DNA:Hylaine’s whole firm approach
Context
Founded in late 2017, Hylaine put emphasis on the idea of working with great companies to provide project-based, high-touch technology services built on trust and integrity. Solving Technology Together.
The Whole Firm Approach was born as we provide team-based support for our clients to ensure ongoing success, consistent services, and successful delivery of projects. Since the beginning, our core tenets for helping our clients succeed have not changed.
Technology, Methodology, and Tool agnostic
Tailored Solutions to meet each client's needs now, and for the long term
100% US-Based Workforce, fully vetted full-time employees
Average 13 years of experience in 20+ diverse industries
So what is Hylaine's Whole-Firm Approach? It is a commitment to our client relationships that when working with Hylaine they are not just working with a consultant or a project team but the entirety of Hylaine's resources, our broad industry knowledge, and previous project learnings. It means that when a question is asked or an issue arises, all of Hylaine becomes available to answer the call to turn problems into opportunities. When a new technology or process blocker is encountered, our team can be engaged to help give guidance and create long-term solutions.
CHALLENGES
"We are a culture company that exists to solve problems through technology."
That statement drives how we work with each other and serve our customers. At Hylaine, we have our TRUST culture (Transparent, Results-Focused, Upbeat, Solicit Feedback, Thankful). It is the core value by which we make business decisions, our attitude toward client service, and how our employees operate. We use these values to form strategic partnerships with our clients so they can benefit from Hylaine helping client organizations to succeed and achieve their strategic objectives.
We have always put our culture to work helping enable our client’s critical initiatives and partnering to deliver outstanding project results. But that's not the only way we help our clients. Many times it is the above-and-beyond actions that teammates just naturally jump at to help our clients when they have critical needs. These situations can range from pre-project whiteboarding sessions to a consultant jumping in with a client to look at a malfunctioning report or codebase, oftentimes after the initial project has ended.
Here are a few ways our teammates have gone above and beyond for our clients to help them succeed in their initiatives.
On a late Friday afternoon when other consultancies leave early, a client asked one of our lead consultants on a project there if anyone at Hylaine had experience with Business Objects reports as they realized during a migration they had missed upgrading nearly 4 dozen older but business critical reports. The lead immediately contacted their Client Engagement resource who set up an internal call to determine available teammates. After brainstorming with a few others into the evening, Hylaine was able to find one of our teammates with the right skill set and set up a meeting with the client that evening. Our expert was able to start that very Monday to help the client begin remediating these reports to not miss their project deadline. As the initial 4 dozen reports were upgraded before the deadline, the client then extended the engagement with our teammate to assist in correcting more reports that can now be pulled into the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
One of Hylaine’s clients is a Fortune 500 energy company where we assist them with a team of Delivery Services consultants that provide Project Management and Agile Scrum Master expertise to lead multiple project teams. The client approached our team and asked if we had Agile coaches who could conduct training for several teams. These Teams had recently gone through some personnel turnover and, as a result, there were various levels of an Agile knowledge base within the Team, from novice to experienced. The client and Hylaine believed that conducting a refresher agile training session would help level-set and improve the overall Team understanding of the Agile philosophy and reinforce the essential Scrum set of values, principles, and practices. Hylaine quickly identified one of our Agile coaching consultants and arranged to meet with the client to understand the training needs. Our Agile consultant started with Hylaine’s Agile Fundamentals training materials and customized the content for the client audience. We then conducted a total of 4 agile training sessions with the client teams. Hylaine also included in these review sessions the opportunity for the Teams to review their Team Working Agreements and make adjustments/updates based on where the Team was at, both from an Agile maturity and Software Development experience level. Hylaine provided this training at no additional cost to the client as part of our Firm Approach as a trusted partner.
During a recent engagement, Hylaine was working with a local media company to upgrade the programming language of one of their partner-facing business applications. This short-term project seemed straight-forward initially but the lead consultant quickly learned the application was hosted with other applications that couldn't be updated. They also discovered that the server itself was not stable for ongoing Production usage. Our lead reviewed their technology landscape with the stakeholder and determined that a minimal footprint in Azure could be deployed to support this in a cost-effective manner, laying out an implementation plan with the stakeholder. While upgrading their codebase to the most current version and pushing to Azure DevOps so that it now was in source control, the consultant also walked the client through activating their Azure instance and deployed the application to a steady state. This extra effort allowed the client to feel comfortable with a modern infrastructure for the foreseeable future while also solving the immediate application needs.
SOLUTION
Hylaine is always partnering with our clients to help them deliver on their business strategy and execute strategic projects. Our teams constantly work together with key stakeholders to identify desired outcomes and milestones. Throughout projects, teammates are constantly looking around corners for our clients to ensure deliverables are not missed, with issues found and addressed before they can become blockers. This is how our Whole Firm Approach works to help clients solve their hard problems.
There are some common ways Hylaine partners with our clients to support them with our Whole Firm Approach.
Phase Zeros are Hylaine's fixed price, fixed time discovery process in which we combine interviews and the firm approach to provide extremely high-value analysis. These types of engagements result in our detailed implementation plan and roadmap that can help deliver results right away.
Deployment of a Hylaine consultant or team in a short timeline to help solve critical business blockers
Whiteboarding or thought leadership architectural resources to help bounce ideas off of or assist in modernization efforts.
