What Stormotion's Project Management Flow Looks Like

# 1: Project Initiation & Planning

To begin with: we are an outsourcing company so, for the most part, the projects are initiated by the clients. Nevertheless, our team has quite a few things to complete during the initiation stage:

• Defining key values and goals of the customer for the project. By the end of the initiation stage, it should be done in a written form so that the team can use it as a reference. Make sure to double-check them with the client.
• Determining success factors for ourselves so that we know what the criteria are for making sure the project development goes successfully.
• Trying to predict all possible questions to reduce the number of uncertainties.
• Documenting all the client requirements and expectations.

There are also several essential questions to cover before stepping into the planning stage. It includes whether the client is scope-driven, deadline-driven, or budget-driven, what their plans for future project development are, and some project-specific details like the regulations they need to comply with.

It's just a small part of possible questions because every project is unique and requires an individual approach but that already allows us to prepare a first rough estimate of the possible development costs.

After that’s done, the planning stage begins. We normally start off with the discovery stage which includes processes like risk assessment, defining the tech stack for the project, building wireframes, and approving them with the customer.

Another important thing to do is to prioritize the requirements to make sure that we know where to start — our general practice is starting with what’s the most important (core features) or the least certain features (high-risk areas). Handling “problematic areas” as soon as possible is a great way of providing customers with a more reasonable development time & cost estimation.

In case the client is deadline-driven, we additionally think about what features are possible to deliver in the desired terms and then build a development roadmap (level of readiness of the project by each set deadline).

For that matter, we surely need to assess the available team capacity and define team composition — how many developers are available, what other team members are needed (QA, Tech Lead, etc.), and so on. After that, we can provide the client with a significantly more precise development cost estimate.

Once we agree on each and every step of the development with the client, we set up internal and external communication channels, define our Quality Assurance methods, and have a final planning meeting with a Tech Lead, Project Manager, and QA. We wrap up the stage with a kick-off meeting with developers where we assign tasks and share the plan.

# 2: Project Executing

We base our approach on Agile Project Management methodologies like the Scrum framework when stepping into the development stage. This framework implies dividing the development process into various events. For us, the best structure is the one that includes such elements as a sprint, sprint planning, daily meetings, demo, and retrospective.

We’ll now talk about each event of the development stage. If you want to better understand Scrum and learn more about the terminologies to be on the same page with the development team, take a look at this great explanatory video:

Last but not least, these are several general Project Management rules and convictions that we follow:

• Systematizing and automating processes is one of the key factors to higher efficiency.
• Keep trying to reduce the level of uncertainty.
• Always make sure to keep values defined during the initiation and planning stage in mind rather than simply perform the tasks.
• Improve the self-organization skills of the team.
• Maintain constant communication with customers.
• Work transparently and systematically.
• Don’t postpone issues that need to be solved to reduce the done drift — a pretty common problem in PM when extra tasks that we didn’t identify at the beginning are being added to the task or when there are change requests.
• Be proactive.

# 3: Project Controlling

From the perspective of project management, project controlling (monitoring) is a regular comparison of planned and actual states and values of the project.

Our controlling flow includes 4 pillars of success: time control, task control, capacity control, and quality control. Let’s take a closer look at each one of them.

Time Control ⏳

When working with the development team, time control = budget control. Each customer has certain budget limitations and expectations, which is why a good time management system and regular reporting on time consumption are of high importance.

The one responsible for building this document at Stormotion is QA Engineer. The actual content of the document significantly depends on the project features but there are still 2 general rules to follow.

1. Each feature must be reviewed by the QA Engineer before we say that its development is completed.
2. Each new version of the app must be approved by the Project Manager before we can present it to the customer.

Last but not least, we’d like to share some insight from our Project Manager. First of all, we make sure that we’re consistent with the plan and budget. Handling risks like impossible integrations or estimation exceedings.

It’s highly important to tell the client what to expect whenever there are updates. Plus, setting suitable KPIs for quality control is one of the most important aspects — you get what you measure.

# 4: Project Closing

When it comes to closing the project, we do all the processes that we already performed for other steps. Except for this time, it’s going to be more large-scale and include significantly more information. The process includes:

• Final check-ups and making sure that all the features are delivered.
• Final quality checks.
• Getting final approval from the customer.
• Final invoicing.

What we do to handle time zone differences is pretty simple since it’s more about Time Management. Thus, the solution to the issue comes down to quite simple concepts:

• Wake up earlier or go to bed later to attend a call.
• Send out emails in advance.
• Find concurrent business hours.
• Allocate time for delayed communication.
• Take all of it into account when establishing Project Management.

Our Expertise: Case Study

To show you our approach to challenges, we’d like to share one real-life example of a Project Management solution we’ve come up with to both satisfy the expectations of the customer and have realistic deadlines in terms of product delivery.

So, one of our clients wanted to deliver quite a big scope of features in an excessively short period of time, which is a normal thing to face when working in Software Development.

However, the main challenge was that we couldn’t increase the velocity of the development by adding more developers to the team — technical limitations simply wouldn’t allow it. In other words, we couldn’t assign more individual tasks to more developers because the development flow required that exact team composition.

💡 Takeaways

Generally speaking, when we build our Project Management Flow for a project, we focus on the 3 key success factors:

• Proactive all-around communication. It’s essential to have efficient ways of communication to enable rapid feedback, updating on development status, etc.
• Systematization of processes while still maintaining high-level agility. By doing this, we make sure that there’s little to zero unnecessary micromanagement and that the time we dedicate to the project is being spent as efficiently as possible.
• In-house product ownership. We pay a lot of attention to what a client wants, what we can offer to reach those goals, and contribute to increasing product value.