Tim Huckaby has made the cover of Channelpro magazine this fall. The
Peer to Peer article titled
Lifecycle of an Engagement was written by Tim and describes the InterKnowlogy Engagement Process.
At InterKnowlogy we employ an agile method of software development called Scrum, named after the rugby term [a way of restarting the game when the ball has gone out of play]. Scrum is pretty simple in concept—there is a Scrum master, the project manager or quarterback, if you will, and there’s a daily meeting in which features of the software are prioritized with the entire development team. Everyone is on the hook. Features are managed daily, and if you don’t get your part done, you’re called out in the Scrum meeting. So there’s a certain pressure to deliver your work. The customer also participates on the Scrum team—attending meetings and helping with the design, approval, and prioritization— and is crucial to the process.
The Scrum process is broken down into manageable chunks called sprints, during which certain commitments are made. Many of the world’s largest software firms use this methodology, including Microsoft, so we mesh well with them. It works great for us too. By instituting this process we are on time and under budget more times than not.
In more detail, the engagement process goes like this: First there is a customer conversation,
or presale discussion. We listen to the problem that needs to be solved, or the complication, and we create a statement of work that includes a recommended technical solution. This solution takes into account the customer’s budget, the technology the company already owns, the things that need to be integrated, and the complications that go with all that. If the solution can encompass products the company already owns, that’s all the better.
After a statement of work is prepared and the customer is on board with it, a discovery document is created that includes the project scope. If the customer continues to move forward, the discovery document becomes the functional design, which is the engineering solution or blueprint for building the software that also spells out the cost and time it will take to build.
The combination of discovery document and functional design is part of what we call the discovery and design phase.
Once the customer signs on the dotted line, we head into the engineering and deployment phase, which, according to the Scrum process, is broken up into small, manageable chunks—usually months or sometimes weeks for small projects. During these sprints the software is built, unit tested, system tested, user accepted and tested, and designed and validated in the Scrum process. Ultimately, that moves us to integration testing and deployment, and then to the training phase at the end. We’re designed to go away after we build a piece of software and turn it over. We hope that they invite us back for new projects, which they do, but we are designed to go away. So at the end of the project we provide administrative training, knowledge transfer, and management training.
That’s the way the process works. And since we’ve formalized it, the process is repeatable and it sets a level of expectation for everyone on the project team.
http://www.channelpro-digital.com/channelpro/200711//?folio=20