Mastering Your Company’s Digital Solution Needs: Practical Tips for Success
For some years now I have been managing internal web and data development projects, leading me to collaborate with various agencies. Some of these experiences were absolutely terrible while others went smoothly, thus here are some tips to do it better.
Appoint someone competent to lead internally
This sounds straightforward but not all organisations and companies have staff at hand with the necessary in-house skills or resources to hire someone to lead one-off IT projects. Even if you completely outsource development work, it’s important to appoint a contact person internally who is not digitally illiterate and shows some motivation and willingness to technically understand the product that you seek to build. Also, give them time to familiarise themselves with the new technology.
For example, if you move your CRM to Salesforce, don’t wait with training till deployment, support your staff responsible for implementation to do training in advance.
First, figure out what you want
Identifying your digital solution need(s) is a great first step but the real work begins once you decide to go ahead. It’s not enough to have a vague idea of what you want to implement, you need to work out the details either in-house or with outside help and that’s the tricky part. This is usually done as part of the discovery or scoping phase which helps to define the objectives and required resources. There is a ton of literature on how to do it right.
Agencies often offer the discovery phase as a service to you within the development journey but this might not be in your best interest. Usually, a given amount of resources and time are allocated to this phase which can make you feel rushed into making critical decisions. Discussions around business processes may open Pandora’s box and result in the need for a wider strategic review.
Furthermore, the time will certainly come when your service provider has the illusion of understanding your needs and makes process decisions for you during development. Then you will experience a profound sense of astonishment when the product is released for testing.
Remember, you know your processes better than anybody else thus take the time to work out what you want.
Get buy-in from senior management
An important and potentially expensive pitfall to avoid is not getting buy-in from senior management. Although most projects go through a round of initial approvals, it doesn’t automatically mean that management is willing to closely follow the development process itself. Due to their busy schedule and various commitments, they are most likely interested in the end product itself — this is something to avoid. If a change request comes towards the end of the lifecycle of the development, that could mess up some critical product logic or overall design and thus end up as an expensive blooper.
Therefore it’s important to agree on roles and responsibilities before doing any development. Discuss the sign-off process with senior management, and try to involve them whenever the developers ask you to sign off bits and pieces of the project. Have an understanding with management that change requests will most probably increase costs.
Senior management is likely to be less interested in how the product works as long as it is capable of delivering its main objectives, rather they are interested in the visuals and the overall story the product conveys.
Don’t blindly trust agencies
Agencies want to make money, understandably, and as we are talking about technology, they presume that you have a very limited understanding of how much time it takes to complete certain development tasks. Therefore it’s good to have somebody on your team who does understand in order to get a realistic estimate of the required time and budget.
Service providers compete with each other for clients thus probably as you are not telling the complete truth on your resume about yourself, they also exaggerate and try to show competence even when they don’t have the experience. That partly comes from the nature of the field: well-versed developers can easily adopt new technologies on the job, but sometimes they do encounter a significant challenge or complication. When they do, depending on the type of your contract, the cost of the development can skyrocket.
To mitigate the risk, when a solution or a component is recommended to you, ask for references to make sure that they have indeed worked with the proposed technology. Especially true for third-party integrations.
Explore alternative development arrangements
Agencies work sometimes with surprisingly large project teams including a project sponsor, a project manager, a finance person, multiple developers with different levels of seniority, testers, analysts, and others depending on the project. Once, at a kick-off call, I had around ten people looking at me on Zoom and then I have never seen half of them.
Consequently, their rates are calculated so all these people get paid. If you have a limited budget, you might want to work with a smaller team or even hire a consultant.
The option to go with a consultant or even put them on a payroll might not be a bad idea at all. This way both parties get more engaged with the project itself, and there is a constant dialogue. Yes, it can be more time-consuming on your end but at least you are not communicating with the developer(s) through a project manager — someone who is hard to come by with sufficient technical skills to get the right message across.
Pick up some coding/technical skills
Getting familiar with the technology that you seek to implement is really a key to success. You don’t have to become a developer yourself unless you want to, but even having entry-level skills will make your life easier. It will help you to understand what’s possible and what’s not; how realistic the price estimates are; be able to debug the system to a certain extent; and speak the same language as the developers enabling you to directly liaise with them.
One of the toughest parts of development is figuring out process logic. Like what a button does when a user presses it, how the data gets handled, what fields will get updated, and whether it will trigger further functions. By picking up some coding skills you will have a solid foundation to work on some of these processes yourself which will be greatly appreciated by developers.
+1) Appreciate techy staff members
Internal staff members who have an appetite for tech are a great asset for all companies. Don’t treat them as the geeky weird ones who should mind their own business. Not only they are usually great rational and logical thinkers, but they can also save your company a ton of money and time by having a good understanding of tech in general. Involve them as much as possible in decision-making processes as well.
They can lead the way in adopting new solutions that might just put you ahead of your competitors.
Hope these tips are helpful although they might not work in every setup thus use them wisely. Please comment if you have other good advice. I would love to hear them.
