Contract better when sourcing

Vendors are experts at bidding and contracting. Most clients aren’t because it is not their day job. Have IDC experts assist you in leveling the field.

Drive an effective process that creates the best outcome in sourcing initiatives. Include market intelligence to short-list vendors and save time, effort and process cost.

The contracting process for a new or existing partner can be as complicated and confusing as the selection itself. IDC simplifies and standardizes the process with its consistent framework to ensure improved outcomes, faster and more effectively and with less pain. We support clients through the process of contracting a new services provider. IDC helps manage the negotiation and contracting processes. We can supply key terms and conditions to ensure a performative contract, benchmark the proposed vendor pricing model against similar contracts and services to aid in getting a market conform contract.

Get the value from your vendors you pay for

Understand the price and performance value of your sourcing partners through market benchmarking of price and performance. Rightsize and improve sourcing relationships. Continuous improvement of sourcing relationships.

It is hard to assess whether the outsourced or MSP service you receive is market price and performance conform. Answering the business question, ‘Are we getting a good deal from this relationship’ is harder than anticipated.

Benchmarking the services contracted against market performance and costs peers gives clients a clear understanding where their sourcing partner is performative and where they aren’t. This provides sourcing relationships mid-course corrections or drives improved contracting for future contract renewals or new sourcing projects. Clients and vendors have seen struggling relationships repaired for mutual benefit. It helps clients avoid the effort of changing sourcing providers by allowing the provider to improve their performance to market value. A win-win for both the client and the sourcing provider.

Improve or modernize your legacy to a modern application!

Many customer organizations possess old, large, critical applications that are mission-critical yet feared for maintenance due to low maintainability and loss of original developers. They require maintenance to manage security and production risks. Modernization, like transitioning to microservices, is a potential necessity.

The Software Quality and Risk Assessment service evaluates code quality against notable standards like ISO 25010, ISO 5055, OWASP, and others, encompassing over 2000 rules, with some deemed critical, especially those concerning security. It scans for rule violations in application code, impacting reported health factors: Robustness, Security, Efficiency, Changeability, Transferability, and Maintainability. Additionally, it measures and reports on technical debt, technical size, and functional size (automated function points). IDC Metri offers a comprehensive application blueprint, visually displaying dependencies and interactions across components, classes, frameworks, and modules on multiple levels.

Complete technical insights of your entire application portfolio in weeks!

The ALA service measures a number of application characteristics of the applications in a portfolio in a short period of time, e.g., quality (elegance, resiliency, agility), business impact, cloud readiness (cloud blockers and roadblocks), open-source safety, size, etc.

The result is a detailed overview on both portfolio level as application level which is the basis for fact-based decision-making regarding cloud migration, modernization, mergers & acquisitions (technical due diligence), open-source safety improvements, etc.

Accurately estimate the cost and duration of your project

Get insight in a realistic effort, schedule, and cost, based on ISO standards for functional size, proven parametric models and peer data selected from over 15,000 realized software initiatives.

The result is a size measurement based on industry standards that leads to a cost estimate that is fully based on peer projects that have been carried out under comparable circumstances in a similar type of business area with a team with comparable knowledge and experience.

IDC Metri analysts are certified to translate your requirements into an ISO-standard sizing, which may be audited by external parties when required. We also have ICEAA Software Cost Estimation certified analysts to build a cost estimation model for your software initiative that is defensible towards the project sponsor and other stakeholders.

After the estimate, the actuals are monitored, which may result in changes to the estimate and early warning signs to support decision making.

Based on customer request, this service evaluates your organization’s value creation, benefits management, and/or IT cost functions.

Value management assesses the Project Portfolio process, offering improvement advice. Optionally benchmarks development teams, analyzing their work methods, adopted best practices, and effort allocation between new functionality and non-value tasks. Objective metrics are gauged and market compared.

Benefits management reviews assumptions in change initiative business cases, verifying post-project benefits with IDC Metri’s help, aiding future business case improvements.

Cost Management addresses significant IT expenses, aiding cost reduction, especially on external vendors. IDC Metri identifies the total cost profile, possibly implementing Technology Business Management (TBM) for better technology investment translation to business value, or employing FinOps techniques like Cloud Economics study. The entry-level service pinpoints IT cost allocation, invaluable for many organizations lacking this insight.

Better user stories result, less rework and defects!

Better quality requirements can save up to 70% of the rework during sprints and results in significant lower incident volumes in production.

Few organizations fully realize the impact of poor requirement management. In practice, many defects can be traced back to poor requirements management, as well as a lot of rework during the development process. The Intelligent Requirements Management services allows you to automatically check the quality of written user stories and to measure the functional size of these. Knowing the functional size is an important factor for estimation and prioritizing as well as managing the progress of a certain improvement initiative. To improve the quality of the user stories before they go into the development team ensures a minimum of rework during tests and results in lower incident volumes, which in turn improves the team performance.

Accurately estimate the cost and duration of your project

Get insight in a realistic effort, schedule, and cost, based on ISO standards for functional size, proven parametric models and peer data selected from over 15,000 realized software initiatives.

The result is a size measurement based on industry standards that leads to a cost estimate that is fully based on peer projects that have been carried out under comparable circumstances in a similar type of business area with a team with comparable knowledge and experience.

IDC Metri analysts are certified to translate your requirements into an ISO-standard sizing, which may be audited by external parties when required. We also have ICEAA Software Cost Estimation certified analysts to build a cost estimation model for your software initiative that is defensible towards the project sponsor and other stakeholders.

After the estimate, the actuals are monitored, which may result in changes to the estimate and early warning signs to support decision making.

Based on customer request, this service evaluates your organization’s value creation, benefits management, and/or IT cost functions.

Value management assesses the Project Portfolio process, offering improvement advice. Optionally benchmarks development teams, analyzing their work methods, adopted best practices, and effort allocation between new functionality and non-value tasks. Objective metrics are gauged and market compared.

Benefits management reviews assumptions in change initiative business cases, verifying post-project benefits with IDC Metri’s help, aiding future business case improvements.

Cost Management addresses significant IT expenses, aiding cost reduction, especially on external vendors. IDC Metri identifies the total cost profile, possibly implementing Technology Business Management (TBM) for better technology investment translation to business value, or employing FinOps techniques like Cloud Economics study. The entry-level service pinpoints IT cost allocation, invaluable for many organizations lacking this insight.

Optimize and benchmark your IT organization

Assess internal IT cost and performance and benchmark against peers. Understand and act on where your IT is underperforming with advice on improvement actions. Identify technology and process debt to drive efficiency.

Cost benchmarking. Assess the cost and performance efficiencies of your internal technology services (or parts) against peer organizations or outsourced options. Act on cost insights to reallocate budget or for investment requests. Provide object, data-driven arguments to support technology investments.

ITSCM provides benchmarked, data-driven evidence on how to drive efficiencies and areas for cost improvement. It provides IT organizations fact-based points for budgeting and showing value to the business. Helps re-direct investments from inefficiency to business enablers.

Optimize your IT organization for today and the future

IT staffing assessment to answer the questions: How should IT establish or shape its organization to address current requirements and evolve to meet future organizational needs?

IDC guides IT in optimizing their workforce for current and future value. Understanding whether IT is properly staffed, structured and skilled to meet current and future organizational needs based on business goals and referenced to peer groups.

The service offers benchmarked, data-driven analysis and helps direct staffing investment. It identifies whether staffing (number and roles) meets current needs and whether staff roles need augmenting for the future. The service further maps staff roles to industry standards to assess appropriate roles and provide a logical structure to organizational roles that improves hiring, staffing and compensation processes.

Complete technical insights of your entire application portfolio in weeks!

The ALA service measures a number of application characteristics of the applications in a portfolio in a short period of time, e.g., quality (elegance, resiliency, agility), business impact, cloud readiness (cloud blockers and roadblocks), open-source safety, size, etc.

The result is a detailed overview on both portfolio level as application level which is the basis for fact-based decision-making regarding cloud migration, modernization, mergers & acquisitions (technical due diligence), open-source safety improvements, etc.

Contract Lifecycle Management

Manage your contract objectives, risks and supplier relationships effectively during the whole contract lifecycle. Do you have a solid foundation for effective and efficient contract management that spans contract creation to completion?

Optimizing IT contracts to achieve objectives that align to the business requires proactive management and control of contracted IT services. This includes timely identification and management of contract risks and managing costs within the contract using an organization-wide standard process.

IDC’s Contract Lifecycle Management provides a framework based on proven contract management methods and market practices to design and implement the contract management function for your IT organization. It ensures that contract management is embedded in the organization and processes where optimal support can be realized through tooling.

Accelerate your leadership growth and development journey with group learning supported by an experienced IT Executive Coach.

Pathways Cohort Learning is a portfolio of group learning options that leverage an experienced, former IT Executive to facilitate small group work and discussions amongst select peers. This unique program enables participants to gain perspective on current leadership challenges, expand managerial and leadership competencies and advance their careers in IT.