Features don't create success. People do.
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It's all about collaboration, transparency, and solving the right problems.
The PRODFIT Framework
PRODFIT applies tried and true product management principles to minimize risk, optimize organizational strategy, and ensure significantly higher levels of success.
We blend strategic thinking, unencumbered creativity, and a proven process designed around simplicity, clarity, and best practice.
Our pillars are:
Total immersion in the current state challenges is necessary to identify products that are truly ‘fit for purpose’.
Accurate, prioritized requirements are born from the user-up, elicited with respect and empathy.
Near-term business results must align to long-term organizational strategy.
Every interaction is to be approached with practicality and humility while maintaining focus on what success looks like.
How we find right.
Agile has been defined as “the ability to create and respond to change in order to succeed in an uncertain and turbulent environment.”
We’ll deep-dive into the current state of organizational processes and work with your team to gain an in-depth understanding of what’s working, what’s not, and what it will take to drive to “fitness for purpose”. We don’t tell you what to do, but help you discover what works.
By breaking efforts down, partnering with stakeholders to obtain rapid feedback, and eliminating silos through cross-functional collaboration, the entire process will be more responsive and your team more adept at recognizing opportunities for improvement across the organization as opposed to their immediate areas of responsibility.
Our process.
Requirements Gathering
User Personas
User personas are narrative depictions of users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users.
They capture important details like goals, skills, and perspectives as well as background information like roles, responsibilities and their environment.
By creating a realistic picture of the expectations, concerns and motivations of users, personas answer the critical question: “Who are we providing a product for?”
Story Writing
Backlog Creation
Prioritization
Prioritization is about optimizing the value a solution delivers based on the input received from all stakeholders. By ensuring the most important and impactful capabilities are at the top of the list, your needs can be mapped to available solutions and the overall value delivered more apparent. Since no single product will meet every requirement exactly as defined, prioritization must be iterative as new information becomes available.
Iteration and Refinement
Alignment
Evaluation and Selection
RFP Requirements
Our team will assist with drafting the summary and requirements for your RFP that get to the heart of need, based on the outcome of the requirements gathering phase. We’ll ensure they are crafted in a manner that allows for the respondents to understand and respond to the requirement clearly and effectively; and for your team to determine exactly if and how the requirement will be met. We also help respond to any questions submitted by the vendor.
Response Analysis
Vendors sometimes struggle to clearly articulate exactly how a requirement is met. We know this process well and view it through the lens of software designers. We will help your team understand the responses to make sure there’s alignment between the need and exactly how that need will be satisfied by the vendor. We also help craft follow-up questions in the event additional clarification or information is needed.
Demonstration Management
During software demonstrations, it can be a challenge for the vendor to present clearly exactly how a solution will meet a given need. It can also be difficult for your team to see how a requirement can be met. This is for a variety of reasons – restrictive demo scripts, poor demonstration skills, a lack of engagement, too little time provided for the demonstration, or a structure that doesn’t allow sufficient opportunity for Q&A. The combination of our knowledge of your organization’s needs, the materials gathered during the project, and our extensive demonstration experience allows us to manage demonstrations efficiently.
User Review and Feedback
We’ll work with your team and stakeholders to gather feedback from the RFP responses and demonstrations. This will be compiled into summary documentation which will be provided to all involved. We’ll also assist with any additional follow-up questions to or from vendors.
Iteration and Refinement
Much like the iteration step in the requirements gathering phase, the team will come together to assess and make any changes to the project’s objectives based on information learned from the evaluation phase. Once again, a determination will be made as to whether enough information has been gathered to secure consensus from stakeholders. The project will move forward in the process or circle back to any previous steps and restart the process.
Vendor Scoring and Recommendation
We’ll assist your team in analyzing everything gathered during the process and provide a guided framework for scoring each solution. We’ll also provide feedback, context and a recommendation for your consideration.
Implementation and Launch
Agile Project Management
The success of an implementation depends entirely on effective project management. Using a sprint-based model allows for an iterative process to prevent missed milestones, poor communication, and misaligned expectations. It’s fluid, responsive and built around the idea that things will change and adaptation is a must. 1-2 week sprints ensures milestones and work streams are managed with minimal disruption thereby keeping the project on-schedule.
Consulting and Training Support
We’ve spent countless hours conducting implementation consulting and training sessions. We’ll leverage that expertise and make sure the right questions are asked and answered, that the needs are met as expected, processes changed to take advantage of the new capabilities, and that your stakeholders are fully prepared to not only train, but educate your users.
Pilot Program
Rolling out new software and new processes is a complicated effort. The typical challenges are magnified considerably if the initial rollout is organization-wide. We strongly recommend a pilot program, and will build a process to drive this effort. By taking this staged approach, not only will the overall launch be more successful, but your team will have the opportunity to gather feedback and make additional changes to the process and related software configurations.
Feedback and Iteration
The final feedback and iteration phase provides the opportunity for end-to-end analysis of the entire project. It’s where we work with your team and stakeholders to gather the information necessary to make any final pre-launch adjustments; or revisit any earlier step in the process.
Change Management
We know that processes will evolve through the implementation and use of your new software solution. We take extra care during this stage to ensure users understand the new process and are prepared to launch. We focus not only on what and how things are changing, but also on the reasons why.
Launch and User Adoption Program
This is where it all comes together. Everything up to this point has reinforced your stakeholders perspective of the value they will receive through use of the product. We carefully work with your project team to bring users online in the system though a staged roll-out. By this stage we’ve created champions who will help bring your user base together in the transformation.