Consulting Services

FFF offers a full range of technical Consulting Services and will tailor the amount of process and methodology used during each consulting engagement to your individual business requirements.

All of our consulting engagements involve the delivery of written deliverables, the structure of which we will agree with you before the engagement begins. All material is provided to you royalty-free at the end of the engagement, meaning you can use and share it as you see fit.

Consulting services that we provide include (but are not restricted to) the following:

Strategic Planning and Budgeting

We can assist you in the formulation of an effective, realistic IT strategy that closely aligns with your business plan. This strategy will not only include technology direction but also a plan for how your business will apply the use of technology for maximum business benefit.

We can also assist you with the black art of IT budgeting and provide you with the benefit of our expertise and cost modelling tools to help you forecast and prioritise future IT expenditure.

Technical Consulting

FFF is able to provide expert technical consultants who not only know how to talk to your technical representatives, but who can also communicate, in business terms, with ‘business’ people and management within your organisation.

We are able to provide Technical Consulting services for just about any type of project, regardless of how big or small it is and what kind of technology is involved. Examples of Technical Consulting services that we able to provide are as follows:

Solution peer review – review of technical designs and other documentation, identification of possible issues, recommendations for improvement.
Management systems review – provides your management with an assurance that a given solution is well designed, cost effective and appropriate for its intended use. The perfect pre-implementation review before undertaking any large-scale project.
Performance, availability or security reviews for individual platforms or for your entire IT environment.
Disaster recovery and/or business continuity studies.
Problem investigation and root cause analysis.
Capacity management and forecasting.

Product Evaluation and Vendor Selection

No major technology purchasing decision should be made before each product to be purchased is appropriately evaluated to ensure that it provides required functionality, can be implemented successfully within your organisation and that there is sufficient justification for selecting it over the competition.

Often the correct product choice is not as obvious as it first seems, meaning that many customers choose end up choosing products that are not suited to their needs and/or that are not as cost effective as they could be.

FFF is able to provide you with professional and independent Product Evaluation and Vendor Selection services to assist you in selecting the correct products for your environment and in negotiating the best possible price. You are free to mix and match the services that you require from the following:

Formulation of Request for Information (RFI) and/or Request for Proposal (RFP) documents.
Product evaluation based on published features, pricing information, customer case studies and publicly available information.
Product evaluation based on limited installation and testing within lab environments.
Pilot studies that include one or more products being rolled out to a subset of users and/or systems for evaluation in a production environment.
Product selection and vendor negotiation.
Contract negotiation (if applicable).

FFF will provide you with a written report at the end of each evaluation (regardless of which services you require.) This report includes recommendations about which product(s) we recommend you purchase, including a full explanation of the rationale behind each recommendation that we make.

Because of our experience in effective vendor negotiation you can be assured that, once you have selected a product for purchase, we are able to negotiate the best possible price for that product on your behalf. (FFF does not add uplift or take a commission of any type when negotiating such purchases upon your behalf).

Systems or Project Auditing

Do you have a system that is not performing as well as it should? A project that is not running as well as you had hoped? Do you have doubts about the effectiveness of the people involved and/or the information that you are receiving?

If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the above questions then it may be time to allow FFF to audit your system or project and provide you with professional advice regarding how well it is running and steps that can be taken to rectify problems (if appropriate).

Outsourcing-related Services

If you are considering outsourcing the provision of IT services to your business units, or if you have made the decision to outsource these services and now need select the right service provider for your organisation then FFF has the skills and expertise to assist you in taking the next step.

Outsourcing the provision of IT services to your business has the potential to offer you with a range of benefits, both financial and otherwise. The transition towards an outsourcing relationship must be handled very carefully, however, to ensure that your organisation achieves maximum benefit from the arrangement and that steps are taken to avoid failure.

Outsourcing is a core competency of FFF and we have extensive experience in the formulation of successful outsourcing relationships between a range of businesses and service providers.

Suitability Analysis

Although outsourcing has the potential to provide tangible benefits to most organisations, it is not a panacea and certainly isn’t right for all organisations.

Before any company makes the decision to outsource it is necessary to carefully evaluate the pros and cons of doing so, as well as the organisational benefits that you realistically expect to result. Factors that should be considered include the following:

The cost case for outsourcing, including an analysis of whether you expect costs to decrease, increase or stay the same (compared to the status quo).
The non-financial advantages and disadvantages to your business of outsourcing.
Whether your organisational culture is compatible with the concept of outsourcing. Outsourcing is generally only effective when the service provider is able to successfully integrate into the customers’ organisation. End users, for example, should not be aware that services are being provided to them by an external organisation.
Whether you are able to find a credible service provider that is equipped to provide your organisation with an acceptably high level of service throughout a services relationship.
Whether you are able to negotiate contractual terms and conditions that will be acceptable to your organisation throughout a services relationship.

FFF can assist you in determining your organisations suitability to an outsourcing relationship using a prescribed process that includes workshops with key organisational representatives, gathering and analysis of your organisational requirements and an analysis of the expected cost benefits to your organisation of entering into an outsourcing relationship.

RFI/RFP Formulation and Vendor Selection

The RFI and RFP processes are of critical importance to a successful outsourcing engagement as they are instrumental to not only selecting a service provider, but also for defining the structure of a future outsourcing relationship. FFF will help you to achieve maximum benefit from this process through:

Assisting you in determining the ideal format and schedule for the RFI and RFP processes, including a decision on whether to release an RFI or whether to proceed directly to an RFP
Assisting you in deciding upon a vendor selection strategy and selecting which vendors will be invited to respond to your RFI and RFP
Assisting you to decide what services you wish to outsource and hence the content of your RFI/RFP documents
Assisting you to generate high-quality RFI/RFP documents and releasing these to vendors
Facilitation of the vendor selection process

Contractual Negotiations

FFF has extensive experience in formulating and negotiating services-based agreements for both large and small organisations.

We place a heavy emphasis on helping our customers develop contractual frameworks under which your service provider is incented to deliver improvements in service and price throughout the course of a services agreement. We achieve this through ensuring that both parties to the services agreement have a vested interest in helping the other party to succeed.

We can draft a services agreement on your behalf and have a range of templates to suit the majority of customer requirements. We are also able to draft a services agreement from scratch if your specific requirements justify doing so.

You choose whether to negotiate the services agreement with your service provider or whether you would prefer that we act on your behalf (in conjunction with you, of course). We can even arrange for the provision of independent legal advice if you should require it.

Outsourcing Services Review

Is your organisation currently engaged in an outsourcing relationship that you feel could be better?

FFF is able to provide you with the benefit of our extensive expertise in this area through the review of your outsourcing relationship and the formulation of recommendations for improvement.

Outsourcing services reviews can be as formal and as informal as you require and each culminates in a set of written deliverables that we provide to you completely royalty free.

If you are not getting the most out of an outsourcing relationship then we are confident that we can help you make things better.

Network and Security Consulting

Hackers, viruses, worms, spam, Trojan horses, software vulnerabilities, even disgruntled employees – all of these things have the potential to disrupt your business and affect profitability. In extreme cases security flaws in your IT environment also have the ability to cause widespread embarrassment to your company and loss of customer confidence.

The BlasterWorm virus epidemic of 2003 illustrated just how susceptible computers are to these threats when hundreds of millions of Windows machines worldwide were infected by this virulent, self propagating virus. It is impossible to accurately estimate the impact of this epidemic in financial terms, but published estimates range between US$10B and US$100B. A survey of small to medium sized American organisations by TruSecure found that survey respondents suffered an average financial impact of approximately US$475,000 each – all from the effects of just one virus.

We provide a full range of security consulting services to provide you with confidence that your IT systems and processes are configured for optimal security (and that they stay that way).

Systems Integration

At FFF we are experts in systems integration: getting your expensive heterogeneous platforms and applications to work together and appear to your business as a single system.

Each systems integration consulting engagement is unique. Examples of some of the tasks that we would typically perform during such an engagement are as follows:

Meet with the relevant members of your organisation to gather and agree your business requirements and expected outcomes for the engagement.
Gather information about your existing systems.
Investigate alternatives for integrating systems, including a cost benefit analysis of each.
Present options and recommendations to you for achieving your stated requirements and expected outcomes.
Assist you with the integration of your systems (if applicable).

Areas of systems integration in which we specialise:

Internetworking (multi-protocol, multi-vendor network implementations, legacy network technologies and topologies)
Directory service integration (LDAP, Active Directory, NDS, etc.)
Database and application integration (message brokers, message queues, inter-process communication)
Multi-vendor platform integration (Linux, Windows, Solaris, Apple OS X, Intel, RISC, zSeries, etc.)