The Changing Wiliam

The past 12 months have been an interesting evolution for Wiliam. When I started here, it was 2008 and I was 15. We built websites as similar as every Toyota car from 1992 - Present; with the big header, mega-nav, 16 page templates and a Standard Content page. Every internal page had a right hand side spotlight area, where promotions were driven.

The Past

All development was done Waterfall and our designs had a lot of gradients and rounded corners. RDD (Requirement Definition Documents) were as big as the Yellow Pages and prototypes were just plain boring.

Developers were blessed with a prototype, RDD and design concepts and were told to Go Forth and Build. An undefined long period later, the Project Manager will arise from the Project Manager squad and will ask whether the Build was complete yet. The answer would always be no. Crisis management would then be taken into effect, and the project would be quickly driven back to completion.

That past has long gone (for the better!).

The Present

The things we do at Wiliam now are exciting. Really, really exciting.

Project Teams

A Project Team is assembled at the very start of the project so you know who you are dealing with. As opposed to finding the Designer when the Design milestone starts, and Developer when the Development milestone starts, you know who your team is at the start and everyone gets their own input.

Workshops

We do a lot of workshops and we get everyone involved. Designers & Developers (your project team!), Stakeholders are all involved in this highly dynamic and creative process in which everyone can come to a good, sustainable course of action. Or approach, whatever you may call it.

User stories are created and used as part of the Estimation and Build process.

Documentation-less

We don’t document as much as we used to and it is a good thing. Developers no longer reference long RDDs. We have replaced it with stories so that everyone can understand the basic functional requirement that is to be achieved.

Agile

We have jumped the Agile boat and like it, for the most part. Whilst some of the intricate details are being sorted out, we have implemented some of the basic principles already such as Sprint Planning and Iterative Development.

And that’s just a few of the things that are happening. Stay tuned…