Our Approach

Tech Holding utilized a project inception process that included a series of discovery sessions and interviews with USC Keck stakeholders to document their requirements for this project and narrow down the MVP scope that we would be able to deliver within our limited time frame.

Our product group took this scope and broke it down into epics and stories that we would use to track progress in Azure DevOps, the client’s preferred project management tool. Additionally, our development team estimated these stories, outlined the infrastructure and designed the architecture we would need to support their delivery, and operationalized the CI/CD workflow that would eventually be handed over to the client and their engineers.

Project management took these discovery artifacts and built a project plan detailing the feature deliverables, milestones, and dependencies for the team to reference. In Azure DevOps, a Kanban workflow was set up, and tickets reflecting the project plan deliverables were added for the team to work on during project execution. Our team reported weekly on the velocity of the work items that were completed, and these were cross-referenced with the project plan timelines. The team would then review any risks, adjusted scope, and priority changes that would occasionally come up through this analysis and communicate it to the client via a weekly executive status review.

Finally, we held bi-weekly demos with USC Keck stakeholders to showcase our development progress and gather feedback from the larger organization. We also held retrospectives to review the previous two weeks of work and identify improvements to our process.

Outcomes

Due to Tech Holding’s efforts to keep USC Keck closely involved and appraised at all phases of the project, the teams were constantly in sync regarding progress and could swarm to address any risks and blockers quickly. Between in-depth knowledge transfer sessions and documentation, Tech Holding seamlessly transitioned ownership of the application and underlying infrastructure over to USC Keck following production launch.

Tech Holding’s precise and proactive project management approach enabled us to complete our side of the development work two weeks ahead of schedule, providing us a buffer to support USC Keck in the final stages of their API transition and swarm lower priority bugs to make the final product as clean as possible.

During launch day, Tech Holding organized a war room to coordinate launch activities and support steps to ensure error-free production deployment. Following launch, we maintained a small team on standby for 30 days to address any post-launch issues and answer any follow-up questions from the client.

Ultimately, the project was a huge success, and USC Keck has adopted our processes and approach to other departments and future application development projects within their organization.