Business Consulting for Tech & Delivery
We help your organisation step back and take the time to create clarity on how best to transition to the next phase of your tech journey, while never losing sight of the human element that, after all, is the true driver of success
CTO as a Service
The CTO-as-a-Service subscription service gives you continuous support and guidance to lead the engineering practice at the company, shaping the company’s technological roadmap, driving the incubation of new capabilities, and ensuring technologic excellence across initiatives. We give tech a voice in the organisation and enable an informed conversation about how the organisational structure is affecting the delivery performance.
This service is ideal for organisations looking for continuous technical leadership without the need for a permanent full-time position. It is often the right choice if you find yourself contemplating questions like:
Is the tech roadmap supporting the long-term business goals?
When is the right time to modernise our legacy systems?
What is currently a bottleneck for faster delivery?
Are we having the right balance between speed and stability?
How can we improve team collaboration?
Do we have a clear picture of our technical debt?
Process
For organisations seeking ongoing technical leadership without the overhead of a permanent full-time position, we take on the responsibilities typically associated with a CTO. We help strengthen your delivery framework and optimise organisational habits for clarifying priorities, resource planning, roadmapping, budget alignment, and development processes. We always start by assessing the maturity of your development lifecycle and the stability of your current services.
... more info about the pricing model with links...
Assess Maturity Level
We assess the maturity level of your software development lifecycle (SDLC) and operational processes, comparing them to industry standards. We provide actionable steps to strengthen your organisation in the short term and long term to ensure that you get the most out of your technology investments.
If you find yourself wondering about questions like:
What is currently a bottleneck for faster delivery?
How can our tech be more stable?
Are we leveraging cloud technologies effectively?
How long can we stay on our current infrastructure?
How do we detect if parts of our system is down?
How much time is spent on fixing problems vs creating functionality?
Did we learn someting from our last incident?
Do we have a clear picture of our technical debt?
Have we tested our backup solution?
How dependent are the teams on each other?
Are we allowing the teams to focus?
Is support and tech talking together?
Have we enabled people to let data drive their decisions?
Is our incident response process as it should be?
How do we detect if parts of our system is down?
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more info
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(and list of questions is too long)
List 3 packages based on org size and complexity - so people know what it costs
Team structure
& resource management
We help you clarify how the team of your future organisation should look like and what roles it should consist of. We are happy to lead the way in talent acquisition, team scaling, managing onshore and offshore growth, out-staffing, or establishing a follow-the-sun strategy for continuous project momentum. We have done it before and can help you get things sorted faster without you having to learn the same expensive lessons we did ourselves. We focus on questions like
If you find yourself wondering about questions like:
What is the best role to hire next?
How can we improve team collaboration?
Do we cover the right capabilities with our teams?
What is currently a bottleneck for faster delivery?
How do we measure tech performance?
Is our incident response process as it should be?
How do we detect if parts of our system is down?
How much time is spent on fixing problems vs creating functionality?
Is our estimation based on team discussions or individual opinions?
Did we learn someting from our last incident?
Do we have a clear picture of our technical debt?
Does the team feel guided or haunted?
Are we prioritising the right things?
How dependent are the teams on each other?
Are we allowing the teams to focus?
Is support and tech talking together?
What culture are we currently fostering?
How can we improve team collaboration?
What meetings are wasting people's time?
Who is diving into the details of the IT budget?
What are the main obstacles in our current delivery management process?
How can we improve our day-to-day delivery activities to ensure smoother operations?
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(list of questions too long)
we also look at how members are performing in the team and identify habits that are limiting delivery speed.
Describe process and areas of focus.
- Delivery framework
Delivery framework
We enhance your software delivery framework by identifying gaps in your current processes and habits that are misaligned with best practise. Our service optimises development workflows, enhances team collaboration, and integrates best practices tailored to your organisational goals. This ensures you achieve faster, more reliable software releases with minimal friction.
Suitable if you are worried about:
How can we use AI to enhance our time to market by strengthening our product development lifecycle?
What training do our teams need to effectively work with AI technologies?
How can we enable the organisation's ongoing experiments with prompt engineering and measure the results?
Which tasks can we speed up using AI tools to increase efficiency?
What AI tools and platforms are best suited for our business needs?
How can we use AI to gain knowledge from unstructured data?
Do we have unstructured data that AI could help condense into facts and knowledge?
How can AI assist in automating routine administrative tasks?
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more info
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Roadmapping
In our experience, long-term success stems from establishing clear and well-balanced priorities across budget, delivery capacity, and product vision. We understand the deep interconnection between these elements - and how the individuals responsible for each area often have diverse, and sometimes opposing, perspectives.
Our Roadmapping service facilitates the tough discussions around feature priorities, investments, and timing. We bring the right people into a meaningful dialogue, fostering compassion and understanding across differing priorities. This creates an environment for healthy and constructive conversations where all concerns are voiced. The process guides you towards clarity and a unified understanding of the overall business priorities, resulting in a realistic plan that balances product vision, team capacity, and budget constraints to support your long-term business case.
This process helps you answer questions like:
What should be our number one priority right now?
Are all stakeholders actively involved in the long-term planning?
What is currently a bottleneck for faster delivery?
Are we balancing competing priorities in accordance with overall, long-term business goals?
Are we being realistic with our timelines?
Are we allowing the teams to focus, or are we doing too many things at the same time?
Do we adjust our product vision to match capacity, or do we invest in more resources?
Is there a business case for getting more people involved?
Should we outsource or hire to meet deadlines?
When is the right time to modernise our legacy systems?
Working alongside your product team, executives, and stakeholders, we help create a realistic and actionable plan that aligns with both your short-term needs and long-term aspirations. We recognise that the necessary knowledge already resides within your organisation. Our role is to inspire, facilitate, and recap discussions, leveraging your internal domain knowledge to drive a productive dialogue. Throughout the process, we challenge assumptions to ensure the plan is grounded in the current and future capabilities of your organisation. We map milestones for the product vision, summarise runway and budget constraints, and propose how team capacity can best bridge the two.
While the tangible deliverable of roadmapping is an actionable timeline, the true value is created during the planning process itself. By aligning stakeholders across the organisation, we ensure all parties understand why this plan is the best path forward for the entire company. We call this approach "Planning with Purpose" - a method of unifying all stakeholders across the organisation, providing a comprehensive view of how to best allocate resources, manage capacity, and meet business demands over time.
Our primary goal is to ensure that the right discussions take place within your organisation. We guide and facilitate the process, recognising that true insights come from within your team. We drive the process and the documentation, allowing you to focus on the discussions that bring clarity to your decision-making. This approach results in a roadmap that people trust, because they feel it embraces the diverse concerns across the entire organisation, forming a shared direction to move along.
Delivery Governance
At its core, delivery governance is about orchestrating success for any type of software development, but we target the term towards projects involving external implementation partners or vendors.
These projects are inherently different from internal development - especially when multiple vendors are interdependent on each other’s deliveries. The usual methods of problem-solving via informal interactions are undermined by challenges such as limited transparency on progress, communication barriers between different organisational cultures, conflicting financial interests, and uncertainty about contractual obligations for scope adjustments.
Without proper governance, misalignments between vendors, timelines, and organisational goals will remain unresolved, leading to significant problems later in the project lifecycle and nagging questions like:
Are project timelines and contract terms realistically aligned?
Are we receiving the best possible advice from our external partners?
Are we addressing potential bottlenecks early enough to avoid delays?
What are the current risks of misalignment between our implementation partners?
How can we improve visibility across our software delivery portfolio?
A well-executed delivery governance framework fosters fruitful collaboration between all involved parties, creating an environment where challenges are addressed constructively and legal measures for dispute resolution can be avoided.
Get the support you need
Our Delivery Governance service is designed to maintain harmony between project timelines, vendors' contractual commitments, and long-term strategic goals. We serve as an independent third party providing oversight and reviewing details to uncover potential surprises and ensure that lines of communication and accountability are clear among all parties involved. Our role is to be your eyes and ears, offering the steady hand of experience, reducing risks, and helping you maintain clarity and control across your project portfolio.
Our approach includes:
Commercial review of project schedules against contractual commitments, highlighting discrepancies before they turn into disputes or delays.
Assessment of the current setup regarding budget management towards suppliers, resource allocation, and the effectiveness of your change request processes.
Delivery assurance audit, including planning reviews, technical checks, and solution design evaluations.
Facilitating steering committee meetings to ensure proper stakeholder engagement.
We know from experience that successful delivery from an external vendor extends well beyond go-live. It takes a strong focus from the onset to consider post-go-live activities as an essential part of the project lifecycle. We work closely with your internal team and vendors to ensure proper knowledge transfer and internal ownership, bridging the project transition from implementation to operational phases.
Delivery governance as an internal capability
Depending on your organisation's setup, it may be beneficial to invest in developing internal delivery governance capabilities. We can help strengthen your team’s ability to drive transparency, accountability, and effective risk management, and assist in establishing a Centre of Excellence to oversee both delivery and ensure internal ownership. Working alongside your internal teams and external partners, we help create a governance structure that promotes transparency, accountability, and effective risk management.
Hands-on
Strategy and long-term thinking are key to long-term success, but can't stand on their own. We are happy to provide practical, actionable assistance by taking responsibility for hands-on activities in your delivery lifecycle such as
:
Suitable if you are worried about:
How can we better facilitate dialogue across design, developers, testers, and DevOps to minimise risks?
Are our delivery timelines and budgets clear and realistic?
How can we improve our day-to-day delivery activities to ensure smoother operations?
How do we ensure that our delivery management practices align with our long-term business goals?
What metrics should we use to measure the success of our delivery management efforts?
How do we balance the need for speed with the need for stability in our delivery process?
How effective is our current risk management strategy in our delivery lifecycle?
are we getting the a quality conversation we need when we talk across departments?
How can we ensure that our workshops lead to tangible outputs and actionable insights?
How could we get more productive collaboration in our workshops?
How effective are our current workshop facilitation techniques in achieving desired outcomes?
What improvements can we make to the format or structure of our workshops?
How can we better summarise and present findings from our workshops?
What tools or technologies can enhance our workshop facilitation efforts?
20. How can we ensure that workshop participants feel engaged and motivated?
What customisations can we make to Jira to improve daily collaboration?
list way too long. We might need a different format for this "bucket of all the rest"
Delivery Management
- Our team drives day-to-day delivery activities, getting close to the team, facilitating dialogue across design, developers, testers, and DevOps to minimise risk, and create clarity around timelines and budgets.
Workshop Facilitation
- Our team facilitates workshops focused on productive collaboration and tangible outputs. We collect evidence, summarise key points, and present findings in a concise report, slide deck, or follow-up meeting.
Jira Setup
- Our team helps you set up Jira to reflect your workflow more smoothly, making it a seamless tool for daily collaboration, supporting your team without becoming a burden.
What we do well
The quality of your technology strategy and successful execution can make or break your business. We help ensure that your technology investments and initiatives align with your business objectives to deliver the desired impact. Our team of seasoned professionals has developed their expertise through years of hands-on experience, covering a broad range of areas.
The question is: What are you grappling with at the moment?
So, you do everything?
No, we don't do everything. We focus on what we excel at. We know our strengths and are proud of the integrity our our team bring with them. This is also why we are happy to refer you elsewhere if your main concern lies at the edge of our expertise.
Cybersecurity
If you are considering how best to enhance cybersecurity in your organisation, improve your security posture, map the security threats, or understand the attack vectors across your networks, you should reach out to the crew over at fractl.au. They have years of hands-on experience with real-world security protection and are exceptionally strong in that area. Yes, they cover many things that we also help with, but if cybersecurity is a key concern for you, these are the people to connect with.
Compliance & Information Security Management
If you are looking for assistance with compliance documentation processes or ISO certification, you should (also) chat with fractl.au. They will ensure your organisation lets up to speed with the necessary compliance and security standards efficiently and effectively.
Enterprise Level System Integration
If you have specific needs regarding custom system integration at enterprise level, we highly recommend reaching out to NJC Labs. Over the years, we have collaborated with them many times, and they always overdeliver on engagement, clarity, and communication while keeping the solution neat, well-documented, and aligned with the rest of your system architecture.
Websites, Online Ads, Marketing & Branding
Have a talk with the crew behind EnterHello.com if you need to strengthen your online presence in any shape or form. They have consistently delivered outstanding results for us and some of our clients when dealing with websites, CRM, online marketing, and branding.
We help you clarify, communicate and coordinate tech
across your organisation
Milling Stone Business Consulting
ABN: 63 643 261 586
Suite 4, Level 5, 377-383 Sussex Street,
Sydney, NSW 2000
Tel: +61 292 613 144