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Our Story

We are a boutique consultancy specialized in promoting the systems engineering principles within the software-intensive product development domain. Our mission is to improve dramatically boost the effectiveness of product development organizations. We should not have to read any more news of massive public sector IT projects costing in the millions. The organizations deserve better, the employees deserve better, the customers deserve better and the society at large deserves better.

With unique insight into organizational improvement, widespread challenges with IT & technology projects and the primary causes of failed IT projects we are well-equipped to support your organization’s journey towards higher effectiveness. One of the key pillars in achieving that we believe is shifting to a proper engineering paradigm. We are fairly opinionated about this, if you haven’t already figured that out. 🙂

We are all about being pragmatic – but 100% grounded in solid theory

Our consultancy is founded on strong opinions about current state of the tech industry, method & process consulting and most of all, what actually works if you want to develop valuable products and services in a cost-effective manner.

We have poured our hearts and souls into understanding why things are the way they are, what principles apply and the successes those before our time have had. We are intimately aware of a wide range of theories.

Theory often gets a bad rap, unfortunately. As Dr. Deming once said, “Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence, without theory, there is no learning”.

All our services promote an approach to product development that is built on a coherent set of theories and principles about how the work should work. The approach is battle-tested for decades so far without any better alternatives. Feel free to prove us wrong however!

Our aim is to deliver all of our services integrated with your real, actual projects so you get to apply your learnings for real, not through obscure or irrelevant games and simulations.

woman writing on a whiteboard

100% Satisfaction guarantee

We are confident about our approach – you’ll get your money back should you feel like we didn’t provide enough value.

Hyper-focused on success and value delivery

Our approach is based on principles all aimed at guaranteeing success and delivering the right values. If you come up with a better application of a given principle than what we teach, great! In fact, that is precisely what we encourage clients to do.

Immediate real-world application

All our services are aimed for immediate application in your real-world situation. We prefer helping in situ outside a formal class room as much as possible.

Founder

Jussi Mäkelä

Founder

Few words from our founder

"For two decades I've witnessed organizations engaged in software-intensive product development and what always struck me was this notion of how there must be a better way of doing things. Maybe the industry is still in its infancy but we really are struggling to consistently succeed in product development - despite the endless amount of workshops, team building activities, processes, frameworks, you name it.

It's not like the answers aren't out there - systems engineering principles have been applied in software projects very successfully already in the 60's but for a number of reasons the industry is completely ignoring them.

This is what the idea behind Flowcus is - A no-nonsense consulting service to support those who simply can't afford to fail and are seriously trying to improve and consistently succeed. 100% focus on the flow of successful products into the hands of our customers."