We succeed where others fail.

At GCA, we pride ourselves on the thoroughness of requirements gathering. It is a simple fact that asking questions in the beginning is cheap and making changes down the road to unasked questions is expensive. We have hundreds of use cases and requirements-gathering questions that we will pull from when preparing for an initial meeting. Oftentimes it takes detective work to get all the answers, so being well prepared is our key to success.

Clear communication is the first key to success whether speaking to the project team, stakeholders, or end-users. When it comes to Identity Management, discussions tend to get technical quickly and it takes a concerted effort to ensure our communication is geared to the right audience. The fundamental principle is that you cannot make progress in obtaining a new budget or developing new functionality if all parties involved are not on the same page. In practice, this takes the form of a concise presentation adjusted for each team or audience that is involved throughout the course of a project.

With IAM it is often the case that a piece of functionality is distributed over many parts. For example, a workflow might call a rule, which uses data from a custom object, which makes a direct database call, and then something gets updated; the point being functionality often doesn’t live in one spot. This reality requires effective documentation that is easily consumed to enable effective environment support and to grow the IAM footprint. At GCA we have taken our documentation so seriously that we are hosting documentation for our clients (with proper access control) so that both the business and development team can learn how something works in IAM with just a few clicks.

Following the design and development of any IAM project comes the all-important testing process. We take a three-prong approach to testing at GCA. First, the developer tests the use cases that were documented along with the design. Once everything checks out the developer hands over the review to a peer in the group who then runs through each test. After the first two rounds of testing have passed then what we call a “Functional Test” happens where each use case is demonstrated in front of the appropriate client stakeholders.

In some instances, IAM programs fail because they do not have the right team to support them. We have seen situations where a successful IAM program failed overnight when a key resource took another position. To help organizations keep the right skill sets, we offer Managed Services across all components of IAM. With this model, organizations have access to top industry experts to help maintain IAM programs at a fraction of the cost of maintaining in-house resources.