Beyondrelational

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Software for Process Compliance & Governance

Why software for process compliance & governance?

· Too many deliverables to control

· Requirements, test, reviews, audits, schedule, project plan, risks, issues etc.

· Normal check-in check-out process of documents not enough to trace history

· Difficult to collate multiple documents from various sources to get one report

· Deficiency of manual process monitoring

· Disjoint and inconsistent monitoring across the organization

· Audit is a sampling exercise – what about all process deviations/violations?

· Corrective actions are taken only on the audit findings – Rest go hidden?

· Mostly, Process Audit is post mortem rather than proactive

· We end up with islands of tools

· Each group uses its own tool and they are disjoint; high maintenance effort

· When tools are different, there is high chance of process inconsistencies

· Lack of visibility into key process metrics increase risk of non-compliance

· Process owners generally lacks the tools to monitor, update, and implement continually improving processes

Key Benefits

· Enterprise-wide visibility to the senior management

· Metrics Collection is a click away

· Organization-wide collaboration under one single portal

· Project groups and support groups share information

· Sales à Projects à Quality à Customer Support, all are integrated

· 100% Traceability of any activity

· Lot of configurable features are built-in to suit customer needs

· Industry standard best practices are built-in the tool by an independent test organization (i.e. Softsmith)

· Web-based light-weight tool, accessible from anywhere anytime

· Designed based on rules specified in ISO 9001:2000 and SEI CMMi

· MySQL support is available and hence no need to invest on costly databases

· You get unlimited user access licenses and features at less than 1/10th of the price of leading tools

· Flexible on-demand and pay-as-you-use licensing policies

SPCG Features

· Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

· Human Resource Management (HR)

· Training & Information Sharing

· Vendors and Assets Management

· Project Management

· Risks

· Tasks

· Requirements

· Timesheet

· Expenses

· Test Management

· Test Planning

· Test Execution

· Defect Tracking

· Internal Quality Audit Management

· Document Management

· Review Management

· Demands (service requests)

· Issues (Administrative issues)

· Completely user role based system

· Access rights are controlled

· Enterprise-Project relationships

· Import/Export of data from Excel sheets

· Standard email notifications

· Configurable Alerts

· Existing UI labels can be changed

· New UI fields can be added on the fly

· Standard reports

· Custom reports

· Charts on each module

· Statistical Dashboards

Customer Relationship Management

· Manage all known contacts

· Assign contact owners and track each touch-basis

· Manage all known accounts

· Assign account owners and track each touch-basis

· Track every single business opportunity and each correspondence on that opportunity

· Provide quotes to customers

· Track all contracts for their status

Human Resources

· Manage data of all employees (personal, vehicles, insurance etc.)

· Track employee leave of absence

· Track all travel requests

· Track all reimbursement requests

· Maintain employee skill sets and update periodically

· Manage complete recruitment workflow (positions, candidate bank, interview schedules)

· Maintain list of holidays

Training & Information Sharing

· Manage a list of internal and external trainers

· Collate training needs and schedule programs

· Maintain training attendance

· Store all waivers for training absentees

· Evaluate the trainer

· Evaluate the trainees

· Maintain Training Feedback

· Provide online exams and maintain scores

· Centrally store all knowledge documents like case studies, lessons-learned etc.

· Share the organizational knowledge with all teams

Vendors and Assets

· Maintain the list of vendors and update the status (preferred, debarred etc.)

· Maintain all branch and location details

· Maintain all assets and categorize them

· Track which asset is allocated to which location and to whom

Project Task Management

· Define tasks, assign to people

· Assignee updates status

· Planned date, effort are tracked Vs actual date and effort

· Trace tasks to other tasks or other project items

· Record all project expenses

· Manage resource rate cards

· Reduces human intervention to collect status

· Automatic notifications keep us up-to the minute

Risk Management

· Define Risks

· Capture risk parameters like severity, likelihood, category etc

· Provide mitigation options, mitigation plan and contingency plan

· Track risks over a period of time

· Provide alerts on risks

· Provide history on every single risk

Timesheet Management

· Users in projects are assigned to specific activity codes

· Daily/weekly timesheets are entered by team members

· Project manager can approve the timesheets and override the regular and overtime hours for weekly timesheets

· Email notifications for timesheet defaulting, approval or rejections are available

· Who approves who’s timesheet – can be configured

· One project level and one finance level approval are built-in

Manage Requirements

· Add, edit, delete requirements

· Maintain requirement hierarchy

· Maintain version, priority and type of requirements

· Attach test scenarios and/or test cases to requirements

· Attach documents and diagrams for each requirement

Manage Tests

· Plan

· Maintain test modules (functional modules)

· Classify test cases hierarchically within a functional module

· Maintain test cases

· Attach documents, requirements to test cases

· Import and export in MS Excel

· Execute

· Create test rounds

· Assign test cases to testers within test rounds

· Log test execution details by each tester

· Defect Tracking

· Log defects and take it to closure

· Maintain history of defects along with all annotations

· Export test assets to Microsoft Excel sheets

· Customizable defect life cycle

· Customizable email alerts based on bug status codes

Manage Reviews

· Any project users can initiate a review

· Attach documents to be reviewed and assign reviewer list

· Reviewers can enter review comments

· Consolidate all review comments

· Author can track the review comments, incorporate in the work product and close the comments

Document Management

· Have a repository for each project

· Control document access, user-wise

· Check-in check-out documents

· Track document history

· Unlock documents if accidentally checked-out

Manage Quality Audits

· Quality Group head can initiate different kinds of quality audits for any project

· Auditor and auditee will be assigned for each audit

· Auditor can enter the audit findings and non-conformances and map to ISO clauses/CMMi Clauses

· Auditee can provide reasons, preventive and corrective actions on the audit findings and non-conformances

· Auditor closes the audit findings

· All process improvement suggestions will be logged as part of quality audits

Demands & Issues Management

· Capture all user demands such as data media, backup, business card printing, software installation etc and provide automatic/custom workflow

· Seamlessly cater the service requests of people

· Every enterprise user would face issues with hardware, software, connectivity, access controls etc.

· Capture all user issues and provide automatic workflow and escalation routes

Reports, Charts and Dashboards

· Variety of standard reports for each module

· Charts and text formats available

· Usage of Telerik Reports for quick deployment

· Usage of Chart Director makes the charts light-weight

· Configurable user reports

· Export facility of to MS Excel and Adobe pdf formats

· Configurable charts – pie, bar, cylinder, 2D, 3D, single and multi-colors are available

· Users can customize what charts to be shown automatically in a single screen (dashboard)

Manage Enterprises, Projects

· We can define different enterprises and projects within each enterprise

· Different administrator users can manage different enterprises and projects

· This architecture enables the application to be hosted for different clients

· Users and roles are common within an enterprise

· Super-user “sysadmin” manages all enterprises

Manage Users and Roles

· Super-user “eadmin” manages multiple projects and users/groups, custom codes for projects

· Project admin manages users, groups, custom codes within one project

· All user privileges are configurable

· Standard and flexible workflow based on user roles as developers, testers, leads, quality team members