You don’t have to write the Kelley Blue Book to know different car makes and models offer different levels of design quality and user experience. The Kia, Camry and Cadillac, for example. All great cars, but you’re going to get more features and better quality as you rise through the list. A Cadillac is a sweeter, more refined ride than a Kia, right? And the Camry is roughly halfway between the other two in terms of materials and features.

 

Same goes for innovative web development. Different stages of the development process deliver different levels of design quality and user experience. The further you move along the development process, the more checks and balances you build in, the sweeter and more refined the product.

 

The technical term for this kind of staged, collaborative development is agile implementation. It involves a project management approach to software development that focuses on small, incremental builds (iterations) to support ongoing customer satisfaction. As the word “agile” suggests, it’s about rapid delivery of business value in a changing landscape.

 

An even better way to think of agile implementation in web product development is build, measure, learn, repeat: a four-step dance that ends with a product as close to perfect as humans can get (at least until the next challenge arises).

 

At GCI/Proteus, our proprietary SmartInnovation™ process for helping clients survive and thrive in the digital age includes agile implementation as the second phase of a proven three-phase process that takes your web presence from basic, through better, to best.

 

We embrace agile implementation (and a range of other modern project management and software development strategies) because we’re not one of those web development companies where you struggle to specify what you need from a software project, hand it to the developers, and then pray it will all turn out. Through our decades in the industry, we’ve learned the most sustainable successes comes from using small implementations to explore, build, and learn.

 

The client is in control of what’s included in each implementation, reviews each implementation, and tests the results with real users (customers).

 

Overall, the process is reactive and lower-risk rather than throwing a bunch of money and a creative brief at a web developer and hoping for the best. We can achieve tremendous value in a short period of time by releasing the product in stages and learning from the customers — the ones who will end up using it.

 

Agile implementation also delivers transparency early in the development process. Stakeholders can see what they’re getting, and can therefore actively shape its development, easily aligning their vision with the technology.

 

You are behind the wheel every mile down this road, speeding toward a real opportunity to build what you’ve dreamed for your organization, and we are right there with you through each implementation, each test and each pivot to get it right.

 

It’s all about putting our client (that’s you) and their customers (your customers) in the driver’s seat, of first the Kia, then the Camry, then finally that sweet, sweet Cadillac.