I’ve had the idea of blogging about project planning for my next blog for a while now, so I was very interested to see Dan’s blog about adaptive development, or basically dealing with changes in project plans. As Dan mentioned in his blog, changes are inevitable and we enjoy brainstorming solutions for these changes and are very adaptive at managing them. While changes will always occur and can be handled efficiently, proper planning is still the most crucial step of a project and will add value from the start.

Before beginning development on a project, it is key to thoroughly plan out what the project requirements will be. Talk to the intended users of a system before beginning development to discuss what features they would like the system to incorporate, how they think things should flow, and how the system can create value for them. Mocking-up processes and flows is a great way to refine system requirements before the actual development begins. Planning a project well adds more value by allowing more time to add additional features and refinements (and make it even more “awesome”) rather than constantly having to rework sections of a project due to poor planning from the beginning.

Gathering technical requirements for a project is also a very important part of planning. While this is usually a very simple step, it can be the most frustrating when not properly planned for. As a developer, I know there is nothing more frustrating than having part of a system that works perfectly using standard best-practice techniques and then have to rework it because some special technical requirements were unknown and not planned for. It’s hard to add value to a project when a change is reworking something to do the same exact thing, just a different way.

Planning your project is nothing to be intimidated by though. We’re always here to meet with our clients to help properly plan and architect their projects from the beginning. When the inevitable changes do come, we will handle those and switch into adaptive development mode. And of course, if a project’s plan starts as a personal ‘About Me’ page and ends up being a system to drive our country’s healthcare system, we can still make it happen and we will make it awesome!

I was recently talking to a software developer friend of mine about a project he was working on. I will spare you the details of the project and the companies involved, but I will tell you it’s a multi-million dollar project that your tax dollars are paying for. One of the main obstacles his team was facing was transporting data from one user to another within the software they were developing. There was an entire sub-team within the project team devoted to this issue, and the best they had come up with for their demos to the client was to enter the other person’s IP address directly in a settings file with the computers directly connected. While I’m sure (or at least I hope) this isn’t their final solution, how un-user friendly! This got me thinking; why not just make the entire solution a web-based application? When would you actually want a software solution versus a web solution? A web-based solution was definitely a viable (and probably better) option for this particular project.

Web-based applications have many advantages over software solutions. All users can benefit from a central data source that would always be up to date among all users, instead of users specifically sending segments of data to each other. Even if they wanted to send segments between users, a web-solution would make this an easy task. As business needs change and evolve, it would also be much easier to update a central web-based application rather than trying to update software on thousands of computers.

With today’s rich and interactive Web 2.0 user interfaces, a web solution can also offer the same amount of interactivity and responsiveness that a software solution can in almost all cases, while taking full advantage of the internet. Take, for example, Google Docs. With Google Docs (which is free!) you can create and edit Documents, Presentations, Spreadsheets, and more all online. (Can you say Word, PowerPoint, and Excel in a free, web-based environment?) You can even import, edit, and save files that were created in the software-based counterparts. Best of all, with their nice Web 2.0 interface, you don’t even realize you’re not using Microsoft’s $400 software package! All this along with additional features such as sharing files with others, publishing, and a plethora of other additional features not available in the rigid software solutions.

Screen shot of some of Google Doc's Web-Based Apps

With the benefits web solutions have over software solutions and with web-technology moving forward so quickly, will everything be a web-based solution within the next few years? Well… I may be biased, I’m a web developer. =) Sure, software has its place, but web applications are quickly taking over many business functions that were only possible with a software solution in the past. Is your business taking full advantage of the web and web-based applications?