This section will provide you with a brief outline of the approach we take in conducting our projects. Our approach pursues two goals: to make project development as effective as possible and make it at the same time as transparent and controllable as possible for our clients.
Below are the basic constituents of the project flow scheme we work on:
1. Project Initiation
a) Contact us
Commencing a project with Micado is fairly simple: just contact us and describe your needs and expectations. Micado’s Business Analysts (if required; Software Architects and IT Analysts) will respond to your request within one business day.
b) Information gathering
At this early stage of the project it is crucial to gather as much information as possible to clearly identify your needs. Ideally our clients provide us with a formal structured request for proposal to speed up the information gathering phase.
c) Analysis
It is critical for your project success to clearly identify your goals and objectives associated with the proposed project. All information gathered will be used to formally conduct a requirements and specification documentation. We consider the analysis phase as one of the most important phases in our project flow as the project success will mostly depend on how well the requirements gathering and specification documentation has been conducted.
d) Proposal
Our Business Consultants will provide you with a well defined requirements documentation for your review. Once all business requirements have been clarified and agreed upon our Software Architects prepare and propose the optimal technical solution.
Our proposals can vary from simple estimations of workload and project cost to comprehensive suggestions regarding the software architecture, technologies analysis, total cost of ownership (TOC) estimation, design enhancements and proposals etc.
Driven by our core value “Client Value Creation”, we work on the principle of charging our clients only for services that add value to their organisation. Hence, we provide our initial estimation of the project costs free of charge.
e) Confidentiality
To protect our clients’ private information or intellectual property, we offer to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) before any project-related information is delivered to us.
2. Solution development and implementation
The process of implementing the actual BI solution into your organisation depends on the modular approach you have chosen (Pure-Module, Unique-Development or Hybrid). However, for each implementation process Micado follows a fully documented and constantly improving methodology. Micado’s development processes are streamlined to best practices and industry standards such as Rational Unified Process, Oracle PJM, ISO 9001:2000 and CMM certificate standards. This process enables us to successfully develop and implement BI solutions within your budget and time frames without compromising our high quality standards.
Our typical BI solution development projects have several phases, with the key ones being:
Initiation
Project start and initial requirements gathering takes approx. 5-10% of the project time.
Elaboration
In the elaboration phase we typically conduct a formal requirements gathering and compose requirements and specification documentation, followed by a thorough analysis, planning and solution design phase. Typically these three phase take approx. 20-30% of the project time.
Execution
Dependent on the Module approach you have chosen, it is most likely that the biggest part of the project time is spent on customising our BI platform to your unique needs and conducting proper tests for quality assurance. This phase can take anything between 40-70% of the project time.
Implementation
The implementation phase determines the last of our seven project phases. This phase carries out the actual integration and stabilisation of Micado’s customised BI solution into our clients’ IT environments. Training sessions are provided; monitoring as well as continuous improvement settings are also made at the end of the deployment. This phase typically takes about 10-20% of the project time.