Housing Technology: Smart strategies for project success

Article originally published in Housing Technology magazine – issue September/2024. Author: Tom Norris, Acutest co-founder.

“Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.” – Ernest Hemingway (from The Old Man and the Sea)

The balancing act: juggling time, cost, and quality 

There is a saying that all projects have three main factors: time, cost, and quality. Stakeholders usually have to choose which two are most important. This isn’t always true: stakeholders often don’t make informed decisions, so projects take longer, costs more, and still don’t meet the users’ needs.

Every project is limited by the resources available. So, how can we deliver on time and make sure it works?

There are many tips, tools and techniques for supporting quicker delivery, that we use at Acutest. But as Hemmingway suggests, it’s not about what you don’t have; it’s about what you can do with what you have.

This article describes three principles that can help you deliver without extra resources, save you time, and hopefully help your stakeholders to sleep well at night. It focuses on the easiest elements to control: 

1. Do less—essential tasks only

On every late-running project we have seen teams working on things that do not matter. It is easier to spot unnecessary extras, but it is hard to remove most non-essential tasks. Identify the tasks that you must do by performing a risk assessment. Hold a workshop with both the business and technical stakeholders and ask yourselves:

• How likely is it that this technology will fail?
• How serious would it be to the business if it did fail?

Plot each of the tasks on a risk matrix like the one below and then focus your scarce resources on those tasks that occupy the top right quadrants of your matrix. These highest priority tasks or features are the ones that are likely to fail and fail with catastrophic results.

2. Be efficient—take every shortcut possible, especially where there is a specific advantage

“We always do it this way!”—effective leadership will encourage everyone to find the shortcuts, whether they are modern methods or automation of tasks. There are two key rules to these shortcuts:

• Motivate everyone to collaborate and take the beneficial shortcuts. Be open and encourage stakeholders to let go of blinkered approaches and work efficiently towards common goals across the development lifecycle.
• Understand the advantage of every tool that is used. Quantify and agree on the benefits in advance—then choose and use tools only if you’re confident they will economically deliver those benefits. Do not waste time and money on tools with no clear advantage.

A note of caution: if the shortcut causes technical debt, make a note — never hide it.

For example: At Acutest, we have focused on how Business Analysts can work when writing requirements. We improved the speed of writing and approving requirements by tweaking the process and using generative AI. This led to fewer errors and requirements in a test automation-friendly format, saving time.

In our experience, precise requirements always reduce the number of defects, sometimes by as much as 90% (data from a financial services customer used our approach to writing requirements in a second phase, enabling like-for-like comparisons).

3. Provide clarity—use real-time status and progress reports for informed decision making

It is human nature to want to please and consequently, most project reporting presents a rosy view of a project’s status. If there are problems that cannot be glossed over, then there is little information to help management understand how bad the situation is, what action they need to take, and where should they spend their resources to mitigate the most important problems.

A common example of a project status report from one of our clients showed that over 75% of testing was complete and go-live was running only slightly behind schedule giving the impression that management intervention was not required. In reality the project was in dire need of help:

• There were features in the functional requirements not on the plan, so they were not included in the 75% figure reported.
• The least important features were the first to be worked on; saving the difficult ones for later. So, the missing 25% of deliverables would take almost half of the project effort—not 25%—and the time required to deliver the most complex functionality meant that the schedule was going to be significantly exceeded.

If project leadership want to be able to make informed decisions, it is critical that all stakeholders, not just the technologists, share a single view of what is going on. Stakeholders need to understand the status and progress of all activities and what this means for the overall project. This means your reports need to:

• Give a clear visual summary that can be absorbed in a glance and is readily understood by all stakeholders.
• Provide the context necessary to understand the issue by relating issues to requirements, business processes, or user outcomes.
• Clearly prioritise the issues so that management time, decision making and scarce resource is focused on mitigating those problems that will have the greatest impact and not on issues that the user will probably not notice if they are not fixed.

By replacing their standard reporting with a clearer and more informative approach, our client was able to:

• Focus effort on high-priority items—developing and testing the features most likely to fail and interrupt the service.
• Report the status against required features so that business stakeholders could answer the question: “if I decide to go live today, what would work?”
• Create real-time reports so everyone could immediately see the status of the project and take immediate remedial action.

Ultimately the project recovered, and the service went live on time. Some low-priority elements were not delivered, but no one noticed.

Think of what you can do with what there is.

Follow the three principles above and you will find that you can always do more than you might expect. Contact the author at tom.norris@acutest.com for more information and to discuss further.

About the author:

Tom Norris co-founded Acutest in 2002 and is a specialist in quality assurance, IT testing, and business change. Tom has extensive experience supporting companies, enabling faster delivery with greater confidence, and ensuring projects meet their objectives efficiently. His expertise spans managing the big risks for projects, test project management, agile software development, and enhancing test strategies in every element of the development live cycle from the initial business goals to acceptance.