As consultants, we work hard to anticipate our clients’ questions and needs. But sometimes we need a little nudge to share more detail. To show how these “nudges” can enhance outcomes, I’ve put together six questions you can ask to get more out of your software consultant team. Read more on Six Questions to Ask Your Software Consultant Team…
Managing Your Team
Want to Increase Your Custom Software ROI? Trust Your Team
To have a successful project, you need to trust your team, and they need to trust you.
This is obvious on some levels. Your team must trust that they’re going to get paid, and you must trust that they’re not going to copy your whole database and sell it to your competitors.
But trusting your team should mean more than that. To achieve real, powerful teamwork, trust must go far beyond, “I know you won’t cheat me.” Read more on Want to Increase Your Custom Software ROI? Trust Your Team…
Six Traits of Outstanding (& Outstandingly Successful) Clients
In over 15 years of consulting, I’ve had the privilege of working with hundreds of clients and stakeholders. While many of them were memorable for different reasons, some clients have been truly outstanding in terms of our working relationship and what we were able to accomplish together.
Read more on Six Traits of Outstanding (& Outstandingly Successful) Clients…
Six Leadership Roles that Can Make or Break Your Software Project
When you hire a software team, you probably have a pretty good understanding of the technical roles they need to fill: development, design, devops, testing, etc. But don’t gloss over the leadership roles—especially the ones that your team may be responsible for. Read more on Six Leadership Roles that Can Make or Break Your Software Project…
Six Pitfalls on the Road to Valuable Custom Software
If you’re about to invest in custom software, you have high hopes for what it can do for your business. As my colleague Mike wrote recently:
Building custom software is like sculpting with clay—you can create just about anything you can imagine. Read more on Six Pitfalls on the Road to Valuable Custom Software…
Read more on Six Pitfalls on the Road to Valuable Custom Software…
The Atomic Agile Process
The best process is owned by its team, but everyone has to start somewhere. That’s why I drafted this, a template for Atomic Object’s Agile process. It’s designed to be a starting point for our maker teams as they come together to tackle a new project.
Read more on The Atomic Agile Process…
Transparent Project Management with Burn Up Charts
Uncertainty is inherent to software development — it’s impossible to precisely predict how long individual tasks will take. And that makes it very difficult to manage software projects using traditional project management tools.
Read more on Transparent Project Management with Burn Up Charts…
7 Guidelines for Constructive Design Feedback
If you’re a client working with a polyvalent team of makers at Atomic Object, one of the most valuable things you can do is to give feedback throughout the project. This may come as a shock to you. In the past, you might have been involved in a project where feedback wasn’t welcome—or even treated as downright hostile. If that’s the case, let me be the first (and hopefully not the last) to apologize on behalf of consultants everywhere. Read more on 7 Guidelines for Constructive Design Feedback…
Who Pays for Bugs?
It’s inevitable that bugs will be created during custom software development projects. And it’s not unusual for clients to have the mindset that the development team should “pay” for the bugs.
Agility is about Accuracy
When you work with Atomic Object, you’ll hear a lot about Agile software development. Agile takes many different forms, but all of them are, at heart, about writing better software faster. Agile is part philosophy, part methodology, and part discipline. The Agile Manifesto emphasizes people instead of mechanical processes.
But before diving into the specifics of how Agile works, let’s back up and look at the problem Agile is trying to solve. Why come up with a new system in the first place?