Acuna Consulting
The Partner to Drive Agile Maturity

For modern-day organizations, agile business transformation is the key to address the ever-evolving client requirements by driving innovation, operational discipline, and overall business performance. However, leading such transformation initiatives toward success is a task easier said than done. It requires a change in behavior of all members, a transformation vision, and an agile mindset. This is where several businesses fall short. For their transformation initiative, they solely rely on the agile book of knowledge. There is no doubt that it enables an organization to address certain challenges, but it does not help resolve issues specific to a business’s environment or culture. To this end, Acuna Consulting helps clients in embodying the agile mindset to achieve complete agility throughout their organization. The company specializes in coaching, consulting, and training in the fields of Agile, DevOps, and test automation.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Aland Acuna, CEO; Areeb Quasem, Senior Vice President of Agile Delivery, share their insights on how they lead businesses to agile maturity.

Could you give us an overview of Acuna Consulting?

Since our inception, we have been providing strategic agile consulting, tailored agile training solutions, and IT Modernization services to commercial, non-profit, and government organizations. Our consultants take a customer-centric approach to meet clients’ specific business needs. We work closely with customers to gain an in-depth understanding of their challenges and requirements and streamline their journey.

Our team works hand-in-hand with clients to transform individuals, teams, and their organizations as a whole and ensure that each individual feels comfortable and heard throughout the coaching and transformation process. Leveraging their extensive experience in agile delivery, our coaches create high-performing teams to drive organizational goals and vision.

Please tell us about the services and solutions that you offer.

Our services include digital strategy services, digital solutions, and enterprise training. The digital strategy services encompass our core capabilities, including agile enterprise transformation, product and agile coaching, product and project management, and agile sense. These services help organizations move from the traditional waterfall model to agile-friendly processes. On the other hand, our digital solutions redefine and optimize client’s legacy systems for the digital world. It encompasses DevOps, human-centered design, software development, automation testing, and Agile Oxygen. Lastly, we offer a suite of enterprise training services to support organizations in embracing the changes that come with digital transformation. We deliver the whole portfolio of training, including Scrum Alliance courses, scaled agile framework, ICAgile, project management, and DevOps.

What is the process that you follow while delivering your services to various clients?

We serve as an organizational architect for clients and help them change culture, adopt modern practices, understand emotional intelligence, and adapt to different situations. We follow 4Es while catering to clients: engage, evaluate, execute, and examine.

We have two ears and one mouth for a reason—to hear first and then talk. That’s why, instead of making off-the-shelf recommendations, our team first listens to clients and learns about their business, culture, and environment. Once the program assessment is completed, we architect the change and create a transformation backlog. The third step is about implementation, where our consultants act, integrate, train, mentor, and coach. Lastly, we examine and measure the sustained results and impacts.

What are the factors that keep you a notch above the rest?

Our two intellectual property models—Agile Sense and Agile Oxygen—are the key aspects that set us ahead of the competition. Agile Sense is an ultimate guide that allows change agents or agile coaches to utilize best practices and processes to deliver maximum value to transformation. This coaching model incorporates seven senses to enable organizational agility. This includes lean thinking, business agility, leadership development, cultural growth, emotional intelligence, customer-centricity, and systems thinking. While running assessments on clients’ business, we analyze and understand organizations’ perception of these seven senses as a whole and as individuals, especially leaders. We ensure that business leaders thoroughly embody these seven senses to attain organizational agility.

Agile Oxygen is an organizational transformation model that promotes team, leadership, and development practices to drive a culture of continuous operations. We mentor teams on innovative, agile, DevOps, modern programming, and product management practices. As such, clients can design customer-centric products. We make sure that clients’ teams at each level are aligned well for working toward a common goal and drive similar outcomes. Our coaches support leaders in creating customer-centric strategic goals, short and long-term vision, and a culture of learning, improvement, innovation, and safety for delivering the highest value. We train organizations to continuously explore, develop, integrate, and deploy innovative practices to build products based on customer demands.

What does the future hold for Acuna Consulting?

Our services have continually evolved with the changing market needs and demands. We have recently introduced Elite Agile Mentoring that focuses on driving change at an organizational level and providing a learning management system for various roles, including HR, finance, and sales. Our aim is to expand the reach of this Lean-Agile integrated organizational membership tool to a more extensive customer base in both the corporate and government sector. People crave knowledge, and we are trying to drive more knowledge, expertise, and strategy through our offerings. Additionally, we continually evolve our core capabilities and plan to explore data science, artificial intelligence, and robotic process automation.