Iknow - Project Support Processes and Infrastructure

Iknow excels at consulting project delivery, including three core support processes: project planning and management, requirements management, and quality assurance/quality control. Iknow has also established a world-class project delivery infrastructure.

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Three Core Project Support Processes

1. Project Planning and Management Process

Iknow employs a formal project planning process that involves developing detailed project plans, tracking actuals against plan, and using sophisticated estimation techniques.

Planning: For each project, we develop formal project plans that detail tasks, milestones, resource assignments, and dependencies. An overall, high-level plan and a detailed plan for the project inception phase are developed at the beginning of the project. During each project phase, detailed project plans are developed and refined for subsequent phases.
Tracking: We formally track progress against the plan on a weekly basis to identify problem areas that require intervention.
Estimating: Iknow employs parameter-driven estimating tools. These tools are continuously refined based on project heuristics. After each project, we enhance the accuracy of our estimating tools by updating them to reflect what we learned from our “estimate versus actual” analysis performed during post-completion project reviews.

Iknow uses specific methodologies and tools to manage project scope, identify issues, and mitigate risk.

Scope Management: Iknow practices rigorous and formal scope management. Project scope is clearly defined during the project inception phase. Any requested changes to scope are documented, challenged, measured to determine impact, and subjected to a formal approval process.
Issue Management: For each project, we maintain an issues-tracking database that is used throughout the life of the project to formally document project-related issues, prioritize issues, track progress against issues, and record issue resolution.
Risk Management: The identification of project risks begins during the project inception phase. All known risks are identified, documented, assessed, and ranked according to a combination of likelihood and degree of impact. Each risk is analyzed to determine how that risk might either be avoided or controlled. Risk mitigation strategies are documented. Risk reviews are performed periodically throughout the life of each project to ensure that known risks are actively controlled and that all new risks are identified and managed.

2. Requirements Management Process

Iknow employs a rigorous approach to requirements management, since project success depends on a thorough understanding of business requirements. We take a clearly defined, systematic approach to eliciting, organizing, and documenting all business requirements as they are identified and refined throughout the project lifecycle.

Iknow employs multiple techniques to elicit requirements. Depending on the nature of the client and the project, Iknow will perform:

Structured interviews with key stakeholders
Facilitated requirements workshops
Storyboarding
Use case development
Role playing
Prototyping

Iknow’s success in eliciting requirements is our knowledge of which techniques are likely to be most successful in any given situation. We then bring in practitioners, skilled in the chosen techniques, to drive and facilitate client requirements sessions.

To bring value to clients, Iknow looks beyond readily apparent requirements. Iknow’s requirements management process ensures that the broad spectrum of requirements are understood and documented so that our solutions reflect the true needs of our clients. We also make sure to capture and categorize requirements that reflect future as well as current needs. Finally, we make sure that good ideas that surface during requirements analysis are not forgotten, even though they may not ‘make the cut’ for the final set of recommendations or early prototype development.

3. Quality Assurance/Quality Control Process

Quality management is an integral part of Iknow’s consulting project delivery process. We take the time, at project inception, to work with our clients to define what quality means to them. We elicit quality requirements along many dimensions, including performance, feature sets, usability, defect levels, and time-to-market, and make them explicit and measurable. We then develop a project quality plan designed to meet our clients' quality objectives. Throughout the life of each project, we measure our performance against the quality plan to ensure that we are taking all necessary steps to meet the stated objectives.

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Project Delivery Infrastructure

Iknow is committed to creating and maintaining a leading-edge infrastructure to support our knowledge management consulting assignments. At Iknow, we strive to enhance the productivity and efficiency of our own project teams by using the same knowledge management, collaboration, and communication processes, practices, and technologies that we recommend to our clients.

Iknow's knowledge management and collaboration infrastructure includes four categories of tools:

Team facilitation tools
Document management repositories
Communication and collaboration tools
Reference materials and educational resources.

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