The Six Ingredients in the “Secret Sauce” of Automation Logic.

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Since we founded Automation Logic back in 2010 the growth in our business and our success to date has been founded in repeat business and referrals within some of the largest organisations in the public and private sector in Europe.

Sure, from time to time we’re exhibited at a show, spoken at a conference, maybe even placed an advert or two, but all of these things have made little impact compared with the enduring relationships that we have established in our customer and partner base.

While we continue to grow at a fast pace the size of our organisation now and plans for the future inevitably mean that as business relying purely “organic” growth is not a sensible strategy and so we’ve recently been scaling out the commercial side of our operations, appointing Tony Weston to head Business Development and working with a consultant to further develop our go-to-market strategy.

It’s been illuminating and challenging to be working with senior and seasoned executives who are new to our business, who demand of us to explain what it is that makes our business so special and unique – the ingredients of our “secret sauce” if you will.
After much coffee, white boarding and sticky notes we think we’ve captured it, and so I’d like to share it with you…

The 6 key Ingredients in our Secret Sauce

 

1. People
   We’re fundamentally a consulting firm. It would be easy to say that we hire brilliant engineers and that’s the secret, but that’s really only part of it. Sure, our guys are super smart, but they’re also not your average “consulting tech. head”. We recruit the brilliant generalists, the ones that can see and influence the bigger picture, who can bring broad experiences to bear to solve knotty problems that might not be just about technology, but could be about people, process and/or technology. Our guys love those challenges and they stay with us because the projects on which they work give them those opportunities over and over again. We’ve built, and continue to grow a truly unique team.
2. Experience
   We’ve worked on some of the biggest and most complicated IT transformation projects that Europe (or indeed the world) has seen – more than 60 to date and counting. In-house IT folks might get to experience the kinds of projects we work on less than a handful of times in their career, yet for our guys it’s ALL they do. You can’t measure the value that can bring in making these kinds of project a success. We recognised the value of this early on and have built processes for systematically capturing and sharing that knowledge, not only across our own team, but also with our clients.
3. Unique Methodology
   Big IT transformation projects aren’t about just strategy, people, process or technology, they’re about a combination of all of these things. They are also about understanding and factoring in the business impact various decisions can make. Getting maximum ROI can be achieved only by considering all of these factors together.  Lastly the on-going success of a project can only assured if, as a part of the process, knowledge transfer and training occur to leave the internal team ready to take back the reigns. Having developed our own approach and methodology to address all of these factors we believe that we’re in a fantastic place to assure each project’s long term success.
4. Cutting Edge Use of Technologies and Processes
   There are a host of relatively new tools and processes at our disposal. Being vendor neutral and having extensive experience with many of them means that we are able to pick and chose the best combination to get the job done. When it comes to processes, like say Agile, we’re also not just following a manual. With so much first-hand experience we know when it make sense to adapt, to “cheat” and to learn and share knowledge from past experience. Sometimes it also leads us to develop our own IP to systematically challenge issues that we see occur repeatedly, either for us or our clients. One example is the HP CSA test library that we recently made available to the broader community via an open source licence.
5. Partner Ecosystem
   We’ve built some fantastic relationships over the last five years with some of the industry’s leading technology vendors. As well as being a trusted delivery partner for their particular solutions, often unlocking greater business benefit for customers is often bigger than any one product. They value our vendor independence and ability to bring multiple solutions together (often with a bit of our own IP and experience in the mix for good measure) to create an even bigger “win” for their clients and in doing so create a win-win-win scenario for all involved.
6. Our Clients
   Last, but by no means least, are our clients. They understand that we’re working in often ground breaking projects, capable of delivering huge efficiencies and/or top line growth to their organisation. Sometimes they need to make a leap of faith and trust in our judgement, and we can jointly celebrate when that faith is rewarded.

So that’s it. The ingredients list in our secret sauce. The recipe? Sorry, there are some things we will be keeping to ourselves…