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Consulting, Coaching, and Mentoring: Helping You to Achieve Your Goals

We offer a batteries included service—which begins by assessing the current situation and by diagnosing the current problems, and ends with the implementation of the solution. It consists of a mix of consulting, training, coaching and mentoring, tailored to the specific needs of your organisation, teams, and individuals that builds on the combined strength of those activities to create long lasting solutions.

Process and Methodology Tuning

The tuning of a methodology or process or the transition to new ones can bring great rewards—better quality, lower costs, shorter schedules, higher productivity, higher customer satisfaction, etc. However, transitions are often complex endeavours involving the acquisition of new skills and habits; changes in the structure of the organisation; creation of new roles and changes in existing ones; coaching, training and mentoring activities; etc.

A naive approach—e.g., mandating the use of some of-the-shelf methodology assuming it will just work—can cause great damage, potentially making the situation worse.

We use and recommend a different approach, based on our experience gained by helping transitions for organisations and projects of various sizes—from small ones with one or few co-located development teams, up to very big ones composed of hundreds of people distributed among many, geographically distributed, teams.

We first work to understand the most important goals for the transition (e.g., improve quality, shorten schedule, lower risk, etc.), and the context of the organisation (e.g., culture, hierarchy, type of product(s), available skills, technologies, etc.) Then, based on that information, we work with our clients to devise and implement the best solutions for them.

Feel free to contact us for further details or to discuss your needs.

Health Checks for Projects Teams and Organisations

Sometimes, projects, teams or organisations, despite their best efforts, fail to achieve their goals in full.

Our health check services can help in finding the reasons why that happens, so that it will be easier to take appropriate corrective action—e.g., tune the methodology and processes, training, coaching, mentoring, or mix of them.

The health checks consist of interviews of key representatives of all key stakeholders (e.g., managers, members of the development and testing teams, product managers, etc.) and of an analysis of any available data (e.g., defect count, length of delivery cycles, quality of requirements, etc.) to get a clear picture of the situation. After gathering all the information, we will analyse it and create a report containing a summary of the findings, along with the results of our analysis and recommendations for improvement.

The length of an assessment varies depending on the size of the organisation involved—e.g. from one day for a small development team, to several weeks, or even months for projects involving hundreds of people geographically distributed.


For Development Teams and Individuals

We believe coaching and mentoring, especially if preceded (or better, mixed with) training, are very effective practices to help teams and individuals learn new skills and habits quicker, and with better and long lasting results.

Our services include:
  • Traditional coaching and mentoring for teams, to help them learn to work as proper teams (as opposed to just groups of individuals)
  • Technical coaching and mentoring for teams on some specific practices, e.,g, test driven development, incremental architecture, automated testing, continuous integration, collective code ownership, intra-team and inter-team collaboration, etc.
  • Technical coaching and mentoring for individual developers, testers and architects. This is just like the technical coaching for teams, but done with individuals

For Software Development Managers

Managing software development at all levels of an organisation has never been an easy task. The intangibility of software along with its perceived plasticity—which makes it very tempting to ask for lots of changes as the development proceeds—make activities like cost and schedule estimation, quality control particularly difficult.

Furthermore, nowadays is very common for software products to be developed by multiple teams distributed geographically collaborating together, which adds another layer of complexity to all management activities.

All those issues can make it very easy for managers to lose control of what is happening.

Using a command-and-control management approach is generally the wrong answer as it will increase the workload of the manager and demotivate the teams with, potentially, devastating effects for the product, the teams, the company, and the manager.

A more collaborative approach based on clear goals, delegation of authority and responsibility is usually a much better one. However, this approach requires some specific skills and behaviours.

We offer custom coaching, mentoring and training to managers who want to tune their skills, or acquire new ones, in order to make their approach more effective in their own contexts.


For Agile Coaches

The widespread adoption of Agile methodologies has brought the role of the team coach under the spotlight.

Coaching a team can be quite a demanding task, requiring strong communication and leadership skills, political savvy, and competence in software methodologies.

For newly minted coaches that often is a tall order. We can coach, mentor and train them to make the learning process much faster and effective.


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