element61 is a learning organisation. Through the shared experience of our consultants and customers, we constantly strive to deliver more efficient project implementations.
To that purpose we have developed our own methodology elementary, which combines the best elements from proven industry practices, real-world lessons learnt and leading project methodologies. In that context, elementary is the summary of our successful Business Analytics experience of 950+ man-years, combined with the application of some of the main project methodologies such as Prince2 and PMI. All of element61's consultants are also certified in Prince2.
High-level overview of the elementary methodology
Having a methodology will not only streamline and standardize project delivery, but it also addresses some of your key customer concerns. elementary deals with all of the below key aspects of project success :
- communication: enable your organization to communicate needs and concerns in a formal & informal way
- quality: design and build it right, the first time
- change management: support processes that make sure your organization can deal with changing environments & processes
- knowledge transfer: involve your business and technical users so they become self-supporting before the project is deployed
- risk management: provide you with best practices to manage the project's exposure to risk (in a cost effective way)
In summary, elementary is our way to ensure repeatable success.
Methodologies can be very heavy and administrative. We have successfully tried to avoid this pitfall by making elementary light and easy-to-use. In our methodology we have substantially limited the number of documents and forms to fill in, so as to avoid that a project manager of project team members spend most of their time filling out forms and templates. The pragmatic nature of elementary ensures that new consultants can quickly get acquainted with its principles and start to apply it. Next to that, we often work in co-development mode with our customers, and their personnel can also easily start working with the uniform, coherent and straightforward documents that are the cornerstone of elementary.
We have also integrated the continuous improvement of elementary within the methodology. At the end of each project, we foresee an "Evaluate" phase in which we do a thorough review of the project - both internally and with the customer - in order to capture all of the lessons learnt. We include all of the relevant lessons in the methodology in order to improve this for the next project(s).