Rational's professional services are based on years of experience helping software developers. Our worldwide staff of consultants brings deep skills and experience to help you improve your team's software development capability and maximize the return on your investment in IBM Rational tools and best practices.
Our skilled consultants can work with you to identify the highest-value development practices for your project, educate your team on their practical application, and accelerate their adoption while minimizing disruption to ongoing projects.
To learn more about how Rational professional services can help you with custom consulting and mentoring, private (onsite) classroom training, short-term assistance, and service offerings, please contact your local IBM Rational account team. To locate your local IBM Rational account team, please visit the directory of worldwide contacts.
Custom Consulting and Mentoring
You can engage Rational professional services on large-scale customized consulting projects that are tailored to meet the unique needs of your organization. Custom consulting services include a project management component to ensure that activities are carefully planned and that team milestones are met.
Private (Onsite) Classroom Training
Rational professional services can deliver private classroom training at your facility. This saves you money by eliminating travel and hotel expenses. Courses can be tailored to meet the unique needs and challenges of your organization. Private Onsite Training allows you greater flexibility and control and thus stronger results.
Short-Term Assistance
You can also engage your local IBM Rational account team for short-term assistance with a single problem to keep your project on track.
Service Offerings
In addition to custom consulting and short-term assistance, IBM Rational also offers several types of "packaged" service offerings that embody the experience of our most senior consultants:
 | Assessment services provide an objective assessment of your software development capabilities. |
| Deployment services deploy a new tool or methodology to your organization or project team. |
| Workshops help you produce tangible assets through a collaborative approach. |
Assessment services provide you with an independent evaluation of your software development capability. An assessment service can range in type and scope from addressing your entire software development organization to a single software project. Rational also offers specially targeted assessments that focus on a single problematic aspect of software development, such as the collection of project metrics or the administration of your software assets. Our team performs an in-depth assessment of your specific circumstances, processes, and/or development environment, and gives you the objective third-party insight and recommendations you need to make sound decisions on how to move ahead.
The types of assessment services available today are:
- Software Capability Assessments
- ClearCase Administration Assessment
- Metrics Assessment
- Development Organization Transformation (DOTA) Assessment
- Software Quality Assurance (SQA) Assessment
- Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Implementation Assessment
- Build Forge Deployment Assessment
Software Capability Assessments
IBM Rational has several software capability assessment services; which one you choose depends on the desired scope of the assessment. All of our software capability assessments, however, follow the same general flow of activities, regardless of scope. The assessment team begins the process by seeking to understand your business model and business objectives. The assessors will then: interview various members of your development staff; review the development environment, practices, and project artifacts; analyze the findings; formulate recommendations for improvement in terms of the expected impact on business results; and present the documented findings and recommendations to key stakeholders.
You can choose any of the following types of software capability assessments, depending on your needs:
One-Day Assessment Service - Conducted and delivered in one day, this brief assessment service is designed to scan a single team's development practices to quickly identify areas for improvement. Single Project Assessment Service - Assesses the practices of a single project team at a single location. It is typically conducted and delivered over the course of a week, with two IBM Rational consultants. Distributed Project Assessment - Assesses geographically dispersed teams where the teams (often different companies) may be using different tool sets and processes, yet developing components of the same system. Depending on the scope, this type of assessment can take several assessors and several weeks to complete. Organizational Assessment - Assesses multi-project organizations. A line-of business is one example, where lines-of-business are defined as organizational entities composed of multiple projects that share common business goals. Depending on the scope, this type of assessment can take several assessors and several weeks to complete.
ClearCase Administration Assessment
This assessment service consists of a set of clearly defined diagnostics and evaluations to discern the current state and areas for improvement for your Rational ClearCase environment. It includes: an environment and topology analysis; procedures evaluation, including crisis recovery procedures; VOB "health check" for database integrity, database-to-pool consistency, and VOB hyperlink health; view maintenance check; performance evaluation; and a summary report of the assessment findings and recommendations.
Metrics Assessment
With this assessment service, an IBM Rational consultant will perform a situational analysis of your project's progress and quality measurements. Based on this analysis, the assessor will provide recommendations to help you reduce the risk of schedule slippage or missing features by enabling your team to better understand the actual state of the software project throughout development.
Development Organization Transformation (DOTA) Assessment
This modular service offering provides guidance, templates, and resources for performing Development Organization Transformation (DOTA) Assessments. Use it to assess large programs, lines of business, or a development organization at an enterprise level, with a focus on System Engineering (including software, hardware, and infrastructure), Project and Program Management (PPM), Business Integration, and Subcontractor Management.
Software Quality Assurance (SQA) Assessment
This assessment provides guidance, templates, and resources for conducting a Software Quality Assurance (SQA) assessment for your organization. You should use a SQA Assessment when evaluating the quality of software development in your organization, with a focus on determining your initial level of software quality in order to guide you to a higher level of thorough testing best practices.
Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Implementation Assessment
This assessment provides guidance, templates and resources for assessing your current Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) practices. This will allow an IBM Rational consultant to recommend the most effective Rational Portfolio Manager (RPM) deployment and PPM consulting services, which will focus on those process areas that will deliver the greatest business value to you.
Build Forge Deployment Assessment
This assessment provides long-term mentorship and service for customers who see value in a deeper relationship with an IBM Build Forge technology team. During the assessment, an IBM technical consultant will be on-site at your location for 2 full days per quarter to review the performance of the existing Build Forge implementation, provide product update and roadmap information, and suggest areas for improvement in your environment.
Deployment services provide a clearly defined road map for implementing industry-standard software development methodologies using Rational tools. These service offerings combine planning, consulting, training, and mentoring to provide a proven method for successfully deploying Rational products and effective software development practices to your team or organization.
Each deployment service offering follows a defined set of activities, beginning with deployment planning in coordination with a designated project manager from your team. Then, with the assistance of your IT department, the computing environment is assessed to determine where each of the software components should be installed for optimum performance, and these decisions are captured in a specification report.
Next, the usage model (the manner in which the tools and practices are to be used to meet your team's needs) is defined and documented, and the tools are installed and configured according the decisions made thus far. The new environment is then made available to end-users, who are trained on basic operations and mentored as they begin to use the new tools and processes in their daily work. After your team has used the new environment for at least 30 days, an IBM Rational consultant will return to your facilities to assess how your team is doing and, if problems are found, recommend solutions to help you realize the full benefits of the Rational solution.
IBM Rational offers the deployment services for the following products:
- Rational ClearCase
- ClearCaseLT
- ClearCaseMultiSite
- Rational ClearQuest
- ClearQuestMultiSite
- ClearQuest/RequisitePro Integration
- Rational ProjectConsole
- Rational RequisitePro
- Rational Rose
- Rational RoseRT
- Rose to RSA Migration
- Rose to RSM Migration
- Rational Unified Process (RUP)
- Rational Unified Process for Systems Engineering (RUP SE)
- RUP Project Deployment
- Rational UCM (Unified Change Management)
- XDE to RSA Migration
- XDE to RSM Migration
- Rational Portifolio Manager
- Rational Functional Tester
- Rational Software Architect
- Rational Software Modeler
- Rational Manual Tester
- Business Driven Development for Compliance
- Build Forge
- Rational Asset Manager
- Rational Solution Deployment for SOA Software Development – Financial Systems
- Rational Solution Deployment for SOA Software Development – Governance
- Rational Model Driven Development
- Rational Systems Developer
Workshops are a special type of service offering that are intended to produce tangible assets for your organization through a collaborative approach. Workshops are facilitated by senior Rational consultants who can guide your team through building the shared understanding needed to make decisions. Workshops can range in type and scope from prioritizing your software development initiatives and establishing a management strategy for your software projects to a custom workshop for producing a set of deliverables for a single project, such as business or system use cases.
Software Management Strategy Workshop
This workshop is designed to promote consensus among the decision makers associated with any significant software initiative. Senior IBM Rational consultants serve in the role of objective third-party software industry experts to facilitate the workshop. Workshop participants are guided through a situational assessment, aimed at gaining a common understanding of business priorities, constraints, and the current approach to software project management. Next, participants are lead through a consensus-building exercise to gain agreement on priorities for your particular software initiative, in light of modern software economics and principles for successful software management.
The goal is to gain agreement on priorities and move the software management strategy forward. IBM Rational will make recommendations to improve the initiative's chances for success, based on many years of experience introducing modern software development technologies and management practices to a wide variety of organizations.
Build Forge Optimization Workshop
This workshop is designed to provide a detailed analysis of a single build and release process, or a well-defined set of such processes. This process may or may not be currently implemented within the Build Forge product. As such, this workshop is appropriate for both new customers as well as customers that are more experienced.
During this workshop, an IBM technical consultant will be on-site at your location to serve as an objective third-party industry expert to facilitate the workshop. Workshop participants are guided through a whiteboard session to help define the overall requirements, the various systems that are part of, and the major logical steps, of the process. Work that is more detailed will then be conducted in those areas, which appear to require significant processing time; especially steps involving check- in, check-out, labeling, and view creation within a commercial source control system or steps that compile or deploy large blocks of source code. Wherever possible, the IBM technical consultant will look to obtain actual processing times for these key steps to accurately identify areas where improvement can be gained.
Upon completing the workshop, the IBM technical consultant will produce a document that details the understanding of the current process and a set of technical recommendations for optimizing that process. The optimization will span efficiencies specific to Build Forge, as well as, other optimizations not strictly covered within the Build Forge adaptive framework.
The goal is to gain agreement on processes and a set of technical recommendations for optimizing the processes.
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