How we do it

Approach

In our experience customers who are successful in getting value from their data and deployment of tools to deliver this, must consider three different areas:

1. their data and information requirements;
2. the people and skills required to interact with such tools or platform, and;
3. the platform and technology eco-system itself.

In practice the development of these themes is best addressed incrementally over a period of time as part of an overall roadmap to achieving visibility of organisational data and improved exploitation of information.

Implementation Cycles

Implementation cycles are the iterative and incremental approach to achieving an outcome, you the customer require.  Themes typically drive the outcome they maybe initially healthcheck, remedial work, but as part of a roadmap become far more strategic e.g. cloud migration, IT Operational Compliance, data enrichment etc.  Overarching the cycles is the optional – but beneficial – Proactive Care Service.  The driving force to this approach is manageable, incremental work packages to your strategic roadmaps for data.  You may accelerate or pause the velocity of these cycles at any point, to cater for any resource constraints.

Key benefits of this approach are

• No dependency on a single person and point of failure
• Less management overhead for you, the customer, of having to manage a single resource and plan their work
• Joint responsibility between you and Apto for achieving the outcomes that you need
• Greater knowledge of your environment and how you operate is disseminated into Apto, providing reassurance that you will always have help at hand
• More cost-effective delivery using the right skill level at the right point – customers don’t need the same level of expertise for all activities. Using this approach we bring the right people with the right skills into the delivery.
• More flexibility in velocity of delivery. Delivery can be sped up or slowed down to meet your needs
• Clear accountability for delivery of outcomes which can be tracked by you
• Access to greater breadth and depth of knowledge within Apto – we can bring in an expert if there is a particular challenge

Activity Phases

Each Implementation Cycle is broken down into the following activities.

Discovery – We deploy a senior consultant to fully understand what you need to achieve, working with you to understand requirements, dependencies and priorities. The output of this session will be a backlog of activities which need to be achieved, planned on to an appropriate software tool (e.g. Jira) with visibility given to you so you can clearly monitor progress, outcomes and blockers.

Implementation – In this phase we deploy an engineer to do the implementation of the specific activity. We use the breadth and depth of expertise in our organisation to bring the right person to the project. Depending on a particular data source you need to work with, integration you need to make or if you require a visualisation and dashboarding expert we can bring the person with the best skills. In addition, if you wish to make faster progress we can deploy more than one person to this phase, thereby shortening the time taken to complete the work. The length of the implementation phase is typically offered in 3 sizes, depending on the complexity of your task;

Go Live – We ensure everything is running properly in the live environment and provide any required handover, training and documentation on what has been done. Importantly, any work carried out gets put into the ‘catalogue’ of items included in the care service. This ensures that any new features, use-cases, alerts and searches are fully supported.