About my Magma consulting activities

It can't be possible!! Nearly 9 months without a word, no picture, no comment, no tweet...how can that be? Well, this illustrates probably how busy we are in our sector, advising one client and then another, organizing meetings, calls, workshops and realizing that nine months have passed. During all those weeks, I have been working on two specific Belgian public sectors assignments (one in Brussels, the other in Wallonia), tackling their technical debt issue. The story is quite complicated, as both entities have been running quite old back office solutions. The modernization pathways is not simple and implies a strong architecture work...but we will get there 😆!! On the Blue Soft Belgium side, we have recruited new colleagues, proposed new client engagements (and won the majority of them, focusing on consultants profiles and a right match with the client's needs). It is a fantastic team we are building here and I'm thrilled to see what the future will bring us... BTW, if y...

Waw...time flies...Already five years working back as a business consultant, advising clients every day (and coping with the traffic jams folks, what a nightmare) - trying to help where and when I can, providing support with concrete and realistic feedback. In a nutshell, this year, I've been busy consulting for two major public entities, both located in Belgium. One where I currently conduct a technical debt reduction strategy (see my previous post on that matter) and another one dealing with the whole delivery department (PMO management, testing and development teams)...and it has been a lot of hard work!! The current complexity in IT architecture, cloud knowledge, generic and broad technical concepts, down to earth KPIs, are nowadays mandatory to run a workshop, to present some convincing arguments (why should the client change, right?)...and all that in a secure (security by design, of course) environment (should use plural here)... And again, this year has been full of great m...

  Now that the year has started, it's a new dive in the day to day business, running from one client to another, shifting between priorities and deadlines. And what strikes me this year, besides the energy crisis (and the IT CIO costs cut paired to scarce resources), inflation, climate crisis, the Ukrainian war, it's the motivation to change the current status. Let me explain. Now that the majority of budgets has been granted, there is the recurrent pressure to 'do more, with less' (less people, less time to execute or to test, less money to get things done) and a need to address the legacy situation within IT departments. Tackling the legacy (being the old systems and solutions, already obsolete or nearly out of date) is not a walk in the park. You need to get an accurate inventory of what you have in prod (back office, front office solutions, hardware, storage, security solutions, development frameworks, security solutions, language used to code...or even your project...

Time to move on, to pause and to reflect on what has been achieved during 2022. In a nutshell, we made this year a subtle mix of management consulting projects (heart of Brussels, regional administration), a second-level of Open Group certification in Enterprise Architecture and, during the last part of the year, we designed a specific approach for managing what is called technical debt . The concept of technical debt is broadly detailed online, but concretely, it addresses all the legacy, the old code, the old technologies a client might have in his IT ecosystem and that need to be updated to new IT norms (code language, software versions, security levels etc.) A quite funny journey 😅 On our recruitment side, Magma filled every client request with a new candidate and quite great profiles were recruited. Congrats to our partner Delphine that made that amazing job! And, last and certainly not least, we hired 2 people for Blue Soft Belgium, bringing the team to 4. And this is a first y...

It has been a while since the launch of Blue Soft in Belgium (yes, we started in April!! Nearly six months already 😨😨😨 and yes (thanks for asking!), the business is doing good. We had this new venture started, but we also boosted our Magma head hunting pillar that was literally exploding during the Spring and the Summer. Several profiles we identified for our clients, in the automotive and industry sectors, offering new positions and new career changes to our candidates! Congrats to all of them and good luck with your new endeavors!! And as from end of August, we will continue to work within the Public Sector, through our NTT Belgium collaboration. A lot of fun (and heavy work) yet to come...

  It has been now a public secret: I'm starting a new venture with Blue Soft Group, a French IT provider, mainly active in France and Switzerland. This will be the opportunity to create synergies and develop projects on application development, professional services sourcing and any innovative joint projects (proof of concepts on IoT or Cloud technologies) that could be a technological answer to a concrete business need (yes, I like the concrete side of business: what's the problem and how can we solve the issue?).  Any information about Blue Soft Belux can be found on our Linkedin Company page (and follow us if you want to stay updated on the job offers :). Everything right here.