Publications

There were three specific goals to be reached with this SKU:

1. Requirements and Likely Migration Planning:  Knowing that many of our clients had a distinct organizational maturity (CMMI Level 1) problem, creating a new service SKU to support our efforts made sense. So, in effect, Reason #1 was about a new service geared specifically towards an NGO/NPO type client; poor collaboration was a top desire requirement when interviewing them for their needs. For our team, this meant a significant change in project management.  We had to change from a heavy use of Waterfall to a more nuanced usage of Scrum/Agile.  But, since many of our NGO/NPO clients worked for the US government, we could not go 100% with Agile.  So, as a part of this SKU, we created a hybrid approach- ScurmFall- Scrum plus Waterfall ScrumFall or, as their organizations have called it, Waggile.
2. MRR:  As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), we highly depended on a monthly recurring income model (MRR).  That is, except for the PMO division.  Payment schedules varied from customer to customer and from project to project.  Sometimes, we would do Fixed Price agreements, while other times, it would be more of a Time/Material contract.  This meant hills representing the weeks of billing and income.  The valleys represented periods where we could not collect funds; thus, if looking at a scale, it would mean lots of ups and downs.  Leadership requested that the PMO find a way to change its financial model so that we would begin to match.  So, we went through many brainstorming sessions.  This involved the PMO, IT, Security, AP, AR, and the Help Desk.  Finally, we settled on a three-year program with 36 payments.  This immediately created an SKU using the MRR model, which was precisely what the leadership had requested.  MRR.
3. Conversion: Clients brought into the fold as an MRR client typically stayed with us for, on average, 12 years.  Sometimes longer.  Until now, the PMO had no clear way to build an SKU that would include MRR. CCn365 quickly became the star service offering of the PMO position.  Creating CCn365 with three distinct phases would make it hard to keep the client otherwise.