FAQ Category: Project management

A change register is maintained during projects and is reviewed as part of the regular work in progress meetings.

This includes:

  • Discussion of affects to budget and timings
  • Decisions on priorities
  • Reports on progress for any further scoping or enquiries made towards any change request made that requires further research

There are several scenarios that can cause deadline or budget breaches that TBST is prepared for:

Unexpected events, or unknown quantities

  • Every project we engage in, we sopce the unknowns as much as possible to avoid surprises. To support this, we also reccomend contingency budgets to accomodate worst case scenarios and reccomend that our clients prepare a process to help define whether to access this contingency if required or recomended.
  • We provide fixed amount costs where possible, and define clear paramters for hourly charges.
  • Part of onboarding inlcudes a discussion on potential risks with the obejctive of creating plans to avoid or mitigate.

Alternative millestones
Discussing alternative milestones is another technique we employ to manage missed dealines or budget overage.

Options include:

  • Reducing scope of initial delivery
  • Staging releases
  • Researching alternative solutions

All of our servers are in Australia, and most of the work we perform is direct to one of our staging servers.

If a developer is required to work locally with sensitive data, then we set up dummy data, or the work is performed by a local developer in Sydney.

There are many approaches to ensuring successful adoption. The approach that works for your organisation depends on resources available to support your website or software project. Therefore, this needs to be a highly collaborative approach.

However, there are three key principles that are applied to whichever approach we choose:

  1. Keep it simple – interfaces can get complicated quickly if we try to accomplish to much with a single element.
  2. Keep it universal – universal access is a step beyond “Accessibility” becuase it considers more than differently abled users, but also different devices, living circumstances and even cultural differences.
  3. Keep asking – we think of it as progress over perfection – as long as we maintain the flexibility, we should continuously poll our users and make improvments based on thieir feedback.

1. Strategic objectives

Websites need to evolve with the organisation’s objectives as well as their adminsitrative capability, otherwise, they are not effective as tools that support your objectives.

Therefore, it is important for the project team to have the same understanding of the organisation’s goals over a horizon in terms of:

a. Resourcing and skills
b. Key projects and developments across the business
c. Finance and budgets
d. Program development
e. Organisational objectives

Typically, we run several workshops with different combinations of members from teams as there will be many shared functions and process, as well as differnt skill levels to accomodate and design for.

2. Policies and governance

Projects often encompass many busines processes such as e-commerce, communications and marketing, operations and customer service, so it is critical to understand the process and policies behind each process to understand the impact a new solution will have. This will also determine the level and nature of ongoing support required once the project has been handed over.

This stage includes the following steps:

  • Workshops
  • Outline workflows
  • Highlight gaps and resources
  • Roles and responsibilities

3. Solution Design

This stage can be quite broad – as there are many possible contributors to a project from different third parties. Often, a deep understanding will need to be developed in the following:

  • Hosting Infrastructure
  • System administration with an ERP
  • Security compliance (will be expanded on from policies and governance)
  • Content creation and updates (including brand requirements and UX development)
  • E-commerce process – reconcilliation, records and paytment gateways
  • Reporting and insights

4. Risk managemnt

Every project contains an element of risk, which we define as unknown variables that can have a detrimental effect on the project outcome, budget or timline. A session where we try to anticpate the risks, document and suggest contingency is a valuable process to managing the unexpected.

At the conclusion of each stage, documents will be created to record decisions and define the project deliverables, timelines and budget.