IT Services

Requirements Definition

Five Points’ carefully researches and formally defines its requirements definition deliverables to ensure they are accurate, thorough, and complete. Our concisely defined requirements lead to quality deliverables, minimize defects, and reduce potentially costly rework. Our requirements definition methodology is designed to promote successful rapid development and improved return on investment. Five Points will perform requirements definition services for its clients either as standalone engagements or as part of IT development or enhancement projects.
When we define requirements we gather documents, meet with the client and project stakeholders, facilitate meetings, conduct walkthroughs, and create interactive prototypes. Our highly experienced analysts work closely with client management to refine requirements so they will provide value-added information technology support to the client’s business processes. Our requirements definition deliverables consist of high-level and detailed sets of requirements definitions that include narratives, flowcharts, and traceability matrices.

Application Design and Development

Five Points’ business analysts and technical staff work closely together to produce system designs that support and enhance its clients’ business processes and tightly integrate technology efficiencies into them. In the design phase we model our clients’ business processes and demonstrate them with prototypes as we translate requirements, system design, and business processes into unified IT systems that provide true value. Five Points can conduct application design activities as standalone engagements or as integral parts of system development projects. Our design deliverables include high-level and detailed flowcharts and design narratives that define technical processes, algorithms, interfaces, modules, inputs, outputs, data stores, security, web considerations, reporting, and all other technical aspects of system design.
Five Points systems and programming staff use an iterative rapid development methodology to create IT systems. We code logic in modules and present them to clients for approval and refinement. Our system and programming staff works with our expert database, web, telecommunications, interface, security, and quality assurance technicians to quickly develop systems that are integrated, accessible, secure, and stringently meet our client’s requirements.

Application Maintenance

Five Points provides application maintenance services for installed or legacy systems, or for systems it develops. Maintenance includes break/fix support, ongoing support for new features, monitoring on-line systems, monitoring daily extracts or reports, ongoing help desk support, and client-specific customization. Maintenance contracts are backed by Service Level Agreements. Our clients use our help ticket system to report maintenance issues, which provides systematic problem reporting and ensures follow-up on all maintenance issues. If a defect is a warranty issue under contract we correct it at no charge to the client. Our clients report high levels of satisfaction with our application maintenance services.

Project Management

Five Points provides project management services for its system development projects or for other system development projects. We build project management offices for development projects that cover the full spectrum of planning, governance, project finances, system development life cycle, risk management, organizational change management, change control, schedule management, human resource allocation, and more. Five Points has highly experienced project managers on staff with technical and business domain knowledge and skills. We also place highly experienced project managers in established project management offices.

Training and Documentation

Five Points provides application training, or can set up application training for its clients. We develop training plans, materials, and schedules, arrange for facilities to be set up for training and deliver training. We can provide instructors for on-site face-to-face training, or remote training with live interactive application sessions accompanied by instructors using conference telephone calls. Five Points provides complete documentation for systems it develops. We will also document existing systems for our clients. System documentation includes flowcharts, narratives, and internal system documentation accompanying code. Our user documentation includes clear narratives in plain English accompanied with screenshots, flowcharts, diagrams, and call out boxes. User documentation is hyperlinked for ease of use, and is made available within applications for immediate access by users.

Hosting Services

Five Points uses the InterSystems Caché® product to develop and maintain web hosted applications. Caché enables rapid Web application development, extraordinary transaction processing speed, massive scalability, and real-time queries against transactional data with minimal maintenance and hardware requirements. Caché objects can be used with many popular development technologies including Java, .NET, C++, XML, and others. Caché is backed with 24x7 support, and is available for Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and Open VMS. Caché supports MultiValue development.

Business Process Reengineering

Five Points’ business analysts have many years experience reengineering child welfare, foster care, adult treatment, and adoptions business processes. Our deep experience qualifies us uniquely to provide BPR services in these business domains. We engineer value-added improvements into business processes that result in efficiencies in and across organizations and leverage IT resources to improve return on investment. Our focus on the goals and objectives of the business guides the development and use of supporting technology helping to control IT costs.

Quality Assurance

Five Points has dedicated Quality Assurance staff who are experienced in the business of child welfare, adult treatment, foster care and adoptions that conduct QA against deliverables from initial design through coding and implementation. Our philosophy is to QA deliverables as early as possible and continuously throughout the development process to reduce later costly rework. We thoroughly test business modules for correct business and technical functionality before releasing them for demonstrations to, or testing, by the client. The QA process is iterative and is synchronized to the development process so each time a deliverable is improved we provide another cycle of quality assurance activity. Testing is conducted against requirements traceability matrices to ensure all functionality meets the approved requirements of the client.

Staff Augmentation

Five Points has been in the business of staff augmentation since its inception and through its experience has developed timely and dependable channels for recruiting, screening, placing, and managing contractor staff. We also augment client staff with our permanent staff where appropriate. We provide consultants, technicians, and business domain experts on-site or remotely to meet client needs. We can quickly bring targeted technical expertise to bear in most areas of information technology. We can provide short term highly specialized skills to projects when needed. Our extremely strong and layered screening process ensures highest quality, appropriately skilled, and dependable human resources are available to client projects at the times they are needed.