Project Management Approach in Belitsoft

The project management approach of Belitsoft Company aims at solving customers’ tasks in the fastest and most transparent manner while simultaneously improving the project by being adaptable due to the use of flexible techniques, as well as a pro-active position.

Our strategy

Our company implements all processes to provide our customers with a full control of the project management, ensuring transparency and effective use of the customer’s budget and risks minimization.

To choose an approach or a technique for managing a project we analyze ultimate goals and project implementation conditions of our customers. Depending on the project goals we can choose the following methods:

• Iterative method
• Flexible development techniques / Agile
• Waterfall
• Rational Unified Process (RUP)

It is worth mentioning that in most cases our company does not rely on just one method, but instead uses their combination, depending on a specific situation. For example, in its pure form Agile (whether it is Kanban or Scrum) is more suitable for product teams (in our understanding). The most widespread method which we use while developing projects is the following:

• The first stage - or preparation: Waterfall/Rup – gathering requirements, preparation of documentation, rough estimate, search of possibilities to reduce development costs.
• The second stage – or an iterative development: Creation of USER stories based on requirements, prioritization and division of the entire project into small Sprints (so that each of them would result in some finished module or functional). Thus in general development goes in the versioning way, Sprints can be allocated in Epics if necessary.

On most projects, the project management team at Belitsoft consists of:

• Project manager
• Business analyst
• Account Manager
• Technical expert(s)

The aims at carrying out integrated management of requirements, all necessary documentation and development cycles in order to ensure professional development and implementation.

Process provision

To ensure the processes and development itself, Belitsoft can provide its own instruments or work with those of the customer. As of 2015 we are familiar with the following tools (major tools are listed only):

• Issue tracking and Project management tools - JIRA /  MS Project / Base Camp /  RedMine, Mantis
• Documentation and Collaboration - Confluence  / OneNote / Google Drive / Dropbox
• Version control platforms - Git / GitHub / BitBucket / SVN
• Continuous Integration and Deployment – TimCity / Bamboo / Jenkins
• Building Tools – Maven / Ant / NAnt / CppAnt
• Automated testing - Selenium / Mercury / PHPUnit / Hivelocity
• Performance Testing – Apache JMetter / Mercury Interactive / LoadRunner
• PAAS – CloudFoundry

Requirements management

Effective requirements management when developing IT projects is an essential component of the entire development process. It implies gathering of requirements, prioritization, as well as management of changes throughout full life cycle of the project.

From our side we guarantee that we can work at different levels:

• Top level business requirements;
• Functional requirements;
• Nonfunctional requirements (technological, architectural, etc.).

Transparent reporting and control

Despite the fact that different methods of project management and levels of customer involvement into development processes imply different approaches to documentation, reporting and control, Belitsoft can assure absolute transparency by providing the following documents:

• Main stages of the project and intermediate delivery terms;
• Resources and terms for achievement of verified results;
• Quality control procedures;
• Frequency and structure of the reports on implemented works;
• Project risks and ways of their minimization.

Communication and knowledge management

One of the most important components of successful project development is proper communication, and for this reason Belitsoft pays much attention to it. At various levels of collaboration this means avoiding collision of conflicting priorities, coordinating, timely updating and reporting. One of our solutions is a reduction of information omissions by assigning a personal Account manager. However, that does not exclude the need of contact at other, lower levels (technical experts, PM, BA) and here we seek to ensure free communication among all project’s participants.

In the sphere of knowledge management Belitsoft company applies a number of means to reduce the risks communication ruptures and loss of information, as well as to speed up reaction time to changes:

• Elaborate documentation strategy;
• Well-proven system of incident escalation;
• Use of control tasks systems;
• Use of the centralized storage of project documentation;
• At our customers’ disposal there is a full range of instruments for the most effective interaction and comfortable communication:
• E-mail and instant messaging such as Skype;
• Video-conferences;
• Online access to the control system of the project, tracking of defects and documentation;
• Periodic meetings at the premises of the customer or at Belitsoft.

Belitsoft can provide a permanent presence of the project manager / coordinator on the customer’s premises if that is required by project’s specifics.