| On-Time Delivery
The practice of shipping products on time and on budget
to a receptive market is a delicate balance between
meeting schedule commitments and meeting the expectations
of the customer base and the sales force. Managing Technology
is frequently engaged in a project management or test
management capacity when clients find themselves facing
deadlines but are unable to deliver a release into the
market using their current testing and development approach.
The On Time Delivery service provides senior management
and project teams with a straightforward set of procedures
for moving a project forward toward schedule and market
requirements goals. Based on our extensive experience
in delivering products to extremely aggressive schedules
we work closely with the project team, develop processes
and actionable status reporting procedures, and create
mechanisms for making business and feature tradeoffs.
Important components of the practice are the use of
the test team to provide objective project level status,
creation of cross functional decision making teams,
tight integration and partnering with select beta customers,
and the creation and review of simple easy to understand
“actionable” status reports. Managing Technology’s
top goals are to deliver the product to the market while
at the same time provide companies with repeatable practices
that ensure early detection of quality risks, effective
mitigation of quality problems and high levels of customer
satisfaction.
The Approach
Managing Technology begins by first quickly assessing
your current project methodology. This includes interviewing
team members, benchmarking project management and quality
assurance procedures, and evaluating the overall team
dynamics. Project and quality procedures are evaluated
to assess their ability to objectively determine status,
clearly communicate status in an actionable format,
and manage project changes against market priorities.
Recommendations are developed and implemented that improve
the project team’s ability to deliver on commitments.
Working with the project team, Managing Technology develops
process improvements, mentors key team members, and,
where appropriate, directly participates in project
management. Enhanced project release processes result
from this benchmarking step, including:
- Plan of Record generation and monitoring procedures
for the release
- Explicit change management procedures to control
runaway requirements changes
- Accurate and timely status on the success of software
builds
- Improved risk management with earlier detection
& development of contingencies
- Creation of straightforward usable test plans that
facilitate more accurate reviews
- Recasting test procedures into subsets of coverage
- Restructured build and test cycle(s) to accommodate
rapid test execution
- Creation of “actionable” test execution
and defect metric reports
- Balanced and targeted investment in test automation
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