How to check if your project is moving in the right direction?
Suppose you have already started collaborating with a software development company and want to track the project's progress. Despite deep knowledge of development procedures, you face serious challenges in measuring project progress and assessing whether your project is moving in the right direction.
We want to help you identify all the "red flags" and poor practices that are hindering you from creating a great product. After reading our article, you will learn what ideal collaboration and performance measurement should look like, and if yours doesn't meet the standards, you'll understand how to improve it.
Measuring Project Progress for Ideal Collaboration
Product development is a complex and intricate process that varies across different development companies. Some project teams use agile development, which prioritizes cross-functionality and the interconnection of individual tasks. Others prefer the waterfall method, adhering to predefined project scopes and timelines, where project parts are executed sequentially.
But regardless of the method, a software development partner must meet certain criteria to deliver a great mobile app ahead of schedule and within budget. Let's look at various aspects of project management to understand what ideal collaboration between a project manager and the development team should look like, and which practices should be avoided at all costs.
Project Management and Inter-team Collaboration
In an ideal mobile software development world, project management and collaboration between backend and mobile teams happen smoothly and continuously. They plan each feature together, provide detailed schemas, and prepare APIs. It's immediately evident that both teams get along well and challenge each other to make the project successful.
However, a worrying sign is when teams work independently and only communicate when something goes wrong. Moreover, if you notice that any suggestion for changes is perceived as a hostile attack, that's a serious red flag. After all, every team member should be aligned and strive for the best overall project outcome.
Requirements Definition and Task Setting
When discussing new features and project plans, the team asks questions, raises warnings, and examines security issues to identify edge cases before development even starts and plan how to avoid them. In case of a technical problem, they offer workarounds and ensure the software runs properly. The development team can evaluate your vision from both technical and business perspectives, prompting you to rethink your ideas. Can you relate to this? If so, you can rest easy because your project's progress is on track.
The problem arises when developers accept requirements as is, without verifying them. If you rarely hear questions about the app's functionality, you should be wary, as this may indicate a lack of engagement and only a superficial understanding of the project requirements. Naturally, this can lead to an increase in bugs and shortcomings during the process, and consequently, a delay in the app's deployment.
Understanding the Business
The key to success is that everyone understands not only the project's goal but also its business value. Under optimal conditions, the project manager and team members have a good grasp of the company's vision, so they feel comfortable in meetings with business stakeholders and propose innovative ideas.
In the worst case, developers refuse to participate in any business-related discussions and refuse to adapt technical components to industry requirements. Any request for a temporary reduction in technical quality, for example to meet a deadline, results in a revolt from the technical team, further worsening the situation. Such an atmosphere is not conducive to product growth.
UI/UX Development
The user interface is a crucial element of any application. A well-executed interface is a competitive advantage because it can turn casual visitors into loyal users. During the development of the app's visual layer, you should receive many suggestions on what can be improved or fixed for better results. Moreover, your team should propose ready-made solutions that allow you to reduce the overall development time and save some financial resources.
However, it may happen that your team offers no improvements and, worse, ignores issues until you ask them to fix them. A lack of engagement and a "not my job" attitude in the development team should be a red flag. After all, you are paying for full commitment and expect cutting-edge solutions.
Work Pace
The fact is that the pace of mobile app development should accelerate somewhat as the project progresses. If the work pace increases over time, it means the team has been able to build a solid foundation and architecture that can scale without major issues.
If it takes increasingly more time to add a new feature, that's one of the key signs that the project is failing. As if that weren't enough, developers avoid discussing the addition of new components and cannot propose viable solutions to current problems. Under such circumstances, you are in trouble. If the development process is not efficient and the team is not proactive, you won't be able to achieve your goals according to the project schedule.
Feature Delivery
You should carefully examine certain development procedures to understand how refined and automated they are, and whether they are automated at all. Why is this so important? Building a reliable CI/CD system will optimize the deployment process, saving time and reducing the risk of issues. Your app is constantly undergoing modifications, including configuration changes, bug fixes, or integration of new features, and doing this manually each time would take a lot of time.
If your team releases app versions daily using basic continuous integration and continuous delivery setups, then your project is in safe hands. However, in the absence of automation, you should be aware of potential delays in distributing DEV builds.
Communication
Good communication is the main condition for mutual understanding, so make sure your development partner is doing everything to let you assess progress and keep both sides on the same page. How to check? In an ideal collaboration, you are always informed about the project's status and know where you are on the timeline. Moreover, you are well acquainted with a detailed plan that includes every step of the development process and a strategy for achieving milestones. All possible issues are acknowledged and clearly articulated so you are aware of potential risks.
That's how it should be, but it's not always the case. You should be concerned if it seems that your team is creating features chaotically, constantly changing plans, and failing to report on project progress. Lack of regular updates on work progress and reports on implemented solutions can deprive you of control over project management and cause the project to deviate from its original scope.
How to Solve These Problems
Based on the list above, do you assess your development team's work positively, or do you rather notice several "red flags" and improper actions in your project? If the latter reflects your current situation, don't lose hope! There are many strategies to keep the project afloat, and you can still wave a magic wand and fix everything. Let's look at common mistakes you might have made to understand how to correct them.
Inadequate Explanation of Project Goals
Proper task setting from the very start of the collaboration can save time and headaches later on. It allows for simplicity and transparency, leaving no room for misconceptions or false assumptions about product requirements.
So, you are now dissatisfied with how the project is going. But are you sure you've specified all the details necessary to create your dream app? Keep in mind that we often miss points that are obvious to us but could shed light on specific questions for others. In app development, it's preferable to communicate more information than seems necessary to maintain a proper software development process. Lack of specifics leads to increased confusion and misunderstanding between you and the team, reduced trust in each other's actions, and a drop in productivity.
Lack of Proper Introduction to Business Challenges
In an ideal world, the company you chose to build your product has deep expertise in your industry and knows exactly how to solve your business challenges. However, nothing is perfect, so sharing your vision of the company's problems with the technical team is a great idea.
If you think you haven't done your best to familiarize the team with your company's requirements, you should try again. Being proactive in maintaining mutual understanding of business matters can help the team structure logic in the code and improve the quality of the final product, which in the long run will save you time and resources.
Narrow Project Concept
Can you understand the meaning of a poem by reading only an excerpt? Of course not. Knowing only a small part of the whole ballad can distort its meaning and lead to wrong conclusions. The same happens with software development. Project owners often see no point in sharing detailed plans of future app development with the team, which is a big mistake.
Understanding what lies ahead allows developers to prepare the architecture, tools, and code for modifications and extensions. You need to know that system architecture errors are the most expensive because fixing them requires a full refactoring. Assuming it may be inconvenient for you, we recommend sharing the big picture with the development team as soon as possible.
Exceeding Requirements Over Capabilities
Only the development team knows how much time and resources are needed to build a working, high-quality, and scalable app, and which features can be reduced, postponed, or replaced with third-party solutions. Therefore, it's important to listen to the technical team's opinion. Sometimes it's better to spend a bit more time on expanding some fundamental parts of the project and improving quality. Constant workarounds and postponing technical improvements will have financial consequences. You don't want to maintain a low-quality project because that means significant losses to your budget. Balancing technical quality and meeting business needs is key. Those who ignore their technical team's warnings usually incur losses, and unfortunately, it's impossible to avoid.