December 6, 2021
There are many reasons why application deployments from enterprises fail. More fail than succeed, after all. There are however some key best practices that every enterprise IT and development team should follow to make sure you don’t fall into the same old traps. In summary though, plan thoroughly, make sure you have the tech you need to succeed and most of all, have a unique, kick-ass idea that there’s a genuine need for.
Here are the top reasons we see enterprise teams fail – and how to fix it!
Pretty simple, right?
Application Lifecycle Management and planning your product strategy from the start is vital for your success. Full planning of governance, development and operations can’t be ignored. Getting your app developed and into the relevant app stores or launched internally is not the end of the process, there is so much more that is needed to effectively market your app, drive adoption and gather data to feed into future updates.
It’s important for product managers, project managers, developers, the business, potential end users, and all other key stakeholders to be present in the decision making process from the beginning.
Most enterprise applications developed today do nothing new. When a team is spending weeks and months custom-coding something that has been done before in a hundred slightly different but ultimately very similar ways already, you’re throwing thousands of dollars down the drain.
Compoze Labs Managing Partner Paul Hilsen talks about a particular consulting job where an enterprise had spent six months and over a million dollars simply building the architecture for an internal platform that was good, but nothing unique. A platform like this could have taken less than a day to build to the same quality with the Compoze platform.
If your IT team is going to build something, you better make sure every single stakeholder in the business has fully bought into the idea. In order for adoption rates to be high and for the business to reap any rewards from the efforts, marketing has to be ready to push it, IT has to have the direction and resources to maintain it, CEO’s and Finance need to see the reasons behind it to continue funding it. Apps often fail because one or more of these stakeholders has been brought in too late, or hasn’t grasped the need for the app in the first place.
Adapting, prototyping and iterating fast is vital to the above. If projects stall, or don’t have much to show for their efforts after a few months, there’s a good change the people who hold the purse strings could get frustrated or even pull the plug on the whole project. Being able to build a Minimum Viable Product and get it tested in the market without it taking months and huge expense to build can be vital in maintaining buy-in across the company and in gathering the data and feedback needed to optimize your product for the target market.
An agile IT team will massively increase project ROI, improve end user experience as issues are dealt with quickly and effectively and should see quicker adoption of the app as market feedback is instant.
One of the keys to developing and deploying in an agile manner is how adept an IT team is at choosing the right products to use in the technological minefield of modern IT. Of course a large part of this is also in figuring out how to effectively and seamlessly transition from legacy systems over to newer technologies.
Legacy systems often stall businesses in becoming more efficient because there is a reluctance to move from what is currently ‘working’ to something else with the promise of greater efficiency. There are inherent risks with any transition, but rewards often mean increased business efficiency across the board.
Moving from legacy systems to greater more modern technologies often allows businesses to pivot faster, make changes quicker, iterate, manage and maintain better, all while gathering and aggregating more useful data across the board. In short, this means that the IT team can respond faster to everything that the business and the market demands. Obviously though, it’s not so simple. Companies need to manage the transition well, and choose the right tech that springboards their IT team and business operations into the modern day.
There are a host of options out there at the moment to streamline enterprise software development and management, with Compoze being just one of them.
Even the most agile IT and development teams can see silos creeping into their day to day operations. Silos slow down processes by inhibiting the major factor for agile application development; effective communication.
Information needs to flow freely within all parts of IT teams, and externally to other departments within the business. Problems need to be communicated and all stakeholders need to be comfortable with taking responsibility for fixing issues collectively.
Have questions about how to effectively structure your IT team and make the most of new technology to develop better? Speak to a Compoze Labs expert, we’re always happy to help.
