Iknow approaches its client assignments with sound project management methodologies and processes.
Project Delivery
Our consulting project delivery methodologies are primarily based on the Service Design Methodology. Service design is a human-centered design approach that places equal value on the customer experience and the business process, aiming to create quality customer experiences and seamless service delivery. Service design helps organizations see an end-to-end, surface-to-core perspective, enabling the understanding of services from a customer perspective. Service design is rooted in design thinking and brings a creative, human-centered process to service improvement and designing new services. Through collaborative methods that engage both customers and service delivery teams, service design helps organizations gain true, end-to-end understanding of their services, enabling holistic and meaningful improvements.
Iknow also leverages the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) V2.0, a set of world-class performance improvement models offered by the CMMI Institute. Proven effective in organizations and governments globally over the last 25 years, CMMI consists of collected best practices designed to help identify and improve an organization’s key capabilities to achieve higher levels of performance, quality, and profitability. A few of the Institute’s business capabilities areas include new product development, service excellence, workforce management, supplier management, data management, and cybersecurity.
Software Development
Iknow uses a software development approach that incorporates the best Agile and DevOps methodologies.
- Agile software development recognizes and amplifies the principles of lean thinking. Agile methods focus on collaborating with customers to understand requirements while developing working software iteratively and in small increments. Bringing customers and developers together eliminates the risk of miscommunications and increases the likelihood that customer requirements will be met. By working in small teams and responding to customer feedback immediately, software quality increases, delivery accelerates, and customer satisfaction improves.
- DevOps software development focuses on eliminating the waste and friction between developers and the technical infrastructure and operations groups. DevOps is a framework that focuses on communication, integration, and collaboration among IT professionals throughout the software development lifecycle. The primary objective is to rapidly build and deploy working software so users can give immediate feedback. DevOps teams are equipped to understand customer requirements, knowledge of release schedules, service and change management, environmental provisioning and automation tools, and application deployment. This tightly integrated framework improves cycle time, software quality, and customer satisfaction.
Project Management
Our project management methodologies are primarily based on the Project Management Institute’s Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). PMI’s standards for project, program, and portfolio management are the most widely recognized in the profession and are models for project management in business and government. The PMBOK has been developed by thousands of PMI volunteers and provides a common language for project management worldwide.
Leading Practices and International Standards
Iknow incorporates leading practices and international standards into our project delivery methodologies. The two examples below describe tools from the American Productivity and Quality Center and the International Organization for Standardization.
- American Productivity and Quality Center. Iknow LLC is a strategic partner with the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC). The APQC is the world’s foremost authority in benchmarking, best practices, process and performance improvement, and knowledge management. Iknow frequently incorporates the APQC’s benchmarking data and best practices findings into our client assignments.
- International Organization for Standardization. Iknow incorporates recognized international standards into the design and delivery of our knowledge management solutions. The world’s leading independent, standard-setting organization is the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Through its members, ISO brings together experts to share knowledge and develop voluntary, consensus-based, market-relevant standards. Consistent standards contribute to transferring best practices, developing interoperable solutions, and promoting quality, safety, and efficiency.
ISO has released many standards that apply to the knowledge management domain, in areas such as document management, records management, metadata development, search, information security, and knowledge management systems. Iknow incorporates these standards when appropriate. Iknow also follows the ISO guidelines for the effective delivery of management consultancy services.
Quality Assurance
Quality management is an integral part of Iknow’s consulting project delivery process. We pride ourselves on maintaining the highest levels of customer satisfaction. Other benefits of sound quality management practices include less rework, higher productivity, and lower costs. We take the time, at project inception, to define what quality means to our clients. We elicit quality requirements along many dimensions, including performance, feature sets, usability, defect levels, and time-to-market, and we make them explicit and measurable. We then develop a project quality plan, including quality assurance and quality control components, which is designed to meet your quality objectives.
Software Prototyping Lab
One important element of Iknow’s consulting methodologies is the use of pilots and prototypes. We believe that early experimentation, rapid prototyping, and pilots are highly effective at facilitating accurate end-user needs identification and requirements gathering.
Iknow operates a software prototyping laboratory to support its consulting and systems integration service offerings. The core of Iknow’s prototyping lab is access to more than 100 complete and fully functional commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) and open source software products, hosted on both Iknow’s dedicated servers and in the cloud. Iknow’s rapid prototyping environment includes software from many of the company's software product partners.
Iknow’s prototyping lab is important to our clients because software prototypes can be easily and quickly constructed to investigate new solutions, processes, algorithms, and approaches. A few recent examples of software prototypes are shown below.
Representative Screenshots from a Recent Iknow Prototypes
