iag profile

IAG Consulting Company Profile

Company Overview IAG Consulting is solely focused on business and software requirements. We are specialists that have worked with over 300 of the Fortune 500 companies to improve the efficiency of these organizations in business analysis. Combined with recently acquired Digital Mosaic, our company has completed over 1,000 requirements projects for companies developing solutions or implementing packaged applications. Our organization focuses on a practical and practiced approach that is efficient for all stakeholders: business professionals, information technology departments, business analysts and project managers. We pride ourselves in bringing measurable gains to our clients:

• Reducing time needed to complete requirements • Ensuring completeness in documentation and reducing change requests • Issuing RFPs where vendors can bid accurately and clients get better terms • Reducing costs in systems development • Salvaging troubled projects

Our average consultant has over 20 years of experience. Each member of our team is taken through a rigorous screening, hiring and certification process that assures a high standard of professional facilitation, analysis and interpersonal skills. Using this professional facilitation, we have found that business requirements engagements can be compressed about 60% from what clients have seen in the past, while assuring a higher level of completeness.

Our Services IAG Consulting works with clients in one of three modes, offering: Requirements Discovery and Management Services: Using small teams of expert analysts, we facilitate requirements sessions, develop requirements specifications, assure completeness, and may even manage your requirements through the delivery cycle. We also develop RFPs, fix broken projects where these projects were derailed by poor requirements, and provide excellent people to accelerate the elicitation and management of business and software requirements. Analyst Professional Development and Best Practices Implementation Services: Using our Best Requirements PracticesTM methods, we help clients change the performance of their analyst organization. We bring the end-to-end combination of tested process and depth in Requirements Practice IntegrationTM, rich professional development assets like our analyst training courses or simulations, and an experiential learning approach that has been proven effective at embedding business analysis excellence with hundreds of clients. Turn-Key Business Analysis Center of Excellence: Some clients are implementing the business analysis function for the first time, conducting a transformational change to the services delivered by the analysts, dealing with a significantly larger portfolio of projects, or grappling with a series of failed projects and overruns and need immediate access to turn-key capability to meet the urgent objective for the analysis function. IAG’s approach enables immediate performance gains on achieving business and project goals while leveraging and developing existing staff and resources. For clients serious about immediate performance change, we deliver exceptional analyst resources and best practice implementation.


Example Engagements

Requirements Discovery and Management

Analyst Professional Development and

Best Practices Implementation

Business Analysis Center of Excellence

Michigan Department of

Transport (MDOT) Providing the highest quality

integrated transportation services for economic benefit and improved

quality of life. As part of an overall plan to improve project manage-ment, Couto and his team first turned to enhancing the business requirement definition process, and ran a test case with IAG to prove the gains in performance efficiency that could be attained. SafeStat or “the Safety Status System” that monitors and tracks the progress of traffic and safety projects was selected with the intent to develop an RFP which would go to one of the major outsourcers – IBM, EDS, CSC etc. For this complex, $1,000,000 project, IAG was able to help compress the requirements discovery cycle into less than 2 weeks and then work with the team to issue a comprehensive RFP. So precise were the requirements, that the variability of responses from these vendors was only $30,000. Doug’s team was able to use this precision to secure far better terms, including performance guarantees, and eventually delivered the project 33% under budget.

Bank of Montreal (BMO)

A financial institution with total assets of $320 billion and almost 35,000

employees Together with some exceptional talent from the BMO organization, our team worked to improve the templates, courses, instruction, and management process for requirements. Together simulation programs were developed and a full certification and assessment approach was developed for the BMO analyst team. To date, BMO has trained over 400 of its people in our methods and practices, has used our e-learning materials tactically to reinforce skills, and has made excellent use of our facilitators on strategic projects. This initiative with BMO became the genesis of the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) – taking this same professional accreditation to BAs worldwide. IAG is a founding member of IIBA and is, of course, endorsed as an education and services provider.

Salt River Project (SRP)

the largest utility in Arizona with just over 4,300 employees and just under 1

million customers Since 1999 IAG has completed dozens of projects with the pragmatic management team of SRP. Acting like a center of excellence for the SRP organization, IAG staffed lead analyst project roles for a period of time, then transitioning these roles to SRP staff. This program included defining and implementing the analysis practices and process for all projects by all IT analysts, designing client-specific courses and training selected Business Analysts in business requirements facilitation and docu-mentation skills in support of the process. Implementing our turn-key capability accelerated the trans-formation of SRPs analysts into a highly efficient and progressive organization. Our team delivered group training, self-paced exercises, assignments, individual one-on-one coaching, testing, mentoring and working together with SRP staff across many projects.


The Potential Performance Improvement brought by IAG to your Organization We play a focused role in overall organization development. The importance of the requirements area cannot be underestimated; for example: the findings of InfoTech Research (2004) “Flawed Requirements Trigger 70% of Project Failures … up to 50% of project rework is attributable to problems with requirements”. Our research (below) has discovered similar findings in a study of 36 projects at 6 client organizations.1

Our basic proposal is that we help an organization get requirements right the first time. This means far less requirements change over the course of development and far better control of time and scope. Clients that use our approach find a significant reduction in the number of changes to requirements over the life cycle of the project. This is not because we do not encourage change, ours is an iterative approach, it is because the clients themselves have a more complete understanding of the system needed, they have achieved consensus, and do not wish to make change. The process of getting requirements right makes a dramatic impact on total time and effort needed to do business and software requirements as well as the total development cost. On many engagements over $1 million, clients have found that they are saving over $200,000 by working with the IAG team. IAG is for clients that are serious about controlling scope and achieving repeated project success.

1 On projects undertaken between 1993 and 2002, six repeated measures on 36 projects in six subject organizations were collected on project, before and after implementing the IAG RDP and using BRP. To ensure both ’before and after’ data sets are logically and methodologically comparable, ‘between-subject variability’ was reduced through sets of project pairings of similar types and function points such that the ‘before’- and ‘after’-implementation statistics are comparable. High and Low here refer to the largest and smallest of the projects in the sample of 38. Generally, it indicates that the larger the project, the more significant the benefit – except – in reduction of change requests where a 75% reduction is true regardless of project size.

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