October 30, 2008, 7:21 AM — Ditch that long, tedious development process. See how you can have a quicker and more efficient process and cut those cycles by half.
A challenged project manager thinks about two things that seem to be the order of his everyday life: how quick and how cheap. How quick can he turn over the project to the client? How cheap can he pull it off? Wouldn’t he be the happiest PM if he can achieve both?
Or, is this achievable at all?
Let’s begin by looking again at the stages of the development process: requirements, design, execution, testing/debugging, release. For years, it had been long and tedious work—the process goes in one direction and each stage is completed before proceeding to the next—linear in other words. Nothing would be started, except the first stage, of course, until the previous stage had been finished. And quite apparently did not have room for changes in the middle of the process. Errors, therefore, would be seen at the tail end when the software had been completed.
This linear approach had been considered not only rigid, but costly, both in time and resources, exactly the things that a PM would evade and an organization would frown upon. The approach, many had believed, would likely leave organizations unable to keep up in today’s rapidly changing environment and businesses slow to adapt making survival difficult.
Today’s project manager has at his disposal various development techniques with shorter cycles collectively known as Agile software development. Through this method, the long, tedious process of development is streamlined and shortened.
Read the full article in ExecutiveBrief magazine and learn how to reduce development cost, adapt quickly to changes in requirements and respond to user needs faster: Cut Your Development Cycle by As Much As 50 percent.
www.executivebrief.com/article/cut-your-development-cycle-by-as-much-as-50-percent
