Continuous Improvement

Continuous Improvement is one of our cornerstone founding principles.

Like most health care providers, your business climate, programs, organisational structure and funding sources are constantly changing. In the spirit of the old saying "common sense isn't that common" we believe that business software should have a healthy dose of common sense at its core:

• Be easily adaptable, by way of a flexible technical architecture
• Structure the software development work practices around regular release cycles
• Ship regular releases that has fixes, patches and upgrades that is required by the business

Adaptable Architecture

Our software architecture starts from a base that is flexible and adaptable. We achieve this with design goals that are focused on simplicity, best practices and off-the-shelf components.

All of our systems have been purpose-built from the ground up which means we are unencumbered by old code and extensive research and development costs to recoup.

Which issues are to be included?

In our products Lingo Systems builds a feedback mechanism into the system itself. The feedback link is prominent to all users and invites grizzles, gripes and suggestions to help make our products even better.

This feedback mechanism is the virtual equivalent to 'walking the floor'.

As business needs change and the system needs to be adapted, issues are raised and logged into our Issue Tracking System. Each issue is assigned a priority in consultation with the business. In this way issues that are important to the business are heard and acted upon.

Regular Release Cycles

All of this is nice, but useless unless it is acted upon. Our release cycles are typically on monthly basis immediately after implementation, reducing back to quarterly once the core implementation issues have been addressed and bedded down.

Once in production on your servers we adhere to your formal change management process. In our experience quarterly release cycles are the optimum balance between responsiveness to business needs, and costs associated with change management - for example, user testing with each release.

We achieve regular release cycles using our own form of Agile Software Development, part of the Rapid Application Development family of methodologies.