Posts tagged with "Consulting"

We are proud to announce that DO OK is now a verified Pangea vendor. This means that we have been recognized as part of an elite community of the top 7% software engineering companies and through our Pangea profile, we will further our commitment to transparency towards our current and future partners.

What is near-sourcing? How to start a development project fast without in-house engineers? Why run an on-site discovery workshop? We'll elaborate on these questions further. Today Finland, Sweden, and Norway experience a massive demand for all engineering disciplines. Government figures show that at least 650,000 people work in ICT, rising all the time. As technology becomes more integrated into our daily lives, the need for software, hardware, web, and embedded developers grows across the Nordic region. In addition to this equation, some available resources unfortunately only have experience with old obsolete or unfit technologies or tools - with a need for an immediate update, like with, i.e. Python 2, which is officially sunset by Python.org on January 1, 2020. Recruiting new skills is a time-consuming process. Finding the person with adequate competencies and being a match with the team is not easy. From the perspective of the result, it is often more important to bring the new service or product early to the market than have a particular skill in-house.  

To make proper technology assumptions for your product roadmap, a product owner or business analyst is not enough. The process may get complex right after the first user story you try to debrief. In this article, we share our understanding of a Technical Architect role and its value to the project. Why do we need TA explicitly? How does it differ from having a senior engineer in your team? What are the touchpoints between business analysts and technical architects?  Continue reading, and you will understand why the collaboration between these two is crucial for successful delivery.

In February 2020 PMI published PMI Pulse of the Profession that says: “Work has changed. So must the way the world thinks about projects.” We continuously need to improve our ways of working and develop our skills, but 2020 gave us a harsh lesson that we also need to be in some way agile. According to PMI, to be successful in the future, our organisations need to be agile, but also focus on the right technology and secure relevant skills. You can read further: “For the first time for Pulse, executive leaders identified which factors they see as the most important to achieve success in the future. The top three were: organisational agility (35 per cent), choosing the right technologies to invest in (32 per cent) and securing relevant skills (31 per cent).”  So let's focus on how the organisation can ensure agility in the management process for software delivery.

DO OK has been ranked 34th in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Central Europe with 710% growth over the four past years. The company is driven by its mission to help create a sustainable future, which it believes will be facilitated through the informed use of its software.

Organizations are becoming more and more reliant on business analysts (or BA’s) to help guide them through this digital transformation, examining data patterns and industry trends to identify best how to adapt products and processes in order to add value for customers and stakeholders.   But just what are the benefits of business analysis for startup founders and established companies? Why is it important to leverage the kind of learnings that a business analyst can provide for the different stages of project management? In this article, we will explore the following key benefits of business analysis for companies and startups, with a specific focus on software development projects.

It’s hard to overestimate the benefits of remote discovery workshops. Over the course of our work with many founders, startups and established companies building or refining more than 150 IT digital products and services, we’ve noticed how little understanding most leaders and project managers have of their own core values, those of their customers, and how their products fulfil those emotional needs. As the world pivots to working remotely in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, running remote workshops can help fill knowledge gaps, build consensus between stakeholders, and deliver more value-driven contributions to project planning and product development.

It would be impossible to cover the entire spectrum of business analysis tools and techniques with anything short of an encyclopedia-sized volume. In this article, we will explore a subset of business analysis techniques that we have integrated into our digital consulting at DO OK, using a methodological toolbox developed over thousands of hours working with many different clients across a wide variety of industries.

During the previous articles in this series, we’ve discussed the discovery phase of project management, the advantages of running discovery workshops for startups and the product development process, and some of the reasons why you may (or may not) want to run a product workshop. Today, we’re doing a deeper dive into how to run a product development workshop, and what to expect at different stages of the process.

In the modern business environment, data has become one of the key factors delineating the boundary between the success or failure of products, established companies, startups, and all types of business operations. Collecting, analyzing, and understanding the enormous quantities of information (over 2.5 quintillion bytes per day in 2018) generated in business interactions and everyday online activities is crucial for any successful business.

When the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2020, most of us optimistically looked ahead to what promised to be a prosperous year. And with good reason. The global economy was booming. The stock market reached all-time highs. Then out of nowhere, COVID-19 swooped in and triggered a seemingly overnight economic recession.Many business owners had to close shop. Consumer needs and preferences changed, and entire markets for goods and services dried up. Businesses have been forced to find new ways to offer value to their customers to ensure both their short and long-term survival. But that is easier said than done. To make a successful strategic pivot, an organisation must employ a highly focused and proven method to identify and deliver value to customers.Product discovery workshops are an essential tool in this regard. In this article, we will explore some popular product discovery workshops and conclude by examining a revolutionary and exciting new approach: the value-focused product discovery workshop.

Modern business analysis is more than just a tool for gaining deeper insights during project development, but also a catalyst for strategic planning and organisational change at the highest levels. Today, business analysis has become a complex research discipline, and the role of the business analyst continues to change and evolve. So, what is a business analysis and how BA bridges the gap between IT & business?

We are software developers, and that means we get to work with lots of amazing product designers, project managers, and startup founders to help define the values & goals of many great companies and products. And being part of a product or design team means that you spend a lot of time collaborating, trying to create better products in order to deliver more value to customers. When conceptualizing or designing a new product, every founder, manager, designer and developer should know when and how to plan a product workshop, why it is an important part of product development, and how to run one. In this article, we’ll discuss how to think about workshops, and when you should (or should not) run a product development workshop.

Exploring the discovery phase and what is a discovery workshop is critical for understanding the goals and business needs of any new product or startup. In this article, I am explaining the importance of the discovery workshop and details on how you run one.

According to Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, over 30,000 new products are introduced to the market annually, out of which 95% fail. Product development is undeniably challenging, but is there a way to prevent your product from becoming part of this bitter statistic? Fortunately, yes, and it involves creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). While it might seem daunting at first, taking part in a discovery workshop will make creating an MVP a lot easier.  Let us take a look at what MVP stands for. 

Gone are the days when a good idea and a lot of hard work were enough to create software products. If you want to build a successful startup, you need market validation. Why? Because turning ideas into fully functional digital products requires a lot of time and money. Luckily, attending a discovery workshop for startups can help you decide whether your idea is worth investing in.   In today's article, we're going to discuss why startups should consider attending a discovery workshop. Before we proceed, let’s take a look at what a startup workshop is.

As a result of recent learnings, I've diagnosed the main challenge thousands of firms currently have: How to align their roadmaps in the ecosystem affected by pandemics? The stated hypothesis bolds out the important aspect of customer values. In this article, I explain how did DO OK pivot in its consultancy offering to help businesses change their service or product development strategies. I reveal some details of two methods: Business Value Chart (™), and Value-Focused Product Planning Workshops.