► G I S C O N S U L T I N G & I M P L E M E N T A T I O N
We realize that many ingredients go into the GIS process. By focusing on these many aspects we can ensure the success of your GIS utilization, saving you time and money.
C O M M U N I C A T I O N
We understand that communication is paramount to the success of any endeavor.
Despite the fact that Rick Engineering Company leverages every known state of the art technology in communication (conference calls, Web meeting, video conferencing, emails, progress reports), we will always travel to meet with our client to meet, in person.
We believe in the old-fashioned handshake and in developing a genuine friendly and professional relationship with our clients. We believe that this philosophy had contributed to many successful project implementations, continued growth in our client base, and in weathering many economic storms.
We are proud to say that we won the trust and enjoyed repeated work with many cities for more than 20 years.
Q U A L I T Y A S S U R A N C E &
S C H E D U L I N G
Quality work requires time even with skill; we understand that. We also understand that most projects have their own scheduling and delivery constraints. It takes diligence and ample skills to balance the need to deliver quality products and scheduling constraints; it’s an Art! We can’t say we have perfected this art, but we are confident that we have made and continue to make great strides towards it.
P R O J E C T M A N A G E M E N T
M E T H O D O L O G Y
The days of the ‘Waterfall Projects’ where tight specifications and schedule are set at the beginning of the project are gone (at least at Rick Engineering Company).
Where it is appropriate, Rick Engineering Company’s vision is to adopt the methodologies and philosophy of the Agile Project Management methods, which were developed specifically for IT and software development projects. This exposes our clients to new and proven methodologies in the IT industry. The Agile Project Management methodology stresses training, technology transfer, and the need to intimately involve our clients in all of the project tasks and subtasks.
T R A I N I N G & T R A N S F E R
O F T E C H N O L O G Y
We usually ensure this by involving our clients’ relevant staff in every step of the project implementation. Instead of exchanging the project deliverables at the end of each task, Rick Engineering Company involves their client during the execution and implementation of each task from start to finish without exceeding their comfort zone. This ensures the training and transfer of technology of our clients and makes sure that when they receive our deliverable it is not the first time they have seen it; they are already familiar with it.
C H A N G E M A N A G E M E N T
This has two connotations; the first is managing our clients’ staff shift in working environment as they implement GIS. To address this, we believe in training and in the gradual and staged GIS implementation. Therefore, training starts on and in parallel with the commencement of our projects. With this methodology, our clients’ staff is ready to make full use of their new GIS environment by the end of the project. We do not, nor recommend, training at the end of the GIS project implementation.
The other connotation of ‘change management’ refers to change orders related to changing the scope of work during the GIS project implementation. We, at Rick Engineering Company, count on change, instead of avoiding it.
It is understandable that as the GIS project implantation progresses, our clients usually get more educated about GIS capabilities and their needs shift towards leveraging more of its technology to serve their business needs. Rick Engineering Company has the expertise to foster our clients’ growth and knowledge and to manage the change in our clients’ expectation without penalizing them with painful change orders or introducing creep in the scope of work and schedule.
P R O J E C T C O N T R O L & M E T R I C S
As is typical of Agile Projects, the project schedule has been broken into as many and modules and subtasks as possible. This will provide our Clients with enhanced control and metrics over the project tasks and deliverables. This is also how we can better manage change requests (see change management above).
B U D G E T C O N T R O L
To help our clients in budget control throughout the project, Rick Engineering Company unusually organizes this proposal so our clients can easily correlate the efforts outlined in our proposal, the deliverables, the costs, and the schedule.
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