Our services fall into five major groupings: strategic business planning and improvement, IT organizational effectiveness and integration, project services, CIO support, and in-house seminars and workshops:

Strategic business planning

Far too much business strategic "planning" consists of little more than throwing vague, high-level ideas at a flip-chart and seeing what sticks. At IT Catalysts, we promote a step-by-step chain of logic that begins with strategic intent and ends with a concrete roadmap that will carry you through the change. Here are the steps:

There's a lot behind each of these steps. If you'd like to discuss them further, please contact us. We'd be delighted to schedule a call.

IT organizational effectiveness and integration

Only you can improve the effectiveness of your IT organization. Our job is to help you succeed. Here's what we can do to provide support:

  • Assess the effectiveness of your IT organization and recommend ways to improve it.
  • Assess your company's effectiveness at making appropriate use of information technology, and recommend ways to improve that.
  • Help you develop an IT strategy, providing a framework for discussion and facilitating the process.
  • Review your company's IT governance processes and recommend improvements and alternatives.
  • Provide tactical assistance to help you decide how to address specific issues.
Behind our recommendations is our proprietary IT Organizational Performance Model - an interconnected view of the 150 factors that drive the effectiveness of information technology organizations. We use it to drill down from symptoms to root causes, and to connect root causes to one or more of the thirty "key leverage points" CIOs can directly influence.

If you'd like more information about how we can work with you, or are interested in learning more about our IT Organizational Performance Model and what it can do for you ... well, we'd like to provide it. Here's our contact form, so we can make it happen.
 

IT Cost Management

Right now, most CIOs are concerned about finding ways to reduce costs without destroying their ability to provide vital services.

We can help. The same tools and techniques we use to assess organizational effectiveness and plan strategy are ideally suited to developing:

  • Pain-free ways to reduce costs (we can usually find a few, just not as many as you would like).
  • Opportunities to address responsibilities more efficiently.
  • Improved governance, to engage the entire business in deciding what to keep and what to jettison.
In particular, IT Catalysts recognizes the importance of managing overhead and unit costs separately - that this makes the difference between cutting costs by harming delivery and cutting costs through improved effectiveness.

Project services

We wrote the book on project management. Okay, it was a short book (Bare Bones Project Management: What you can't not do, by Bob Lewis) but it's a book nonetheless, and it earned a perfect 5 in its Amazon.com customer reviews. We can help you improve project results by:

  • Assessing your current project management practices and recommending improvements.
  • Providing project management training and coaching.
  • Providing business sponsor coaching and consulting.
  • Reviewing your current project status reporting and suggesting improvements.
And if you have a project that's in serious trouble, ask us about our Project Rescue Service. We will quickly:
  • Determine why the project has derailed.
  • Develop a "rescue roadmap" describing the steps necessary to salvage the effort.
  • Provide a dispassionate perspective on the relative risks of attempting the salvage or terminating the effort.
  • At your option, assist you during the salvage effort.

CIO support

As CIO, the help you need can't always be packaged in the form of formal assessments, strategies or other project-sized engagements.

Sometimes, you just need to talk things over with an informed, unbiased advisor. Or, you need someone from outside the organization to help convey a complex or difficult message to the executive team. Or, you need help to bring your own management team into alignment on a tough issue.

Or ...

Whatever kind of support you need, in whatever form or size of engagement, we're here to provide it, either on a schedule, or as the need arises.

In-house seminars and workshops

We provide formal in-house Leadership and Project Management seminars, and in-house workshops covering IT strategic planning and technical architecture management.

Leadership seminar

Based on Bob Lewis's popular book Leading IT: The Toughest Job in the World, our IT leadership seminar covers the Eight Tasks of IT Leadership: Setting direction, delegation, staffing, decision-making, motivation, team-building, business culture change, and communication.

Our seminar provides nothing but practical techniques that can make every member of your management team a more effective business leader.

And, you have the option of our providing follow-up coaching with each of your managers, to help you make sure your managers put these techniques into practice.

Project Management seminar

We've turned Bare Bones Project Management into a high-impact one-day seminar. Clients have found it has a clear advantage over more traditional project management seminars: Even the most skeptical project managers see the value of the techniques we provide.

And because we present only ... and literally ... the bare bones, even novice project managers won't be overwhelmed by a vast and unnecessary collection of templates, forms, and artifacts.

Best of all, our project management seminar pays attention to the human issues as well as those required for effective project planning and administration - the "street-smarts" side of project management that too-often gets lost among the project-management formalisms that dominate so many commercial seminars on the subject.

We also offer a two-day version

Sometimes you need more than good project managers. You need a company that's good at project management.

In our two-day seminar we add business sponsor training and project governance consulting -- two factors that, done well, pave the road for project managers, and done poorly can prevent even the best run projects from succeeding. We also provide a project clinic for projects that could use an outside pair of eyes to help spot and address challenges of one kind or another.

IT strategic planning workshop

We've organized a two day working session that guides you and your IT leadership team through the steps needed to create a clear IT strategy that establishes leadership goals, organizational priorities, and resource allocation.

The 2-Day IT Strategic Planning Workshop isn't a substitute for full-fledged IT strategic planning. But if your budget and schedule won't support a complete strategic plan and you aren't satisfied with the way you've been setting direction, this is an excellent solution.

It's also an excellent way to jump-start your IT strategic planning process by giving your leadership team a common framework for thinking about IT strategy and practical experience in its development.

Technical architecture management workshop

In just two days, you can take control of your technical architecture.

If you're looking for a comprehensive methodology you can use to generate an enterprise architecture and a services encyclopedia complete with fully developed use cases ... look elsewhere. We've seen too many instances of these turning into either one-time wastes of effort or ongoing white-paper factories.

In one day we can show you and your staff how to use IT Catalysts' proprietary technical architecture portfolio management tool, and will help you make a serious start documenting your architecture at all three layers: Applications, information, and platform.

Then we'll schedule a return visit after you've finished the documentation (a process that rarely requires more than a few staff-days of effort). We will facilitate a planning clinic, working with you to start the process of planning and managing your technology portfolio.


Praise for the Bare Bones Project Management Seminar

"By implementing the basic BBPM fundamentals our clients have seen great improvements in project performance. I would directly attribute their success to BBPM's simplicity. It's easy to understand, simple to implement and simple to maintain. For most organizations it's the most pragmatic approach to project management on the market."

- Andrew Graf, Principal, TeamDynamix

"Our company wanted to improve our execution with projects while developing additional project leadership talent. After reading Bob’s excellent Bare Bones Project Management book, we decided to bring in IT Catalysts to do a seminar for all of our leaders.

In the seminar, we walked through one of our more aggressive projects and immediately used the plan to complete the project on-time and on budget. Since that time we've used Bare Bones Project Management as the basis for all corporate projects.

Bare Bones Project Management is a realistic approach that all leaders can learn and put to immediate use."

- Dave Kaiser, CIO, SFM

"The Bare Bones Project Management approach is a perfect fit for our situation at The University of Arizona. We are re-implementing all of our major administrative systems, and the Implementation Directors, while expert in their own business functions, are not generally experienced as project managers, nor is that their long term career direction.

The Bare Bones approach is exactly on point and just right in its level of detail and emphasis. In this context we see the Bare Bones approach as a complement to highly experienced project management provided by our consultants. In other contexts, where the projects are smaller, we are considering establishing the Bare Bones approach as the foundation."

- Hank Childers, Project Director, Mosaic, University of Arizona, UITS