Methods
Reduce Risk, Cost and Time to Field
by Investing in Practices That Support Delivery,
Sustain Teams, and Grow Culture
Engage in Continuous
Ideation and Innovation
Solutions are continuously evaluated and improved upon to maintain “best in class” status.
We energetically challenge stagnation and staid thinking.
Ideation
ATA’s process of developing ideas from conception to implementation.
Continuous
Continuous processes lend themselves to iteration, allowing ATA’s ideas to evolve naturally.
Innovation
At the core of innovation is open and collaborative problem solving across teams and technical disciplines.
Leverage Knowledge Patterns
DevSecOps
Consistent with the modern view of software development and the DevSecOps paradigm, ATA engineers are practiced in the full software development lifecycle.
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Open Source
As a solutions and outcome-based company, ATA is technology agnostic. We work with commercial technology providers while remaining experienced integrating COTS, FOSS, and custom-developed software.
When project objectives or constraints align with the use of open source, there are a number of benefits:
- Choose from mature, widely-adopted software options
- Protect the ability to modify software source code to rapidly respond to changing requirements
- Avoid vendor lock
- Reduce or eliminate licensing costs
- Retain the technical freedom to move data or swap components as needed.
Data Fabrics, Data Meshes, and API Gateways
ATA’s solutions marry the overlapping concepts of the three modern approaches to data management. Data fabrics, data meshes, and API gateways are new paradigms that have emerged in the last several years to address the complexity of data management in the age of cloud computing and the realization that monolithic approaches (enterprise data warehouses and data lakes) are increasingly impractical in practice. Like a fabric stretched across an organization’s data infrastructure, ATA’s data fabric solutions provide capabilities for discovering, connecting, integrating, transforming, analyzing, and storing data assets without disrupting data producer or data consumer’s existing processes.
Data meshes provide many of the same functions of data fabrics, with domain-driven and self-service capabilities that allow data producers to own their data and provide it as a product to data consumers. Just as data fabrics and meshes enable data transactions, API gateways are tools for managing communication between clients and backend services, including load balancing and protecting valuable data by applying policies, authentication, and access control.
MLOps
MLOps is a design pattern that applies the rigor of modern software development processes and DevSecOps to the development and deployment of machine learning into operational systems. While the MLOps methodology is still very new in the machine learning landscape, associated technologies have begun penetrating the market in the most forward-leaning sectors and organizations. There is little doubt that MLOps will soon be the primary means by which ML models are put into production.
Apply Agile Principles and Practices
This method treats problem definition, solution design, work planning, skills balancing, and execution as constant processes that always work in parallel and in concert. ATA recognizes that solution discipline is more critical than ever. Requirements development, solution design, and execution must interact intimately.
DESIGN+BUILD has four components, each with an internal cycle of testing and refinement, along with inter-process recursion that informs the other components.
- Define customer need—not just wants—until you have measurable criteria for success.
- Design the smallest number of the simplest pieces that can translate defined success criteria into a flexible solution.
- Planning required skills, resources, and task sequences that translates design and maximizes the likelihood of achieving success on time and under budget.
- Execution brings all of these pieces together in concert and prioritizes results over reports, people over procedure, in a constant rhythm of iteration to fulfill need.
ATA’s DESIGN+BUILD method ensures that all of these processes are aligned and working together towards a common goal.
This results in faster, more efficient, and more innovative solutions.
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Upskill and Professionalize Talent
We hire talented people that are a cultural fit for the company, our partners and our clients. One of the greatest values of being a part of ATA is the opportunity to learn new skills and work with new technologies.
We also believe that learning should be integrated with projects since it is accomplished with better context and can be immediately applied.
Periodically, we institute planned staff rotations to provide the opportunity to work on different projects (internal and/or customer-focused) with different team members to learn new technologies and techniques; this also helps prevent burnout and support employee retention.
Our team members obtain assistance with specific technical problems, receive training, engage in hard and soft skill development and promote our culture in a number of ways, to include:
- On call, on-demand support from our “Mentor-in-Chief” who provides confidential 1:1 support to remove roadblocks, enhance productivity and maintain project velocity.
- Pairing, mobbing, and Architecture Design Review (ADR) sessions promote cross-domain knowledge transfer and sharing of lessons learned.
- ATA’s Technology Control Board (TCB) provides a forum for the review of standards and compliance as well as the exchange of ideas and communication of needs.
- Weekly Company Scrum supplies status updates on every project and invites sharing and calls for expertise and/or assistance to reinforce the open, collegial and collaborative nature of our company culture.
- Brown Bags, Level-up Sessions and Plus Ones are regular, special purpose forums for employees.
Establish Communications Rhythms
We maintain a tool infrastructure for agile design control making it possible to integrate with any team, anywhere, and respond to any customer-unique or partner-specific requirements. These tools are integrated into a fully automated project execution and reporting flow, with real-time documentation and reporting, and bottom-to-top linking of functional and non-functional requirements to deployed objects.
This infrastructure is available anytime, anywhere and is effectively leveraged to satisfy most requirements.
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Work from Anywhere
ATA has team members, partners and customers in 25 states across the country today, simultaneously delivering on multiple projects. In-person co-located teams face the same communications and collaboration challenges as distributed teams.
These challenges have only been accelerated and intensified as a result of the pandemic: most teams that are co-located have remote work teammates that contribute either completely or partially from another physical location.
A clear strategy to support team project management, communications, and delivery across space and time prevents drops in productivity and burnout that can lead to personnel turnover.
Engage in Knowledge Transfer
Experience has shown that knowledge is best transferred through close collaboration between ATA and its customers.
Stakeholders, end users, and developers work closely during all phases of project development from planning to execution and transition so that our customers are prepared to use their solution from Day 1 and have true ownership over project success.
ATA transfers knowledge to our customers through processes both structured and natural, including documentation, mentoring and pairing.
Documentation consists of written designs, procedures, and guides for both the technical personnel responsible for maintaining and operating the system, and the user base that will direct interface with the solution as part of their every day jobs. Mentoring consists of one-on-one interaction and help support during and after training. Pairing consists of the same interactions but between two individuals working on a task together. These practices and techniques are educational in nature and help build the skillset and knowledgebase of the personnel we support.