Confessions of a Software Consultant - David Cutting - NIDC 2024 - Conf Room 1A

Описание: Confessions of a Software Consultant: Lessons learnt delivering software for external customers

This talk will build on over years of experience in managing the often fraught relationships between development teams and their customers (it will focus on external customers but is also relevant to internal work). We will examine some of the commonly held beliefs and how these differ (for example varying from the customer is always right to the customer is always wrong) and identify key tactics and approaches for success in these relationships. Increasingly developers are being asked to interact directly with non-technical customers as development becomes more embedded into businesses and less of a standalone service, which can lead to friction, breakdown of relationships and ultimately failure of projects to deliver.

Using real world examples, the talk start by covering how requirements gathering and agreement is critical and introduce useful practical techniques to make this successful including dealing with the inevitable dread of scope creep and requirements change mid project. Challenges in communication between technical and non-technical stakeholders presents a particular problem and as we can’t expect our customers to up-skill we have to be able to adapt and communicate appropriately, understanding their position and interests.

The talk will work through the full lifecycle of projects identifying particular pain points illustrated with first-hand examples as well as simple approaches which can help to overcome them. These will include initiation, requirements, ongoing progress reporting, acceptance testing and handover as well as specific cases where things go wrong (over budget, over time, changed customer needs, and more).

The talk is targeted to anyone including less experience developers who have to liaise with non-technical customers to deliver projects. The key takeaways will be a set of widely applicable approaches which can help to ensure project success even if nothing is guaranteed!

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Recorded in Conference Room 1A of The ICC Belfast, Northern Ireland
NIDC 2024 - Saturday, 23rd November 2024