9 Things to Consider When Starting Your Next Development Project

January 19, 2018

It’s time for your big development project, but first you should understand how to make your experience the best it can possibly be. We’ve done countless Custom Development projects over our 25 years and we would like to share our knowledge with you in order to help make your experience more worthwhile. This list gives you some suggestions that you can use to make your next development project go as smooth as silk.

Tip #1 – Determine Your (Projects) Workflow Process

Determine the methodology behind your project; it is important that this is decided on early in the process. There are many types of workflow designs, i.e. Agile, Waterfall, Incremental, Cleanroom, Spiral, etc., which is why careful consideration needs to be placed on the right workflow design for your project. At CoreSolutions, we use an Agile workflow because we feel it provides benefits such as constant testing and short feedback loops for our clients; our two-week sprint cycles, followed by a project demo for the client allow for constant communication and satisfied customers. All workflows have their individual benefits and downfalls; this is why choosing the right type for your project can go a long way toward the success of your custom development project.

Tip #2 – Before You Start, Gather Input from All Staff

Often there are many stakeholders in a project and you’ll need input from all of them in order to ensure a consistent vision. Nothing derails a project like scope creep and changing functionality. Everyone who is involved has their own needs & opinion to bring to the table and if everyone is given the opportunity to speak their mind, the project will have a much more cohesive end-result. And, a much happier you!

Tip #3 – Plan for the Future

Create a project that is future-proof. You don’t want to create your project and in two years it becomes outdated and you have to redesign. Build something with both a modern design and something that has longevity.

Tip #4 – Use Incremental Building

If unchecked, some projects may gain a life of their own and become much more overwhelming than originally anticipated. However, if managed correctly, the project can become a success in terms of both, project functionality and overall client approval. Incremental building lets you properly lay the foundation and allows your concept to healthily grow into the project you originally envisioned.

Tip #5 – Determine the Best Timing

Is now really the best time to start your project? Will your computers need to be upgraded? Are all of yours resources ready? Do you need other hardware or software to make this work? Do you have the proper staffing? Can your budget handle this project? You need to understand that if your budget, time or scope of the project change, all other factors will change along with it. Do not rush your project; plan your resources and time accordingly before you begin.

Tip #6 – Ensure a Comfort Level Throughout

Communication is Key! If there is anything you do not understand, ASK! Constant communication and updates with your team are vital in the custom development process. When using an Agile workflow, among others, you have to meet regularly with your team or project goals will not be accomplished. You have to be comfortable enough with the process in order to ensure there are no miscommunications.

Tip #7 – Testing and Using Throughout

Whether it be yourself or a team member, double-check functionality and design throughout the project. This will help iron out the rough patches as well as create a more unified final project. Some ideas for testing your project include…

- Schedule demos with your development team to experience the full functionality of your project.

- Avoid workflows with testing stages near the end of the process; stick to workflows that allow for constant testing and fine-tuning.

Get a second opinion; have users who will be using the custom development project or users who have used similar projects in the past to come test out the functionality and have some input.

Tip #8 – Break Project Down Into 2 Sub-Parts; Need-to-Have and Nice-to-Have

When you are originally planning your project, the potential is endless. There are so many possibilities and, like a kid in a candy store, you are probably full of intrigue and excitement. This is why it is extremely important to manage your Need-to-Haves and Nice-to-Haves. There are a lot of features that would be Nice-to-Haves; however, with the walls of your budget and the ceiling of your timeframe encasing your project, ensuring your Need-to-Haves are in order should be your top priority.

Tip #9 – Build Within Your Budget

Development projects are important. But, so is your well-being. Ensure that you have a determined budget and PLAN ACCORDINGLY! Just because the possibilities are endless does not mean your cheque book is as well.

With these 9 tips, your next Custom Development Project should go as smooth as possible.

Here at CoreSolutions Software, we’ve been in business for over 25 years and we understand that providing exceptional service and support, alongside our versatile customizable software applications, is what sets us apart from the competition. Our team is dedicated to delivering cost-effective, top quality products, on time and on budget – Guaranteed!

Have any questions or comments? We’d love to chat about your next development project, so call us today at 1-800-650-8882 or fill out a contact us form on our website.

Competency-Based Learning

January 2, 2018

One of the most significant opportunities being missed by most organizations today is the lack of a competency talent framework. I’ve always believed that the only true business differentiator is the competency of your organization. Everything else can typically be easily duplicated with financial resources.

The exact opposite is true for people. They are complex and require a great deal of effort and energy, however, if you can tap into their talents and keep them engaged in building their strengths, you will flourish. History has proven this time and time again.

When it comes to the term competency, it’s often confused with other words like talent, strengths, or skills. By definition, a competency is where, motivation, knowledge, and skill meet. A competency can be a talent and it can certainly be a strength, so let’s not get too hung up on the term. The goal is to identify the critical or core competencies that are drivers of your organization’s success. Typically, I encourage the organization to select anywhere from 8-12 competencies – more than 12 becomes difficult to manage.

Once they’ve been identified and agreed upon,(this requires feedback from all levels of the organization), you can then start to incorporate them into the other systems and processes that drive your talent framework – selection, performance management, succession planning, personal development, and organizational values. These competencies also become an integral part of your culture.

Marcus Buckingham, the author of, Go Put Your Strengths To Work, also advocates focusing on the people’s strengths and not their weaknesses. What I found compelling about his work was that it aligned with my experiences as a leader.

Most performance review processes focus on improving someone’s weakness but rarely have I seen an improvement. However, if they focused on a strength, I would see great strides being made. Even Dan Pink discussed this when he identified what motivates individuals – Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose. The mastery of skills is aligned with focusing on strengths and that’s aligned with what Malcolm Gladwell shared in his book, Outliers, where he wrote that “ ten thousand hours is the magic of greatness.”

If you are going to build a competency-based organization, make certain that the learning opportunities you provide are tied to those competencies and incorporate them into everything you do.

On a final note, I’d like to suggest another philosophical opportunity. Would you hire a person that wasn’t willing to develop or improve themselves? You probably will tell me that you wouldn’t but we do it all the time. One important criterion that is missed in the selection process is assuring newcomers that if they join your organization, they have to be willing to continue to learn and develop. If not, why would you hire them?

If the competence of your employees is a business differentiator everyone has to be willing to continue to learn.

John Prpich, TalentBlueprint

Becoming a Learning Organization

December 29, 2017

During my 20 years in the business of learning and competency development, I’ve experienced a pattern that continues to plague organizations – confusing tools with strategy and process.

A good example of this can be found in performance management. Organizations focus all their energy on the tools and ignore the process, therefore the system has always failed. As the old saying goes, if I give you a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Developing an organizational mindset with a focus on behaviors necessary to ensure that the crystallization of the behaviors that will support the change you are looking for.

In the business of learning, organizations typically go directly to purchasing content or tools that will support the content – Learning Management Systems (LMS). Let’s remember if you buy a racing car that doesn’t make you a racing car driver. It just makes you someone with a racing car. If your goal is to build organizational competence, you need to understand how to bring that change about.

It isn’t easy. There are a series of questions you must ask yourself, here are some examples:

What does it mean to be a learning organization?
What are the benefits?
What are the challenges?
How does this align with our Mission, Vision, and Values?
What are the desired outcomes?
Who will champion this change?
How will this impact our goals?
What type of investment is involved?
How will this impact our culture?
How will this impact our ability to attract talent?
What behaviors are we trying to change?

As you can see, the list of questions will be very long and there’s a good reason. The average investment for a LMS today is around $100K, not including the learning content you would purchase or the overhead expense for managing the process. Take that and then factor in learning engagement trends, (30-40% of the organization), you’ll start to understand that this can easily be an expense instead of an investment.

Most organizations don’t realize the pre-work that proceeds getting ready to become a learning organization and they simply fail. Learning in North America is more of an expense than an investment. Billions of dollars are spent every year yet its rare for someone to articulate what happened or changed that impacted that expense that made it worthwhile. Part of this failure must do the lack of understanding of the model of learning evaluation (See Jack Phillips or Donald Kirkpatrick). Organizations should be developing Level 3 type evaluations to measure behavioral change. It isn’t difficult, but most don’t understand how.

The other challenge is the perspective you must take when it comes to learning as a support function should engage with internal customers. Most learning departments use a push strategy, trying to force their customers to engage in learning – this never works. You need to have the mindset that you are a vendor with a solution that can help your internal customers and the currency you are dealing with is time. How do you get your customers to invest their time in your solution? You must market your solution and you need testimonials from internal customers to encourage other customers to engage in your solution. This is a completely different mindset, but it works well. I’ve been doing it for 18 years.

The other two critical components that are always missing are the Communication and Change Management strategies. How many times have you observed your organization’s leadership announce a change without doing any ground work and then watched that change fail. People went back to work doing the same things they were doing before you told them what was going to change. We tend to forget the dangers in not explaining the Why’s of what we want to do and how that will positively impact the employee first, not the organization.

The other value of change management and communication is to get buy in. Remember, you want the leaders of the organization to drive the process and change, not the learning department.

John Prpich, Learning Protagonist

TalentBlueprint

Making a Case for the Digital Transformation of Municipal Learning & Development

December 20, 2017

The digital transformation of municipalities has morphed over time from simply being a trendy “buzz word”, to becoming a central component of a modern municipal business strategy. Fortunately, government leaders are really starting to leverage modern technology to implement and improve administrative best practices.

“Smart governments integrate modern technology into their day-to-day operations to enhance engagement with citizens and other stakeholders to drive better outcomes – And, better technology improves public administration.”[1]

Modern technology is revolutionizing and transforming all aspects of public administration – everything from the way you manage your public works and assist citizens, to the way you administer your learning and development programs.

An LMS is a software application that helps organizations manage the administration, documentation, tracking, training and reporting of their Learners. It reduces the time, effort and cost of training programs while offering deeper insight into your Learner’s experience, compliance and progress. The number of organizations that now use learning management systems (LMS), is higher than ever before and digital learning and training is becoming more widely accepted and used.

That’s why it’s hard to understand, with all the proven efficiencies and benefits of using LMS software and digital learning, why some learning and development professionals still consider expensive, face-to-face, instructor-led training preferable to digital learning?

So, here’s a case for going digital:

It Breaks Down Silos – Different departments often use different systems resulting in decentralization and “everybody doing their own thing” with training and development. Centralizing your learning and development programs by using an LMS, eliminates the decentralization that results in scattered data across multiple municipal departments and improves management analytics and reporting so more informed decisions can be made.

It Eliminates Spreadsheets – Spreadsheets and legacy systems are unwieldy processes that lead to increased errors and a limited ability to track and monitor training, which ultimately results in frustration.

Produces IT Savings – On-site software requires in-house IT resources and expensive IT ongoing maintenance. It needs to be updated continually – plus it’s difficult to access information across departments and away from the office.

Using cloud-based software and Software-as-a-service (SaaS), eliminates the time spent on installations and manual software updates, while at the same time providing a more cost-effective solution that saves time and provides online data centers with far greater computer power and storage capacity.

You Can Do More with Less – Transforming your learning programs to digital learning simply allows you to deliver more training to more learners at less cost. It stretches training budgets because it reduces training costs (less travel, time away, travel expenses etc.)

Deliver consistent learning across your organization, anywhere, anytime – Maybe you need to deliver the same compliance course to various departments in your municipality at the same time? An LMS and digital learning makes this easy.

Adopting digital learning lets your team obtain certifications such as PMP, Change Management, Risk Management and more – right from their desktops – at a fraction of the cost of traditional classroom learning to acquire the same certifications.

Puts you ahead of the curve in your ability to entice younger workers – many of them are quite used to digital learning already.

It’s predicted that over the next 5 years, 51% of senior municipal staff members employees will be eligible to retire. Therefore keeping the current workforce engaged –millennials, generation Xers and baby boomers included – is essential to the success of each municipality. When you create a modern digital workplace and give employees tools to help them do their jobs it helps drive employee engagement, which keeps more young professionals in local government.

Establishes the right learning opportunities for tomorrow’s leaders – You can create Learning Paths and Learning Objectives within an LMS to ensure you are helping shape tomorrow’s leaders.

Improved control over the creation, deployment and management of your own training initiatives and staff development.

And More…………

As digital technology continues to evolve successful digital transformation will require careful collaboration, thoughtful planning and the inclusion of every department.

However, digital transformation isn’t only about technology, it’s about meshing the power of technology with a corporate culture that embraces the change technology can lead for the organization.

Any learning initiative needs employee buy-in and the support of upper management. And often organizations need assistance to help them create a strategic roadmap to guide them through their digital learning and development transformation.

We wanted to know why municipalities have been slow to adopt new technology to transform their learning and development programs so we conducted a survey in 2017. What we learned was, that while municipalities would like to have an LMS, purchasing their own LMS software is a huge capital outlay that is simply cost-prohibitive for many municipalities. In addition, we heard that those municipalities who already have their own LMS have a hard time sourcing quality, accredited training.

So, we developed muniLEARN – a collaborative learning management solution for municipalities that’s intended to be an end-to-end solution to help them as they navigate through their learning and development transformation and digital learning.

muniLEARN is a robust, secure, turn-key learning platform that lets you manage the deployment of your own learning and training initiatives – digitally, in a cost-effective manner.

If you’re considering transforming your learning and development program, Click here to try our free needs assessment tool to check your readiness to transform, or

More information about muniLEARN and/or a free introductory demo for your team
How your municipality can participate in our free Pilot Program to test drive using an LMS and digital learning

Remember, Learning Isn’t Where You are, It’s What You Do!

By: Susan Shannon, Founder & Principal of muniSERV.ca.

[email protected] or at 855.477.5095

[1] The Digital Transformation of Public Administration – OpenGov

Inexpensive Electronic Tools to Enhance your Meeting Organization

December 13, 2017

Quick, we need to jump into a meeting. What’s the first thing that jumps into your head? If you’re like 47% of the respondents in a recent Igloo survey, you’re thinking things like “boring”, “necessary”, “tedious”, “useless”, “pointless”, “long”, etc. It seems that there is a lot of distain for meetings, which isn’t entirely unfounded.

Meetings are often seen as a necessary evil. When effective, they can help teams collaborate and stay on track, but if not well executed, they can lack productivity or get viewed as a waste of time. A recent study conducted by Verizon Business found that 89% of individuals thought that their meetings could be improved with better technology. So today, we are going to explore a few new technologies to get you some productive meeting time back in your day.

Tools for Scheduling meetings

CoreUM – Full Disclosure, our team built this software, but there are free plans available and we think it’s the best thing for meeting coordination.

The frustrations typically begin with one of the most difficult parts of the meeting process; the actual coordination of the meeting! If you’ve never been on the receiving end of a reply all email or mass communication thread, it typically goes something like this:

John – “Is everyone free Wednesday at 7:30pm?”
Bill – “Not at 7:30, but I can do at 6.”
Suzy – “Tuesday works better for me, I’ve got softball on Wednesday nights.”
Jen – “Can we do Saturday instead? But only before 2:30.”

Using a meeting scheduling app like CoreUM allows users to simply poll and coordinate available meeting times with invitees.

Step One – Provide meeting details (name, location, etc.) and propose a handful of dates and times.

Step Two – Select your invitees.

CoreUM takes care of the rest to gain consensus. 

Your invitees select the times they’re available, allowing you to select the option with the most availability.

CoreUM is the only system on the market to include CORPORATE BRANDING, QUORUM and GROUP MANAGEMENT. Whether you are using CoreUM for organizing your next committee lunch, gathering the best dates and times for your annual golf trip, or planning your next corporate outing, CoreUM may become your favourite productivity application and revolutionize the way you organize meetings.

CoreUM is free to try the VIP subscription for 30 days. If you like CoreUM, use coupon code “muniserv” at checkout when upgrading to a corporate membership to receive 20% off of your first year of corporate membership.

OK it’s meeting time.

For hosting meetings

We love GoToMeeting. It’s a staple, been around forever, and almost everyone has some familiarity with the user interface. Simply create your meeting and send an invite link and you can instantly share your screen, have a video call, chat forum, record your call, and see who is engaged and paying attention. Yes, you are able to see when individuals click away from the tab that you are showing them. GoToMeeting isn’t free. You’re paying at least $26 per month in order to use the software.

Other options include Skype for Business (free if you use Microsoft Office 365), ON24 and Adobe Connect.

For keeping track of your ideas

Now that you have coordinated meeting times with CoreUM and began your GoToMeeting, which tool can you use during your meeting to keep track of your awesome ideas? We have a lot of experience with this area as we’ve tried a lot of different software packages. There are a couple of great options:

1. 1. Evernote – Evernote allows you to post lists, images, and ideas while also collaborating with your meeting attendees. The best part is it’s free to use, but in order to sync across multiple devices, you will have to purchase a paid membership ($46.99 to $120 per year). Their mobile app and search features are big sellers here. I personally store all of the PDF of important documents and manuals in Evernote so I can easily come back and reference them. They also have a handy chrome app that allows you to clip webpages and save them directly to Evernote. We did run into some issues with syncing when multiple individuals were editing the same note.

2. 2. Google Docs – If you want everyone to be able to edit your notes as you work, Google docs has you covered. Many individuals can contribute new ideas and edit documents in real time. Sometimes this can cause the “too many cooks in the kitchen” challenge. The best part is that the Google suite of products is free to use and corporate membership is only $50 per user per year. You don’t need to have a Gmail account.

3. 3. Basecamp – We love basecamp. Basecamp is more of a project management tool but If you need to collaborate on a project with internal and external individuals, it works amazingly well. There is a group chat (they call it campfire), a message board, schedules, tasks, to do lists, storage for documents and files, etc. they even have automated reminders. Project participants can get notification of progress and updates on the status of changes to the action items and to do’s in the projects. The reason it’s not number one on the list is because the cost is $99.

4. 4. OneNote and Microsoft Office 365. OneNote works similarly to Evernote but it’s the product from Microsoft. This means that it integrates into other Microsoft products. It will easily let you store meeting notes and agenda items as well as share those notes to other individuals in your organization.

All of these examples are inexpensive and can really help organize and structure your meetings. They’ll even let you upload pictures from that awesome brainstorming session.

Bonus tool – Consider not having a meeting using Slack

While I feel the most effective way to have a meeting is face to face, I know some companies are limiting the number of meetings they are having using productivity apps like Slack. Instead of getting together for a daily status meeting (or Scrum, for those in the Agile world), they use simple automatic reminders to ask the team what’s going on. Each person responds with their top priorities, from wherever they are. Managers scan the channel to address any questions, and it saves about 15 minutes of time per employee every day.

The Conclusion

These are just a few of the tools we use to try and make the meeting process easier and is by no means an exhaustive list. This won’t prevent your sales manager’s noisy dog from barking in the background when their working from home or your customer service manager from forgetting to put themselves on mute, but it is a start to make the organization easy.

Thanks for reading

CoreSolutions Software.

Two Methods for Breaking Your Development Project into Parts

December 13, 2017

Part Eight in the Series: Software Development Guide for Business Leaders

Determine Minimum Viable Product Features

As you build your functional requirements, you must choose the features and functions needed to create a Minimum Viable Product or MVP. A minimum viable product has just those core elements sufficient to deploy the product and no more. Using an MVP style of development encourages feedback from the stakeholders, costs less to develop and is a good strategy to use when developing customer facing apps.

Utilize the MoSCoW Method

When developing your MVP, break the requirements for the down into sub-categories. A handy method for this is the MoSCoW Method. With the MoSCoW method, you break each element down into the categories: Must have, should have, could have and won’t have.

I like the MVP and MoSCoW methods because they use standard language and terms that we can understand easily.

Critical to the success of creating a MoSCoW frame is a budget and a time-box or end date. If you had unlimited time and budget, it would allow you to have everything in your product.

Since there are seldom cases where the budget and timeline are unlimited we then employ the MoSCoW Method to determine:

Must Have Items: requirements that are critical to the success of the current development time-box.
Should Have Items: important but not necessary for the current time-box.
Could Have Items: desirable but not necessary for the current time-box.
Won’t Have Items: won’t be included in this time-box as agreed upon by the stakeholders.

As an executive, your biggest problem will be the classification of each requirement and to avoid making each one a “Must Have Item”. Facilitate this process with your Project Manager.

Two Methods for Breaking Your Development Project into Parts Conclusion

Your PM may have some tools up their sleeve to facilitate a workshop or meeting but here is a tool that you can use to focus the session and attain a good result. The device is called the Prioritization Matrix. With it, you can easily have a stakeholder meeting and get everyone to agree which requirements are going to have the biggest impact and then the “must have” items for your next sprint.

MoSCoW, MVP, and Agile go together well. Start each sprint with a MoSCoW session, build your MVP and you’re ready to start. Evaluate each successive time-box and apply the MoSCoW method iteratively.

CoreSolutions of London, Ontario, is a locally acclaimed software development firm with over 25 years of experience. CoreSolutions’ team of experts, including developers and project managers, build web and mobile applications using the Agile Methodology and tools. CoreSolutions will assist you through all phases of your project including brainstorming, requirements planning and project management.

Connect with CoreSolutions today to start your project with a Free Needs Analysis.

Importance of Testing Throughout the Development Project

December 11, 2017

Part Seven in the Series: Software Development Guide for Business Leaders

Develop Testing Strategy & Assign Testing Engineer.

It’s important to have a testing strategy for your project that tests early and often. At the beginning of the project ensure that testers are available from the user community and the development team. You may identify a “testing engineer”; someone that represents the customers’ needs and can engage quickly with the project team.

Don’t fall for the “Testing Phase” approach, where testing occurs at the end of the project. Testing at the end of the project can lead to cost and budget overages. The sooner an issue is isolated, the sooner it can be addressed and fixed.

Make it easy to do testing and to provide feedback. Develop a test plan that the testing engineer can use to run scenarios based on the user story and use cases.

Rotate Developers in the Role of Product Demonstrations & Testing.

Assign a different development resource to lead each iteration of testing. Empowering the developers through leadership, broadens their perspective, increases responsibility, improves quality and brings them closer to the customer’s view. By including the development team in the testing processes with the customer, you will integrate testing with development; these are often considered separate processes. An integrated testing/development environment is a healthier system that results in better cost and quality control.

Placing a developer at the center of the testing process reinforces a culture of quality. No one wants to have bug occur during a demo, so visible demonstrations encourage improved quality.

In summary, how you approach testing can make a significant impact on the project. Insist that a testing plan is part of the Project Plan. Include in your plan:

Placing the developers at the center of the testing strategy to improve the quality of the code.
Assigning a testing engineer that represents the needs of the customer.
Provide feedback easily with a testing plan, use case scenarios, user stories, forms, & automation.
Test early and often.

I’d like to add a note for successful implementation of a developer led presentation. Some developers will absolutely cringe at the thought of being the center of attention, presenting software to clients and others will shine. Be considerate and weigh individual skills and strengths and try not to put any of your team into a difficult, nerve wracking situation. Your much better to assign supporting roles to the more introverted members of the team.

CoreSolutions of London, Ontario, is a locally acclaimed software development firm with over 25 years of experience.

CoreSolutions’ team of experts, including developers and project managers, build web and mobile applications using the Agile Methodology and tools. CoreSolutions will assist you through all phases of your project including:

Brainstorming;
Requirements Planning;
Project Management.

Connect with CoreSolutions today to start your project with a Free Needs Analysis.

Determine the Best Timing for a Development Project Start

November 29, 2017

Part Five in the Series: Software Development Guide for Business Leaders

Setting a delivery date for your project is the domain of the stakeholders and leaders. But, when is the best time for you to start a project? What variables do you and your project manager need to factor into this critical timing decision? Here are some factors you can reflect upon to help you make a great timing decision.

Project Motivations

Each project in your organization will fall into one or more of the following categories: strategic, operational or regulatory.

Strategic: The project is required for the achievement of business goals.
Regulatory: A government body has set a deadline you must comply with, i.e. new tax, privacy legislation, etc.
Operational: Addressing a non-optimal operational situation would result in business improvement.

In almost every circumstance, when evaluating which projects to start, the strategic, or money-making projects, are going to come first. However, a regulatory or operational project can supersede a strategic project. Think about the existing and planned projects for your business and weigh how they impact your project.

Planning Window

What is your planning window: What is your time estimate for development? Once this is known, then set that window of time x 1.5 to provide you with a planning window which can slide along your time scale, known as a sliding planning window.

Inside of this time scale, you can place any critical dates including:

Regulatory Deadlines: what regulatory constraints must be me and by what date.
Business Deadlines: what business deadlines and product rollouts are planned and on what date.
Pre-Existing and Contingent Development Projects: are there existing projects that need to complete before starting your project? Does your proposed system rely on the functionality being developed for another project? Include start and end dates that impact your project.
System Upgrades: what system and critical upgrades are occurring during your planning window which either are critical to project success or that could impede project progress. Include planned system upgrades that will impact your project.
Infrastructure Expansions or Acquisitions: what infrastructure must be acquired and implemented before deployment of your application. As you evaluate your infrastructure requirements, consider using Cloud-based servers for applications and database and developing web applications instead of traditional apps. Be sure to add these critical dates to your sliding planning window.
Team Load: what existing projects are in play and how is your project team impacted by that load? Can you dedicate your resources; will they be required for other projects? Internal resources are finite; will your resources utilized on other projects or unavailable for your project until a future date?

The Impact of the Schedule on the Project Budget

Optimizing your budget during the planning phase is critical and can set the stage for a project that lands and is within its budget. You may also be able to find savings through scheduling that can be ‘banked.’

Using your sliding timescale, reflect on when the most cost-effective time to execute on your project is. Will pushing your project out result in cost savings or will it incur overtime wages to meet business or regulatory deadlines? Will it impact other projects and incur additional costs? What would happen if you outsourced some or all your project?

The Impact of Outsourcing on the Project Start Date

Finally, consider what would happen to each constraint if you outsourced your project development. Would it remove many of the variables, resource challenges, hardware requirements, database issues, and would it be easier to fix your budget? The answer is likely a big YES.

To summarize, setting the start date of your project impacts much more than the delivery date. It affects all aspects of the project, resources, budget, system upgrades and updates, the delivery of constrained applications, and of course, the customer; rolling out a tax software application for accountants during tax season would not be a good idea!

CoreSolutions of London, Ontario, is a locally acclaimed software development firm with over 25 years of experience.

Brainstorming;
Requirements Planning;
Project Management.

Connect with CoreSolutions today to start your project with a Free Needs Analysis.

Advantages of Integrating Your Mobile Workforce

November 23, 2017

What does integrating your workforce mean?

What will I gain from mobile integration?

Why does mobile integration matter?

These are the important questions that customers are asking more and more. Whether you are a small or medium-size business owner or an IT professional at a large enterprise, you are most likely considering how, what and why mobile integrations have become such a big deal.

Integrating your mobile workforce means your systems and data are relayed to the smart phones or off-site systems of your employees. They receive real-time reporting, customer information, tracking codes – whatever form of data your organization uses can be integrated through mobile.

Mobile Integrations: Here Comes the Boom

With the recent boom of reliance on cloud storage and cloud integration, IT managers and business owners who are not using mobile integration are playing catch up. Yes, your in-house systems may be integrated to some extent, but your business no longer takes place only in-house. At a bare minimum, I am willing to bet your team uses their email from their smartphones (unless there are privacy concerns). The world is more connected than ever, Wi-Fi is available in more places than ever, and smart phones are available to more users than ever. But, your systems and your data are still just in-house?

Mobile integrations are here to stay and the benefits gained are ever the more valuable:

Offers New Revenue Streams

Mobile integration gives salespeople many more opportunities to turn budding prospects into paying customers. With reports and data input information being accessible via a smartphone, the chances of sales opportunities increases simply due to availability of resources.

Empowers Your Mobile Workforce

Mobile employees use integrated systems to receive important documents, company memos, web messaging – if it can be sent to the cloud, it can be sent to your team. This allows your mobile team to be instantaneously informed and engaged with the onsite team.

Reduces Data Conflicts

Users will receive real-time data. The data they see will be the most up to date and the data they enter will be available in-house just as efficiently. Data conflicts will be reduced, stress levels will remain bearable and all parties involved will be more efficient and effective.

Saves Money and Time While Reducing System Complexity

A properly developed mobile integrated system means less cost for hosting an in-house data centre. Maintenance costs, housing costs and installation costs will all be decreased. IT workers will have more time for important tasks and all employees will receive a more seamless software experience.

Even the Farmers Are Getting In On the Technology

Heavyweight agriculture and technology equipment manufacturer, John Deere have dove into this mobile integrations movement (John Deere Press Release) like it’s the local pond. John Deere’s most recent dabble into the big data movement is their implementation of their Operations Centre. The Operations Centre is a suite of farming software that relays data to farmers, but they are now integrating with their mobile workforce via smartphones and in-cab technology. Here is what Senior Product Manager Tyler Hogrefe of the John Deere Intelligent Solutions Group has stated,

“We’re making machine and agronomic information available to users where they want it and when they need it. Users will be able see how their operation is performing, direct and adjust operations in the field, and seamlessly collaborate with trusted partners in order to increase efficiency and profitability.”

John Deere prides themselves on being a leader in not just agriculture and construction equipment industries, but also a leader in information technology and their mobile integration strategy is unlike most other companies. They have used mobile integrations to transform not just how their employees do day-to-day operations, but how their entire business is run and also how their business is perceived.

A large scale mobile integrations strategy like John Deere may not be quite on your radar; however the expanding industry and possibilities of mobile integration should excite you. New solutions are being developed every day and these solutions are changing the way businesses operate and changing how employees work. Large or small, if you need mobile integrations solutions – or just advice – be sure to reach out to CoreSolutions Software.

Incremental Building Strategy Delivers Large Software Projects

November 17, 2017

Part Four in the Series: Software Development Guide for Business Leaders

For larger development projects, using the Incremental Build Model for software development can improve project success and get useful products into production quicker. By using an incremental build model to develop smaller, fully functional components, you are breaking the project into smaller, more easily digestible chunks. This model leads to greater success, improved client approval, and better functionality.

Why Break the Project into Smaller Increments?

The project management team may break a larger project into smaller pieces when delivering, delighting and getting customer feedback are important. Accomplish this by having the project entirely defined, scoped and then chunked into deliverable components.

Sometimes the best plan of attack on any large project is to use a divide and conquer technique. Using this approach helps to deliver good software solutions to the customer quickly. Using this strategy produces customer goodwill, a feedback channel from the client and helps the project team achieve a series of small successes which is great for morale.

We suggest that for any big project you consider breaking it down using the Incremental Build model so you can divide and conquer it and delight and deliver to your customer.

The solution starts to sound like an Agile project, but it has nothing to do with the project management technique employed. It’s a strategy to deliver quickly and get valuable customer feedback.

Use of Incremental on Larger Projects

Image of a circle being divided up into incremental parts

Project managers and clients can decide to break a larger a project into smaller increments. An Incremental Model’s success hinges on a complete scope and requirements. Once detailed and documented, the project can be broken into smaller, deliverable, pieces and delivered in stages throughout the project.

Breaking a larger project into smaller increments can reduce the cost of initial product delivery but may increase the cost of the whole project.

Another benefit of an incremental build is the stream of customer feedback on each increment that can help to identify deficiencies, additional features, and product changes which lead to a better final product.

By breaking the project into smaller increments, then using a traditional waterfall project management technique, the project manager can plan, define, develop and test each increment.

Because few changes are made within any single increment complete regression testing to identify development deficiencies can happen quickly.

How Does the Incremental Build Strategy Improve Success, Client Approval, and Functionality?

Your customer, whether an internal department or an external client, wants to get their hands on their applications as soon as they can. When you deliver, using an Incremental Model, you delight them by delivering; then engage them for feedback. The result is a better product and a stronger relationship with your customer.

On your next larger development project, use the Incremental Build Strategy to break it down into smaller chunks to delight your customer, deliver quicker and to develop better projects.

CoreSolutions of London, Ontario, is a locally acclaimed software development firm with over 25 years of experience. CoreSolutions’s team of experts, including developers and project managers, build web or mobile applications using the latest technology and tools and will assist you through all phases of the project including brainstorming, requirements planning and project management. Connect with CoreSolutions today to start your project with a Free Business Systems Requirement.

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