Developed over the course of 20+ years, our Flex6™ process is designed to deliver projects on time and on budget all the while creating meaningful and positive relationships with project stakeholders.

Six Feet Up's "On time, on budget and on cloud nine" Process

01. VISUALIZE

As in every human venture, the project can only succeed with the right players. We start all engagements with an initial conversation to go over the 5 key elements of your project: success definition, constraints, expertise needed, timeframe and funding. This helps determine if we are the right partner or if we can refer you to a group that will be a better fit. 

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02. STRATEGIZE

We leverage our "Gray Hair" counselors' decades of expertise to provide forward-thinking technical strategy and practical feasibility studies.

Strategic Insights

Technology is merely a mean to an end, which is why it makes sense to start by reviewing where we want to go (and why) first, and work backwards from there. The Vision Builder™ Workshop is designed to get all stakeholders on the same page, united in a common vision and ready to row in the same direction.

In a 90 minute session, we explore dangers and opportunities, key outcomes, success criteria, capacity gaps, critical timeline, and budget constraints for the project. We clarify how success will be measured. We discuss how we will collaborate together to make your vision a reality.

Research

If you need to prove your business idea can work and is viable, we can build a simple "proof of concept (POC)" to mitigate the investment risk. The POC can help stakeholders understand the opportunities as well as the limitations of the system.

If you are considering an acquisition, we can conduct a pre-investment review and leverage our industry knowledge to provide some perspective and advice on the technological assets. To this end, we can perform a code review, participate in due diligence conversations, and generally help sort between the hype and the facts.

03. PLAN

Whether reimplementing an existing system or kicking off a new project, the Planning phase helps clarify the requirements, outline priorities and constraints, and get all stakeholders on the same page. 

The Planning phase consists of the following steps:

  • Outline desired outcomes, success metric criteria, and constraints
  • Define the most appropriate technical approach
  • Document the requirements, including such things as user-facing features, expected scalability and reliability, inputs and outputs, authentications, workflows, calculations, data storage, and browser and OS support
  • Break the work down in bite size units
  • Develop a Complexity Scorecard™ that highlights the complexity of each unit by estimating the difficulty, uncertainty and effort needed to complete the work
  • Present the Plan to Six Feet Up's Architect Guild for a sanity check
  • Finalize the scope of work based on cost and priority
  • Develop a Project Plan with resource quantity, timeline and budget

The final deliverable is a Peer-Reviewed Game Plan – a comprehensive roadmap that documents the approach, features, functionality, and capabilities of the new system.

Once the Plan is approved, we identify the Impact Team™, i.e. the engineers who are best suited to work on the project based on their skillset, industry-experience, interests and personality assessments ("EQ+IQ").

04. CO-CREATE

Two decades of software development projects have taught us that the following 7 elements are key to ensure projects are on track, and to facilitate support in the long run:

The Right People

  • We foster passion by aligning skillset, interests and conative scores with project needs
  • We bring in SMEs from other teams when necessary
  • We reach out to experts in the tech community if needed

Working Together

  • We host daily engineering standups, giving our clients access to our "Collective Wisdom"
  • We support each other and our clients via messages and pair-programming
  • We schedule regular design reviews and knowledge transfers
  • We engage and support the open-source community

Documenting What's Important

  • We believe in ticket-driven development
  • We track time spent vs time planned
  • We document code, processes and architecture

Keeping Everybody in the Know

  • We host weekly Pulse Meetings with our clients
  • We report progress on KPIs weekly via a Progress Chart and a Pulse Report
  • We host project reviews (Pit Stops) at regular intervals to correct course if necessary
  • We ask for candid feedback as part of our 5-Star Guarantee

Using SDLC Best Practices

  • We formulate a design before beginning implementation
  • We encourage atomic commits and short-lived branches
  • We run unit tests in our CI/CD pipelines
  • We review and merge code through pull requests
  • We validate business requirements through UAT

And Strong Security Standards

  • We maintain and regularly update our internal Security Policy document
  • We use the Principle of Least Privilege
  • We enforce permission-based access to source control
  • We manage secrets carefully
  • We track metrics, manage queries, and get alerts of logs using analytics tools
  • We set up automated security checks through our CI/CD pipelines 

05. LAUNCH

We increase release velocity and reliability through continuous integration and deployment:

  • We track code base changes and resolve conflicts by using Source code management (SCM)
  • We ensure reproducibility and security/compliance by provisioning infrastructure through IaC frameworks
  • We reduce the complexity of managing/scaling clusters by using container orchestration to deploy applications
  • We automate build creation, tests, environment provisioning and security scans via Continuous Integration
  • We set up Alerting with intelligent filtering and escalation thresholds

In addition to our commitment to best practices, we adopt a "Mission Control" approach to every launch, whereby experts on the team stay ready to jump in and assist if need be.

We conclude every launch by hosting a 360º Retrospective meeting with key members of the project. This is an opportunity to celebrate and go over lessons learned.

06. OPTIMIZE

We offer flexible support options that include ongoing as well as emergency assistance. You may mix and match to fit your needs:

Continuous Innovation™

The Continuous Innovation retainer is for organizations who are planning on getting assistance on a regular basis. It is defined as follows:

  • We guarantee “x” number of hours to be available to you each month.
  • Lead time may be anytime from 1 day to 1 week as we fit the work in our schedule as we go
  • Up to one month's worth of hours may roll into the following month.
  • Work is to be scheduled during normal business hours
  • You can borrow hours from subsequent months.
  • Minimum: 30h/month

Emergency Support

The Emergency Support plan guarantees a two-hour response time and offers peace of mind. It includes the possibility to contact Six Feet Up after business hours. The hours are “use-it-or-lose-it”.

On-Demand Support

Flexible and convenient, the On-Demand Support option doesn’t require any commitment but is subject to availability. It is defined as follows:

  • ‘Urgent Support’ is for work that requires attention in fewer than 8 business hours
  • ‘Scheduled Support’ is for anything that can be handled in more than 8 business hours

The On-Demand Support option comes with the following terms:

  • Response time is not guaranteed as access to engineers depends on availability
  • Support is billed in one-hour increments.
  • Payment in full is required prior to the start of the work.

No matter which support option you choose, our Flight Control Team is here to look after your system.

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