Select Computing - Software Development

Clients:

US Health and Human Services
US Veterans Affairs
University of Minnesota
Allianz Life

The project management practice of The SCi Way is called Epiphany. Epiphany support iterative projects. It encourages the broad development of requirements and architecture and a narrow focus during engineering and implementation on meeting the most valuable requirements. The result is a flexible, iterative approach to project management, that minimizes risks by allowing the project team to focus on high-value deliverables while maintaining the enterprise level perspective. The four stages of an Epiphany project are:

Feasibility;
Elaboration;
Implementation;
Deployment.

Stages are further decomposed into activities and tasks. For each task, Epiphany specifies the deliverables to be produced, the roles that must participate in the production of the deliverables, and what tools can be used to aid in accomplishing the task. Epiphany also stipulates which tasks are mandatory in the project's work breakdown structure. The project manager and the client has the flexibility to adapt the plan to the project's specific circumstances.

Epiphany provides different planning work breakdown structure templates for different types of projects, such as Operation Implementation, Systems Engineering, ETL Project. For example, the following is an overview of how Epiphany is used in a software engineering project.

Feasibility: The key objective of the feasibility stage is to establish a shared understanding of the system under study. In this context, “system” includes the people, process and technology. The goal is to identify high-level requirements for the system so that the scope may be identified and project funding obtained. The models that capture these requirements are business process flows and use cases. This stage breaks down into three activities areas; Business modeling, requirements gathering, and architecture.
Elaboration: The objective of the elaboration stage is to flesh out the requirements to the 80% level, to finalize the architecture of the system, and to prove that the architecture works via an end-to-end technical prototype. The Elaboration stage breaks down into two activities; Design and COTS evaluation
Implementation: The objective of the implementation stage is to build a working system that is ready to be put into production. The implementation stage decomposes into three activities: Engineering, Construction, and Integration. These three activities occur in all projects, regardless of the outcome of the buy vs. build analysis.
Deployment: During the deployment stage the goal is to test the system to ensure that it is ready to be deployed into production, to make needed corrections, and to actually deploy the system. This phase includes monitoring and evaluating the live site, and fine-tuning for optimum performance and results.

Epiphany can be followed in a single, waterfall iteration. This is appropriate when the scope and requirements of the project are well known and well understood. If there is uncertainty about the nature of the end-state, an iterative approach is more appropriate as it allows the project team to adjust priorities as the solution is delivered. These iterations are referred to as time-boxes. A waterfall project has one time-box while an iterative project has many time-boxes.

[Epiphany WBS]