The Stonebridge approach to delivering technology solutions involves identifying appropriate solution development methodologies as well as focusing on several key areas that can significantly influence a project’s chance of success.
Phase Zero Assessment
For any technology solution endeavor, the estimates of effort, duration, and cost are completely dependent on the accuracy and completeness of requirements. By investing additional time (e.g., typically 3-5 weeks) with the business stakeholders early in the project, our Phase Zero Assessment can assure you of considerably greater accuracy of requirements, which will translate into more accurate designs and a high-level project plan that reflects greater understanding of the effort and duration required to complete the solution.
Requirements Gathering/Documentation
Capturing requirements accurately and completely is a fundamental prerequisite for project success. Stonebridge emphasizes the importance of capturing both the functional and non-functional requirements for a given business problem, and then decomposing those requirements to a sufficient level to permit accurate estimation and measurable testing. These same requirements serve as the basis for creating the solution test plan.
Activity/Time/Cost Estimation
Stonebridge has invested heavily in training our consultants on how to develop accurate estimates based on the identified requirements, the corresponding tasks and deliverables, and associated risk mitigation. This begins with creating a detailed requirements mapping, cross-referencing it against the solution methodology lifecycle phases, and recording this information in a transparent format that encourages collaboration and review with the client. This visibility into the mechanics of how the estimates are created helps both the client and Stonebridge establish a level of trust and understanding upon which the subsequent project phases can be built.
Project Management
Given the tremendous amount of empirical evidence and statistical figures surrounding challenged and failed IT projects over the past 20 years, it is more important than ever that sound project management best practices be diligently applied to achieve project success. Stonebridge is strongly committed to providing professional oversight and management of our software technology projects with clients to ensure that the fundamentals of project success are performed. This includes multilateral communications, scope management, risk mitigation, driving schedule and financial performance, and managing stakeholder and sponsor expectations. Stonebridge's weekly project status reports are designed to give maximum transparency into project health and progress, including explicit tracking of project financials vs. approved budget, deviations or delays in project schedule, changes in project scope or direction, or issues that could impact project success.
Phased Delivery
A fundamental problem-solving skill that has been taught since elementary school is to break the problem down into smaller, more manageable pieces and solve them individually. Yet, despite this conventional wisdom, one still sees news and industry reports of massive technology projects spanning many years that end in spectacular failures with prodigious price tags.
While it is understandable to request and desire a price estimate for large projects spanning nine months or 12 months or more, the historical evidence indicates that the level of accuracy is extremely poor. The interactions of dozens of variables (e.g., changing business requirements, revised deliverable priorities, resource availability, company political developments, etc.) essentially render such long-term estimations useless. This results in missed milestones and deliverables, an endless stream of change requests, and continuous resetting of stakeholder expectations (i.e., delays and functionality) with a price tag that continues to spiral upward and sponsor patience that continues to dwindle.
By learning from the success and failures of others as well as our own experiences, Stonebridge strongly believes that successful engagements should be divided into smaller, more manageable phases with useful deliverables provided to users at the end of each. The MSF and Agile/Scrum methodologies serve this approach very effectively, and do a much better job of keeping the users involved, managing stakeholder expectations and demonstrating usable return on investment.
Solution Testing
Testing solution functionality begins not after the design and coding are complete, but far earlier in the project lifecycle, i.e., during requirements gathering. As functional and nonfunctional requirements are captured from the business, they must be decomposed sufficiently to create supporting test cases that permit objective, quantifiable testing in order to confirm that the design and construction have satisfied each requirement. Once a given deliverable has been completed in development, the test plan can then be executed using the test cases that were defined and agreed upon at the same time the requirements were captured. This approach is very beneficial in setting user expectations regarding planned deliverable functionality and avoids undesirable misinterpretations that can result if the test plans were developed weeks or months after the requirements were captured (e.g., after requirements or user perceptions may have changed).
Solution Deployment
Once the current phase deliverables have been designed, constructed, and stabilized, Stonebridge works closely with the client's Quality Assurance and/or User Acceptance Testing units to comply with client policies and procedures for moving the solution into production. While these migration procedures vary from company to company, they most often involve creating documentation that describes the activities and configuration settings that are necessary to prepare the database, business logic, and presentation environments.
Knowledge Transfer
Ideally, during the project the client will assign one or more IT resources that will work closely with Stonebridge during the project to understand the requirements, design, and deliverables that are constructed and deployed. As each phase of the project nears completion, these client IT resources will have gained sufficient knowledge to assist in the configuration and deployment of the solution as well as participate in the mentoring and training of the business end users. We strongly advise our clients that this involvement occur as early as possible in the project definition, rather than waiting until the project enters the testing or deployment phases.