Lynton takes a lean, agile approach to projects, like many other cutting-edge software companies, to deliver solutions with business value. Therefore, we work on a points-based system. This allows us to be transparent around deliverables we’ll provide, and what we are working on. Each of our activities are tied to points, based on the average effort needed to complete each activity. Your planned monthly points and the status of each deliverable will be outlined in your Roadmap, based on our strategic recommendations and your organization’s needs. Roadmaps are maintained in Google Sheets and are accessible to you at all times. Collaboratively, we’ll agree on a rolling calendar with planned activities and deliverables that align with your goals.
Every engagement has four key phases, which are:
Professionals don’t prescribe a solution until they diagnose the problem. We use this phase to dig into your needs, truly understand your business, and identify your goals.
Discovery helps us identify and assess your requirements at a much deeper level, and to architect a technical solution that appropriately addresses those requirements.
The output of discovery is a backlog which itemizes all of the activities and deliverables that we could deliver within the project (we describe these using Agile planning constructs called Epics and Stories). Each item is estimated in terms of Points, an Agile planning technique that allows us to estimate more realistically than traditional methods. We will manage your budget in terms of Points, creating a high degree of transparency with respect to how your budget is being deployed.
You ultimately approve which items in your backlog move to production/deployment, and we'll help you work within the budget constraints that you are facing. Depending on your constraints, you might decide to proceed with only a portion of the backlog items, leaving the “nice-to-haves” for a later phase. We'll help you prioritize and understand the tradeoffs and implications of your decisions.
With a stronger sense of project scope and budget in hand, we create a Roadmap. The Roadmap brings everyone into alignment on how we will attack the selected Backlog items -- the order of operations, the timing, and the dependencies between items.
The Roadmap provides a much clearer sense of the project schedule before we move to implementation. The implementation phase is when your points are converted into tangible solutions that help your business. Points will be used to build the technology you need for the business outcomes you desire.
As the project progresses, we'll update the Roadmap in real time and review it with you, alongside your budget utilization, on a regular weekly cadence so you are always fully in the loop and equipped with the information you need to make decisions.
We'll set up the Roadmap so that we are attacking your Backlog throughout implementation in iterative, incremental slices, which allows us to put finished work in front of you earlier and more often, meaning we have more opportunities to solicit your feedback and ensure that we are on the right track before your budget is depleted. We’ll continue to discuss what goes into the implementation of each of these slices of work, such as development, testing, acceptance, launch, measurement, and more.
We know that business requirements are a moving target as your vision evolves throughout the project. In this phase, we can use any remaining budget, or additional points purchased, to make improvements to your existing solution, resulting in greater business benefits.