Eliminate the Fluff

I have been working in Business Analytics for about 20 years, and for a good part of that, focused on aligning teams of consultants for projects. A lot of thought goes into putting these teams together.  The most important attributes to consider are technology expertise and domain knowledge.

Consultant profiles span a myriad of technologies, so what someone looks like ‘on paper’ from a technology expertise perspective can be deceiving. Technical expertise can be the most difficult to assess from a customer’s point of view.  You’re buying into the fact that the consulting firm may have done this successfully in the past, though perhaps with a vastly different set of characters.

After three or more projects, one generally has enough domain expertise so they no longer have to fake it.  In the ‘full-service’ consulting model, juniors would be put on the team as billable consultants, learning both technical skills and domain knowledge on the client’s nickel.

Before founding RMDA, I worked on a projects with an experts in EPM that involved Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Analytics. Each resource billed around from between $150/hr at the low end to $225/hr+ on the upper end.  So in in just one month, for a team of just three resources, the client was billed around $100,000.

The Less is More Paradigm

During the build of the project, it took effort to make sure the right hand know what the left hand was doing. Precious time and money at $200/hour could be spent, for example, on naming conventions. This overhead adds cost and risk to the project.

With a ‘less is more’ mindset, RMDA challenges this resource alignment method and dares to ask, “why not?’  Why not reduce the footprint related to business analytics to fewer, pinpointed resources?

The paradox is, you can leverage the underlying technology investment in the ‘to be’ state better, while retaining more of the enhanced, prized intellectual capital you wanted to attain in the first place.

Combining an agile approach with experience in the business analytics domain as practitioner’s, transformative results can be delivered without the layers.

RM Dayton knowledge worker engagements consist of fewer, but laser focused resources, without the fluff – an approach that has earned the honor of being one of The Silicon Review 50 Most Admired Companies of the Year. Because you don’t have four or five experts sitting around, when one or two pinpointed resources would do, you save time and money while reducing project risk.

We can do this, as RMDA is not focused on ‘all’ IT, but rather, is focused solely on advanced analytics.