NeuEon
Leading the Agile Transformation Journey

"Transformation is hard. It’s much less difficult with an experienced guide,” begins Peter Karlson, CEO of NeuEon, as he describes how organizations today are challenged to scale Agile practices. For traditionally-managed organizations, Agile introduces radical change, not just in processes and technology, but also in culture. Companies struggle, Karlson points out, given the undertaking’s magnitude and complexity. This is where NeuEon steps in.

NeuEon guides clients through Agile transformation using a wide array of proven, unbiased methodologies, frameworks, models, and applied theories, coupled with hands-on guidance from a team of former C-suite leaders with decades of strategic experience. Their approach is flexible, consultative, and results-focused. Services are designed to enhance predictability, quality, and time-to-market, regardless of the Agile framework in use. “Our collaborative approach to working with clients on each step closes the business-technology gap, which is critical for successful transformation,” states Karlson.

NeuEon begins Agile transformation engagements with its guided Agile Maturity Self-Assessment, which analyzes seven performance categories at the team level to quickly ascertain Agile maturity. Results from multiple teams are rolled up to measure organizational maturity. With these baselines, NeuEon creates highly-prescriptive recommendations for improvement, for example, education, process change, or automation, quickly moving to coaching and guidance to support execution and ensure successful outcomes. They implement a core set of business-driven metrics upfront, like value delivered, cycle time, time-to-market, and efficiency, to measure improvement over time. “One of our large, global clients experienced a 25 to 30 percent improvement in all seven categories across the company within a year,” states Karlson. “This drove significant positive impact on the business.”

NeuEon provides leadership on other transformational initiatives–whether they are focused on improving efficiencies, moving processes online, modernizing technology platforms, or merging processes and infrastructure post-M&A.

They begin by defining clear, business-driven objectives and then facilitate collaborative workshops to procure a deep, detailed understanding of cross-company business processes. By engaging a cross-functional group of leaders, managers, and staff from all departments involved, the workshops ensure a rich, shared understanding of workflows, handoffs, and upstream/downstream dependencies. NeuEon identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies, areas ripe for improvement, and changes required to make transformation possible. They create prescriptive recommendations for streamlining and automating workflows to drive business efficiencies and customer satisfaction. NeuEon also offers a Strategic Technology Assessment service to help clients understand overall IT performance against business strategy and create recommendations for improvement. “Our value proposition is the objective, outside perspective we bring to the table,” says Karlson. ”Often, people in the organization are too close to the problem to identify the root causes of inefficiencies and see the options available to them to improve.”

Engagements often reveal the need for technology investment. NeuEon provides a proven, unbiased, data-driven methodology based on decades of hands-on experience for making the best choices–whether of software, hardware, or vendor services. They use process clarity to define detailed, business-driven requirements and research vendors and products to thoroughly understand the market. They can also manage the end-to-end RFI/RFP process–something many organizations find challenging to do efficiently given day-to-day workloads. With active involvement in the negotiation process, NeuEon mediates the best contractual agreement for its clients. “We are completely technology agnostic and have no ties with any software or hardware vendor,” adds Karlson.

As NeuEon has grown, the firm has built strong, long-lasting partnerships with its clients, facilitated cultural change, and improved transformational outcomes. With decades of experience underpinning their core values of optimism and collaboration, NeuEon takes an entrepreneurial approach to continuously improve its capabilities in the Agile transformation space. “Each customer is unique, so our strategy for the future is to continue flexibly engaging with companies that are looking to make the leap and need a helping hand,” concludes Karlson.