The first stage is always the most important. Unlike most, we involve end-users at this stage as we believe one of the biggest pain points for any business is adoption of new systems and processes. If we talk directly to those users in conjunction with the wider business, we get to the real root cause of many issues. This in turn will give you a solid foundation to implementing something new with a potential consequence of reducing business costs due to staff turnover and solution apathy.

Some of the techniques we use include:

• Interviews
• White boarding
• Surveys
• As-Is Process Analysis

We can also help with your proposed Solution review in this phase (see Solution Evaluation Service)

Following on from the Discovery phase, we start writing all of the findings down so that you have something tangible to work from (and it also makes it easier for us to explain to stakeholders!). We consolidate all of the information and produce documentation which you can take and use internally or with another provider if you so wish.

Example documentation includes:

• To-Be Requirements
• Solution Architecture diagrams
  Methodology proposals
• Templated implementation plan with recommendations
• Target Operating Model
• Testing and Environment strategies

Planning is the most visible and yet one of the most difficult aspects to get right, ensuring that a project can be completed on-time and within budget. Balancing delivery methodologies, requirements, resources and vision is a skill and one that we excel in.

We focus on lean delivery, removing unnecessary process both with the solutions we deliver and the way we work. The balance of documentation is important at this stage. For short-term projects, the project plan can be holistic with a fair level of accuracy but for longer programmes of work, we actively encourage regular progress reviews with both the project team and the business. Transparency is key to collaboration and ultimate success.

Some of our deliverables include:

• End-to-end project plan
• Organisational, resource, and cost planning
• Release Planning
• RACI matrix

Once the hard work of producing the business case, requirements, traceability and the overall project plan, we get to the practicalities of delivery. We offer a full end-to-end management and delivery service or you can pick and choose elements from within our offering. Delivery should be efficient, effective, high in quality and transparent in nature and we will work closely with your internal teams or external suppliers to ensure that you get the best set of outcomes possible for your business and users. We support the right delivery methodology for the right customer, be that Waterfall, Agile Scrum, Kanban or DevOps. It depends on your organisational readiness as to which option we choose together, but rest assured we will choose the right one.

Options:

• Project Management – Waterfall, Agile Scrum, DevOps
• Business Analysis – includes requirement refinement, end-to-end requirement ownership, functional and technical specification creation, UML modelling
• Data Analysis – includes modelling, ETL, data mapping, visualisation creation and insight generation
• Quality Assurance – includes management of the overall test process, automated and manual quality assurance execution
• Release Management – we can support you in the management of your release process. This can either be wrapped into another role or depending on the complexity of a project, you may with to have a dedicated manager.

Regular feedback loops are important to the overall success of your project. We work closely to identify appropriate Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that can be tracked and easily reported on, with the option of using further data visualisation dashboards to support the messaging towards project and business stakeholders.

We also support the project by supporting during the project go-live hyper care period, establishing robust support processes and managing any incidents that result from the implementation.

Continuous improvement and feedback is pivotal to businesses being able to leverage their new and existing systems, learn what works, what doesn’t, what can be streamlined or how other new programmes of work can be connected for an even more robust and valuable solution. This phase is about communication and retrospective analysis and will help you improve your business even further than you previously imagined.

Example outputs:

• Process improvement recommendations with cost benefit analysis
• New requirements refined and added to product backlog
• Survey feedback from users
• UX/UI statistics

Back into delivery mode – we can continue to support you as you evolve the business further, based on the feedback loops in the earlier phases. This can come in the form of continued business analysis, a project extension or helping create a Business-As-Usual model for you to implement in order to deliver yourselves.