All IT departments have experienced product development in a hurry in order to respond to a need or a bug and all business application users have experienced bad communication with project managers and/or IT teams. This is the consequence of inefficient project management!

Reworking represents more than half of the tasks of a developer!

However, the impacts of poor project management are not insignificant! The forced acceleration of a product or functionality launch often results in losses in terms of cost and performance. Some features are sometimes misunderstood, not meeting the initial need, and require a lot of reworking on the developer side. As a result, 80% of developers admit that half of their tasks are dedicated to reworking, according to a study conducted by Geneca! This finding highlights a huge waste of time for developers on project progress and frustration on the business side due to incorrect production of the requested feature.

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

IT departments are particularly affected by reworking

In large groups where the organizational structure makes that not all employees are assigned to a similar or nearby location, this problem is strongly amplified because communication between the different teams is made complex. This challenge has a number of impacts, particularly on ISD who are facing a production challenge.

Indeed, companies that prefer to guarantee their costs and the performance of their products instead of deadlines, very often face the risk of a gap between the understanding of the need on the product side and the real needs of users.

On the other hand, insisting on the understanding of the need from the very beginning of the project helps to reduce costs, ensure ROI and user satisfaction. This is why, according to a study conducted by Appian, 50% of new product development is a failure!

Which strategy to avoid reworking?

First of all, it is important to rebuild a process where all teams are involved in the project at the right time and where information flows smoothly, without data loss.
To do this, it is essential to work efficiently and to change the culture. Involving and listening to its users is not a standard when a roadmap is already pre-defined. However, this has become a priority for many companies today who have become aware of the added value of being user-centric!
This user involvement becomes stronger and earlier over time. But if collecting these needs seems to be the right strategy, good practices should be put in place in order to reduce the reworking rate of features!

Qualify your user feedback more efficiently

Your users are the first concerned when it comes to identifying the next features to be developed. Let them exchange with each other so that the 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. This way, the backlog will be reduced and you will avoid dispersion of efforts on the product side. In addition, this will avoid all the costs of non-quality development.

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

Sending contextualized requests

All requests sent in development must be submitted with the full context of the feedback: system information, browser version, screenshots … It will be necessary to centralize all these data to avoid any loss of information in emails or other exchanges.

Controlling costs

Optimal product development is less resource-consuming, and therefore encourages the implementation of an efficient workflow for collaboration between users and the product team. Thus, budgetary constraints are forcing down reworking.

Anchor in the future of work

Avoid any frustration 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 exchanges between business and IT to create complete requests

Reducing the reworking rate of features is an important challenge to be addressed to contain and compensate as much as possible for all the losses, in terms of team productivity as well as financially. The challenge is to break down all barriers between teams in order to rely on a smarter and clearer communication so that all the information related to a request is perfectly transmitted and supported by the entire IT context. Developers must now focus their efforts on value-added tasks!