At TGA we strongly believe in the importance of careful analysis, however, we have also found that it is possible to spend too much on planning without the benefit of visible results. Our goal is to use our seasoned architects carefully – enough to get a solid grasp of the problem – and then use offshore resources (where appropriate) to build the solution in short, fixed fee iterations - all at a reasonable cost/benefit ratio (see cost savings).

This type of technique has been called prototyping, the spiral method, or timeboxing. The idea is to break a large project up into small pieces and to have a deliverable at least every 3 months. By creating working prototypes and redoing them our clients can easily monitor progress.

In our experience, such frequent working iterations are the only design artifact that we have ever seen to pay off consistently downstream in an environment geared toward rapid development. The problem has been that building such prototypes has been costly. The great thing about our business model is that by making judicious use of offshore resources, TGA can build real working prototypes inexpensively enough with current tools to be practical.