Product Integration and Documentation
Business Challenge
Internal applications can be a source of flexible and functional capabilities that are tailored for the organization that developed them. The organization has tremendous opportunity to customize a tool that fulfills a unique business need or process.
Managing the development of an internal application presents a set of challenges. Who is working on the vision and direction of development? Who is managing the team (or teams) making changes and how are the users supported?
Our client needed a way to manage the expectations of the users that engaged with this homegrown internal application on a daily basis and provide necessary features to extend the lifespan of the critical application. They needed to ensure uptime and integrations with other applications that consumed data from this essential service. Since there was no existing client team dedicated to this effort, our client needed an EQengineered team that would provide all necessary support and feature updates to work autonomously and enhance the application so that it could run with minimal support and maintenance needs in the future.
EQengineered Approach
The EQengineered team worked as a dedicated product development group to organize and direct the work in the following ways:
Held meetings with key users and product stakeholders to understand, describe, and prioritize potential features and functionality
Created and collaborated on innovative technical solutions that would eliminate future development touchpoints and automate key processes within the application
Utilized agile methodology to iterate on the work and provide transparent views into release delivery through proven and tested processes
Organized and maintained an effective documentation wiki to help provide clarity into previously opaque features and architecture for users, QA teams, and future development needs
Business Results/Outcomes
The internal application is able to run with minimal development touchpoints, and includes necessary features and updates to extend the lifecycle of the application until business needs change.
The focus on reduction of manual or development-heavy tasks freed up significant time for the customers of this internal application.
The documentation and reporting that was completed during this engagement serves as a blueprint for future efforts at this client for organizing other teams and achieving similar results.
The outcomes provide a foundational and procedural roadmap for aligning interdepartmental teams on shared internal processes that will be critical for future organization-led applications.