Practice Areas

Clear, Practical, Solutions in Action

 Management Consulting

(Strategy, Frameworks, OCM, Governance)

  • Insight
  • Analysis
  • Objectives
  • Strategy
  • Plan
  • Execution
  • Measure

Helping client organizations to better define, design, and govern in order to actualize and drive organization goals and bring ideas to fruition is a key focus area for Aria Consulting.

We believe an organization,be that the entire company, a division or department, or even just a key team, that doesn't have clarity of purpose, the path to achieve the purpose, and metrics to evalute progress, can benefit greatly from our experience working with organizations from small to multi-nationals, and government at all 3 levels.

 Programme Management

Aria Consulting’s Programme Management Approach

Programme Management provides a layer above the management of projects and focuses on selecting the best group of projects, defining them in terms of their objectives, and providing an environment where projects can be run successfully.

In a Programme Management capacity, Aria Consulting typically has oversight of the design, purpose and status of the projects in a Programme and can use this oversight to support project-level activity to ensure the Programme goals are met by providing a decision-making capacity that cannot typically be achieved at project level or by providing the project manager(s) with a Programme perspective when required, or as a sounding board for ideas and approaches to solving project issues that have Programme impacts.

 

The 5 phase Programme Management Methodology

According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), The Standard for Program Management, 2nd Ed.,

“A Program is a group of related projects managed in a coordinated manner to obtain benefits and control NOT available from managing them individually. Programs may include elements of related work outside of the scope of the discreet projects in the program…..Some projects within a program can deliver useful incremental benefits to the organization before the program itself has completed.”

Transformation

Successful Transformation requires a multi-step process to be able to move an organization from current state to an improved target state. Starting from developing Value Propositions through Business Process Reengineering (BPR), continuing with ongoing, deep, and wide monitoring of KPI’s and CSAT’s to ensure the changes are achieving goals.

Along with optimizing the processes within your value chain, Aria Consulting can work with your team to refine roles and determine T&D needs, ascertain regionalization tweaks if necessary, and establish a framework for ongoing optimization.

Does your organization have some possible opportunities to improve?

Solutions Architecture / Technology Design and Advisory

A solution outline typically defines the business context, business data to be created or used, the application components needed, along with whatever is needed to meet non-functional requirements (speed, throughput, availability, reliability recoverability, integrity, security, scalability, servicability, etc )

The role of "solutions Architect" requires knowledge and skills that are both broad and deep. To be effective the solutions Architect must have experience on multiple hardware and software environments and be comfortable with complex hetrogenous systems environments and Aria consulting's solution Architechture work typically starts at high-level conceptual and proceeds to a mid-level of detailed software and infrastructure engineering.

 

Could YOUR team, department, divison, or organization benefit from expert help to envision, design, and deliver a solution(s) to to improve your current state?

Enterprise Architecture

The term “enterprise” in the context of “Enterprise Architecture” can be used to denote both an entire enterprise – encompassing all of its information and technology services, processes, and infrastructure – or a specific domain within the enterprise. In both cases, the architecture crosses multiple systems, and multiple functional groups within the enterprise.

Today’s CEOs know that the effective management and exploitation of information through IT is a key factor to business survival and success, and an indispensable means to achieving competitive advantage. An Enterprise Architecture addresses this need, by providing a strategic context for the evolution of the IT ecosystem in response to the constantly changing needs of the business environment.

 

Project Management

Wikipedia defines Project Management as “the process and activity of planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling resources, procedures and protocols to achieve specific goals in scientific or daily problems. A project is a temporary endeavour designed to produce a unique product, service or result with a defined beginning and end (usually time-constrained, and often constrained by funding or deliverables), undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value. The temporary nature of projects stands in contrast with business as usual (or operations), which are repetitive, permanent, or semi-permanent functional activities to produce products or services. In practice, the management of these two systems is often quite different, and as such requires the development of distinct technical skills and management strategies”.

Today, there are a multitude of approaches to the practice of Project Management. At Aria Consulting, the preferred approach is the University of St. Andrews Lean Project Process. This 8 step model is more of an Iterative, versus “Agile”, model which gives great advantage in terms of alignment with standardized budgeting approaches with organizations.

Another major advantage is the insertion of a Training step after the initial round of Planning. This creates an excellent real world opportunity to expose aspects of the overall project solution that don’t align well with stakeholder behaviours and expectations. In this respect it somewhat mirrors the intent of Agile methodologies with ‘sprints’ while not eschewing some advantages inherent in more legacy methodologies like ‘Waterfall’.

Following this early-stage stakeholder engagement is a redesign step to address the findings from the training and make tactical, and sometimes strategic, course corrections prior to implementation at scale.

Aria Consulting always strongly recommends candid review and feedback steps to more fully inform and guide the next iteration.

Do you want to explore the advantages of this methodology?