How to reduce feature reworking

All CIOs have one day experienced product development precipitously (or not) to meet a need or a bug and all users of business applications can testify to exchanges with project managers and/or IT teams that are not very productive. This is the consequence of an inefficient management of his project!

Reworking represents more than half of a developer's tasks!

However, the impacts of poor project management are not negligible! The launch of a product or a feature very often results in losses, whether in terms of costs or performance. Some functionalities are sometimes misunderstood, not meeting the initial need, implying a strong need for reworking on the developer side. As a result, 80% of developers admit that half of their tasks are dedicated to reworking! This observation highlights a huge waste of time for developers on the progress of the project and a frustration on the business side due to inadequate production of the requested functionality.

N.B: WeLoop reduces the critical communication path between business teams and product teams by removing all barriers between them by 5!

CIOs are particularly affected by reworking

In large groups where the organizational structure means that not all employees are assigned to a similar or close location, this problem is strongly accentuated because communication between the different teams is made complex. This challenge has several impacts, including the impact on CIOs who are facing a productive challenge.

Indeed, companies that prefer to guarantee their costs and the performance of their products at the expense of deadlines very often face the risk of a mismatch between the understanding of the product's needs and the real needs of users.

Conversely, insisting on understanding the need from the start of the project makes it possible to reduce costs, ensure ROI and user satisfaction. That's why, according to a study conducted by Appian, 50% of new product development is a failure!

What is the strategy to avoid reworking?

First of all, it is necessary to rebuild a process where all teams are involved at the right time in the project and where information flows smoothly, without losing data.
To do this, it is necessary to work effectively and to change the culture. Involving and listening to your users is not a norm when a roadmap is already predefined. However, this has become a priority for many businesses today who have realized the added value of being user-centric!
This user involvement is getting stronger and earlier over time. But while harvesting these needs seems to be the appropriate strategy, good practices should be put in place in order to reduce the reworking rate of functionalities!

Qualify your user feedback more effectively

Your users are the first to be concerned when it comes to identifying the next functionalities to be developed. Let them discuss with each other so that the most priority and relevant needs are identified and pre-qualified by your community! It's up to you to prioritize and qualify them before sending them to development. Thus, the backlog will be reduced and you will avoid the dispersion of efforts on the product side. In addition, this will avoid all the costs of developing a non-quality.

N.B: Thanks to WeLoop, the project manager receives feedback that is already qualified by his user community. The community ensures that users only create relevant feedback by interacting with each other. Once the need is well defined by the community, the project manager can make it evolve in his backlog and send it for development.

Send contextualized requests

All requests sent in development must be accompanied by the entire context of the return: system information, browser version, screenshots... All this data must be centralized in order to avoid as much as possible any loss of information in emails or other exchanges.

Control your costs

Optimal product development consumes fewer resources, and therefore encourages the implementation of an effective collaboration workflow between users and the product team. Thus, budgetary constraints are forcing reworking to decline.

Anchoring ourselves in the future of work

Avoid any frustration, whether on the product or business side, and offer your employees optimal experiences on their daily applications so that they can effectively contribute to the improvement of your applications.

Conclusion: streamline upstream exchanges to create complete requests

Reducing the reworking rate of functionalities therefore proves to be an urgent challenge to deal with in order to reduce and mitigate as much as possible all losses, whether in terms of team productivity or financially. The challenge is to break all barriers between teams in order to focus on more fluid and clear communication so that all information relating to a request is perfectly transmitted and accompanied by the entire IT context. Developers should now focus their efforts on value-added tasks!