IMPACT™ Sogeti’s Process and Project Assessment Methodology
IMPACT™ is Sogeti’s well-defined and structured consulting methodology. It is designed to support organisational, process and project assessments across the full Software Procurement and Development Lifecycle (SPDLC). It has been used to conduct assessments across a wide range of organisations and industry sectors including the public sector, and telecommunications, banking, insurance, energy and life sciences companies.
Figure 1: IMPACT™
IMPACT™ supports organisational assessments and process improvement initiatives. It helps to draw out findings from our review of project documentation (process and project samples) and discussions with your organisation’s project personnel.
Where feasible, we recommend that a breadth of stakeholders be included in the assessment to include, for example, the IT manager, project office/project managers, business users, development manager, developers, test/QA managers, test leaders and testers.
Scope
Sogeti’s collaborative consulting methodology considers the following six key themes (see figure 2 below) during the review and evaluation:
- Environment – e.g. the business climate you operate within
- Processes – the software procurement and development lifecycle processes (especially for end-to-end testing)
- Technology – the technology that underpins your business applications and test environments
- Organisation – e.g. the capacity and structure of your organisation
- Capability – e.g. the skills and knowledge of your personnel
- Metrics – key measures your organisation uses to measure quality and critical success factors for business applications acceptance.
Figure 2: IMPACT™ Six Themes
Our well-defined and structured methodology is designed to minimise the intrusion and impact on day-to-day activities of your personnel and uncover findings in a rapid and efficient manner. Our consultants meet with stakeholders individually or in small teams (usually for 60 -90 minutes each). Moreover, it is supported by a number of templates and tools that allow Sogeti’s practitioners to prepare for the assessments quickly and capture findings and outcomes efficiently.
Deliverables
The following key deliverables are generated from the assessment:
- Findings & Recommendations presentation (MS PowerPoint) – which summarises strengths and weaknesses of your current approach provides recommendations for improvements and the associated benefits of making such improvements
- Process Improvement & Observations Log (MS Excel) – a draft action log that you can use as the basis of a process improvement plan (based on the findings & recommendations)
Benefits
As a result of a process assessment, we would expect that some or all of the following benefits would be realised by your organisation:
- Baseline the current status of your SPDLC processes and the maturity of the current organisation with respect to usage of these processes
- Identify opportunities to reduce cost or gain efficiencies by improving key SPDLC processes
- Identify how to improve metrics to provide better estimation of effort and monitoring of deliverables throughout the SPDLC lifecycle
- Identify the changes needed to allow continuous improvement to be established, to drive process improvement and help make it “a way of life” for your organisation
- Introduce the concept of standardised processes and documentation and centralised templates for all projects within your organisation