Assisting and supporting individuals and organizations with effective quality approaches to meeting their information technology objectives.

Our consulting and mentoring program includes a diverse array of personal and project services:

Process Improvement

Our process improvement services focus on building organizational capability for self-help through a mastery of core process management principles combined with a continuing improvement in the professional knowledge and practices of individuals throughout the organization. Our process emphasizes mentoring the individuals who are ultimately in a position to effect change toward improvement in their own organizations.

Requirements Definition

Project and organizational success often centers on improving organizational practices and capabilities for requirements definition and management. Our services include conducting requirements elicitation and analysis activities at the project level, including facilitating large or small requirements sessions, modeling requirements findings, and assisting in the transition of business and functional requirements into design activities and deliverables.

Process Maturity

Organizations striving to continuously improve eventually find that continuing levels of improvement are enhanced by adopting an external model of professional maturity to which the organization can aspire. Our services include helping organizations understand and apply these models by incorporating their requirements into existing quality and process improvement practices. We emphasize that organizations should not attack these models as stand-alone initiatives, but should use them to clarify the direction and goals of existing initiatives that are focused on continuous improvement of products and services. The three model domains we work with involve general business maturity (Baldridge National Quality Award Criteria for Excellence), information technology process maturity (SEI Capability Maturity Model Integration), and project management maturity (PMI Organizational Project Management Maturity Model).

Project Quality Assurance

No matter how much an organization invests in process improvement, the desired quality levels are only realized if projects effectively use the resulting processes. Our quality assurance services support project success by providing an interactive assessment and mentoring cycle that assists teams in taking advantage of the process capabilities that have been put around them by an organization's quality improvement and process maturity initiatives. We provide an enabling support system that helps assure project success.

Software Engineering

Sound engineering of software requires the rigorous application of principles and techniques, many derived directly from the quality and process management disciplines. Our services work to promote rigorous tool application at the project level. Systematic modeling and analysis techniques, using a combination of traditional data and process modeling approaches coupled with the synergy provided by the integration of quality techniques such as Quality Function Deployment, all us to assist in the effective engineering of software solutions based on sound engineering and management practices.

Strategy Development

Effective continuous improvement requires that an organization establish a sound basis and context for teams and individuals to focus effort toward improvements. Our services include assisting organizations and work groups as they struggle to identify or clarify their vision, mission, goals, and values. This increase clarity forms an attractor against which on-going improvement efforts can be targeted and measured.

Standards Compliance

Organization looking for comprehensive improvement in quality capability typically gain advantage from adopting and adapting external standards. The alternative requires extensive work that simply ends up reinventing the scope and content of existing standards, and such in-house efforts never achieve the same level of results. Our services assist organizations in identifying and adapting the most appropriate standards for the types of problems being addressed today. Typical efforts usually include some combination of ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 for general compliance, as well as many more domain specific content standards such as ISO 17799 for security, and a full range of IEEE software engineering standards.