IT Optimization

When the IT department doesn’t seem to be matching up with business objectives and you can’t determine the ROI in the IT budget, it’s time for a change. It happens…things get out of step and need to be realigned. W5 Digital can establish a lean IT department aligned with your business vision and strategy with a budget that makes sense. In other words, we make IT work for your business.

W5 Digital Engagement

We take the time to understand your business, vision and strategy. Then we take a deep dive to identify how IT enables your business, drives value or impacts growth. We perform a thorough assessment of people, process and technology to determine what you have and what you need. Then we establish the Identify-Fix-Measure cycle:

Identify the problems and why they are happening
Implement real solutions to fix the root cause
Measure and report impact of changes

No change immediately becomes part of the company culture. That’s why W5 Digital helps manage the organizational change to ensure new processes and technology become part of the DNA of the company. We mentor and coach the IT team to help so new processes can be operationalized going forward and IT can stand on its own.

IT Optimization

Case Studies

Developers working on fixes vs. new products

Case Study

Management was growing continually frustrated with IT missing deadlines and moving too slowly to keep up with business growth and goals. Not to mention the IT infrastructure was outdated so outages and poor performance were common in a business that relied entirely on technology to operate.

The company was falling behind its competitors and unable to capitalize on several strategic partnerships. After reviewing the people, processes and technology, a plan was implemented to address the most relevant issues and provide the biggest impact.

There was no structure for the IT Help Desk. It seemed that a handful of employees were playing the hero, but not establishing institutional knowledge to benefit the rest of the department. A little process went a long way in handling the overload of requests coming in, with triage for high impact issues to take priority and tracking to ensure every issue was assigned and resolved.

Standard Operating Procedures were created for issue resolution, which allowed for better tracking and gave everyone the same playbook to operate from. Now there was uniformity in how the department operated.

Reporting the root cause for incidents was done in regular meetings with the development team and the business users to create better transparency, establish responsibility and timeline for fixes and improve accountability.

Budgets were established for fixes for root cause issues. The budget was either financial or developer capacity. For developers, incentives were established for teams based on performance and business goals.

The focus of the changes was not to achieve perfection, but to focus on those activities that with the greatest impact.

With the new processes, people and technology in place, IT Operations freed up 30% of their capacity to focus on building for new revenue.

This is IT Optimization

In real life

The Partner Integrations team was not able to keep up with the amount of new business coming in. Their processes were well documented, project templates were all in order and APIs were built, but everything was out-of-date.

After assessing people, process and technology, we put the team through a LEAN exercise and took advantage of new tools and technologies to drive more value. The overhead in manual management processes and paperwork was dragging the team down. Minor investments were made to optimize the process for developers and DevOps.

We also identified new opportunities to feed enhancements and suggestions back into the product team, which helped standardize customizations. This accelerated the evolution of the core product for our partners. The end result was a stronger core product with derivative plug-ins and an implementation process that was cleaner and more efficient.

Slow integrations are impacting revenue

Case Study