This is Part 1 of a series on IT Modernization best practices with Oberon
Building the plan of work
In high-stakes IT modernization, most failures don’t come from the tech—they come from the team. The wrong people assigned to the wrong roles, mismatched expectations between client and consultant, and zero investment in upskilling the internal team. The result? Burned timelines, blown budgets, and fragile outcomes. But it's nearly impossible to go it alone as an enterprise IT shop, getting the cloud, app and migration skills, as well as AI skills, requires working with a talented and capable partner. But how to build a successful co-delivery approach?
Oberon offers a better way to start: with verified skill intelligence, shared visibility, and a joint capability map that sets up both sides for success before the Statement of Work is drafted.
For the Customer: Build a Joint Statement of Work That Invests in Your Team, Not Just the Consultant.
Traditionally, SOWs are written in a vacuum, often by external teams with limited insight into the
actual capabilities of your internal staff. Oberon changes that by giving you a real-time, data-backed inventory of what your team can do—not what they say they can do.
Using the Chessboard view, your team’s active skillsets—based on recent project work, Jira tasks, service tickets, and Git commits—are visualized against the needs of the initiative. You can instantly see:
✅ Which roles are staffed with validated experience
🟡 Where skills are emerging but unproven
❌ Where true gaps exist that require outside help
Instead of outsourcing wholesale, you can make surgical partner requests—“Lead our cloud automation track, but mentor our infrastructure team in IaC tooling”—and then track how those capabilities evolve during the engagement.
With Oberon, the system can even suggest courses and learning plans for your team members who are close but not quite ready. That means by the time the project starts, they’re better equipped to contribute, and by the time it ends, they’ve leveled up.
And for critical team members, Oberon enables mentoring flows: pairing consultants with internal staff on deliverables, with milestones that count toward internal skill progression. This isn’t shadowing—it’s structured, auditable skill transfer.
For the Service Provider: Build Smarter, Defensible SOWs That Protect Your Team
From your side as a partner, Oberon gives you a critical advantage: truth.
Too often, firms walk into projects blind—assuming the customer has “a strong platform team” or “a few senior developers who can take on orchestration.” These assumptions later become liabilities when delivery falls behind.
With Oberon Team, you can evaluate the client environment based on work data already in their systems. No guesswork. No gut feel. AI Assessments and profiles that help you know exactly who is capable of what work.
You’ll know:
🛠️ Where you need to deploy your most experienced consultants immediately
🤝 Which initiatives you can co-deliver with the customer
📉 Where you can plan for handoff or ramp-down over time
You can even propose skill transfer clauses in your SOWs—structured timelines where your team’s work includes mentoring, reviews, and co-creation activities. Oberon tracks these moments and reflects them in the client’s team capability graph, helping you prove the value delivered beyond “bodies and hours.”
This is how you shift from vendor to transformation partner.
The New First Week: Capability Co-Mapping
We recommend that partners and clients begin every project with a capability co-mapping session. This is a 3-to-5 day pre-engagement sprint using Oberon Team to:
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Validate existing staff capabilities through operational data and building complete profiles to know their abilities
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Highlight critical delivery dependencies and execution risks in the project plan and ensure experience leads the way
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Design an optimal blended delivery model between internal and partner resources to balance the budget effectively
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Generate learning paths and mentoring tracks directly in the platform to ensure everyone is brought up to the skills needed for Day 2 and the project
This session results in a “skill-aligned SOW”—a joint plan rooted in what the team can do today, and what they’ll be able to do tomorrow.
It de-risks delivery, accelerates value, and sets up both organizations to win 🏁
