The Syntergy Professional Services methodology is a disciplined approach to the identification, evaluation, execution and support of projects for our clients. Its goal is to ensure a consistent, high quality process that enables our consultants to build exceptional software, and to exceed our client’s expectations.

At Syntergy, a team is much more than a group of people assigned to the same project. An effective team has the right expertise for the project, empowers members to use that expertise, and holds them accountable for results in the areas they own. Accountability and empowerment remove the obstacles to high achievement.

We define a deployment team as a team of peers working in interdependent and cooperating roles. Each team member has a well-defined role on the project and is focused on a specific mission. Team members are from both Syntergy and the client organizations. This approach encourages ownership and ultimately results in a better product. The leaders of each team are responsible for management, guidance, and coordination, while the team members focus on carrying out their individual tasks.

The team comprises six clearly defined roles.

• Engagement Management articulates a vision for the product or service, acquires and quantifies customer requirements, develops and maintains the business case, and manages customer expectations.
  
  
• Program Management drives the critical decisions necessary to release the right product or service at the right time, and coordinates the required decisions to deliver it in a manner consistent with organizational standards and interoperability goals.
  
  
• Development builds or implements a product or service that meets the specification and customer expectations, delivering a system that is fully compliant with the negotiated specifications.
  
  
• Testing ensures that all issues are known before the release of the product or service, exercising user interface, APIs, and integration of new software into existing system.
  
  
• User Education maximizes user experience through performance solutions and training systems. It also reduces support costs by making the product easier to understand and use.
  
  
• Logistics ensures a smooth rollout, installation, maintenance and migration of the implementation.

Process is a double-edged sword. Too little of it results in an environment in which everything is urgent, and frustrated team members lose focus maintaining familiar, chronic issues. Too much of it results in an environment in which everything has a management policy and not even serious issues are urgent enough to drive change. The challenge is to identify what milestones are important and manage those against known tradeoffs.

Without an effective process model in place, certain obstacles to success are predictable. Perhaps you’ve seen some of these symptoms in your own projects:

• The project changed into something it wasn’t designed to be.
  
  
• The project is taking too long to develop and getting too expensive.
  
  
• Nearing release time, someone adds more features.
  
  
• You just discovered a major issue and have to start all over again.
  
  
• The project is complete, on budget, but now you don’t need it any more.

Syntergy’s process model is a milestone-based model that provides guidelines on planning and controlling results-oriented projects based on their scope, the resources available, and the schedule. It is an iterative and adaptable model that:

• Identifies alternative approaches
  
  
• Defines critical, manageable milestones for development.
  
  
• Creates explicit team accountability.
  
  
• Addresses project risks in the early planning stages.
  
  
• Describes the variables and priorities that affect scheduling, features, and trade-off decisions.