PPM and SDLC Case Study

Introduction of Project Management Methodology and SDLC gets development team back on track.

Company

Full-service creative advertising, marketing, and branding agency with global reach, including several Fortune 500 clients

Challenge

Although their primary business is traditional media advertising, our client saw an opportunity to develop and sell their own software product – online software that manages customer incentive programs. Well received by existing and new customers, the software product and business quickly grew to become half of their overall business.

This rapid growth caused several technical challenges. The product was not designed to support more than a few dozen accounts, it was taking too long to setup new clients, and extensive customizations were causing support issues. After weighing these challenges against their long-term strategy, they decided to rewrite the software.

Their internal team quickly began new development, with a 12-month target date. The team worked loosely with little to no structure, often jumping between projects. The developers we not held accountable and began missing dates, delaying new sales and revenue. Furthermore, leadership had no visibility and was unable to predict progress or rely on proposed schedules. With the combination of not knowing when the project would be complete, increasingly mounting issues with maintaining the current code base, and no new sales; the company began to discuss permanently closing the online incentive division.

Solution

The Client called on Aprelion’s project management team to provide a full discovery of the project scope, assess the current state of the codebase, provide guidance on onboarding a new development team, and develop a project plan and schedule to complete the project. Aprelion emphasized project management fundamentals as a foundation to drive organizational change.

Initial discover identified several challenges, including poor team alignment and communication. Current members of the development team were unaware of overall project goals and objectives, and how their performance was impacting delivery. Aprelion quickly pulled everyone together to outline roles and responsibilities, and how each individual contributed to the near and long term vision. Team members were more motivated, and felt more secure in their positions.

Aprelion and the reinvigorated development team worked together to establish a new project lifecycle, which included the following:

• What elements should go into the Project Plan and why they are important
• Creation of work breakdown structures
• Risk category examples and what constitutes a high, medium or low risk
• How the team should handle dependencies in scheduling
• Task estimating and what techniques are the simplest and most effective
• When and how often the Project Manager should engage stakeholders
• The significance and necessity of escalation to the Agency Partners
• The importance of establishing a change control process at the start of a project

Additionally, daily scrum meetings for the development team members were instituted. Bi-weekly status meetings were also put into place to communicate project status with project sponsors.

By improving communication and implementing SDLC principals, there was an immediate improvement in project delivery. Developers began to meet their timelines, and milestones were on time and on budget. Better adherence to milestones allowed ownership to begin selling and committing to new client engagements.

To further improve productivity and shield the development team from distractions, the Aprelion project manager interfaced directly with existing customers – customers were no longer able to speak directly with developers. Issues and new features raised by existing customers were queued in the product backlog for later prioritization.

Results

With help from Aprelion, the client development team was able to successfully rewrite the original application, making it more scalable and easier to support. Existing customers were quickly migrated to the new platform, while onboarding new clients.