We have been able to set up a proper and working ICC model. This ICC structure has been proved to be successful with several customers.
Out of this experience we learned a lot of things and we improved our knowledge making efforts to refine even more our solution. As summary of lessons learned, I would like to share with you the following points:
- Ask for a meeting report/minute in order to summarize the outcome of the meeting and keep track of what has been discussed
- Do not start resource planning without having a quote approved
- Do not overlook functionalities and efforts required to implement a technical solution
- Do not assign too many tasks to the same resource even though he/she promises to complete them in a proper way and in time
- Make clear assumptions and ask for a validation/confirmation whenever the final agreement is not reached and the business requirement has to be released anyway
- Keep a common repository (e.g. SVN) accessible to all the ICC resources, where all the documents and artifacts have to be shared
- Ask for an artifacts’ daily commit free of validation errors
- Ensure and plan in advance proper activities’ hand-over in order to cope vacation’s leave, end of commitment and resignations
- Agree on baseline’s documents in order to implement any requirement/functionality
- Keep an issue and project tracking system (like JIRA) in order to trace changes with reference to the number task created in the tracking system
- Bind together tasks belonging to the same project/release
- Summarize in the description of the tracking system task all the details necessary to identify the documents used to build that solution (e.g. interface specification, high level design … etc )
- Set strict guidelines to be followed by each phase (e.g. design, development and testing)
- Foresee peer-to-peer review for the different phases, possible done by people with the highest seniority level
- Automate repetitive steps (e.g. applications’ building and deploy, regression tests… etc) as much as possible
Taking in mind the content of the previous bullet points will help you out running a working ICC. Those points are even more important in environments with several people, working remotely and dealing with different technology, skills and mindset.
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