Today’s debate about Information Technology often misses the point. It’s not about how much or how little you spend on information technology, it’s “How You Spend It” that counts. The real challenge is discovering how to separate high-business-value IT investments from those of lower value.

Our management consultants understand that the best point of departure is to gain a true appreciation of the environment you operate in and the challenges you face. We start by developing an understanding of what you’re trying to achieve and then leveraging your own assets and strengths.

We Never Do “Technology for the Sake of Technology”

By understanding your goals and values, we can design an innovative solution that will help you leverage your people, refine your core business processes, and get the most out of what technology has to offer. Sometimes it’s a sustainable competitive advantage - sometimes it’s a much lower cost of doing business - sometimes it’s a new business model or product enabled by technology.

Our approach will truly align your “People, Processes, and Technology” and we can show you how we do it.

IT Governance

IT Governance is a framework that ensures IT is run like a real business. It gives business leaders of the company a method of ensuring business alignment for all capital investments, provides valuable insight into the IT demand and supply activities on a day-to-day basis, and delivers the real business value necessary to rationalize the significant investment technology excellence requires.

IT Governance is critically important when business leaders are just as likely to look to an ‘Outsource Provider” for IT services as they are to the internal IT organization.

The time-tested “Business-Driven” IT governance process that Palmaris uses allows clients to:

• More effectively prioritize real value creation opportunities
• Generate a much higher Return-on-Investment (ROI) - defined the way that makes the most sense for your organization
• Deliver real measurable value
• Develop more favorable ratios of strategic versus tactical spending (invest in something more than keeping the lights on)
• Gain real-time visibility and control of the IT project portfolio
• Improve executive IT customer satisfaction

Project Recovery

It seems like almost every organization occasionally has a project that gets away from them for a variety of different reasons.

Palmaris uses a project recovery process that has been developed over 30 years through experience in many different industries. We have been successful in recovering and delivering entire product / software development programs running in a formal software release and version environment as well as large, customer-facing, projects highly visible to a substantial customer base.

We understand the necessity of discretely and tactfully engaging with the current project participants so that we can assess status, options, and alternatives.

We deliver a reconstituted project plan with revised project costs, schedule, success metrics, and other recommendations.

IT Strategy & Planning

The old adage “Every Business is Perfectly Aligned to Get the Results They’re Achieving” couldn’t be more true.

However, business executives continue to struggle with aligning information technology strategy with core business drivers such as revenue growth, cost reductions, operational efficiency, and enhanced customer experience.

Simultaneous pressures to reduce costs, do more with less, deliver better solutions - faster, seemly almost tear the IT organization apart and business alignment seems even further away.

The Palmaris approach to IT Strategy and Planning focuses on the following:

• Assess the current state of the IT organization including its capabilities, capacity, and service levels. This includes a business and technical assessment from the perspective of IT professionals, executive management, customers, vendors, and partners.
• Define the desired future state of the information technology organization.
• Develop an organizational transformation plan to restructure the department and build new or stronger capabilities and position the IT department for future success.
• Re-engineer core information technology processes and implement improved management toolsets.
• Develop a strategy implementation plan as well as the necessary management processes and metrics to measure success.

Portfolio & Project Management

Strategic initiatives often fail because of inadequate program planning, organization, and execution. Many times internal IT teams are overwhelmed with day-to-day maintenance and operational responsibilities and simply don’t have the time to work on new strategic initiatives that are key to company success.

A strong Portfolio Management capability provides the organization with the ability to monitor risk versus return and to develop a portfolio of projects to support key goals and objectives such as revenue growth, cost reduction, operational efficiency, enhanced customer experience, or product differentiation. This gives senior management and business leaders the ability to choose based upon the risk and the expected return of various projects and only select the most attractive technology investments.

Palmaris’ Portfolio Management practice provides significant business value by helping you focus only on those projects that provide the greatest return over the long-term at the lowest risk.
In addition, it provides a process and a forum that fosters innovation while still providing management with the flexibility to quickly eliminate projects that don’t meet the stringent risk/return metrics.

Our Project Management practice can help you achieve greater reliability and predictability in the project pipeline by making greater use of team collaboration, better management reporting, and global project management standards.

This gives management the ability to confidently undertake even the most aggressive strategic initiatives because of the increased probability of success and the enhanced reliability of delivery.

Offshore Software Development Planning

In Thomas Friedman’s book “The World is Flat”, he says that “Companies that learn how to take advantage of lower cost resources in places such as India and China will thrive in the years ahead” - an understatement to be sure.

Are your competitors successfully taking advantage of offshore resources? If they are…..what does that mean to your competitiveness in the future?

Taking advantage of offshore resources isn’t for everyone and it takes a certain set of core competencies that not all companies possess. But if you can extend yourself to take advantage of those possibilities, and choose the right engagement model and partner, the incremental benefit is significant.

Palmaris has nearly 10 years of experience in helping client’s develop offshore software development centers (EDCs) in places like India, Sri Lanka, and China. We have helped clients outsource operational functions to India, the Philippines, Japan, and Ireland.