WHO WE ARE
Everything you need to know about us.Hochhuth Consulting
Hochhuth Consulting GmbH is an international consulting firm headquartered in Berlin, Germany, which provides innovative digital governance solutions. Our aim is to identify the potential of digitalization in your organization and to develop smart dedicated solutions that will enable you to maximize your impact. We combine long-standing experience in the Governance Sector and Development Cooperation with latest IT knowledge and Change-Management practice. We provide a wide range of digital services, from basic webhosting platforms, online collaboration and task management solutions until the development and technical implementation of comprehensive strategies of making digitalization work.
Since its foundation in 2017 Hochhuth Consulting has established itself as a service provider for digital governance solutions and innovative approaches to process optimization. Centred around the long-standing experience and vast network of its founder and supported by a large team of agile IT experts, the company has developed services perfectly tailored to the needs of its clients, aligned and in sync with their unique technical context.
Our service portfolio has also expanded exponentially. Through our distinctive agile approach, we are able to draft first usable solutions often within 48 hours, based on more than 1000 technical products and around 130 digital content services. Thus, the focus of our work is on building smart knowledge, team and project management structures based on existing experiences, but customized exactly to the needs of each client.
We can build our solutions on Microsoft Teams and SharePoint environments but also offer to setup individual and cost-efficient stand-alone solutions.
Our goal is to provide user-friendly and innovative digital solutions for international cooperation, which enable our customers to coordinate processes and projects more efficiently, and to contribute to sustainability and to poverty reduction with the help of digitalisation.
ABOUT US
We are an international team of Governance and Economic Development experts, project managers and IT specialists, including over twenty full-time staff, complemented by experts for part-time assignments.
The Digital Governance Team
Our digital governance team works closely together with the clients in order to understand their individual needs and to identify the most suitable digital solutions in agile and interactive collaboration. The team then translates those needs and solutions into technical requirements and coordinates the implementation with our highly skilled IT team.
Each team member brings in a unique perspective and distinctive expertise. Responsibilities, tasks, and skills are very mobile within the organization, so that staff are often faced with opportunities to work on diverse sets of tasks and projects. We not only develop efficient collaboration solutions for our clients, we also use such agile approaches ourselves and therefore test our own products every day. This allows us to manage this flexibility efficiently and stay connect to each other and our clients at any time.
The IT Solutions Team
We count on a powerful and dedicated team of full-time SharePoint Developers, UI/UX Designers, Solution Architects and Product Owners who not only know our products very well but are also highly familiar with the needs and technical requirements of our clients; and who are proficient in using agile development methods to conceptualize and implement solutions in no time.
The Founder
The team is led by Stefan Hochhuth, founder and main contact at Hochhuth Consulting GmbH who ensures that the high-quality standards of Hochhuth Consulting GmbH are met on every level. He is an economist, holding master’s degrees in both, Economics and Social/Political Sciences with a particular interest in topics in digital governance, political economy, and economic policy. In his more than 20 years of experience in international development cooperation, he has worked for various institutions among others, German development institutions, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and the World Bank. He has nurtured a keen passion for digitisation and innovation and uses highly agile management skills to create smart applied technical solutions and make any form of digitalization happen, often build on his own user-experience. Driven by the huge potential of digitalization for poverty reduction, he started to fill the gap between the widely available expertise in development economics/governance and the lack of digital solution knowledge by becoming an expert on applied digitalization himself and bringing together digitalization and governance experts.
What We Offer
We provide a wide range of Flexible & Useful Services.
ONLINE COLLABORATION PLATFORMS AND NETWORK FACILITATION
We offer easy-to-use tools and templates that allow our clients to share content effortlessly, access information and efficiently work together. We understand the importance of harvesting an organizations’ intellectual capital, of increasing corporate memory and of facilitating an internally and externally focused knowledge transfer. We do that not only by creating a platform to share information in, but also by using our technical backgrounds to shape the channels and develop the contents with our clients.
DATA MANAGEMENT
We can turn everything you handled in the past in Excel-lists into easy-to-use and powerful digital data solutions. For many years now we have turned overwhelming Excel-files into powerful web-designs focusing on easy-to-use forms and visualizations, while still managing the data-structure in the background, using the effective Excel-technology. We design smart solutions to manage any kind of data, from simple surveys to complex databases, combining all kinds of data-sources and collecting new data via simplified fill-in forms. Thereby not only reducing administration time, but also increasing the acceptance of users through attractive design.
PORTFOLIO ANALYSIS
We support our clients in improving data quality and provide the tools to collect, compare and analyse all kinds of data. Creating powerful sites and consolidating data from different processes is one of our core competencies. We have built a strong reputation to build efficient tools to collect data through survey forms or mobile apps from numerous assignments, introduced highly effective tools to verify, merge and consolidate data from different data sources and analyse and visualize the data on highly secured online or internal servers. We provide a variety of customized solutions that allow our clients to access and analyse their organizational data with just a click.
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
We consult on and develop digital solutions that make project management simpler and easier to grasp for our clients. Hochhuth Consulting has been applying various forms of project management tools, based on 20 years of experience, handling up to 100.000 project items and can offer full project cycle management – from digital project appraisal to execution, to evaluating impact. Because of our unique combination of expertise in international development cooperation and our technological capabilities, we are perfectly placed to liaise between both worlds and assuring a comprehensive mix of both worlds to our clients.
AGILE TASK AND ORGANIZATION MANAGEMENT
We offer tailored task and operations management solutions that allow you to efficiently deal with any tasks in your organisation, while always keeping an eye on your KPIs and impact. Our task management tool centralizes all incoming projects and tasks allowing to prioritize, keep track of deadlines and milestones, storing all background information and relevant documents, manage and allocate team members according to their skills and availability, while working together online in workspaces with simple, one-click access to any information needed. The tool is highly flexible and has been applied for various clients at their individual scale, in complex and diverse environments, as well as within our own operations and in any assignment Hochhuth Consulting is engaged with.
PROCESS OPTIMIZATION
Our team of digital governance experts helps you in identifying the key challenges of transforming your team’s daily routines into smart digital solutions. We guide organizations to achieve more from their work by making business processes more efficient, through supplying the right mix of digital tools. We take the role of a partner and analyse processes, conceptualize new solutions and then develop and implement them together with our clients, in a cooperative agile approach.
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
We see a huge potential in facilitating change in institutional structures through attractive digital solution incentives. We help organizations to realize their innovative potential and employ change through a structured process involving stakeholders from all levels, carefully steering uptake and always keeping an eye on the bigger picture. We ensure uptake among users, conformity with management principles and technological constraints and ultimately an impactful implementation. Other than traditional approaches, we allow digital innovations to identify drivers of change and help in making reforms happen.
ONLINE MONITORING AND EVALUATION
We develop smart monitoring and evaluation tools by connecting data and turning workflows into digital solutions. We put our technical expertise to use and develop powerful tools to assess and analyse data in real time. Our track record includes creating fully fledged monitoring platforms, integrating and visualising relevant data in online dashboards or periodical reports, while assuring that all sources are best aligned and consolidated.
CONSULTING AND ADVISORY ON DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Besides building solutions and processes, we offer technical advice in digital transformation processes, especially within the field of development cooperation. Based on more than 20 years’ experience in international development cooperation, our experts are well seasoned in topics ranging from economics and public policy, to migration and poverty alleviation, and proficient in making digital solutions work for development.
HOW WE WORK
Our Philosophy
Combining Governance & Digital Solutions: Digital Governance
We believe digitalization is not only about the right technology but the processes beneath it. Thus, we look at it from a solutions perspective, where our clients’ needs and processes are the focus. We adopt the technology according to their needs. The first step is always to thoroughly understand our client’s organization. Because of our extensive solutions portfolio and our very collaborative agile development methodology, we can develop solutions at an extremely fast pace and in close coordination with the client
Finding the best solutions and right technology
We master both Governance and Digital Solutions. Our team of experts have long-standing experience in international development procedures and institutions and know how to turn this knowledge into digital solutions. Using a profound understanding for state-of-the-art technology, we can contextualize the needs of our clients and choose the best suitable tools for the task at hand.
Collaborative conceptualization and smooth agile development
Once an entry point for digitalization has been identified, everything is possible. For the past 12 years we have constantly developed and improved our solutions and have integrated them into a modular system of tools and features. Based on our long-standing experience and this unique portfolio of solutions, we never need to reinvent the wheel but can build on top of it, with each new assignment pushing the frontier a little further.
Our strength is to conceptualize and draft solutions at an extremely fast pace. Using our modular system, we can usually setup a first working draft often within 48 hours. From there on we focus on shaping the solution collaboratively with the user. The smooth iterations between conceptualization and development mean that our clients will receive a tailored and workable solution in little time, while the collaborative approach ensures that it will not only be a great piece of technology, but processes that really matter.
Fast implementation, all around carefree
Due to our agile development and modular system approach, we can implement new ideas at an extremely fast pace. This allows our clients to avoid lengthy procedures if they have a new service idea or discover new ways to improve their operations. Instead, we can offer to start with a functioning online solution and conceptualize from there. As a result, new features and improvements do not have to wait but can be implemented instantly.
Moreover, Hochhuth Consulting offers a consultancy service which includes more than development and maintenance of the technology. We have made significant experiences in working for our client’s organizations. We use the same technology in-house, so we have first-hand experience and every day insider insight on the solutions we offer. We see the challenges ahead and can navigate change early on. We become a partner, taking care not only of the development but the full-service implementation of digital solutions.
Target groups
Hochhuth Consulting works with clients whose business model is predominantly purpose driven. Since its establishment, the company has developed services tailored to a wide range of customers. We focus mainly on public and international development actors, and have a track-record with a range of institutions from international development cooperation to civil society organizations. But we have also had successful collaborations with the private sector, political and cultural organisations, think tanks and other actors involved in the social sciences. Our digital solutions and their use are virtually unlimited, but to us it is important to engage only with organizations that aim at having a positive social impact.
TOPICS AND REGIONS
At Hochhuth Consulting we have worked in fields such as economics, public policy and governance, better business but also in migration and poverty alleviation. Regarding our technological and methodological capacities, we have assembled software developers, data analysts, UI/UX designers, business analysts, product owners, network facilitators and communication experts. Our team has the know-how to use a range of development approaches, Scrum, Kanban, design thinking and many more. Our team member’s underlying common-ground is our passion and unique skillset towards process optimization and digitalisation. Together we bring along the experience from consulting and implementing solutions from all over the world, whether it be at headquarters in Germany or elsewhere in Europe, or at project level on-site in Africa, Asia, or Latin America.
AGILE DEVELOPMENT APPROACH
Our collaborative and agile design approach conceptualizes the solutions based upon a comprehensive understanding of the demands towards the underlying processes. We use a carefully designed tool which allows us to analyse processes instantaneously, while further specifying the requirements to the solution with the client and simultaneously developing it in the background. Analysis, conceptualisation and development are integrated in a smooth loop until the product has been developed. Even after the successful implementation of the solutions, our toolkit enables our clients to stay in touch, communicate with the team and allocate tasks to the respective expert.
TECHNOLOGY
Using out-of-the box SharePoint, Hochhuth-Consulting has developed a vast range of customized service options from simple sites to sophisticated multi-database solutions. We have specialized in the development of solutions using SharePoint and MS Teams as platforms. We offer services at any scale from simple tasks within an existing tool to fully fledged, hosted server solutions. Our developers have experience in working with other technologies as well and are highly competent to work and integrate with other software, if desired. SharePoint allows for most users to intuitively make use of the technology, for its elements of design and functionality are similar to the Microsoft Office suite.