Polaris staff are very professional and provide well thought out solutions which have always met my needs. They deliver timely solutions to complex problems in a simple understandable way at an appropriate level of abstraction. Polaris have a no surprise approach to the services they provide. They like to engage fully with me as the customer and hence manage my expectations so that I was always aware of problems as they arose and knew the sort of output to expect. The outputs they produced were always thought provoking and when necessary were provocative.
Background
From 2000, the Above Water Effects (AWE) capability customer in MOD suffered significant budget cuts in their research programme year after year. As AWE managed one of the larger research budgets in MOD it was an easy target and it was believed by the centre that it would be able to find efficiencies in their programme that could absorb the cuts. However, it was believed by most in AWE that they had a fairly taut research programme and it provided value for money, however it was difficult to demonstrate this to the auditors and scrutineers.
Polaris
Polaris Consulting Ltd helped identify the key characteristics that make research valuable (impact against the problem, affordability, exploitability and technical maturity), identified metrics that were easy to interpret and collect data for and developed support tools (MARVEL) and visualisations to provide evidence about the value of the research which stands up to scrutiny and also helps identify problems areas in the research package.
In the first year it was piloted the evidence that was collected and analysed was sufficient to provide a strong rebuttal to the decision to cut the AWE budget by £1.8M and hence reverse the decision. The MARVEL approach continues to be used effectively in different parts of MOD and has been used to support in excess of 12 separate audits over the past 5 years.
Polaris have also been engaged on managing and analyzing the user requirements for the MOD Equipment Capability Customer road mapping initiative (CONNECT). CONNECT is a method and tool to aid MOD’s management capability, equipment and research activities in a joined up way. The attention to detail and the analysis they have undertaken has been invaluable and once again provided sufficient evidence to secure continued funding for this often politically sensitive project.