Foursquare Way – City Dynamics Consulting & Delivery Methodology
Our Approach
Using our experience of hundreds of implementations across different industries, we have formulated our own sales and delivery model that produces successful projects. The biggest element of our delivery is not the technology, we know the people/process ingredient is key in a successful project. We also understand the required relationships with our clients that create a successful project.
Initial Call
On our first call we’ll understand your business, your challenges and the reasons why you’re considering a change of system or partner. With this knowledge, we’ll explain how Dynamics 365 will help you to solve your challenges, and how City Dynamics will be able to implement and support you going forward. We’ll explain how Dynamics can improve your processes and allow you to achieve more with the same team. We’ll confirm on the call that that we understand your sector and have the experience to deliver your project. We’ll also be able to give you a likely implementation, licence and support cost based on our conversation to date. Importantly, if we’re not the right partner, or if we feel the solution doesn’t fit your requirements, we’ll tell you.
Demo
With the information from our initial call, we’ll demo the system to show you how we’ll achieve your requirements and tailor it to your specific requirements, we try to avoid “off the shelf” demos and prefer to use the knowledge we have gained in the process to help drive the thought process. As we present the demo we’ll discuss further functionality and options available and gain a deeper understanding of your business and requirements.
Proposal
Having gained an understanding of your requirements we’ll prepare a proposal, it will contain detailed consulting fees broken down by workstream, so you are clear on how your investment will be used. It will also contain a breakdown of the licences needed, and also the post live support fees. Once you have reviewed the numbers, we’ll arrange a follow up Q&A session to answer any questions from the demo and the proposal. If anything needs clarifying we are happy to walk through those areas in more detail with a tailored follow up demo.
Project Kick Off
Once you have signed the paperwork to commence the project, you’ll be onboarded by our Project Management Office team so we can commence the project. We’ll kick off the project with both teams to set the project expectations and success criteria. We’ll start building the project plan based on agreed go live dates, and with your workloads in mind. We understand that our clients often have their BAU work and a project to deliver, and we build this into our plan to ensure as little impact on your daily work as possible. Whilst Teams for meetings is great, sometimes, it’s just better to be in a room together to brainstorm ideas and project challenges. We’re happy to travel to your location for these meetings. Many post COVID projects, just like work, have become a hybrid of partly onsite and partly remote working via Teams.
Workshop Requirements Gathering
To ensure a deeper engagement from the start, we involve our delivery team in the sales process. This way, you’ve met the team who’ll be delivering the solution right at the start. It ensures the client an early opportunity to create a productive working relationship with the consulting team. During requirements gathering, we’ll conduct detailed workshops to gather all the information required to understand to your business, and the challenges you want to overcome with the new system (both technology and people/process). We’ll document our discovery and we’ll conduct a system and several process walkthroughs with your team
System Design & Configuration
An initial system design will be created and presented, with an opportunity to discuss and have a Q&A. Once we have sign off, this we’ll commence the configuration of the system.
Walkthrough UAT Training
We’ll have a walkthrough of the system and at the earliest point begin to engage your team with the system. By uniquely combining the Training, UAT and part of the Data migration we ensure the system embeds into you business at the earliest possible stage to achieve high engagement, a smoother go live and a fast ROI. You will learn on a system that has been configured for you rather than a generic out of the box system, with real data that you can associate with.
Go-Live Planning
With our Go-live process we’ll systematically check that everything is in place before the decision is made to go-live. We involve some of our support team at this stage to process the checks and start engaging with the client and new system. This is a good opportunity for the client to meet and get to know the support team, who they will be working with on completion of the project.
Intensive Go Live Hand Holding
We understand the period immediately after go-live may initiate queries as the teams becomes familiar with the new system. We ensure that consultants and the support team are available to work with you closely, allowing you to independently engage with your new system as soon as possible.
Handover to Managed Service & Support Desk
In our unique approach of involving the support team at the go-live stage, the team will already be familiar with your system and your team. There will be a formal project closure meeting and a handover to support and managed service team.
