Global Engineering Company - World’s First Atern Implementation
The client is a well-known Global Engineering Company with significant investment, plants and offices throughout the UK, America, Europe and the Far East. The client has a global business improvement programme in place to introduce and exploit a Product Lifecycle Management based approach to their business, supported by software from a leading PLM provider. The project required significant, deeply technical work to configure the software to meet the client’s needs. Earlier projects have suffered from time and cost over-runs, often as a result of poor performance of the IT elements. The client needed to drive predictability of delivery into the system configuration aspects of the project to enable the delivery of business change and flexibility that is essential in a challenging global market.
RADTAC IT Transformation Services
The client selected RADTAC for our skills in IT Transformation, to work with them to improve their ability to deliver IT capability to support the business, and chose DSDM Atern as the cornerstone for this innovative programme. Atern is the latest version of the well-established Dynamic Systems Development Method, and was selected because of its proven record of enabling “on time” delivery, its ability to address and exploit the inevitability of changing requirements, and its ability to ensure that the best possible business solution is delivered within pre-set constraints of time and budget.
The client embraced the opportunity to apply DSDM Atern to introduce a number of fundamental Agile concepts that at first seemed to some to conflict with the existing methods. However, working with experienced RADTAC practitioners, the client team recognised that adopting and exploiting new concepts delivered specific benefits in quality, communication and delivery time, which sometimes required a cultural ‘mind-shift’ by members of the project team who had previously been familiar with the established processes.
Atern enables businesses to selectively and pragmatically enhance traditional processes. Frequent, consistent, open collaboration between the “Delivery” and “User” members of the project team and focussing on “just enough” detail in every iteration of the lifecycle, delivers visible progress and engenders mutual trust and buy-in. All of which are essential to provide a firm and flexible foundation, and to evolve the solution over time. This consistent communication focuses the project team on business benefits and applies specific methods to guide the prioritisation process and maximise business value. The focus on consistent short development cycles – Timeboxes - ensures high quality and on-time delivery.
Summary
RADTAC has delivered Training and Coaching to the clients’ in their offices in the UK, Europe and the Americas. The small team of high-quality RADTAC consultants have been consistently well-received by the client business community and recognised for the quality of their delivery. The project has received positive recognition from all involved, and the significant successes have been noted by the CIO. This is an ongoing project with further releases and developments planned in 2008 and beyond.
RADTAC Transformation Services; Consulting, Project Management, Process Improvement, Change Management, Training and Coaching ~ World’s First Implementation of DSDM Atern
Solution: Agile DSDM
