ALM is a puzzle with many people involved, different activities, disciplines, practices and processes.  And although it can be complex, successfully implementing an ALM strategy can also be very rewarding.

Luckily, proper selection of tools and processes can greatly simplify the ALM puzzle and help with your successful adoption of an appropriate ALM strategy.  Notion Solutions provides a series of workshops, jumpstarts, training and custom consulting solutions to help your organization reap the benefits of Application Lifecycle Management.

ALM Workshops

The starting point for most organizations considering Application Lifecycle Management is an ALM Workshop.  This engagement is a fixed-duration/fixed-cost session designed to help you better understand your organization's current strengths and weaknesses, identify suitable maturity goals for your organization's activities and disciplines, and provide a roadmap to help you achieve these goals.  Through our partnership with Microsoft, we may be able to offer the ALM Workshop at a significant discount!  Contact us for more information on our ALM Workshops.

ALM Jumpstarts

Jumpstarts are engagements designed to help you adopt a specific discipline, processes or tools in your environment.  For larger institutions, jumpstarts can help individual teams or pilot users with the desired adoption; for smaller organizations a jumpstart may be the basis for a full corporate implementation.  Although the specific contents of jumpstarts vary, most include some amount of: discovery, implementation, and training.  This may seem like a fair amount of work, but many individual jumpstarts can be completed within a few of days.  The following table summarizes the standard Notion Solution Jumpstart engagements as they apply to the different ALM activities:

Jumpstarts are malleable and can be custom fit to your needs.  It is possible to engage Notion for a single targeted jumpstart, however most companies will recognize economies of scale by combining multiple Jumpstarts together or with other Notion training or services.  Contact us for more information on which jumpstarts are right for you or to schedule an ALM workshop.

Training

Notion Solutions offers a variety of training alternatives.  Many customers will opt for on-site training or targeted mentoring on specific ALM tools and disciplines.  For broad rollouts or self-paced instruction, our eTraining options may be more appropriate.  Finally, for people who fare better in a standard training environment, Notion has partnered with SQE to provide a selection of our most common courses (i.e., Team Foundation Server and Testing Applications) in a public class setting.

Consulting and Mentoring Services

Sometimes your needs do not fit into a predefined package.  In these cases, Notion can provide highly skilled and experienced consultants to help solve your application lifecycle problems.  These can be succinct implementations such as integrating custom ALM toolsets or building reports to increase your ALM visibility, or they can be more amorphous versions of our jumpstarts to help your teams get up and running in specific areas.  With few exceptions, our consulting engagements are designed to help your team understand how to care for your application lifecycle long after we've left your site.  Contact us for more information on our consulting and mentoring services.

Almost by definition consulting services are tailored to individual needs and no two engagements are the same.  That said, the following should provide some context to areas which we can help you:

• Team Foundation Server Installation and Configuration
• Visual Studio Team System Upgrade Services
• Compliance consulting (SOX, SAS70, ISO, CMMI, etc.)
• Agile Development Practices
• ALM tool integration (e.g., HP Quality Center and Team Foundation Server)
• Application development outsourcing
• Build management outsourcing

For nearly any of your ALM needs, Notion Solutions can provide experienced consultants who truly can help you efficiently write better software.  Contact us with your challenges to learn how we can help you!