How to develop complex mobile applications at pace whilst retaining quality and innovation

In an ever evolving world of innovative mobile applications, how do you deliver a secure digital platform, support multiple applications, provide access to multiple legacy products, deliver a new UI & UX (user interface and user experience) design, provide new market appeal whilst evolving the internal delivery methods of a traditionally waterfall organisation?

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This overhaul of products and services is not an uncommon problem for any organisation. Often teams will look at digital innovation by seeking a new UI/UX, whilst transforming the delivery of these elements by coaching their internal teams in agile development. This is most prominent in the Public Sector where governance cycles often take precedence over the ability to progress change.

Although both are valuable skills to enable delivery of innovation, they cannot live in isolation. The agile mindset must be scalable throughout the organisation. Without this scalability, delivery of innovation is often hampered by a lack of transparency and ultimately stakeholder engagement and the perception of value.

1. An independent view on the technology landscape

The first and most important step is to take an independent and un-biased view on the technology that could fit within the current architecture, infrastructure and strategic direction of the organisation.

Our approach is to enable the client to make a considered and informed choice on technologies with the benefit of a clear understanding for the basis for these decisions. We recently helped a large Public Sector organisation procure the right partner to provide an accelerated delivery of a substantial digital transformation programme. Most importantly, they needed a partner who could support development, meet the cross functional requirements of the client and would support the sharing of skills and training to enable future enhancements to be delivered internally.   

1. Driving forward best practice

Continually assessing the methods and practices that are used, whilst working alongside the client to ensure they are the best fit given the existing governance rigour and digital delivery maturity is a key part of integrating new practices. Fortunately, some of the key constructs of Agile delivery enable this continual assessment; the challenge comes when multiple parties have a differing view of what good Agile looks like. Credera’s role often worked as a mediator to develop methods that would work within the client’s environment whilst enabling suppliers and stakeholders to deliver transparently and at pace.  

1. Challenging and disrupting

Providing an innovative and excellent user experience based on the services available often provides a challenge between the integration of existing services, their orchestration and the desired UX/UI. The challenge is to manage the technical constraints without impacting the overall desired experience for the user.

This can often be a war of attrition between design, architecture, development and test teams, however ensuring you create a cross functional team, who collaboratively design the product and features, the process becomes like clockwork.

Credera ensured that all stories were reviewed and assessed for the ability to be able to deliver, and provided a prioritised backlog, considering complexity and development dependencies on external suppliers and service owners.

Our experience

We recently developed a production application within 6 months from inception. Within four months of it being live, it provided our client a revenue of £188m, an average sale of £224 and 508,000 registered users.