Across all industries and services, software development teams are a critical but expensive to staff and maintain. Regardless of the skills available and the size of the investment, repeated failures in application development are all too common:

• Project estimation fails to consider the entire scope and complexity of the project and simple projects become monsters.
• Requirements analysis fails to capture the detail required and get confirmation of the planned implementation causing costly wasted effort.
• Development gets caught in endless rework and unexpected changes keep adding effort while timelines extend with no insight into remaining work.
• Final acceptance always finds issues that no one saw coming and claims were always part of the requirements. The cycle repeats as new work is added to the queue to address the problem.
  

Dealing with continuing project failures is a costly process that saps the strength out of initiatives and creates an atmosphere of failure that kills teamwork. Out of frustration, teams and management try many methodologies and tools that are each expected to be the “silver bullet” that will solve the problem. None of them succeed entirely but each one takes on its own life and internal advocates insist that failures are because implementation was “imperfect.”

Our Experience

Scio has found that many of the same basic issues recur in attempts to implement a development process based on simple adherence to any single methodology. The truth is that a successful development process does not spring directly from a methodology and cannot be consistently applied to every team and situation. The same can be said of most reporting models for software development projects. Generally they either embrace the project management side or the developer environment, but there is little available to bridge the gap. The project world revolves around deliverables and schedules, the development environment revolves around work packages, tasks and process, and finance looks at overhead, direct cost and return.  Very little is available that will allow development teams to pull it all together and have a single system that covers the process from project planning, through the developer environment, to testing and release with financial reporting and deliverable tracking.

At Scio, we’ve dealt with these problems over the years and it has forced us to rethink our approach several times. It is what caused us to invest in the research, testing and planning necessary to implement our own methodology stack. But even as we continue to improve on our approach, we also realize there is no “one size fits all” methodology, process and reporting system. If we’re successful it is because we continue to evaluate our needs and problems and make changes to adapt over time.

Coaching Your Team

Based on our commercial experience over the years and many application development projects, Scio offers development process coaching to help teams bring together an approach that fits their business, skills and resources. This engagement can be provided in several formats from a simple assessment that provides a roadmap and a plan, to a more comprehensive project that includes assessment, planning, implementation, training and mentoring.  The outcome is an individualized stack of methodology, process and systems that delivers success repeatedly, feeds continuous improvement and creates value for your organization.

Scio Development Process Coaching Addresses:

• Assessment of your business environment, development team skills and environment
• Consideration of alternatives based on your goals
• Development of an underlying development process that addresses the issues you face and creates a repeatable framework for improvement
• Methodology adaption to meet your team and stakeholder requirements
• Implementation planning with a roadmap, timeline and budget within your means
• Oversight and resources to fill the gaps where you need it
• Training, measurement, reporting and mentoring to ensure success

Your First Step

To begin, regardless of the depth of your needs, Scio provides a short assessment that will help to define issues clearly and present the broad alternatives you have before you. This assessment can be put together and completed in a elapsed period of two to three weeks depending on the size of your team, the availability of your key resources and our current assignment backlog. It is a quick, budgeted approach to bringing together a plan to address your problems.

If you feel development process coaching could be an opportunity for you – contact our service engineering team today. We’ll provide a simple plan and proposal for your assessment immediately.