A third differentiator is our commitment to creating and maintaining a leading-edge infrastructure to support our global software development. At Incoda, we strive to enhance the productivity and efficiency of our project teams through the use of project management, document management, and collaboration and communication technologies.

Incoda’s comprehensive infrastructure includes:

Team Facilitation Tools

• Project Management. Monitors timelines, deliverables, responsibilities, and schedule adherence of all software development processes and activities.
  
  
• Shared Calendar. Tracks team and individual meetings and events. The team calendar allows all team members to schedule upcoming meetings and identify schedule conflicts.
  
  
• Team Contact Information/Experts Finder. Provides detailed information on project team members, their roles, and contact information. Search capability allows the identification of individuals with specific experience and expertise.
  
  
• Performance Metrics/Balanced Scorecard. Presents project-related financial and nonfinancial metrics.

Document Management Repositories

• Document Repository. Stores a variety of project team-related documents, including project plans, meeting minutes, internal presentations, correspondence, contracts, and working papers. Stores documents in a variety of formats; searches and retrieves documents; allows check in/check out and versioning; allows mark-up and other collaborative editing, and other capabilities. Security features are in place to limit access to and editing of all documents and folders.
  
  
• Digital Asset Repository. Stores and manages the graphics, logos, photography, audio, video, and other assets used in the development of the software, its documentation, and in the change management activities around deployment.

Collaboration and Communication Tools

• Collaboration. Incoda's project teams have access to a variety of web-based tools for collaboration, including Internet meeting tools such as Webex, Placeware, and NetMeeting, and Incoda's shared repositories.
  
  
• Communication. Incoda uses a wide variety of communication technologies for the regular exchange of information between geographically distributed team members. Telephone, e-mail, instant messaging, audio and video conferencing, and interactive tools are used for informal interactions. Formal communications are written and include status reports, status reviews, and all exception reporting.

Reference Materials and Educational Resources

Incoda’s philosophy is to leverage our talent by having our team members focus only on value-added work. There is no value-added in ‘re-inventing the wheel.’ Accordingly, we have invested in the development of several resources that address various activities and outputs that are common in the range of activities we typically undertake during our projects.

• Templates Library. Stores our set of proprietary templates, which are associated with the tasks and deliverables in our project methodology. Project team members can readily identify which project artifacts are applicable at each step of a project and have a standard, well-constructed format to capture information and develop project deliverables. Our templates library provides consistency to our project approach and is a mechanism to support our quality assurance activities. Each template comes complete with guidelines for completion as well as a section for change / version control and approval. Additionally, we actively work to incorporate improvements into our templates. Template usability reviews are a standard part of our post-project review process.
  
  
• Software Module Library. Stores Incoda-owned software modules for reuse.
  
  
• Best Practices Repository. Provides access to lessons learned, best practices and case studies, process descriptions, SOPs, process and information flow maps, checklists, and more.
  
  
• Distance Learning. Provides access to on-line training courses and links to learning-related content and resources.