Davidson company overview: Davidson Hotel Company is a full-service company providing management, development, consulting and accounting expertise for the hospitality industry.

Davidson Hotel Company (www.davidsonhotels.com) currently manages 22 hotels across the United States under flags such as Marriott, Renaissance, Hilton, Radisson and Holiday Inn. These hotels represent 6,000 rooms and 3,200 employees. Experienced in hotel development as well, Davidson has developed twenty hotels containing over 2,500 rooms and planned and carried out major renovations at twenty hotels containing over 5,000 rooms. These projects encompass well over $300 million in capital improvements.

Davidson & IC INFOTECH Partnership - Overview

Davidson selected IC INFOTECH as its offshore development partner to fulfill their entire software development needs, which included new module/application development, incorporating change requests into existing applications and ongoing maintenance, along with customer support.

The IC INFOTECH engagement model included an onsite resource in Memphis, TN. This enabled both the partners to bridge time zone differences and communication gaps effectively, and was very helpful during the initial transition stages.

The engagement which is now nearing 2 years of completion has proved to be a successful offshore partnership for Davidson, in effectively managing their development requirements in a very cost effective manner, besides maintaining high levels of quality.

The offshore team size ranges between 5 - 10 resources, with an average of 6 resources till date. IC INFOTECH facilitated a dynamic ramp up and ramp down model for Davidson to cost effectively utilize resources based on development needs. This was achieved through a collaborative capacity planning exercise between the PM and Davidson team at regular intervals.

Software Development - Overview

The nature of projects involves development & maintenance of web solutions to cater their Line of Business (LOB) functions. All the solutions are hosted under a single umbrella platform, DHARIA (an intranet platform serving more than 400 concurrent users of the company).

The Intranet platform has features made specific to various departments of the company, personalization features, sophisticated security features and a comprehensive Content Management Solution for managing content across the application.

The MIS solution, which is in-built in the intranet, is a web based application, for multiunit hotel budgeting, forecasting, nightly revenue audit and, reporting purposes. This serves as a one-point customized repository for all individual data from each of the properties.

The property users, corporate staff & external users like investors and other partners access this application for their day-to-day activities.

Engagement Model

The Information Technology division of the Company takes care of all of the IT needs. This comprises of a Director of Technology, Manager of Hotel Business Systems, Internal Project Manager, System Administrator & other IT support staff.

IC INFOTECH works closely with the entire IT department addressing all their needs.

The offshore team consists of the Delivery Head, a Project Manager, Technical Lead, Development Team and Testing Team.

The Project Manager has the overall ownership of the project, their role includes managing the process, issue tracking, escalation point, client interaction for planning, resource management, performance evaluation and improving the quality of deliverables by introducing process improvements to the team.

The Technical Lead (TL) is the daily contact of the project. The activities of the Development and the Testing teams are closely monitored and coordinated by the Technical Lead. The Technical Lead’s core responsibility includes continuous interaction with the Customer Team for gathering requirements, technical architecture / solutions guidance & design, project scheduling, requesting clarifications on requirements through Ic2Customer, Instant Messengers and by facilitating conference calls when needed, leading the development effort, and constantly communicating with the client about the status of the project.

It is the Technical Lead’s responsibility to manage requirements and understand the project completely before starting its development. Ongoing changes, enhancements, defects, and so on need to be tracked throughout the project life cycle. Prime responsibilities of the Technical Lead include Project Scheduling, Resource Management, Build and Test Management and Escalating issues to the Project Manager. Close interaction with the client helps to identify new requirements and internal training needs.

Process & Quality Standards

IC INFOTECH tailored its development methodology & processes to suit the maturity levels of the customer’s own methodology. One of the primary challenges of this engagement was to handle multiple change requests (averaging to 3 - 5 every day) and incorporating them into the solution within the shortest span of time.

The methodology combined the conventional software engineering approach of the lifecycle, and also implemented mechanisms from the RUP model to facilitate requirements gathering and change management.

Project specific metrics are collected throughout the project lifecycle and the trends are evaluated periodically to take corrective measures and to monitor the overall quality standards. Examples of such metrics include: Schedule and Effort Variance, Defect Density, Volatility of Change Requests, and so on.

Documentation requirements were kept at minimum at customer request. The methodology followed the Requirement Analysis (RA), Design, Development and Testing approach.

With our dedicated web-based project management and collaboration channel www.Ic2c.infoterch.com, the client stakeholders were kept updated about the progress throughout the project lifecycle and to review builds, make change requests, and provide feedback on the project. This enabled process transparency and increased management bandwidth. To facilitate change management, all change requests from client are channeled through the Ic2Customer, which is driven by the best practices of Rational Unified Process.

As soon as the client posts change requirements on Ic2Customer, the development team is directly alerted by an email from Ic2Customer. Further clarifications and feedback are facilitated using the same tool. New features and enhancements can be communicated and feedback/clarifications can be obtained in a short span of time. Issues & messages posted by the Client are usually addressed and resolved within 24 hours. Urgent messages and alerts can also be sent through the multiple communication channels (toll free line, SMS, direct numbers) open to the offshore team.




Testing Process

Testing process involves unit testing for change requests and module development with integration testing done at logical stages, based on the impact of change requests in the system.

New modules and/or new applications pass through the lifecycle of unit, integration and system testing, before deployment.

Two test engineers are dedicated to this account and are responsible for managing the test lifecycle including preparation of the test plans and the test cases.

Once a module is completed, it is tested against a defined set of test cases. On completion of the testing lifecycle (including regression testing) the Technical Lead reviews & approves the module to be moved to the staging server for the customer’s review. (See environment setup below)

Customer reviews the module on the staging server and on approval, the module is deployed in the live environment.

The delivery is accompanied by a walkthrough document. The Technical Lead ensures that the builds are generated and maintained on a regular basis and the tests on the project being executed by the test team are in sync with the guidelines.

All hotels have dedicated Internet access (ranging from 256k to T1), and use VPN to access the intranet.

Netscreen VPN is used for secure network communications between the IC INFOTECH offshore center and Davidson network.

Corporate Setup

1) Web Server
The intranet is hosted centrally on this server at the corporate office. Operating System - Windows 2000 Advanced Server running IIS 5.0; Other - .Net framework to support.net applications.

2) Database Server
Operating System - Windows NT running SQL Server 2000. This acts as the data warehouse.

3) Corporate Financial System
This SQL based Client Server application is used by the accounting department. The MIS system exports budget and forecast data from the system for comparative financial reports, and imports period actual totals for its own reports.

Property Level Setup

This network is connected to all the other 22 individual servers at the other properties. These servers house the Sales & Marketing Software as well as the Payroll Management System.

Sales booking data is exported from these systems and is manually uploaded to the MIS for forecasting. Data is also automatically gathered into a sales data warehouse. Labor cost data is exported from the payroll management system, SQL based application to the MIS for forecasting.

Environment Setup for Hotel Management System
A dedicated server environment is established with two servers for Development and Staging. The Application Server and database server are separate, due to large volumes of data.

A setup very similar to the corporate office is made available at IC INFOTECH’s end and it is a part of the VPN network. The application is replicated at our end.

All software assets for the account are kept under version control in VSS.

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