Anais Software Services engagement organisation leverages on our long-history and experience with project outsourcing with corporates in India, Russia, China to offer our customers "no-pain, no-brainer solutions"
ANAIS invites its customers to team up together in various possible configurations in order to make the most of the relationship.
Well-adopted configurations are:
- The "Mixed ANAIS-Customer" team: A mixed team is mostly suitable when the production of some key project artifacts, such as the project VISION for instance, requires close cooperation between partners and tight intellectual collusion. It is particularly compelling to projects, whose scope and solutions are not clearly outlined at inception time. It is a typical engagement configuration for the "inception", "elaboration" as well as "transition" life cycle phases.
- The "Accountable ANAIS team". The "Accountable team" configuration is to be considered for projects or projects phases whose scope and solution are believed to be well-understood and where interaction between an ANAIS team and the Customer staff can be modeled through formal deliverables. It is a typical engagement configuration for the "construction" life cycle phase.
- The dedicated "Development Centre Team", a.k.a. "Production-life cycle" team. The dedicated development centre team is a permanent team of specialized resources at ANAIS, who are empowered the responsibility of managing the "Production" life-cycle phase of a product or a project in partnership with the customer. Its applies elegantly to the "Operations & Support"-related concerns of the customers and typically serves ISV's and large Media customers with an installed base of products & solutions ANAIS delivered
What is an "ANAIS-Customer Mixed" team?
A mixed team is mostly suitable when the production of some key project artifacts requires close cooperation between partners and tight intellectual collusion. It is particularly compelling to projects, whose scope and solutions are not clearly outlined at inception time.
ANAIS believes that the "Mixed team" configuration is most suitable to the production of project artifacts and deliverables in the following disciplines:
- Project Management
- Business Modeling & Requirements (including User Interface storyboarding)
- To a lesser extend Analysis & design
ANAIS does not recommend non-collocated mixed teams to be involved in development (implementation)
- as measuring individual performance in mixed teams requires setting-up appropriate and costly metrics monitoring tools
- because teams residing at different places do not interact as intensively as collocated teams
Hence, ANAIS does not recommend its Customers to produce "detailed design" artifacts without the involvement of the Anais project team and resources responsible for implementing.
Indeed, ANAIS believes that detailed design artifacts produced by workers - at least partially involved in the implementation discipline - are superior in terms of key KPI's such as #design defects/unit. Likewise, ANAIS believes key developers must be empowered through involvement in detailed design.
Therefore ANAIS recommends partnering in mixed team with Customer mostly at the "high-level" design level and assign the responsibility of producing "detailed design" artifacts to the team also responsible for the "Analysis & design" and "Implementation" disciplines.
What is an Accountable ANAIS team?
An Accountable ANAIS team is a team made entirely of ANAIS resources responsible for delivering a particular set of agreed-upon deliverables in a particular phase of the project lifecycle.
No Customer resources contribute directly to the production of the agreed-upon deliverables.
However, Customer resources are involved in the production of some input deliverables and, so doing, interact with the ANAIS team.
The "Accountable team" configuration has the advantage of offering clear performance assessments and success metrics.
The "Accountable team" configuration is however restricted to projects whose scope and solution are believed to be well-understood and where interaction between an ANAIS team and the Customer staff can be modeled through formal deliverables.
Formal interaction deliverables are for instance:
- clearly identified in the project Work Breakdown Structure (or project life-cycle phase WBS)
- templated in a knowledge-base accessible to all project stakeholders
- produced entirely by a Customer team or a mixed "ANAIS-Customer" team
- approved by the ANAIS team before acceptance as "artifact delivered by Customer"
Example: ANAIS is involved in the project code-named "Triton", of which the scope is
- re-factoring of a legacy application at Customer in order to lower maintenance costs
- and the addition of extra features to the legacy application in order to seize new business opportunities
The ANAIS team can be held fully accountable for the project acceptance (i.e. delivery of a well-defined set of deliverables within an agreed-upon level of quality) and project success in a particular phase of the project life-cycle; upon receiving and approving the following deliverables from Customer
- Requirements specifications (using an agreed-upon format such as RUP use-case driven requirements specifications template)
- Software architecture document of the legacy application (using an agreed upon format such as RUP 4+1 views SW architecture template)
- Legacy application source code / database sample
- Legacy application deployment specifications & configuration (using an agreed upon format)
Typical artifacts to be delivered by ANAIS are:
- Software Architecture document
- Commented source code & deployed application
- Test plans
- Acceptance test plan
In order to streamline the interactions between the customer and ANAIS, ANAIS owns a knowledge-base of about 60 typical software development project artifacts, which can be made accessible to the Customers.
The "Accountable team" configuration is suitable to the production of project artifacts and deliverables in the following disciplines:
- Analysis & Design (Software architecture)
- Implementation
- Tests
- Deployment
- Environment
It must be noted that the production and delivery of formal artifacts as interface between ANAIS and the Customer teams is in no way against an "agile" perspective on software development. To the contrary, such interfacing model allows for unambiguous definition of roles and responsibilities, high compliance with the selected development process and explicit accountability.
Performance measurement: Typical KPI's for an ANAIS "Accountable team" are:
- Project management KPI's: earned value (AWP/BWP/AcostWP)
- Analysis & design, implementation KPI's: #design defects - #implementation defects / unit (system function points/TSLOC)
- Test KPI's: #total defects identified in acceptance tests v. system function points
What is an ANAIS dedicated development team?
A dedicated development centre team is a permanent team of specialized resources at ANAIS, who are empowered the responsibility of managing the "Production" life-cycle phase of a product or a project in partnership with the customer. Its applies elegantly to the "Operations & Support" - related concerns of the customers and typically serves ISV's and large Media customers with an installed base of products & solutions ANAIS delivered.
So, concretely how does it work?
In order for its customers to leverage on the competitive and technology advantages, which the ANAIS Software Development centre located in Bucharest offers, ANAIS engagement model typically entails:
-
Services performed at the client side by a mixed team ANAIS-Customer. Such services
- Project management
- Business modeling & Requirements (including storyboarding)
- Possibly high-level Architecture & design
- Test (acceptance tests)
- Deployment (as well as educational training courses)
- Configuration & change management (change request management)
-
Services performed at ANAIS Software Development centre by an Accountable ANAIS team. Such services usually cover the following disciplines
- Architecture & design
- Implementation
- Tests
- Environment
- Configuration & change management
- Deployment
Example: A permanent or transient team resides at Customer facilities, assigned the following roles:
- Project manager (process)
- Business analyst - System analyst
- Team leader, single point-of-contact/liaison officer with ANAIS Software development
Such roles are played by 2 or more FT and/or PT resources.
A permanent team resides at ANAIS Software development centre in Bucharest, Romania in support of Customer projects, with the following roles:
- Team leader
- System architect(s), Component Architect(s), Database architect(s))
- Developer(s)
- Test engineer(s)
- Deployment manager
- System administrator
Such roles are for instance played by 3 or more FT resources
ANAIS encourages and recommends regular face-to-face meetings between key Customer staff members, on-site ANAIS staff members and key staff members from ANAIS SDC Bucharest. Such meetings are organized as:
- 1 - week + Internships (typically during the "inception", "elaboration" phases of projects)
- 1 - day + face-to-face sessions in order to produce key project artifacts (Vision, SW architecture, ...)
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