We believe that successful system design and development requires a strong partnership between the development team and the client. The client's business mission and rules must be thoroughly understood and become design considerations in the most effective IT solution.

To this end, DPRA's IT professionals and domain experts work closely and continuously with our clients to determine the client's strategic business context; analyze and define user and system requirements; and design and implement support systems providing the highest long-term value.

Whether enterprise- or application-oriented, today's powerful, flexible, and cost effective technologies permit consideration of previously unimaginable functionality with lower cost and shorter development schedules.

Taking advantage of the technology, DPRA employs rapid application development methods, particularly component-based and object-oriented techniques, to accelerate the time from problem definition to solution creation. This approach highly integrates and greatly shortens the life-cycle development stages of:

• Strategy and Problem Definition

• Requirements Definition and System Design

• Engineering and Development

• Piloting and Testing System Installation

• Implementation, Operation, and Maintenance

New design and development tools and methods continue to telescope the developer's task, which until recently was characterized by distinct and heavy sequencing of these stages of development.

Proceeding from any stage of the system life cycle, DPRA uses the most modern methods and tools, engaging system managers and end users in all stages of development. To the extent practicable, design, development, testing, and deployment are executed in parallel.

The working application becomes an aid to analysis and design by giving DPRA's developers and users alike a tangible context for feedback and improvement. Development thereby becomes an interactive process, allowing DPRA to rapidly revise and adjust application features to emerging requirements.

In the case of a working prototype, the prototype itself can be often be enhanced to create the finished application. And, rather than tending static systems from cradle to grave, the life-cycle manager can take advantage of the object-oriented and component-based features of the system to easily and continuously improve existing solutions.

Example Solutions

DPRA undertakes systems design and development projects of wide-ranging complexity and effort for many public- and private-sector clients, as demonstrated by the following examples.

The IT solutions required by our clients range from small database and tracking systems to web-enabled, GIS tools for national environmental decision-making, and large, complex modeling tools supporting DoD's global transportation planning efforts for wartime and contingency actions.

• The Joint Flow and Analysis System for Transportation (JFAST) is a multi-modal transportation analysis model used by the U.S. Transportation Command and the Joint Planning Community to determine transportation requirements, perform course-of-action analysis, and project delivery profiles of troops and equipment by air, land, and sea.

• The Michigan Manifest Tracking System makes hundreds of thousands of manifest records available to the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and ten district offices via LAN/WAN connections.

• The Independent Government Cost Estimate (IGCE) System is a tool that automates the process of cost estimation that is required for contractor services with the government.