This is a guest blog post by Revelwood’s Lee Lazarow.

Designing and developing successful business analytics applications requires a unique blend of skills; a team must understand both the nuances of the technology and the idiosyncrasies of business. We’ve built – and are continuing to build – our PSG team with those needs in mind.

Each Revelwood PSG team member understands both the technology and the overall business goals. Some consultants are stronger on the technology while others excel at understanding the business issues, so we put together our client teams with the goal of balancing that knowledge. To paraphrase the Greek saying, I truly believe that the strength of the whole team is greater than the sum of the skills of each individual.

Revelwood consultants are a true team. One way we demonstrate this is via our daily “huddle.” Every morning our team has a 15 minute phone call to share who’s working on what, who may need help with something, and what’s going on. Like many services firms, we have team members who work remotely and we never want to get in the position that they feel they are “alone.” Our huddles benefit both our team members and our clients.

I have recently started playing chess and I believe that a TM1 project can be very similar to the game. One aspect of chess is deciding how to use all the individual pieces in conjunction to achieve a common goal … just like the concept of creating a project team. Another thing about playing chess is that strategy requires you to think a few steps ahead. We are able to do this in our projects because of our deep and lengthy experience with business analytics technologies. Revelwood has been around long before Cognos and IBM bought TM1 and there’s not much we haven’t seen. That experience, combined with our commitment to exceed our client expectations and focus on putting the business goals first, means we understand where things are going. Like chess, we can easily read the board, assess the situation, and come up with the right strategy to win the game.

“Winning the game” can mean different things to different people and organizations. Some may view it as closing as many sales as possible and churning through projects quickly. But for us, “winning the game” means we get our projects delivered on time and under budget, while having clients tell us “I trust you.” That’s when we know we’ve achieved our checkmate!