Business challenge
Teams engaged in large programs can lose sight of the main requirement: high-quality delivery. Staying on schedule, implementing requirements accurately, and managing changes in scope and personnel can all get in the way of progress—yet maintaining positive momentum is key to success.
Solution
Our experts work closely with your team to determine the exact current status of your project—and to identify the challenges that must be overcome for successful delivery. As part of our way of working we:
- Prioritize project tasks by business need and technical risk
- Split the project into small manageable iterations
- Increase visibility and expand the involvement of all stakeholders
- Ensure the problem domain is fully understood, and that the team is focused on the business problem specifically
Practices
We share our library of practices with you, leveraging the practices that will make the greatest difference to your particular project. Taking a practice-based approach helps you achieve dramatic results with minimal effort.
Training
Our mentors actually join your team, guiding you to successful delivery and helping you maintain and build momentum. You will see improvement in your organization, control and confidence within the first iteration of improvement (typically six weeks).
Coordination
The best results are achieved when you adopt a practical way of working, attending to both the business and IT sides of the software development endeavour. Working together in a smart way will help all sides of your business address key issues and improve efficiency.
Collaboration overview
Our mentors involve themselves directly in your project, work with senior technical staff and project managers to assess status and prioritize the issues that need to be addressed.
We then identify the key practices you need to implement. We often encounter people who say “We do not have time to change because we have to deliver.” In fact, you have a choice: to continue on the road to unsuccessful delivery or change direction and move toward success.
We make small, palatable changes that quickly and directly demonstrate value—and never implement change for change’s sake.
How this benefits you
- Successful delivery of your software project
- Acquisition of an independent, industry-standard methodology that can be spread throughout your organization
- Access to a skilled and motivated team of experts
Sample implementation
We were engaged to work on a project that was delivering on time but producing such poor-quality releases that they were unusable. In the team’s rush to fix problems and deliver more functionality, the project quickly got out of control. Testing was minimized, which meant that untested releases were being deployed.
We analyzed the project and implemented an iterative approach with a focus on agile testing that was used consistently thereafter. Within three iterations the quality of the delivery increased and defects dropped by 90%.
Today, the project continues to deliver successfully and has earned a strong reputation. Other projects within the same organization are now looking to re-use the approach to improve their productivity and delivery. Key lessons learned included:
- User requirements and test cases are both needed up front
- Developers and testers should be paired
- Every day is test day
Implementing small but key changes to the project enabled quick recovery from its previously perilous position and allowed it to become an example of the success that arises through forward thinking.
Effort used: Two days’ mentoring a week for one year.
What we left behind: A set of IJI practices, associated templates and guidelines to help all future projects adhere to the identified standards—and a skilled team that helped roll out the methods to other projects within the organization.