We offer our clients a complete solution. From the initial needs assessment to development, deployment and ongoing operations, we have the experience and expertise to anticipate the challenges, come up with the answers, and deliver a solution that meets your expectations, on time and on budget - guaranteed.

Needs Assessment
This is perhaps the most critical aspect of any development project. Accurately defining the requirements of your application is the critical first step in creating the program specification which will guide the efforts of the development team and define the end product.

In the needs assessment, we help you establish realistic expectations for the outcome of the development effort. Often, you will have to prioritize your requirements and choose those you consider most critical, or those having the greatest impact, in order to size the development effort to fit your budget and time constraints. We help you make the right choices.

When various stakeholders are involved - end users, business owners, external customers, or IT staff, buy-in also becomes a critical factor. Properly conducted, the needs assessment can help identify potential challenges to buy-in and help you determine your best strategy for a successful implementation.

This is where our experience in business process engineering and organization can really help. We know enough to ask the right questions and, because of our experience, we can anticipate the likely pitfalls. We will help you devise a strategy that quickly gains the consensus and buy-in of your stakeholders while setting expectations for the outcome that you can easily deliver.

Program Specification
From the needs assessment, we create the functional requirements or program specification for your application. This is a detailed document that thoroughly covers every functional design aspect of the application, including graphics and presentation. It is the blueprint that the developers will use to build the application.

Just as the needs assessment documents the expectations of the end users and the business, the program specification establishes the standard to which the development team's results will be measured. You can expect that the application we will deliver will meet all of the criteria of your program specification.

Development
Our application development process is modeled on the precepts of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and managed after the best practices of the Project Management Institute (PMI).

For many, including us, the Rational Unified Process is mostly intuitive, based on good common sense and plenty of practical experience. RUP advocates an iterative approach to application development in successive stages, where each stage benefits from and incorporates the insight and feedback of the previous stage. In this way, risk is minimized because the development is tested on an ongoing basis as an executable software program and, equally, in terms of its business use and function. This should mean fewer surprises and a greater chance for success.

Equally important to a development effort's success is the overall project management. We follow PMI best practices to establish a discipline and structure to our project management. We set an expectation for our staff and our customers concerning the conduct of work, the required documentation to support the development effort, the process for change management, test procedures, milestones and deliverables and, the measurement and reporting of progress.

Our project managers bring this project management methodology to life. They have the experience necessary to judiciously apply our methodology to best fit your circumstances while preserving the essentials of project management that are critical to a successful outcome. What does this mean? A natural fit between us: a truly collaborative team, made up of your staff and our consultants, with the enthusiasm and confidence to get the job done - done right and on time.

Implementation
Throughout the development phase, we anticipate and plan for the implementation. A new application will inevitably mean change. How much and to what extent will naturally depend on the type of application and the environment in which it will operate.

If the application we develop is intended primarily as a technological improvement, for example, a web-based application replacing an existing client-server application to improve performance and accessibility, change may be limited to certain hardware or software and not much else.

On the other hand, a new application intended to automate an existing manual process, or an altogether new process, will likely involve process changes, will require sufficient training and documentation to orient the users, and may also require integration with legacy systems and data.

In any case, the introduction of a new application will proceed most efficiently and have the greatest chance for success if the implementation plan is given careful thought well in advance of the rollout, and the requirements for implementation documented and carried out as a project within the project.

We can help you create a "punch list" of action items that need to be accomplished, and a timeline for getting them done, so that your new application gets off to a running start. We will also help you present the new application to your users and stakeholders by planning training and orientation sessions and other forms of notification.

We offer the following services…   In these environments and languages Needs Assessment Microsoft NT/2000/XP Program Specification Linux/Unix Application Development HTML, XML, PHP, ASP, JSP, .Net Implementation C/C++, Java, VB, Cobol/CICS Hosting and Support Oracle, MS SQL, MySQL, DB2