Kiva Consulting

Project Management

Kiva consultants can help you with all of your project management needs. Many organizations find it difficult to hire project managers who are knowledgeable in software development techniques as well as project management best practices. At Kiva, we offer both. We can help you jump start a project, rescue a project that is in trouble, or manage the entire effort. Our consultants are members of the Project Management Institute and have been trained in classical project management techniques as well as rapid development methodologies. Specific ways we can help you include:

	Management of individual projects
	Project management training
	Defining project management methods and procedures for your organization
	Review, purchase, and install software to assist you in Portfolio and Project Management
	Assistance in using project management tools, such as MS Project
	Individual coaching and mentoring in project management.

Planning

Kiva offers assistance in the areas of Strategic Planning and Technology Planning. We will help your organization develop a strategic plan by working with you to define your organization's needs and goals. We will work with you at your site, and we are also available to conduct off-site strategic planning meetings. But it doesn't end there. We will continue to work with you after your planning session to make sure that momentum is not lost, so your organization can benefit from the knowledge you have gained.

We can also help you review your technology portfolio to help you determine whether you are putting your technology budget to its best use. We have the expertise to set up the tools and information gathering systems that will show you how you are spending your money, and help you to become more efficient in your Information Technology operations. The bottom line is that you will get more value from your technology spending.

Consultancy Practice

Kiva's Consultancy Practice group will help you to build a consulting organization if you are just starting out, or to improve the organization that you already have. We will help you evaluate how your human assets are deployed and look at ways you can increase your group's performance without increasing its budget. We are available to present our Consulting Skills program, targeted at companies who deliver technology. This program is designed for people who are running projects and who have considerable client interaction.

A typical program lasts three and one-half days and can be set up at your site. We divide the group into teams and have them work on real-world case studies. We cover topics such as contracting with clients, defining business problems, and identifying client requirements. Please e-mail us for details and costs.

Product Development

Kiva offers a focused set of engineering services that help our customers achieve their goals of quickly introducing new product concepts into the market or adding new capabilities to existing product lines.

At Kiva we understand the importance of building the right product for the right market and delivering that product to market on time, within budget and with great quality. Our typical engagements utilize our planning services to help the customer clearly understand their value proposition and market strategy. As this work is completing with introduce our project management capabilities into the mix to insure that we create an efficient, effective and manageable project that will be successful in its execution. As part of this process we utilize our agile development process to insure that we deliver incremental functionality quickly into the market.

With our iterative, rapid cycle development model we can quickly introduce small pieces of functionality into our target markets. We constantly seek to gain market insight into our product development activities and utilize this feedback to continuously change and improve our product offering. The end result is a product offering that has already been validated and embraced by the target market, resulting in success for our clients in their product marketing and sales efforts.

As part of our engineering services we provide expertise in the following areas:

Management and Infrastructure
Development Methodologies
Technologies

User interaction
Middleware, application servers and runtime environments
Storage - databases, KM systems, content management
Languages
Data transformation

Product Deployment