Our Open Implementation Philosophy Explained

Optimising initiatives through the exploitation of best practices

January 2012, MONETICAL presented at a British Computer Society working group its white paper titled: Our Open Project Implementation Philosophy. As MONETICAL now embarks on the dramatic expansion of the underlying capabilities of its 360° digital consulting service (becomes fully integrated with Google Gemini), building extensively on the principles discussed over a decade ago, it would like give its readers an opportunity to discover how MONETICAL has consistently been striving to use various statical models to leverage historical data in the pursuit of optimising a wide range of organisational tasks. Today, organisation can gain access to the right expertise at 5th of cost of traditional firms by exploiting best practices. (Click here to see a patent application of one such use case).

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Introduction

At Monetical we’re fully committed to granting initiative sponsors, owners and their teams unrivalled access to the right resources and knowledge to succeed. A cornerstone of our philosophy is the capturing of past and current unstructured implementation experience, then converting it into structured knowledge. It is then published to the community of registered Monetical subscribers. Helping them optimise the design, development and deployment (release) of their initiative more efficiently as they leverage the emerging best practices, repurpose existing requirements and specifications. Dramatically reducing risk & optimising project schedules, which collectively reduce implementation costs & improve ROI.

Community Philosophy & Collaboration

Open Source is driven by a community philosophy and collaboration, leading to better software code emerging. (Wikipedia) The Monetical 360 extends this community philosophy and collaboration approach to include initiative requirements management and software engineering implementation tasks, i.e. the actual project mgt activities (ceremonies) and the solutions that emerge. This results in gaining access to know-how about features and capabilities, which otherwise could only be acquired at considerable cost from 3rd parties, e.g. System Integrators. At the core of its open community philosophy lies a repository storing three three types of structured knowledge. Source code, stories & solutions.

Implementation Roadmap

Product Owners and Business Analysts won’t find a more efficient way to define their product backlog than using Monetical 360. The repository of predefined Open Stories™ accessible through a predefined sprint roadmap board, brings everything together for review and any necessary tailoring during Iterative (sprint) Planning. Also provides the ability to identify and promote quality assurance practices, reduce the learning curve and testing of new capabilities.

Open Source

Open Source consists of a Monetical Source and Revision Control System (SVN) and the supply of associated source code.

Source Code
Monetical subscribers gain access to the actual source code, which has been developed for production from past projects by Monetical Consulting Staff or its community members.

Source Control
A free of charge SVN account is provided to each registered Monetical subscriber, therefore removing the need for organisations to invest in their own software code management system for a potentially highly distributed and hybrid project team.

Project Wiki
Facilitating collaboration across the entire community is at the centre of everything Monetical does. Collaboration is fuelled by the availability of the Monetical Wiki - used to present the MONETICAL User Guide and large volumes of project related knowledge, e.g. best practices and project implementation guidelines, templates and examples.

As a wiki, every member of the community is encouraged to make a contribution, therefore, constantly increasing the quality and the range topics of the structured project knowledge with each new implementation.

Open Stories™

Open Stories is the component of the MONETICAL structured knowledge (i.e. consulting advice). As the figure above indicates, in additional to available Open Source components three additional components make-up each Open Story.

Project Experience
Open Stories describe a collection of recommended project tasks based on past project experience. This hierarchical collection of tasks (coding, research, admin and documentation etc) all relate to the successful implementation of a specific project requirement (e.g. DocBook integration, hardware deployment and configuration, data migration (ETL) or PDF generation). The true value of Open Stories is the associated relative implementation estimates provided with each task (story points) and the links they contain introducing additional supporting material (e.g. Wikis, Blogs and other websites).

Best Practices (capability assessments)
The ability to constantly health-check the teams implementation approach (benchmark against best practices, checklists, surveys and guidelines) allow project owners to rapidly analyse their capability and plan the most appropriate corrective measures to deal with short term risks within the current project.

Community Support
At Monetical we recognise software and IT implementations can be challenging, and with a vast amount of unstructured information out there on the web, Team often spend hours tracking down the right piece of information to solve a particular implementation challenge, understand in greater detail a core piece of technology or details on how to best employ Agile methodology on your project. MONETICAL community support feature consists of the following repositories:

Tools: 3rd party technology and modules
Forums: wikis, blogs and discussion forums
Recommended 3rd party training and consultancy

The ease of access ensures that this vital source of information either created from MONETICAL led projects or a specific Technology, is available in an efficient manner to all MONETICAL subscribers . The Community Support feature is also a significant contributor to the body of knowledge providing on-demand support where necessary in a direct, organised and easy to access format.

Open Solutions™

Open Solutions deliver industry specific Add-ons for specific technology products, services and applications. These Add-ons are true low cost alternatives to developing custom code. Each Open Solution consist of production quality software code, documentation and an array of additional capabilities to optimise implementation.

Test Scripts
MONETICAL supplied Test Scripts exploit Apache JMeter, a Java desktop application designed to load test functional behaviour and measure performance. Each published Testing Strategy document is accompanied with the associated JMeter test scripts (XML config files). Thus saving each project valuable time and helping the community develop a set of best practice testing scenarios.

Documentation
Where necessary the MONETICAL team has produced End User and Technical Documentation in the form of a Wiki, which enables constant improving, by allowing new authors and reviewers to make a contribution.

S&M Agreements
Annual MONETICAL subscribers gain access to the entire Monetical repository, which includes source-code and a license to use the solutions for the duration of such Consulting Agreement. Otherwise, organisations gain free-of-cost access to the MONETICAL Agile ALM capabilities and high-level Open Story™ descriptions (i.e. implementation estimates only, not the individual tasks of source code)

Licensing
An additional charge may be applied where the solution includes a 3rd party tool or product. Alternatively, customers that don’t have an active annual Agreement with MONETICAL may acquire individual solutions, applications or products, which are supplied with tailored terms of use and charging model.