In a fast-paced IT environment, it's nearly impossible to re-visit the same quality issues over and over again. More importantly, missteps in project quality can devour an IT budget and alienate an IT organization’s partners, clients and end users. Organizations continue to struggle with high IT project failure rates, often as high as 60+%, and re-work costs that often make up 50% or more of the overall project cost. At the same time, the pressure for documentation and compliance at every step continues to increase. CDI provides a comprehensive Quality Management program to help improve productivity and ensure success.
Our methodologies, processes and tools include:
Defect Prevention (Quality Assurance): We provide tools to assure defects are not generated or escape detection during the applications development process, improving the efficiency and quality of the overall delivery.
Defect Detection (Testing): CDI’s testing methodologies extensively test the applications output to make certain that the final product is as defect-free as possible.
Project Management TailoringTM: Our unique industry tool helps tailor systems development methodology and discipline to increase overall quality measures and reduce the required project management overhead.
Methodology
CDI provides end-to-end defect prevention and detection services that reduce the cost of application development and accelerate time-to-market. CDI’s unique Project Management Tailoring (PMT) methodology and Center of Excellence (CoE) approach enables organizations to improve application quality in less time with fewer resources.
CDI provides a comprehensive set of Defect Prevention and Defect Detection service offerings, all of which leverage our expertise and experience.
PMT Methodology: Our unique PMT methodology helps reduce project management costs and improves delivery by tailoring required processes, policies and templates based on project complexity. Comprehensive assessment, design and implementation services are supported by ProjectOptimizer, a web-based application that automates the generation of compliance and process variance reports and project schedules.
Center of Excellence Approach: CDI brings together technology, processes and policies to consolidate and maximize QA and Testing resources into a more efficient and cost-effective CoE.
Quality Assurance Assessments: CDI can provide a rapid assessment of more than 20 different IT disciplines. By capturing voice-of-customer and comparing it to best practices from SEI CMMI®, ITIL® and HDI®, we can quickly identify ways to reduce cost, improve productivity and better service end users.
Partnerships: CDI leverages our alliances with key technology partners to cover an increasingly wide range of applications, platforms and technologies.
Efficient Delivery Model: CDI’s offerings are entirely onshore, giving clients superior visibility and eliminating time zone issues as well as quality and high turnover/re-training issues associated with off-shore providers.
SDLC Expertise: With our strong staffing and recruiting experience, we are able to rapidly build teams with expertise across disparate systems and applications including hard-to-find legacy and industry-specific technologies.
Value Delivered
CDI helps mid-range and large organizations address quality management challenges by:
- Reducing the risk of IT project failure (industry studies from the Standish Group show only 32% of IT projects are successful)
- Improving the speed and quality of applications delivered to end users
- Reducing application testing costs
- Ensuring compliance with SDLC or IT governance processes
According to research by the IEEE, companies that discover and resolve defects early on in their SDLC process can realize a minimal defect resolution cost. However, defects that are found in the Field or Post-Production Testing phase result in 10x-150x higher resolution costs.
Case Study Briefs
CDI has helped numerous clients reduce application development costs, improve quality and ensure compliance.
- A major ship builder was struggling with customizing and integrating a critical enterprise software application. They were concerned the application would not scale to meet their needs. CDI helped identify infrastructure related bottlenecks and areas of the application that required performance tuning. We conducted a thorough assessment of testing processes, created a library of optimized test cases and resolved the performance issues with the critical application.
- A major utility provider needed to optimize IT operations, reduce defects throughout the IT life cycle and improve customer satisfaction. The client had 60+ years of legacy applications, no incremental budget for improvements and application documentation that was obsolete or missing. CDI conducted an in depth assessment of existing policies, methodologies, processes and templates and performed a formal gap analysis against industry best practices. We then identified more than 12 different opportunities for improving IT operations.
- A large financial services company was aggressively moving externally-facing applications and web properties to an Open Source platform. Due to a combination of limited testing expertise and tight budgets, the client used administrative personnel to perform ad-hoc testing. CDI quickly stepped in, identified and delivered a team with the necessary skills and assumed all responsibility for application testing. Within days, a comprehensive test strategy was created including test cases, milestones and success criteria.
- A large healthcare provider was looking to identify potential areas for improvement to reduce the cost of IT operations and improve both internal and external communications. A combination of rapid growth in applications, few metrics and weak IT governance were seen as barriers to improvement. CDI conducted a detailed assessment of QA policies and practices and prepared a gap analysis against the SEI’s Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI®). As a result, process improvements of up to 35% were identified and put into effect.
