Once we have had an onsite kick off meeting to validate and agree upon a detailed project plan and meeting schedule we enter phase one of the solution work plan which involves empathizing with our clients and observing their business in order to distinguish what their company does and gain cross-functional insight and perspectives into the problem to reveal the issues faced by your business. This allows us to gain a deep understanding of the solutions that our customers need, rapidly generate ideas, and visualize and adapt the results.
Our approach is to work with the working group to understand the business’ processes and review all system documentation. This process includes client participation in the completion of our Deployment Questionnaire in order to do a high level configuration of the solution. Our team will then perform a fit-gap analysis to address the gaps, determine how closely our solution meets the specific business and technical requirements, and begin developing a detailed plan of approach. At this time, we can help align our solutions existing functionality with the existing business procedures in an attempt to streamline and/or find additional efficiencies.
Different problems require different solutions, that’s why for every problem we consider many solutions. Our dynamic and fully featured solutions allow us to demonstrate our ideas and foster collaboration between team members and clients to create a richer solution to their problem and help them better visualize our solution. With every deployment, at a minimum, we anticipate requiring the following resources from the Client’s side: a) A single point of contact that will provide project management on the Client’s side; b) A working group of subject matter experts (SME) to validate business requirements; c) A steering committee, and; d) Adequate testers from the various departments.
At this stage we experiment with the options allowing them to grow to see which plan will achieve the best results. Once the initial configuration is complete we work with the Client to finalize the business and reporting requirements by using our interactive design and prototyping approach (this is where we determine branding, i.e. ‘look and feel’). Next we work with the Client to finalize permissions and security requirements of the solution. Prior to moving forward with any more configuration, we obtain approval on the finalized business and reporting requirements.
During phase three prototypes are created and testing becomes more critical and intense. Our use of a prototype throughout the business requirements validation process allows the working group to see a visual representation of the requirements being gathered and documented. Our experience has shown that this approach allows end-users to better understand the technical concepts being discussed and motivates users to think more broadly about the solution and how it will assist in their daily work.
Using a web-based platform, unique to Run Straight, we can make our prototype available to users so they can review the business requirements at any time. This tool has proven to be very useful as evidenced by the fact that we were able to receive input on 399 requirements for our LAO project from 80+ stakeholders located across the province. Final requirements approval was obtained from over 96% of the stakeholders.
During phase four we rigorously test our product to guarantee success. We pride ourselves on detailed testing from both a functionality and usability point of view. It is our approach to use the use cases as a basis for our test cases. Our Business Analysts and our QA team work closely with our developers to conduct testing iteratively using the test cases developed. This also means that they have a strong understanding of how the solution should work.
We use an in-house Project Management Tool (PMT) to track the progress of issues and bugs, and perform regression testing in the test environment (development environment) as well as the live site(User acceptance testing environment UAT) to ensure that the live database does not cause issues with the new functionality. Our application functionality testing looks at the functionality and errors of the application as well as performance and failover. Our security testing will test the permissions and access levels of user roles to ensure that there are no breaches or errors in access levels. Finally, where applicable, our data migration testing will ensure that the migration process was done successfully and that all data was correctly migrated into the new database.
During the final stage we implement and deploy the live solution.
A unique feature of our solutions is our customizable page level help. A great support during and after training since the business can maintain the content as they see fit.
