OUR APPROACH

All projects start with a period of discovery. The first phase of discovery typically involves a couple of meetings and affords us the opportunity to understand your business, the nature of your requirements and your vision for the potential outcome. Key to this stage is us listening to you, gathering information and really understanding the root of the business issues. We can then identify possible solutions that are business focussed rather than technology centric and ultimately meet the actual business need.

The second phase of discovery is the proposal. We take your requirements, our software experience and ideas and produce a proposal solution. At this stage we also provide indicative costs and timescales. This allows you to quickly get a firm view on the project deliverables, budget and timescales.

Once the proposal has been agreed a project plan is established. This provides the framework for the project and the roadmap for a successful project delivery. Project resources, deliverables and a schedule are compiled in order for work to commence. All aspects of the project will be shared with the customer and a communication plan will be agreed to help facilitate a collaborative experience.

User stories and detailed requirements will be captured to form the basis of the functional specification. The functional specification is the blueprint for your application identifying the required functionality in a simple to understand format. In order to help customers visualise the end solution we will also provide prototypes of the key areas of the application. This will help ensure that the development meets expectations and all requirements are met.

With the design agreed and plan in place we begin development. Depending on the project complexity and the agreed project plan the development may be broken out into a number of work packages or completed as a single development.

Using our toolset framework we rapidly develop to the agreed specification. We provide early alpha access to the development implementation allowing you to view progress on a regular basis. Customer feedback and Internal testing is incorporated into each fortnightly release. This provides the mechanisms to test and validate early and if required perform corrections early in the process rather than at the end.

User acceptance testing (UAT) is a key stage of the overall process. At this point we provision a trial environment that is similar to the production environment. Users are able to test the application in this environment mimicking the production application. Because of the early visibility of the alpha releases the majority of snags will already have been worked out of the system. The UAT trial will however provide an extended test period to a wider audience of users allowing full confidence that the application fulfils the functional specification.

Once the trial is complete and any additional changes have been incorporated, the application is ready to be launched. Depending on the launch plan, i-Associates will either provision the production environment or provide the necessary software for the customer to launch the application. If training has been agreed this will also be provided as required.