Acing Project Deliveries

Delivering successful projects requires balancing several crucial aspects, including techno-business requirements, client interactions, and project management. These requirements involve understanding and incorporating the technical and business needs of the project, effective client communication, collaboration, and relationship-building. In this SME Speak interview, Karthik explains how by balancing these key aspects, companies can deliver projects that exceed client expectations, achieve business objectives, and build long-lasting relationships with customers.

1. What are some effective ways to communicate a product's business benefits or value to a client?

I always believe understanding our customer's product roadmap and related overall business value is crucial. While the underlying technology is important, we have to understand as to how the features developed benefit the customer's business.

We also need to understand the customer's domain well [viz. pharma, manufacturing, etc]. Understanding the business process and related nuances gives a much better grasp of their specific needs and challenges and tailor the product to meet those needs. It helps us deliver a product that truly meets the customers' needs and enhances their go-to-market strategy.

2. How can a delivery team ensure they meet the technical requirements and the client's business needs?

When we work on projects, we always take a holistic approach to make sure that the business, as well as technical aspects, are handled seamlessly. For us, that means the delivery team handles the entire end-to-end business flow, not just the technical flow.

We achieve this by working with a team composition that includes a product owner/BA, an architect, software developers, quality assurance consultants, and a scrum master/project manager.

The project lifecycle management from requirement elicitation, design, sizing, scheduling, development of given features, QA/user acceptance, and final release and deployment is handled seamlessly.

The team also ensures that the feature prioritization is conducted in concurrence with the client's business stakeholders and roadmap, and in-sprint demos and user testing ensure that the product is formally validated before production go-live. Since our projects typically follow an Agile methodology, the functionality delivered is in interim sprints and releases rather than waiting till the end of the project.

By having everyone contribute their expertise and cover every aspect of the project, we ensure customer success.

3. How important is a holistic understanding of the client's business when delivering a solution?

When it comes to delivering a solution to a customer, it is extremely essential to understand not just the requirements but their overall business as well. Sometimes, delivery teams get so caught up in the technical design and architecture that they tend to miss the larger picture. To make sure we truly understand the customer's vision and how that translates into requirements, we preempt a direct discussion on technical solutions.

That could mean a further requirement session, walking through the client business process, finding out if the customer has a similar solution already in place, or determining if they need an enhancement to an existing solution, etc. which would meet their needs rather than a new design which will consume a larger effort.

4. Can you give an example of a project where you were able to deliver a solution that met both technical and business requirements?

A very recent one comes to mind. We were developing a mobile app for an online retail client. From a technical perspective, the app needed to handle a high traffic volume, process transactions securely, and provide a smooth user [UX] experience. From a business standpoint, however, we knew that the app needed to generate revenue, boost brand awareness, and provide a platform for end users to have a one-stop platform for all their online retail needs.

If you only focus on the technical side of things, you might end up with an app that works perfectly but doesn't meet business needs or attract customers. If you only focus on the business side of things, you might end up with a poorly designed app that doesn't deliver on its promises. So, it's all about finding that balance between the technical and business sides of things to create a functional and successful application. We, therefore, had a detailed business and tech architecture discovery and design during the initial project initiation and requirement phase, which subsequently led to a very successful delivery leading to immense client satisfaction.

5. How can a team balance the technical requirements of a solution with the user experience?

We use an agile scrum process for development. We start by getting high-level requirements from business users, then we break those requirements down into epics, features, and individual user stories with the help of our customer product owners. Once we have our user stories, we prioritize them based on urgency and release requirements. Then, we work on them in sprints, which are basically just short development cycles. As soon as we develop a new feature, we demo it back to the users as an in-sprint validation. That way, they can provide feedback, and we can make any necessary changes right away before the feature is formally released. This keeps everyone plugged into the project at all times and ensures a largely defect-free and business-driven delivery.

6. How do you ensure that you are delivering a solution that is scalable and can adapt to changes in the business environment?

As indicated earlier, our team is diverse, with a mix of roles like product owner, senior architect, developers, QA experts, etc.

We start by understanding our customers' requirements. Then our architect and product owner collaborate to develop a solution that can handle a higher level of performance, accommodating any potential future scalability needs. We also ensure that our development is modular and configurable by users rather than frequent backend interventions by IT.

All of this helps us to be agile and responsive to our customers' needs. We are always looking for ways to ensure that we are creating the best possible solution for them, both now and in the future!

7. Can you provide some examples of how your team went beyond the technical aspects to deliver a solution that exceeded the client's expectations?

Sure! We recently completed a project for a prominent networking products company. Our team was asked to revamp their entire user interface as the legacy UI they had was not very user-friendly. To make the data more accessible to the customer, we developed some illustrative graphs and pictorial depictions to display data trends and performance in a clear visual manner. The customer was immensely pleased with the results because they could easily understand the data and monitor the service performance with a single click. In addition to the UI revamp, we worked on several integrations. We made sure that the code was written in a modular fashion to make it easy to configure any new sources that could be added later. Customer delight is our constant endeavor, and we focus on always going above and beyond when it comes to serving our customers.

8. Why is it important to understand the client's perspective when designing a product or service?

Often, only senior team members like the product owner, architect, leads, or scrum master interact with the client to get initial requirements. However, it's important for everyone on the team to have that perspective. They need to understand what they are doing, the real timelines, and the criticality of the project. They should also be aware of the rationale behind the timeline [viz. Business criticality, go-to-market strategy, revenue considerations, etc.] and what needs to be delivered in that period. Having a clear understanding of the project's goals and the intended audience is important in prioritizing tasks and delivering the project on time.

9. What are some best practices for client interaction during a project?

Governance meetings and Weekly Status Reviews [WSRs] are very critical and an important part of our overall service management processes. We have regular client and internal cadence meetings at pre-determined frequencies based on the project's criticality and stage. The governance meetings include regular operational reviews [at least once a week], management service reviews [once a month], and business reviews [typically once a quarter called QBR].

The operational reviews track project metrics and trends, transactional risks and issues, accomplishments, and upcoming work components. Monthly service reviews are organized to discuss overall project health status, CSAT feedback, mitigate escalations, technology reviews, best practices, etc. Quarterly business reviews provide overarching leadership governance where business and IT management review business outcomes and contractual changes (if any), discuss the future roadmap, upcoming org initiatives, etc.

All the above connects enable Intelliswift to be a true partner to the client rather than a service provider.

10. What role do risk management and contingency planning play in your approach to IT services project delivery?

When it comes to IT project management, we know that risks can occur unexpectedly. That's why we take risk management and contingency planning seriously; we integrate them into our standard service management process from the very beginning, viz., the pre-sales phase of every project. We use a predefined risk management template to identify all potential risks, and then we create a proactive mitigation plan to deal with them. We also have a contingency plan for critical roles to ensure we are always prepared for any unforeseen contingencies.

Transparency being one of our core values, we ensure that we are always transparent with our clients. We document and discuss risks with them regularly to mitigate any potential problems. If there are any changes to the project scope, we have a predefined change management process to handle them seamlessly.

11. How does Intelliswift ensure that its project delivery approach is aligned with the needs of its clients?

Before initiating a project, we have a detailed conversation with the client to understand their requirements, objectives, and timelines. We also assess our client business mandates w.r.t parameters like market demand/go-to-market strategy, our customer's direct and indirect competition, project funding, etc. Once we have a clear understanding of the client's goals and constraints, we work on a plan that prioritizes the most critical aspects of the project.

For instance, sometimes, they have a specific timeline, such as needing an MVP to be released in the market within, say, three months. In some cases, it may not be practically feasible, we acknowledge that it may not be possible to deliver everything within that timeline, so we prioritize the top objectives and negotiate with the client to complete those first and then work on the rest in a staggered basis.

So, we always make a point to clearly understand the objectives and establish project milestones based on the requirements beforehand. This way, we can work efficiently towards our goals and reduce potential bottlenecks during execution.