Our Experience with the Web
Web Management
Running a web delivery department teaches you a lot about all aspects of IT, from the level of representing your department at CIO and business leader level, through individual programme management, people management, requirements analysis, testing, strategy, development methodology, training, coaching, product maintenance, customer satisfaction, and so on.
The skills and experience developed in our successful execution of this responsibility gives us the credentials to slip into any one of the roles above, either in a (interim) managerial context, or for coaching and change management We have experience running organizational change, off-shoring and web legacy system upgrades |
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Web Product Upgrades
We have presided over big upgrade programmes for publicly facing financial websites, which had to deal with legacy systems with inadequate documentation and the requirement for the new one "to do the same as the old one".
We approached this by freezing development on the existing webs as soon as possible, allowing only essential maintenance (break-fix etc). Then we delivered the first phase of the new web as soon as possible. Thanks to some clever architecting, it was possible to have the two working together, but it was not ideal. Key to the ability to do this was a very early step in implementing the new authentication infrastructure. Eventually it was possible to remove the old web (minus some non-changing legacy), and the new system was as complete as it was going to be, until the next upgrade. |
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One Size doesn't Fit All
In another engagement, which was agile within DSDM, the XP process had to be adapted somewhat to fit in with the traditions and culture of the company.
Although this sounds scary, you do not need to lose the power and magic of agile in doing this. What it came down to was complying with the way project information/status gets fed to management, and turning the certainty of "on d/m/y we will deliver something, but we dont know what yet" into a more "predictive" statement like "phase 1 of company-product will be released on d/m/y, containing all must-have reqs and some extras". Once we got over the temptation to be too loose about what was going to happen when, allowing the customer to decide, it was straightforward to join up with existing process. |
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Leveraging Scrum
Scrum is now the primary flavour of agile used in most companies. It is easy to understand, but also easy to do wrong. It needs mastering.
The key to Scrum is adherence to the few simple rules, and the strength of character of the Scrum Master in ensuring the team understands how to follow them. But the notion of "done", TDD, automation, estimation and velocity of a team are still as hard to cope with as ever, and therefore it is vital to have the right guiding force behind it. We have experience using Scrum in
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