Digital Transformation Squad
Win Win, Integrity, Innovation and Agility
An introduction from Peter Brookes-smith...
- I’ve loved IT since I saw my first computer wheeled in to the classroom when I was 16 years old and I thought I was on the set of Star Trek. It was 1979 and the computer was a PET.
- Of course, I had no idea how computers would affect my life for the next 40 years (so far).
- I’ve been an engineer, a developer, a manager, a fixer, a director, and an entrepreneur (my last business grew to become an award winning and exciting digital transformation agency with over 700 employees that deployed systems in many countries including the UK, Ireland, Germany, Poland and the USA)
- I left that business a couple of years ago and I’ve been working on the next adventure.
- I wanted to create a business that could help to transform peoples’ lives and deliver an amazing service to clients. I also wanted to create a progressive organisation in line with my values and with the highest levels of engagement for all the people working in the business.
- I’ve recruited some amazing team members over the years who were ex forces. They had such high levels of integrity, self sufficiency and cool headedness. I’ve also had success in recruiting professional people from outside the IT world and helping them acquire all the skills and knowledge to deliver.
- I combined these two ideas to try and create a team of veterans who I’ve trained to the point they can be a productive team member delivering digital transformations. And in this way, dt-squad was born!
- dt-squad is not a training organisation that earns fees from putting bums on seats and printing certificates. My actions have always been to help clients create value by building and deploying core systems and processes that will sell more, cut costs, increase margins or just do things better. That’s why I give my time freely so I can mentor, coach and train vets. As of December 2021, dt-squad has helped over 20 students with an average of around 50 hours each of 1 to 1 training.
- As the training progresses, the students are free to do what they want with no strings. Of course I hope they’ll be able to join us at dt-squad and start creating value for clients.
- If that’s not possible for any reason, or they would simply prefer to work somewhere else, they are free to do just that and I hope they will remain a friend to our business.
- If they stay with us, they’ll become part of a progressive business that’s 80% owned by the employees with board level representation to decide the future direction of the business. Of course, they’ll also enjoy their share of 80% of the distributable profit for as long as they are employees.
- The remaining 20% is held by me and I have no exit plan. I’d like to be a part of this business for as long as the board thinks I can add value!
A selection from our blog
Five tools for innovation mastery
Innovation is a core ingredient for successful transformations but the ability to innovate on demand doesn't come easily to everyone. In this blog, Peter describes five proven techniques to help us all increase our innovation skills
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Finding defects with AI and computer vision
If you're interested in how computers can be used to deconstruct images (or a video stream) to systematically find features that are hard to see with the naked eye, then I think you might enjoy this blog from Peter. He describes the approach he took when a global tech business asked for help with one of their client's production line problems
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Photo Editing with Rachel
We're happy to give a showcase here to our dt-squad students and in this blog, Rachel describes her journey with coding and gives a demonstration of her image editing app. She used numpy and opencv to allow users to upload images then apply a number of effects and even create a drag and drop puzzle. Since then, Rachel has continued her development and in addition to a weekly mentoring session with Peter, she is currently undertaking a self funded full time programme. Go Rachel!
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Business agility: What & why?
It's almost impossible to open a journal or watch a business video without bumping into "agility". But what is business agility and why should you care? In this blog, Peter explores those questions and tries to help everyone get just a bit more agile
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De-clutter your application landscape
Everyone is keen to talk about new systems and the impact they'll have on our business performance. It's much less common to talk about the difficulty of decommissioning the systems we already have. In this blog, Sush describes a step by step process to reduce risk and clear the decks.
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Lessons in life from an ai agent
Does mankind have anything to learn from ai? In this blog, Peter shows how an artificially intelligent agent with a simple task to achieve can help us to think about some of the biggest questions we face in business
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Are values our fair weather friend?
There's nothing unusual about a business claiming that it's driven by values. In reality, sustaining a values driven business is much harder than making the claim. Peter describes his own views on how to build a sustainable, values driven organisation
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Our values driven organisation
We're values driven and believe it's important to crystallise and communicate them in multiple ways. It means we can be held to account when we fail (which we sometimes will). Peter describes the values that he brought to our business
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What is Governance
Great governance helps us deliver value for our clients. That definition is true but not so helpful when we're trying to build a governance framework that's fit for purpose with a new client and transformation programme. In this blog, Sush discusses his own views born of many years succesfully creating change for multiple clients
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