Small Company - erratic product delivery (limited IT budget)

Customer Profile
 A small manufacturer could not rely on its IT resources (12 staff) to effectively deliver applications and support to its operational staff. Applications were being delivered late and rarely satisfied the business needs. Frequent IT inefficiencies resulted in constant rework (requirements) on the applications and non-existent testing practices ensured the application would be in a constant state of repair.

Challenge
After an initial QAIassist Snapshot exercise - it became evident the IT organization required some fine-tuning. The results of the QAIassist Snapshot indicated there was a need to have the user community more engaged with the IT staff throughout the development (and maintenance) life-cyle of mission critical applications without encumbering them with formality and technical paperwork.

To successfully deliver applications, the IT staff had to identify the means and methods they would utilize to ensure they remained in communication and synchronization (to ensure business requirements were built into the applications) with the user community stakeholders throughout the life of a project. Without this communication, they knew they would continue to develop applications that did not meet the operational needs and require constant re-work and re-training.

Solution
The IT department reviewed the QAIassist Integrate Methodology to determine the specific deliverables they could utilize to ensure they remain in sync and in communication with the user community as applications were defined, designed, constructed, tested and implemented. They selectively chose specific deliverables of the QAIassist  Integrated Methodology that served their purpose (and even customized some of them to meet their specific needs) and began sharing them with the business community.

Tangible Benefits
The business community was pleased to be able to incorporate all of their requirements as the applications were developed and the IT Department resources were freed of having to constantly do re-work and testing on the production applications. Both the business community and the IT Department staff were pleased to be delivering quality and timely applications without being encumbered with the need to produce "too much" documentation.

Intangible Benefits
The scaleability of the QAIassist Integrated Methodology enabled the business community and IT department staff the freedom and flexibility to incorporate and adjust deliverables to best suit the business need. The primary benefit was that the QAIassist Integrated Methodology could be customized to best deliver and maintain mission critical business applications.

ROI Analysis
It has been estimated that delivery and maintenance efficiency has increased 15% (though few metrics were available from the outset of this engagement) and rework has decreased by 25%.

The cost to implement the QAIassist Integrated Methodology included several initial training sessions ($9, 000) and a monthly support fee of $1200. Average annual cost less than  $ 25,000 (approx).