Your time is valuable, and hey, so is ours. At Tyrannosaurus Tech, we prioritize speed and communication over bulky processes.
Instead of the traditional, waterfall-style approach to project management, we utilize agile methodologies to ensure that our team can move quickly and that you’re always in the loop and able to provide valuable feedback on deliverables. By presenting deliverables in small iterative steps, we can receive rapid approvals and stay on track.
We use several tools, touchpoints, and tactics to accomplish this agile approach. In the following blog post, we’ll dive into more detail about what you can expect from our agile project management style.
Communication Tools for Success
An open dialogue is critical to delivering a quality product that solves your problem and brings the most value to users. Here are some of the communication tools that we use most often:
- Slack: For quick, instant-message style communication, we will set up a shared Slack channel. Slack allows for easy collaboration, and it integrates with our project management tools and code repository (it’s a win-win).
- Google Meet: We will set up recurring touchpoints that allow us to report progress, demo new features, and get quick feedback.
- Google Sheets: To keep you updated on our progress, we’ll create a shared Google Sheet that automatically updates daily from our project management tools with the most current status on every work item.
Your Project Lifecycle in a Nutshell
The creation and delivery of your project will unfold along several major stages that we refer to as the Project Lifecycle. At each stage in the game, you’ll play an essential role in coordinating with our development team to ensure seamless delivery of a product that brings the most possible value. We ask that you are actively engaged at every step of the product lifecycle.
Investing in custom software for your organization is not like buying a suit off the rack! Our tailored approach to your product is specific to your strategic business goals and your users’ needs and preferences—far from a one size fits all sale. Our team needs to understand who your users are, how they’ll engage with this product, and where the product fits in its broader ecosystem. Then we need you to get in it, stretch in every direction, and tell us how to make it better. Your active engagement is part of your product’s success.
Define Opportunities
Our first step is to understand the problem we’ve been tasked with solving. This involves gathering insights into the users’ needs, understanding current behaviors, and researching the market. In this first step, we translate users’ needs and your business requirements into clear, accurate instructions for our team. Anything that gets lost in translation will change the final product, so we believe in the “measure twice, cut once” approach, making this part of the development process more time-consuming.
Your role in this step will be to help us…
- Define the problems and opportunities.
- Identify the use cases being considered.
- Set priorities for which opportunities to realize first.
Identify Solutions
Next, we set our strategy for solving the problems we are tackling.
Your role in this step will be to…
- Collaborate with our team to determine what the product should do.
- Confirm that solutions relate to overarching business goals and KPIs.
Plan Roadmap
In the planning stage, we begin to flesh out the form of the project. We set up timelines and identify critical milestones.
Your role in this step will be to…
- Work closely with design and engineering to establish key milestones.
- Align with our team on timelines.
UX/UI Design
In the design stage, we get into the spec of precisely what we’re building. Your engagement at this stage is essential—and fun! When we use the word design, we’re not just referring to the look and feel of the product. This design phase also includes defining user workflows, how the data will be structured and used, and what functions will and will not be in scope. The easiest (and cheapest) time to iterate on the product is in the design phase before writing true code.
Your role in this step will be to…
- Work closely with our design team on mockups and specs.
- Review and provide feedback to inform design decisions.
- Work with the Project Manager to outline different scenarios to be tested, detailing the expected behavior.
Iterations
During this stage, our development team will demonstrate features as they are developed. You’ll have the opportunity to give immediate feedback to ensure the product we’re building aligns with your needs and goals. We will report on our progress weekly and keep you updated on what’s next.
Testing is a crucial step in every iteration of the product implementation. In addition to our team’s QA (Quality Assurance) resources, we ask that you also perform acceptance testing on features as they are deployed to staging to identify any issues that might arise.
Your role in this step will be to…
- Clarify requirements.
- Address any edge cases that surface.
- Give frequent feedback to make sure we’re on track.
- Provide acceptance testing for work delivered during each iteration.
- Report any issues or report bugs.
- Prioritize items to be fixed.
Launch
The launch can be a “silent launch,” iterating on the current product in production as features become available. Alternately, launches can be coordinated with marketing and PR as part of big announcements to drive new signups or engage existing users. Either way, the launch to production will be a scheduled event, planned around your business goals and pending the testing and approval of all relevant features and functionality.
Your role in this step will be to:
- Work closely with the development team and any other departments to plan the timing and release criteria for the launch.
- Write or review any material being written about the launch for users and the public.
- Adopt a plan for user support and continued maintenance of the product after launch.
- Review data and assess the launch’s impact on business goals and metrics.
Measure
Finally, we want to take time together to assess how the project went. We can use what we learned throughout the project to inform the next project and ensure we’re always improving in our collaboration.
Your role in this step will be to…
- Review key metrics, user sentiment, and other indicators of impact.
- Sustain ongoing maintenance and support for the product.
- Identify learning opportunities and plan for the future.
- Celebrate successes!
Help Us Help You
Now that you better understand the steps required to release your digital footprint, here are a few final tips to set you up for success. Be ready to work with us to define clear and comprehensive requirements, focusing on what you do and don’t want in your product. By offering us easy access to representative users that will help shape the product requirements, their perspective will help us make the iteration phases as streamlined as possible. And finally, remember that our transparent approach will call for an open line of communication between our project manager and your key decision-makers.
Ready to get started? Get in touch with our team for a free developer consultation.