Great Products Consulting

Tag: issue management

  • What you need to do to manage your development project

    What you need to do to manage your development project

    Regardless of what work you’re outsourcing to someone else to do, people often forget that you can’t just dump it on someone’s desk or inbox, and walk away. This is especially true when you’re getting someone to build you an online platform or mobile app. Since the building of your product is the most important part of getting it to market, it’s critical that you make the time to manage your development project.

    What’s does it mean to “manage” your project?

    At its most fundamental level, managing your project means that you have to keep an eye on what’s going on. It seems obvious, but most people don’t look beyond the basics of schedule and budget, which means they miss out on a whole lot of important stuff.

    Here are 5 key things that you should be managing:

    1. Cost
    2. Schedule
    3. Scope
    4. Risks
    5. Issues

    1. Cost

    Cost is how much you’re spending on your product development project. Yes, it’s probably the main thing that you want to track. Most people have fixed price contracts (i.e. a set price to do all of the work), which means that they only think about costs when their developers ask for more money. Regardless, of your contract, you should keep a close eye on your costs. The more money you spend upfront, the more you have to sell to pay off your investment.

    2. Schedule

    Time is another important part of your project. You want to have a clear view of when your developers will be giving you stuff (Hint: It should be in your contract.) If there are delays in completing development, then it will take you longer to get to launch, and you’re waiting longer to start making money.  Make sure you’re seeing progress in your project.

    3. Scope

    Scope is about building the things that were agreed to. You want to make sure that you’re getting what you asked for. Scope creep is one thing that’s really common in development projects.  It can cause your costs and timelines to blow out considerably. Scope also covers quality – developers may build what you want, but it might not work properly – and that’s not good either!

    4. Risks

    Risks are basically anything that might affect the outcome of your project. They come in all different flavours and can be in your control, and out of your control. Some examples of risk include regulatory risk, technology risk, legal risk, resourcing risk, financial risk – pretty much anything can be a risk. You want to have an idea of all of the key risks that might derail your project, and have a plan for mitigating them.

    5. Issues

    Issues are things that are raised, and need to be addressed during the course of your project. These generally are related to things that aren’t working as they should, or things that need to be resolved to complete a development project. For example, an issue might be that a button doesn’t work on a screen, or maybe your developers can’t get your website running on your host. You need to track and manage your issues to ensure that your project can finish successfully. You may not solve everything prior to your launch, but the important items will be fixed.

    In summary…

    Cost, schedule and scope are all tied together. If you increase the scope, it will cost you more, and take longer to build. Alternatively, if you’re behind schedule, you may need to get more people working on your project, which increases costs – or you can reduce how much you build. Finally, if you’re going too far over budget, you can reduce what gets built.

    Risks and issues run alongside of the other three. They can relate to any of the three issues, and to other things in and beyond your control.

    As the person that’s paying a lot of money for a developer, you have a very strong interest in seeing your product development project complete successfully. By having an awareness of these five factors for managing projects, you’ll be able to track and monitor how well things are going. More importantly, you have a head start when (not if) things go wrong.

    Want more tips on how to turn your idea into a great product?
    Read our Foundations for Non-Tech article.
  • How do you manage issues with your platform or app?

    How do you manage issues with your platform or app?

    Issues are raised when something doesn’t work as expected – a user can’t log in, a picture or information doesn’t display, a number on a report hasn’t been calculated correctly, a link is broken, etc. For those of you that have launched a platform or app already, today’s blog post will certainly resonate with you. Getting to launch is often the focus for many, and they don’t get a chance to think about what happens after. In a previous article, I described 3 areas that you have to consider after launch. Today, I’m going to look at one area in particular – supporting your new product.

    It would be nice to think that nothing goes wrong – unfortunately, it does. When it does, you need to do something to fix it. Your developer – or the people you hire to support your platform – will probably help you with defining this process. They may also have processes in place already. However, it always pays for you to be aware of what should be involved, so you can raise questions and make informed decisions about how your product will be supported.

    1. Categorise your issues:

    The first thing about managing issues (a.k.a. defects, bugs, problems, incidents) is you need to know how bad it is. In tech jargon, this is called “severity”. Issues are often categorised into different severity levels, which indicate how important it is for the issue to be fixed. You might hear terms like “critical”, “major”, “minor” or “cosmetic”.  People also use “severity level 1, 2, 3” – where the 1 is the most critical.  You determine if an issue is “critical” based on its impact to your business and your users.  The criteria for each category should be pre-defined, so that when a new issue is raised, you can just slot it into one of the categories.  There shouldn’t be a big discussion when the issue is raised, because everyone is on the same page.   

    2. Define timelines to fix each type of issue:

    The next step is to decide when each issue needs to be fixed by using the severity levels that have been defined above. Some issues may be so severe that it requires everyone to drop everything to fix it. Others don’t have the same urgency, as there are ways to work around the problem until it can be fixed.  

    The timelines that you define will depend on what level of support that you want (and can afford). If you only have users in one country, then you may only need support during business hours or maybe for specified hours during the day. Alternatively, if you have users all over the world, then you may want to consider 24 x 7 support where someone is always available to respond to issues – even at 3am in the morning!

    3. Define a process for working through each issue:

    This step is about defining a process for investigating and resolving each issue. You need to think about thing like – how users notify you of an issue; checking if an issue is valid (e.g. is it really an issue or just human error?); documenting the issue (e.g. what information do you have to provide to the technical team?); categorising issues; testing an issue to make sure it’s fixed; where you test fixes; how  fixes are implemented; etc. When you answer these questions, you’ll be able to create a process for handling issues when they arise.      

    4. Establish penalties for missing deadlines:

    Running a business is hard enough when things do go right, so it’s critical that things get fixed based on the timelines agreed. If you can’t fix an issue, it could cost you money – both in terms of lost revenue and in payouts you might need to make. Your support partner needs to be accountable for that. However, you don’t want shoddy fixes just so that a deadline can be met, so ensure that you consider quality as well. When you’re setting up your support processes, make sure you define penalties – especially when the most serious deadlines are missed.  

    5. Create your service level agreement:

    When you’re setting up your support process, all of the above pieces will form the basis of a contract with your technical team. This contract will define “service level agreements” (or SLAs) that set out the expectations for resolving any issues that come up. As with your initial contract with your developer, this contract is about protecting your business and making sure everyone is on the same page – especially when the worst case scenarios occur.        

    6. Track and monitor issues:

    Now that you’ve got all of the above setup, you need to track and monitor what happens. This is important – not just for keeping on top of what’s going on with your product – but also to understand how your product is working. Issues can tell you where people are having problems with the user experience, or a specific function that needs to be reviewed.

    To manage your issues, you need to a single place to list all of the issues that are raised, and what their severities are. Issues should be given a status based on their progress through the process that you define. You should also track the dates issues were raised, and when they were fixed. All of this information will help you to stay on top of whether your technical team is meeting the agreed SLAs.      

    Don’t freak out – it’s not so bad!

    This might all seem like a lot to take in, but once you’ve got it all worked out, you can focus on the track and monitor piece. Your technical team will have a lot of input into this too, so they’ll be able to help you. If you’ve completed a thorough test of your product, then it’s unlikely you’ll have too many issues at the beginning. However, the nature of beast is that you can’t test everything, so there’s always a chance that something will go wrong. Setting this up will make sure you’re ready when it does.   

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