Project Management Suite
Blueprint Lumina Consulting LLC can help businesses to effectively manage both business and Information Technology (IT) projects. By consistently doing these simple things, Blueprint Lumina Consulting LLC can ensure that our clients feel engaged and empowered and know that they’re a crucial part of the equation. This ensures our work stays agile—and that our clients stay happy.
Our founder has extensive experience in delivering numerous business and IT projects on budget, on time and within quality standards.
Within reason, we always strive to keep our clients informed about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and why we believe it will ultimately benefit the project. Our founder and management follow four best practices for embracing Agile project management and making our customers happy. The key principles behind these best practices are collaboration and transparency.
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Maintaining an Up-to-Date Product Roadmap
A product roadmap is critical to determining the scope of a project and the specifics of the project triangle. Getting the roadmap right from the outset is well worth the significant time and expenditure that planning takes. The planning process must include all stakeholders and will not be rushed.
The roadmap can help facilitate discussions using a more agile approach, while keeping in mind the timeline and budget. Of course, roadmaps can change—our philosophy is that you must consider changes in a conscious, careful way and with full transparency to our client. This way no one is surprised by changes to the development roadmap.
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Collaboratively Prune the Backlog
It can be difficult to get on the same page with customers about what the team can finish, by what time, and for how much money. Our philosophy when working with a client is to manage the backlog carefully—which means pruning back unnecessary features—this is actually a great way of aligning with our clients. Doing this requires having fully transparent, collaborative meetings with your client—meetings whose laser-focus is on the goals of building a high-quality product and launching on time and on budget.
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Stay in Contact Through Vision-Alignment Meetings.
Our founder has developed the use of vision-alignment meetings at a regular frequency. These are scheduled meetings for the product/service-development team and stakeholders, which occur after a predetermined number of sprints. The focus of these meetings with a larger group of decision makers is on reassessing the current roadmap and assessing the features that have already been implemented, as well as what’s up next for the project. The team can also reconsider the scope, cost, and timeline. Such opportunities to carefully review a team’s work can be beneficial for discovering possible new features and discussing priorities with executives and decision makers. These meetings also provide an opportunity to expand the timeline or budget, if necessary.
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Hold Retrospective Meetings
Other important, agile-process meetings are recurring, retrospective meetings. The primary purpose of these retrospectives that our company follows is to allow the product/services-development team time to discuss what’s working, what’s not working, and how to improve things, but the client is always welcome to attend.
The intent of a retrospective is to produce action items the team can implement to improve the product-development process. In many cases, these meetings also help the team hone the scope, timeline, and cost triangle by saving time or reducing scope. Over the course of several retrospective meetings, our team adopts multiple improvements that can have a synergistic effect.
