Project Management: A Quick Start Guide

Becky Griswold

Partner

Becky is a leader of leaders and a trusted advisor who can connect with anyone on a human level. She has mentored some of Phoenix’s best talents and led several of its most complex government implementations. She has extensive mortgage knowledge and appreciation of Agency and Government mortgage financing programs and serves as Phoenix’s partner to MISMO. As a lifetime learner who regularly pursues certifications and industry knowledge, she is a Certified MISMO Standards Professional (CMSP®), Associated MISMO Standards Professional (AMSPTM), Certified SAFe Scrum Master (2022), Certified LeSS Practitioner, Certified SAFe 5.0 Agile Product Owner and Product Manager, and Certified SAFe 5.0 Practitioner.

Connect with Becky on LinkedIn.

The Process.

We strive for maximum value for our customers by generating insights that improve business outcomes. Throughout the full product life cycle, we provide online analytical assessments of the current state of your data framework to better plan the next steps for your product or service. Our approach is four-fold. First, we aggregate the information and allow the data to direct us to the value patterns. Second, we clean the data, removing structural errors, filter irrelevant information, and validate to provide clean, concise data that can be catalogued. Next, we index and store the data and finally, we process the data to discover and deliver valuable data sets.

Prioritize and Refine.

When all is said and done, it is a clearly prioritized and buttoned up product backlog that brings the vision to life. Equally important is a Product Owner’s ability to lead and own priorities, leveraging positional authority and collaboration to gain alignment and empower development team members to deliver value quickly with quality. Our Product Owners lead with a vision and are respected by the organization as leaders of the product.

Design and Validate.

Nothing is more important than showing customers that you hear and understand their needs at the earliest possible point in the engagement. Our Product Designers embed themselves with the customer, building trust based on empathy and listening. This early relationship allows us to research, design, and validate design hypotheses and experiences quickly and efficiently. Working in collaboration with the product and technology teams, we keep the experience and the technological capabilities to achieve the experience at the forefront of everyone’s mind.

Vision and Value.

A clear and concise product vision is imperative to gaining alignment on the desired outcome. Whether we are supporting the definition of a net new product or enhancing an existing product, we develop a vision that aligns to the overall business or organizational goals and reflects the anticipated value. Our Product Managers are experts at communicating and gaining alignment on the vision, value, meaningful and measurable objectives and key results (OKRs), and hypotheses. We collaborate with product, business, and technology to discover and ideate on new opportunities to solve business problems and increase the user experience. The future state vision is summed up through value-driven roadmaps, reflecting the iterative chunks of value the business and customer can expect to receive.

Tela Mathias

Managing Partner, COO

No one out strategizes Tela. She has spent the last 23 years defining winning strategies in both the federal and private sectors, allowing nothing to stop her from leading those strategies to realization. Tela loves to create and is a SAFe 5.0 Certified PO/PM, LPM, APM, SPC and SSM, Pragmatic Certified PMC II, and Certified Net Promoter Associate.

Connect with Tela on LinkedIn.

Solutioning for Quality.

Ideating on a solution to a problem, technical, architectural, data related or otherwise, is usually complicated – in fact, we hear this more often than not. We love solutioning the hardest problems and bring with us the collaborative mindset to conquer the process together. Our team has partnered with some of the largest companies in the financial services industry to discover better, simpler, and faster ways to achieve the desired outcome. We do this intentionally with a quality at the forefront of our minds. Our solution strategies include an early iteration of the test strategy and plan because we know that if you do not set the stage for quality early on, you will wish you had.

Developing with Quality.

From the first piece of code to the last, we develop it with built-in-quality and accuracy. Our team treasures collaboration and works with customers, business and product teams to build the right thing the first time. Completed features means the code is unit tested and tested end-to-end. We balance automation with manual testing to maximize the development of value and the sustainability of testing. We make sure the juice is worth the squeeze. Either way, we ensure that every defect is reported, logged and tracked in a ticketing system such as Azure DevOps Server or JIRA.

Delivering on Quality.

Deploying and releasing quality code is the key to delivering value. Our approach separates delivering and releasing software to effectuate timely launches. While code is tested end-to-end as it is developed, the real test is when a user gets his, her, their hands on it during user acceptance testing (UAT), or lifecycle testing. This is where test scenarios, test cases and quality automation comes into play. Once those test cases pass UAT, we ready it for release when the end user is ready to accept it.

Drive the Vision.

Our implementation leaders guide the collaboration and alignment on the implementation vision, success metrics and roadmaps between all stakeholders. Our leaders understand the ‘what’ and ‘why’ so clearly that they can artfully communicate the value and help end users embrace the idea of change sooner, rather than later.

Support the Execution.

Implementation success involves much more than tracking to a timeline. It involves helping people grow into better, more empowered team members, while making sure the teams stay focused on the right things and not in the churn of analysis paralysis. We leverage an implementation backlog and scrum to manage outcomes and activities during discovery, delivery and, risk, communications and expectation management.

Ensure the Transition.

Our delivery and adoption readiness and preparations starts at the beginning of the project or program and culminates when the end users are ready to receive the value. During this time, we manage change, assess and coordinate training resources, participants and needs, communicate the transformation roadmap, and remove impediments.

The People.

Our analytics team not only works for our clients, but with them. Our mission is to help our client’s find actionable data and create solutions that will drive value for each of them. We do this by building custom reports, providing analytics and interpreting results to provide a holistic view of the data. We are also ready, willing and able to support and guide our client’s to realize their data value throughout every step of the process.

The Technology.

Our goal is to provide data analytics that fulfills all unmet needs without the expensive price tag. We pride ourselves on being an industry leader in data analytics, equipped to support your outcomes at scale with a secure, cloud-based platform that requires no hardware maintenance.

Tanya Brennan

Managing Partner, CEO

Tanya is an expert in implementations, launch readiness, adoption, and overall leadership. She has over 22 years of experience and is a passionate leader with a keen ability to communicate the value of different approaches to our clients. She is a Certified Scrum Master, SAFe 5.0 Certified Agilist, and Lean Portfolio Manager.

Connect with Tanya on LinkedIn.

Paul Weakley

Partner

Paul is a master engineer and one of the strongest Solution Architects in the mortgage technology business. He has spent the last 18 years feeding his passion for solutioning complex problems and building the solutions to solve them. Paul is a true servant leader who uses his certifications as a scrum master, BPMN, DMP and SAFe 5.0 ARCH to provide maximum value to clients and team members.

Connect with Paul on LinkedIn.

Melanie Lewis

Partner

Melanie is all about helping our clients and team members appreciate and realize their potential value. For over 14 years, Melanie has strategized, led and delivered on some of the most complex initiatives in the mortgage technology space. In addition to being a product leader, she also leads our marketing and volunteer teams. Melanie is an empathetic leader who is passionate about mentoring and uniting people. She is a Certified Scrum Master, Shipley Trained Proposal Manager, BPMN certified, SAFe 5.0 Certified Agilist, PO/PM and Lean Portfolio Manager.

Connect with Melanie on LinkedIn.

Lindsay Bennett

Partner

Lindsay is all about detail and leading teams to deliver value quickly. For over 14 years, she has led enterprise teams to envision, design, deliver and validate complex mortgage solutions in the federal and commercial spaces. She is a true collaborative product leader with a rock solid history of delivering the most business value to her clients. She uses her Certified Scrum Master and BPMN Method and Style knowledge to help teams move quickly through ideation to delivery.

Connect with Lindsay on LinkedIn.

Tom Westerlind

Managing Partner, CFO

A highly admired leader, Tom is a product delivery expert with over 22 years experience serving federal and private sector clients realize value as a complex Program and Portfolio Manager. He is one of the most balanced and measured leaders able to connect with people on the most complex initiatives. Tom is a SAFe 5.0 Certified PO/PM, Agilist as well as Certified Scrum Master (CSM).

Connect with Tom on LinkedIn.

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Continuous Development.

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Continuous Solutioning.

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The Right Training.

Our Training Services are designed to help individuals and teams learn all the skills necessary to deliver value and meet personal growth needs. We truly believe that training should not suck the life out of individuals or the organization. That is why we use the latest in cognitive neuroscience (the study of how the brain learns) to customize training strategies and develop curriculum that simultaneously entertains and educates, ensuring that participants learn more and retain more than traditional training methods. Our training services include:

Training Strategy and Design
Custom Training Delivery (Synchronous, Asynchronous, Instructor Led, Virtual, and CBT)
Leadership Development Programs
Curriculum Development for Lifelong Learning

The Right Advising and Coaching.

Our advising and coaching services transform companies from good to great and beyond through customized approaches that touch all levels of the organization to rally around value and foster a continuous learning mindset that drives evolutionary change. Our advisors and coaches are Lean-Agile, Product, and Change Management experts experienced at blending and creating customized approaches using our Rally Around Value Everyone (Rave) approach to change walking leaders and the organization from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence. Our Advising and Coaching Services include:

Kanban/Scrum Team Coaching
Product Management and Ownership Coaching
StratDevOps Coaching
SAFe, LeSS, Scrum at Scale, & Customized Frameworks
Leadership Development at All Levels

The Right Facilitation.

Our facilitation services ignite your teams’ creativity and tap into the hidden talents and ideas of individuals that typically lie dormant with typical meeting facilitation. We ensure that every voice is heard and every minute counts by blending techniques from Improv, the latest in Cognitive Neuroscience, Lean, Agile and other frameworks in an effort to get the most value out of every meeting. Our facilitation services include:

Lean Decision Jams
Design Sprints
Lean-Agile events and workshops
Release Planning
Product/Requirement Elicitation
Strategic Planning Sessions
On Site, Off Site, and Virtual Event Planning
Facilitation Training and Workshops

The Right Strategy.

We make sure our clients choose the right tool to meet their strategic direction and vision, especially when it comes to client experience and loyalty. When the customer is at the center of the strategy and vision, there’s no better tool than Salesforce and we know how to develop and deliver a strategy and vision that will add continuous value to your customer throughout their loan life cycle experience.

The Right Approach.

Ultimately the right approach will result in fast delivery of value and investment realization. It is critical to gain alignment on the approach and we focus on three things to achieve this. Our philosophy is to deliver value quick and often so we can have continuous improvements and continuous value realization. Then we focus on operations and maintenance, establishing support and optimization processes. Last is systems stability, conducting periodic solution reviews to ensure scalability and long term viability.

The Right People.

People are the core of any business, whether defining a strategy, requirements, or building and releasing a solution. Without the right people success is at risk We assess the team and identify gaps in skillsets, roles or responsibilities. From this analysis we make talent recommendations, ensuring full transparency on expectations to achieve the desired results.