The De Villiers Walton philosophy is to pioneer a route for more comprehensive, cost effective and efficient solutions to business and IT needs. To achieve this, our team has pooled their collective knowledge on the common pitfalls of IT projects and categorized their offerings into phases to address these common areas.

Historically IT projects have evolved from a sense of need from the IT department. More recently common business practice has been for the IT department to respond to specific business needs and for IT strategies to be intrinsically tied to the Business strategy. However this is not always the end result.

If an IT project were to be dissected we could split it into 3 key phases:

• Evaluating or planning: vendor selection, blue-printing and expectation setting
• Resolving or building: heart of the IT project, with implementation, custom development, integration etc.
• Executing and running: post go-live where users are able to actively use the system and support and maintenance take focus

Classically the majority of project failures are found between the phases, particularly between:

• Planning to building: where projects or software have been oversold – a typical issue from the larger vendors
• Building to running: where failed go-lives lead to more expenditure on consulting and technology leading to a virtual downward spiral of spending and disappointment

Therefore, the core of De Villiers Walton expertise is focused on these two gaps and stopping the issue by either:

• Prevention methods – identifying the simpler route
• Resolution tactics – going back to basics and reworking the solution

Which ultimately result in faster, leaner, clearer projects which can be executed and completed before the gap between business need and IT solution widens.