Background
Shiiba Village Japan
Process Improvement
KASSEBAUM CONSULTING specializes in the reengineering of product development processes and teams. Our specialty is working with product development and support groups that suffer from one or more of the following issues: schedule slippage, feature creep, cost overruns, quality problems, poor relations with internal and/or external customers, high staff turnover, etc. We've worked with groups that range in size from 3 to 70 people and on projects from 3 to 24 months. Most projects typically require only one consultant. For larger projects we have an experienced pool of technical managers from which to draw upon.
At KASSEBAUM CONSULTING we treat people with respect, value the opinions of all and work to make cultural changes that will persist. Our technique is to first learn your way of doing business, understand the problems that you've identified as well as the remedial efforts that you've utilized or considered. Then we start looking at everything and everyone associated with the project in question. Some changes will be easy to implement and others will not. In either case, we shall keep you, our sponsor, abreast of all that is going on, per informal briefings as well as more formal progress reports and/or action item requests.
At KASSEBAUM CONSULTING we are firm believers in management by walking (and sometimes flying, depending upon where team members might be located). We utilize corporate anthropological techniques to augment more traditional means of gathering information. To this end, our consultants will spend a considerable amount of time working alongside team members.
Our job is to help you and your team implement sustainable ways to do the following:
- Work smarter, not harder. We've found that it's seldom necessary to totally reengineer a group and/or its processes. Often, the greatest benefit comes from the identification and mitigation of smaller issues. The manner in which these issues are identified and resolved is key to the cultural changes that we will instill within your development team.
- Reduce GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). We will work with team members to improve the quality and management of product requirements, engineering documentation and customer documentation. We will also work to ensure that all relevant team members have a voice in the creation, review and adoption of internal and external documentation.
- Improve entire team's overall understanding of issues relating to Quality, Project Management and internal/external customer relations.This will include making cultural changes that encourage groups to continually look for ways to improve quality, efficiency and customer satisfaction.
- Encourage formal and informal mechanisms to reward excellence. Employee recognition is a cheap yet vital part of ensuring that a development team is functioning properly.
If you have a team in the San Francisco Bay Area that is in need of our services, feel free to contact our lead consultant, Erik Kassebaum erik.kassebaum@kassebaum.org.
