Polaris Advisor is our full service advisory offering to help software companies implement a Continuous Improvement program with Ergonometrics™ and Continuous Measurement, powered by Polaris.
It is the next stage in the evolution of the advisory programs we have been offering since 2011.
Polaris helps us move from a pure advisory model to a hybrid engagement model with the self-service platform doing much of the heavy lifting of data and analytics and allowing us to focus the advisory work on showing you how to use the data it provides to improve the your processes, and run the program on your own.
The Polaris Advisor program starts with a concierge on-boarding that includes an initial assessment of your current product development process, and recommendations on where you need to focus your continuous improvement, a concrete iterative program to achieve targets, training for internal resources to build and run the program on their own, and ongoing monitoring, advice and engagement from us as needed to adapt the program over time.
For larger companies with multiple value streams and organizations, Exathink can help you put together a strategic enterprise level continuous improvement program with custom analyses and reports to solve specific organizational or process pain points that may not directly be captured in the standard Polaris application
Polaris Advisor is an advisory program that improves product development processes by connecting the work your teams do to the value they provide to customers.
If you have a product team of 30 or more people, or are operating multiple product teams of 8-10 people each.
If you are partially or fully remote.
If you outsource engineering work to development partners and want more visibility and control over delivery practices.
If you are still operating with a mix of manual and automated processes, have functional silos and handoffs, and would like to figure out how to systematically eliminate them to deliver value to customers more efficiently.
If you don't have clear visibility into your customer value streams, and the data that can connect the work your teams do to the value customers derive from the work, it is hard to know how changes impact business outcomes.
We believe our unique approach to modeling and measurement is intuitive and effective for both engineers and managers, but it requires a clear understanding of the principles of connecting work to value.
Not all companies are well versed in this, and our advisory program helps you establish the right foundations.
The wrong way to do this is to start with metrics.
Off the shelf metrics platforms take a "one size fits all" approach and you can get simple, but wrong answers to what your true barriers to customer value creation are.
Even if you just focus on work processes, if your process consists of a mix of automated and manual steps, functional silos and multiple handoffs on the path to delivering value, the simplistic analytics from these tools will often have you focusing on the wrong sort of optimizations.
The data needed to connect product development work to value can be instrumented from your delivery toolchain and by collecting qualitative data through surveys.
But it is often not a trivial matter to extract actionable insights, since the data is often noisy and needs to segmented and analyzed along customer value streams, taking into account the specific context of your organization and team structures.
Polaris Advisor is a turnkey solution that blends advisory services and analytics support to solve this problem for you.
The Polaris Platform is an analytics platform that takes care of the heavy lifting needed to produce the data and analytics needed to support our program.
Companies try to build this infrastructure in an ad hoc fashion with custom integrations, spreadsheets and reports. There is a real cost to building and maintaining these over time. It takes away precious engineering resources, and it usually does not scale beyond a certain point.
There are many Engineering Intelligence platforms on the market that help you collect the engineering related metrics, but they are designed for least common denominator and are not designed to look beyond the engineering silo.
Value Stream Management platforms give you end to end visibility, but they are designed primarily with Enterprise project management use cases in mind, and are primarily targeted at giant enterprises with complex product portfolios.
Polaris is designed primarily as a platform that collects detailed diagnostic data for continuous improvement programs for mid-size to large software organizations with a few hundred to a few thousand people, and it fills a major gap in the measurement marketplace today: a sophisticated analytics tool to connect work to value.
The Advisor program will show you how to interpret and use the real-time signals generated by Polaris in the context of your company, to connect work to value.
If you have not done this type of exercise before, there is an art and a science to it, and we can teach you how to do this at your company.
We work with your executive leadership team as well as the product delivery engineering teams on the ground to understand the unique needs and dynamics of your company and culture, the specific areas where you want to focus on for continuous improvement and create the conditions for maximum success.
An initial engagement will run for 60-90 days. We typically pick one or two key areas to focus on initially.
It starts with mapping and modeling your customer value streams and starting to see your operational metrics from the perspective of your customers.
Our program has a very unique approach to effect these changes. We will have a good working baseline after 2-4 weeks of real time observations together with historical data. It might take 45-60 days to scope and define a concrete action plan for near term improvement, though often things will move much faster.
Once you see initial results, we help you build a longer term continuous improvement roadmap, focusing on key KPIs like Response Time, Quality, Alignment and Team Health and can either help train your internal team to operate the program, provide ongoing advice in partnership with you, or both.
No.
As mentioned above, there are many commercial and open-source products in the market now that are better suited for operational and reporting use cases.
But it is often hard to tell which of these tools will work well for your context without collecting data from your company first, and you dont want to be constrained by the capabilities of your metrics tool.
We solve this chicken-and-egg problem, but our platform is intended for deep analysis and advisory work, not for ongoing operational management.
It is part of our service offering and you don't pay for the technology, just the advice.
But having built this platform, we can help you choose the right commericial or open source tools for ongoing operational measurement as part of our advisory program.
Our goal is to become your trusted partner in helping you connect work to value with actionable data and insights.
