Delivering results in client engagements
GGA recognizes that an essential part of program management involves assembling diverse groups of people and organizations into an effective team. With years of experience working with some of the world’s largest corporations, GGA's knows that, to meet its clients’ needs, it must be able to work effectively within today’s environment of complex reporting relationships and dynamic organizational change.
Effective program management requires the ability to work closely with the client to respond to the client’s evolving priorities and needs. GGA's team has proven its ability to steer entire programs forward in real-world settings that have included all of the challenges that can occur in corporate IT, including budget constraints, shifting priorities, changing requirements, and client reorganizations. GGA has deep experience in the software and database development fields and has overseen dozens of successful client engagements, often lasting for years and spanning multiple parallel activities. GGA's project managers have extensive experience leading commercial software development teams that support multiple products simultaneously, including suites of integrated workflow applications and testing of myriad products in a company’s portfolio. Many of GGA's senior technical professionals have also acquired years of experience working with specific clients on multiple projects. GGA's low staff turnover also helps to assure continuity on projects even in highly dynamic client environments.
An example of the service that GGA can provide to the client organization when working on an entire program occurred at a large pharmaceutical company that has retained GGA to serve as the primary development organization for its cheminformatics systems. Each of the legacy products is managed within the client by a different team and supports a diverse set of scientists within the company. These applications must interoperate, but in the past the decisions about which application needed to change to accommodate the other applications often resulted in political and funding struggles between the different project teams and produced technically unsatisfactory results. Now that GGA is responsible for the engineering for all the applications, the teams have found that it is easier to refer the problem to GGA to propose and create the best technical solution with a unified vision.
Another example illustrates GGA's abilities to work with diverse groups in large organizations. As part of one client engagement, GGA was asked to take over responsibility for the ongoing development of a commercial application that had originally been created by the client’s field support group. Both the field support and development groups were independently enhancing the original code base, and the client ran the serious risk of breaking every customization with each new release of the product. GGA was able to work effectively with the client's development and field organizations to create a project model that allowed the client to rapidly incorporate features created by its field support staff into the product while at the same time ensuring that these new features were engineered to be compatible with future product releases and to meet the client’s stringent product development standards. GGA provided full-service engineering, including development, quality assurance, technical writing, and build and release engineering, while sharing the source code with the field support organization and merging field innovations into the product after careful code review and testing.