A common challenge in today’s conditions is how to optimize your project costs and timelines. On one side, you are challenged to reduce costs ad keep the “lights on” and on the other hand, to bring down the cost of keeping the lights on, you need innovation.
How do you optimize a project?
Think Again: Don’t just repeat the process or the technology you used last year. Think AGAIN; look at all the options available to you.
Use the right technology: there is a lot of options; the sky is the limit. Let’s say you are building a mobile app; you need authentication in the app. The way you can do authentication is in many ways. Think about your target, if you are targeting internal users, think of AD Azure Directory service, if you have SAP think about the SAP cloud platform. How secure is your app, and what do these frameworks provide you to make your development process faster. If you are talking about public access, consider AWS Cognito and auth again, Facebook, etc. The real point being, there is a lof of prewritten framework and code which can be reused or purposed for different projects. Don’t just do what you did last year. There are newer and better options coming out by the day, which will move it faster and better. Cloud has changed how you did thinks before.
Agile Vs Waterfall: Sounds simple; just use agile, but what does Agile even mean. What is your project structure? Do you know what you are building? How will users validate this process? Have you done an MVP? Do you want Scrum, how is your team organized, what is the work culture? So many questions to ask before you define your project structure and execution methodology.
User Base: How varied is your user base, what is their work environment? How many users and are their geographical locations? What tools are they used to? All these questions help you create the right architecture. DO NOT OVERARCHITECT. That’s a general challenge that increases the project cost. We replace technologies all the time, and what is effective today will be a thing of the past tomorrow.
Machine Learning: Machine learning, if used correctly, can solve so many challenges, and it not like you need to write your models; just use them. The cloud providers SAP and AWS have provided so many cool technologies and ways to use machine learning technologies. Use them, technologies like AWS Textract and SAP Conversational AI make it so easy to add functionality to your application, which took a long time earlier. CLOUD IT
Additional Resources
https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/ten-business-cost-optimization-ideas/
