Development Services for Multi-channel Retail

When you have to deliver strategic systems, integration and e-business projects on time and to budget and your internal IT resources are strained or lack specialist experience, you need a seasoned, dependable and pragmatic partner to make your vision real.

IVIS Group is the partner of choice for some of the largest and most successful multi-channel and online retailers including Tesco.com. Our clients choose to partner with IVIS Group because of our depth of experience, long track record of successfully delivering complex large scale projects and our unique approach to bridging the gap between business and IT throughout the project lifecycle.

IVIS Group's Unique Approach

In today's dynamic business environment traditional 'waterfall' development methodologies do not deliver the agility that companies need to compete. IVIS Group has developed a process which blends the most effective vision and requirements capture, project management, development, programming and testing methodologies into a single iterative approach.

This IVIS Group approach has proved effective over hundreds of projects from point solutions through to the largest e-business infrastructure rollouts.

How we Work for You

Every project starts with a thorough understanding of the needs of your end-customers, business stakeholders and IT staff and ensures that these requirements are linked inextricably to your strategic vision. Gathering requirements in this fashion ensures that there is an ongoing balance between the external needs of your customers and the often differing internal needs of your business functions and IT team. It also allows rapid prototype development in the early stages of the project that further reveals core functionality and naturally sifts the essential features from non-essential 'nice to haves'.

Rapid prototype iterations run parallel to the build-test cycle, allowing your users to see and feel the solution early in the project lifecycle and continuously sense check it in a controlled environment to ensure that the project is delivering what your end-customers and business need. This enables potential road blocks and unexpected non-functional requirements to be revealed and resolved quickly throughout the project lifecycle.

The iterative process continues through the build, integrate and deployment phases and beyond, guaranteeing the maintainability and scalability of the solution in the long term.

Our partnership approach to client relationships often leads to the merging of our project teams with your in-house teams and greatly adds to the value delivered by any project. By including concurrent mentoring, empowerment and knowledge transfer elements in each project, your own in-house IT team rapidly develops new skills that enable them to run with the solution when it is deployed, enhancing the maintainability, reliability and longevity of the system.

IVIS Group Mitigates Risk

Implementing new technologies and building software systems can be complex. IT project failure rates are high and few businesses have all the internal knowledge, skills or processes necessary to successfully complete projects in-house. Working with IVIS Group enables you to mitigate risks by letting us focus on the key project success factors:

• Commitment to your business vision and objectives


• Deep understanding of the needs of your end-customers


• User involvement in the project from day one


• Engaging management support for the project


• Clear and realistic requirements capture


• Rigorous planning


• Application of competent, focussed and expert resources

The IVIS Group Approach in Detail

Our methodology is business-centric, iterative and leans towards the programmatic rather than the project approach. This ensures that each engagement results in real long term business benefits to your company. The stages of any project are as follows:

• Stakeholder Requirements Gathering - We workshop all of your stakeholders including customers, users, business leaders and IT to determine the core requirements and deliverables of the system.
• Vision Statement - Based on the requirements gathered, we prepare a Vision Document using the Rational Unified Process (RUP). The document is reviewed by the key stakeholders and states our understanding of your business drivers and potential problems that could impact the project. It also defines external systems and users that interact with the system, the activities that these external systems and users undertake and a preliminary architecture that will meet these needs.
• Design Brief & Technical Architecture Review - This document describes the system that will be delivered, its component parts and the architectural and platform environment in which they will be implemented.
• Project Initiation Document & Project Plan - The Project Initiation Document outlines the technical solution based on a logical view of your requirements using Use Cases. It includes a project overview, objectives, user requirements, system requirements, critical success factors, project scope, risks and issues and project organisation.
• Implementation Stages - We run prototyping activities iteratively alongside the development and testing processes. This ensures non functional requirements are considered and that your users see, feel and finesse development activities early in the project lifecycle. Our development methodology combines the best of Rational Unified Process (RUP) and eXtreme Programming (XP) and we have proven expertise in integration, Unit Testing, User Acceptance Testing, training documentation and deployment.
• Post-Deployment Services - IVIS Group offers ongoing support through education, training and mentoring plus remote, phone and onsite support packages.

See also

• 

  The Multi-channel Landscape

  Clarifying a complex world

• Industry Solutions

• On-line Ordering Portals