Having been a consultant for most of my career, I have been a part of many successful projects, but I have also seen projects fail. In my experience, all good projects have a leader who has a clear vision for the future, the project team is aligned around that vision, and the project has the right talent in place to deliver. Sounds like it would be an easy task right? Any number of consulting firms have talented individuals who can help you establish a vision, get your team on board, and then provide the experts to deliver a successful project. Even still, IT projects continue to fail at an alarming rate. In fact, according to Gartner, an estimated 85% of big data projects fail. So where is the disconnect? Why are projects that seemingly have the pieces in place to be successful failing?
A big reason is that many firms rely too much on their talent alone. In today’s world, you can find and deliver work from anywhere, with more than 50% of the workforce estimated to work remotely in the very near future. So now the barriers to starting a consulting practice are very low – giving rise to new consulting firms, often founded by experienced consultants, whose employees work remotely or from the client’s offices. While this model creates benefits for both employees (flexible working hours, very short commute times) and customers (access to more talent, reduced cost), it is not without its challenges. In particular, how does a virtual company deliver repeatable, measurable results when people aren’t working right next to each other? This is where your talent has to be backed by your methodology.
At Atrium, we believe that a good methodology is like a roadmap; it lays out paths to a specific destination while allowing the driver choices along the way. While some companies take a more prescriptive approach, we have built our methodology to be flexible. Rather than ask our customers to conform to just one way of doing things, we have defined a set of best practices, tools, and templates that can be tailored to match our customer’s working style which, in our experience, yields the best results.
We are focused on providing value at a unique intersection of business transformation, CRM, and data science and we have designed our methodology from the ground up to deliver transformative solutions to our customers. We are not simply implementing software or building machine learning models; we are helping our customers harness the power of their data to make better decisions in real-time. And we could not do that without a defined approach to our work.
Our methodology is a critical part of our ability to scale our business. This way we can ensure that all of our projects are delivered in a repeatable, measurable manner while delivering on our vision of providing a business transformation. It should be noted that methodology is a journey, not a destination. If managed correctly, a methodology will always grow and evolve to adapt to new technologies and techniques and to better meet the needs of our customers. Today, Atrium is working to evolve our methodology to incorporate user-centric design and workshopping techniques into our approach.
Check back regularly to learn more about the specifics of our methodology and how it is growing to better serve our customers and ensure project success!
