Pursuit Method

Stressful change	Today's competitive market forces a business to store increasing amounts of data and subject it to complex operations. If managed, the stress of larger volumes and changes can be dealt with, but typically a business may find that data becomes difficult to manage. Under these pressures and the data quality will begin to degrade and the cost begins to escalate.
Evolutionary	Without evolutionary change a system can not serve a business effectively since a business must adapt for survival. If change does not occur the business is likely to be tied to the operation of a system.
Offers protection	The Pursuit Method provides mechanisms to protect your business data against deterioration, resolve legacy data issues and enable the necessary evolutionary system changes. It is a flexible framework that can orchestrate analysis of the problem areas to produce solutions. These solutions may take the form of a quick fix to resolve issues in the short term and enable the business to continue to operate. Or the solution may take a longer term strategic view to allow a system to expand.

	The method focuses on two main approaches to data management:
	The tactical approach is largely reactive and enables the current and known errors to be dealt with so that a business can continue to operate. There have been a number of high-profile business failures that have been caused the loss of control of the data and IT systems.		The strategic approach is proactive and focuses on the development and enhancement of business procedures to allow future errors to be resolved effectively. It builds a strong relationship between the Business Analyst; the End-User; and the IT provider.

Flexible	Whether you decide to take a tactical approach, a strategic approach or a mix of the two, depends on the requirements of the business. The method incorporates the Pursuit Tool which can be used in either a tactical or strategic approach. However the method is sufficiently flexible to enable you to chose the way forward.
Accessible	Although termed a method, it does not require training to utilise and is not rocket science - it has been formulated from many years of experience resolving critical problems with development and live production systems. It focuses on the real issues associated with error resolution - the cost of the data and the root cause of the problems.