Software Solutions Delivery Process
NextLogic applies agile software development approach, which is rather different to traditional waterfall approach. To easier understand what it means, we provide you a picture of a typical project cycle that we take our customers through. Every stage of the cycle is important and necessary to successfully accomplish the whole project. All stages repeat themselves in sub-cycles called iterations during which certain parts of the final system are being developed and delivered to the customer for immediate feedback and testing.
Delivery process phases
Envision
The Envision phase creates a vision for the customers and the project team that covers what, who, and how. Absent a vision, the remaining activities in getting a project off the ground are wasted effort. In business-speak, vision is the "critical success factor" early in a project. First, we need to envision what to deliver—a vision of the product and the scope of the project. Second, we need to envision who will be involved—the community of customers, product managers, project team members, and stakeholders. And, third, the project team members must envision how they intend to work together.
Speculate
The word "speculate" first calls to mind an image of reckless risk taking, but actually the dictionary definition is "to conjecture something based on incomplete facts or information," which is exactly what happens during this phase. The word "plan" has come to connote certainty and prediction, while the more useful definition of plan, for exploratory projects at least, is speculating or hypothesizing based on incomplete information. APM consists more of envisioning and exploring than planning and doing—it forces us to confront the reality of today's precarious business environment and highly volatile product development environment.
The Speculate phase, which is actually an extension of and interactive with the Envision phase, consists of:
- Gathering the initial broad requirements for the product
- Defining the workload as a list of product features
- Creating a delivery plan (release, milestones, and iterations) that includes schedule and resource allocations for those features
- Incorporating risk mitigation strategies into the plan
- Estimating project costs and generating other required administrative and financial information
Explore
The Explore phase delivers product features. From a project management perspective there are three critical activity areas during this phase. The first is delivering planned features by managing the workload and using appropriate technical practices and risk mitigation strategies. The second is creating a collaborative, self-organizing project community, which is everyone's responsibility but is facilitated by the project manager. The third activity is managing the team's interactions with customers, product management, and other stakeholders.
Adapt
Control and correction are common terms applied to this lifecycle phase. Plans are made, results are monitored, and corrections are made—implying that the plans were right and the actual results, if different from the plan, are wrong. "Adapt" implies modification or change rather than success or failure. In projects guided by the philosophy that responding to change is more important than following a plan, attributing failure to variation from the plan isn't productive. A purely ad hoc process fails to learn from its mistakes, whereas the incorporation and retention of lessons learned are key pieces of APM.
After the Envision phase, the loop will generally be Speculate-Explore-Adapt, with each iteration successively refining the product. However, periodically revisiting the Envision phase may be necessary as the team gathers new information.
In the Adapt phase the results are reviewed from customer, technical, people and process performance, and project status perspectives. The analysis looks at actual versus planned, but even more importantly, it considers actual versus a revised outlook on the project given up-to-the-minute information. The results of adaptation are fed into a replanning effort to begin the next iteration.
Close
Projects are partially defined by the presence of both a beginning and an end. Many organizations fail to identify a project's end point, often causing perception problems among customers. Projects should end—with a celebration. The key objective of the Close phase, and the "mini" close at the end of each iteration, is learning and incorporating that learning into the work of the next iteration or passing it on to the next project team.