Software Delivery Control System

Delivery management no longer focuses on overseeing deadlines and tasks. Today, it plays a strategic role in driving collaboration, aligning cross-functional teams, and ensuring projects reach business goals. Thus, more companies are thinking about structuring their processes and building a reliable delivery framework to increase productivity and transparency within their organizations.

It is particularly visible in evolving companies. As the number of projects grows and operational complexity rises, they are looking to adopt more structured practices and approaches. Hence, such organizations often jump straight into searching for a tool, hoping it would be a one-stop solution for establishing a reliable delivery management setup. So, companies eventually end up playing Lego, trying to assemble a tool and internal processes to cover the flow. This adds the additional overhead of how to manage it all efficiently and scale further without any losses in transparency and productivity.

We’ve been through this journey too. Further in this article, we’ll share our experience in finding a solution that not only gave us a solid baseline for managing projects and coordinating their efficient delivery but also helped us build a truly working, scalable delivery control framework.

Starting point: Adopt vs Develop a Delivery Control System

Things took off quickly for us when our team began scaling from 150 members to over 2K we have today. Our workload was expanding at a fast pace, making it challenging to keep everyone aligned with the best practices established in the organization. As a company with a long history in IT services delivery, we already had a project management methodology in place, drawing on the extensive experience and lessons learned from the challenges of real-world project cases. Yet the initial toolset that helped us sustain this approach started to lose its efficiency. At that time, it included different systems like SharePoint and a couple of ALM solutions for task tracking, project planning, etc. However, it became clear that we needed something more cohesive and efficient enough to both maintain our rapid evolution and ensure workflows ran smoothly.

Like many businesses, we initially saw a ready-made solution as a potential way to meet our needs quickly. However, as our processes have evolved, we decided to conduct an internal audit in the first place to clarify the requirements. Once we got a holistic view of our operational state, we outlined three major requirements we have for a new tool:

1. Alignment with Project Management Culture: Strengthen established practices while helping new team members follow them.
2. Scalability: Seamlessly integrate with existing workflows and grow effectively to support our business evolution.
3. Centralization: Consolidate all project management assets into one place and provide a comprehensive portfolio-wide picture.

We found that the functionality of traditional portfolio management tools would not cover all our needs, as our priority was to get a big picture of the delivery pipeline not dependent on a particular task tracking system. So, the question was – whether we should build brand-new or adjust ready-made software. That wasn’t an easy choice, so we decided to benchmark the pros and cons of each option. We created an adopting vs developing tool list, which may also be of help for your own analysis:

Adopting Ready-to-go Solution

Building Custom Solution

We carefully evaluated the possibilities and decided that complete tool adjustment to our workflows and control over a system’s features is crucial for us. This way, we could quickly add functionality based on our findings and lessons learned and adjust the overall delivery process on the go if needed. Customization of any existing solution, in contrast, would be a more challenging, time- and effort-consuming investment. Therefore, our team went with building our own PM Tool from scratch.

Evolutionary Development of the PM Tool

Our delivery management culture is rooted in keeping synergy among business units and projects, which is why we foster regular reporting on a company level. It helps us take a broad perspective over project statuses, make long-term planning, and quickly respond to any possible issues, thereby elevating the company’s rate of success. Hence, when we started the development of the PM Tool, reporting became the first functionality to implement.

It all started with the creation of unified reporting templates that allow us to avoid inconsistencies across the departments and business units. Later, our experts also worked out a pre-defined flow of reports needed for a certain type of project, which safeguarded essential information was gathered on time. All this helped us elaborate clear reporting guidelines so that even new managers could easily navigate company standards and create a report according to a unified structure right away.

As this functionality also facilitates the spreading of our project management methodologies across the company, we kept improving reporting over time. As a result, we complemented it with the following features:

• Project card – shows project performance trends and analytics through visualization
• Customizable KPIs – helps monitor and measure specific metrics that are relevant to a particular project
• Summary report – offers dashboards with unified statistics on project statuses, allowing management to check the whole portfolio at once and focus on the most important or urgent questions

The next step in the evolutionary development of our PM tool was adding built-in assessments. The goal behind it was to make sure all our projects met the technical, quality, security, and regulatory requirements of the company or industry in general. Also, it helps us review overall compliance with internal policies, industry standards, and certifications, including ISO. Thus, we prepared and implemented extensive checklists that can be customized to the specific standards we wanted to align with.

It was also important for us to turn our solution into a central place for all delivery processes. Thus, we focused on integrating it not only into our workflows but also with other solutions we use across the company. To date, the PM tool consolidates all essential information in one place, streamlining the overall management process.

As a part of the future growth plans for the PM Tool, our team is also integrating an AI copilot. This would be an intelligent assistant providing managers with potential risk forecasts, routine activities automation, and data-driven recommendations across projects to enhance overall decision-making

Delivery Control System Core

After thoroughly testing and refining our PM Tool on real-case scenarios and using it for several years in a row, we’ve Designed with leading PM practices in mind, the tool helps businesses build a solid framework for managing individual projects and entire portfolios comprehensively, even starting from scratch. Also, the current version of our PM tool embodies over two decades of our project management experience and practical know-how. As a result, it features unique functionality that sets it apart from other market options and brings measurable outcomes. Since integrating the PM tool into our own internal processes, we’ve reduced the number of red-status projects by half, freeing our teams to take on new projects. These custom features include:

1. Advanced project management triangle:
   Besides the traditional time, costs, and scope monitoring, the PM Tool allows tracking one more criterion – customer satisfaction. Thus, PMs and DMs can measure how well their services help clients both solve technical issues and fulfill business needs.
2. Library of predefined templates:
   A built-in collection of ready-to-use templates covers a variety of project management areas, from risk management and project management planning to QA and other types of reporting. Those templates serve as a starting point for users where they can customize templates to specific requirements and kick off a project right away.
3. ISO-compliant process:
   PM Tool has an out-of-the-box project management flow, helping businesses sustain consistent project quality, ensure robust documentation, and simplify audit preparation. All these streamline the process of achieving ISO certification for organizations.
4. Immediately actionable overview:
   The tool offers an intuitive dashboard enabling managers to spot the most urgent and exact areas that require attention. It prioritizes analytics over raw numbers, making information easier to understand and use for business purposes.

Key Takeaway

The market offers a variety of tools, promising companies to improve their delivery culture and business success metrics. However, while the right tool can make a difference, its effectiveness always depends on how well it aligns with your processes and addresses your specific needs.

So, if you are building your organizational delivery management culture and looking for a solution to serve as its foundation – don’t hesitate to contact us. Our experts will share all the necessary information about the and guide you through its adoption to make sure it fully integrates with your organizational structure. Additionally, we will provide you with an all-out delivery process assessment to help identify areas for improvement, eliminate bottlenecks, and fine-tune the overall delivery pipeline to boost your business outcomes.

• #Establishing Quality Process
• #Industry Standards Compliance
• #Information Technology
• #Turnkey Project Outsourcing