collecting and benefitting from AAF Data’s clear, complete, consistent data sets and features without delay!
Let’s install, configure, and certify your own AAF Data service instance(s) (yes, you own your services and the data they collect — no ongoing fees) so that you can start collecting and benefitting from AAF Data’s clear, complete, consistent data sets and features today!
#business-entity-model #relational #data #normalized #postgres #data-science #sql #microservice #script #entity #data-structures #restful-api
Mission Brief
I’m a big “mission statement” guy. One of the first lessons I learned in this business (thanks, Kent!) was that a well-crafted mission statement with buy-in from the team can make the difference between project success and failure. I basically won’t start any new project, initiative, etc without a written statement describing what we intend to accomplish, why it’s worth doing, and how we’ll know when we’re done.
As the years have gone on and I’ve had the opportunity to see inside of hundreds of organizations and teams, I’ve also learned that it’s also extremely useful to have a document that collects all the relevant, high-level project information so that it can be found easily and so that a quick review will tell anyone anything they need to know about the project.
Let’s document the mission, it’s purpose, and those involved improving both internal alignment and external transparency!
#considerate-communication #strategic-roadmap #c4-model #erd #bpmn #dmn #user-stories
Day in the Life Of (DILO)
A Day in the Life Of (DILO) presentation graphically illustrates and dramatizes the differences between an organization’s current state and a future state where a new process, system, or capability has been put in place, enabling stakeholders to envision the value of investing in this change.
Let’s help your stakeholders and prospects imagine and appreciate the value of solutions you can create aligning and convincing decision-makers to take action!
C4 Technical Design Diagrams
The C4 Model for Visualizing Software Technical Design was developed as a way to help software development teams describe and communicate software technical design both internally and with non-technical stakeholders, both to document up-front design intentions and to retrospectively document an existing codebase. It’s a way to create maps of your systems and source code with all-important context, at various levels of detail and abstraction (Context > Containers > Components > Code), in the same way you would use a tool like Google Maps to zoom in and out of a geographical area of interest.
Let’s document your technical design intent and existing system components and interactions enabling clear communication with business stakeholders and technical teams!
Business Entity-Relationship Modeling
Each business entity model consists of name, attribute, data type, relationship (cardinality, ordinality), and dependency data and metadata (e.g. minimum and maximum values, validation criteria, etc), as well as any entity-specific scripted lookup/reference data.
These models can be used to create corresponding data structures, e.g. database tables, microservices, application programming interface (API) documents, and user interface components, and can be grouped in the business domains to which they belong.
Let’s identify and model your organization’s key business entities positioning you for better data collection and analytics, automated processes, and business rule definition!
Business Process Modeling and Automation
Modular, reusable, self-documenting, executable business process models can be created and maintained using the global Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard, i.e. these models are not just pictures of business processes; they are the business processes. Behind the scenes, the modeling tools automatically create executable XML code as the process steps are established and refined.
Non-technical stakeholders find these diagrams easier to understand for business processes than simple flow charts and much easier to understand than UML Activity diagrams or source code, making them perfect for collaborative process design and for establishing a shared, graphical understanding of process flow between process owners and technical teams.
Let’s identify and model your organization’s key business processes positioning you for better collaboration between non-technical stakeholders and technology teams, business process automation, and business agility!
Business Rule (Decision) Modeling and Automation
Modular, reusable, self-documenting, executable business rule or “decision” models can be created and maintained using the global Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard, i.e. these models are not just pictures of business rules/decisions; they are the business decisions. Behind the scenes, the modeling tools automatically create executable XML code as the process steps are established and refined.
Non-technical stakeholders find these diagrams easy to understand (and with some training even to maintain) for business decisions, making them perfect for collaborative decision design and for establishing a shared, graphical understanding of business rules between business owners and technical teams.
Let’s identify and model your organization’s key business rules/decisions positioning you for better collaboration between non-technical stakeholders and technology teams, business decision automation, and business agility!
Application Programming Interface (API) Design
REpresentational State Transfer (REST or “RESTful”) application programming interfaces (APIs) are one of the most important tools and technical design artifacts we have for documenting and utilizing system services and data…
Granular, well-structured APIs are also key enabler of vital business capabilities like business process modeling and A/B/n testing.
Let’s plan and document your organization’s APIs maximizing the ease with which then can be used to understand and leverage your valuable services and data!
More Effective User Stories
User stories are one of the most important tools and technical design artifacts we have for documenting system requirements. Good, actionable user stories enable accurate, consistent estimation and efficient, complete delivery of high-quality software features without defects or the need for rework …
Aided by the structure of the Gherkin syntax, the process of thinking through and writing clear, consistent, considerate, complete, and actionable user stories with objectively verifiable precondition and postcondition acceptance criteria will serve us well. It requires discipline and time, but the time and other precious resources saved in the effort will much more than pay for itself.
Let’s improve the way we document requirements in user stories reducing defects and rework!
Pragmatic Agile Process
It’s hard to overstate just how radical the ideas introduced in the Agile manifesto were and how different the world was when they were introduced …
Like most processes, the steps must be understood and followed in order to be successful. Think about the mess that the process of baking a cake would create if the purpose or importance of certain ingredients or steps were misunderstood, the wrong ingredients were used, the right ingredients were used in the wrong proportions, or the steps were skipped or performed in the wrong order.
Let’s understand, select, and implement that Agile processes that will most benefit your organization, improving quality and collaboration between business stakeholders in order to predictably deliver real value to your customers!
Coding Standards and Code Review
Coding standards are a set of rules and best practices intended to result in cleaner, more readable, more consistent, more performant, more efficient, more secure, more maintainable code with fewer defects …
Structural consistency and readability impact code maintenance more than any other factors, and maintenance makes up 75% of the total cost of code, compared with the 25% required to create it initially.
All of this makes it vitally important to see software development as a team activity rather than a solitary one and as a process with a large but largely hidden impact on an organization’s bottom line, both directly and indirectly …
Let’s establish team coding standards and organic ways to ensure that they are followed in order to improve compliance and code quality while reducing costs, defects, and time to value!
Coding Interview
When hiring software engineers, organizations need to assess each candidate’s problem solving, design, and implementation abilities while also getting a feel for how s/he might fit into the team and the organization’s overall culture. Early in an organization’s history, each hiring decision may represent the organization’s ultimate success or failure.
Organizations try to do all this in a number of different ways, many of which end up testing things that don’t really matter and that may be perceived by candidates as irrelevant and even as annoying or insulting. This is a crucial phase where inadvertent miscommunication can lose valuable talent.
It’s important to be clear by keeping the most important things front and center.
Let’s find these spectacular people and fill your organization with talent who can help to find and deliver the answers that you and your customers need!