About Us
Our team of consultants is committed to delivering innovative solutions and fostering a culture of continuous improvement. We serve the entire university community, including faculty, staff, administration, and student-led organizations across all CMU locations! We offer a suite of comprehensive services to clearly define your business needs, identify improvement opportunities, and work to define a plan that delivers results to your most pressing concerns.
Business Innovation Consulting
Business Innovation Consulting (“Innovation Consulting”) is the practice of transforming and elevating organizations by applying BIO’s principles of innovation to our partners’ challenges, processes, strategies, and technologies. This practice uncovers material change opportunities and develops strategies to enact them.
Explore our project support services from needs assessment and planning to successful implementation.
Services
Advising
Strategic Business, Project, and Change Management Advising
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Strategic Business Advising
Strategic advising involves sharing knowledge, expertise, and lessons learned from past projects with our partners to offer guidance and a broader perspective as they encounter tough decisions, work on solving challenges, or consider starting a new project. Through strategic advising, the BIO offers CMU leaders direction, individual and group knowledge, and useful insights gained from past project experiences to guide them.
Project Advising
Project Advising provides access to a BIO Project Delivery expert to help you plan and organize your projects. This service helps ensure that partners understand how to approach their projects, capture tasks, track issues and risks, log changes and decisions, and perform other critical project execution tasks seamlessly.
Change Management Advising
Change Management Advising involves guiding and supporting partners through the human aspect of implementing new processes, technologies, or strategies. We understand that successful innovation goes beyond technical implementation. It also involves gaining buy-in and support, developing an appropriate communication plan, and ensuring smooth rollout and adoption across the affected teams and individuals.
Business Analysis
Technology and Process Assessment and Requirements Gathering
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Technology Assessment & Analysis
Technology Assessment and Analysis involve documenting and analyzing the technologies used to support a particular process, service, or organization. In this context, "technology" encompasses various elements such as hardware, software solutions, general infrastructure, architecture, data flow, and more.
Process Assessment & Analysis
Process Assessment and Analysis are essential practices at the BIO. They involve a detailed examination of each step of a process to understand the current state, identify opportunities, and define core issues. The result is an annotated process map with labeled improvement areas, waste categories, descriptive icons, and data quantifying the process and its impacts.
Requirements Gathering
The BIO uses the requirements gathering process to extract detailed requirements and information from participants to better understand their needs for business and solution requirements, specifications, innovation, and opportunities.
Partner Enablement
Tools, Templates, Educational Materials, Training and Education
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Tools, Templates & Educational Materials
The BIO aims to help our partners effectively manage their projects and integrate innovation into their businesses and processes by providing resources such as a structured approach, best practices, useful tools, and more. To support this, the BIO keeps a library of resources, templates, guides, and training in different formats to guide and empower our partners. We also offer guidance, assistance, and coaching to our partners throughout the project life cycle.
Training & Education
The BIO believes in the importance of sharing knowledge, skills, and tools with partners to effectively support the CMU community in fostering a culture of continual improvement. We are dedicated to creating a collaborative environment to train our partners in the fundamental practices of continual improvement. To achieve this, BIO aims to provide resources, hands-on learning opportunities, on-the-job training, and formalized educational sessions. These efforts will prepare CMU partners to carry out their innovation initiatives.
Project Delivery
Project Management
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A Project Manager (PM) is responsible for leading the planning, communication, and execution of a project within a specific time frame and budget. They identify and document risks and issues, hold the project team accountable for action items, and escalate issues so they can be addressed and the project can be adjusted. This role is well-defined in nearly every industry, although methodologies may vary.