Never is an awfully long time

How do you deliver a 14 month project on time, that the client loves, doesn't chase your developers away and, most importantly, makes you money?

Carefully!

All projects come with a degree of apprehension but when the estimated development time is over a year, the risks grow exponentially. Estimates that are under by 10% can add a month to the timescales. That thing the client forgot to mention now requires unpicking an extra 3 months of work. 

This session tells the story of how we delivered, to the hour, two websites for Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) over a 14 month development cycle with 5000 hrs of effort.

Beginning with the extended planning phase, the session will cover:

• The Agile principles we followed (with a strong Scrum influence), how we introduced them to the client and how they ensured the client received a system that is useful now and future ready.
• The estimation, resourcing and forecasting techniques we used to provide up to date analysis throughout the project to ensure the system was delivered on time.
• How a 3 week sprint cycle provided sustainable development velocity and allowed for processes to be improved over the life of the project.
• The risk assessment and impact study techniques used to minimise the uncertainty felt internally and by the client.
• How acceptance criteria, automated regression testing, manual testing and other Quality Assurance (QA) techniques used to ensure that all development was rigorously tested.
• How daily scrums, daily client calls and other communication techniques were used to ensure that the development team and client had all the information they required without descending into continuous meetings and feedback loops.
• How we ran a 12 month migration project concurrently with the build project to ensure maximum functionality and existing content were ready for launch.
• How to orchestrate a seamless replacement of 2 huge web sites upon which lives depend.

Great Ormond Street Hospital is an international centre of excellence in child health care, and one of the UK’s biggest charities. Being among the world’s top five children’s hospitals their websites facilitate 240,000 patient visits a year, support £50 million of annual fundraising and provide invaluable information to medical professionals across the world.

The session title “Never is an awfully long time.” is a hat tip to J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan. J M Barrie gave all the rights to Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital in 1929, and this was later confirmed when he died in 1937.

Since then the hospital has received royalties every time a production of the play is put on, as well as from the sale of Peter Pan books and other products.