What we know.

The fact is clear: the modern business needs digitalization to grow fast on the market. So, your Company realized its need for a mature IT Partner and set the procurement process to select an IT Company that can help your Enterprise with continuous improvement.

There were a lot of procurement stages and negotiations so once the best IT Company defined. Finally, you have got IT-Partner.

Usually, business people shape success criteria as a set of high-level requirements for upcoming Software and IT-infrastructure improvements expecting smooth Company transformation. IT Partner listened to you carefully helping you with Digital Transformation Roadmap that takes all your success criteria into account.

Also, they promised to be agile sharing your business goals. That is why your expectation to have ROI soon makes sense. Nevertheless, it is your assumption until they deliver the first outcomes to the market.

Nobody likes surprises.

So, how to get the right IT-partner if all of them sound equal, promising and committed as declared by their website, portfolio, and references? What is the possible impact of such a wrong decision made, as to the choice of a weak IT-Partner? And the main question: how to avoid it?

The Solution.

Do not rely on your standard procurement procedure choosing your IT Partner. IT-services is something different so it needs a special approach to achieve ROI.

• There are two strategies of partnership with IT-Company: transactional cooperation or long-term partnership. Plan your procurement process according to the cooperation strategy. It is all about your investments.
• Use different criteria to choose IT-Partner for Software Projects or Infrastructure Transformations. It is all about your business risks.
• Ask your potential IT-partner about their employee development processes. The way such processes might impact delivery and budget as attrition rate, ramp-down, promotion & career plans, team succession planning. It is all about business-transformation continuity.
• Ask your potential IT-Partner about their professional culture of personal commitment. How do they plan, set up and manage it? It is all about change management and procedures you can shift to your IT-Partner.

Agile/SCRUM, as a proven approach for incremental value delivery for Software Development projects, enables ROI of Software Services. It is just a matter of time as Software Solution is online serving consumers and brings the money. You can remove technical debt, find and fix defects and even refactor whole application user experience or software architecture of newly developed Software services. Or do nothing. That means you have the tools to manage the ROI of Software Development Projects mitigating business risks.

In the case of Process & Infrastructure transformations, you should run with DevOps methodology as operations, it is crystal that slacks and downtimes are unacceptable and changes have to be implemented in real-time. It is another kind of engineers with their own DevOps Professional Ethics who committed to get things done by all means possible securing the value chain continuity. That means you unlock the ROI and make it possible.

So there are DevOps Professional Ethics principles:

• DevOps chases 100% service availability. Client’s value chain sustainability first.
• DevOps ensures authorized data and services accessibility. Data safety first.
• DevOps protects the Client’s intellectual property. Confidentiality first
• DevOps is driven by industry best practices. Information Security standards compliance first
• DevOps increases ROI. Cost of operations savings first.
• DevOps is open, clear, positive & collaborative. Negotiations first.
• DevOps is proactive and educative. Knowledge sharing first.
• DevOps make the world better contributing to society. Opensource first.