Establishing a development process under strong growth

The client was a small ERP vendor with a growing customer base due to some larger wins in the market. The growth was putting a strain on the organization and quality was suffering in the customer deliveries. In order to dramatically improve their delivery capacity, the client decided to engage us.

The starting point was a complete lack of development process and controls, each developer was working on their own with very little coordination. So our consultant first had to establish a sense of urgency by showing the customers experiences from the delieveries they were handing over. The next step was to establish a development process with controls that everyone in the team had to follow it.

The outcome was that the client got much better control of and quality in their deliveries. Further, once the team saw that their earlier firefighting disappeared they were able to commit to plans with customers.

The key challenge from the beginning was to get everyone to believe that process and discipline would eventually lead to much less fire-fighting.