MDB Consulting uses the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) to consistently deliver high quality business software solutions on time and on budget.
MSF, based on proven practices from Microsoft, provides an adaptable framework for successfully delivering information technology solutions faster, requiring fewer people, and involving less risk, while enabling higher quality results.
The MSF helps teams directly address the most common causes of technology project failure in order to improve success rates, solution quality and business impact. Created to deal with the dynamic nature of technology projects and environments, MSF fosters the ability to adapt to continual change within the course of a project.
What is the Microsoft Solutions Framework?
The Microsoft Solutions Framework provides an industry standard set of models, principles and guidelines for designing and developing enterprise software solutions in a way that ensures all elements of a project, such as people, processes and tools can be successfully managed.
The MSF Process Model describes a generalised sequence of activities for building and deploying enterprise software solutions. This process is flexible and can accommodate the design and development of a broad range of technical solutions. The MSF Process Model is a phase based, milestone driven and iterative model that can be applied to developing and deploying traditional applications, enterprise solutions for e-commerce and web-distributed applications.
It combines the best principles of the waterfall and iterative (spiral) models. It combines the waterfall model’s milestone based planning and resulting predictability with the spiral model’s benefits of feedback and creativity.
MSF uses a pool of real-world best practices, which have been proved both internally and externally, and simplifies, consolidates, and verifies them for easier understanding and adoption by partners and customers. Now a robust and mature framework, MSF is managed and developed by a dedicated product team within Microsoft, with guidance and review from an international advisory council of subject matter experts.
If you wish to find out more about the MSF, there are a number of excellent resources on the subject:
In addition, you can see some of Microsoft's own case studies regarding the Microsoft Solutions Framework.