Category: Insights

Tackling a technical project as a non-technical person can be intimidating. You don’t need to be a software developer to achieve success, but you do need to have some understanding of the technology involved to make sure that the custom software development company you hire fits your needs.

If you hire the wrong software partner, it immediately sets your project up for failure. Working with the wrong team eats into your budget, as well as your timeline for getting the project up and running. It’s also incredibly frustrating to your staff and other stakeholders.

Fortunately, there are a few simple ways you can evaluate a software outsourcing firm, to make sure you’re working with the right team. Sitting down and having an interview in person or over Zoom is a great way to communicate your needs, and evaluate how the software development company responds. By asking pointed questions, you can get a pretty clear sense of how well they understand your needs, and what the process of working with them will look like.

Getting Started with a Software Development Partner Interview Checklist

Coming up with a list of questions to ask your software partner is key to a productive first meeting. If you’re meeting with several companies to hear proposals, make sure to keep the core questions consistent throughout, so you can compare and contrast their answers.

Here are some of the questions we would ask before hiring a software development company.

1. Do you have experience with similar projects?

A good indicator of success is whether the team has worked on something similar in the past. If they have, they’ll be able to use the knowledge they gained to the benefit of your project. It isn’t just technical knowledge that’s helpful in this case – if they have experience working with an organization that’s similar to yours, it should also help streamline communication.

Once they’ve told you about their past experience, you can follow up by asking them to tell you about any actions they took to make these past projects so successful.

2. Who will I be working with, and how is the team structured?

To help facilitate the success of the project, you’ll need to work with your development team closely. To do that, it helps to have a clear understanding of the team’s structure. As you walk away from your initial meeting, you should have a good understanding of who you’ll be working with, as well as how many developers will be dedicated to your project.

3. Who is my contact person?

Every development team, no matter how small, should have a point person whose job is to liaise with clients. If you don’t have a single contact person, it’s easy for critical information to get lost, even within a close-knit development team.

The software or product engineering company you’re working with should understand this, and should be able to identify a point of contact for you to work with throughout the project. If they don’t, it’s a sign that they don’t take communication with clients seriously.

4. How will we communicate?

In addition to identifying a contact person, every software development team you interview should give you details about how they communicate. Do they do weekly video meetings, or do they prefer to pick up the phone? Will they use Trello, Asana, or another tool for tracking tasks and staying on schedule?

There’s no one right answer. The most important thing is that the company has a communication plan, and can add you in seamlessly. By clearly showing how they’ll communicate with you, they demonstrate their willingness to be transparent with clients.

You should also address how often you’ll communicate, and what type of issues or questions will trigger a conversation or meeting. Talking about these situations in advance can help avoid miscommunications in the future.

5. What does your development process look like?

Every software development company has a different process that they use to achieve good results. Even if you don’t have a deep technical understanding of software development, you should still ask each company you interview about their software development process, and why they chose it.

You may not understand words like scrum, agile, or waterfall, but by the end, you should have some insight into the different stages your project will go through before completion.

6. Can you estimate a date for completion?

Even if you’re coming in with a rough idea, a good software development company should be able to offer an estimate for how long it will take to deliver a completed project.

There are a lot of factors that influence the final delivery date of any project, including unclear requirements, scope creep, and technical debt. Each company you interview should be able to tell you how they work to limit these common delays.

7. What happens after delivery?

Every software project, no matter how simple, will require some kind of post-delivery technical support. Whether it’s improvements, debugging, or even just adding new features, you should make sure your software partner will be available to provide support after launch day.

8. Why should I choose your company?

Any company you work with should be able to articulate why they’d be a good match for your project. If they’ve listened to you at all during your conversation, their final pitch will be reflective of the points you’ve brought up – not just a recitation of their organizational achievements.

Choose Taazaa as Your Next Custom Software Development Company

Now that you’ve come up with a list of questions to ask before hiring a software development company, you’ll be much more prepared to begin your next development project.

At Taazaa, we believe that communication and collaboration are critical to executing a project that meets both your business goals and your users’ expectations. Get in touch today to learn more about our company, or to find out more about our approach to software development.

In today’s work environment, you need more from an employee than just strong technical skills. Sure, software engineers need to be familiar with the appropriate programming language. Similarly, data analysts need to know their way around a spreadsheet. However, these things alone won’t make them more useful. They need to know of thinking outside the box to become more innovative.

Businesses that welcome ideas from all employees have better growth prospects.

‘Great Place To Work,’ an analytics institute, surveyed 500,000 employees in 800 companies. It surveyed employees on how frequently management allows their involvement in strategic decisions. Whether the management shows interest in their ideas? If they are invited to try new approaches to their work?

The survey findings concluded that where people’s ideas were valued, yielded revenue growth and productivity. Companies topping those metrics generated 5x the revenue growth of companies at the bottom. High-scoring companies ranged from smaller start-ups to large multinationals. They were in an array of industries, from finance to health care. Researchers found that many had set up a unique culture to encourage employees to brainstorm.

Fostering a culture of innovation can set you ahead of your competitors. It should not come as exceptions but should be the new normal.

As a leader, you are the role model for your whole team. By following the path of inherited work-culture, don’t expect the employees to do the contrary.

The most prolific notions require imagining out of the box. Sometimes, motivating greetings at a critical moment could also work wonders! If you are a leader, then consider these thirteen tips for deriving higher levels of innovation out of your team.

1. Chart Out Time Separately For Innovation

Successful organizations, chart-out separate research and innovation timings in their working schedules. As an example, in Google, that leisure period is called ‘20% time’. This 20% of employees’ time led to the inception of Google Earth and Gmail. The Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company also reserved 15% of the employees’ working hours for innovations.

2. Encourage And Increase Dialogue

While innovation usually happens in isolation, the possibility increases multi-fold with team-cooperation. When it comes to fostering innovation, some essential patterns of communication are a boon. Leaders can build hubs where workers can hang-out and share ideas freely. With more approaches around, better become the chances of hitting the moon.

3. Friendly Collaboration

To achieve goals such as a product release contest among employees could prove helpful. However, you have to be cautious about creating an extremely aggressive work environment. Employees might be reluctant to speak up, assuming that their idea might get stolen. Instead, promote the value of teamwork. Say, during a project launch, asking employees to come with ideas on components might help.

4. Lessen The Workload

Innovation cannot evolve if employees are burdened with their everyday tasks for long hours. The most creative phase is when people are busy but not overburdened. Ensure that your business is staffed sufficiently. It is a must for employees to have positive energy and mental space to be innovative.

5. Be Available

Do you hold-up in the corner with other managers quite often? If so, then use that time to interact with your team. For the team to genuinely co-operate, they require your collaboration, counsel, and engagement. Ensure that you’re approachable and friendly. Take a step farther and give words of encouragement. Tell them that you are happy and always available to your team.

6. Maximize Diversity

The more is diversity in points-of-views, the more innovative your work experience becomes. You can introduce employees to new concepts and novel ways of thinking with job rotation. Ensure that the team interacts and coordinates with people from different backgrounds and generations. Hiring new employees, having different backgrounds, would help. Maximize diversity, and you shall be able to maximize innovation.

7. Implement Innovation Reward System

When you promote creativity, it comes under the notice of other employees. They get encouraged to do something innovative and emulate their behavior. It is essential to recognize individuals in your team that exhibit innovation readily. You can also implement a reward system to show you appreciate the innovative ideas. It shall help in making the workplace a more creative place.

8. Calm The Opposition

The reason why employees don’t provide suggestions is that they are worried about the reaction. Nobody likes his thoughts shot down instantly or becoming a butt of jokes. Create an environment that makes people confident about brainstorming actively. Even if an employee says an obvious thing, appreciate him for putting in effort. Employees should have a channel to put their suggestions in writing. It is for those who are hesitant to discuss within a group. The entire team should know that inputs in any form are welcome.

9. Get Them In Front Of Your Customers

Customer service doesn’t end with your final invoice. It would help if you let your team face clients to know about their evolving journeys. How does your product fit in their own lives? How its experience can be improved further? What other issues they have? What innovative stuff they should do to make their life easier and more flexible? Let your team interact with your customers with open questions. Let them think of ways adding value to the money of your customer. You shall soon be having a plethora of new ideas.

10. Asking The Team Their Choice Of Learning

It is one of the most effective ways to engage the team, asking them what they would like to learn. Consider this case; let us say anyone asks, “videography.” Then you should chart a videography course helping to delve deep into their current projects. It should allow them to research the competitors and bring their ideas. It should be helpful in the conception of a feedback system and learning by doing.

11. Have Respect for Failings

Failure is an indispensable part of the entire learning process. It will help if you move forward with the assumption that every idea cannot be successful. Innovation takes up numerous experiments for the creation of new solutions and products. Only those organizations would be able to taste the fruit of innovation, where there is an appetite for failures. Where employees live with a fear of failure, they won’t bring new ideas. They would instead work with traditional assessed methods.

Return and risk are two sides of a coin. For getting higher returns on investments, companies have to follow a culture of risk-taking. To decrement the chances of failing, companies might start with lesser and calculated risks. It is not just about taking risks; it is also about the numerosity of experiments. There are many examples, such as Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison, who succeeded after failings.

12. Try To Build An Environment Which Is Free From Blames

Building an environment free from blames brings creativity and innovation. Employees like to go with traditional approaches and mechanizations. It is because they feel that going to uncharted territories might lead to highly visible errors. So, the blame goes to the person who has made that decision. It becomes a necessity that your employees don’t have to face the heat. It doesn’t mean doing away with repercussions for safety violations and conscious ineptitudes.

In some organizations, publicly shaming the employees for their lapses is the norm. Such an environment can cause many hindrances in the path of innovation. Some managers think that fixing the guilty might stop other employees from committing mistakes. What happens is just the opposite. Here the employees start misreporting and hiding their mistakes. Such hidden errors amplify at a later stage because their existence was denied in the first stage.

13. Lead By The Example

It is challenging for many leaders, but if they lead by their examples, the message will go along very far. Leaders have to start by accepting their own mistakes. It would create a significant trickle-down effect on the whole team. Substantial process improvement and innovation would kickstart on its own. If managers reveal their calculated risk, employees, too, shall emulate the model. Reducing the guilt by one’s example keeps innovation alive.

Wrapping Up

Finally, take a serious note of the skill sets in your group. So, when was the last time you advanced education and training? To think innovatively, you need to empower your employees with new tools and technology. With the ideal directional approach and support, you will enable your team to enhance their ability. Also, it would make your company an innovative workplace.

Project management is a very important business process. All organizations that have over 10 employees need to be able to organize themselves as best as possible to streamline all projects and make sure that everyone does their share so that all deadlines are met. Apart from having managers that take care of such processes, companies also need technical solutions that will allow them to do this in a better way.

This is why a project management tool is an absolute essential for managing projects in modern organizations, especially when you understand that digital solutions are effective and simple, compared to older techniques. These are advanced solutions that can handle various types of projects and allow companies to organize themselves flawlessly.

One of the features of project management tools is that they can be used for creating project templates. These templates can be quite useful if an organization constantly has similar projects that have the same structure and task list. Instead of always having to create new tasks and lists, you can simply create a template that can be used for every new project.

How to save time with project templates?

If a business organization has large projects, project templates can save a lot of valuable time because of the simple fact that they won’t have to create brand new plans for each project. The project manager won’t have to do the same job over and over again and spend valuable time.

Instead, he or she will just have to find the right template and fill it in with appropriate information. Even though it might take some time for the manager to find the appropriate template, or several of them, when they are located, it’s smooth sailing, as they say.

The manager can then consider the project at hand and see what kind of values need to be set. Rather than having to do a lot of planning and paperwork, the project manager will only have to fill in all of the forms in the template and prepare the project.

How you can save money with project templates?

When you start using project templates for creating project plans in your project management tool, you will soon realize that not only will you save time, but you will also save money. When you work with your project management tool, over time, you will realize patterns and trends in projects and, when you create a template that suits the pattern, you won’t have any additional costs.

When a project manager creates a couple of templates using the project management tool, he or she will gain experience and knowledge, which will allow that person to choose adequate templates in the future without having to spend any money. An experienced manager that is in charge of many products can easily create templates that will always be useful and this doesn’t cost a thing.

This means no big investments to talk to outside consultants that will be in charge of creating reliable documentation that will further help a certain project run smoothly. It might take some time and resources to develop templates, but once this is done, you will always be able to start new projects.

Be extra careful when developing your templates

In order for your templates to be effective and beneficial to your business, you must make sure that your development approach should be in the right way so that they can truly shine. It’s important that you work hard through trial and error during that process, and even before that.

The creator of the template needs experience in project management and working on projects that are specific to your business. This is how this person will know all the difficulties, specifics, ins and outs. He or she will be able to create a template that meets all the necessary demands.

Create a template from your current projects

If your business works on the same kind of projects constantly, and you create marketing campaigns, work with purchase orders, develop products, etc. you won’t have to create a project management template from scratch. Instead of doing this, the best way to create templates for similar projects that you know you will work on in the future is to simply copy your current projects.

When I say “copy”, I don’t mean literally, but most project management tools give you the “save as template” option or similar features that allow you to quickly use your current project to create a template that you can use in the future. Name this template appropriately so that you know for which kind of project you can use it.

Additionally, all project management tools allow you to perform edits on these templates and, if needed, you can change small things that are still very important so that there are no mistakes or confusion in the future.

Project templates are valuable time-savers that can make starting new projects a piece of cake. Even if you get larger projects than you regularly do, a template with the right structure can be expanded in no time and adapted for larger jobs. These documents can make the life of project managers much easier and allow them to start off projects on the right foot and in less time. A business that uses project management tools to create templates improves its overall productivity.

Author Bio: David is a technical writer currently associated with ProProfs project. Owing to his keen insight, he enjoys writing about emerging trends and associated learning in the project management domain. He lives in Detroit, Michigan with his wife. In his spare time, David loves exploring the city, listening to Metal music and riding.

In today’s day and age, there are thousands and thousands of apps out there for people to use. These apps can do a ton of different things, and several have become so successful that they have made their founders and creators billionaires. So how do these apps get so successful? Well, tracking metrics was a large part of it.

Tracking metrics is all about seeing what is working for your app, what isn’t working, and how you can fix what isn’t. With that in mind, this article is going to look at some of the most important metrics that you should be monitoring within your app.

App Downloads

Of course, the amount of app downloads you are getting is incredibly useful to keep track of. This should be the very first indication of how your app is doing. If you are getting lots of downloads, great, but if you are not, then you need to look at why. It could be your description, could be your marketing or even your icon/screenshots.

The number of downloads isn’t the only thing important, so is noticing how they trend over time. If you are having a hard time getting downloads, maybe it’s time to increase your marketing efforts. Also, it is important to know that there is no set amount of downloads that you should be looking to get, as it will differ from app to app.

Active Users

Tracking the number of users is also a metric you want to keep updated. However, not just the overall users you’ve had, but the active users. These active users are those who regularly use your app. You can also segment active users into daily active users and monthly active users. The ultimate goal is to have everyone turn into a daily active user, someone who uses your app each day.

However, with 20% of apps only being used literally once after downloading, retaining users isn’t always an easy thing. You need to offer in-app updates frequently to address concerns and don’t be afraid to send push notifications to remind your users to revisit your app.

Screenflow

Measuring and tracking screen flow is essentially following along where a user goes throughout your app and the path they take. This is useful as it will not only show you where most users are going but how they are getting there. This will also help to illustrate which pages need to be improved (as they don’t get much traffic) and tracking can also show which page people are at when they leave your app.

By knowing which paths are most used by your user base, you will be able to make them even more efficient to give a better performance and hopefully attract new users.

Average Visit Time

Tracking this metric will show you the average duration of each user session in your app. This is very useful as it can show just how engaged with your app your users are. If a user just checks the app for a minute and then turns it off, that is not as valuable as if a user is on it for a half hour or more each session.

If your users only interact with your app for a short period, you should look at adding more things to do to engage them and keep them using the app longer. If your users already spend a lot of time on your app, it is all about making that experience as great as possible for them.

In-App Feedback

Of course, no app is perfect, so you need to offer somewhere for your users to give you some feedback. This could be in the form of a survey, a contact form, or other method of delivering communication. By offering this option, you will allow users to let you know what they like, what they don’t like and anything they think needs to be addressed further.

In addition to helping you fix problems and right wrongs, giving this option to users (and keeping track of it) will make the users feel as if their voices are being heard and that they have an active part in helping your app become successful. This will make them feel more connected to the app and thus, more likely to continue using it.

Thankfully, there are tools out there that can help you track and monitor not only these metrics but also the overall performance of your app, which is also important to do to prevent downtime, that can cost companies tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If you are interested in checking one out or learning more about what they can offer, be sure to check out https://stackify.com/what-is-apm/.

Remember what it was like before project management tools entered the picture? Providing deliverables on time to clients was one of the biggest challenges organizations faced. Technically, it is true even today. But why so? Why did completing planning to execution phases became cumbersome for project teams?

Were tasks not divided correctly among teams? Did lack of communication delay the execution of the project? Or did teams failed to collaborate effectively? Each question may sound bitter. But all these stand true. They are giveaways why projects got delayed.

What outcomes did they entail? There were many. Some include:

1. Delay in providing project deliverables. This leads to the loss of both stakeholders and organizations. According to Chaos Manifesto, less than a third of projects got delivered successfully on time and on budget.
2. According to a study, only 33% of the organizations meet the original goals and objectives while completing the project. This happens because teams are not clear about project objectives or lack of business focus. It also leads to project failure.
3. Relations between the project team and stakeholders were severed. This can result in a bad market reputation and lead to achieving fewer projects for an organization.

The above outcomes can be averted if an organization integrates project management tools into its workspace. No more will they be tangled in the process of sending emails. They can easily overcome the “schedule a meeting” phase and quickly get all the members involved with a project to get on the same page.

Before the tool was devised, project teams also faced communication issues. This is because they didn’t have the means for real-time communication. It often affected team collaboration and project outcomes negatively, especially in the case of remote employees.

Today, with various online project management tools available, the scenario has changed, and so has a cross-team coordination process. Let’s take a look at how an easy project management tool can help teams to collaborate and complete all their projects on time.

Centralized Workspace

With project management software, creating an online centralized workspace is a piece of cake. It gives your team members easy access at any given time. All the information they need will be stored and organized in a single location. This is made available to them 24/7, regardless of the devices they use.

Other than that, all project-related files and documents become accessible across teams. This, in turn, helps:

1. Both team members and stakeholders the opportunity to complete their respective tasks without glitches.
2. Project teams significantly save time and the chance to improve team productivity and ROI.

All this is beneficial for cross-functional teams that are spread across different departments. But this has also helped remote team managers. No more do their location and time difference impact the project collaboration process negatively. With a few clicks, their work gets centralized easily.

Better Collaboration

Another feature that makes project management tools a useful integration to the workspace is their built-in collaboration feature. Cross-team coordination has reached a whole new level, thanks to the PM tool. Multiple teams collaborate by sharing files and commenting on every stage. Besides, they can simply view various checklists and reports necessary for successful project completion.

The best thing about utilizing project management software: Every team member gets to see all the updates made to the documents instantly. Without the tool, they could have wasted much time. How? Collecting multiple copies of documents and notes becomes an unmanageable task if done through mails.

However, with the integration of the tool, keeping up with all the changes and completing tasks effectively has become relatively easier. Also, team members are not required to attend numerous meetings to stay updated or on track with relevant changes made by the client.

Effective Communication

According to recent project management statistics, 57% of projects fail due to a breakdown in communication. Bad communication can also make your clients feel frustrated. Luckily, project management tools are here to save the day.

Quite similar to collaboration, project management tools have real-time communication features. This enables different teams to communicate in real-time. In short, it helps cross-functional teams to improve their efforts and make useful contributions to projects and overall organizational success.

Before PM tools came into the picture, email was the number one communication platform. But it never guaranteed whether all stakeholders will receive the necessary information in time or not. This changed with the coming of project management software. Everyone receives relevant information on time. The notification feature plays an important role. It alerts team members about the recently assigned tasks.

Moreover, the tool can be integrated with live chat. This further assists teams to communicate with one another without the need for meetings, phone calls, or video conferences.

Full Transparency

It is said that transparency is crucial to make every project successful. It is true in cases where team members are spread across the globe or different departments in a company. Project management software helps to create a single, centralized and shared workspace. This helps every team member to see all the tasks, along with task dependencies, thereby clearly understanding what needs to be done to reach positive outcomes.

With complete transparency during the planning and execution phase, everyone exactly knows what they are responsible for, and when tasks have to be completed. They can clearly view all the key information, every schedule, objective, deadline, and track the progress hassle-free.

This, especially task dependencies, can save a considerable amount of time and increase the success rate of a project. Besides, it helps cross-functional teams to determine every milestone and the big picture that many fail to see.

Complete transparency is also responsible for helping team members track the impact everyone’s effort has on the project besides their own. This helps to add more suggestions from different teams to further improve the productivity of fellow members.

Real-Time Project Monitoring

Another aspect that makes the relevance of simple project management software important is monitoring the project. Earlier, to monitor the progress of a project, clients had to call in regular meets with the project team. Not only this wasted their time but also further delayed the task completion progress.

However, PM tool integration has made the task easier to manage. It is capable of improving the project monitoring process and that too in real-time. In fact, 21% of the organizations claim that real-time status dashboards have become one of the popular methods to monitor the progress of a project.

With this tool, you can monitor your projects in real-time and clearly see the entire progress as a project unfolds. You can see the status of projects, the time it takes to complete particular tasks and milestones, and how long it takes every team member to finish their work.

That way, you can jump in whenever you feel that you can contribute. Get a full picture of everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. You can determine who should be rewarded for their efforts, as well as who may need additional training in order to improve and grow, thereby helping your organization grow.

In the end

Helping your organization to grow and reach the good books of your future clients is an important goal to achieve. This is possible when your team completes projects on time and budget. How to achieve this goal? Try improving cross-team coordination tactics. However, you may lose track of every tactic and come back to square one, if done without integrating an effective tool.

To avoid this outcome, it is essential to implement the use of simple project management software to improve cross-team collaboration. This not only helps to communicate better and save more time but also assists in improving workflow and providing deliverables on time.

So why wait for your competitors to overtake your position in the market? By using the tool, your business can reach a whole new level of success.

Author Bio: David is a technical writer; his works are regularly published in various papers and top-notch portals. His rich experience in the project management domain helps him offer the latest and fresh perspective on improved efficiency in workflows across organizations. His informative works on similar lines can be reached out on ProProfs Project.