Home Company Profile Sectors The RTIS Approach

The RTIS Approach

Project Success

RTIS offers clients a commitment to ensuring successful implementation of IT initiatives. We approach this by concentrating on factors that are crucial for project success, namely:

• Use of proven delivery process, methods and tools
• Understanding the requirements and expectations of the client
• Involvement of representative business and technology people
• Continuous client feedback throughout the project
• Consideration of the impact of technology solutions on people and their working practices
• Identification and early addressing of project risks

We do not rely on a purely technical specification, but invest time and energy in understanding the working dynamics and environment in which the software will be used. The high failure rate of some software projects is often caused by insufficient understanding of this area rather than purely technical deficiencies in the product.

Client Participation in development

RTIS approach software development with a participative iterative approach (download a more detailed .pdf file). Since there often is not a complete initial specification this is usually necessary. Our approach is to spend some learning about the relevant job roles that will interact with the system and the environment in which it will be deployed. Our success has been underpinned by our willingness to allow the specification of a project to evolve during the development. Inevitably as software is tried in practice, refinements, unforeseen obstacles, or inappropriate specifications can be uncovered. Given the interactive nature of developing a solution for a client, the client's commitment to this process also affects its delivery. The client-side team and associated roles should be clearly defined for such tasks as project coordination and milestone sign-offs, design and design approval, roll out and implementation. These are all significant influencing factors in the cost and timescales RTIS can deliver to.

Reuse of existing code and data handling components

RTIS are specialists in developing bespoke applications to meet a client's requirements. However when a system is reduced to the final programming requirements of storing, manipulating and presenting information, common programming techniques and patterns recur frequently in apparently unrelated business systems. RTIS are able to draw on a vast resource of building blocks and tools that have been deployed and currently in use in a great many systems that are business critical for our clients. This offers three important advantages:

• The components are robust and have been tested in many environments
• The system can be developed more quickly and at lower cost as we can reuse components from other projects
• Our clients can see functionality that has been provided in other systems and request it to be included.

We usually develop in Visual Basic for Microsoft operating systems, and can work across a variety of database platforms, including MS-SQL Server and Oracle. Linking data with other systems in an organisation is a common feature of our work.