ASCALab Approach
Trust is the backbone of any good relationship.
When being approached by a client, we always start our partnership by performing assessment in approximately two weeks duration.
By performing an assessment, we allow the client to limit the risk of entering into new partnership.
It also allows us to show the client on their very case our capabilities and identify the most suitable solution for the client’s needs.
How do we do the Assessment?
1. KICK OFF THE ASSESSMENT PROCESS
We make a presentation for the management and key project stakeholders where we explain our approach and plan for the next two weeks.
We start by interviewing management and key people and identifying pain points (issues, needs). We usually face one of the following scenarios:
» Client is missing certain team members or the whole team:
- Developers (we identify which technologies are necessary and propose to provide adequate team)
- QA (we identify the status of the current testing process and possibilities for testing automatization)
- PM (we identify whether project manager or scrum master is needed
» Missing key processes
- Client has difficulties with deployment process – maybe test or pre-prod environments are missing?
- Are releases organized in controlled manner? Is it clear when the development branch may go to release candidate and when the release candidate is ready for production?
- Is testing process sufficiently established? Can we automatize certain steps? Are there many broken functionalities when issuing new releases?
- Management issues: Delivery team is doing ad hoc staff? Client’s clients are not happy due to missed deliveries? Team members are frustrating due to being assigned to several tasks at the same time?
- Is it necessary to involve Business Analysts? Are developers talking directly to end users? Is there a lot of misunderstandings and repeatedly updated functionalities?
» Challenging technical tasks the internal team doesn’t have capacities to deal with
2. RESULT OF THE ASSESSMENT
Upon completing our two weeks assessment, we can expect one of the following areas to be proposed:
- List of key improvements to be done by area
- Client is missing certain team members or the whole team.
- Missing key processes.
- Challenging technical tasks the internal team doesn’t have capacities to deal with – we propose the appropriate technical solution by giving client several options where each option has its advantages and disadvantages.
- Project plan for execution
- Proposal for future cooperation
We never limit ourselves to pure outsourcing.
We dig into clients’ needs to fully understand them and then maintain the expertise of our team to ensure the appropriate level of our service.