The conceptualisation practice covers all the important early phases of a project where careful problem definition and solution selection are critical to the success of the project. The services offered by the conceptualisation practice include the following:
Research
Reports, discussion papers, policy papers and executive briefs on domain or system issues with a view to providing informed opinion and offering appropriate options.
Business Case Creation
Creation of business cases to support or verify management decisions. Particular cases might include buy versus build or outsource versus in house development.
Business Model Verification
Conducive works with clients to verify pricing and operational models with specific skills in low value, high volume payment systems such as fare collection and infrastructure usage pricing.
Requirements Analysis
Assistance in gathering customer requirements through artefact review, structured interviews, development sessions and joint application design sessions. Once gathered, requirements are grouped, analysed and articulated in a requirement specification.
Product Selection
Conducive leads customers through the process of defining product requirements and creating a selection matrix, then assists in identifying candidate products and provides guidance in the selection of the final product.
Volere Capability
The Conceptualisation practice has adopted a framework based on Volere for requirements specification. Volere was selected because of the atomic and testable nature of the requirements definition and prioritisation of the requirements.
Conducive was engaged by a client to pilot and assess Volere as a standard for business requirements specification across multiple divisions, and help customise templates and guidelines to encompass specific quality and regulatory checkpoints. The successful outcome reinforced the selection of Volere over alternate methodologies used by our consultants in the past.
The prioritisation of requirements provides a strong lead into our Design practice where Agile approaches may be used. Similarly, the way in which Volere defines a rationale and fit criteria for each requirement supports the Execution practice, particularly in defining user acceptance criteria.
Selected Conducive consultants have already attended training on the Volere framework and the company has committed to train other key members of the Conceptualisation team during 2010.