Our Methodology
Businesses are drowning in data. The promise of harnessing new information and enabling data-driven decisions has – in reality – been a painful clash between business needs and complex technology. Silver Lake’s goal is to cure your pain as fast and efficiently as possible.
Every project is different but we always start by understanding your business, culture, industry and growth and scalability needs. The approach we would typically take with your project follows the industry standard Systems Development Life Cycle.
Step 1: Discovery & Analysis. We want to understand your business and your business goals, understand your problem and pain points and the drivers to finding a solution. We pride ourselves on being active listeners. Even if you have already identified requirements, we’ll want to dig into them to understand how they relate to your goals and business needs.
For example, if your business goal is to “…increase the number of contracts processed by 50%”, we’ll ask:
- How does the process work now?
- What are the drivers for the current process?
- What is it like to sit in the chair of contract processor?
- Can the work flow be altered in a manner that reduces the number of times a contract is handled?
- How can errors be reduced or eliminated?
- Can users and supervisors put their hands on data and documents easily?
- Do compliance requirements need to be met?
- How are the contracts initiated?
- What are the needs of the other stakeholders (IT, Compliance, your customers, your sales personnel)?
You get the idea. Notice we haven’t begun to talk about the technology yet, we just want to identify the problem and its parameters and come up with a set of business and application requirements.
Step 2: Design. The primary objective of the this phase is to create a design that satisfies your business and application requirements. In the design phase, we move from answering, “What problems need to be solved?” to “How are we going to solve them?”
Great design is about increased productivity – not just a great interface. We’ll deliver both, by understanding what needs to get done and how to make the most efficient use of your time. We put ourselves in your shoes and design the system that works best for your budget. No shortcuts.
Step 3: Implementation. This is when we build the system to meet your needs per the requirements. We’ve done amazing things with FileMaker before, we’ll do it for your business too.
Step 4: Testing. We test all code and integrations for interoperability, errors and bugs. We employ several industry standard testing methodologies to insure the integrity of your data. This is a critical stage that other consultants often rush through.
Step 5: Deployment & Training. This is where we put the system into production to help run your business. No solution is complete without these final steps to insure trouble-free operation and acceptance from users. This essential stage is often overlooked entirely. But what good is “the business solution” if nobody knows how to use it? We will not declare the project complete until it is deployed and used successfully.
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