The expanding footprint of BSG (Africa)

Due to the success BSG (Africa) has experienced in the South African market, BSG (Africa) has endeavoured to expand its footprint. This prompted a venture into the UK market where BSG has worked on projects across the financial, construction and education industries through our UK brand operation, BSG (UK)*.

Our success is largely due to the model we employ. BSG is a company that is strongly delivery and deadline focused. Key to this is ensuring our clients understand the end-to-end delivery process in detail, supported by frequent visible releases to the customer, ensuring every day spent on the project impacts the client's bottom line.

We have a strong UK team equipped with the skills and competencies to deliver and manage our UK projects. Our team is highly skilled with expertise in business analysis, project and change management and technical architecture. BSG currently focuses development efforts on the Microsoft and Java platforms. The BSG (UK) Business Solutions team works with our client's own project team to co-create future processes that meet their business requirements while leveraging their existing solutions and technology infrastructure. After the real detail has been uncovered during this journey, BSG will help translate the vision into a reality by working with the BSG (Africa) Software Solutions team who, as a broader team, have many years experience working together.

The transition from design to development is overcome by our distributed development framework which ensures that the BSG project delivery team:

* Works with the client's stakeholders to fully understand the requirements

* Seeks to resolve ambiguity to meet those requirements

* Manages the development work using configuration management tools to provide world-class quality deliverables

* Engages with the project board continuously to ensure expectations are managed

* Minimises and mitigates project risks to achieve project goals

Our approach enables the analysts in the UK to work closely with the client and the development team in defining, developing, testing and reviewing their requirements.

Our clients are able to enjoy the peace of mind that their solution is being defined, developed and managed by a delivery partner with a similar culture, language and operating in similar time zones. This facilitates effective and efficient communication, helping to realise the project objectives. With this approach, BSG ensures that the client achieves value from project initiation through to implementation.

On a recent project for a leading UK construction company, BSG (UK) was contracted to assist in defining the requirements for a management information system. The project objectives were to provide timely, meaningful and complete information through reports in order to help the client assess their alignment to strategic goals and to implement corrective measures where required.

BSG (UK) was engaged on the project to help the client understand its current context, determine areas of innovation and consolidate its business requirements. Once the business requirements were specified, BSG (UK) worked with the client to ensure those requirements were translated into the cohesive functional design of the solution. The BSG (Africa) Software Solutions Delivery team was then brought onboard, working from South Africa, to develop the solution.

The client had this to say about BSG, our approach and the way we communicate:

"Thanks for your efforts to resolve the issues; it looks as though the approach to resolving the problems has been of great benefit to all parties. To be honest, it's a breath of fresh air dealing with you guys. Things go wrong with every project but what has been really frustrating for us in the past is that it takes forever to get a follow-up on issues. Being able to speak directly with you made trouble-shooting a lot easier and quicker."

At BSG, our philosophy is to uncover the detail of the problem before attempting to solve it, which is why we have locally-based business analysts. This means our clients can be confident that their business problems are thoroughly understood and because of the unique ability of the BSG analyst to think with both business and technology in the same brain, BSG are able to translate an understanding into functional specifications for our software development teams.

From a software development perspective, BSG Software Solutions Delivery therefore profoundly challenges the perception that building software solutions to meet organisations unique needs is an expensive and risky option.

BSG passionately believes that where appropriate, building a solution, or in certain cases building components around a packaged solution, allows businesses to use technology to stand out in a growing competitive global market - allowing BSG to help create that difference.

On a project with an Australian-based online gaming company, BSG was requested to extend the client's current gaming system and integrate this extension into their existing solution. The existing system was already implemented at a number of sites, so this presented a challenge to the team: upgrading the current system while minimising the disruption to the utilisation of the current system.

In addition, the new system could not deviate significantly from the current system to avoid disrupting the user's gaming experience and performance. The project requirements were to allow real-time updates, scalability, security and availability, and the functional requirements had to comply with government-specified regulations.

The BSG (Africa) Software Solutions Delivery team ensured that communication with the client was concise and effective. This involved reviewing screen designs and final code releases with the client technical team. Besides the technical challenges in this project, the practicalities of communicating across an eight-hour time difference were a test of BSG's distributed development approach.

Managing the project according to a sound methodology ensured that all the requirements were gathered and translated into appropriate detailed design documents which were reviewed thoroughly and agreed with the client stakeholders. The BSG (Africa) Software Solutions Delivery team used an iterative development approach to ensure consistent client collaboration in the development lifecycle.

Quality and governance of our projects are managed by our Projects Office, which is PRINCE2 aligned, ensuring the quality of our work is always on par with, if not superior to, global industry standards. This alleviates many concerns typically associated with offshore projects.

By following our distributed development methodology, the team delivered an extended, integrated solution to the Australian-based client that met their functional and project requirements, and was of world-class quality.

All through the project lifecycle, BSG works with our client's project team to ensure that analytical and software development deliverables meet the agreed quality criteria and BSG liases with the BSG (Africa) Software Solutions Delivery teams to facilitate cost-effective and high quality delivery from the software development process.

For a solution to be successful, it should carry on delivering to the business stakeholders; hence BSG (UK), in partnership with BSG (Africa), provides post-implementation on-the-ground support, change management, user training and application support services to ensure our client's technology keeps on going to work each day and keeps on providing real benefit to the business.

On a project with a Nigerian Bank, BSG was approached to consider how the existing core-banking platform could be optimally utilised. The widely used existing platform integrated both retail and corporate banking with an easy-to-use graphical user interface. The team had identified that none of the bank's existing processes had been reviewed or innovated when the new technology was implemented.

The users had to create unnecessary workarounds to make the new technology work with the existing processes. The technology offered the users the ability to see consolidated client views, but the bank was not utilising this unique functionality. The technology was therefore not being used to its full capability.

The BSG team provided technical assistance and expertise on the development of an automated workflow solution for many of the bank's business processes in the customer loans, advances and overdrafts functions. The BSG team ensured a reduction in delivery time and impact on the current system by using components of an existing package which the bank had already been utilising.

This meant the bank's staff already had the necessary maintenance skills and that the bank did not need to invest in new technologies or licences.

Development followed a phased approach, with regular deliveries to the client for testing to ensure process improvements were reviewed as early as possible. The last part of the project entailed the BSG team spending a week on site in Nigeria facilitating final user acceptance testing and user training with the client project team. The Nigerian Bank values its partnership with BSG and had requested that BSG review the quality of the implementation process, and provide guidance where necessary on an on-going basis to continue to help add value to the business.

BSG provides the client with world-class solutions anywhere in the world by following well documented and managed processes, utilising effective communication methods and project controls. Leveraging off the experience gained in various distributed development projects that span multiple industries, BSG is able to provide value to the client from business analysis all the way to system implementation and support, making the client's technology go to work for them everyday of the project and beyond.

*(Not to be confused with BSG plc, a shareholder of BSG (Africa).