The Think Digitally Development

In our previous articles, we covered both the blueprint and the design phase. These are important and lead up to accumulating all the hard work and building your new software.

Most people think we go away, lock ourselves in a room, and write your software. Nothing could be further from the truth. While it is correct that we have to build the foundations before we can get into the user interface, we must have your input and support from day one.

To achieve this, we require our customers to appoint a champion. This champion is our point of contact from day one and will help drive the development and manage the buy-in and inevitable scope creep.

You would have noticed we used the word, inevitable, and for a good reason. We strive to be completely honest and transparent at all times. We don't make promises we cannot keep. Our budgets are estimates, and your requirements are fluid.

Scope creep is a natural outcome when you develop new software and should not be discouraged but instead managed.

Why?

When you develop software, you discover situations that have not been fully considered or not fully understood on paper. You want the best possible solution for your business, and in the development phase, it allows us to adapt the software as we progress with the coding. 

All variances have a cost, both in terms of time and money.

In your company, a champion is a critical person. They need to control and assess the impact of change requests, decide which ones make it into the software, and manage those that don't. 

We expose your champion to the software as soon as practical to help introduce the software into your business. The transition starts earlier and allows your team to identify any additional work areas. We have progress meetings between our development team and your project team to track progress, recognizing any delays and scope creep.

Many software companies in the market will tell you that they can do a project within a fixed budget and timeframe. Unfortunately, this rigid approach could mean you will end up with a software product with no flexibility to adapt it as the development proceeds. The real danger (and we have seen this on numerous occasions) is a rigid software product that no one uses or can easily use. Inferior software leads to user frustrations, inefficient processes, and ultimately a costly rewrite.

We do not expose the new software to users too early.

We work extensively with your champion in the development phase, and there will be a point when it is time to present the new software to the user base. We do this with care; if you expose it too early, it can cause anxiety but too late may result in too many change requests.

Your champion and our team work together to establish the best point to present this and who will get the first look within your user team.

And then the exciting bit gets even more exciting. We start counting down to release. In part four of this series, we will discuss the preparation for release, the training that must occur, and how crucial ongoing maintenance is.

Please feel free to contact me in regards to any software development requirements. 

We welcome the opportunity to start the journey with you.

Roger Graham MACS

Think Digitally (APAC)