The Beating Heart of the Project
2 Sep 2016
After a fun Summer, it’s time to embark on the next chapter of 2016. The start of September tends to be one of the pivotal moments of the year for all of us and the projects team in particular. Many of our clients like to get jobs closed off before the Summer holidays, before coming back to us in September with a new batch of queries, feature requests and general work they want doing on their system. I’d like to walk you through how the process then rolls out.
These requests are logged with an account manager, who will then scope out what is being asked, to determine firstly how much work is entailed and secondly how it will be carried out. Once we have established the nature of the work – whether it is a professional services request or a more significant development requirement – and the customer has signed on the dotted line, that’s when the project management steps begin.
The project manager becomes the customer’s direct line of contact until the work is completed. This generally entails clarifying any questions that the client still needs to answer and outlining a timeline for the work to be carried out.
Once the job is underway, the project manager liaises with our development team, making sure that they are carrying out the task to the exact specifications agreed. At each relevant step, we carry out testing and document the work done. This will translate into a customer-facing guide to the new feature or enhancement as well as an internal guide outlining the technical specifications involved.
When the work is completed, our technical team steps in to review the wizardry created by the developers, to ensure that the code is nice and clean and covers all the bases. Parallel to this the project manager takes the work through some rigorous testing, again to ensure that all possible scenarios are catered for.
Once this has all been signed off and sealed, the project manager will arrange delivery of the work and a feature walkthrough with the client. When everyone is happy, we’ll ask the customer to sign the job off and the project manager will hand the reins back over to the account manager – until next time!
My role is to build our Customer Success team and I work with our clients and prospects helping them get the most from their subscription – it is a fun challenging role as no two days are the same. When not in the office I’ll be either making a noise on my guitar or getting my trainers on for a run out in the Yorkshire Dales, North York Moors or the Lake District.