Every organization must be adaptive. You have to reevaluate your strategy. You are productive but you can still be better. Innovation is a continuous process. Your software business, especially, needs an efficient project management methodology. Specifically, you need RAD – Rapid Application Development.
So today, I am suggesting you start to implement RAD (Rapid Application Development). It will help you develop software and applications faster. You will stay on budget and delight your clients. There are two aspects to RAD in our constructs -the Client and the Product. In these two cases, they have a symbiotic relationship. You need the Product done right to keep the Client and when you take care of the Client, he comes back. The client can always come back, products do not. So, it is important that you stay engaged and communicate with the client even while building a solid product.
So why do you need RAD?
“Rapid Application Development (RAD) is a development lifecycle designed to give much faster development and higher-quality results than those achieved with the traditional lifecycle.” Rapid Application Development thus enables quality products to be developed faster, saving valuable resources. RAD takes advantage of automated tools and techniques to restructure the process of building information systems. This new process, extrapolated to the entire IS organization, results in a profound transformation of information systems development. RAD replaces hand-design and coding processes, which are dependent upon the skills of isolated individuals, with automated design and coding, which is an inherently more stable process.
What the above means is that with RAD you don’t need to send weekly reports, developers don’t send reports they submit finished process phases. With RAD you can better monitor a project life cycle, even if you have no technical knowledge of your own. Oracle and Microsoft projects are managed by seasoned managers, not by developers, they do this through a sustainable methodology.
The Phases of RAD
- Requirements Planning phase
- User design phase
- Construction phase
- Cutover phase
With a RAD methodology, you can tell at which phase a project development is at anytime, if for example it takes one week per phase, then the project should be ready in 4weeks. A developer is not allowed to give an abstract time frame without backing it up with an explanation. So if a project will take, say 4weeks, the developer will need to submit a documentation that shows how long each phase will take and why it will take that long. The the manager will look at it and then decides if its appropriate or not. Based on the completion of a phase, the manager can demand for implementation of the phase and know which phase of development any project is.
So Across Nigeria, decide to develop a RAD strategy because it will make your business better.