Data and machine learning company, Mudano advises new startups in the space to ‘launch early and learn’. The customer feedback is well worth the pain of a few rough edges, and customers feel part of the product and companies can act on their experiences quickly and improve them.

What is Mudano – what problem are you solving?

Mudano is a data and machine learning company focused on disrupting the wasteful Business and IT consulting industry. We do this across two key areas;

• Mudano Data Services & Solutions
  • Mudano are a full-stack FS data services company that works mostly with our clients to help them drive more value from their data through innovative approaches around data strategy, data innovation labs, machine learning research, advanced analytics & visualisation etc.
  • Our FinTech R&D capability has helped our client’s develop novel and bespoke data solutions for their business or customer needs. Some examples being using machine learning to help reduce fraud, customer matching, predictive complaints analysis, propensity modelling and helping underwriters to better understand risk / claim correlations.
• Sharktower Delivery Science Platform
  • Every year, organisations waste billions on change projects. In increasingly complex environments, they still rely on methods that have barely evolved in 25 years. We are doing something about this.
  • Born out of Mudano’s Delivery Science principles, we developed our own data-driven project management software, Sharktower. Sharktower includes tools for collaborative visual planning, task management and unique guided stand-ups, alongside real-time reporting and machine learning intelligence to identify potential issues before they occur and help you address them.

What is a data-driven approach to project management?

Projects have always proliferated data, but it’s often of poor quality, or spread across multiple systems, meaning that reporting becomes a shadow industry, taking huge amounts of time and money to generate limited and delayed insights. Sharktower aims to bring together data, display it in real-time and augment it with machine learning & AI elements to create what we call Delivery Intelligence.

We have developed machine learning models which use key signals from project data to provide an objective project health score. We also provide proactive assurance, training models on historic data to determine the probability of plan slippage by applying natural language processing to understand team sentiment.

What are some of the main causes of why so many digital transformation projects fail to deliver on what was promised?

There are lots of reasons and plenty of research being done in this area, precisely because the headline numbers are so startling. One thing that we’re very strong on is keeping projects focused on business value and linking project outcomes to business objectives: it’s so easy for projects to become obsessed with delivering agreed milestones without stopping to think about whether these are still what the business needs. This disconnect leads to projects ‘succeeding’ on paper, but everything they deliver being mothballed or put on a shelf to gather dust because it doesn’t deliver real business value.

What advice would you give new startups in this space? 

Launch early and learn. We’ve definitely waited too long before putting new features in front of clients before now, thinking that things had to be absolutely perfect – the feedback that you’ll get is well worth the pain of a few rough edges, and customers feel part of your product when you can act on their experiences quickly and improve them.

We have an array of craft beers and independent music at FinTECHTalents – Give us a great song to listen to AND tell us your favourite tipple

With bases in London & Edinburgh, we’ll have to split our choices along Anglo-Scottish lines. So let’s have Gerry Cinammon’s Canter for the song, and Beavertown Gamma Ray for the drink.

Meet Mudano as part of FinTech Stories at FinTECHTalents this November.