Planning and Methodologies

Any IT delivery will not be successful without the correct planning and methodologies. TFS Consulting Services has a lot of document templates and methodologies that – if applied correctly – have been proven successful in delivering an IT project. Below is the list of services that we offer in this area:

Starting and Planning an IT Project
There are so many different type of IT projects from custom software development, infrastructure and networking, specialized applications such as SharePoint and many others. From TFS Consulting Services’ past experiences with various clients, a lot of these projects are not started and planned properly. For example, we’ve had a client that have decided a deadline without even defining the business requirements. As a result, scope creeps and the project was delivered outside the budgeted hours even though they still hit the deadline.

We’ve heard a client said to us, “Sometimes we just have to do a project for a loss just for the sake of proving ourselves to the client that we have the capability”. Luckily this does not have to be the case. With a proper planning you will never lose any money. TFS Consulting Services can help you starting and planning for your IT delivery. We have methodologies and documentations that you can apply within your team to ensure that project is finished within deadline and budget.

Development Methodology

Dealing with changing of requirements can be daunting. If not executed properly, a simple change request can eat up your project hours. TFS Consulting Services – again – has document templates and methodologies to deal with change requests.

Or how about your internal development team. Have you run a source control application such as SubVersion or TFS to store your source code? What if your main/key/head/master developer leaves, can the application be supported? Or you may have purchased a third party application but the company that you purchased the application from has gone bankrupt and is not around anymore. How do you ensure that you still get a support for the software? TFS Consulting Services has a lot of strategies that can be applied to deal with these situations.

Deployment Management

You need to deploy a solution to the Production environment. Have you got the right process and communication strategy? Your IT support team surely will not welcome hundreds of phone calls regarding your main website that is suddenly down because you are rolling out an update?

Or have you ever been in situation where you simply lose control over what version of the software that is currently deployed in Production vs Test?

TFS Consulting Services has a lot of strategies and document templates that can be used to deal with various deployment scenarios which if applied can help you managing deployment properly.

Capacity Planning

You are implementing a shopping cart. How do you make sure that your shopping cart is still up and running healthily even though there is a huge surge in purchases because Christmas is near? Let us give you an example: there was a shopping website in Australia that was hyped because they planned to sell discounted products for Christmas. The discounts started at a particular midnight in December. People were waiting and when the time finally elapsed everyone went to it. Unfortunately after 7 minutes the website was down and only came back up 12 hours later. Their customers were obviously angry and their brand was all over the news. TFS Consulting Services can help you to properly capacity plan your system.

Another scenario: you are implementing an Intranet solution using SharePoint. Initially it will be deployed locally but then your board members are so happy with the product and would like to implement it nation-wide. Do we have to get thousands of employees connect to one portal instance or can we implement multiple “local” servers?

Have you considered caching or optimizing your stored procedures? What about the login, search mechanism and content deployment? Again, TFS Consulting Services has a lot of strategies to help you properly plan for growth.