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As
an SEA client, you can expect us to do the following:
•
We objectively assess your present capabilities to satisfy
the software
development
essentials
in your business context (both where you are today and
where you want
to be tomorrow)
so you know where you stand.
• We identify
capabilities that are missing or challenged or otherwise
might impair
the ability of your
software development system to satisfy the essentials
in your
future business goals.
•
We recommend practices and processes and actions to
address the challenged
and missing
capabilities and help develop a cost-effective implementation
plan.
•
We help you implement the recommendations through hands-on
collaboration
with your project
and technical staff in selected service
areas, (see below),
including
finding or providing the required technical and project
management resources.
•
We help you monitor your organization’s capabilities
over time so you can adapt
and
refine them as your business evolves.
You
can also expect us to avoid unhelpful practices:
•
We don’t tell you what your business ought to be. We
limit our intervention
to assessing
your software core competencies and capabilities and
how well
they serve your product
missions.
• We don’t tell you how to do
the domain-specific technical parts of your product
development,
although we can help you find domain experts if required.
•
We don’t try to impose a particular software development
methodology, language,
operating
system, CPU vendor, development environment, or tool.
These choices
belong to your
development staff and management. We will, however,
advise you
on the consequences
of a particular choice in the context of project or
resource
management.
•
We don’t sell you products. Our goal is not to
sell you a particular configuration
management
or development or project management tool. Again,
we will advise
you on those decisions
if desired.
SEA’s
mission is to help its clients build a software development
system that
satisfies the eight essential goals.
We have created a proprietary model we call the
Product
Development Pyramid
that
decomposes the eight essential goals into specific
software
development capabilities. The PDP groups them into
more than 20 capability
areas distributed among the
four tiers of the Pyramid. These capabilitie areas
cover the
eight essential goals but are organized to
facilitate
our consulting relationships with clients.
They
are used to help establish the scope of an engagement.
The
enumeration and organization of the PDP capabilities
is continually being refined.
To give you an idea
of the value SEA
consultants can bring to your organization, we have
collected
selected capabilities and expressed them more conventionally
as services that
SEA
can perform during an engagement. They are grouped
into seven service areas
(click on an area to see
the selected services in that area):
•
Software
economics and decision-making
•
Product
definition
(product mission and requirements development)
•
Product
architecture
•
Project
performance
(initiation, planning, execution, and termination)
•
Software
construction
•
Software
quality management
(quality assurance and product quality control)
•
Resource
management
(people and process)
Keep
in mind that each service represents both the ability
of SEA
to help you verify,
acquire, or enhance the capability
associated with the service, and the ability of SEA
to
perform the service as part of your software development
system. Different types
of engagements emphasize
different aspects of the services.
To
see how SEA
structures and operates in an engagement, see the Methods
page.
Strategic
Outsourcing Services
SEA
offers a full spectrum of software engineering services.
This includes an innovative
type of targeted
engagement that we perform as part of our Resource
Growth Advisors
partnership
with RGA
Associates. This engagement is aimed at product
software development
organizations who seek economic
alternatives to doing all their development in-house.
We
work with the client to identify work that must remain
in-house in order to retain control
over core and
competitive aspects, work that can be effectively outsourced,
and work that
can be successfully completed using
distributed development teams. We help (1) establish
the
proper business case for partitioning the work, (2)
plan the distribution of the work
between internal
and external resources, (3) refactor the product architecture
if needed
to support the partitioning, (4) recommend
and drive process changes needed to support
the work
distribution, (5) source and quality external and additional
internal resources needed
to conduct projects, and
(6) supervise the external contracts as part of the
overall project
management.
A
key component of this engagement is the development
of a work distribution strategy
for the client. The
WDS is tailored to the client’s business objectives
and to the client’s
own system of software development.
It introduces a systematic way of choosing work
distribution
plans that relates decisions directly to business goals,
exposes the many hidden
costs present in distributed
development systems, provides a mechanism for exploring
feasible
alternatives, and leverages decisions across product
lines and multiple projects.
When developed and applied
diligently, the WDS brings real value to the client
and to its
projects by guiding it to make the right
economic decisions.
For
more information about the SEA’s
work distribution strategy, click
here.
For
more information about the Resource
Growth Advisors
partnership between
SEA
and RGA,
click
here.
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