Services from Two Hills






Two Hills Ltd is a registered company, the business vehicle for our principal, Rob England, based in Wellington, New Zealand. Two Hills operates business activities ranging from IT consulting services, to training/coaching, publishing, Web 2.0 social networking and web journalism. Contact us here



In everything we do, it is all about "sensible business practices":

We are heavy on common sense, as distinct from purist theory. We take a pragmatic, practical approach to deliver the results. We are sceptical of technology or process for its own sake.

We understand business (and public service) imperatives. We are driven by return on investment, cost justification, necessary compliance, and risk control.

Our expertise is around operational practices: the combination of process and people to operate the organisation.




Two Hills is differentiated by our independence, frankness, and Kiwi no-nonsense approach. Rob is an internationally recognised thought leader in IT through his blog The IT Skeptic.



To find out how we can help make your business more effective, contact Two Hills


Consulting

Two Hills Ltd provides real consulting: we charge for the hours we work and we work only when we are providing useful service to you, which is generally high level advice and planning (though we are also happy to roll our sleeves up and get things done for you too). We tend to steer away from 40-hours-a-week contracting except when you need an operational role created or temporarily filled.

We do a lot of work for mid-range organisations: local government, smaller national government departments, mid-size businesses, but we have also been engaged by some of the largest organisations in New Zealand.



Consulting on Service Management and ITIL®: We know Service Management.   Some areas where we specialise include:

    Service design improvement: raising the quality of services delivered through evaluation, comparison against best practice, and development of a planned improvement program


    Service delivery remediation: troubleshooting dysfunctional service delivery functions and processes. Get your people and culture back on track.


    Service catalogue and portfolio: we guide the development of the heart of service management, the catalogue. This should be an early and central part of any service improvement program, to focus and drive cultural change and to provide a linch-pin for all processes.


    Cultural change: when it comes to driving a service management mindset, we provide advice for planning and workshops for execution.


    ITSM coaching: Help your staff through an ITIL or other ITSM implementation.  Most consultants will provide either a one-off packaged engagement (eg. training course, packaged implementation) or continuous services by the day or week.  Many organisations can only afford to do the ongoing work in-house, so an initial training and/or implementation package is purchased then the organisation is left to drift, going it alone.  We provide an ongoing packaged service of regular ITSM coaching workshops to keep your people on track, and to help overcome the day-to-day sticking points that arise.

    Workshops and seminars: Two Hills offers onsite half-day or one-day seminars and workshops on a range of ITSM topics to stimulate learning and debate within your organisation.

    Review of requirements or review of proposals:  We start from the position of questioning if  ITIL is the best option for your organisation and then reviewing the ROI and rationale of adoption.  We take a hard look especially at any technological requirements to ensure these arise from genuine process need. How Rob approaches these reviews is hinted at by his blog The IT Skeptic and his book Owning ITIL®.



IT strategy and governance: Rob's critical, skeptical and pragmatic approach to IT adds value to any strategic or governance planning, bringing an experienced eye to the development and review of strategy, policy, structures, plans and processes.



"Expanding presence" consulting:  Rob has explored the new online territories of business presence, branding and messaging, including websites, blogs, forums, content management systems, open content, and virtual worlds like Second Life. For organisations entering or considering entering social / Web2.0 / virtual domains, Rob can provide strategic and practical advice on their business application.


Content

When you source content from Two Hills, you will get a freshness of viewpoint, an independence of opinion, and an originality of ideas that you won't find in many other providers of IT content. Our material is unique. If required, it is also provocative and quirky.



Piecework writing: See Rob's portfolio of published content.  He will write ghost content for articles, white papers, webpages, blogs etc.  This can be organised remotely anywhere in the world via phone, VoIP and email.


Public speaking:  Rob has been invited as keynote speaker at a number of conferences, and invited multiple times by itSMFnz, itSMF Australia, CCLearning PRINCE2 and Pink Elephant USA. He was voted best speaker at itSMFnz 2011 national conference and was voted second-best speaker at itSMF Best Practice Netherlands 2008.
He can speak to a wide range of topics.

Bid writing: Rob has considerable experience in the software sales industry as a business technologist: communicating between the need and the solution, between clients and techos, in a presales context.  He is available on hourly contract to review, manage and/or edit your sales bids (RFI, RFP, RFT etc).  This can be done remotely anywhere in the world via phone, VoIP and email.



Training

EnGrok professional training and coaching, focus on sales and service. See the EnGrok website for details of courses, which include:

    Presentation skills:  Rob has presented many times to audiences from 3 to 300, and managed and coached presenters for ten years.  A coaching workshop can be tailored to your individual skill or content needs, as you and Rob judge them.  We use our own proprietary methodologies for evaluation, skills building and content development.
    Sales: Rob has been selling software for twenty years: as a presales techo, and as a manager and coach of presales people.  Rob is heavily trained and experienced in selling. He has developed and delivered training and coaching for sales staff.
    Technical staff sales development: if presales people aren't in selling mode, or consultants are not bringing back opportunities, morale is low and cynicism high, product demonstrations take you backwards, or people don't have the skills to sell and close, then talk to Two Hills about a professional development program.  Rob is highly successful at motivating and training technical staff.