Our Business Approach - Why We Are Unique
 
 

Advanced Strategies motto is "The Performance Transfer CompanySM". As a client, what you will receive from Advanced Strategies are services which enable your organization to succeed after we are no longer actively participating in the project. What you should never experience are: feelings of dependency and growing reliant on Advanced Strategies; political ambition in that we would try to take over an engagement; or bait and switch tactics where what you receive is not what we have agreed to.

 

To deliver this, we have had to build a unique organization. The foundation for this starts by having professionals who do both training and consulting. By training customers on the consulting work they do, our professionals understand the reasons behind the techniques and how to apply them to varying situations. Consulting on what we train ensures that our techniques are practical and effective in today's environment. In addition, the attitudes required to perform this combination, help ensure that Performance Transfer occurs during our consulting engagements.

 

Having professionals who can both train and consult has required us to only provide experienced consultants. When we hire consultants, who are already experienced in their field, we provide additional extensive training to ensure the consultants are able to realize our principles and deliver our techniques. This enables us to provide "Mapmakers", not "Navigators". Our consultants are prepared to chart uncharted water, rather than trying to force square pegs into round holes.

 

The techniques our highly trained professionals deliver are based on an engineering approach. This ensures that:

  • whatever consultant you receive from Advanced Strategies will utilize a consistent set of techniques and vocabulary
  • that all work done will be able to be transformed as the project moves in what the MN Department of Commerce has recently called an "Unbroken Chain" from need to application
  • that the business users can take comfort in realizing that a professional process is being followed

 

Finally, our techniques were built to enable error free development. While the vast majority of the projects we work on would not receive optimal Return on Investment by using full error-free techniques, having this foundation ensures that projects are: on-time, within budget, with expected functionality, and meet the business need.

 

Advanced Strategies' approach utilizes one major paradigm: User-Centric Development

User-Centric Development is a process that places the business users in the center of the development effort in terms of:

  • Contributing enterprise expertise.
  • Making policy, feature, priority, and economic decisions.
  • Determining the ongoing and final success of the effort.
  • Feeling that they are the ones being served.

The delivered results of user-centric development add more value since they are driven by the existing and future needs of the business.

Advanced Strategies' approach employs the following techniques and sub-techniques:

  • Joint Development Approach (JDASM)
  • "Real-time" Modeling
  • Incremental Development

JDASM is a technique used to derive consensus among a variety of participants representing multiple, potentially conflicting, perspectives and needs. By allowing the business experts to openly communicate (including agreement and disagreement), key underlying business issues and beliefs are discovered. This information base is then used to determine and agree upon the optimal solution available at that time.

Modeling is a tool to enhance open communication by allowing explicit statements to be made, understood and agreed upon. By documenting the information gathered in a "Real-time" modeling session, where we draw the diagrams in front of your team, businesses will have a basis for making decisions and taking action. If a project is abandoned and later revisited, the model captures work already done so it need not be repeated. For a given business project the five business aspects that must be addressed are shown below:

Incremental Development is an approach that provides for development in a series of small implementable sub-strategies. The initial sub-strategies can then be implemented before the attention span of the organization lapses and resources are reallocated to another project. These initial successes motivate the team, establish credibility with the stakeholders and buy time for the team to deliver on the next sub-strategies.

Advanced Strategies approach was developed to enhance the positive business impact of information systems and has proved to be efficient and effective. In addition to the development of software, databases, web architectures, data warehouses, and other information systems, companies doing business process reengineering and strategic planning have successfully utilized our methodology.

 
 

 

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