Axiom:1 Services

The services we provide our customers are based on a solid foundation of experience acquired over many years of successful development, implementation and execution of IT business functions.

We have grouped our services into four functional categories. Each detailed service within the categories is supported standalone or may be combined with any of the other services based on your specific needs. If you have any questions or would like to discuss particulars about any of our services please contact us, otherwise more information is available by clicking on any of the following categories.

IT Process Improvement

An organization with a process driven perspective has the advantage of orienting your company to meet the demands of the global 24/7/365 economy. This requires organizational alignment along core processes that not only cross functions and divisions, but quite often time zones, languages, and outsourced business partners. Unfortunately, companies often undertake this transformation with a narrow perspective, which can result in limited success, frustrated customers, and demoralized employees.

We’ve oriented our IT Process Improvement services to help in key areas that enable improving quality, efficiency and a more positive customer experience while being structured to achieve significant return on investment (ROI).

  • Vision and Mission Development – Through facilitated workshops and interviews we help clarify your existing Vision and Mission or help develop them.
  • Strategy and Planning – In assessment workshops and analysis we help design the best strategic process recommendations that align your company to meeting your strategic goals.
  • Budget Management – We analyze your existing budget planning and management approach with a goal of gaining agility and efficiency in constantly changing priority and economic environments.
  • Organizational Management – Our efforts in this area include reviewing and optimizing your organization with an eye towards increasing span of control and decreasing layers to bring your workforce closer to your customer.
  • Enterprise and Application Architecture – We review your current EA to validate meeting the service and functional demands of your business. We can guide development of an EA (SOA, SaaS, Integration) program if needed.
  • Measurement Program and Balance Score Card – We cultivate the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and Key Result Indicators (KRI) that provide ongoing and evolving insight into your organizations overall performance.
  • Change Management – Through analysis and review we develop new or improved CM processes that support agility and communication of change within your organization.
  • Process and Quality Improvement – We review key strategic processes with a goal of ensuring they are optimized to enhance the bottom line.
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IT Product Testing and System Quality Assurance

Ensuring product quality is a must for companies that want to optimize customer satisfaction, maintain constant uptime and availability and have a competitive advantage. With the complexity of today’s systems, especially in the area of integrated systems, ensuring high product quality and superior performance requires a significant effort. Unfortunately, one or both are sometimes sacrificed in an effort to meet time to market demands.

Your overall quality program is a key strategy for growing your business and should be as efficient as possible without sacrifice of thoroughness.

  • Organizational Structure – Whether your company model is to have a centralized test organization or a distributed one, we review your process to ensure you are achieving the highest level of product testing. We will also evaluate the use of on-shore and off-shore resources in your testing model.
  • Test Process Improvement – After a thorough review of your test processes, we provide recommendations for improving test organizational effectiveness in the areas of test functions, tools and technologies, staffing and resource competencies.
  • Testing Coverage Improvement (Functional, Performance, Integration and Production) – We review your current test strategies in all key testing functions such as unit, functional, system, integration and performance to ensure maximum test coverage is being achieved.
  • Test Data Efficiency – Maintaining consistent test data is an arduous task and one that is not often done well. We review your test data management procedures to ensure coverage, validity and reuse of your data is maximized, recommending process enhancements and technologies as necessary.
  • Measurement Program – We evaluate not only the specific test metrics maintained within your organization, but also key quality indicators of the software development life cycle to ensure all data that can assist in validating your overall organizational performance is being captured.
  • Technology Evaluation – We review existing technologies used within your testing process and provide recommendations for additional or different test tools as needed.
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IT Product Portfolio Management

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is a term used by IT program management organizations to describe methods for analyzing and collectively managing a group of current or proposed projects based on numerous key characteristics. The fundamental objective of the PPM process is to determine the optimal mix and sequencing of proposed projects to best achieve the organization's overall goals. Research contends that greater than 50% of IT organizations have little oversight of their project portfolio and employ non-repeatable, chaotic planning processes.

Our IT Project Portfolio Management services utilize our experience in enabling successful PPM programs, or improving existing ones.

  • Operational Analysis – After a thorough review of your PPM processes, we provide recommendations for improving operations via potential changes in the information model, staffing and/or portfolio program.
  • Portfolio Budget Management – We conduct extensive analysis around portfolio program focus, objective prioritization, priority funding over next best investment decisions, and planning processes with a goal of aligning IT/R&D strategies with corporate objectives.
  • Asset Performance Management – Capturing the performance of strategic assets and resources are of significant importance to the portfolio management function. Our analysis is focused on eliciting metrics that provide qualified and comprehensive insight to aid management in making critical business, budget and planning decisions.
  • Time/Resource Management – We review current time and resource information collection and reporting and then make recommendations that support accurate information feedback for estimating, planning, billing and allocation of resources.
  • Organizational Efficiency – We review the current Portfolio Management organizational model and possibly realign it to satisfy achieving the group's mission and vision as well as stakeholder needs. Models such as staff augmentation, centralized program management and information consolidation are considered.
  • Change Control – We conduct a detailed review of the portfolio, stakeholder and development group's responsibility, standards, and communication processes and evaluate them for agility, practicality and efficiency to provide recommendations that affect the best possible throughput when change occurs.
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IT Product Delivery

There are many steps involved in the delivery of a software product and depending on the size of your organization it can include a variety of functional areas and a large number of people. A documented, repeatable Software Development Life Cycle that is well known and consistently followed within your organization makes delivering your products more efficient.

The extensive experience we’ve acquired over many years of success delivering IT products enables us to provide our customers with detailed reviews of existing procedures, resources, standards and technologies governing their product delivery process. Our goal is to assist your organization in decreasing costs while preparing for and managing growth by instilling a process-driven perspective.

  • Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) Review – We review your organization’s SDLC approach and analyze the impact of management models, resource allocation and competencies, budget, strategies, training, tools, technologies and metrics, making recommendations for improvements as needed.
  • Release Management – We assess the release management procedures within your organization to ensure they are effective and efficient. The release management process must provide sufficient governance to ensure effective change control of your software assets, utilizing tools and automation technologies to maximize efficiency.
  • Deployment Management – We analyze the deployment process, tools and automation technologies used within your organization. The deployment process should be tightly integrated with the release management process to ensure the effect of integrated systems is constantly considered during deployments.
  • Measurement Program – We evaluate the overall quality indicators of the software development life cycle to ensure all data that can assist in the successful delivery of a quality product is being captured. A consistent review and validation of this data is key to providing you with an overall health-check of your organizational performance.
  • Configuration Management – A strong configuration management process is necessary to ensure all functional activities within your SDLC are operating with expected versions of your software stack, in addition to environment deployment scheduling. We conduct extensive reviews of the practices and procedures involved to ensure proper controls are in place to minimize the risk of configuration issues later in the SDLC.
  • Tools and Technology Evaluation – As part of the overall product delivery process, we will evaluate how tools and technologies are utilized within your organization to determine if you are achieving optimal results. We will also recommend additional or updated tools and processes as needed.
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