The Process

Business Discovery

In all cases of application management, the initial phase is to determine the applications to be managed or migrated to a new platform.

The consultancy required is to understand the relationship between the applications in use in a company, and the application set designated to become the strategic supported portfolio. This takes the form of both automated and manual effort, including workshops with appropriate business unit owners to determine which applications are retained and which are retired or removed from the platform. Key to the success of this phase is a clear understanding of the target platform to determine compatibility, as well as an ability to negotiate with and understand the business requirements of the business stakeholders.

Application Discovery

This is the process of compiling the technical information required package a specific application. This includes investigation of any dependencies, interaction with technical contact to determine configuration options and documentation of all installation steps required to correctly configure the application during the packaging process. A detailed and accurate discovery process is essential to ensure application requirements are correctly identified.

Examples of the information required will be:

• Application name
• Application version
• Application target platform
• Location of source media and licence information (to allow installation)
• Technical contact(s)
• Business owner(s)
• UAT tester(s)

Packaging Mobilisation

Project Mobilisation is the process of understanding and implementing the customers detailed application packaging standards and requirements to ensure high quality, accurate packages are created for the duration of any packaging engagement. This event happens at the commencement of a packaging service or programme.

Application Packaging

The collected Technical discovery information and source media are used as a base to generate the package.

This stage involves converting the source media into a fully configured MSI package or Virtualised application. This includes applying any configuration or customisation in addition to any customer-specific corporate standards. The application packaging covers the application conversion of software media and installation instructions to a “package” that can be deployed onto relevant target platform. 

QA

High quality, ‘right first time’ packages are a top priority for ECS to ensure that our customer expectations and deadlines are met. To achieve this, a 2-stage process is employed, the first of which is the QA stage.

Verification

Once a package has been ‘passed’ by the QA team it is sent for Verification. The verification process involves a functional test of the application package within the customer-specific virtual replica environment.

User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

This test ensures that both the package and the application itself function as expected by the business. UAT should be completed by application owners that are familiar with the correct functionality and configuration, and have the business authority to sign off an application package as fit for purpose. Due to the user interaction and testing required during the UAT process this stage is usually carried out from within a central customer site.