Delivering IT excellence is a journey - not a destination. That's our philosophy, and it shows in every step of a Shine project outlined below.

Start at the beginning - every project needs a blueprint

Every Shine project starts in the same way. You have a vision, and you've asked us to look at building it. The very first step is for you to define that vision so that we understand exactly what it is you want. In our experience, the vast majority of problems afflicting projects happens right here - in the first tentative project steps. Many development projects make a whole host of assumptions in order to "get on with the job" and start coding. We won't. We know that's false progress. The difference between a good and bad requirements document is very often the difference between project success and failure.

We will work with your business until we have a very clear idea of what you want. We then document that knowledge in a clear, concise and readable format and communicate our understanding back to you. Once you've agreed with this understanding, you'll sign it off and the project's first major deliverable has been finished. The Requirements deliverable is the blueprint for all future project activities.

Scoping and Costing

Once we have your requirements signed off, we can work out how long it will take to develop, and how much the development will cost. Again, we'll partner with the relevant people within your organisation to ensure that our project takes into account your development requirements, for example, Change Management processes or database reviews with your Corporate DBAs. We'll come back to you, to present the work plans, to consider options (such as time and materials, or fixed price contract). At the end of this process, you will choose the contract which best suits you, and approve the project.

Now that the project is approved, Shine gears up for delivery.

We manage our projects very closely. In fact, we believe that our project management skills are one of the competitive edges Shine has. All our project managers are trained using the Rob Thomsett project management techniques, and better still our project managers apply them. Recognise and mitigate risk. Report status in clear, plain speaking and intelligent ways. Understand and communicate with all stakeholders. Know when and how to say "No". We operate a no surprises style of project management. If we agree to do something, it is because we can - not because we hope we can.

Design and Build for success

Most development shops will tell you that the build phase is where it all happens. We don't believe that's the case. If your project has quality requirements, and has a strong design then the build phase is already half way home. You know what you need to build (design documents), and you know why you're building it (requirements document) . It's then a simple matter of translating design into code. But even with quality design and requirements, things can and do go wrong in Build. We manage the small things in Build. We don't have personal styles in our code - we have a project style encapsulated in project standards. We always unit test. And we review the code and the unit tests. The outcome is quality code; common look and feel, minimal defects, easy to maintain. And we've got good news. If you do all the right things, at the right time (as you build), then you can achieve a massive increase in quality without an increase in cost.

Test... and then test some more...

Unit testing is just the start of the testing life cycle. The Build phase results in individually tested units, we now need to combine these into the whole system. And ensure that the system meets the requirements as originally outlined. Again, we go back to the original document - the requirements document. And we create a system test plan based solely upon the requirements document. After all, this is the blueprint by which the project's success will be measured. We then test the whole system exhaustively against the system test plan, and when it's passed our tests we give it to you.

And the testing isn't over until you're confident that the system does what you've asked it to do. You run User Acceptance testing until you're ready to sign the system off. And you have the requirements document specifying all the capabilities of the system so creating a comprehensive and accurate test plan is fairly straightforward.

A journey of success - a project on time, on budget, without controversy.

From here, we will help implement your system, and support it during the initial weeks. And your vision is now a reality - your business has the system that it dreamed of. Delivered on time, without controversy, and on budget.

Beyond Delivery - The total cost of ownership is often overlooked.

Quality projects mean low costs of ownership, low bug levels and low levels of user frustration. But the delivery of the project is not the end of the project. It gets used, extended, and all too often it will fail in production. And this is where the Shine approach hits paydirt. Because we've built quality into every step of the development approach the system you have is easy to maintain (common standards, strong design), easy to extend (common standards, strong design) and will exhibit a very low bug rate (common standards, peer reviews, unit tests, system tests, user acceptance tests). So your ongoing maintenance and extension costs are significantly lower. By the way, studies consistently show that the bugs found in production are anywhere between 10 and 100 times more expensive to fix than the same bug found in development. Another way of looking at this spend an extra dollar on fixing bugs in development and you get a return on investment of at least 1000%. Not bad eh?