At SUMO Heavy, discovery is a foundational phase for a successful relationship. We learn your business, processes, and products, and gain insight into how well we work together.
During this mandatory phase, we learn as much as possible about your business as possible. The process can last between one and three months. During this time, the SUMO Heavy team will perform stakeholder interviews, break down the development and business processes, and create a roadmap based on detailed requirements. This includes on-site and video conference meetings, as well as planning and documentation.
At the end of the discovery phase, all formalized documentation is presented. Generally, it's a report full of surprising information and issues that you may or may not be aware of. Our discoveries have helped teams discover how badly they need processes they don't have, and have even uncovered issues that take just moments to address but have millions of dollars in impact.
During the interview portion of discovery, we have open discussions with everyone on the team. This not only includes C-level executives but more importantly the people that are involved in the day-to-day running of the business: project and product managers, engineers, customer service, and warehouse staff. It's not unusual to uncover one person performing a process that could hold a powerful impact across the business. The best processes happen organically and are often discovered by talking to people where efficiency means the difference between getting everything out the door – or missing deadlines.
Isolation needs to be removed from business processes. In order to help our clients build efficient processes, we need to gain a complete understanding of all the moving pieces. An eCommerce website will affect accounting, which affects salespeople, and the warehouse, and customer service. We often find that many departments or even different engineering teams – work in isolation. They'll have different standards and ways of approaching problems that can cause internal confusion across the organization.
Some examples of business processes that will be documented are (but not limited to):
Every engineering team uses a slightly different workflow which fulfills their business' requirements. It's imperative that this process is documented. The development processes, along with build tools and deployment pipelines need to be fully understood in order for us to participate in the daily management of your software development lifecycle. Some clients prefer SUMO Heavy's development workflow after a collaborative review of it, and others prefer for us to act as an extension of their existing teams. [ the choice is yours etc]
Development workflows often reflect the requirements of regulatory compliance. These are but a few of the processes SUMO Heavy can implement:
As your partner, we are aware of your company's external requirements so that we can help develop the most impactful development workflows and understand the impact. Many times the cost savings with a particular development workflow or process relates to regulatory audits which can occur periodically or unexpectedly.
Code reviews are incredibly important -- not only during the lifecycle of a project, but especially when working on a project that we have not yet been introduced to. Having a 'fresh set of eyes' on code can provide insight based on our extensive experience with high-volume and real-time software requirements. Any inefficiencies found by having other points of view are documented and prioritized, as well as other maintenance and technical debt.
During the code review, we review your application code with your engineering team, as a collaborative effort. This will help us make recommendations for build systems, static analysis, and other automated testing that can help make your applications more reliable.
At SUMO Heavy, we strongly believe that cost savings are as important as growth. Our clients agree, with some having entire processes to schedule time into yearly plans for cost-saving projects. While many companies hear "cost-savings" and thinking about terminating jobs, we prefer to see it happen through efficiency. By having better processes, software, and integrations that serve your company in a more individualized manner, costs can be cut and existing teams will have more time to use the power of their minds for feature planning rather than bug fixing. Our goal is to help you get as much as possible out of this, by analyzing inefficiencies and documenting solutions.