Home > Services > Organization, Workflow and Tools
Overview
We all know, deep down, that our Workflows and tools within our software or IT organization are not optimal and that with some careful consideration, efficiency could be greatly improved. Wastage (inefficiency) can present itself in several ways:
- Poor prioritisation (people work on the wrong things)
- Poor specification and review (people implement the wrong things)
- Oversights (people forget things)
- Communication (people's progress on things is not communicated or visible)
- Slow development (people don't have the right workflow or tools)
- Poor quality requiring re-work (testing insufficient)
- Slow deployment (when people come to deploy, it is slow and non-repeatable)
- Inappropriate organization (too many blocking points)
- Inefficient workflow (too many holdups when people don't realise they are on the critical path)
SSW has the experience to advise its customers on the organization, workflows and tools required to reduce the impact of the above. The solution will depend on the complexity of product and the culture, size, maturity, budget and resources of the organization.
Benefits
- Greater efficiency; improving overall efficiency by 10% is usually achievable given a great ROI for this service
- Better morale as staff always know what they should be doing next and tedious tasks are automated
- Complete visibility for management on work in progress and work outstanding allowing appreciation of the impacts of priority and scope change
- Tracking of all development work and time spent (to full 40 hour week) leading to better estimating and planning
- Management analysis and reporting on where the time really goes leading to better estimating, planning & efficiency
Our Approach
- Efficiency review; provides a report of where the best bang for buck can be made
- Staged Plan - a plan with estimated costs for implementation. This is guided by the client who chooses from a list of presented option
- Project Management of implementation
- Implementation of any parts of the tools and workflows chosen not to be performed by the client
Technologies/Products
At SSW, we have extensive experience in the following technologies and products and would choose the appropriate tools for customer needs:
To provide source control and detailed tracking and sharing of tasks for Agile projects where scope and priorities can change regularly.
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To provide detailed tracking of waterfall projects; where the plan is not expected to need to change at all.
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Microsoft Project can be used with Project Server, @task (see below) and on its own where the project has dedicated resources with a very fixed scope.
In some simple cases, Outlook can be the appropriate tool.
Provides great integration between Outlook and Team Foundation Server
Jira is the leading tracking tool for agile environments. Atlassian has other products that may provide value depending on the environment.
@task is a leading project tracking tool for waterfall projects
There are numerous Open Source and free tools available which may be appropriate in some cases.