Plan/Review Technology and Product Roadmaps: INSTEP staff routinely works with senior product and technology client staff in planning and reviewing technology and product roadmaps for soundness, timeliness, appropriate use of COTS and open source technologies driven by the business requirements for the application.

Cloud and Hybrid Architecture Reviews: INSTEP staff routinely perform architectural reviews for Cloud-based applications and/or hybrid (On-premise and Cloud) applications for factors such as scalability, reliability, performance, cost and security. In addition, attention is paid to DevOps and efficient/effective source code management in a hybrid world.

Technology Evaluation and Selection: All product efforts require decisions to be made about key technologies based on business drivers and current/future team skills. We define and execute on a technology evaluation and selection process, including the assembling of a team, definition of technology requirements, identification of candidate technologies, definition of selection criteria, evaluation of candidate technologies against the criteria and delivery of fact-based recommendations of technologies. Our technology areas of expertise include: programming languages and frameworks, security, workflow, database/data analytics, reporting, AI/ML, Cloud infrastructure, PaaS, policy management engines, UI frameworks, DevOps and managed operations, Agile process tools.

Technical Debt Management: All products incur technical debt as a result of time to market expediency, aging products or rapid technology advances. INSTEP staff support technical teams in understanding, tracking and systematically retiring technical debt.

Managed Operations: Today’s cloud-based applications require a level of visibility and management of all operational aspects of an application at the network, infrastructure and application levels. Our services in this area support the planning and review of application SLAs and the processes, tools, personnel and metrics used to manage production applications at scale.

Customer Success Management (CSM): Cloud-based applications are driven by rapid learning from customer experiences and product usage. Our services in this area focus on the proper instrumentation of a product to gain key customer and user insights, as well as the tools and practices used to harness those insights in actionable improvements in product features and end user experiences. Careful attention is paid to the role of customer success manager in the organization.

Agile Organizational Structure, Processes, Tools and Personnel: We live in the age of lean and agile development where all competitive technologies companies are building and evolving products at incredible speed driven by customer engagement and rapid learning. Our services in this area focus on successfully using agile methods to gain competitive advantage and include a focus on process and role definition, tool support and training.