Strategic Management Consulting

Accelerate your Digital Transformation Outcomes

IT Strategy

Define your enterprise and align your Strategy across business units. Develop core capabilities with Project Portfolio Rationalization & Development to drive project portfolio execution and business goals.

Blue.cloud’s Strategic Management Consulting brings in a proven 14-step process for refining or building your IT Strategy. This process encapsulates the work needed to clarify strategic intent (if not already clear) in addition to identifying the business areas that require the most attention and the development of an actionable Program/Project portfolio. When a client follows this 14-step process, they are also building executive level support across the organization through clarity of needed work to achieve specific business unit and enterprise goals. Our unique collaborative consulting style engages your high performing individuals in this effort, so that we mentor and coach them for the future of your company. This approach ensures that the IT Strategy can live on after Blue.cloud completes the efforts and you begin to launch strategic programs.

Leadership Consulting

Current State Assessment (CSA) - We assess people, technology, and critical path Journeys quickly through Blue.cloud standard approach. Our template is built based on our experiences of been there and done it as corporate executives. Part of our team includes technical and business architects along with financial analysts and process engineers to cover the economic, technical, people and process focal areas. We always look for savings and quick hits as part of our assessment. We seek details about opportunities and challenges and gather examples supported by observations. Since we have owned IT as a functional group, we provide recommendations based on what we have found and what has worked with us and other clients in the past. To make life even easier, we can provide Root Case Analysis (RCA) and leadership for the execution of identified recommendations, if needed.

Executive as a Service – Blue.cloud’s Strategic Management Consulting team consists of former corporate executives with extensive professional networks. Therefore, we can provide an emergency stop gap for an unexpected executive opening or added help for executives during massive transformational change. Our client’s most common catalysts for a need of an Executive as a Service are:

  • Enterprise Transformation initiative requires short-term leadership to take on transformation project leadership or business as usual leadership so current executives can deliver the enterprise value that only employees can deliver.
  • A sudden departure of a Sr. Director, VP, C-Suite or even BOD may occur at a critical time and an immediate short-term replacement is required.
  • You are considering a major acquisition or divestiture and need access to multiple executives with different functional expertise to help assess or build a plan.
  • Your leaders need advisors, sounding board, or alternate perspectives
  • To provide external cross industry perspective with executive presence and insight
  • There is a need to reinvigorate innovation, strategic, and hands-on execution.

IT Leadership Support & Delivery Service – Blue.cloud’s approach is to collaborate, architect, engage, align, design, and help drive the strategic business efforts with your cross-functional leadership. And, we know how to engage with your IT's most technical people to understand what it takes to deliver unprecedented outcomes sought by your business leaders. The combination of our Strategic and Technical service teams will create and provide clarity from complexity. As such, we identify and remove barriers before they are encountered because we have experience doing this work for other Fortune 500 companies. We understand the business drivers and the technical language and can uncover communication breakdowns and people change needs to make your transformations successful.

Enterprise Program and Project – Rationalization and Development

Blue.cloud’s strategic and technical service leaders can assess, develop, or update an organization’s strategic IT projects to determine how the projects should be structured to cost effectively achieve the business goals. We can work across your organization to create a cross functional strategic roadmap. This can include a business and technical heat map, verification of project value, clarify your “Vectors of Value”, and even the enterprise “Path to Value”. Our experience can be applied to troubled, stalled, or otherwise blocked strategic projects while we also seek out duplicate and synergistic projects to enhance efficiencies of your investment.

One of our clients that engaged us for this service found $1.4B in savings from their $2.5B annual capital plan once we started to clarify projects across multiple functional areas and divisions. By consolidating these projects and restructuring them to deliver high value portions first, we simplified the entire portfolio and allowed our client to invest in needed infrastructure upgrades (telecom, buildings, fiber, etc.).

Virtual PMO

Virtual PMO’s objective is to achieve maximum PMO delivery performance despite the distributed physical and geographic nature of your business and the existing PMO delivery structure. We provide this as an outsourced service or set it up for your existing program management organization. This offering is a combination of software, methodologies, and collaboration and is a change of how projects are managed. To provide this as a service, we first start with on-site project setup and develop Project Process Standards and Templates. Our off-site project administration leverages enterprise tools that every project team member must use. This tool set includes an enterprise dashboard for executive use, email alerts to team members for To Do list reminders, and cross team collaboration. Our team can then actively manage issues and risks, engage in PM mentoring and coaching, and participate remotely in projects meetings to enhance Governance accuracy and consistency for business projects, optimize collaboration and communication and allow for scaling your project team’s effectiveness.

Digital Strategy Transformation

IT Digital Transformation is designed to help enterprise IT teams assess, define, prepare, and deliver transformation to a 21st century Infrastructure, Network, and Telecommunications Services capability while preserving capital and reducing operating costs. “More than 73% of business transformations fail! And this disastrous number declines to an even worse 93% failure rate when the transformation targets quality improvement. That’s just unacceptable and businesses deserve better. With this new service, Blue.cloud enables all areas of the business to work in parallel to accomplish visible and tangible improvements that establish the digital foundation, show progress, generate excitement, enhance revenue, and reduce risks and costs over time.

Deliver the Digital IT Ecosystem Optimization Plan

  • Baseline a Self-Funding Digital Transformation – create ROI, TCO, Data Center Costs, and Run Rate models showing the value of the IT Ecosystem.
  • Benchmark Vectors of Value (i.e., where value is created and destroyed) such as SaaS, Automation, Asset Lifecycle Management, Contracts, ERP, EMR, Cloud Native, VDI, Cloud, and On-Premise.
  • Create a “Path to Value” executable with swim lanes to achieve business outcomes and enable Agile development in Cloud Native, Cloud Refactored, and Containers.
  • Financial Gearing – Plan to leverage financial options to eliminate incremental / dual OpEx costs during execution.

Deliver the Holistic Digital Transformation Strategy

  • The Digital IT Ecosystem Optimization Planned above in second phase.
  • Lead the transformative programs / projects with your employees and other partners you may choose with enterprise executive leaders and business architects
  • Evolving our unique partnership consulting style to work within your culture to deliver the development and engagement of your employees.
  • Build an Agile and Flexible Business to meet the demands of 2021 and beyond with highly experienced IT transformation leaders skilled in Agile methodologies including XP, Kanban, Kaizen, and Advanced RUP partnering with experts in designing and deploying DevSecOps groups and tools.
  • Provide the Intellectual Property (IP) to solve barriers to Digital Success and other common challenges before they are encountered in the transformation program(s).
  • Introduce a smoother cultural, technical, process, and economic transformation to enhance your customer’s experiences through skilled adult education programs created and supported by your HR organization and the partners they choose.