The Power of Smart An enterprise today must grow at least as fast as its competition, or it risks becoming obsolete. Its ongoing mission is to innovate and create differentiated services, drive efficiencies and reduce operational costs. In this age of business-led IT, however, software creation is not just a matter of delivering finished systems. They must also be relevant to your context, and well suited for your specific business needs. The organizational context is particularly important: business strategy, enterprise architecture, risk and change management plans must increasingly be taken into account in the development process. A collaborative approach is also essential so that everyone clearly understands the scope of work. We train our experts/consultants to communicate with many stakeholders and to think like business people. Only then can we see where the project’s value really lies in the organization and what makes economic sense before we deliver software that is valuable for the customer. Above all, a smart approach must be transparent and free from conflicts of interest -- unlike massive, multi-year software projects that are typically complex and prone to cost overruns, or platform-dependent solutions that can easily keep you locked into a rigid eco system. That’s why at Aprico, we’re open-minded and independent: we do not base our recommendations on specific technologies or platforms, and are not affiliated with particular vendors. The Power of Lean A culture of Lean improvement is another source of competitive advantage. In software development, this means driving out unnecessary complexity, such as repetitive planning, work on low-value features, work in process, or excessive documentation. This also calls for applying the right resources at the right time and at the right cost to quickly get a working application into the hands of business users. To raise development productivity, we can leverage engineering practices that depend on your context:

• Standardized processes, including best-of-breed methodologies.
• Techniques that are best suited for your development process maturity, such as continuous integration, test-driven development and automatic unit testing.
• Collaboration and visualization tools.

The result? We help deliver the most valuable features more quickly and predictably… and at reduced risk. The Power of Agile In today’s volatile environment, traditional techniques don’t deliver fast enough to satisfy your customer, business and marketing demands. It’s important to put people and customers first. No one knows current issues better than the customers and staff who deal with the processes every day. As a result, we involve stakeholder groups early. Together, we look at each step in a business process, identify opportunities for improvement, and revise or cut out steps that do not create value. We recommend creating small pieces of targeted functionality that deliver business value at each iteration. By breaking the work into manageable units and frequent builds, testing and reviews become more focused. Quality is also improved as we can locate and fix defects more easily and more rapidly. This combination of ongoing collaboration, rapid prototyping, and frequent tests, helps shorten project duration and improve customer satisfaction. A Dynamic Approach Of course, your market may change rapidly and unpredictably:  we understand this, and we welcome your changing requirements -- even late in development. Through constant collaboration, task decomposition and short feedback cycles, we can help you adapt to new situations and opportunities. As a result, risk is minimized, and a project can adjust to change quickly, giving you ownership and control. Is Your Enterprise Ready? Aprico has been helping companies transform their businesses for over two decades. This means that we can bring you the best practices, technologies and business models you need to adapt quickly to today’s fast-changing business and IT environments.