This article sets out a list of 5 steps that can help reduce the timescales of a project.
Step 1
Establish the confidence of the estimates. Are some high due to a lack of clarity of what is required or a high amount of contingency added. It may be possible to get lower estimates from challenging these.
Step 2
Identify what is known about the scope and requirements and establish what can be de-scoped if anything.
A key question to help determine priority is if the solution didn’t deliver this requirement then would it make the project not worth having.
Go through the requirements with the most cost and time associated with them and establish whether this is in line with the what the business expect and whether it still adds the value required compared to the cost.
Explore the possibility of phasing. It may be that not all functionality is required in 3 months and some functionality can be in a later phase after this date.
Step 3
Agree acceptance criteria. This is to ascertain whether the solution proposed is more than required by the business. This may be a workshop needed between the business stakeholders and IT stakeholders so that different options can be discussed which meet the acceptance criteria. Business requirements can be met by more than one solution. A cheaper faster solution may meet the same acceptance criteria.
Step 4
Establish if there are any manual workarounds can be used in the short term if there is a gap.
Step 5
Establish whether the project is suitable for an Agile approach. There are 2 main approaches that could be suitable for consideration.
- Can the project be broken down into smaller chunks so that more people can work on it and have parallel working. Use cases is one technique that could be used to achieve this.
- If the project has high stakeholder buy in then daily scrum meetings with key business and IT stakeholders can be held to ensure the project is kept on track and to resolve any blockers quickly. User stories and story boards are useful techniques for getting agreements of how the solution must work and getting joint understanding and consensus
Thoughts? Questions? Please share in the comments.
