Organizational Assessment
Maxsam Partners Organizational Assessment helps organizations make improvements in the way they operate to better meet their business goals. Our assessment objectively evaluates your organization's strengths and weaknesses and helps you leverage your strengths for success. Organizational assessments results in a prioritized improvement strategy targeted at leveraging existing strengths and addressing weaknesses. We start by understanding your improvement objectives. Working with these objectives in mind, we provide high-leverage recommendations that can take your organization to the next level of efficiency. These assessments are based on a structured process that focuses on your specific business challenges. Each organizational assessment uses this basic outline:

• Self-Assessment. Maxsam Partners provides you with a package of self-assessment materials used to collect and analyze information needed for the assessment.
• Review. Maxsam Partners reviews work products you supply such as estimates, plans, designs, standards, source code, test cases, and other project artifacts. Maxsam Partners then analyzes common threads in this information to create a set of preliminary focus issues for use during on-site interviews.
• Interviews. Maxsam Partners conducts on-site interviews with selected personnel.
• Organizational Assessment Report. The Assessment and Recommendations report restates your improvement goals, provides observations on the current strengths and weaknesses of the project, identifies high-leverage recommendations, and includes a roadmap to help you achieve your business goals as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.

Report Card
Report Cards assess the use of software engineering best practices in areas such as requirements, design, construction, testing, quality, process, and configuration management. The assessment provides a baseline of strengths and weaknesses and provides recommendations for the high leverage areas of improvements. These assessments are based on a structured process that is focused on your specific business challenges. Each assessment uses this basic outline:

• Self-Assessment. Maxsam Partners provides you with a package of self-assessment materials used to collect and analyze information needed for the assessment.
• Review. Maxsam Partners reviews work products you supply such as estimates, plans, designs, standards, source code, test cases, and other project artifacts. We perform a review and analysis of the architecture, design, source code, and databases which provide representative samples of the systems. Maxsam Partners analyzes common threads in this information to create a set of preliminary focus issues for use during on-site interviews.
• Interviews. Maxsam Partners conducts on-site interviews with selected personnel. Phone interviews are conducted with key technical staff to review the architecture and discuss the implementation in the representative samples.
• Analysis. Through the review of existing artifacts and information, as well as interviews, Maxsam Partners analyzes the current practices and rates the team in the following 10 knowledge areas:
  
  • Software Engineering Technology
  • Software Engineering Management
  • Software Design
  • Software Construction
  • Software Engineering Process
  • Software Configuration Management
  • Software Maintenance
  • Software Quality
  • Software Requirements
  • Software Testing
• Report. The Report Card report restates your improvement goals, provides a benchmark of the current capabilities, offers observations on the current strengths and weaknesses of the project, and identifies high-leverage recommendations of areas to improve.

SDLC Definition
A solid Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) provides structure so that team members and project stakeholders all understand the current state of the project. It supports visibility and predictability while enabling project teams to make specifics choices that achieve the business goals and constraints. Maxsam Partners can provide guidance, support, and expertise as you define your SDLC. Common SDLC Focus Areas. We typically define and deploy an SDLC in two phases. During the first phase, we'll work together to review existing SDLC or process materials and project deliverables. The focus in the first phase is on:

• Identifying the major software development phases
• Creating project profiles to capture the unique types of work occurring in the organization
• Determining major gaps in current process materials
• Identifying process materials that need to be modified or extended
• At the conclusion of the first phase, you'll receive an overview of the new SDLC and an Implementation Plan for piloting the SDLC on one or more projects. The Implementation Plan will identify specific process changes, the pilot project(s), and the activities and deliverables anticipated for the pilot. Typical activities that occur during the pilot include:
  
  • Refining your SDLC overview and creating more detailed process documentation
  • Defining the responsibilities and authorities that are necessary to ensure team members understand their roles
  • Tailoring Maxsam Partners MP Process Framework to support efficient creation of high quality deliverables
  • Conducting Maxsam Partners best practice seminars to grow your staff's skills and knowledge in fundamental software engineering practices
  • Conducting retrospectives to identify lessons learned and creating actions plans for improvements after major project milestones

Agile Adoption
Wondering which agile practices will best meet your company's needs? Unsure whether you have the mix right of agility, predictability, and visibility? Looking for independent verification that being Agile has improved your quality and productivity? Maxsam Partners can help your organization navigate the waters of Agile practices with our Agile Practices Review. We start by understanding your Agile-related business objectives. We review your existing practices, both Agile and traditional. We then provide recommendations about specific business planning practices, agile practices, and software lifecycles that you can implement to achieve your objectives. Common Agile Recommendation Areas:

• Selecting the overall lifecycle or methodology that will meet the needs of your projects and programs (Evolutionary Delivery, SCRUM, FDD, Staged Delivery, and so on)
• Determining the most efficient and effective requirements techniques (storyboards, prototyping, user stories, or others)
• Identifying the level of up-front estimation, design, and planning that's appropriate for your business needs
• Recommending specific management techniques and practices for your detailed iteration planning
• Our clients often ask how to be responsive to customer needs while providing project predictability and visibility. Our Agile Practices Review can help you launch an Agile initiative or improve an existing Agile program. An Agile Practices Pilot can follow the review to help your organization efficiently adopt the recommended changes.

Improvement Planning
Maxsam Partners can help your organization build a specific process improvement plan. Our experts will work with your team to determine the specific activities and deliverables necessary to implement change, assign owners, establish the criteria identifying when tasks are complete, and place activities on a detailed improvement timeline.

• An Improvement Planning Workshop commonly follows our Organizational or Project Assessments to ensure the recommendations can be quickly and fully implemented to provide the highest return on your investment. Process improvement is an ongoing effort requiring continual tuning and focus. We provide ongoing assistance as you deploy improvements throughout the organization and on specific projects. Our experts can help solve specific project issues, review changes and deliverables as practices are deployed, or coach specific employees to grow the skills of your staff.
• Health Checks produce a report outlining the progress to date and providing recommendations about the highest leverage changes for continued improvement. They provide an ongoing review of your improvement efforts to ensure they stay on track and focus on the highest leverage items.

Software Due Diligence
Acquiring a company or product is a significant undertaking. Solid software due diligence uncovers risks and provides insight into whether the software and/or development organization you are buying will meet your business goals. Maxsam Partners provides independent evaluations of code, design, technology, and capability tailored to your business goals. Using a combination of automated tools, visual code inspection, and interviews with the software team we quickly provide the information you need to make a sound business decision. Some of the ways that Maxsam Partners has helped companies perform due diligence include design and architecture reviews, code quality assessments, and development capability reviews.

• Architecture and Design Review analyzes the system architecture, technology, designs, and code to identify strengths, weaknesses, and risks to your business goals. Our experts engage with your team to ensure we understand your concerns and provide key information as early as possible. Commonly addressed topics include:
  
  • Providing an overview of the key physical and logical views of the system
  • Identifying scalability risks and architectural strengths that support scalability
  • Providing insight into the sophistication and robustness of internal algorithms and data models
  • Characterizing the effort required to modify the system to support new functionality
  • Clarifying the level and extent of internationalization support
  • Identifying security and privacy risks
  • Answering specific questions about the system's architecture
• Code Quality Assessment characterizes the system's size, maintainability, and defect history. Our analysis provides quantitative measures that reveal:
  
  • The understandability of detailed design and code
  • The use of good coding practices, including factoring, abstraction, commenting, naming, coupling, cohesion, consistency, etc.
  • The use of secure coding practices including buffer management and string handling
  • Risks to internationalization, portability, or other specific questions
  • Size and complexity of functional modules
  • The appropriate use of language features
• Development Capability Review provides a summary of the technical practices used to produce the software and the current state of operations. Our due diligence includes analysis of:
  
  • Revision control, build, release, and deployment systems and practices
  • Developer testing practices
  • System testing practices including test cases, performance testing, etc.
  • Test automation
  • Development lifecycles and documentation practices
  • Defect tracking practices and defect data
  • Operational practices for host service offerings
• We have extensive software due diligence expertise and are experienced in a wide array of target platforms (including Windows, Linux, and embedded software) and many languages and technologies.

Estimation Process
A standard estimation procedure provides a systematic way of developing and refining accurate estimates for your projects. Maxsam Partners estimation process development workshop enables your organization to create a standard estimation procedure that provides an analytical process for creating estimates, a mechanism to refine the estimates throughout the project, and ongoing improvement of estimation accuracy through the use of historical data. Our workshops are based on a structured process that is tuned based to focus on your specific process goals. Process workshops typically result in the following deliverables:

• Process Framework. The process framework describes the activities and tools needed for your projects to develop and refine the relevant artifacts throughout the project. This includes details about deliverables produced, techniques used, when hand offs occur and how, when and how people participate, and the necessary supporting materials.
• Deployment Plan. A deployment plan outlines how and when the new process will be deployed into the organization.
• Beyond the creation of a standard estimation process, Maxsam Partners can help develop a high quality estimate for a key project or review your existing project estimate for its accuracy.

Project Chartering
A project charter helps to create a common vision for the project, which is critical as it sets the stage for successful planning, management, and completion. Explicit project chartering ensures that key stakeholders come to an agreement on the scope, objectives, constraints, and completion criteria for the project. A project charter helps ensure team-wide alignment on project priorities. Project chartering clarifies the priorities and goals for the project to the project team and all stakeholders. By aligning the team, it sets the stage of detailed planning and successful project execution. A project charter should include the following elements:

• A business case for the project including costs and benefits
• Measurable goals that identify the desired results the project will bring the organization
• A definition of what is in and out of scope for the project
• Clear project priorities which allow the project team to make appropriate trade offs to achieve the goals
• A list of the assumptions, risks, and constraints that could support or impact the outcome

Project Plan Review
During a Plan Review, Maxsam Partners reviews the requirements, project plans, estimates, project schedule, and other related project materials. We will work with your team to identify practice changes or gaps in existing deliverables. Common issues identified during a Plan Review include:

• Current project tracking mechanisms are inadequate to support project visibility
• The project vision is not commonly understood by all team members
• Critical requirements are not well understood by the team
• Project estimates are overly optimistic
• The project schedule is unachievable
• Inadequate project planning undermines project predictability, product quality, and team morale. A solid project plan ensures you have the necessary level of visibility, predictability, and control over your project. Let Maxsam Partners experts ensure yours are on the right path.

Project Estimates
With the possible exception of software requirements, the area of software estimation is probably the most talked about and yet least understood of all software development practices. Project predictability and visibility are impossible without a solid project estimate. A useable estimate supports business-based tradeoffs between the desired schedule, the expected feature set, and the effort needed to build the product. It enables solid project planning and control to achieve the desired results. Projects without a solid estimate are commonly delivered late, over budget, and/or without the desired feature set. Some of the ways that Maxsam Partners help project teams with estimation include:

• Estimate Creation. A realistic estimate is one of the key ingredients to software project success. It reduces schedule pressure, development errors, and supports project predictability and control. Maxsam Partners experts use a wide range of estimation techniques. Maxsam Partners can help your project team create an estimate of the project effort, schedule, and cost. Working together we help your team to avoid the pitfalls that can impede your project's success.
• Estimate Reviews. Maxsam Partners experts can review your estimate to ensure it accurately reflects the current scope and state of the project. We'll help you determine how to feed back information from the project into your estimation process to obtain better estimates. We can establish how your project should track the actual schedule and effort to understand if it is on track.

Methodology Selection
From implementing more agile practices, to piloting Feature Driven Development, to tuning your current software development methodology, Different projects have different constraints, goals, and business objectives. Selecting the right lifecycle and methodology supports project visibility, minimizes overhead, and supports on-time project delivery. Maxsam Partners can help. We'll work with your team to determine the lifecycle, methodology, and technical processes that will meet the needs of your project. Maxsam Partners methodology selection support commonly includes the following activities:

• Determine the project objectives, constraints, and goals
• Clarify project priorities such as schedule, feature set, existing customer commitments, etc.
• Select the lifecycle and practices which match the stability of the requirements and the business need for responsiveness
• Identify project management techniques and practices that meet the unique needs of the project
• Ensure the existing architecture and code base will support current and future business objectives

Technology Selection
Is C++ the best language for our system? Should we use .NET? Does it make sense to use a COTS application? Our broad experience and expertise in custom software development makes us uniquely qualified to answer technology selection questions. We'll help you perform a business-based evaluation of technologies and products to select the best fit for your needs. Some of the issues to consider when evaluating a technology, platform, language, or product are:

• Can we achieve the desired functionality with it?
• Does it support our performance and robustness needs?
• Does it support our usability and/or maintainability needs?
• What platforms will our system run on?
• Can updates be obtained in a timely manner?
• What is the vendor's track record for support and enhancements?
• Maxsam Partners experts will help you evaluate products and technologies from a technical and business perspective to ensure it meets your short and long term goals.

Outsource Project Management
Outsourced projects require as much, if not more, oversight than internal projects. Maxsam Partners experts can provide the control and visibility you need to manage your outsourced project to a successful conclusion.Common ways in which Maxsam Partners supports outsource projects include:

• Project management. Maxsam Partners will plan, manage, and track your project from kickoff to successful conclusion.
• Planning audits. Maxsam Partners will improve and validate the teams project planning and engineering approach. We'll review the preliminary project plans, requirements, estimates, schedules, and other materials. We'll discuss the current goals and plans with the project manager, key technical staff,and project stakeholders to ensure the teams approach will achieve the objectives. Recommendations for specific project management or other practices changes will be provided.
• Project reviews / project audits. Maxsam Partners reviews project materials, interviews project staff and stakeholders, and provides visibility into whether or not the project is on track to deliver the expected functionality on time and within budget
• Architecture and code audits. Maxsam Partners reviews the current architecture and code to evaluate its quality and ability to meet current and future business objectives.

Coaching and Mentoring
Maxsam Partners can provide ongoing assistance as project managers implement new practices or take on more complex and larger projects than they have experience with. Our experts can coach specific employees to grow their skills while helping to move your project forward.Common areas in which Maxsam Partners provides coaching and mentoring include:

• Project planning assistance. We'll work together to create a plan outlining the technical and management processes that will be used on the project
• Agile management support. Assistance implementing feature driven development, incremental delivery, or other agile project management techniques
• Risk reviews. Analysis of project materials and team discussions focused on identifying risks that could impact the anticipated delivery commitments
• Project reviews. Review project status with key stakeholders and technical staff to identify lessons learned
• Deliverable reviews. Maxsam Partners reviews project plans, schedules, and other management materials and provides feedback to improve the detail and content of the deliverable

Project Assessment
Maxsam Partners Project Assessment provides recommendations for leveraging your project's strong points, while addressing its weaknesses. Our project assessments help you avoid classic mistakes, apply fundamental development practices, identify and manage risks, and determine the practices that will provide the most leverage on your specific project. Maxsam Partners project assessments are based on a structured process that is focused on your specific business challenges. Each project assessment uses this basic outline:

• Self-Assessment. Maxsam Partners provides you with a package of self-assessment materials used to collect and analyze information needed for the assessment.
• Review. Maxsam Partners reviews work products you supply such as estimates, plans, designs, standards, source code, test cases, and other project artifacts. Maxsam Partners then analyzes common threads in this information to create a set of preliminary focus issues for use during on-site interviews.
• Interviews. Maxsam Partners conducts on-site interviews with selected personnel.
• Project Assessment Report. The Assessment and Recommendations report restates your improvement goals, provides observations on the current strengths and weaknesses of the project, identifies high-leverage recommendations, and includes a roadmap to help you achieve your goals as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.

Retrospectives
Would you spend one percent of the duration of your current project to save weeks on the next one, and the one after that, and so on? Every project provides opportunities to learn how to improve the way that your team builds and delivers products to its customers. Project retrospectives are a structured way to capture lessons learned and create specific actions plans for improving on the next project. These retrospectives are based on a structured process and uses this basic outline:

• Analyze the Project. The project is reviewed from a number of different aspects to understand the important events that occurred.
• Develop Lessons Learned. The specifics about what went well and what can be improved on the next project are captured.
• Create Action Plans. A plan outlining the tasks, deliverables, and timelines, and owners for implementing changes to address the highest priority lessons is created.
• Our project retrospectives result in a specific actionable plan to increase the effectiveness of your practices on the next project.

Project Recovery
Most projects fail or are cancelled because of ill-defined or changing requirements, poor project planning and management, uncontrolled quality problems, unrealistic expectations, inaccurate estimates, or naive adoption of new technology. Maxsam Partners is prepared to help you address these issues and determine corrective actions that will get your failing project back on track. Not only do we pinpoint the major issues that are responsible for your project's difficulties, but we also provide an expert, unbiased opinion that is based on years of experience helping troubled projects. Our project recovery plan provides a detailed roadmap that enables you to put your project back on track. We assess your strengths and weaknesses, and put together a prioritized roadmap to recover the project. We provide project estimates, project management, and the technical expertise to help you successfully deploy the roadmap quickly and effectively.