We’ve written before about Katabat’s commitment to agile methodology and process-driven speed. Our way of operating enables us to deliver the best possible results to our clients.
What does agile deployment really look like?
How do we approach projects that need to be up and running quickly? What steps do we take to ensure our clients get what they need and want in such a short amount of time?
We recently worked with a U.S. based fintech to deploy our standard SaaS-based customer experience management solution. With minor integration requests, the solution was secure and ready to use within a month. Our highly configurable product, which provides a majority of the functionality that a client requires, meant that we could deliver quickly.
For many companies, a turnaround like that is unthinkable. But we’ve done it with many clients using a combination of process-driven speed and unique expertise. The key is staying focused, channeling the advice of former Olympic sprinter and speed coach John Smith that “to go fast, you have to take your time.”
Here are five ways you can use process-driven speed to deliver a project quickly, regardless of your industry:
- Push Dedicated Teams on Both Sides. For agile deployment to work, the client and provider cannot be working independently and then reporting back to each other. Instead, there needs to be a continuous communication feedback loop in action throughout the planning and deployment processes. Open and continuous communication each step of the way ensures that client and provider are on the same page and that the deployment is seamless. When selecting your provider, it’s important to ask about their level of industry expertise to streamline the conversations and ensure that your project manager understands both the business requirements and technical aspects.
- Deploy the Standard Product Solution. There is a difference between personalization and customization. Personalization is primarily about configuration of the system and is easy if you’ve built the product right; customization is about programming changes to the platform and slows down the process while you wait for approvals and can drive the cost up. Prioritizing the requirements and limiting the scope of deliverables for every sprint accordingly (see below) ensures quality and achieving tight deadlines.
- Perfect is the Enemy of Good. In this case, the French philosopher Voltaire’s quote recognizes that once the solution is deployed and in use, you’ll find new use cases and can enhance the product or service. Agile makes it easier to handle these adjustments. The iterative development, testing, and production release lifecycles allow our clients to access the functionality and use our product while building out their next iteration of requirements. It’s how we deliver a product that will meet the needs of our clients so quickly.
- Build/Deploy in Two-Week Sprints. What makes agile deployment possible is the shift in how a project or deployment is approached. While we may still work with a client over an extended period, we develop and deploy new code for testing in two-week sprints. New enhancements can be deployed into production quickly. Having defined goals and a good feedback loop with the client ensures that with each iterative release, more components can be delivered based on a client’s priority.
- Develop Iteratively. The product that we deliver is not static, but rather a living, breathing solution. As a client’s business evolves, so can the platform. Katabat’s iterative development process allows us to practice a continuous improvement approach, adjusting to our clients’ needs, the marketplace and our competition.
Adopting an Agile Mindset
While agile solution deployment has been around for years, it has been a new process for many of our financial-services clients. It’s a completely different way of approaching solution development than what many of them are used to. We have made agile deployment converts out of many customers as they see the benefits it delivers within their own organizations. Katabat is dedicated to this agile mindset, as we have seen it provide quality, highly customized solutions to our clients again and again.
Elysandra Ziegler is the VP of Product for Katabat. She can be reached at eziegler@katabat.com. Rohitha Kodali is a software engineer for Katabat who contributed to this post.
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Ely joined the Katabat team in 2009 bringing 15+ years of business development and operations experience. Ely has held a variety of leadership roles within client delivery and product management. Prior to Katabat, Ely spent 15 years at MBNA in a variety of roles within business development and marketing. After MBNA, Ely was a founding member of a credit card start-up, responsible for establishing all operational process for their growing affinity portfolio. Ely studied Business Management at Wilmington University. Ely enjoys spending time with her family and attending all of her children’s activities. She’s known as the loudest member of their cheering squad!
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