High-Impact Consulting Services

Introducing our new service, “OASIS: Software Solutions for Climate Change Problems”

2022-07-31 by Deploy_Admin

The world needs software solutions for Climate Change problems.

In 2019 we set out to investigate if there is a need for a solution that gives citizens personalized help preparing for and recovering from climate change impacts and lets trusted authorities assist them and report on their results.

As part of this effort, a great deal of market and technical research was conducted over the last few years. Over 140 students have been involved so far, in dozens of academic institutions in Canada and internationally.

Our greatest finding is the willingness of citizens to take responsibility and use climate change impact platform to help themselves, their neighbors and community plan for, mitigate and recover from climate change disasters. We also confirmed that software solutions can be built to help.

Software can help respond to climate change issues - but the world needs a better way to build it.

Climate change software applications pose unique challenges that aren't always encountered in other areas. Climate change is causing impacts and disasters to occur more frequently, with little or no warning, and with increased danger and complexity. Each impact or disaster is unique and responding to it places complex burdens on individuals, communities, and authorities.

Custom software development is needed to meet the unique needs of each situation and it must be built in a way that is most useful to affected people and communities. But, building software from scratch is traditionally complex, time-consuming, expensive, and has a high failure rate.

A new software development approach is needed, that addresses the issues and challenges raised by climate change.

While there are many ways to build software, when you follow a standard approach, using common tools, resources, patterns and practices, you achieve better and more consistent results. This approach is called a "software methodology".

We believe solutions for climate change impacts are at their best when they are Open; Accelerated; in agreement with the latest Science (as stated by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change); Insightful; and meet SMART goals and objectives.

This is OASIS methodology!

Sharing Knowledge and Technology

But a software methodology without working software, or one that nobody uses, is completely useless.

So, we are currently building a working technology prototype to accelerate the creation of climate change solutions and demonstrate how this methodology works. It shows how software can address and help overcome common communication and other barriers that prevent individual and communities from preparing for, responding to, and recovering from climate change impacts and disasters.

Now we'd like to share our knowledge and progress with you.

Learn how software can help respond to climate change impacts.

Our free OASIS newsletter will hit your inboxes every Tuesday. As a sign up gift, we'll provide you our detailed 42-page report, "Why Won't People Act on Climate Change?" (read the excerpt, below). Become an OASIS+ subscriber for a monthly or annual fee, and unlock access to private webinars, premium resources and content, while directly supporting our ongoing R&D work.

Why Won't People Act On Climate Change? (An excerpt from our initial research report) from Deploy Software Solutions ("Deploy Solutions")

Software Product Management Support

2018-03-26 by Nicholas Kellett

We listen closely to our clients. Sometimes that takes us in directions we didn’t expect.

In addition to our software project management assistance, we’ve been providing consulting services that would be considered “software product management”. Until recently, most organizations did not develop their own software products. While it is still somewhat rare, the increasing power, simplicity, and importance of software products, services, and apps has resulted in more and more businesses taking on this function. Once it reaches a certain scale and importance within the organization, a software product usually requires dedicated management from a product manager.

We’re seeing this evolution with some of our own clients who have asked for our assistance with their growing product management needs. The good news is that this added service fits quite well with our software project management offering. Our mission is to help companies manage their software projects better, and some of our goals apply directly to software product management.

The role of a product manager tends to vary a lot from organization to organization. Generally speaking product management is recurring work that occurs as part of an ongoing lifecycle, rather than as part of a software project that has a defined start date and end date. Still, the product manager often contributes to (or manages) multiple smaller projects that are required as part of the product development. And depending on the client need and the product manager’s own skillset, he or she may focus more on the technical/development side or on the non-technical marketing side. Some of the common tasks include researching and defining the product vision and corresponding sales and marketing objectives, then translating those into technical specifications for the software engineers to build. Once a product is created, a great deal of time and effort goes into identifying and responding to competitors, maintaining a release roadmap, determining and communicating the desired user experience, prioritizing features and bugs, assisting with marketing material, attending trade shows, as well as providing pre-sales assistance.

This is a complicated role because it requires a great deal of software experience, strong communication and negotiation skills, the ability and willingness to sit at the junction of the client, upper management, and the technical, marketing, and sales teams. A good product manager evangelizes the product vision, within the company as well as with the outside world.

We’ve expanded our service offering to assist clients with software product management needs. We can do this directly by providing part-time product management assistance as you mature your product and processes. We can do this indirectly if you need help shaping your initial product vision and roadmap, or extra muscle defining and prioritizing your product features. We can template your product marketing, sales, technical, testing, and installation material. We offer a high-flexibility, high-value, high-impact consulting service that will be tailored to your unique product management needs.

So, please book a call, choose the “What can we do for you” option, and let’s see how we can help you!

Consulting Support Grouped on Periodicity: Before, During, and After a Project

2017-04-13 by Nicholas Kellett

We’ve been busy over the past few months working on our project management and delivery methodology, and helping customers on a number of different types of project. Since we offer a variety of professional services, we wondered how best to organize and present them.

We have now observed that the project support services we provide naturally group themselves based on periodicity: that is, they are logically organized into intervals which occur before, during, and after a project.

Here’s how that works:

Before A Project Starts

This kind of assistance is preparatory: creating proposals for customers; producing detailed statements of work defining what will be done on a project; or turning business goals and objectives into multi-year, multi-phase roadmaps, with supporting strategies, high-level implementation plans, resourcing, and costs.

We hypothesize that some key offerings before a project are:

Proposals & RFPs
Statements of Work
Roadmaps & Strategies

You can learn more about our “Pre-Project Support” offerings here.

During A Project

This is our “core” consulting support work, assisting project managers and teams with their project delivery and coordination work.

In some cases we act like second-level project support, for instance assisting the team with avoiding or overcoming specific project issues on an “as requested” basis. For more complex or long-running work like migration and software releases, we provide ongoing technical advice and project management help, for example coordinating between several groups including IT staff, the software vendor, and the application service provider.

We hypothesize that some key offerings during a project are:

Scheduling & Tracking
Migrations & Cleanups
Deployments & Releases

You can learn more about our “Project Support” offerings here.

After A Project

This is what we call “future investments”.

It’s our vision to reduce global software failure rates, and if we don’t measure something, we can’t reliably improve it. Objectively gathering project feedback and metrics, analyzing the results, and then suggesting areas of improvement is therefore vital to our methodology.

By providing templates, content, and tools to accelerate project work, we should be able to simultaneously improve its quality while reducing its effort and expense, which in turn should serve to reduce the risk of project failure.

We hypothesize that key offerings after a project are:

Feedback & Lessons Learned
Project Analysis
Templates & Accelerators

You can learn more about our “Post-Project Support” consulting here.

As a result of our observation, we’ve redesigned our website to showcase our project support offerings more intuitively. We’d love your feedback – please comment below, contact us via the “Feedback” widget at the bottom of this site, or book a call.

Deploy's New Company Website Launches

2016-11-18 by Nicholas Kellett

Welcome to Deploy Software Solution’s newly-launched corporate website.

Our vision is to reduce the remarkably high rate of software project failures worldwide, by transforming the way companies manage them.

To that end, we have just launched this company website to showcase the growing list of consulting services and products we can offer our clients.

In addition, we are currently working hard on our software project delivery methodology, accelerators and tools, many of which we will share on a dedicated micro-site / blog. We plan to open that up to the public in the first quarter of the 2017. You can sign up to our “Software Projects” newsletter to get notified the instant it is live, or check back regularly for more news.