Project Management

The key to our project management approach is flexibility. We consider effective project management to be a crucial factor in the success of any project. We expect our project managers to engage directly with both our client's business and the development team - it's not just an administrative process.

Our development approach delivers the maximum benefit to our client at the earliest opportunity. This strategy gives the client the option to take a working sub-set of functionality to the market for early feedback.

Lost Wax advocates an agile approach to software development. Agile approaches are effective in that they enable highly productive and efficient application development. In summary agile development offers:

• Flexibility with project discipline
• Increases development efficiency
• Delivers working software to the users quickly and frequently
• Reduces risk
• Ensures end-user satisfaction and acceptance
• Achieves ROI

The Lost Wax agile approach is based on best practice methodologies (extreme programming, SCRUM, Crystal and DSDM). Our development teams have extensive experience in these techniques, which provide the following benefits:

• Active user involvement - user representatives have a defined and active role in the development team and whenever possible are collocated with the developers.
• An empowered team - to ensure rapid development the project team must be empowered to make functional and technical decisions about the project without recourse to outside authorities.
• Incremental development - project planning, monitoring and control is based on time-boxes, thus allowing an on-going view of progress through frequent deliveries and customer review points.
• Integrated testing - functional, performance, system, and integration testing are conducted on an on-going basis throughout the development phase, rather than waiting for the end of the project.

We pride ourselves on our ability to deliver systems to aggressive timescales and tight budgets, whilst consistently building software that exceeds our client's expectations. Over the years Lost Wax has successfully employed agile methods to turn new business ideas into working software. We have used these methods on small projects requiring only one or two developers through to those requiring project teams over 30 people, and on projects lasting only a few weeks to those extending over two years.