Product Life Cycle Definition and Management

Managing Technology works with development teams and senior management to create first generation development strategies or move established product definition, development and delivery processes to a new level of predictability, efficiency, and quality. The resulting processes are flexible and tailored to the specific business needs of your organization. Managing Technology has extensive industry experience in developing and implementing processes and process change across a company. We have experience adapting classic staged development practices and state of the art modern Agile approaches to arrive at an appropriate mix of repeatable methodologies for defining, planning, developing, delivering, and supporting software products and services.

For young companies, or new development teams inside of larger companies, the practice yields a straightforward, low overhead, predictable approach to defining and managing software projects. The process frequently is introduced into the new organization in appropriate steps as a release is rolled out to the market.

For more established software development companies a process already exists. Frequently these companies face issues of efficiency, predictability and failures in communication between the development teams and the customer facing functions. Many times these issues trace back to legitimate disconnects in the way each organization goes about its business. Managing Technology has extensive experience in working with each functional organization, adjusting internal procedures and communication approaches to arrive at a coherent set of processes that improve overall project and product performance.

The Approach
Through interviews, analysis of existing project documentation and attending various project and cross-functional meetings, the existing approaches are researched. In conjunction with key team leaders, this information is integrated with industry practices and our own experience, resulting in the definition and documentation of a tailored "Product Development Framework". An important part of the process is the generation of procedures for obtaining, validating, reviewing, monitoring, and changing commitments.

The documented framework identifies the specific activities and deliverables of each organization as they relate to each stage in developing, releasing and supporting a product or service. The framework accommodates a project team’s need to experiment with different ways of implementing documentation, communications, and risk management.

Throughout the process and for an appropriate period of time afterwards, Managing Technology works in a senior management capacity with each of the cross functional teams to align their internal procedures to the framework.