Project Management

ArcherMind believes that excellence in project management is the key to successful completion of projects and to creating customer satisfaction.

Project Management Philosophy
Quality Assurance
Change Management
Risk Management
Development Process Management (DPM)
Communication Enhancement

Project Management Philosophy
ArcherMind has earned its excellent reputation by our single focus on delivering client value in every engagement. Our Americanized business model processes and belief system separates us from other software development companies that attempt to leverage just low cost development resources and labor. Our model not only promises the benefit of low cost software development but more importantly we combine affordability with guaranteed quality and IP security. This can only be achieved and offered because of the expertise we have developed in overall project management and the quality of our people.

ArcherMind believes that excellence in project management is the key to successful completion of projects and to creating customer satisfaction. ArcherMind has standard project management principles and processes to drive every customer project. Each project must have a detailed plan which includes: schedule of activities, resource allocation, risk management, etc. Each project execution describes each milestone of the project in more detail and also includes the acceptance criteria for each milestone. The assigned project manager will develop a customer communication plan to ensure good communications between the ArcherMind development team and the customer.

Quality Assurance
At ArcherMind our Quality Assurance (QA) philosophies include: "fit for purpose" and "do it right the first time" which we apply to all product software development and services. In the area of QA Management, we deploy the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) approach.

We divide QA responsibilities between two departments:

• One department takes charge of quality control by "Failure testing" the operation of a product until it fails, which often uses every kind of testing skills to expose many unanticipated weaknesses in a product.
• Another department uses CMMI standards to measure the Quality Assurance, and the statistical process control standards of "Six Sigma" to reduce the unexpected failures.

Development process improvement is achieved utilizing both of the above methods.

The Quality Assurance program at ArcherMind has been refined and enhanced continuously to include the following key process fundamentals:

1. Pre-defined QA specifications and requirements are in place
2. Strict conformity to QA specifications is required
3. All customer issues related to QA are quickly and thoroughly resolved
4. User and Customer feedback is secured and utilized in new product designs
5. Aggressive process change control management and immediate notification delivery

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Change Management
Change Management (CM) is the practice of tracking and administering changes during the development of a product or service. Our Change Management process includes:

• capture and record changes
• assess the impact, cost, benefit and risk of proposed changes
• develop business justification and obtaining approval
• manage and coordinate change implementation
• monitor and report on implementation
• review and close change requests

Our goal is to use standardized methods and processes that derive from CMMI standards for efficient and prompt handling of all changes to avoid errors and minimize the impact of change-related incidents upon service quality. We absolutely focus on minimizing the consequences of unexpected and unrecorded changes and enable approved changes with minimum disruption.

The Change Management process in the company is as follows:

1. Review the requests for change
2. Analyze and filter changes
3. Approve changes
4. Implement changes
5. Verify changes
6. Record changes into CM Library

Throughout the process back-up plans are created based on ISO27001 to ensure that all project goals are achieved on time.

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Risk Management
According to ISO/IEC 27001 and CMMI standards, risk management is used to manage uncertainty related to a threat, through a sequence of human activities including: risk assessment, strategies development to manage it, and mitigation of risk using managerial resources.

ArcherMind's Risk Management process includes the following activities:

1. Identify all areas of risk within the development process
2. Assess each risk area as to its potential severity of loss and to the probability of occurrence
3. Manage risk by category: Avoidance, Reduction, Retention and Transfer
4. Create a risk management plan
5. Prepare mitigation plans for each risk area selected for mitigation
6. Implement the risk management plan by following all of the planned methods for mitigating the effect of the risks
7. Review and evaluate the plan for improvement

Development Process Management (DPM)
At ArcherMind our DPM is based on CMMI standards along with the application of knowledge, skills, tools, techniques and systems to define, visualize, measure, control, report and improve processes with the goal to meet customer requirements.

We are also dedicated to a disciplined process approach when developing, implementing and improving the effectiveness of a quality management system that further enhances customer satisfaction.

Our Development Process

Our Development Activities:

1. Analyze and design objectives and key milestones
2. Plan the work according to the objectives
3. Assess and control risk
4. Estimate resources
5. Allocate resources
6. Organize the work
7. Acquire human and material resources
8. Assign tasks
9. Direct activities
10. Control project execution
11. Track and report progress (DST Management System)
12. Analyze the results based on the facts achieved
13. Define the products of the project
14. Forecast future trends in the project
15. Implement Quality Management (QA&QC)
16. Manage issues
17. Resolve issues
18. Identify, manage & control changes
19. Communicate to stakeholders

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Communication Enhancement
ArcherMind creates an official communication plan for each customer. The purposes of the communication plan are as follows:

• build a good relationship with every customer
• create a good and clear process for project execution
• understand project requirements

The customer communication process can be designed on a daily or weekly basis.

Daily Communication Process

Daily communication includes email, instant messenger and audio/video conferences. ArcherMind is selected by many companies because of our ability to deliver on projects that require the highest levels of complex software programming. It has been our experience that in the most technically demanding projects that a day-to-day communication process is most effective and often leads to a sped-up in the development cycle.

Weekly Communication Process

ArcherMind recommends for many projects that a weekly communication process be utilized. On a weekly basis we typically conduct two audio/video conferences with a customer and each conference call will last at least one hour. One call will focus on project management and the other on technical details.

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