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Providing a "sounding board" for your team leaders to help overcome team, project and delivery issues.
We’ve found that our most successful clients have utilized "sounding board" sessions with our team members at some point during their own project lifecycle. With over 1,000,000 hours of successfully delivered projects over the last 20 years, we've been able to identify best practices, project templates and repeatable solutions to many common issues related to software delivery. Here are a few examples:
A Vice President of Marketing called us and said "We need to deliver our new marketing site in 90 days and our internal IT team doesn't have the experience that's needed. Can you help us?". We were able to sit down with their project team and assess their strengths and weaknesses and help them put together an action plan for delivery. Together, we created a high level project plan and we provided various project management templates and structure as a starting point. Our architects worked hand-in-hand with their team to design the software and we developed the initial key modules while their team came up-to-speed with training courses and specialized instruction. By the end of the development phase, we were able to help their leadership team manage the project, their project management team deliver the project and we acted as development mentors to their developers to ensure their success.
A Director of Marketing called us and said "Our two lead developers left and we have a deadline to launch the site in 2 months! What can we do?". In this scenario, our development team examined their existing code and implementation plan and compared it to the remaining work needed for the upcoming launch. In this case, we unfortunately had to tell the client that they were much farther away from launch than they expected (they had already delayed the launch 2 times due to missed deadlines). We worked with their stakeholders to create a realistic set of launch features and two of our developers were able to take over the project and lead the client's remaining developers to a successful launch a few months later. Once the launch had occurred, our team helped establish best practices around the software development process and trained their team to become self sufficient again.
A Director of IT called us and said "Our internal IT group has focused on building home-grown applications over the last 10 years, but our new corporate mandate is to shift to cloud based 3rd party software. How do we get there?". This is becoming a more and more common scenario as companies realize the benefit of moving applications to the cloud, but the internal team's experience doesn't align with the vision. In this case, our first step was to thoroughly understand the new corporate vision and to help the client create a 12-month roadmap for data consolidation and application migration. We helped the client understand their true business needs and facilitated a RFP process for the alternative cloud offerings that were available to them. Once the new software choices were made, we worked with their internal teams to help them successfully migrate the data and train their staff on the new process and systems.
If you're facing scenarios like the ones above, or others related to the software development process, please reach out to us. We'd appreciate the opportunity to talk about your challenges and see if there's some guidance that we could provide.