Professional Services

Our teams are experts in digital case management. We use best-of-breed technologies including open source and open standards based approaches. We have invested substantial resources in tools that allow us to rapidly prototype, deploy and configure flexible, secure, Government-strength solutions.

We are proud of our track record in delivering an overall reduction of up to 50% in customer project costs.

Optimising Outreach For Government

Even before the award of a project we will work with you to target the right approach to the delivery of your Digital by Default services. First, we will help you explore what technology choice you look to adopt – Is it a commercial off-the-shelf product or is a bespoke software development the way to go? We then help you explore the different development methodologies you could utilise:

1. Agile - an iterative approach that follows Government Digital Service (GDS) Discovery-Alpha-Beta-Live standards. This allows room for change during a project, gives flexibility to arrive at a viable product through working closely with the customer(s) and gives transparency and control over expenditure.

2. Agile+ - A synthesis of Agile and PRINCE2 to manage and govern projects. This approach builds on core Agile development principles to prioritise and mitigate risks of non-digital project dependencies and address the total project lifecycle. This Approach is also known as Agile Project Management and we believe this to be the right choice for many projects.

3. Waterfall - The traditional approach to configuration and development of software applications.

Delivering Your Project

Once you have asked us to help deliver your project we will work through a methodology which includes the following four distinct phases:

1. Discovery, including project initiation and requirements validation.

2. Main implementation which includes UAT and usability testing.

3. Final assurance and preparation for go-live.

4. On-going PRINCE2 risk management

Within each phase, and especially during implementation, we typically work with 1 to 4 week sprint cycles giving our customers the opportunity to review and input at the end of each cycle.

In the initial discovery phase we will get under the hood of your requirements by working with your business subject matter experts through exploration workshops; we will validate existing requirements, identify anything that has been missed and understand how you want to work during the project. To help in your decision making process we will immediately create a prototype to help your team understand exactly what they want screen by screen. We believe this helps really visualise what you are agreeing to and avoids potential confusion and delays later in the project

Stories and Epics

From the output of the discovery workshops we will turn your requirements into Agile stories and epics. We will work with you to define priorities based on your business requirements, our risk assessments and create the Backlog; a prioritised list of requirements for the project.

Sprint

Following that, we work in sprint cycles of typically 1 to 4 weeks each, at the end of which we conduct a workshop review, demonstrate changes and get user feedback. This can include:

Delivery of a revised version of the system, containing additional configuration items. This will already have been tested by our QA test staff and your teams who will then have the opportunity to review and carry out your own assurance as the system is configured and to feed back to Toplevel on the new configuration.

Jointly working with the product owner to re-prioritise the remaining Backlog items, thus keeping the Backlog under continuous joint review, which in turn allows for:

The prioritisation of items to change during the project. For example it may be realised that some lower priority (optional) items are preferred to others that were originally higher priority and so requirements may be flexibly changed by joint agreement.

PRINCE2 - End To End

To ensure the smooth delivery of every client solution, all our project managers are skilled in internationally recognised PRINCE2 standards. They will conduct on-going risk management and assessment throughout the project on key dependencies and identify issues that are sometimes missed until later in the process in Agile deployments. This mitigates the risk of scope creep, associated delays and additional costs.

 On-Going Testing

Our test staff are ISEB trained testing specialists and carry out testing from the start of the project including the initial requirements gathering stage. We believe this ensures a quality deliverable for our customers. Our approach includes:

• Release roll-out plans are used and tested when implementing changes into any test areas.

• Design defects are mitigated by testers reviewing development specifications. This ensures tests can be considered and planned from the outset.

• Test environments used are separated from ‘live’.

• All testing is undertaken in the UK by UK nationals.

• Test Data is anonymised where necessary.

Fast Prototyping

This is a real advantage of the Toplevel approach. Our team are able to provide rapid prototyping from as early as the discovery phase. For projects where Outreach Design Studio is being used simple prototypes can be delivered in hours and customers are able to accelerate the production of full project prototyping timescales, cutting delivery times from months to weeks.

Collaboration

We work collaboratively with in-house teams. We have a strong track record of working with multi-disciplinary teams including client staff and staff from their other suppliers. We are also flexible in terms of working remotely using modern tele- and video-conferencing or as a fully or partially co-located team.

Additional Services

We offer a number of optional value added services to help our customers

• Agile Education - Where customer staff involved in the project are unfamiliar with Agile, we can deliver an overview of the processes, principles and ways of working and what will normally be expected of them.

• Outreach Jumpstart - For customers familiar with our Outreach COTS product and just want a helping hand about learning how to get the best out of Outreach, we offer Jumpstart. This is a bespoke onsite service based on your needs where we could help you to:

  • Produce working prototypes or design and implement integrations.

  • Understand how Outreach modules that you have not used before could be used - the authentication and registration module or the document publishing facilities for example.

• Total Solution Management - We can manage the entirety of the project to include management of other suppliers (e.g Security audits and penetration testing).

• On-premise extra - Delivery teams can help customers specify infrastructure requirements and best practices around third party software configuration (firewall ports etc).

• Support for installation and setup of Outreach.

Our People And Experience

• 75+ projects delivered over the last 15 years

• All our project managers are skilled in PRINCE2 standards, and are experienced Agile Scrum Masters.

• QA test staff are ISEB trained and certified.