Tech Brief

Description

Product Description

My technical briefings are designed to help you make an informed decision related to buying, building, or adopting new technology for your business. A briefing is a five to ten page document filled with the facts you need to make a buy or pass decision. We take an unbiased approach to exploring and reviewing the specific technology in relation to your cannabis related business.

Our briefing delivery process is made up of the following steps:

1. An initial one to two hour briefing workshop. In this workshop we look at the desired business outcomes from the technology, how it would fit into your existing strategic architecture, and how your organization and teams would adapt to it.
2. Ten to twenty hours of research and document composition where we focus our scope to your desired business outcomes, comparisons to similar products on the market, and the product maturity
3. A one hour delivery presentation where we deliver the document, summarize our most important findings, answer questions, and discuss possible next steps.

Why use a Technical Briefing service?

An organization’s strategic and tactical architecture is usually built slowly, over time, through decisions. The planning for these decisions can be methodical and deliberate, but more often they are spontaneous and driven by market or compliance forces. If you could purchase a product off the shelf to help you make better decisions, more informed decisions, without spending your valuable time on product demos and research, decisions based on your specific organization’s desired outcomes, wouldn’t you?

That’s what my technical briefing service is meant to do. It’s meant to give you an edge.

The technical briefings are designed to help you make an informed decision related to buying, building, or adopting new technology for your business. A briefing is a five to ten page document filled with the facts you need to make a buy or pass decision. I take an unbiased approach to exploring and reviewing the briefing subject in relation to your organization.

Here are a few good examples of subjects for a technical briefing:

• My cultivation team is spending a lot of time measuring and adjusting the environment for our plants. I’ve heard there are many great automation products on the market that use IoT to help regulate and manage the ideal growing conditions for our plants at every stage of their cycle, but how do I know which is the best solution for our particular facility. Unlike many other growers, we have many small rooms where we grow specialty strains. Every IoT solution I look at seems to be built for cultivation rooms the size of a football field. How do I know what’s right for me?
• We have a great IT person on staff, but she’s overwhelmed with all the things she needs to keep up with. Hiring someone to help is in the works, but we’re having a difficult time finding someone who meets our qualifications. Our IT person says we can hire managed services and move some of our servers to the cloud. She claims this will save us time and money. We’ve reached out to three different vendors who have made different proposals at different prices. We just need someone to help us make sense of the offerings and help us make a better decision.
• We’re evaluating three possible ERPs. Each has features we like and we’ll definitely use, but there are things we would want to add that aren’t there. We need to know if we commit to an ERP that we can continue to expand upon it and that it will work for us for many years. We have a complete facility with a grow, a processing facility, and a dispensary.

What can I expect from the service?

Once you purchase the service and the order is processed, I’ll direct you to a page to schedule your two-hour collaborative session—we may not need the full two hours. You’ll be presented with a form that will require you to summarize the answers you’re expecting from the brief. Before the meeting I’ll complete preliminary research about the subject and your organization. I might reach out with additional questions over email.

You’ll receive a welcome email that will outline what the whole process entails and what you can expect to get out of the experience.

The Process

For our two-hour session I’ll facilitate a guided discussion. The meeting does require access to a internet connected computer or tablet where you can run Microsoft Teams (there is a browser-version). I’ll share an instance of the collaboration board I use. For this workshop, we focus on gathering the following information:

• What are your desired business outcomes and what are some of the obstacles you face today that keep you from achieving those outcomes?
• How do the obstacles and outcomes fit into the value chain that fulfills your customer’s needs?
• What is your current strategic architecture related to the subject of the brief?
• What is the change impact of the brief’s subject on your existing workflows, processes, and people?

It’s from those questions that we determine how the subject of the brief fits within your organization’s strategic architecture. We’ll close the meeting with a good idea of where the subject of the brief fits within your organization, some of the best reasons to adopt or reject the technology, and what level of effort will be required to adopt the subject of the brief.

The Technical Briefing

I’ll write up my findings and complete any additional research or answer any additional questions that were raised during the collaborative session. As an example, if the subject of the brief was the adoption of a new software service, I will research the service, compare and contrast it to similar products on the market, and build a matrix showing how well the features of the product align to the desired business outcomes of your organization. I’ll report any additional considerations you may need to think about like security, operational needs, reliability, performance, and cost optimization.

The basic format of this document could consist of the following:

• An executive summary section that focuses on the strategic importance of the brief’s subject, the opportunities and solutions around the brief, how it would fit within your organization, and high-level basic costs assumptions
• An expansion of the strategic importance of the brief’s subject viewed through the lens of the overall market with comparisons of other related products or services
• The types of roles, skills, and organizational structure that might be required to accommodate the subject of the technical brief
• Details that would be important to your organization related to things like security, reliability, cost optimization, operations considerations, and availability
• Examples of possible tactical architecture implementations

This format is flexible. For instance, if you know you want the report to be in a standard whitepaper format, that’s something I would try to accommodate.

This is delivered as a five to ten page document composed to link the brief subject’s features with your desired outcomes and answer your primary question. The Tech Brief is usually delivered within one to two weeks after the collaborative meeting during a one hour meeting with you and your stakeholders. I leave plenty of time for questions and plans for next steps.

When should I not use the Tech Brief?

When you’re looking to take on a complete project and need someone to help plan out the business outcomes, strategic vision, team alignment, and tactical architecture. The goal of the brief is to answer a complex question that needs a deep level of research and evaluation tailored for your organization’s specific needs. The goal of the Tech Brief is to help you come to a decision. It is not meant to be the plan for a project implementation.

The following table is a good example of when to use what services:

We’re considering adding a social media marketing tool to our stack of technology and we want to know if that’s the right decision for us.	Mini Tech Brief
We’re using three different software applications to run our cultivation operations and we’d like to know if switching to an ERP like Cannabis 365 is a good choice.	Tech Brief
We have two SaaS applications that we would like to integrate, but we also want to create a report with data from both systems. The report will make it easier for us to track inventory. What’s the best way to complete the integration and what might it cost?	Assessment
We collect data by exporting from all our SaaS applications and store these in Google Sheets. We know it’s time to move to a database, but we’re not sure what kind we need or where it should be hosted. We would like to know the best options for our organization, the level of effort to implement the database, and about what it might cost.	Assessment
We’ve been collecting data related to our retail sales for the last year and we would like to make better predictions for our inventory. It would be nice if the system could produce reports and notifications to help us and our vendors better prepare for seasonal fluctuations.	Assessment