Agile Brains Consulting: Pioneering the Micro-consulting Approach to Agile Transformation

What, according to you, are the other key differentiators of Agile Brains Consulting?

I think our greatest strength is our team that we have built over the years. We’ve created a culture over trust and collaboration within our handpicked highly experienced team members who have practical knowledge in various industries / domains. They are not the typical consultants who have always been in a traditional 'consulting' career path. This allows us not only to better empathize with our clients, but also be able to provide in depth perspective about the tools / areas of expertise that other consultants can often fail to provide due to their knowledge only at a strategic level or in a uni-dimensional domain.

Unlike several other firms in our line of work, our team is not limited to simply process consulting. We have the skillsets and knowledge base of modern technology, development stacks and DevOps tools. We focus on the technical stack of tools and software our clients have, whether they are using microservices, containers, and how they are building up their CI/CD pipelines to deliver value faster.

Think of this as trying to learn how to dive better or play golf better or even learning how to drive. How do you think you’d fare with someone who has not been in the pool in years, or not played with the modern golf clubs or better yet, never driven? It is our team of “brains” that we very selectively onboard who’ve been in hands-on deliveries using the most modern DevOps practices of machine learning, artificial intelligence, monitoring, logging, infrastructure as code, internet of things and many more. As actual doers in this space, we are well positioned and trusted by our customers to guide them better on their technical and digital transformation journey.

Lastly, we also provide training to our clients, which is extremely important for their overall roadmap. Our certification course offerings include all the leading governing bodies such as Scrum Alliance, IC Agile and Scaled Agile. Today, we offer over 150 training courses, in various technical and non-technical domains to help customers and set them up for success.

Could you share with us a customer success story?

There are a few but I think I’d like to first talk about our strategic partnership with a multibillion dollar private equity FinTech firm in New York City. We began our engagement by performing an organizational assessment where we interviewed the company’s key decision-makers and individual contributors. Post assessment, we brainstormed with the leadership teams to improve the intake process, execution framework, and deployment techniques. In the end, the client was well placed on their digital transformation journey.

As a result, today, they have a centralized Agile Project Management Office (PMO), which is responsible for managing large scale delivery of projects using Agile. Interestingly, their teams that used to consistently delivery in the vicinity of ~35% of commitment goals, now leverage the relative story points for managing their work. The teams use their own individual capacities and capabilities to define goals and velocities that are normalized over the enterprise portfolio. The outcome has been that while working in two weeks sprints, with program increment ceremonies in place, the delivery percentage has gone up to nearly 78%.

One of our other highly successful digital transformation successes has been in the utilities space in one of the largest states in the East Coast where we partnered with our customer on their mobility initiative. A workforce of thousands of field workers to be enabled to use modern day phones and laptops to perform their day to day work as opposed to paper. Helping the client make key strategic discussions on whether to build in-house versus buy off the shelf and configure, or bring developers or outsource development, our team of brains has delivered a portfolio of 8 mobile applications in just over a year. This is of critical importance since we historically associate utilities to be behind in the technology-ecosystem; having tremendous success with Agile in the utilities sector will be appreciated by customers.

Rapid delivery of microapps that help customers report hazards in a call for field support versus a large-scale enterprise application that allows digital data capture to minimize paper usage for field information capture. These are cloud based solutions utilizing cutting-edge mobile app development tools and modern secure coding practices. With an automated testing coverage of nearly 90%, and fully integrated CICD pipelines, some of these product deliveries are up-to their fifth versions in their iterative agile product lifecycle. The flagship mobile application to help Construction workers and contractors manage and report personnel and material usage is being used to make payments of over 1 Billion USD annually – so I guess no pressure there (laughs)

How has your track record been in the recent past? What does the roadmap look like for Agile Brains Consulting?

Despite the unfortunate COVID-19 pandemic, I’m very pleased to say that we’ve continued to grow throughout this year. Just earlier this summer, a leading product management company partnered with us for a targeted micro-consulting engagement. We did a comprehensive organizational assessment to evaluate their current state of product delivery and helped them create their delivery framework roadmap. We observed their teams in action and conducted multiple interviews to understand their pain-points and areas of improvement. We were able to complete this virtually and received positive fantastic feedback from our client. We continue to “drink our own champagne” and constantly come up with innovative ways to satisfy our clients. We have already seen massive success with our micro-consulting approach, that will be one of our key focus areas.

We’ve also been trying to give back to the community as much as possible. We started a weekly gratitude corner where we invite people to just speak about something they are thankful for that week. We’ve also been conducting virtual workshops for students from our Drexel University honing their interview skills, coaching them on job search and helping them grow professionally.

Besides that, we have supported clients in the Middle East, Canada, and the Caribbean, while the US is our key market. For the next two years, we will strive to get more clients and start working with SMBs.