At Pacellico we develop proprietary software solutions to help us in big data analytics, supply chain modelling and consulting. I recently learned again how important it is when creating a product to clearly define requirements and get regular feedback during development.
The story begins at our internal strategic workshop: 11 senior managers and consultants, and me as the Software Development Lead. We were brainstorming ways to engage with customers and provide them useful business improvement input. We came up with the idea of developing a self-assessment tool. This seemed like a simple software task – there are many tools and libraries available for creating surveys, so plug and play, easy! I was more concerned about the content, but the others took ownership for this, the task for the development team was just to write the code.
While the business team went away and started working on the content, we developers did some research and planned the solution architecture and our “happy path”. But when we came back together in the wider group, we found our “happy path” had evaporated: we were to implement a complex questionnaire with real-time evaluation providing insightful recommendations, a graph and a PDF report. This was no longer a simple plug and play but challenging code with sophisticated logic.
So off we went, again: API and front-end, contracting a UX expert to ensure a pleasant user experience. Approximately 60 development days’ work invested before we had the actual content. Once the content was ready, we had to get our data scientists to design the algorithm to turn assessment responses into meaningful recommendations. Their solution was clever but added even more complexity to the software (+20 developer days’ work).
Finally, our big day came – presentation to top management. After many iterations we were proud of our work and prepared to showcase it. They loved it, at least up to the point when we showed the PDF report, which they hated (too much data, not interesting, ugly, …). We had prepared a template for the report but did not get it signed off in advance. Back to the drawing board, you live and learn.
But we got there in the end. Five months and around 100 development days later the application is ready and working. From a simple plug-and-play “happy path” it ended up being something much bigger (and better) – watch this space, we will be launching it in the next couple of weeks!