“When a customer says they want something today, in reality, they wanted it yesterday. Therefore today, organizations need to elicit and anticipate the needs of stakeholders and be able to deliver innovative and valuable solutions in a fast, flexible, and nimble manner,” states Founder of APPTRA Learning & Transformation Consulting, Rumesh Wijetunge. It’s a standard fact that most business leaders today agree upon, irrespective of their industry. Therefore, companies must embrace innovation to keep pace with fast-changing market conditions and deliver value to their customers. Yet, most organizations struggle to implement practices to capture, define, and deliver value properly. Instead, they blindly focus on processes. In reality, it’s a shift in the mindset that everyone must understand at all levels.
APPTRA began as a training company. As a training company, it brought globally recognized professional certifications related to business analysis, agile, and project management that empowered local industry professionals. APPTRA has since evolved into a learning and transformation consulting company. It helps professionals and organizations of all sizes accomplish agile and business transformation. They do it through capacity building, business analysis, consultancy as a service, agile transformation services, and many other services to help clients achieve true business agility.
APPTRA’s history of driving transformation
“To achieve true transformation, the most important component to align is the people, their skills, vision, and capacity,” declares Rumesh when asked about their philosophy for enacting transformation within a business. Before founding APPTRA, he had served in several senior positions in the IT industry, working with organizations across several industries. Additionally, he had over 8 years of experience as a trainer and a lecturer in Agile Project Management, Coaching, and Business Analysis.
From these experiences, Rumesh identified that several organizations had vast untapped potential. If it were unlocked, they’d experience an extensive transformation allowing them to deliver vast value to their customers. However, to do so would require a multifaceted approach to developing their talent, mindset, and operations. To help organizations unlock this latent potential, APPTRA was born in March 2019 as a learning and transformation consulting company.
Training by industry professionals for industry professionals
With the establishment of the training arm of APPTRA, the services provided were two-fold. The first of these training programs are targeted at professional certifications for individuals. The company is the sole training provider in Sri Lanka for several leading international certifications. The other facet of these efforts was toward corporate training in Sri Lanka. What’s unique about APPTRA in these avenues is that the company consists of qualified industry professionals conducting training programs that bring a practical flavor to these sessions. Further, these trainers collectively have more training hours than any other provider. These factors combined result in APPTRA’s sessions consisting of practical discussions, live exercises, quizzes, and ongoing mentoring and support afterward.
Regarding the former, APPTRA is the only institute offering IIBA Business analysis and Management 3.0 training in Sri Lanka. The company is the only Endorsed Education Provider (EEP) of IIBA (the governing body for Business Analysis) in the country and has trained over 700 professionals with a 100% pass rate. Further, Rumesh is the only trainer in Sri Lanka that conducts Business Analysis training from all main bodies related to the profession, namely IIBA, PMI, and BCS.
Rumesh is also the only Management 3.0 facilitator and trainer and one of the country’s two trainers for Scaled Agile (SAFe) certifications. APPTRA also conducts Project Management training targeting certifications from PMI and Agile training targeting certifications from Scrum.org, and it is safe to say that APPTRA is the only company with professionals from the IT industry providing such training for IT professionals.
Whereas its corporate training programs focused on capacity building of teams in organizations trained on aspects of Business Analysis, Agile, Scaled Agile, and more. These are customized targeted training programs designed to meet the specific needs of a business. Afterward, these teams are coached by APPTRA to apply these learnings, thereby allowing the full value of the training to be achieved.
Business Analysis as A Service – Driving organizational transformation
“Even if an organization has the tools necessary to be agile and transform, there’s no guarantee they will be implemented properly,” reminds Rumesh. Having recognized this phenomenon, APPTRA also helps companies effectively utilize these tools. Thereby, the teams of these organizations are empowered to drive true business transformation across departments. The effort is described as “Business Analysis as A Service.” Strong Business Analysis capabilities are a necessity for any organization. This need stems from the fact that 60% of failed projects or change initiatives are attributed to either incorrect requirements or wrong management practices.
APPTRA has a team of certified, experienced business analysts who join development teams as consultants to carry out business analysis activities for projects. Notably, these analysts are familiar with over 100 techniques that can be used while working as effective analysts or product owners. Thus, eliminating the need for organizations to maintain in-house business analysts. Instead, the experienced consultants from APPTRA work alongside their teams to perform the elicitation, analysis, specification, modeling, verification, validation, and communication of project requirements and designs.
If an organization seeks to build these capabilities in-house, APPTRA’s Business Analysis as A Service also facilitates this transformation. The process involves trained coaches from APPTRA first analyzing the BA approach used by the organization is plan-driven or change-driven. From here, the team helps the organization define appropriate business analysis practices, tools, processes, and techniques, along with templates and good practices for the business analysts.
But the engagement doesn’t end at merely building a newly minted team of business analysts and practices. APPTRA also offers continuous coaching and mentoring for this new team to ensure they succeed. Elaborating an example of the challenges they help overcome through the coaching, Rumesh shared, “Business Analysts and organizations struggle with how to write requirements as user stories, how to split them, and how to use other BA techniques to better structure requirements. That is one area in which we have supported many organizations.”
APPTRA’s Business Analysis as A Service also features process consultancy and product management services. The former refers to understanding the current state, defining future improvements, gap analysis, and helping organizations build change strategies to minimize or eliminate waste through lean practices. The latter involves ideation workshops with stakeholders using design thinking and other good product development practices. Thus, identifying and redefining stakeholders’ real needs, shortlisting needs through prioritization mechanisms, running brainstorming sessions to ideate potential solutions, building prototypes, visualizing solutions, and working with teams to bring ideas to life.
Agile Transformation Services: Helping organizations find better ways of working
True business agility is achieved when technical teams transform the way they work with the business teams. Today any organization is a digital organization. Those who master the art of large-scale software delivery thrive in today’s digital age. However, this requires a complete shift in the mindset of everyone in the organization and adjusting to a new way of working. APPTRA provides unique, well-formulated Agile transformation services to satisfy the demands of today’s VUCA world.
APPTRA’s consultants first assess the organization’s current way of working by conducting current and desired value stream mapping exercises to identify the precise series of work to deliver value. Next, training is provided to technical and non-technical teams on Agile mindset and Agile Frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, XP, SAFe, and others to get everyone on the same page. Afterward, a transformation roadmap is curated, carefully aligning delivery objectives to the organization’s goals. Then APPTRA’s consultants work with the key stakeholders to form the Agile PMO, LACE, communities of practice, and steering groups to lead the transformation.
By working with these stakeholders, the Agile teams are formed. The consultants work closely to tailor and define agile processes and practices and select appropriate tools such as JIRA, Trello, and others. Ongoing support is provided through coaching for the key roles and the teams. This support includes scrum master, product owner/manager, and program manager coaching, along with coaching for technical teams.
Ultimately, Agile transformations are successful only when operations teams and the leadership are also onboarded to this new way of working. Hence APPTRA focuses on leadership coaching to better structure lean budgets, guardrails, planning horizons, and metrics in a more Agile manner. In addition, APPTRA is a true advocate and supporter of Agile by helping organizations identify areas of continuous improvement through Agile maturity assessments.
The future of APPTRA Holdings
As the company continues its journey of growth, it’s making its knowledge more accessible. APPTRA has ongoing collaborations with several local universities to bring industry-focused agility and business analysis training to undergraduate students. Further, it’s also collaborating with several efforts with SLASSCOM to train more industry professionals. Looking toward the future, APPTRA aims to expand its training services related to business analysis, agile, scale agile, project management, product management, and design thinking to APAC and the MENA regions through their global partnerships.
Through its many efforts, APPTRA pushes the transformation envelope with solutions tailored to the needs of entities ranging from startups to conglomerates. Ultimately, however, Rumesh states, “True business transformation comes about due to the ability of the people in each team and their focus to understand the purpose of any changes implemented.” In a dynamic business world, it’s now a necessity to innovate and stay ahead of the competition.
It’s a feat that’s only possible by organizations that regularly invest in developing the skills of their employees while providing the tools for success. Hence, there’s a growing demand for the transformational services offered by APPTRA Holdings. Check out its website and LinkedIn profile to learn more about its transformational consultancy services.