February 16, 2009 at 13:12Team selection for project implementation
In this article I want to talk about our attempt to answer the question that every customer who asks himself to implement his project with the involvement of external contractors: a team of outsourcers. It will be about medium-sized projects, within which it is necessary to implement a rather complex application, and small teams that carry out custom-made projects.
First of all, the customer is interested in the previous experience of the teams, their productivity, terms of the project and the cost of work, in order to complete the project successfully and minimize their own costs.
Independent and small tasks may well be performed by freelancers, the result of which can be seen in numerous portfolios on freelancer sites. In this case, the result of work on design, printing, website development is often quite simple to evaluate only by looking at the work. But what about applications that cannot be placed on the site or transferred to the customer for review? A line in the summary: “took part in the development of an enterprise-level management system” says almost nothing about the contractor, except that he knows the subject area. Moreover, the fact of participation does not indicate the nature and quality of participation in the project. One team can write an application for a year, and another similar application for three months.
We tried to provide the customer and developers with a tool that will allow you to objectively assess the level of the team or individual executor based on the projects they have completed. As examples, I will use links to real projects to demonstrate how this works.
What can a customer find out about a team?
The customer begins acquaintance with the performers on the basis of a rating, a less objective indicator, based on real work results.
Projects completed by participants or teams are listed in their profiles. The customer can get a general idea of the implemented functionality and appearance of the user interface on the project page .
Using project statistics calculatedproject management system (number of tasks, iterations, releases), the customer estimates its size and complexity. Indicators of speed and effectiveness of the team characterize the possible productivity of the project participants and the efficiency of spending the project budget. Burndown digrams demonstrate the team’s commitment to meeting deadlines.
If this is not enough for the customer, then you can ask the team to include him in the project as a customer and then he will get access to more detailed characteristics of the project and the participants. High transparency of the development process allows you to look into the history of the project and get a qualitative and quantitative understanding of the capabilities of the team that completed this project.
The number of projects completed by the team indicates its cohesion and stability, which can sometimes be the most important criterion.
How can an artist appear in the best light before a customer?
The basis for ranking participants and teams is a rating calculation mechanism that takes into account many indicators of participants: its social significance - participation in the life of the community and third-party projects, its speed and effectiveness indicators, calculated on the basis of completed projects.
Rating is a kind of integral indicator of the level of an individual artist or team and is intended to represent the starting point for the customer. A better understanding is achieved through customer analysis of your projects. The more your projects are carried out in DEVPROM, the higher the rating, and the customer will be more accurate and versatile in assessing your level.
Nuances
The system has not yet implemented the ability to assess the cost of the project and the work of participants, but in the next iterations it will be implemented.
Not all customers are ready to publish project results, and often organize the process on their servers. This makes it difficult to obtain an objective assessment of the project by an external user. We are still thinking how best to organize the transfer of statistical indicators to devprom.ru from such projects, maybe you have ideas?
First of all, the customer is interested in the previous experience of the teams, their productivity, terms of the project and the cost of work, in order to complete the project successfully and minimize their own costs.
Independent and small tasks may well be performed by freelancers, the result of which can be seen in numerous portfolios on freelancer sites. In this case, the result of work on design, printing, website development is often quite simple to evaluate only by looking at the work. But what about applications that cannot be placed on the site or transferred to the customer for review? A line in the summary: “took part in the development of an enterprise-level management system” says almost nothing about the contractor, except that he knows the subject area. Moreover, the fact of participation does not indicate the nature and quality of participation in the project. One team can write an application for a year, and another similar application for three months.
We tried to provide the customer and developers with a tool that will allow you to objectively assess the level of the team or individual executor based on the projects they have completed. As examples, I will use links to real projects to demonstrate how this works.
What can a customer find out about a team?
The customer begins acquaintance with the performers on the basis of a rating, a less objective indicator, based on real work results.
Projects completed by participants or teams are listed in their profiles. The customer can get a general idea of the implemented functionality and appearance of the user interface on the project page .
Using project statistics calculatedproject management system (number of tasks, iterations, releases), the customer estimates its size and complexity. Indicators of speed and effectiveness of the team characterize the possible productivity of the project participants and the efficiency of spending the project budget. Burndown digrams demonstrate the team’s commitment to meeting deadlines.
If this is not enough for the customer, then you can ask the team to include him in the project as a customer and then he will get access to more detailed characteristics of the project and the participants. High transparency of the development process allows you to look into the history of the project and get a qualitative and quantitative understanding of the capabilities of the team that completed this project.
The number of projects completed by the team indicates its cohesion and stability, which can sometimes be the most important criterion.
How can an artist appear in the best light before a customer?
The basis for ranking participants and teams is a rating calculation mechanism that takes into account many indicators of participants: its social significance - participation in the life of the community and third-party projects, its speed and effectiveness indicators, calculated on the basis of completed projects.
Rating is a kind of integral indicator of the level of an individual artist or team and is intended to represent the starting point for the customer. A better understanding is achieved through customer analysis of your projects. The more your projects are carried out in DEVPROM, the higher the rating, and the customer will be more accurate and versatile in assessing your level.
Nuances
The system has not yet implemented the ability to assess the cost of the project and the work of participants, but in the next iterations it will be implemented.
Not all customers are ready to publish project results, and often organize the process on their servers. This makes it difficult to obtain an objective assessment of the project by an external user. We are still thinking how best to organize the transfer of statistical indicators to devprom.ru from such projects, maybe you have ideas?