PCG can provide independent and objective oversight for major projects, typically based on assessments of their likely future performance. Our services include Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V), Independent Project Oversight (IPO), Independent Technical Assessments, and Quality Assurance (QA). These services are particularly well suited to projects with a major financial or technical decision point beyond which revisions become exceptionally expensive.
Independent Project Oversight
Our Independent Project Oversight (IPO) services can help your organization protect its IT investments and comply with control agency mandates. We believe that only experienced project managers should perform IPO services, to provide both an effective assessment and value-added recommendations. Effectively utilized, IPO can provide project executives with an early warning of risks and issues that may threaten the success of the project.
Our consultants have extensive project management experience and IPO experience, having assessed some of the largest and most complex IT projects developed and deployed in the world today. We take a risk-focused approach to IPO services, using a process that has been refined over the years based on lessons learned from numerous project management and project oversight engagements.
Independent Technical Assessments
PCG’s Technical Assessment services help our clients evaluate technical solutions and strategies, and develop approaches and methods to address shortcomings and leverage advantages. We offer deep experience in the complexities of large public sector technology solutions, and understand how strategy, performance measures, coding standards, network and hardware components, service management, and reporting mechanisms interconnect.
Our assessment methodology was built from the ground up to provide value for all phases of the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC), and is especially valuable for Maintenance and Operations (M&O) organizations. Our services cover the spectrum from procurement through product development (whether waterfall, agile, hybrid, or other) and on to DevOps or M&O.
Through our services, we examine the details of relevant components, boil down our findings to consumable outputs, and focus on building strategies and/or tactics to better support your mission. These services are often used to help form the strategy to take with a legacy system (replace, refactor, encapsulate, etc), define strategies to consolidate or separate related systems in an enterprise, to evaluate proposed solutions, to troubleshoot poorly performing systems, to redesign organizational structures, or to improve service management components such as change, release and configuration management.
Independent Verification & Validation
Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) is an independent process that evaluates the correctness and quality of a project’s business product. IV&V often serves as an early warning mechanism for large complex projects, enabling project leadership to make adjustments early in the project lifecycle when they are most economical and practical to implement.
PCG TC’s IV&V Center of Excellence (CoE) powers our trademarked IV&V service offering: Eclipse IV&V®. As we execute IV&V projects across the country, the CoE captures the collective knowledge gained via the project work and, along with industry standards such as IEEE and best practices such as ITIL, distills it into consumable products for our clients. This ensures our services always include experience with the most current technologies and latest methods, are relevant to each project, and that our consulting teams deliver real value to each client.
Quality Assurance
The timely delivery of software supporting business needs is critically important in IT projects. If software is delivered with poor quality, the business is put at risk and operational costs will increase.
Our Quality Assurance (QA) services provide organizations with best practices in implementing effective measures to help guide projects using testing, appropriate metrics, and business objectives. Our goal is to achieve a balance between the time to address immediate business needs and the long-term effects that may arise from poor quality. The modern methodologies we use, such as test-driven development, enable quality activities to be conducted throughout the life cycle, and deliver higher quality at lower costs. Our services aim not only to test early and iteratively, but to help our clients identify trends and capitalize on those which are positive, and make smart strategic and tactical decisions to address negative disruptions.