Paul K space : find / engineering_success | grep discovery

Created by Paul Kelleher on Apr 09, 2023
In delivering software engineering success, what discovery should we do to be prepared?

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=defining+software+project+success

How much effort for Discovery?

While each of the areas covered

(blue star) (blue star)

Discovery Stages - be mindful of the effort expended on the Discovery stages of any technology endeavour - depending on your level of experience and how involved with the process you are, will reflect how much time and effort is required from you. As an engineer with 25 years experience, I can be involved right from the start… as someone considered outspoken about honest delivery, I have often been involved with the c-suite executives ensuring that we’re taking a direction that’s right for the business at this time

At a minimum, you should be able to tick every box - knowing with confidence that you take the right engineering direction, with inputs from all the areas you meed to deliver success

At a maximum, you should be prepared to break down each of the areas, explain why this information is important to get right for a succesfull delivery - and to provide detail for each area, and have your recommendations approved by the appropriate reviewer

(tick) Executive Sponsor

Implementation and engineering details for a solution are where you expel most of your effort - but ensuring the solution you aim to deliver is rewarded for its success, it’s important that it’s highly visible to the business, and helps improve the business.

By ensuring that a solution to be delivered feeds into success of the business, we should understand that we are aligned with where the business is aiming

Approves Alignment with Business Objectives

The business objectives are how the business measures it’s success internally - and often to shareholders or the market… so spend the time to highlight how you will feed into achieving one or more of the business goals - often based around the topics below

  • Revenue objectives: Maintaining consistent profitability is essential for any business. Companies cannot be profitable without consistent profit. Measuring revenue is a great way to track the sustainability of a firm.

  • Operational objectives: Operational objectives include making sure that the logistical elements of your business are up to scratch. For instance, it might mean ensuring your supplies will arrive from a manufacturer at the same time each month. These objectives keep the company running smoothly.

  • Productivity and performance: Employees are the lifeblood of a business. Making sure that employees remain productive drives revenue and improves customer satisfaction. Measuring employee satisfaction and setting goals for each team ensures efficiency and productivity.

  • Customer satisfaction: The customer is always a top priority in any business. Some organizations regularly survey their clients to ensure that they’re making the right impression and driving loyalty.

  • Growth: Companies measure growth over the long-term and short-term. Growth appears in the form of website traffic, social media followers, turnover and product sales and much more.

  • Does the product, and the solution your going to deliver help to meet any of the criteria
  • How will you feed into the objectives - in detail…
  • How will you measure it
  • Approves Alignment with Business Objectives

Approves Alignment with Technology Roadmap

Most organisations will have a technology direction that they are heading in.. a roadmap to what technologies or methodologies we want to use to ensure consistency, value for money and resource

  • Are we able to take direction from the roadmap?
  • Are we able to leverage existing resource on the roadmap to enhance delivery or re-use mechanisms?
  • Are we able to enhance the business by feeding in our engineering to the roadmap
    • Best Practice Investigations and Publication
    • Proof of Concepts and Investigations to help attain roadmap goals as well as meet project requirements
    • Deviation from the roadmap
  • Approves Alignment with Technology Roadmap

(tick) Product Owner

The product owner is likely the main interface for engineering into the business - and its important that a number of factors are considered for a successful relationship. The product owner will own the problem definition that we will use to come up with solutions - so it’s incredibly important. that there is clear communication each way - and that we ensure understanding in both directions

  • The Product Requirement should well defined and encompass the user, what their expectations are and typical user experiences they expect in the form of user stories

  • The information that we want to collect to metric success - and if that collection is within legal and accepted boundaries

  • The most important features or deliverables that will quickly indicate success factors

    • by helping the product owner understand and define the features that can provide an insight into custom usage or indicate whether the product will be a success

    • building in feedback from the start can provide engineering metrics indicating performance and showing potential issues that could be proactively addressed rather that reactively flagged

Defines Product Requirement

The

  • Defines Product Requirement
Defines Success Metrics

For any base delivery or solution, we should consider any metrics that we could expose and collect to provide insight.

For engineers, we could consider the time a transaction takes to process - helping us understand where we can improve

For Product Owners, matching customer behaviours - such as reloads, abandonment etc indicate custom usage

Matching custom behaviour to engineering data allows us to pro-actively adjust the solution to affect customer satisfaction

  • Defines Success Metrics
Defines Delivery Priorities

Initial priorities for the product delivery

  • Defines Delivery Priorities
Minimal Viable Product Feature Selection

  • Minimal Viable Product Feature Selection
Feature Delivery Roadmap

  • Feature Delivery Roadmap

(tick) Subject Matter Experts

(tick) Engineering

(tick) External Entities

Stakeholder Identification
  • Organisation
    • Executive Sponsor
      • Approves Alignment with Business Objectives
      • Approves Alignment with Technology Roadmap
  • Product Owner
    • Defines Product Requirement
    • Defines Success Metrics
    • Defines Delivery Priorities
    • Minimal Viable Product Feature Selection
    • Feature Delivery Roadmap
  • Subject Matter Experts
    • Existing Processes
    • Existing Technologies
  • Implementation
  • Customer
    • Expectations
    •  
  • External

How much effort?

(blue star)