The Budgeting stage is where the initial scope is determined and the project budget is estimated. Because every business is unique, an initial analysis is conducted by sizing specialists to understand and capture the scope of the project. The resulting estimate includes a description of all the functionality, a timeline for the project, a list of the key milestones, and the effort, time and cost to deliver the project.

The Initiation stage is where we start the actual project. The key focus is on understanding the business and users needs to build with the customer the vision of the future application: How will it answer to the most important users stories? How it will look like? What will it’s architecture be?

The application is delivered through an incremental and iterative process. This means that every 2 to 3 weeks a checkpoint is done with users and stakeholders to demo the part of your application developed during that time. These checkpoints are also the way to cope with business changes. While projects are being developed, business priorities might change, or whole new requirements may show up. Because the detailed analysis, development and testing are done incrementally, if a change or a new requirement comes up that brings significant value to the business that one can exchanged with another of lower business value. During Sprint Development, after each demo, the users are also invited to test the application. Doing so will enable them to provide feedback that will improve the application’s overall quality and usability.

This phase is the moment for the stakeholders and users to thoroughly test the entire application end to end and for the delivery team to do the final improvements before the going live of the new solution. At the end of this stage the new solution will be live and the business will start benefiting from it.

When application starts being used some usability and performance issues will surely come up. This phase aims at performing a small amount of tuning that will improve the adoption and promote a great usage experience. This is also the right moment to plan for the future and discuss how to ensure the application continuously supports the business over time.