NDItech's March Towards Resilience - Lessons From Supply Chain Industry

By | February 10, 2015

At NDItech, we build innovative software products, consult with the regional teams to solve program needs through mobile and web based solutions, and innovate in the Tech4Dem space with breakthrough ideas and partnerships. In the face of multiple customers, diverse products, and evolving challenges, the NDItech team aims for resilience:  tolerate variability, adapt continuously, and maximize opportunities.

I recently came across a great piece titled “From Risk Management to Resilience” on Sloan Management Review. The article discussed the Supply Chain Resilience Assessment and Management (SCRAM) methodology. SCRAM involves identifying vulnerabilities in an organization and developing and strengthening capabilities to mitigate the vulnerabilities and thus improving resilience.

In this short blog, I attempt to list the key vulnerabilities of the NDItech team and map them to capabilities that we have developed and/or developing to address those vulnerabilities.

Our nine member Scrum team works across the gamut of topics and operates at capacity with very little buffer for additional demands. Our key vulnerabilities are the following;

  • Turbulence - unpredictability in customer demands, technology failures (security). This manifests in the form of say, Drupal security patch that needed to be applied to all our production servers, or a field team demanding 3 new features in 2 weeks.

  • Resource Limits - skilled labor and funding. Our ticket backlog is usually large.

  • Connectivity - degree of interdependence on outside entities. We are sometime dependent on one vendor for a particular feature and are constrained by the ability and availability of that vendor to deliver.

  • External Pressure - health, vacation, snow days(?). Sudden, unplanned personal/business interruptions do make a dent in a small team’s schedule.

Over the years, we have developed capabilities to adapt to shifting demands. For example,, in order to respond to unpredictability in customer demands or potential turbulence, we have instituted the following capabilities;

  • flexibility in sourcing to satisfy surges in demand; identify and archive alternate product platforms, institute contract flexibility with external vendors. We can now hire contractors at short notice to meet immediate surge in demand

  • improving visibility of demand to support timely decision making by improving information exchange with our customers. By being plugged into our (potential) customer planning meetings, we are able to plan resources and schedule ahead of time.

  • early anticipation and recognition of changes to enable strategic responses; As practitioners in this Tech4Dem space, we build tools and resources anticipating the users needs. We are able to provide our customers these existing solutions in short notice. Demtools - CiviParty is a case in point of a constituent management system that we were able to provide our clients.

  • close collaboration with customers to ensure coordinated action. We guide teams through proposal process thus building in adequate resources - time, skills, into programs.

  • finally, our organizational capability allows us to be flexible. As problem solvers, NDItech team has diversity of skills and experience allowing us to step up to shifting demands of field support, project management, strategy planning, technical project planning and customer support

We are also working hard on strengthening and building other capabilities. Key among them are;

  • standardization to unlock efficiency. Among others steps, we are building processes for quality management, and preventive maintenance. Standardization will improve our productivity further making us resilient

  • strengthening our market position by being an end-to-end provider of technology solutions, and increasing customer loyalty/retention. We are working with regional teams to be one stop tech shop for their communication, contact management, data collection, and visualization needs

It is evident that the terms and jargons of the Supply Chain Industry and much broader challenges are applicable to a small team of technology innovators in the democracy space. We will keep you informed of NDItech's expanding capabilities in the upcoming blogs. 

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