The Mini Tech Brief

Description

Product Description

A high-level conversation where we discuss the adoption of specific technology, system, or process in your organization. This is a one hour collaborative session with stakeholders to establish desired business outcomes. During the session we form a shallow overview of your organization. Outside the collaborative meeting I meet the basic research requirements, and compose Mini Tech Brief for delivery to you and your team. The Mini Tech Brief is a one to two page document to help you make a decision or determine next steps. The document is delivered in a one hour meeting with stakeholders. I leave enough time for Q&A. At the end of the meeting we can determine next steps.

Why use a Mini Tech Brief service?

The Mini Tech Brief is the ideal service to use when you’re looking for technical information that’s specific, or attempting to answer a single technical question. If you need a comparative list or a feature matrix to help make a small to medium-sized technical purchasing decision, this is the best consulting service. This is also the ideal service to select for an inexpensive second opinion on larger purchases.

Here are a few good examples:

• As a cultivator, should I upgrade my watering system to include automated nutrient feeding, and if so, what are the best products on the market?
• As a retailer, is there a rewards program I can integrate with my point-of-sale that is compliant in my state and affordable?
• As a processor, does software for monitoring and measuring my equipment’s Overall Equipment Effectiveness exist? If so, what are my choices

What can I expect from the service?

Once you purchase the service, I’ll direct you to a page to schedule your one-hour collaborative session. 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 do a little 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. Please share the meeting invite with your team and any stakeholders who you feel need to be involved.

The process

For our one-hour session I’ll facilitate a guided discussion. The meeting requires access to an 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?

It’s from those two 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 architecture, some idea what level of effort will be required to adopt the subject of the brief.

The Mini Tech Brief

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 consider like security, operational needs, reliability, performance, and cost optimization.

This is delivered as a one to two page document composed to link the brief subject’s features with your desired outcomes and answer your primary question. The Mini Tech Brief is usually delivered within five to seven business days during a 30 minute meeting with you and your stakeholders. I leave plenty of time for questions and plans for next steps.

When should I not use the Mini Tech Brief?

When you’re looking for something deeper than simply a detailed answer to a complex question. I have other types of workshops designed to meet the needs of more complex situations. The standard technical brief service that I offer is designed for exploring a subject more completely and with more detailed captured about your organization and desired business outcomes. More research time is dedicated to the standard brief, the result of which is something more like a white paper than a long blog post. If you’re contemplating taking on a bigger project, and you wish to know as much as you can about how that project will change your organization, then I would suggest you consider purchasing an assessment. I offer three levels of assessments. Each level allows me to spend more time with your team to collaboratively build strategic and tactical architecture.

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