Agile collaboration for a ‘tailored fit’

At Bluestar we work closely with our customers to produce solutions that fit your needs. Here’s how…

Your Challenge: Finding IT that fits your Force and budget

Few things are more frustrating for your officers and support staff than losing time while they ‘fight the computer’ – for example by double-keying information into two different systems. A poor fit from your IT can result in:

• impacts to front-line officer availability
• increased costs
• data integrity issues and even security issues – if your users are tempted to ‘work around’ your IT

Every Police Force has a unique history and faces unique challenges. This is frequently where large integration IT projects fail. Your Force will have its own specific processes, relationships with neighbours, legacy systems, key targets and geographically distinct ‘hotspots’. And of course, all these things can change over time.

Doesn’t Everyone Say They Are ‘Agile’?

IT suppliers like to say they are ‘agile’ but are they really? The reality can be disappointing – especially on larger projects. If you find yourself talking through ‘middlemen’, maybe your IT supplier isn’t so agile after all. We are!

Our Solution: Close Collaboration

At Bluestar, direct contact between our customers and our technical leads is our lifeblood and we adopt a truly agile, flexible approach in all our development engagements. Our expert technical team collaborates with you directly, giving you the best possible ‘tailored’ fit. With over twenty years proven success, we have built an enviable reputation for delivering exceptional value too. Our technical team has depth of experience, and we specialise in rapid development of customised or entirely bespoke solutions. We also have exceptional expertise in integrating to the most common police IT systems in the UK including the top 3 RMS systems currently in use.

We follow these three principles:

• Speed and Directness: we champion collaboration that cuts out ‘red tape’, eschewing complex customer engagement in favour of directly earning your trust. For speed, nothing beats a direct connection to our expert technical team. We use an iterative development process so you can see progress as it happens, helping you to steer priorities and get the most out of your project. Our organisation is less complex so we can steer clear of inefficient processes and instead trust our teams to deliver. This ‘high ownership’ ethic is the hallmark of truly agile software companies.
• Solid Standards: we utilise the wealth of standards in our mature Corvus® architecture for common concerns like configuration, high-availability, security, performance, data integrity… This gives us an enormous advantage for delivering high-quality results, even with more esoteric requirements.
• Specialist Expertise: we respect our technical people! Our team has been built through years of accumulated experience in delivering quality solutions, and we can also boast high employee retention. This means we deliver software to a higher standard. Having smaller ‘tight teams with big brains’ makes us efficient and responsive to change.

Visibility

Within our iterative development model, you are involved every step of the way with regular reviews as the solution takes shape. As a project sponsor, you and your end users will be invited to review progress regularly, so that you can influence the emerging solution and consider any alterations in your working practices in parallel. We advise to start small and expand later, giving you the chance to see how early versions might influence your own processes and requirements, which might change. New ‘quick wins’ might emerge during development, and other requirements may no longer matter. By adapting during the development process, the result is a better product and a lower cost of ownership.

Time & Materials

We offer ‘Time & Materials’ contracts as part of our agile engagements.

Bespoke Applications

Bespoke applications take up a significant proportion of our overall development, and we offer first rate expertise in designing and building applications that are unique to your businesses requirements. Most of our bespoke development work has been for the UK police market where security and reliability are of paramount importance. A few examples of our bespoke solutions:

• Freedom of Information (FoI) request handling – solution integrated to an existing website
• ‘Suspect In Custody’ notifications for OICs – automated by keyword detection in the arrest report
• Officer location – tracking and recording
• Home Office statuary reporting – various solutions
• Migration from legacy systems – managing updates to legacy system records after system decommission
• Custody facial recognition – to automatically identify detainees

We offer free initial consultancy, we never shy away from radical ideas, and we have an enviable reputation for rapid delivery.