Category Archives: Press Release

New York, NY | August 1, 2022 – Ariel Partners is thrilled to announce that it has been awarded the Class 1 Systems Integration (SI) contract by the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation (formerly known as DOITT). This award underscores Ariel Partners’ commitment to delivering innovative technology solutions tailored to the unique needs of New York City. The award is for a potential duration of six (6) years, commencing on January 1, 2023, through December 31, 2029, an initial three (3) year term with one (1), three (3) year extension at the discretion of the City.

The NYC Office of Technology and Innovation aims to transform the city’s digital infrastructure, ensuring improved service delivery to all residents and businesses. The contract covers system design, implementation, and ongoing support to keep New York City’s digital infrastructure at the forefront of technological advancements. For New Yorkers, this means enhanced efficiency, reliability, and transparency in public services.

“Ariel Partners is deeply honored to receive this award. Our team’s dedication to robust and scalable technology solutions aligns perfectly with the city’s vision of a smarter, more connected urban environment,” said Craeg Strong, CTO of Ariel Partners. “This contract will enable us to implement systems integration solutions that will significantly improve the city’s technology landscape, benefiting millions of New Yorkers.”

The Systems Integration Services are available to all New York City agencies, departments, and offices. Since 2016, Ariel Partners has a proven track record working with NYC Agencies, and this SI contract will leverage their extensive experience to support the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation’s strategic goals.

Moreover, Ariel Partners’ commitment to continuous improvement and innovation ensures that the technology solutions provided will evolve with the city’s needs. By fostering a collaborative environment, Ariel Partners will work closely with city officials and stakeholders to deliver exceptional outcomes and drive sustainable growth for the city’s technology ecosystem. “Our goal is to enhance the quality of life for all New Yorkers through innovative technology solutions,” added Craeg Strong. “Our customer-centric approach ensures that we understand and meet the unique needs of the communities we serve.

Ariel is a certified minority and woman owned business headquartered in Times Square, NYC. Ariel provides digital services, coaching, training, and management consulting to government and commercial clients. Ariel holds a Top-Secret Facility clearance and is appraised at maturity level three by CMMI for both Development and Services. Ariel is certified ISO 9001:2015, ISO/IEC 20000:2018, and ISO/IEC 27001-2013 compliant. Ariel has recently achieved 100% compliance with NIST 800-171 standards for exceptional cyber security, including all 110 controls required for the US Government DOD Cyber Maturity model (CMMC) level two compliance.

7 June 2022 New York, NY. – Ariel Partners, a leading IT firm offering Agile and Enterprise Coaching, Training, and Consulting, announced that they have partnered with Kanbanize, a leading tool for managing projects and knowledge work, to help solve our customer’s most critical business challenges together. As a Certified Bronze Partner, Ariel offers extended free trial versions, attractive discounts, and premium support to new and existing Kanbanize customers.

“A client of ours faced an extremely complex coordination challenge, involving multiple software, design, lesson production, videography, and printing teams. They needed accurate forecasts to plan in advance if they were going to meet key milestones, and Kanbanize delivered. We are impressed by the capabilities of the Kanbanize tool, and we are confident in its ability to address our largest and most complex customer challenges.” – Craeg Strong, CTO of Ariel Partners

Kanbanize is a company focused on creating foundations that bring true agility and agile tools to business teams competitively and innovatively centered around the visibility and communication of people within an organization. Their clients include organizations in Aerospace, Pharma, R&D Engineering, telecommunications, and IT. They offer industry-focused expertise and guidance to provide tailored business solutions that address challenges for scale, strategy, coordination, and delivery.

“With Kanbanize, Schlenk created a smoother flow of information, reduced the waiting times between process steps, and put perspective on how workflows beyond personal and team levels.”

– Adalbert Huber, VP Rn D Schlenk

“We supported transferring over 6,000 users and several hundred boards from another Kanban-tool provider (one which is amongst the market leaders) to Kanbanize. Kanbanize offers customer service that we haven’t experienced anywhere else, they exceeded our naturally high expectations by far.”

– Andrea Haase, Continuous Improvement Leader

(01 June 2022) New York, NY – Ariel Partners, a leading IT firm offering Agile and Enterprise Coaching, Training, and Consulting, announced that they have partnered with Kanban Zone, a visual collaboration platform that provides effective Kanban best practices and solutions that connect work processes across an organization. Ariel Partners supports executive management and senior leadership in monitoring large-scale efforts by tailoring agile practices to allow for better planning, governance, and developing realistic estimates and forecasts. Ariel recommends KanbanZone for students of their Kanban classes as an excellent way to get started, particularly for non-IT groups.

Kanban Zone is a company in Arizona committed to software and methods for organizations to continuously improve productivity and unleash the full potential of an organization. As a Kanban Zone Partner, Ariel Partners have forged a partnership to work with organizations and agile coaches creating solutions that align with company goals and leadership.

“A fantastic Kanban tool for multi-team coordination. Kanban Zone is extremely intuitive and easy to use and has incredibly responsive support. The “mirror” feature is a powerful way to show what another team is doing. Highly recommended!”

– Craeg Strong, CTO of Ariel Partners

Starting immediately, Ariel Partners now offers public Kanban Zone training courses using lean visual portfolio management. Students work through Kanban practices that enable full collaboration across all levels of a business organization. Kanban Zone enables leaders to visualize complex value streams, connect every workflow to achieve complete process transparency, and continuously access metrics and analytics to improve performance.

“Kanban Zone has now become an essential tool for running my business. It has helped us organize all our projects and our teams to better collaborate. This solution is much more flexible and customizable than most we have seen. Great tool!”

– Jerome Guidollet, CEO of Tuango Inc.

New York, NY, April 09, 2022 – Ariel Partners, a leading IT firm offering Software Development, Consulting, Coaching, and Training, announced today that its Information Security Management System has achieved certification for compliance with ISO/IEC 27001:2013 standards. The certification applies across the full range of Ariel’s current service offerings, including the provisioning of IT solutions, training, coaching, and program management.

ISO/IEC 27001 is an international standard for to managing information security. It details requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining, and continually improving an information security management system (ISMS), aiming to help an organization make the information assets they hold more secure.

“We have all seen stories of high-profile cyber intrusions, data leaks, and ransomware. Thankfully, Ariel adopted a cloud-native posture since day one, using Software-as-a-Service rather than installing servers and information assets on-premises,” said Craeg Strong, Ariel’s CTO. “Nevertheless, establishing an Information Security Management System was important to us. Given the ongoing delays with the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification [the cybersecurity assessment framework established by the US Department of Defense], we knew we needed to start with ISO 27K. This certification is a tangible sign to our customers that we take cybersecurity very seriously.”

The ISO 27K framework contains three critical requirements:

1. The organization must systematically and wholistically examine the organization’s security risks, taking account of threats, vulnerabilities, and impacts.
2. The organization must design and implement a comprehensive suite of information security controls and risk management strategies, and
3. The organization must adopt an overarching management process to ensure that information security controls continue to meet security needs on an ongoing basis.

These elements profoundly impact all aspects of how an organization conducts business. For example, before adopting a new technology (e.g., augmented reality), Ariel will conduct “red team” and “premortem” sessions to analyze all possible attack vectors and to quantify the worst-case impact for each of them, were it to be successful. By performing these steps upfront, Ariel can continue to innovate at a high rate of speed while maintaining strict security levels.

“We are proud to have achieved ISO 27K, which represents the next major milestone on our journey of relentless improvement and utmost commitment to quality and security,” said Craeg Strong, Ariel CTO. “The ISO 27001 certification now takes its place alongside our CMMI level 3 DEV & SVC assessments and our ISO 9001 and 20000 certifications. ISO 27000 is particularly relevant for Ariel since we maintain a Top-Secret facilities clearance (FCL). We will continue our security journey with CMMC, and we plan to be one of the first CMMC-certified organizations out of the gate when the assessments become available.”

The ISO standards equip organizations with an approach to continuous business process improvement that considers a wide range of practices for establishing mature and effective processes.

(23 November 2021) New York, NY. – Ariel Partners, a leading IT firm offering Software Development, Consulting, Agile, and Enterprise Coaching and Training, announced that their CTO, Craeg Strong, has achieved certification for the Flight Levels Coaching Program.

The Flight Levels Coach Certification Program is an expert training program created for senior coaches focused on enterprise business agility. Flight Levels Academy designed this program to help prepare graduates to leverage flight levels to enable large and small organizations to better align their operational efforts with their strategy, address challenging systemic issues, manage and coordinate dependencies between teams and value streams, and visualize the flow of work throughout the organization. Flight levels is a thinking model that can be used to understand where in an organization we have to do what in order to achieve the results we want. Flight Levels starts with a solid grounding in Kanban principles, adding a library of board design patterns, a powerful set of building blocks for creating coordination and strategy-level Kanban systems, and an overall work systems topology to understand the big picture and suggest places where we may want to start. It helps us gain a better understanding of how work is actually flowing through the organization, and based on this understanding, we can make laser-focused improvements. The overall flight levels work systems architecture helps us link and align our work so that it is directed to the business outcomes that we want to achieve.

Craeg Strong said: “The Flight levels thinking model is a perfect complement to our existing Kanban coaching and training offerings, enabling us to extend the benefits of Agility to all areas of an organization. These techniques and visualizations work beautifully for both “run the business” as well as “change the business.” Given the recent amazing advancements in tooling support, now is an excellent time to dive into Enterprise Kanban and Flight Levels for your organization!”

Flight levels was created by Klaus Leopold and described in his most recent book “Rethinking Agile.” Klaus has written several other books for Kanban for knowledge work. The Flight Levels Coaching Program certification criteria include a rigorous course schedule including how to facilitate Flight Levels workshops, coach managers and change teams, design Flight Levels workshops, and approach challenges and provide solutions in your day-to-day business.

The Flight Levels coaching program takes a unique approach to developing senior coaching professionals. Rather than a quick 2-day course, the program takes place over six months of graduated study and practice. The classes are punctuated with intercession work and informed by practical case studies from each of the participant’s professional experiences. This unique approach ensures a very high level of quality and commitment and guarantees that the flight levels coach certification will retain its value over time.

New York, NY, Aug. 08, 2021 – Ariel Partners, a leading IT firm offering Software Development, Consulting, Coaching, and Training, announced today that its IT Service Management System has achieved certification for compliance with ISO/IEC 20000-1:2018 standards. The certification applies across the full range of Ariel’s current service offerings, including the provisioning of IT solutions, training, coaching, and program management.

The ISO/IEC 20000 family of service management standards were originally based on best practice guidance contained within the ITIL framework and have since been extended to cover other IT service management frameworks, including COBIT. These standards help organizations ensure they establish, maintain and utilize a service management system that covers the entire lifecycle of service delivery—starting with initial service planning, design, and transition, continuing with service delivery and continuous improvement, and ending in service retirement and replacement.

“We are proud to have achieved ISO 20K, which represents the next major milestone on our journey of relentless improvement and utmost commitment to quality,” said Craeg Strong, Ariel CTO. “The ISO 20000 certification now takes its place alongside our CMMI level 3 DEV & SVC assessments and our ISO 9001 certification. ISO 20000 is particularly meaningful for Ariel since we are a services company. This certification encompasses our public and private training classes, systems integration work, Agile coaching, governance and program management consulting, and even specialized offerings such as digital transformation and legacy modernization.”

Maintaining and complying with ITIL and ISO 20000 standards brings significant benefits to both Ariel Partners and Ariel’s customers. As an organization, the standard frameworks assist Ariel in creating baselines for consistency and ensuring that essential steps are not missed while prescribing a disciplined approach to continuous improvement. Ariel’s customers can rest assured that they will receive consistently excellent delivery of services and that their feedback will be proactively sought and implemented quickly.

Strong continued: “The ISO 20000-1 standard and ITIL are perfectly compatible with our Agile approach. This certification demonstrates how Ariel continues to successfully adapt Agile methods for use on complex, mission critical programs that make a difference in people’s lives.

We will continue to invest heavily in research and development into new ideas and better, more efficient processes for the benefit of our customers. A recent example is our development of a custom training provisioning application, “TIM,” that enables us to immediately spin up or spin down multiple instances of complex training environments for our students. We are going to continue pressing forward to ever-increasing levels of maturity, bringing our already mature processes and procedures to the highest level for our clients’ benefit.”

The ISO standards equip organizations with an approach to continuous business process improvement that considers a wide range of practices for establishing mature and effective processes.

New York, NY, June 29, 2021 – Ariel Partners, an IT consulting firm offering software Development, Consulting, Coaching, and Training, announced that it had expanded its partnership with the Scaled Agile Partner Network from Bronze to Silver Transformation Partner. This worldwide network includes transformation and platform providers who help enterprises facilitate and accelerate business results by adopting the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®).

“As a Scaled Agile Silver Partner, we are expanding the range of SAFe-related services we can offer our customers,” said Craeg Strong, CTO of Ariel Partners. “The Scaled Agile Framework is the most popular large-scale Agile framework on the market today, and there is a significant need for expert coaching and training assistance. Ariel has a comprehensive understanding of the Agile ecosystem, offering training and coaching in several approaches, including Scrum and Kanban. Since the Scaled Agile Framework incorporates both Scrum and Kanban as required elements, it is extremely important that organizations choose a coaching partner with expertise in all of the above.”

“There is a reason that SAFe is enjoying significant adoption in larger organizations, and that is because it addresses enterprise concerns such as strategic planning, portfolio management, and budgeting. The breadth and depth of its scope seek to connect strategy to execution. This is a strength and a differentiator compared to most other Agile scaling frameworks that concern themselves only with software development. SAFe correctly recognizes that larger enterprises require elements of many practices, including Human Centered Design, Kanban, Scrum, DevOps, Lean and systems thinking.”

Ariel is offering a full suite of SAFe-related training classes, including SAFe Scrum Master, SAFe Product Owner, Lean Portfolio Management, and Release Train Engineer. Ariel will also provide targeted coaching and consulting for organizations seeking to facilitate a large-scale Lean/Agile transformation using the SAFe framework. Mr. Strong said: “Although some people consider the SAFe framework prescriptive, there is, in fact, a lot of flexibility both in how SAFe is practiced and how it is initially rolled out. Ariel has identified a specific set of Agile practices that greatly reduce pain and friction associated with the initial adoption of SAFe and continue to improve outcomes while using SAFe. We are excited to share these with our customers to help them accelerate their growth and evolution.”

June 2021, New York, NY. – Ariel Partners, a leading IT firm offering Software Development, Consulting, Agile, and Enterprise Coaching and Training, announced that they have been selected as the official PMI NYC partner to provide training courses for Atlassian products, including Jira. Ariel will be providing courses targeted at a range of skills and experience levels, including Jira Fundamentals, Jira Intermediate, and Jira Advanced training courses to support the continuing professional development and education of project management and IT professionals.

PMI (Project Management Institute) is the world’s leading not-for-profit project management professional association. Established in 1969, PMI has over 200,000 members in 150 countries. The New York City Chapter (PMI NYC) offers a variety of educational experiences, with opportunities to earn PDUs, to support and advance the careers of its members.

“This is an exciting opportunity for Ariel Partners to broaden its reach and connect with PMI’s global community to lend our expertise to help advance the project management profession.”

– Craeg Strong, CTO of Ariel Partners.

Starting immediately, Ariel Partners now offers public Atlassian training courses for Jira Fundamentals, Intermediate, and Advanced. Students work through Agile and DevOps practices in the context of the Atlassian tools, using highly realistic environments. These Jira training courses are designed for team members and those in an oversight role for technology delivery and sustainment programs.

“Unlike competing courses, our Jira courses provide each student a fully configured and highly realistic environment for their use. We start out by practicing each skill hands-on and then provide context and background, including both Scrum and Kanban examples. Students come away learning not only about Jira but about the fundamentals of Agile in a highly pragmatic way.”

– Craeg Strong, CTO Ariel Partners.

“Craeg the instructor was outstanding, content was well paced, thorough coverage of the content for this level of course. Very well done, very much appreciate their time and expertise.”

– Jira Class Participant.

“Craeg did an outstanding job presenting the content, managing time, and addressing many questions in class and during breaks. The training project instances aided learning. Thanks for the excellent course!”

– USAF, Jira Class

New York, NY, March 05, 2021 – Ariel Partners, a leading I.T. firm offering Software Development, Consulting, Coaching, and Training, announced today that its teaming partner is among the awardees of the Small Business track for a $12.6B Indefinite Duration, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contractual vehicle established by the U.S. Department of Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to provide a wide range of IT-related services to Agencies in the Defense and Intel Community.

The program is known as Solutions for the Information Technology Enterprise (SITE III), and it is a follow-on to the highly effective contract vehicle E-SITE. The duration of the contract is up to 10 years, with the work to be done within the U.S. in various locations based on the specific task orders.

“We are thrilled to solidify our partnership with prime awardee IMTAS and to support the Agencies that play such a pivotal role in keeping our country safe,” said Craeg Strong, CTO of Ariel Partners. “We are looking forward to working with IMTAS to help improve the readiness and effectiveness of the U.S. warfighter and while supporting the Agency’s crucial mission of keeping our infrastructure and population safe by disrupting and disabling terrorist threats.”

“Ariel will leverage its deep and diverse expertise in applying Agile, Human Centered Design, Knowledge Management, Cybersecurity, and DevOps principles to help the SITE III community streamline systems and improve processes, modernize their mission-critical systems, enabling them to work more efficiently and effectively. Mr. Strong said: “Ariel offers a more mature approach to infusing Agile methods that leverages systems thinking and results in steady, sustainable, and long-term improvements.”

New York, NY, Sept. 30, 2020 – Ariel Partners, a leading IT firm offering IT Development, Consulting, Coaching, and Training announced today that its Quality Management System has achieved certification for compliance with ISO 9001:2015 standards.

The ISO 9000 family of quality management systems is a set of standards that helps organizations ensure they meet customers and other stakeholder needs within statutory and regulatory requirements related to a product or service.

This certification for ISO 9001:2015 indicates the organization is performing in alignment with the International Standards Organization’s requirements for quality management systems. At this level, quality management processes are well characterized and understood, and are described in standards, procedures, tools, and methods. The organization’s set of standard quality management processes is established and improved over time.

This certification highlights Ariel Partners’ commitment to quality and customer satisfaction, delivering on their specialties in digital transformation, IT services, training, and management consulting services.

“These achievements reflect our foremost commitment to quality, continuous improvement, and dedication to providing quality consulting services for our clients,” said Craeg Strong, CTO of Ariel Partners. “Specifically, it demonstrates that our execution of projects, services, and operations are based on standards, procedures, and methods that are well defined and understood. For example, our business development practice leverages the proven Shipley method. Our software development practice leverages proven methods such as Lean, Kanban, and Scrum. This indicates that customers can expect consistent results and excellent quality, time after time.”

The ISO standards equip organizations with an approach to continuous business process improvement that considers a wide range of practices for establishing mature and effective processes.

Strong continued: “Ariel celebrates this achievement as a major milestone along our journey of constant improvement and relentless innovation. We will continue to invest heavily in research and development into new ideas and better, more efficient processes for the benefit of our customers. Two recent examples are our adoption and advocacy of the Kanban Maturity Model (KMM) and our new Governance and Oversight framework for Large-Scale Agile programs. We are pressing onward and looking forward to continuing our advancement to increasing levels of maturity, bringing our already mature processes and procedures to the highest level for our clients’ benefit.”