Linebeyond Methodology
LineBeyond’s offshore development process methodology has been refined from years of outsourcing experience. Our FlexSource TM methodology offers a proven combination of on and offshore resources to significantly reduce the complexity and risk of outsourcing. This five-step process makes it easy for our customers to transition work offshore and realize significant advantages in a timely and cost effective manner.
Step 1. Advocacy
Using our on and offshore partner network, LineBeyond represents the interests and objectives of our clients to ensure the highest possible level of collaborative support. Activities in this area include:
- Understand clients' position in their marketplace as well their vision, and long and short-term business objectives.
- Understand clients-specific challenges from commercial and cultural perspective and how these challenges affect their IT strategy.
- Develop a concept for business improvement through IT adoption that reflects client's vision and objectives.
- Distill the business improvement concept into a roadmap that connects the client's IT vision to the current practical reality.
- Vendor due diligence and product selection.
Step 2. Discovery and Definition
LineBeyond fully describes the roadmap towards business improvement through IT adoption.
Position for success:
- Identify winnable situations where obvious benefit can be derived with minimal effort.
- Look for areas that can generate a quick return from an off-shore strategy.
- Define project scope.
- Identify and measure project benefits.
- Develop requirements specifications that reflect business imperatives, the formal concept for business improvement.
- Develop a plan; include schedules, budget, resources, and prototyping efforts.
- Involve the business and prepare to overcome resistance to change.
- Cultivate business sponsors to help with change management.
Step 3. Solution Preparation
We mobilize and organize the assigned assets to achieve the defined project objectives.
- Identify and address organizational change management issues that may impede or otherwise put a project at risk.
- Develop an architecture that accommodates legacy in a non- disruptive way, while enabling the introduction of an integration infrastructure and service abstraction layer.
- Identify and segment key development efforts such as:
- Integration infrastructure development and product validation
- Core business applications
- Security structure
- Management and monitoring
- Fault tolerance and redundancy
- Localization and encoding
- Database and Mainframe administration
- Provide in-house and out-sourced resources for project management, development, integration, testing and deployment.
- Establish a service level agreement for production support.
Step 4. Execution
We deploy the allotted resources to the project, implement the feature set (outlined in well-documented functional and technical specifications), and deliver in strict adherence to the organization's expectations.
- Manage schedules and compare against planned targets.
- Develop features in parallel and in adherence to defined specifications.
- Develop test plans, harnesses and code promotion strategy.
- Develop release, support and operations processes.
- Execute test plans.
- Promote solution to user acceptance test and production.
Step 5. Support
Provide on-going solution support services. Respond and re-align as necessary in response to post-production service requirements and budgetary issues.
- Define and establish service level activities that align vendors and projects participants with established SLA’s.
- Implement and staff call centers.
- Deploy management and monitoring facilities.
- Implement escalation procedures.
Throughout our engagement, the emphasis is on knowledge transfer to enable client self-sufficiency and knowledge utilization to leverage existing resources effectively across the enterprise.
