Tech Strategy
The tech strategy for the Consulting circle mainly focuses on tech/engineering functions, but anyway requires synergy and integrations from Sales and Marketing.
The general pillars for crafting a good strategy are:
Balancing Innovation with Core Strengths: Exploring new areas while maintaining the core values outlined in the Elite Data Engineering Manifesto, striking a good balance between innovation and leveraging established strengths. This dual focus is essential in a rapidly evolving tech landscape. While the company grows is important also to stick with our roots and be sure the whole company is capable to deliver on promises.
Adaptability and Market Sensitivity: It's crucial to stay adaptable and sensitive to market changes, especially in technology and data engineering. Customer and Prospect probing to acquire relevant information is crucial, don't follow hype without any grounding on our target and addressable market
Revenue Generation vs. Value Creation: While generating revenue is a primary goal, it's also important to consider long-term value creation for our clients. This includes not just immediate financial benefits but also enhancing their capabilities, agility, and competitive edge.
Risk Management in Innovation: While exploring new areas, especially those with potential for high market disruption, a calculated approach to risk management is necessary. It's important to validate the stability and reliability of new technologies and methodologies before fully committing resources. In many areas big vendors can disrupt consulting value propositions by creating SaaS and automated offerings
Thought Leadership and Skill Development: Continuing to establish thought leadership is a priority. Concurrently, upskilling and reskilling the team in new emerging areas will ensure staying ahead in the market. Pay attention that reskilling is not happening in a short time, so innovation and value proposition must take reskilling in account to create feasible adoption plans.
Client-Centric Approach: We need to stick with a client-centric approach, focusing on specific customer needs and market gaps. Future-Proofing through Research and Development: Investing in R&D not only prepares us for future market demands but also positions us as innovators in the field. Innovation should never be auto-referential, but it should be always linked to potential new business for the company.
When we create a new strategy we focus mainly on four areas, and foreach of them we need to identify areas of interest, topics, methodologies and technologies:
Thought leadership: we aim to establish Agile Lab or its reliable representatives as experts on a particular topic, and we want to do this possibly at a global level to support our internationalization process. Thought leadership is important to drive credibility and trust of our value propositions.
Value proposition: clearly define what we are proposing to the client, what problems it solves, and the benefits it brings to them. When we decide to add something new to our global value proposition, we need to create supportive material for sales and marketing, and we need to be sure we are capable to deliver what we promise.
Competencies: after selling a project, we must deliver on promises to create trust and fuel the business. Therefore, it is necessary to develop skills in all the areas included in the strategy and all the aspects of our core strengths. From this we decline the training and certiication programs for the entire company
Innovation: some topics that do not allow us to make an impact on the business now, but may do so in 2-3 years, so it is important to gain experience in areas we believe to be promising. This is pure research, but anyway it should be connected to consulting business opportunities.
All the elements included in the tech strategy must also be classified with different priorities: top - secondary - nice to have
The Process
When: The tech stratgy process starts at the beginning of the last quarter of the year, with the goal to release a self-explaining document by the end of january of the next year.
Participants:
- Stakeholder: the CTO is the main driver of the process and the ultimate responsible for it
- Contributors: All the Eng4 and upper levels in the ladder, belonging to consulting circle
Activities:
Step 1: At the beginning, all the contributors are required to work autonoummously to collect their understanding of the market and create a structured and written proposal about the oportunities they see for the next year, clarifying on which area ( Thought Leadership, Value Proposition, Competencies, Innovation) they would invest for each topic. In this phase each contributor can decide to involve his team or other peers.
Step 2: Open discussion in one or two meetings, all the contributors explain their strategy to trigger other opinions and reasoning
Step 3: CTO selects best ideas and prioritize them, creating a draft document ( MOU ) for the strategy and sharing it with the working group
Step 4: Contributors provide final comments and suggestions about the strategy
Step 5: CTO shares the strategy with the whole company