How can you maximize your system development budget?

Every minute you spend scoping could be hours and days saved in development, testing and bugs. Setting clear boundaries and even recording the items that were thought of but considered out of scope shows not only that things were thought out, but also gives future iterations an idea where the project can go. Make sure that with scope, you have enough perspectives. It's good to start with a scaffold and an initial statements so that all your stakeholders can contribute. Timelines can be important part of scope in order to declare to coordinate with other projects and events. Knowing important dates can help provide constraints.

Scope creep is thought of as a development issue but in reality is comes from the business user/client who does not have a clear indication on what their problem is that needs to be solved. I have seen most developers specially younger ones in their career always tell the PM/Client/Business Sponsor, "we can do that" without really knowing if it is needed to solve the end goal. It is crucial to have a great Solution Architect/Product Manager who are on the same page of what is the key features versus the WOW factor features.

Defining your scope is crucial for effective system development. It helps prevent scope creep, manage costs and delays, and ensures alignment with project goals and objectives. Identifying goals, deliverables, assumptions, constraints, and risks while involving the team and stakeholders fosters a shared understanding and facilitates successful outcomes.

prioritizing your some of the system requirements, the deliverables, the system development timelines will have a significant impact on the budget. Doing one step at a time as predefined in the methodology part will have a system developed using a certain convention that achieves either one part or whole system integration a better experience. Testing each parts of the system will have you a cutting edge experience when testing the integration and also testing the whole system. The scope will have you prioritizing the aspects of the system are important and that need deploying before going on to the ones which can be added onto the system with time

Tener presente el objetivo y establecer una hoja de ruta para diferentes escenarios. Esto le dará al proyecta una visión estratégica que permita llegar al objetivo. Al contemplar escenarios será necesario dotarlos de herramientas y recursos. Esto permitirá tener presente los costos y presupuestos para la asignación de actividades y tareas en el tablero.

Selecting the appropriate methodology is crucial in managing the budget for system development. Different methodologies, like waterfall, agile, scrum, or hybrid, offer unique advantages and disadvantages depending on project scope, complexity, size, and flexibility. It is important to align the chosen methodology with project characteristics to effectively allocate resources, control time, ensure quality, and mitigate risks. By carefully considering and choosing the right methodology, you can optimize budget utilization and enhance project outcomes.

Las metodologias agiles simples son perfectas para proyectos peque?os y de poco presupuesto. Permitirá una implantación rápida y ciclos cortos. Para proyectos grandes es importante escoger una metodología estandarizada y ampliamente difundida para poder contar con personal capacitado con un mismo canal de comunicación.

Cumplir rápidamente con los objetivos y características principales mostrará viabilidad del proyecto y su continuidad. Evitar artefactos que impliquen mayor coste y tiempo se puede posponer.

It is essential to prioritize your features when developing a system. By identifying and focusing on the most important and valuable functionalities, you can avoid spending resources on low-priority or unnecessary features. Techniques like MoSCoW, Kano, or RICE can be employed to prioritize effectively. Regularly reviewing and updating feature priorities allows you to adapt to evolving project requirements and changing user needs. This iterative approach ensures that resources are allocated efficiently, and the resulting system delivers maximum value to its users. ????

"premature optimization is the root of all evil." - Sir Tony Hoare Knowing what is too much pre-optimization is part of the art and science of system development. An experienced architect can help balance this out. In general, removing as much as possible is a good start to not only optimization but reducing pre-optimization. The best part is no part and the less parts the better. - E. Musk If you can get it done with less components, thats fewer things to develop, test, break, or fix.

Optimizing the design of your system plays a significant role in managing your system development budget effectively. A well-designed system enhances performance, usability, security, scalability, and maintainability. To achieve an optimized design, it is crucial to adhere to best practices and industry standards. Techniques like modularization, abstraction, encapsulation, and cohesion contribute to a robust design. Additionally, leveraging appropriate tools and frameworks such as UML, ERD, or MVC can streamline the design process and improve overall system architecture. By allocating sufficient attention to design optimization, you can create a system that is efficient, user-friendly, and adaptable. ????????

El dise?o puede estar orientado a cumplir objetivos de forma rápida y con bajo coste. Es importante optimizar el dise?o y sus funciones para ser base solidad de nuevas iteraciones, funcionalidades o incrementos.

Testing is crucial for ensuring system quality. It identifies errors, bugs, and defects early on, saving time and cost. It involves planning, executing various tests, and reporting results. This improves functionality, performance, and user satisfaction. ??????????

En un desarrollo donde optimizar el presupuesto es importante es imprescindible contar con baterías de pruebas constantes y retroalimentación para cumplir rápidamente los objetivos y funcionalidades.

The best way to do optimize change is to design objects (both GUI or non-GUI objects) that are non-fixed. For example, when deploying a table of data to a user, there's a strong temptation to lay out the fields that the product owner or business analyst has specified. Why not instead build a table object that is externally configurable based meta data and deploy it anywhere in your application.

Most of the time while discussing the project budget the main focus is on where you're going to deploy the application and what resources it would consume. One more crucial budget part would be in maintenance and managing applications in the long term which goes unnoticed and not in the main focus. Now it entirely depends how the resources are getting managed where the applications are running. It requires careful investigation from time-to-time to check and make sure that resources are being utilised in an optimised manner. e.g. In intelligent systems, you could always scale up the system with more instances when there is heavy traffic and scale down in case of less traffic which saves and maximizes your budget.

Verify that your department strategy is aligned with the overall corporate strategy. Not all companies perceive software development as an important and critical part of their business. A software development culture that functions extremely well in one corporate context may totally fail in another. If you find that your budget is inexplicably frozen, limited, or reduced for reasons that seem preposterous, it is probably because your department strategy is misaligned: You are not perceived as "one of us" by senior management. Find a way to make what you're doing "fit in" to what they are doing, and the budget increases will follow.

One of the biggest things overlooked is what is get going to cost us to support this system once in production. If tools are not available and costly resources are needed in order to support/maintain the system then this could cause a huge dent in your revenue and be a very costly expense. Companies usually see the development budget as being the biggest reason to say no but I have seen that sometimes is not the case.

Doing accurate estimation is key to successful development projects. Consider keeping an estimation database for common object types. Then continue updating the database with actuals. If you encounter a new type of object that hasn't been done before, consider doing a proof of concept (POC) to eliminate unknowns from the development process. The POC doesn't have to be elaborate. It just needs to be sufficient to eliminate or reduce unknowns so that you have much greater confidence in your estimation. And speaking of confidence, how about providing a confidence factor in all your detailed estimate line items so that you can more accurately predict the final delivery date and possibly drive additional unknown discovery?