Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

Developing software that aligns with key business objectives is challenging for most businesses. In turn, managing the effectiveness of workflows and the software development and implementation presents an even bigger challenge. Many software projects often fall behind schedule, exceed budget and more alarmingly, fail to meet requirements and deliver value to the business.

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) focuses on improving and managing the activities, tools and processes you use to build and, more importantly, upgrade and maintain an application over its lifetime. ALM encompasses everything from initial concepts through to the first release and then beyond as you modify, extend and build upon the initial application.

Using ALM techniques will improve and refine not only your engineering and project management practices, but also the tooling you use to support those practices. Implementing a successful Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) strategy is guaranteed to increase collaboration and productivity within your team, as well as improve the quality of your software.

The conventional ‘just develop it’ attitude to IT systems development is more often than not failing to deliver measurable business benefits and return on investment, due to the poor alignment of IT and business sponsors.

Benefits of an ALM approach:

• Improved communication and understanding of business needs between IT and the rest of the business
• Increased visibility into the development process
• Increased ability to accept changes
• Improved quality of delivered software
• Greater collaboration and productivity within the IT team
• Increased return-on-investment from IT initiatives

Readify can help your business by breaking down what can seem a significantly large and long-term program of work, into the many small and incremental steps needed to successfully bring about the changes for improvement easily and efficiently.

Working with a series of Microsoft development tools, Readify can help you define your path to improvement through our extensive knowledge of the Microsoft toolset, coupled with our hands-on experience helping many other customers who have been faced with the same issues.

Regardless of whether your business currently adopts a ‘just develop it’ approach, or conversely is so ‘process driven’ that nothing gets done (or even somewhere in between), Readify can help your business improve its IT solution delivery process.

Implementing an ALM strategy takes time. Your focus should be on practices and practice improvement, and not simply tools. Tools should be used only as a way to support your process improvements.

Readify strongly recommend that practice improvement be introduced gradually, as big bang process changes typically result in a lot of noise and smoke that can be very exciting at the time, but after everything settles down very little value is actually achieved. A better approach is to make many small changes, phasing in only one or two new or improved practices at a time. When drawing up your implementation plan, you should also ensure that it is aligned with your key business drivers and consider the impact on existing projects.

Readify is ideally suited to assist you by combining the outstanding features of Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) with the best practices for both engineering and project management, refined through years of experience in software development.

Readify has designed a 5-step process to help you to define and implement an effective ALM strategy by:

• assessing where you are at right now;
• helping you gain internal business and key stake holder support;
• building an implementation plan; and
• executing against that plan.

Readify focuses on establishing the right processes, then guides your team in implementing those processes. Once in place, we assist you in selecting the right technology to support the process improvements your team have made.

Readify specialise in assisting your business implement ALM processes through a deep understanding of MS tooling - such as Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), Reporting Services and SharePoint. As well as this, Readify has an extensive understanding of multiple methodologies that can be applied to managing a project, such as the Microsoft Solution Framework, Scrum and other Agile methodologies.

Step 1      Online ALM Assessment

The Online ALM Assessment tool helps identify where your business is today, and subsequently helps measure progress throughout the implementation change process.

Step 2      Readify Onsite Awareness Overview

One (1) day onsite awareness overview to key stakeholders, which includes an overview of ALM & ROI benefits and an analysis of current ALM maturity (based on Online ALM Assessment results).

Step 3      Readify Onsite Deep ALM Assessment & Roadmap

At completion of Step 3, you will have a detailed roadmap and prioritised plan specific to your environment and application needs, along with many tips and pointers on how the plan can be implemented should you choose to do the work yourself.

Step 4      Readify Tooling, Methodology and Best Practice Implementation

Five (5) to Ten (10) days customisable implementation of tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (or alternatives), methodologies (such as MSF Agile and Scrum) and engineering best practises.

Step 5      Ongoing Support, Mentoring and Training

To gain maximum long-term benefit from your ALM implementation, it is strongly recommended that a regular series of face-to-face coaching and/or mentoring sessions be established to encourage feedback on progress.

• Related Training on TFS, VSTS and Agile click here
• More information on Visual Studio Team System 2008
• Readify holds Microsoft Competencies in the following:
  • Business Intelligence
  • Custom Development Solutions
  • Data Management Solutions
  • Information Worker Solutions
  • Mobility Solutions
  • Service-Orientated Architecture (SOA) & Business Process