In this stage of the project lifecycle, the foundation of the project is established through a Strategy & Planning session. The following core items are identified in this session:

• Business drivers that have caused the initiative to be identified and pursued, as well as the key objectives expected from the initiative.
• Executive Sponsor that is responsible for the initiative, as well as any key executive stakeholders. We refer to this team as the Executive Steering Committee.
• Key roles on the project, and who will fulfill those roles from the client team as well as the BST Global team.
• High level scope required to achieve the key objectives, as well as expectations regarding a timeline for completion.

The deliverables from this phase of the project include a project charter that captures all of the elements discussed in the Strategy & Planning session, including key assumptions and risk items. Additionally, an initial project schedule, resource plan and project cost estimate is developed as a deliverable for this phase. Finally, a formal commitment to proceed with the work outlined in the project plan is obtained.

Our solutions are developed for the professional services industry; however, process and procedural requirements must be gathered to determine how to configure the various areas of the solution. The requirements are gathered by conducting process workshops with subject matter experts that are facilitated by BST Global consultants with deep process, product and industry knowledge. The workshops are organized around specific business processes and follow the approach below:

• Understand and capture how your process operates currently; review BST Global’s enterprise solution capabilities.
• Discuss the vision for the business process going forward, and make decisions regarding product configuration.
• Identify gaps between the vision for the business process and BST Global’s enterprise solutions, and develop a plan to mitigate and fill the gaps.

The deliverables from this phase include documented business processes, product configuration decisions, specifications for customizations/integrations and a plan for data conversion.

System configuration and custom components of the Enterprise solution are developed based on the fundamental inputs provided from the Analyze & Design stage by the project team. Based on the test plan, relevant business scenarios and conditions are performed with you to validate the specific design requirements, as well as align the solution with your project objectives. This phase of the project ensures that your solution is ready for deployment and is aligned with your original project objectives and requirements.

Focus is placed on completing the end-user training and socializing the solution throughout the user community to assess the organization’s readiness to operate on the Enterprise solution/application. In addition, the production technical environment is evaluated to confirm that it is ready for the final stage of deployment activities such as code migrations, data conversions and architecture configurations. The deployment acceptance criteria are discussed with all key stakeholders and are used as input to the go/no-go decision process. Finally, the solution is introduced into the production environment and your organization begins performing business processes on the system. The BST Global implementation team will support your organization through knowledge transition, and will ultimately introduce the BST Global support team to facilitate on-going support and maintenance of the system.